■ELECTRONICS
Amazon, Penguin sign pact
Online retailer Amazon said on Wednesday it had reached an agreement with publisher Penguin on pricing of electronic books for the Kindle e-reader. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. “We have an agreement with Penguin and will soon be offering their complete selection of digital books to Kindle customers,” an Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement. With the arrival last month of Apple’s iPad, a number of publishers have been seeking to renegotiate their deals with Amazon, which set prices for new releases for the Kindle at US$9.99.
■AUTOMOBILES
Strikes shut Honda China
Japan’s Honda Motor said yesterday that production at all four of its vehicle manufacturing plants in China had halted after workers at an auto parts factory went on strike. The shutdown was not expected to last long, but it was not known when production would resume, Honda’s Beijing-based spokesman Zhu Linjie (朱林杰) said. “The company is negotiating with workers in coordination with the local government,” he said. The assembly lines shut down due to a lack of parts caused by a strike at the company’s auto parts facility in Foshan city in Guangdong Province, he said.
■MUSIC
US probes Apple behavior
The US Justice Department is examining Apple’s tactics in the market for digital music in a preliminary antitrust inquiry, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. The newspaper, citing “several people briefed on the conversations,” said department staff members had talked to music labels and Internet music companies as part of the inquiry, which it said was “in its early stages.” The Times said the conversations had revolved broadly around the dynamics of selling music online.
■PHARMACEUTICALS
French firm eyes Japan ties
French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi-Aventis said yesterday it was considering a tie-up with a Japanese partner in an effort to position itself in a fast-growing generic drug market. “We are interested in the Japanese market for generic drugs and we are currently in discussions with potential partners,” CEO Christopher Viehbacher said at a press conference in Tokyo.
■BANKING
Treasury sells Citi shares
The US Treasury Department said on Wednesday it raised US$6.2 billion from the sale of 1.5 billion shares of Citigroup stock it received as part of the government’s rescue of the bank. The government sold the shares at a profit as it seeks to recoup the costs of the US$700 billion financial bailout. The sales took place over the past month and represented 19.5 percent of the government’s holdings of Citigroup common stock. Treasury said it had started a second round of stock sales through its agent, Morgan Stanley. That will involve an additional 1.5 billion shares.
■ECONOMY
Manila posts 7.3% growth
The Philippine economy grew 7.3 percent from a year earlier in the first quarter, its fastest growth in three years, boosted by increased consumer and government spending, improved exports and remittances from overseas Filipino workers. The growth, which was a big improvement on an expansion of 0.5 percent a year earlier, was the fastest since the second quarter of 2007, the National Statistical Coordination Board said yesterday.
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