Taiwan’s representative office in the US on Wednesday held a Double Ten National Day celebration at the Twin Oaks Estate in Washington, where new or incoming American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) officials made their first appearance.
More than 3,000 guests, including US officials, diplomats based in Washington and overseas Taiwanese, attended the celebration ahead of National Day on Monday.
“Taiwan, Republic of China, easily a small country, but too big to ignore, with 23 million hardworking men and women, we’ve come a long way,” Representative to the US Stanley Kao (高碩泰) said.
Photo: Tsao Yu-fen, Taipei Times
John Norris, newly appointed managing director of the AIT’s Washington Office, and James Moriarty, reportedly the likely successor to outgoing AIT Chairman Raymond Burghardt, were among the guests at the event.
“I know President Tsai [Ing-wen, 蔡英文] to be a pragmatic, level-headed leader. I’m confident that she will successfully lead Taiwan into the next chapter of its story. I’m equally confident that the United States will continue to serve as a close and trusted partner as Taiwan chooses its future path,” Moriarty said.
Kao showed Moriarty products from Taiwanese tech companies, and the former US ambassador to Nepal and Bangladesh tried out a HTC Vive virtual reality headset to play some virtual baseball.
Taiwanese pitcher Chen Wei-yin (陳偉殷), who plays for the Miami Marlins, also attended the celebration as a special guest and was introduced by Kao as “the pride of Taiwan.”
Chen, who was visiting the compound for the first time in his five years in the US, said he felt quite nervous beforehand, but was happy to find out that Kao is an avid baseball fan.
The representative office’s New York unit also held a National Day celebration at the Marriott Marquis hotel near Times Square, which was attended by about 800 guests.
US Representative Charles Rangel, who attended the New York event, praised Taiwan as a free and democratic nation that values human rights.
Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York Director Hsu Li-wen (徐儷文) thanked the nation’s allies for speaking up in support of Taiwan’s participation in international organizations at the opening of the UN General Assembly’s new session last month.
She added that Tsai, the nation’s first female president, has shown good faith and determination to maintain regional peace and to establish mutual trust and cooperation across the Taiwan Strait.
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