A French bid to lift the EU's arms embargo on China by April 1 was rebuffed by the bloc's foreign ministers on Monday due to concerns about the country's human rights record.
The ministers agreed only to reconsider the ban -- imposed after the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square -- at a future meeting.
The EU enjoyed a trade surplus with China at the beginning of the 1980s, but it now has a large and widening deficit which stood at around 47 billion euros (US$59.15 billion) in 2002.
Ending the arms embargo could open up lucrative trade opportunities with the world's fastest-growing major economy.
France's push, which coincided with a visit to Paris by Chinese President Hu Jintao (
"Do European governments want to risk having blood on their hands by allowing European weapons to be used against civilians in any future crackdown?" Graham Watson said in a statement.
"A desire to curry favor with the Chinese president during his state visit to France is no excuse for rethinking a long-standing European policy rooted in principle," he said.
France argues that the ban is "anachronistic" given the improved relations between Beijing and the EU and sits oddly with weapons embargoes imposed by the bloc on only three other nations -- Myanmar, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
"China is now a special partner ... playing a key and responsible role in the international system," French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told reporters before going into talks on the sensitive issue with his EU counterparts.
"We should encourage it in this direction to contribute to international stability and security, especially in Asia," he said.
But he won no support in the meeting for France's aim to lift the embargo at an EU summit at the end of March.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
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China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
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