Vice President Annette Lu (
"All evidence has proved that I was the first target to be shot (on March 19), yet many people still promoted their theories against me, which makes me feel like I'm being assassinated again," Lu said yesterday at a Presidential Office reception for a Singapore think tank.
Despite theories by the police and other government investigators that the shooter was aiming at President Chen Shui-bian (
She said the disputes over the shooting incident and their effect on the presidential election should be treated as a serious issue by all countries of the Asia-Pacific region, and thanked her guests for their expressions of concern.
Lu stressed that the obstacles to Taiwan's democratic development can hardly be imagined by people of other countries, citing her experiences of being jailed for participating in opposition activities and developing cancer due to her intense commitment to leading the nation's feminist movement.
"I had never thought that I would be shot on the eve of the election," Lu said, "and I was able to survive because of a miracle."
She said that the country's democracy, freedom, progress and prosperity are not presents given by the gods, but are hard-won fruits earned by the efforts of all Taiwanese people.
"Taiwan is an independent country, whether other countries in the world admit it or not," she said, "and our efforts to seek democracy and peace will not surrender to any violence or military threat."
"The international community and some individual countries always adopt their own perspective to understand Taiwan, so I would like to provide the Taiwanese view to assist those foreign guests and countries in understanding Taiwan," Lu said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS