The government has adopted heavy security measures as it gets ready for the arrival of China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) today.
The police authority said some 2,000 officers will be dispatched to escort Chen and members of his delegation from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport to the Grand Hotel, where the delegation is staying during its five-day visit.
About 800 police have been deployed to stations inside and outside the airport, while another 1,200 have been deployed at stations along the route that Chen and his delegation will take from the airport to the hotel. Some 800 officers have also been dispatched to guard the Grand Hotel.
Before 11am, the airport will be cleared to get ready for Chen’s arrival.
Travelers waiting to depart the airport will be taken to a controlled area, while passengers arriving at the airport will wait on their airplanes until Chen has left the airport.
Chen will be escorted and protected by 40 special forces officers wherever he goes and police will form a “human shield” around him to prevent any unexpected protests that may break out, police said.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip William Lai (賴清德) said: “The government has turned the nation into a police state and Taipei has been placed under martial law because of Chen’s visit. No to mention the waste of tax payers’ money.”
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) spokesman Lee Chieng-jung (李建榮), however, disagreed.
He said yesterday that the deployment of the heavy police presence was down to the DPP, “because its supporters used violence against ARATS Vice Chairman Zhang Mingqing (張銘清) during his visit to Taiwan last month.”
Following a report by the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) yesterday that police had erected sharp barbed-wire fences around the hotel, the Taipei Police Department issued a statement later yesterday saying that it had removed the fences out of concern that people might get hurt.
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