■MINING
Xstrata drops Lonmin bid
Anglo-Swiss mining giant Xstrata PLC dropped its US$10 billion bid for British rival Lonmin PLC on Wednesday, saying the turmoil on the financial markets made a takeover of the world’s No. 3 platinum producer too risky. “The current lack of clarity and certainty regarding the future availability of credit introduces significant risks into the financing package available to Xstrata,” Xstrata chief executive Mick Davis said in a statement posted on its Web site. Xstrata, based in Zug, Switzerland, had planned to partly finance the takeover with bank loans.
■INVESTMENT
Google drop blamed on error
The last-minute pounding Wall Street gave Google’s shares was caused by “erroneous orders” that NASDAQ says it is canceling. Minutes before the closing bell on Tuesday, a flurry of trades sent Google stock plummeting 10 percent to close at US$341.43. NASDAQ said erroneous orders routed to NASDAQ from another market center were responsible for the high volume of trades. The exchange raised Google’s closing price to US$400.52 — a 5 percent gain for the day — and canceled all trades below that amount and above US$425.29 between 3:57pm and 4:02pm EDT.
■THEME PARKS
HK Disneyland clears loans
Hong Kong Disneyland said yesterday it has cleared its commercial loans of about HK$3.3 billion (US$425 million) thanks to help from The Walt Disney Co, which provided a cheap financial arrangement. The loan payment, which was due on Tuesday, removed a significant obstacle in the theme park’s expansion as it wiped out worries that Hong Kong Disneyland would have to refinance in an increasingly tight credit market and accept less favorable terms.
■INVESTMENT
Man arrested over rumor
A second Hong Kong man has been arrested for spreading Internet rumors that a city bank would be shut down, police said yesterday, amid a jittery investor environment that saw a recent bank run. The 18-year-old was arrested after he posted a message in an online forum last Thursday that an unnamed financial institution was in trouble, police said. It follows the arrest of a 34-year-old man after he posted an item encouraging people to take out their deposits from an unnamed bank.
■ECONOMY
China must help US: Slim
Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim, one of the world’s richest men, said on Tuesday that China should lead rescue efforts for the US financial crisis, and that worldwide stock markets needed better rules. “China is now the most important country to help responsibly in this crisis,” Slim told journalists at a meeting in Mexico City. “China has great liquidity, large resources, surpluses in its current accounts and a lot of capital flow,” he said.
■ECONOMY
Tankan index turns negative
Japanese business confidence turned negative for the first time in five years as executives fretted about escalating turmoil on global financial markets, a key central bank survey showed yesterday. The malaise in corporate boardrooms deepened for a fourth straight quarter amid growing fears of a recession in Asia’s largest economy. Confidence among big manufacturers tumbled to minus-three last month from plus-five the previous quarter, hitting the lowest level since June 2003, according to the Bank of Japan’s Tankan survey of more than 10,000 firms.
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