When a koala dies, a new occupant won’t move into its home range (a group of several trees that they regularly visit) for about a year — the time it takes for scratches on the trees and scent markings to disappear. Then, as long as they are not disturbed, koalas keep their home ranges throughout their lives — up to 18 years.
Often called koala bears because of their cuddly teddy-bear appearance, they are in fact marsupials — and can be aggressive. They breed once a year (koalas usually only produce a single cub, or joey, though occasionally give birth to twins), and once a cub is born — 2cm long, blind and hairless after a gestation period of 35 days — it relies on its sense of smell and touch to crawl into its mother’s pouch, where it stays for the next six months, feeding on milk. After it emerges, the cub will remain with its mother until it is one year old, riding on her back or clinging to her belly.
The adult koala’s days are filled with sleeping and eating. They survive on a diet of predominantly eucalyptus leaves and bark — to most animals, eucalyptus leaves are incredibly poisonous, but the koala’s digestive system has evolved to manage the toxins. It is often said that eucalyptus makes koalas “stoned” — probably because they sleep for up to 18 hours a day, wedged between branches of eucalyptus trees — but this isn’t true: Their high-fiber, low-nutrition diet means they have to sleep to conserve energy.
They also don’t tend to drink, getting almost all the water they need from leaves. Indeed, the name koala is thought to come from a name in one Aboriginal language meaning “doesn’t drink.”
Southeast Asian food delivery platform Grab Holdings Ltd in March applied to acquire Delivery Hero SE’s Foodpanda operations in Taiwan, with the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) scheduled to announce its decision on Oct. 27. On the surface, the deal is a business merger — but in substance, it involves personal data, national geospatial information and digital sovereignty. It cannot be assessed solely in terms of market share and price competition. Grab has extensive and long-standing connections to Chinese capital. In 2015, Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing and China Investment Corp, a sovereign wealth fund, invested in Grab. Grab invested in Chinese autonomous-driving
The most troubling message coming out of Washington for Taipei is not any single statement but the cumulative effect of a series of signals suggesting that US President Donald Trump is rethinking Taiwan’s strategic value while viewing the US-China relationship through the lens of a transactional great-power bargain. The danger behind Trump’s new softness toward Beijing is a potential US-China bargain that undermines Taiwan’s core interests. During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) recent state visit to Washington, Trump and Xi appeared to rewrite the history of World War II. In a Sept. 25 fact sheet on Xi’s visit, the White House said,
The official English name for Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator and Taipei mayoral candidate Puma Shen’s (沈伯洋) campaign is “the Taipei Current.” It comes from the Chinese term yangliu (洋流), a direct translation of which would be “ocean current,” using the last character of Shen’s name, yang (洋, “ocean”). The Chinese term is a reference to the 2018 campaign for Kaohsiung mayor that swept a hitherto marginal player within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), who is now legislative speaker, whose successful campaign then was termed the “Han Wave” (韓流). Shen’s usage of the Chinese term is intentional.
Early this month, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) held two large election campaign rallies in Taichung and New Taipei City on the same day. However, KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) was marginalized at the rallies. Cheng shouted herself hoarse campaigning onstage for the mayoral candidates, but neither candidate was onstage at the time. In the morning of that day, the KMT’s Taichung mayoral candidate, Deputy Legislative Speaker Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), entered the venue accompanied by Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜). That afternoon, the party’s New Taipei City
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