Since the beginning of this year, the world has faced the unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has changed the way of life familiar to everyone.
To highlight the success of the government’s relief efforts, CTBC Bank (中國信託銀行) on Sunday launched its Our Ordinary Home (家．如常) corporate video on major TV channels and social media platforms.
CTBC Bank said that it obtained permission from Taiwan’s international friends to use their remarks in the video, affirming the nation’s successful epidemic prevention measures.
Photo courtesy of CTBC Bank
The video also shows how Taiwanese battled COVID-19 in their daily lives, with the aim of conveying a message of “getting together, there is hope,” the bank said.
The video begins depicting an ordinary day in Taiwan, where students go to school and people visit restaurants when they are hungry.
This contrasts with the lives of those in other nations that have been more severely affected by the pandemic, highlighting the efforts of Taiwanese to fight the disease together and maintain their precious way of life.
This spirit stems from Taiwanese becoming accustomed to facing international predicaments alone over the decades, and people have become stronger following major historical events such as the nation withdrawing from the UN, the loss of official diplomatic relations with the US and fighting the SARS outbreak, CTBC Bank said.
The video revisits some of these historical news events and recreates the way of life of Taiwanese in the 1970s, it said.
Through the voices of former Taiwan Television Enterprise news anchor Sheng Chu-ju (盛竹如) and former Government Information Office director-general James Soong (宋楚瑜), it brings memories of the past back to life, it added.
Despite the international community’s indifference to Taiwan over the past 50 years, the nation still fulfills its responsibilities as a good global citizen and loves the rest of the world like family, CTBC Bank said.
As the effectiveness of Taiwan’s epidemic prevention measures has been mentioned many times by its international friends, CTBC Bank gained the permission of those friends, such as Canadian lawmaker Michael Cooper and Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso, to quote their remarks affirming Taiwan’s achievements.
The video also shows taxi drivers and snack bar owners working hard, and greeting their overseas relatives and friends through video messages, emphasizing that Taiwanese work hard to protect their homeland, the manifestation of the spirit of CTBC’s “We are family” brand.
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek (深度求索) is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US artificial intelligence (AI) models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News showed. In the memo, sent on Thursday to the US House of Representatives Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs.” The company said it had detected “new, obfuscated methods” designed to evade OpenAI’s defenses
NEW IMPORTS: Car dealer PG Union Corp said it would consider introducing US-made models such as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Stellantis’ RAM 1500 to Taiwan Tesla Taiwan yesterday said that it does not plan to cut its car prices in the wake of Washington and Taipei signing the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade on Thursday to eliminate tariffs on US-made cars. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz Taiwan said it is planning to lower the price of its five models imported from the US after the zero tariff comes into effect. Tesla in a statement said it has no plan to adjust the prices of the US-made Model 3, Model S and Model X as tariffs are not the only factor the automaker uses to determine pricing policies. Tesla said
Australian singer Kylie Minogue says “nothing compares” to performing live, but becoming an international wine magnate in under six years has been quite a thrill for the Spinning Around star. Minogue launched her first own-label wine in 2020 in partnership with celebrity drinks expert Paul Schaafsma, starting with a basic rose but quickly expanding to include sparkling, no-alcohol and premium rose offerings. The actress and singer has since wracked up sales of around 25 million bottles, with her carefully branded products pitched at low-to mid-range prices in dozens of countries. Britain, Australia and the United States are the biggest markets. “Nothing compares to performing
AUSPICIOUS TIMING: Ostensibly looking to spike the guns of domestic rivals, ByteDance launched the upgrade to coincide with the Lunar New Year China’s ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) has rolled out its Doubao 2.0 model, an upgrade of the country’s most widely used artificial-intelligence (AI) app, the company announced on Saturday. ByteDance is one of several Chinese firms hoping to generate overseas and domestic buzz around its new AI models during the Lunar New Year holiday, which began yesterday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese partake in family gatherings in their hometowns. The company, like rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), was caught off-guard by DeepSeek’s (深度求索) meteoric rise to global fame during last year’s Spring Festival, when Silicon Valley and investors worldwide were
RSS