With the new administration beginning May 20, President-elect Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) Cabinet is almost complete, Vice Premier-designate Yu Shyi-kun confirmed yesterday.
Yu said Tsai Ying-wen (蔡英文) is to become chairperson of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) and Shea Jia-dong (許嘉棟) the Minister of Finance.
Yu made the announcement of the lineup of the new Cabinet yesterday and confirmed there were only six posts left to fill: the Department of Health, Environmental Protection Administration, National Youth Commission, Council for Economic Planning and Development, Atomic Energy Council and National Sports Council.
Yu said that the still-vacant Cabinet posts would be filled by the end of the month and be announced by Premier-designate Tang Fei (唐飛), who is currently recuperating from an operation for the removal of a thymus gland cyst.
When pressed by reporters to reveal more details, Yu said: "There is no need to keep guessing, all I can tell you is what has been decided."
Most of the names officially confirmed yesterday had already been tipped for the posts by the media.
Tsai's nomination by the president-elect as the head of the MAC had been leaked 10 days ago, but was not officially confirmed until yesterday.
The reason given for the delay was said to be Tang's hesitancy about the appointment, a source said.
Some media reports said that Tsai was in the ad hoc advisory group that drafted the "special state-to-state" interpretation,of cross-strait relations for President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝).
However, another source said there was no such group but only informal gatherings of close aides to Lee, and that the "special state-to-state" model was more of a general concept than an elaborately planned strategy.
Shea is currently deputy governor of the Central Bank of China.
"It was my sense of responsibility for society and the country that made me take the post," said Shea at a news conference last night.
Meanwhile, the newly-confirmed head of the Aboriginal Affairs Commission, Yahani Isagagafat (尤哈尼．伊斯卡卡夫特), an Aboriginal rights activist, said that he was taking the new job because he cared about the welfare of his people. He is currently the chief of general affairs at Yushan College of Theology.
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
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