The Legislative Yuan will vote on an amendment to the Offshore Islands Development Act (離島建設條例) that seeks to legitimize the operation of casinos on the nation’s outlying islands during tomorrow’s plenary session, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) said yesterday.
During a meeting with Penghu County Commissioner Wang Chien-fa (王乾發) in the legislature, the speaker said lawmakers across party lines had agreed to discuss the bill as “the timing seemed ripe.”
Wang did not elaborate on his remarks, but a consensus among legislators could be seen as a major breakthrough for the long-stalled issue.
For years, representatives of islands such as Penghu have been fighting for the opportunity to house casinos, arguing that it will bring much-needed jobs and boost local economies.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) also proposed to include a special “casino article” in the Offshore Islands Development Act when he was running for president.
Gambling is illegal in Taiwan.
The Democratic Progressive Party caucus said that the government should propose a set of measures to improve tourism on the islands while the government considers legalizing casinos.
During a report to the president on Dec. 26 last year, the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) gave its blessing to the development of a gambling industry on the islands to boost tourism and economic growth.
CEPD Vice Chairman Huang Wan-shiang (黃萬翔) said governments of the islands still needed to win the support of more than half of their residents before the governments could begin soliciting potential casino investors.
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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