Polls for local chiefs and councilors take place today to elect 319 local chiefs and 879 county and city councilors.
The elections for local chiefs may be the last of their kind to be held because the Ministry of the Interior has proposed terminating the polls in 2006 and appointing local chiefs and councilors in a bid to save public resources.
PHOTO: CHANG HSUN-TENG, TAIPEI TIMES
There are a total of 2,939 candidates registered for the elections, which include 852 candidates running for village, township and city heads and 1,992 candidates running for the county and city councilor seats.
The ruling DPP has nominated a total of 432 candidates for the elections, 166 of whom are local chiefs and 266 of whom are vying for councilor positions.
The KMT has nominated 324 candidates to run in the local head elections and 637 candidates to run in the county and city councilor elections.
The People First Party (PFP) has nominated 27 candidates to run in the elections for local heads and 267 candidates to run in the county and city councilor elections.
The newly-formed Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) nominated only two candidates for local chief positions and 39 candidates for the city and county councilor elections.
Political analysts predict that the KMT, which has long dominated local elections and developed a strong local voting system, might perform well in today's polls though the DPP might increase a substantial number of seats.
The KMT is estimated to win 175 out of the 319 seats for local chiefs and 400 out of the 879 seats in the city and county councilor elections.
Hsu Yang-ming (許陽明), deputy secretary-general of the DPP, said that the DPP hopes to see a 10 to 20 percent increase in the number of seats in the two elections.
The PFP said that it will do its best to have all of its candidates elected in the two elections.
The goal of the TSU is to see at least half of its candidates elected, according to Hsiao Kuan-yu (蕭貫譽), director of the TSU's public relations department.
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