Silicon Alley, Silicon Saxony, Silicon Roundabout ... Russia is not alone in its plans to emulate California as a global technology hub.
Thanks to its proximity to Wall Street’s cash, Manhattan’s Silicon Alley was close to overtaking Silicon Valley before the dotcom bubble burst in 2000. Now Manhattan is thriving again with startups, including gossip site Gawker in SoHo, and eBay and Facebook are moving in.
The auction site expects to expand its New York office to more than 200 people and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said she was looking to “hire as much talent” as she could in the Big Apple.
Tech is also the talk of various cities in Germany. Berlin, which is said to host about 400 startups and regularly holds events designed to propel them into being fully grown companies, is billing itself, rather unimaginatively, as “Silicon Berlin.”
Munich, which hasn’t yet come up with a name to describe its tech-friendliness, claims more than 55,000 people work in research and development within a few kilometers of the city center.
Max Nathan, a research fellow at research center LSE Cities in London, believes there are many parallels between Munich and California’s bay area.
“Both have shifted from being mainly rural communities to high-tech hubs. Both offer a strong economy and an excellent quality of life — something that’s helped keep people in the area,” he said.
Dresden has copied Berlin and Munich, but given itself the rather catchier name of Silicon Saxony. Almost 300 companies, many involved in solar power, have signed up to the region’s industry agreement.
Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) led a bipartisan delegation to Taiwan in late February. During their various meetings with Taiwan’s leaders, this delegation never missed an opportunity to emphasize the strength of their cross-party consensus on issues relating to Taiwan and China. Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi are leaders of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Their instruction upon taking the reins of the committee was to preserve China issues as a last bastion of bipartisanship in an otherwise deeply divided Washington. They have largely upheld their pledge. But in doing so, they have performed the
It is well known that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) ambition is to rejuvenate the Chinese nation by unification of Taiwan, either peacefully or by force. The peaceful option has virtually gone out of the window with the last presidential elections in Taiwan. Taiwanese, especially the youth, are resolved not to be part of China. With time, this resolve has grown politically stronger. It leaves China with reunification by force as the default option. Everyone tells me how and when mighty China would invade and overpower tiny Taiwan. However, I have rarely been told that Taiwan could be defended to
It should have been Maestro’s night. It is hard to envision a film more Oscar-friendly than Bradley Cooper’s exploration of the life and loves of famed conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. It was a prestige biopic, a longtime route to acting trophies and more (see Darkest Hour, Lincoln, and Milk). The film was a music biopic, a subgenre with an even richer history of award-winning films such as Ray, Walk the Line and Bohemian Rhapsody. What is more, it was the passion project of cowriter, producer, director and actor Bradley Cooper. That is the kind of multitasking -for-his-art overachievement that Oscar
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