The US will approve the sale of 12 P-3C Orion anti-submarine aircraft before year’s end, a newspaper reported yesterday, quoting a military official.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily quoted Navy Admiral Wang Li-shen (王立申) as saying that the US would approve the sale of 12 P-3Cs before the year’s end, and the P-3Cs would join the navy in 2012.
US naval personnel recently inspected facilities at an airbase in Taoyuan to see if it was capable of receiving the P-3Cs, the daily quoted Wang as saying.
Wang said that as the budget for the 12 P-3Cs was large, the navy was not buying Harpoon missiles, which are carried by the aircraft, but would share the 60 Harpoon missiles the US agreed to sell to the Air Force early this week.
The Apple Daily said Washington’s upcoming sale of the 12 P-3Cs indicated the US has ended the freeze on arms sales to Taipei.
The US — Taiwan’s sole supplier of advanced weaponry — is believed to have imposed the freeze on arms sales last year, although the policy has never been confirmed by administration officials.
Analysts have said the move was an attempt to gain favor with China ahead of US President George W. Bush’s trip to the Games.
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
UPDATED TEST: The new rules aim to assess drivers’ awareness of risky behaviors and how they respond under certain circumstances, the Highway Bureau said Driver’s license applicants who fail to yield to pedestrians at intersections or to check blind spots, or omit pointing-and-calling procedures would fail the driving test, the Highway Bureau said yesterday. The change is set to be implemented at the end of the month, and is part of the bureau’s reform of the driving portion of the test, which has been criticized for failing to assess whether drivers can operate vehicles safely. Sedan drivers would be tested regarding yielding to pedestrians and turning their heads to check blind spots, while drivers of large vehicles would be tested on their familiarity with pointing-and-calling
RSS