Minister of Finance Lin Chuan (
"The president [Lee Sheng-yann (李勝彥)] of the Bank of Taiwan (台灣銀行) should be held responsible for mismanaging the crisis, which caused the public to panic," Lin told a press conference yesterday.
Public confidence in the security of electronic banking transactions was rocked after the Bank of Taiwan failed to properly handle the incident's aftermath, Lin said.
He said he hopes the bank's board will decide to issue Lee a demerit within a week. The board is scheduled to meet today.
Within the next week, Lin said, the three banks in the scandal should demote the heads of the four branches where investigators found that forged ATM cards were copied from their card-swipe door-entry systems.
"They should be held responsible for internal management, which was seriously flawed since it didn't detect the videotaping equipment that had been secretly installed in the ATM entry systems," Lin said.
However, the ministry took time yesterday to praise a police officer, a Makoto Bank (誠泰銀行) official and the Financial Information Service Co (財金公司) for helping authorities crack the fraud ring.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained