Calculated by the lunar calendar and filtered through Taiwanese tradition, President Lee Teng-hui (
In fact, Lee is only 79 this year, but as Taiwanese custom holds that the number nine is an inauspicious sign, every birthday containing the unlucky number as the second digit is automatically skipped over.
As KMT heavyweights gathered yesterday for the party's weekly Central Standing Committee, they greeted the president heartily as they filed into the party's headquarters.
Later, as Council for Economic Planning and Development chairman Chiang Pin-kung (
"May chairman Lee be healthy and strong on his birthday!" Chiang declared.
In fact, high-ranking party officials said later that they had arranged to have a five-layer cake delivered to mark the occasion, as the 80th is considered a particularly significant birthday.
Lee, however, refused to have any of it, and was quoted as saying that there should be a distinction between public and private occasions.
The party officials had no choice but to make other arrangements, relying on symbolism instead of words. A party official managed to get the president to accept something at the end of the meeting: a "birthday peach."
Two sets of triplets born at Linkou hospital
Two women gave birth to triplets at the Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital (
In the first delivery, Yeh Lih-ling (
Chung and her husband told reporters that they were especially pleased with the arrival of their three "millennium babies" because the pregnancy was the result of a fifth try at artificial insemination. Four of the six newborns are doing fine, doctors said, although two of them are in the intensive care unit because they had low birth-weights.
E-mail news tips and stories to:
offthebeat@taipeitimes.com
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has