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.
A total lunar eclipse coinciding with the Lantern Festival on March 3 would be Taiwan’s most notable celestial event this year, the Taipei Astronomical Museum said, urging skywatchers not to miss it. There would be four eclipses worldwide this year — two solar eclipses and two lunar eclipses — the museum’s Web site says. Taiwan would be able to observe one of the lunar eclipses in its entirety on March 3. The eclipse would be visible as the moon rises at 5:50pm, already partly shaded by the Earth’s shadow, the museum said. It would peak at about 7:30pm, when the moon would
Taiwan’s Li Yu-hsiang performs in the men’s singles figure skating short program at the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday. Li finished 24th with a score of 72.41 to advance to Saturday’s free skate portion of the event. He is the first Taiwanese to qualify for the free skate of men’s singles figure skating at the Olympics since David Liu in 1992.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) yesterday held a ceremony marking the delivery of its 11th Anping-class offshore patrol vessel Lanyu (蘭嶼艦), saying it would boost Taiwan’s ability to respond to Beijing’s “gray zone” tactics. Ocean Affairs Council Deputy Minister Chang Chung-Lung (張忠龍) presided over the CGA event in the Port of Kaoshiung. Representatives of the National Security Council also attended the event. Designed for long-range and protracted patrol operations at sea, the Lanyu is a 65.4m-long and 14.8m-wide ship with a top speed of 44 knots (81.5kph) and a cruising range of 2,000 nautical miles (3704km). The vessel is equipped with a
Two siblings in their 70s were injured yesterday when they opened a parcel and it exploded, police in Yilan said, adding the brother and sister were both in stable condition. The two siblings, surnamed Hung (洪), had received the parcel two days earlier but did not open it until yesterday, the first day of the Lunar New Year holiday in Taiwan, police said. Chen Chin-cheng (陳金城), head of the Yilan County Government Police Bureau, said the package bore no postmark or names and was labeled only with the siblings’ address. Citing the findings of a
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