Last Week in Viral News

April 30th, Sat: A woman returns from a morning jog to her room in a corrugated iron house in Yau Ma Tei to find an 83-year-old man lying motionless on her bed. Seeing a large hole in the roof and rubble on and around the bed, she suspects that the man had fallen through the roof. Authorities pronounce him dead at the scene. Initial investigations show that the man, who had been suffering from cancer and diabetes, had jumped from the roof and fallen into the woman’s home on the fourth floor podium. The woman discards her mattress.

May 1st, Sun: A video shared to a Facebook page goes viral: A woman leans next to the doors of an MTR carriage with one leg between those of a man, who is kissing her. The man appears flushed, and is rubbing his groin against the woman for the length of the two-minute-long video. Some netizens suggest that the man has an intellectual disability and criticize the person who uploaded the video for not alerting MTR staff, while others liken the man’s behavior to that of a dog in heat.

May 2nd, Mon: A security guard at a residential block in Happy Valley sees what appears to be a gun-toting individual in the building and notifies the police. Emergency Unit officers with bulletproof vests, helmets and submachine guns arrive and begin to search the premises. The search ends when officers find a 13-year-old boy with a toy gun in one of the flats. He had just returned home from a wargame.

May 3rd, Tues: A man pushes his bike onto a Central-bound MTR train. He is resting a homemade battery pack for his speaker on the bike seat. As the train nears Sham Shui Po station, there is a small explosion and smoke starts to pour from the box. Six hundred commuters are evacuated from the smoke-filled carriage and MTR staff and police take the man, whose hand is bleeding, to assist with their investigations. He says he had found the batteries on a street in Kwai Chung.

May 4th, Wed: Police arrest 11 people involved with a medical center which claims to provide services that can revitalize the brain and cure cancer. Patients who sought help from the center were required to vow not to undergo surgery, chemotherapy or take Western or Chinese medicine, or all treatment fees would be forfeit. As part of the treatment process, the center would tie magnets to patients’ foreheads and limbs, and instruct them to soak their feet in ginger water to improve their immune system and kill cancer cells. An investigation is underway.

May 5th, Thurs: A video of two middle-aged women fighting on an MTR train goes viral: The video begins with the women wrestling with one another on a row of empty seats. One woman has grabbed the other woman by her collar as two male passengers step in trying to break up the fight, but without success. The women yell for other passengers to call the police and accuse each other of starting the fight. They finally stop fighting when an MTR employee intervenes. Due to their larger size, some netizens start calling the women “heavyweight fighters.” 

May 6th, Fri: A photo of a banner put up by the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong in Wong Tai Sin goes viral: The banner reads “Happy Parent’s Day.” A week earlier, a DAB member had put up a banner which read “Happy Mother’s Day” in Chinese and “Happy Father’s Day” in English. Some netizens accuse the DAB of discriminating against single-parent families, while others suggest the party should just make an all-purpose “Happy Festival” banner.