Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday said he would halt a urban renewal project on Muzha Road Sec. 5, two years after the city learned that explosives had been found 60m underground on the site.
The project, on 16 hectares near the Taipei Zoo, was proposed in 2004 when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was mayor of Taipei. The city government didn’t learn about the explosives until 2007, when it began to put together the plots of land for the project.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City Councilor Lee Ching-feng (李慶鋒) and Independent Councilor Chen Chien-ming (陳建銘) condemned the city government yesterday for wasting NT$3.3 billion (US$102 million) over the past six years and ignoring the rights of local residents who have been unable to renovate their homes during that time.
“The project has been put off for six years, and local residents are living in fear and uncertainty. The city government should resolve the problem as soon as possible and stop wasting taxpayers’ money,” Lee said at the Taipei City Council.
Lee said 125kg of explosives as well as detonators were buried after a coal mining company was flooded by a typhoon in 1984.
Taipei City Government spokesman Chao Hsin-ping (趙心屏) said the city had invited experts and government agencies to discuss the issue last year, and the experts said the explosives should pose no immediate danger to local residents.
Hau said experts would be invited to inspect the geology of the area and the urban renewal project would be halted indefinitely until the safety of the area could be confirmed. The city government applied to the Ministry of the Interior in August to delay construction, he said.
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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