■ Oil prices
SIA adds fuel surcharge
Singapore Airlines (SIA) plans to introduce a fuel surcharge on passenger fares for the so-called Kangaroo Route which covers trips from Australia and New Zealand to Britain and vice versa. SIA's announcement in a statement late Monday followed moves by Qantas Airways and Air New Zealand, which began to pass on the cost of higher jet fuel prices to passengers via a surcharge. "Singapore Airlines is monitoring and reviewing the situation of whether to implement a surcharge on passenger fares," SIA said. "However, SIA intends to follow the initiatives taken by national carriers on the Kangaroo Route and apply a fuel-related surcharge in the Australian, New Zealand and UK markets in the coming days."
■ Oil
Price declines slightly
Oil prices paused from a five-session rally yesterday as some players took profit from this week's run up to 21-year highs on nagging worries that supplies could not meet surging demand. US light crude slipped US$0.28, or 0.7 percent, to US$41.27 a barrel, just US$0.58 off Monday's intraday peak of US$41.85, which marked the highest level since futures were launched on the New York Mercantile Exchange in 1983. Ministers from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will meet on the sidelines of a producers-consumers conference in Amsterdam starting on Saturday.
■ Steel
Chinese demand surging
China, which uses more steel each year than the US, Japan and South Korea combined, will account for more than a third of global demand within seven years, BlueScope Steel Ltd chief executive Kirby Adams told a meeting in Sydney. China's annual steel demand may reach 385 million tonnes in 2010, from 233 million tonnes last year, said Adams, who is also chairman of the International Iron & Steel Institute. Increased use of steel in the world's most populous nation will boost global demand by more than a quarter to 1.09 billion tonnes in the same period.
■ Japan
GDP grows 1.4 percent
Japan's GDP grew a better than expected 1.4 percent in the three months to March from the previous quarter, the Cabinet Office said yesterday. On an annualized basis, the world's second-biggest economy expanded 5.6 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, it said. Private economists on average had forecast 0.9 percent quarterly growth, or an annualized rate of 3.5 percent. In the past fiscal year to March, the economy grew 3.2 percent, well above the government's official forecast of 2.0 percent and up from 1.1 percent growth recorded in the previous year.
■ Mobile phones
AT&T to re-enter market
AT&T Corp, the US' largest long-distance carrier, will start offering a mobile phone service using Sprint Corp's wireless network, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the situation. AT&T may package the service under the AT&T Wireless brand, which it will soon regain the rights to after it closes the sale of AT&T Wireless Services Inc to Cingular Wireless LLC for US$41 billion, the paper said. AT&T plans to forge additional resale agreements with other carriers, securing access to the strongest cell phone networks in particular markets, the Journal reported.
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