The Control Yuan's decision to impeach Minister of Education Ovid Tzeng (
"Tzeng's academic achievements and his dedication to Taiwan's educational reform leave no room for criticism. Nonetheless, the agreement reached on Monday [to impeach Tzeng] was due to his violation of the Nationality Law over the past eight years. It is simply a legal issue. There is no reason to politicize the entire matter," Lin said.
Lin's statement was made in response to fierce criticism by numerous educational organizations that said that the decision was unjust and politically motivated.
"I wonder why the Control Yuan has suddenly become so efficient as to pass this motion within such a remarkably short period of time? I suspect the decision was a political move," DPP lawmaker Chiu Tai-san (
Chiu, joined by representatives from dozens of educational organizations, held a news conference yesterday to garner support for Tzeng.
The Control Yuan's decision to impeach Tzeng for unlawfully serving in three positions at national universities while holding dual citizenship, has created a stir among the public.
Lin said that Tzeng had been negligent over the issue and that several notices from the Ministry of Education -- his direct supervisory unit when he served as administrator of National Cheng Cheng University (CCU) and National Yang Ming University (YMU) -- were sent to remind him to revoke his US citizenship.
However, Tzeng took no action, Lin said.
What makes him more vulnerable to the impeachement charges is that on June 29 of last year he promised to renounce his US citizenship within a year, when he began his stint as president of YMU, Lin said.
Though he filed the paperwork to renounce his US citizenship at the American Institute in Taiwan on June 5 of this year, the procedure was not completed until July 14, which was too late, Lin said.
Tzeng was accused of breaching Article 10 of the National Law Enforcement Statute when he served as the dean of the College of Social Science at CCU from August 1992 to May 2000. The statute stipulates that employees of state-run education facilities are considered public officials, and as such must revoke citizenship of other countries.
The statute was revised in February of this year, to state that only those who gain approval from their supervisors can hold dual citizenship and serve as president of a national university.
Tzeng, as president of YMU at the time, continued to violate the legal regulations because he never applied for approval from the education ministry.
Lin said the verdict was based on Article 1 of the Civil Servant Services Act (
The related documents are in the hands of the Judicial Yuan's Committee on the Discipline of Public Functionaries. It is up to them to decide how to deal with the case.
According to Article 9 of the Law on Discipline of Public Functionaries (
"Our next move will be directed at the education ministry, because it failed to monitor its subordinate organizations as a supervisory unit for all educational institutions of the country," Lin 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
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