■ Education
Reading festival continues
The Chengpin Reading Festival is in progress around the nation, with a large variety of activities underway, organizers said yesterday. Chengpin is a major bookstore chain viewed by some people in Taiwan as a "cultural arena." The topic of the annual festival is "a new vision of the world" and to present the topic, the bookstore has organized a series of activities, including concerts, dancing, film screenings and seminars, in addition to book exhibitions. The event will run until Aug. 21. The bookstore was slated to sponsor an outdoor concert in Taipei City today.
■ Diplomacy
Hsieh plans October tour
Prime Minister Frank Hsieh said (謝長廷) he plans to embark on a diplomatic tour in October and may make transit stops in Japan and the US. In the face of China's diplomatic embargo, Hsieh said he plans to visit one or more of Taiwan's diplomatic allies in October. However, he said, the itinerary has not yet been fleshed out. Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials said planning is already underway, with Paraguay the most likely destination. Paraguay is Taiwan's only diplomatic ally in South America. President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) is scheduled to visit Nicaragua in September to attend a biennial summit meeting with the heads of state of the ROC's Central American allies. Chen may also visit several allies in the Caribbean.
■ Diplomacy
Costa Rican leader to visit
President Abel Pacheco from Costa Rica, one of Taiwan's few diplomatic allies, is scheduled to visit the island next week, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said yesterday. Pacheco, accompanied by his wife, will lead a 14-member delegation on a six-day visit to Taiwan for the inauguration of the Democratic Pacific Union (DPU) founded by Taiwan's Vice-President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮), the ministry said in a statement. Pacheco is expected to deliver a speech at the union's opening ceremony on Aug. 14 and ink a joint communique with his Taiwanese counterpart, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), it said. The DPU is an international NGO grouping some of Taiwan's diplomatic allies in Latin America and the Pacific with representatives from the US, Japan and Australia. It is committed to promoting democracy, peace and prosperity.
■ Education
Whiz kids challenge US
Four mental arithmetic youngsters from Taiwan will visit five cities in the US later this month to demonstrate how they can calculate even faster than an electronic calculator. Tseng Chun-chao (曾春兆), president of the Association of Chinese Childrens' Mental Arithmetic Development, said on Thursday that at the invitation of the National Education Association, he will lead the team of four youngsters aged between nine and 17 to visit Dallas, New York, Boston, Atlanta and Los Angeles from Aug. 19 to Aug. 28. The four youngsters will demonstrate their abilities in the hope of helping education officials in the US promote arithmetic. To impress their American spectators, Tseng said they welcome any American citizens between the ages of 9 and 100, using calculators, to challenge Liu Yu-ming (劉育名), a nine-year-old student. If they can beat him, Tseng promised NT$50,000 or a free 10-day trip to Taiwan. Liu, a second grader in an elementary school in Hsinchu, northern Taiwan, is able to complete 23 calculations in less than three seconds.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was wooing leaders from across Africa with a banquet on Wednesday night, King Mswati III of Eswatini was notably absent. That is because the kingdom — about the size of New Jersey and with just 1.2 million people — is one of Taiwan’s remaining dozen diplomatic allies. That means Eswatini does not participate in Xi’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, the centerpiece of China’s diplomatic outreach to Africa, which was held in Beijing this week. The landlocked nation, which sits between Mozambique and South Africa, is the last holdout in Beijing’s seven-plus decade mission to make Africa
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