The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday said it was comparing statements made by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and three others who were summoned on Thursday evening over allegations that Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) had leaked details of an investigation into a case of alleged improper lobbying by Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平).
Ma, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) and former Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Lo Chih-chang (羅智強) were subpoenaed as witnesses, while Huang was questioned as a defendant.
The district prosecutors’ office summoned the four after several lawyers and citizens filed lawsuits against Huang, accusing him of leaking secrets in the Special Investigation Division’s (SID) probe when he briefed Ma on information gathered through wiretapping involving Wang and Democratic Progressive Party caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘).
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The prosecutors summoned Ma to clarify the details of meetings he had with Huang on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, five days before Huang called a press conference to accuse Wang of misconduct.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said Ma was given plenty of time to answer prosecutors’ questions. After the questioning, which was conducted from 8pm to 9:30pm, Ma spent more than 10 minutes reading his testimony before signing it, the office said.
The office added that prosecutors offered the president a travel fee for coming in to present his statement, but Ma declined, saying he traveled by foot.
Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office spokesman Huang Mo-hsin (黃謀信) said prosecutors were busy comparing the four statements and the office has not decided whether it should arrange a confrontation meeting for all parties.
Separately, Deputy Minister of Justice Chen Ming-tang (陳明堂) said the ministry’s task force set up to investigate the wiretapping controversy has interviewed experts from Chunghwa Telecom Co (中華電信) to learn more about technologies involved in wiretapping.
Chen said their statements would be compared with those made by SID prosecutors, as well as experts from the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau.
Chen added that the task force had questioned SID spokesman Yang Jung-tsung (楊榮宗) and SID prosecutor Cheng Shen-yuan (鄭深元), but it has not decided whether to question Huang.
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