Legislator’s document leak<\b>
There was a government document leak incident several years ago when I was working at a civil institution. There was a coworker on our team who was extremely diligent and circumspect about their duties.
One day when they were in the office, they suddenly had an emergency come up and inadvertently left a document with critical information where anyone could see.
The district prosecutors’ office later indicted my coworker, charging them with leaking national security secrets.
Fortunately, the judge on the case understood that this supposed criminal act was undoubtedly related to needing to rush off to an emergency, and was not an intentional act. The judge ultimately handed my coworker a lenient sentence.
In stark contrast, we have Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) publicly divulging contents from secret documents related to Ukraine. Hsu came straight out and intentionally revealed the payment methods and channels listed in the documents.
Not only did she damage the mutual trust between Taiwan and the Czech Republic, but she also unnecessarily made things more difficult for Taiwan’s assistance to Ukraine, even to the point of greatly lowering our national credibility in the eyes of other countries.
She is evidently a suspect in divulging secrets and intelligence. As a legislator, Hsu’s salary comes from the public purse. At the very least, she ought to be protecting classified documents.
If political power is used to intervene in judicial processes and she gets off scot-free, then what message does this send to civil servants on the bottom rungs who end up prosecuted for bona fide accidents? What an utter shame.
Yeh Yu-cheng,
Pingtung
Would China attack Taiwan during the American lame duck period? For months, there have been worries that Beijing would seek to take advantage of an American president slowed by age and a potentially chaotic transition to make a move on Taiwan. In the wake of an American election that ended without drama, that far-fetched scenario will likely prove purely hypothetical. But there is a crisis brewing elsewhere in Asia — one with which US president-elect Donald Trump may have to deal during his first days in office. Tensions between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea have been at
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hypersonic missile carried a simple message to the West over Ukraine: Back off, and if you do not, Russia reserves the right to hit US and British military facilities. Russia fired a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile known as “Oreshnik,” or Hazel Tree, at Ukraine on Thursday in what Putin said was a direct response to strikes on Russia by Ukrainian forces with US and British missiles. In a special statement from the Kremlin just after 8pm in Moscow that day, the Russian president said the war was escalating toward a global conflict, although he avoided any nuclear
A nation has several pillars of national defense, among them are military strength, energy and food security, and national unity. Military strength is very much on the forefront of the debate, while several recent editorials have dealt with energy security. National unity and a sense of shared purpose — especially while a powerful, hostile state is becoming increasingly menacing — are problematic, and would continue to be until the nation’s schizophrenia is properly managed. The controversy over the past few days over former navy lieutenant commander Lu Li-shih’s (呂禮詩) usage of the term “our China” during an interview about his attendance
Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), the son of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee Politburo member and former Chongqing Municipal Communist Party secretary Bo Xilai (薄熙來), used his British passport to make a low-key entry into Taiwan on a flight originating in Canada. He is set to marry the granddaughter of former political heavyweight Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政), the founder of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital in Yilan County’s Luodong Township (羅東). Bo Xilai is a former high-ranking CCP official who was once a challenger to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for the chairmanship of the CCP. That makes Bo Guagua a bona fide “third-generation red”