The war of words between election opponents Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) and Kaohsiung County Commissioner Yang Chiu-hsing (楊秋興) escalated yesterday after prosecutors unexpectedly summoned Yang’s key campaign officials for questioning over a controversial campaign flyer.
Kaohsiung prosecutors on Thursday night summoned Yang’s campaign spokeswoman Tseng Yin-li (曾尹儷) and deputy campaign director Chen Wu-hsun (陳武勳) for questioning less than two hours after Chen Chu filed a lawsuit against Yang for allegedly distributing flyers spreading false rumors about her.
On a motorcade to the city’s Nanzih District (楠梓) yesterday, Yang denied Chen Chu’s allegations that he had launched a personal attack against her, adding that the contents of the flyer were not fabricated and came from material already presented at press conferences during his campaign.
PHOTO: CNA
In the flyer, Yang accused the mayor of taking a nap at her residence when parts of Kaohsiung City were experiencing their worst flooding in the last 50 years on Sept. 19. The flyer also alleged she had sabotaged the campaign of Huang Chun-ying (黃俊英), the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) mayoral candidate in 2006, by asking young campaign officials to make vote-buying allegations against Huang.
It also alleged that Chen was manipulating the judiciary to sabotage his chances of winning the Greater Kaohsiung mayoral election. Later yesterday, Yang visited Kaohsiung Prosecutors’ Office chief Hsing Tai-chao (刑泰釗) to express his dissatisfaction.
Responding to Yang’s comments, Chen Chu told reporters she did not have the means to influence prosecutors.
While Yang was trying to tarnish her reputation, Chen Chu said, she was confident Kaohsiung voters could tell right from wrong.
Head prosecutor Wang Chun-li (王俊力) told a press conference after Yang’s visit that prosecutors had summoned Tseng and Chen Wu-hsun as witnesses because the case was urgent.
Yang’s allegations of Chen Chu’s tactics against Huang stemmed from a late-night press conference held by Chen Chu’s camp the night before the last Kaoshiung mayoral election, in which it accused Huang of giving cash to people who participated in his rally.
The next day, Chen Chu defeated Huang by a mere 1,114 votes.
Ku Hsin-ming (古鋅酩), who rented a tour bus to take participants to Huang’s rally, said he paid them of his own free will. In August last year, the Supreme Court sentenced Ku to three-and-a-half-years in jail for vote buying.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift