The ceasefire in the Middle East is a rare cause for celebration in that war-torn region. Hamas has released all of the living hostages it captured on Oct. 7, 2023, regular combat operations have ceased, and Israel has drawn closer to its Arab neighbors. Israel, with crucial support from the United
Three decades ago, I could not even finish a 600m run and was mocked by my classmates for being effeminate because I did not like sports. To my utter shock, I was drafted into the Marine Corps, and for a three-year term, while others were only required to serve two. I stood there speechless as the c
The number of celebrities involved in the military draft dodging scandal has continued to rise. Prosecutors and police during the third round of probes took several celebrities into custody — including actors Hsiu Chieh-kai (修杰楷) and Chen Bo-lin (陳柏霖), boy band Energy member Chang Shu-wei (張書偉) and
Beijing has come out in support of incoming Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), particularly her call for Taiwanese to proudly say “I am Chinese.” It marks a shift in their Taiwan strategy, moving away from military threats and toward the infiltration of institutions an
EDITORIAL CARTOON
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has received US$145 billion in international financial assistance. While this support, generously provided by partner countries and other donors, has been immensely valuable, it comes with strings attached. The most significant restriction
Despite its geopolitical weight, Southeast Asia has rarely been more divided. In separately seeking tariff relief from the US, nations from Malaysia to Indonesia have undermined their collective leverage. They have a chance to present a united front at a regional forum this weekend — a move that wou
An outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) a week ago disrupted apps and Web sites around the world, affecting more than 2,000 companies and leaving millions of users unable to access apps such as Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, Duolingo and Amazon itself. Removing the tech from our tech-dependent existence l
Taiwan Retrocession Day is observed on Oct. 25 every year. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government removed it from the list of annual holidays immediately following the first successful transition of power in 2000, but the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-led opposition reinstated it this y
On Oct. 3, the Ministry of Economic Affairs approved a 3.5 percent pay raise for employees of state-run enterprises — Taiwan Power Co (Taipower), CPC Corp (CPC), Taiwan Sugar Corp (Taisugar) and Taiwan Water Corp — which would take effect starting from next year. On Sept. 26, the Ministry of Labor a
In 1925, Mao Zedong (毛澤東) published his article “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” (中國社會各階級的分析), which outlined six distinct classes and spelled out his thinking. He wrote that “our enemies are all those in league with imperialism — the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the b
In the past few weeks, I have been following the controversy surrounding Holger Chen (陳之漢) — commonly known as Kuan Chang (館長) — the fitness influencer and YouTuber who, during a live stream, suggested the beheading of President William Lai (賴清德). The Taipei Times covered the story closely, detailin
Voting for competenceAs the outer rim of Typhoon Fengshen swept across northern Taiwan, bringing torrential rain in its wake, many feared that New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止) would once again be flooded. Fortunately, it was spared as the Yuanshanzih (員山子) flood diversion in Rueifang District
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An international coalition of artificial intelligence (AI) labs and cloud providers just did something refreshingly practical: They pooled their compute resources to make Apertus, a Swiss-built open-source large language model (LLM), freely accessible to people around the world.The queries that Aper
During his 13 years in power, Xi Jinping (習近平) has steadily tightened his grip on all levers of authority in China — the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the state apparatus, and the military — while expanding surveillance into virtually every aspect of society. Yet his recent purge of nine top-rankin
Just before lunchtime on Tuesday, Alphabet Inc’s stock price took a sudden 4.8 percent tumble. The bad news? OpenAI was about to announce its long-awaited — some might say late — entry into the artificial intelligence (AI) browser wars.However, as OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and his colleagues ran
A Reuters report published this week highlighted the struggles of migrant mothers in Taiwan through the story of Marian Duhapa, a Filipina forced to leave her infant behind to work in Taiwan and support her family.After becoming pregnant in Taiwan last year, Duhapa lost her job and lived in a shelte
Landslides occurred on both sides of the mountains near the Swallow Grotto Trail (Yanzikou, 燕子口步道) in Taroko National Park in Hualien County, forming a barrier lake in the Liwu River (立霧溪). As water levels rose rapidly on Friday last week, the Hualien branch of the Forestry and Nature Conservation A
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