A water-supply system funded by Taiwan has been inaugurated in Sao Tome and Principe, one of the nation’s diplomatic allies in Africa, with the aim of resolving long-standing water problems at the country’s military headquarters, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Ambassador John Chen (陳忠) told the opening ceremony that Taiwan was pleased to continue its cooperative programs with Sao Tome and Principe and would assist with other infrastructure projects once the government’s budget allows for it.
The contractor for the water system, a company called ABC, said the two storage tanks with a total capacity of 105,000 liters will be able to supply the military headquarters with water for an estimated 72 hours if the main water system fails.
Meanwhile, Taiwan recently launched an initiative in Haiti, another of the nation’s allies, to develop a white-sand beach called Point Sable in the south of the country.
Ambassador to Haiti Hsu Mien-sheng (徐勉生) said the beach had great tourism potential and expressed the hope that private businesses would join in developing the area.
In related developments, a local religious foundation delivered relief supplies yesterday to residents of a slum in South Africa whose homes were razed in a fire.
The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation said its South African branch had visited a slum area called Langa near Cape Town to distribute blankets, flour, oil and sugar to the residents of more than 470 households.
The residents of the slum have been forced to stay in tents since losing their homes in the fire earlier this month.
The foundation said that since last week it had distributed hot meals every day to some 2,000 people in the area.
It said it was also taking the opportunity to raise awareness among children in the area of the importance of environmental protection.
The foreign ministry, whose overseas staff also helped with the distribution of the supplies, said that travelers from the Netherlands who happened to be in the area at the time of the fire had made a donation to support the relief efforts.
Meanwhile, closer to home, Taiwan’s business association in the Philippines donated 50 wheelchairs earlier this month to Makati City as part of its efforts to improve the lot of the country’s marginalized minorities.
Makati and Taichung are sister cities, the ministry 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
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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
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