The upper house of the Irish legislature has passed a contentious Finance Bill needed to comply with terms of a massive international bailout package for the country, Irish state television reported.
The Finance Bill was designed to comply with the terms of an EU-IMF loan, which is contingent on Ireland cutting 15 billion euros (US$20.56 billion) from its deficit spending over the coming four years and the country imposing the harshest cuts this year.
The vote was 30-20, Raidio Teilifis Eireanne said.
The bill’s passage was expected. Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen has said he will seek dissolution of the legislature tomorrow, setting the stage for a national election. Cowen’s Fianna Fail is expected to take a drubbing.
The party has long dominated, but Cowen, who was Ireland’s finance minister from 2004 to 2008, is widely blamed for Ireland’s stunning slide.
The measure included a 90 percent tax on bonuses paid to employees of Irish banks needing state support to survive after a runaway property market collapsed.
The government proposed the tax last month following uproar over news that Allied Irish Bank, the beneficiary of a 3.7 billion euro bailout, was about to pay bonuses to more than 2,000 executives totaling 40 million euros.
The idea was dropped, but revived on Wednesday to secure the votes of two independent legislators, clinching passage of the bill in the lower house.
The parliament has already approved cuts in welfare benefits, the minimum wage and salaries of Cabinet ministers, and it has raised school fees. However, the Finance Bill will increase income taxes across the 2 million-strong work force, raising effective tax levels to 41 percent or more.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts