A court case involving Yang Hui-ju (楊蕙如) began at the Taipei District Court yesterday.
Yang is accused of heading a group that posted messages online that have been linked to the suicide in 2018 of diplomat Su Chii-cherng (蘇啟誠).
Yang was a Web manager for Representative to Japan Frank Hsieh’s (謝長廷) 2008 presidential campaign.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office on Dec. 2 last year indicted Yang over comments online that accused the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Osaka of failing to offer timely help to Taiwanese in Japan during Typhoon Jebi, which made landfall in Japan on Sept. 4, 2018.
Critics have accused the DPP of paying Yang to run the “green camp cyberarmy.”
Yang and the DPP have denied the accusations.
Prosecutors investigated reports that Yang on Sept. 6, 2018, met Tsai Fu-ming (蔡福明), who she allegedly provided with Professional Technology Temple (PTT) accounts, including one named “idcc.”
PTT is the nation’s largest online bulletin board system.
She allegedly instructed Tsai and others to generate discussion in PTT articles about evacuation proceedings at Kansai International Airport in the wake of the storm after it forced the airport’s closure on Sept. 4, 2018.
Messages critical of the official response to Taiwanese stranded at the airport were reported at the time.
The Osaka office was responsible for the travelers.
Su, who was director-general of the Osaka office at the time, committed suicide at his residence eight days later.
Media reports said that his death might have been linked to work pressure caused by public criticism.
Yang denied any wrongdoing in court yesterday.
She said she had instructed people to “clarify false information on the situation” after posts that said China had dispatched buses to the airport to help evacuate people, and had picked up Taiwanese passengers as well as Chinese.
This was later shown to be false reporting.
Prosecutor Chen Chao-shih (陳照世) said that Yang’s and Tsai’s actions were outside the realm of freedom of expression, and had seriously undermined the nation’s authorities.
Tsai and other defendants apart from Yang were not at the hearing yesterday.
Tsai pleaded guilty to related charges in an earlier case.
He has said that Yang instructed him and others to post the messages on PTT.
Additional reporting by Jason Pan
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching