Vice President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday urged Beijing to stop media repression in Hong Kong, where the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily is printing its last edition today after a police crackdown last week.
In a post on Facebook, Lai criticized Hong Kong police for targeting the Hong Kong edition of Apple Daily, which has been critical of the authorities in Hong Kong and Beijing for undermining freedoms and human rights in the territory.
Hong Kong police on Thursday last week raided Apple Daily’s newsroom and arrested five executives on national security grounds.
Police have also frozen the assets of Apple Daily and affiliates.
Lai urged Beijing to stop oppressing freedom of the press and speech, and said Taiwan stands with the people of Hong Kong.
Among the five people arrested last week, parent company Next Digital chief executive officer Cheung Kim-hung (張劍虹) and Apple Daily editor-in-chief Ryan Law (羅偉光) have been charged with collusion with foreign forces and remain in detention, while the other three have been released on bail.
Dozens of articles published by Apple Daily have been used against the detainees, making it potentially the first time news reports are used as evidence of crimes under the National Security Law.
Many Hong Kong people have defied the government, Lai wrote, adding that Apple Daily sold 500,000 copies the day after the office raid.
It is unclear how many copies the newspaper sold that day, but it printed 500,000 copies, up from 80,000 the previous day.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,