HONG KONG
Chief forced to resign
The head of a Hong Kong sports association resigned yesterday after making a comment that the government said contravened the “one China” principle by implying Taiwanese independence. Josephine Ip (葉永玉), chairperson of the Hong Kong, China Weightlifting and Powerlifting Association, was criticized this month after giving a speech that listed “Chinese Taipei” among the “countries” taking part in a tournament in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government on May 11 said that Ip’s speech was “absolutely unacceptable” and gave rise to a “suspected violation of the ‘one China’ principle,” adding that local sports officials would investigate. The association yesterday said that Ip has stepped down “due to personal reasons.” The body earlier apologized for the “serious oversight” and said Ip bungled the speech which had meant to refer to Taiwan as a “region.” Critics such as pro-Beijing politician Adrian Ho (何敬康) cast doubt on the explanation, pointing to a similar comment Ip made in March that referred to Hong Kong as “a relatively small country.” Last year, Hong Kong’s sports associations were told to include “China” in their official names or risk having funding pulled.
CRIME
Chris Wang jailed
Actor Chris Wang (宥勝) was sentenced to eight months in jail by the Taipei District Court yesterday for assaulting a woman. The court said that Wang, 41, was a well-known entertainer who attracted considerable media attention at the time of the incident in 2016 and that he had a superior-subordinate relationship with the woman. It added that Wang exploited the woman’s trust and his violent actions severely infringed upon her sexual autonomy and bodily integrity. The court said that Wang contacted the victim and witnesses of the case before the cross-examination while court proceedings were still ongoing, showing a lack of sincere remorse. This led to the court deciding to impose an eight-month jail sentence on Wang. The ruling can be appealed. The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office indicted Wang in November last year.
TECHNOLOGY
Taiwan LLM to be expanded
Taiwan’s self-built large language model, Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE), is to have its application fields further expanded to accelerate improvements in industry productivity and public sector efficiency, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said on Thursday. Cabinet spokesperson Chen Shi-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference that as an indispensable partner in the global semiconductor supply chain, Taiwan must keep up with artificial intelligence (AI) developments. TAIDE was initiated by the National Science and Technology Council in April last year to create a foundational model for a traditional Chinese generative AI dialogue engine specifically for Taiwan. According to a council report on TAIDE presented during a Cabinet meeting, a TAIDE model based on Meta’s Llama 2 (Large Language Model Meta AI) model (TAIDE-LX-7B) was released for commercial use on April 15, and another version for research only (TAIDE-LX-13B) has also been released. Both models have excelled in a variety of tasks, such as English to Chinese-language translations, with results comparable to Open AI’s ChatGPT 3.5, the council said. It added that the TAIDE team is working with industries and academia to develop diversified applications, including agricultural knowledge searches and a Hoklo-English AI chatbot for elementary and junior-high schools.
COLLABORATION: As TSMC is building an advanced wafer fab in Dresden, Germany, it needs to build a comprehensive supply chain in Europe, Joseph Wu said Taiwan is planning to team up with the Czech Republic to build a semiconductor cluster in the European country, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said on Friday. Wu, who led a Taiwanese delegation at the annual GLOBSEC Forum held in Prague from Friday to today, said in a news conference that Taiwan seeks to foster cooperation between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and its counterparts in Czechia. Such cooperation is expected to transform the country into one of the most important semiconductor clusters in Europe over the next three to five years, he added. As TSMC is building an advanced
A joint declaration by Pacific leaders was reissued yesterday morning with mentions of Taiwan removed after China slammed an earlier version as a “mistake” that “must be corrected.” After five days of talks in Tonga, a “cleared” communique was released on Friday that reaffirmed a 30-year-old agreement allowing Taiwan to take part in the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). However, the wording immediately raised the ire of Chinese diplomats, who piled pressure on Pacific leaders to amend the document. The forum reissued the communique without explanation yesterday morning, conspicuously deleting the paragraph concerning the bloc’s “relations with Taiwan.” “It must be a
A tropical depression in waters east of the Philippines could develop into a tropical storm as soon as today and bring rainfall as it approaches, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday, while issuing heat warnings for 14 cities and counties. Weather model simulations show that there are still considerable differences in the path that the tropical depression is projected to take. It might pass through the Bashi Channel to the South China Sea or turn northeast and move toward the sea south of Japan, CWA forecaster Yeh Chih-chun (葉致均) said, adding that the uncertainty of its movement is still high,
TAIWANESE INNOVATION: The ‘Seawool’ fabric generates about NT$200m a year, with the bulk of it sourced by clothing brands operating in Europe and the US Growing up on Taiwan’s west coast where mollusk farming is popular, Eddie Wang saw discarded oyster shells transformed from waste to function — a memory that inspired him to create a unique and environmentally friendly fabric called “Seawool.” Wang remembered that residents of his seaside hometown of Yunlin County used discarded oyster shells that littered the streets during the harvest as insulation for their homes. “They burned the shells and painted the residue on the walls. The houses then became warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” the 42-year-old said at his factory in Tainan. “So I was
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