It happened almost 50 years ago, during the White Terror period, but finally justice has triumphed. The Kaohsiung District Court yesterday ordered the government to pay approximately NT$3 million in compensation to a former English teacher who was jailed in 1951 for 616 days. His crime? Owning a copy of Karl Marx' book titled Dialectical Materialism.
Ko Chi-hua (
After his trial, which lasted for a month, Ko, was sent first to a Garrison Command detention center in Taipei for "thought reform" and later transferred to a jail on Green Island.
According to his lawyer, Ko was illegally detained during the White Terror period and the case against him never went through an open trial. He was released from prison on April 6, 1953.
In later years, Ko wrote several English-language reference books and became a well-known English teacher trainer.
Where did the Chinese come from?
"According to ancient tradition," Anthony Spaeth writes in a recent issue of Time magazine, "the Chinese were savages until various sages came along and taught them how to contruct shelters, use fire and cultivate crops. The last of these sages was the Yellow Emperor Huangdi, the father of Chinese civilization."
That's the traditional view. The new scientific view, part of the Chinese Human Genome Diversity Project, takes a different approach and comes up with this verdict: Chinese, like the rest of humanity, evolved from Africa.
"They migrated eastward along the Indian Ocean and made their way to China via Southeast Asia," Spaeth writes.
Truth or mere speculation? Read the article and come to your own conclusions.
Tank Town along the Potomac
What do you call a city with a lot of think tanks? According to a recent article in the Washington Post, Washington has a new nickname: "Tank Town." It's a place "awash in smart thoughts and prescient predictions," the Post noted.
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
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
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
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