New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, arrived back in Taiwan on Friday last week after an eight-day visit to the US.KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hailed the trip as a success, with Hou visiting New York City, New Jersey, Washington and Sa
The Taipei City Government this month released a report that said the partial collapse of residential buildings next to a construction site in the Dazhi (大直) area in Taipei’s Zhongshan District (中山) was because Kee Tai Properties Co (基泰建設) failed to take action after warnings from a supervisory syst
A blaze at a Launch Technologies Co (明揚國際) factory in Pingtung County resulted in heavy casualties among firefighters and employees. Launch Technologies and its parent company, Advanced Group (明安國際), in an online news conference promised to set up a trust fund to compensate people affected by the di
EDITORIAL CARTOON
Last spring, my tween was begging for more independence, starting with being allowed to walk home from school alone. The walk involves crossing a few busy streets. I was hesitant; she does not have a phone, so she had no way to contact me if something went wrong.However, we practiced a few times wit
Ever since Microsoft Corp put US$10 billion into OpenAI in January and began integrating ChatGPT into its products, people have been watching closely to see how its biggest tech rivals would respond. Google scrambled to release its chatbot, Bard. Meta Platforms Inc launched its own large-language mo
The Washington Post’s famous slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness,” is sadly coming true in many parts of the US. The digital age has shattered the business model of newspapers, turning many communities into “news deserts” with no local journalism. About 2,500 daily or weekly newspapers in the US hav
In March, Lu Chien-yi (盧倩儀), a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, and other academics caused a stir by forming an “anti-war” group, which called for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine; an end to “American militarism and economic sanctions” against Russia;
The ultimate end of a situation in which communists are in charge of a capitalist economy is economic depression, with China’s economic woes the prime example. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has suspended monthly reports on youth unemployment, which had previously been at a record high, go
China’s youth unemployment rate, after rising every month this year, reached a record high of 21.3 percent in June. Faced with hypercompetitive work environments and grim job prospects, many of the country’s young workers and middle-class professionals have embraced the “lying flat” movement — which
Based on the EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation that took effect in January, the EU started to investigate subsidies for Chinese electric vehicle (EV) companies. The investigation was launched 10 days before the EU-China High-level Economic and Trade Dialogue. Although Chinese and European vice preside
EDITORIAL CARTOON
Europe’s establishment has failed again in dealing with the region’s migrant crisis. Boatloads of asylum seekers from North Africa have converged on the Italian island of Lampedusa, providing a new round of ammunition for Europe’s far-right and nativist political groups, widening the gulf between Eu
A coup by any other name would seem suspect. Nonetheless, the US still refuses to call the military takeover that took place two months ago in Niger a “coup.” That is because this label would legally require the US to halt military cooperation with a strategically located country in Africa’s Sahel r
To most of the world, the Indian government’s response to Canada’s charge that it might have sponsored the murder of a Sikh activist in British Columbia must appear befuddling. India has denied the charges, for which Canada provided no evidence publicly as yet.The Indian government has responded by
India has long been touted as one of the world’s top emerging economies, and was a BRIC nation — Brazil, Russia, India and China — when it formed in 2001, expanding to BRICS in 2010 with the addition of South Africa. For a long time, India trailed China in the speed and size of its economic developm
During World War II, German U-boats almost succeeded in bringing Britain to its knees. US Navy submarines saw their greatest success against Japan with the sinking of more than 500 vessels in the Taiwan Strait. The complete blockade of Japan with US submarines, US Navy aircraft and an aerial mining
Since former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August last year triggered China’s drills in six ocean zones around Taiwan, the probability of a military confrontation across the Taiwan Strait has escalated substantially. From China’s perspective, the Pelosi incide
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda on Friday last week signed a decree stripping retired Russian Olympic figure skater Margarita Drobiazko of her Lithuanian citizenship for her public support of the Kremlin waging war in Ukraine. Drobiazko, who won a bronze medal for Lithuania at the world champio
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