■ Labor
Musicians continue strike
Musicians on strike against the use of taped music on Broadway kept New York theaters in the dark for a third day Sunday in a costly standoff dealing the local tourist industry yet another blow. Among the shows affected were long-running hits like The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, The Lion King and Rent. "Who wants to sing karaoke?" asked Lucille Decristofaro, who sang in a Broadway production of Les Miserables. "The whole point of Broadway is live music, a sound you can only get live." The stoppage shuttered 18 musicals and three more in rehearsals after actors and stagehands surprised producers by observing the musicians' picket line on Friday night. Cabaret is the only Broadway musical still on stage, due to its separate arrangement with the union.
■ E-government
Giants target Asia-Pacific
An alliance between Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft is targeting the burgeoning Asia-Pacific e-government market, a spokesman said in a published report yesterday. The Keystone Alliance is seeking to enter the e-government domain in a big way in the region, said Jason Fedder, Intel Asia-Pacific's director. He told the Business Times the alliance, set up in December 2001 by the IT giants, plans to deliver affordable e-government solutions. The trio initially targeted the financial industry, offering solutions to leading banking and capital markets in the Asia-Pacific area. Ambitious e-government strategies have been launched with China, Australia and Singapore.
■ Employment
EADS to cut 1,700 jobs
European Aeronautic Defense & Space Co, the primary owner of Airbus SAS, plans to cut an additional 1,700 jobs by 2005 as it reorganizes its space operations, La Tribune said, citing unidentified union officials. The job cuts will be shared between France, Germany and the UK, the French daily said. Seven hundred people will leave the company this year and next year, while the departures of a further 1,000, scheduled for 2005, will be announced in three months, the newspaper said. The French company will cut 1,600 jobs in 2002-2003.
■ Matchmaking
Resumes of females sold
Businesses in Shandong, China, have been caught selling the resumes of attractive female job applicants to a matchmaking agency, a news report said yesterday. The dating agency paid between 30 and 100 yuan (US$3.60 to US$12) for each resume and passed them on to clients seeking marriageable girls. A police investigation was launched after several girls reported receiving pestering phone calls from strangers, the South China Morning Post reported.
■ Crude oil
OPEC pumping at capacity
UAE oil minister Obaid Al-Nasseri said yesterday that it would be difficult for OPEC to increase production as the 11-nation group is already at almost full capacity. "I think everybody is producing almost about" full capacity, Al-Nasseri told reporters when he arrived in Vienna for a meeting today of the OPEC. Key oil producers Venezuela and Algeria said here Sunday they believed OPEC had enough room for manoeuvre to avoid a supply shortage in the event of a US-led war on Iraq. Al-Nasseri said: "We have to consider the fundamentals of the market before we think about the war."
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
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