US Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of US President George W. Bush's administration could be called to testify if Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's top aide, goes to trial on a criminal indictment involving how the US went to war in Iraq.
Libby's "not guilty" plea to the five-count felony indictment, which he gave at his arraignment on Thursday, seemed sure to prolong debate about the White House's prewar use of intelligence, probably in a protracted court battle.
"With respect, your honor, I plead not guilty," Libby told US District Judge Reggie Walton.
Libby is charged with obstruction of justice, two counts of lying to the FBI and two counts of committing perjury before a federal grand jury.
Libby's indictment has enabled Democrats to bring back questions about the Bush administration's primary justification for invading Iraq, the incorrect assertion that ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and the ability to use them.
The indictment also comes with Bush's popularity rating at its lowest level since he took office after a week in which his administration bungled a Supreme Court nomination, the US death toll in Iraq passed 2,000 and a cloud remained over his chief strategist, Karl Rove, in the leak case. Rove remains under investigation.
Libby waived his right to a speedy trial, and it will take his legal team three months to get security clearances to examine classified information that the prosecution must produce to the defense.
Libby was charged with lying to investigators and the grand jury about leaking to reporters the CIA status of a covert agency officer, Valerie Plame. Plame was revealed after her husband, former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence in the run-up to the war to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.
Wilson made his accusation after a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa in which he said he found no evidence to support the allegation that Iraq had an agreement to acquire uranium from Niger.
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
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
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
RSS