The Department of Health is planning to visit Canada at the end of the month to evaluate the possibility of lifting the ban on Canadian beef, President Chen Shui-bian (
Chen, who hosted a delegation of Canadian parliamentarians and their families at the Presidential Office yesterday, told his guests that Department of Health Minister Hou Sheng-mao (侯勝茂) was scheduled to lead a delegation of experts to inspect Canadian beef quarantine and sanitary procedures at the end of the month.
The information obtained would serve as a reference to the department's evaluation of whether to reopen the local market to Canadian beef. Several Asian markets, including China, Japan and Taiwan, banned Canadian beef following a case of mad cow disease in Canada in May 2003.
Taiwan was the fifth-largest market for Canadian beef and the exports were worth C$20 million (NT$580 million) each year.
As Taiwan is Canada's seventh-largest source of tourists, Chen yesterday called on the Canadian government to offer visa-free travel to Taiwanese visitors.
Statistics show that an average of 100,000 Taiwanese tourists visit Canada each year. In addition, there are 15,000 Taiwanese students studying in Canada, a number that is growing by about 2,500 students per year.
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
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