■AUTOMOBILES
Toyota to keep it in family
The grandson of Toyota Motor Corp’s founder will take the helm of the automaker in June, newspapers said yesterday. Toyota’s top executives will hold a board meeting as early as Monday to endorse the appointment of Akio Toyoda, said the Nikkei daily, a top business newspaper, citing no sources. Apart from the Nikkei daily, Japan’s Yomiuri newspaper and the Mainichi daily said in their evening editions yesterday that Toyoda will take over the top job in June. It will mark the first time in 14 years that a member of Toyota’s founding family will run the auto giant. Neither of the papers cited any sources.
■CHINA
Plan receives revamp
China has updated an ambitious blueprint to aggressively revamp the country’s key manufacturing region — a plan that has already helped cause many low-end factories to move or shut down. The sweeping new plan, released on Thursday in Beijing, covers the next 12 years and targets the booming Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province. The National Development and Reform Commission says the general goal is to transform the region into a base for advanced manufacturing, innovation and heavy industry. The plan calls for the creation of 10 China-based multinationals, each with annual sales of US$20 billion by 2020. It will be home to two to three big automakers with output worth more than 100 billion yuan (US$14.6 billion) each by 2020.
■TELECOMS
Palm Inc unveils smartphone
Palm Inc, a pioneer in handheld devices but suffering hard times lately, unveiled a touch-screen smartphone on Thursday that impressed reviewers and sent its stock price soaring. The Palm Pre, released at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, runs on a new operating system, the Palm webOS mobile platform, developed by the company. Palm said the Pre would be available through US carrier Sprint by this summer. It did not reveal the price for the device, which notably allows users to move seamlessly from one application to another like with a desktop computer and run multiple applications at the same time.
■TELECOMS
Skype turns to cellphones
Skype, which brought cheap and free calls to the Internet, is doing the same for cellphones. The Web-based voice and text messaging service owned by auction giant eBay announced on Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show that it was bringing its Internet communications software to cellphones. It said it had developed a “lite” version of Skype that can be downloaded for free to more than 100 models of Java-enabled cellphones or those using Google’s open-source Android platform. The T-Mobile G1 runs Android software, while phones from LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsugn and Sony Ericsson are Java-enabled.
■COMPUTERS
Dell to cut Irish workforce
US computer maker Dell Inc announced on Thursday it will slash its Irish work force and shift its European manufacturing operations to Poland in a move certain to undermine Ireland’s recession-hit economy. Dell is Ireland’s second-largest corporate employer, its biggest exporter and in recent years has contributed about 5 percent to the national GDP. Economists warn that each Dell job underpins another four to five jobs in Ireland. Managers told its approximately 4,300 Irish employees that 1,900 of them would lose their jobs between this April and January next year.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
CHINA REACTS: The patrol and reconnaissance plane ‘transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,’ the 7th Fleet said, while Taipei said it saw nothing unusual The US 7th Fleet yesterday said that a US Navy P-8A Poseidon flew through the Taiwan Strait, a day after US and Chinese defense heads held their first talks since November 2022 in an effort to reduce regional tensions. The patrol and reconnaissance plane “transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,” the 7th Fleet said in a news release. “By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations.” In a separate statement, the Ministry of National Defense said that it monitored nearby waters and airspace as the aircraft
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique