■ JAPAN
Tokyo tells US to heal itself
Finance Minister Fukushiro Nukaga yesterday ruled out any plan to introduce a stimulus package or tax cuts despite growing calls for concerted efforts to help combat a US mortgage crisis. "Fiscal stimulus or tax cuts used to be called for when our economy deteriorated, but we are not in a situation that we need to use a conventional, knee-jerk approach," Nukaga said in an interview with TV Asahi. "We have to adapt ourselves to the present situation." He called on Washington to concentrate on its own efforts to subdue the mortgage crisis. "The epicenter of the subprime loan problem is in the United States," he said. "The United States has to resolve the problem by itself."
■ AVIATION
A380 slides malfunction
Airbus' A380 super jumbo, the world's largest passenger aircraft, has encountered problems with its inflatable escape slides, the Internet site of the Germany weekly Stern reported on Saturday. The escape slides had to be revised after just a few flights, the magazine said, citing reports from clients of the European aircraft maker. The article quoted an Airbus spokesman confirming that there had been a problem. The explosive charges meant to inflate the slides in just a few seconds during an emergency evacuation were deteriorating over time and becoming unusable, the report said. To replace the faulty charges, all the slides had to be dismantled in what was a time-consuming operation, Stern reported.
■ MINING
Workers end strike
Workers at Mexico's largest lead mine have ended a nearly month-long strike after receiving a 6 percent wage hike, Mexico's Labor Department said. The strike at the Naica mine in the border state of Chihuahua ended on Friday night after owner Industrias Penoles SAB agreed to the hike and said it would pay 50 percent of the salaries lost during the walkout, the department said in a statement late on Friday. About 350 members of the National Mining and Metal Workers Union stopped work on Jan. 15, arguing that their wages didn't reflect corporate profits from high metal prices.
■ AUTOMOBILES
GM tries to rein-in states
General Motors Corp CEO Rick Wagoner urged the National Automobile Dealers Association to lobby against individual US states trying to set their own limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Wagoner, speaking on Saturday group's convention in San Francisco, said several states want to go beyond requirements passed by the US Congress. If that happens and automakers must focus on state regulations, they won't be able to focus as much on alternative fuel vehicles to reduce oil consumption and pollution, he said. "We're not going to be able to accomplish everything that we otherwise could," he said. He also said dealers and automakers should push for infrastructure to handle new technologies, including hydrogen and ethanol fueling stations and charging stations for electric vehicles.
■ MYANMAR
Junta to auction gems
The military government will hold a new sale of gems, pearls and jade next month in a bid to earn much-needed foreign currency, despite calls to boycott the auctions, state media said yesterday. The official New Light of Myanmar said the sale would be held from March 9 to March 20, just two months after the last auction. The sale last month drew about 280 foreign buyers, despite calls from the US and rights groups for a boycott because of a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests last year. The government did not reveal how much it earned off the sale, but last November, the junta earned US$150 million from a gem emporium.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Green city under way
The oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE) was set to start work yesterday on construction of the world's first zero carbon emissions city, a spokesman for the project said. "Construction on Masdar City begins today," the spokesman said, adding that the 6.5km2 development would cost US$22 billion and was set for completion in 2015. Masdar City will house 50,000 people and will be run entirely on renewable energy such as solar power, exploiting the desert state's near constant supply of sunshine. The city is named after the Arabic word for "source." Residents will use electric-powered travel pods to get around the city. The UAE sits on the world's fifth-largest oil reserves and fourth-largest gas reserves, most of them in the emirate of Abu Dhabi
■ TELECOMS
PRC lines badly damaged
China's telecom industry faces a huge bill after the worst winter in decades, with millions of users cut off and thousands of kilometers of phone lines damaged, state media said yesterday. Preliminary government statistics showed the massive snow falls led to losses of 1.1 billion yuan (US$150 million), Xinhua news agency reported. Ten million mobile and fixed-line subscribers were still unable to use their phones as of Friday, Xinhua said. A total of 10,000 mobile phone base stations remain out of service and 150,000 poles for fixed-line services have collapsed, while 16,000km of lines have been damaged, Xinhua said. It reported that 80,000 telecom industry workers had fanned out across the country to seek to restore services. China had 547 million mobile phone subscribers and 365 million users of fixed-line services at the end of last year, government data said.
■ AGRICULTURE
France bans modified corn
France has banned a strain of genetically modified (GM) corn from US agribusiness giant Monsanto, delighting environmentalists but sparking outrage from the company and French farmers. At least one association planned a legal challenge to Saturday's decision, but leading environmental campaigner Jose Bove welcomed the decision, describing it as the fruit of a 10-year battle. A spokeswoman for Monsanto said on Saturday that France's decision to outlaw the use of the MON810 strain of corn, the only GM crop grown in France, "had no scientific basis." "Monsanto is studying all the legal options to defend the liberty of French farmers to use safe and authorized products," she said.
MULTIFACETED: A task force has analyzed possible scenarios and created responses to assist domestic industries in dealing with US tariffs, the economics minister said The Executive Yuan is tomorrow to announce countermeasures to US President Donald Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs, although the details of the plan would not be made public until Monday next week, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. The Cabinet established an economic and trade task force in November last year to deal with US trade and tariff related issues, Kuo told reporters outside the legislature in Taipei. The task force has been analyzing and evaluating all kinds of scenarios to identify suitable responses and determine how best to assist domestic industries in managing the effects of Trump’s tariffs, he
TIGHT-LIPPED: UMC said it had no merger plans at the moment, after Nikkei Asia reported that the firm and GlobalFoundries were considering restarting merger talks United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s No. 4 contract chipmaker, yesterday launched a new US$5 billion 12-inch chip factory in Singapore as part of its latest effort to diversify its manufacturing footprint amid growing geopolitical risks. The new factory, adjacent to UMC’s existing Singapore fab in the Pasir Res Wafer Fab Park, is scheduled to enter volume production next year, utilizing mature 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer process technologies, UMC said in a statement. The company plans to invest US$5 billion during the first phase of the new fab, which would have an installed capacity of 30,000 12-inch wafers per month, it said. The
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his