Taipei Times

2 days ago | taipeitimes.com | John Cheng

By John Cheng At this year’s Harvard graduation ceremony, Chinese graduate Jiang Yurong (蔣雨融) delivered a speech titled “Our Humanity.” With polished eloquence, she urged graduates to see beyond divisions, warning against a world where people who “think differently, vote differently or pray differently” are viewed not just as wrong, but evil. Her call for empathy and cross-cultural understanding struck a chord — particularly among those weary of the US’ partisan fight.

3 days ago | taipeitimes.com | Ann Wang |Annabelle Chih

SOLAR AND WIND: A Yunlin fisherman said that new wind farms have made getting out to traditional trawling grounds much harder and catches have fallen By Ann Wang and Annabelle Chih / Reuters, Yunlin County Taiwan has set an ambitious goal to develop green, renewable energy as it seeks to play its part in tackling climate change, and the banks of wind farms visible in the haze off its blustery western coast are a major part of those plans.

4 days ago | taipeitimes.com | Anuj Chopra |Sumit Dubey |Maria Clara Pestre

By Anuj Chopra, Sumit Dubey and Maria Clara Pestre / AFP As misinformation exploded during India’s four-day conflict with Pakistan, social media users turned to an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for verification — only to encounter more falsehoods, underscoring its unreliability as a fact-checking tool.

4 days ago | taipeitimes.com | Gearoid Reidy

By Gearoid Reidy / Bloomberg Opinion A cottage industry has spun up in Japan in the past few years offering abandoned houses, known as akiya, to foreigners. Many countries have stock of underused housing, but Japan is certainly one of the worst offenders. Since the post-COVID-19 pandemic reopening, there has been a surge of interest in akiya among those priced out of their markets at home.

6 days ago | taipeitimes.com | Michael Turton

By Michael Turton / Contributing reporter “Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say.