Six people including a child were killed by an explosion at an illegal fireworks factory yesterday in southern Tainan county, according to reports last night.
The blast at around 5:30pm demolished the factory near the town of Yenshui (鹽水), 300km south of Taipei, which was swarming with tens of thousands of visitors a day before an annual fireworks festival.
``The loud explosion could be heard 3km away,'' a state radio report said.
Police found the body of 12-year-old Li Ching-chieh (李靖傑) at the site of the explosion.
The couple who runs the factory and four of their employees are unaccounted for. Police found body parts scattered in an adjacent field.
TV footage showed colored scrap paper and fireworks fuses spread over a wide area in a sugarcane field next to the factory. Yenshui is known for its annual parade when townspeople carry fireworks that shoot from beehive-like boxes to drive away evil spirits.
The parade is held on the Lantern Festival, which ends a 15-day celebration of the Lunar New Year. The festival begins tonight.
Tseng Hsu-cheng (曾旭正), deputy commissioner of Tainan County, said an initial investigation showed that the accident could have been caused by careless construction of the beehive rocket-launchers built for the event. He did not elaborate.
Tseng said the county government would step up inspections of the rocket launchers. But he added that the accident would not affect the fireworks festival, which was scheduled for today.
In recent years, Taiwan has enforced strict rules that ban fireworks except on certain festivals. But authorities have promoted the fireworks parade in Yenshui as a tourist attraction.
Taiwan’s Lee Chia-hao (李佳豪) on Sunday won a silver medal at the All England Open Badminton Championships in Birmingham, England, a career best. Lee, 25, took silver in the final of the men’s singles against world No. 1 Shi Yuqi (石宇奇) of China, who won 21-17, 21-19 in a tough match that lasted 51 minutes. After the match, the Taiwanese player, who ranks No. 22 in the world, said it felt unreal to be challenging an opponent of Shi’s caliber. “I had to be in peak form, and constantly switch my rhythm and tactics in order to score points effectively,” he said. Lee got
EMBRACING TAIWAN: US lawmakers have introduced an act aiming to replace the use of ‘Chinese Taipei’ with ‘Taiwan’ across all Washington’s federal agencies A group of US House of Representatives lawmakers has introduced legislation to replace the term “Chinese Taipei” with “Taiwan” across all federal agencies. US Representative Byron Donalds announced the introduction of the “America supports Taiwan act,” which would mandate federal agencies adopt “Taiwan” in place of “Chinese Taipei,” a news release on his page on the US House of Representatives’ Web site said. US representatives Mike Collins, Barry Moore and Tom Tiffany are cosponsors of the legislation, US political newspaper The Hill reported yesterday. “The legislation is a push to normalize the position of Taiwan as an autonomous country, although the official US
CHANGE OF TONE: G7 foreign ministers dropped past reassurances that there is no change in the position of the G7 members on Taiwan, including ‘one China’ policies G7 foreign ministers on Friday took a tough stance on China, stepping up their language on Taiwan and omitting some conciliatory references from past statements, including to “one China” policies. A statement by ministers meeting in Canada mirrored last month’s Japan-US statement in condemning “coercion” toward Taiwan. Compared with a G7 foreign ministers’ statement in November last year, the statement added members’ concerns over China’s nuclear buildup, although it omitted references to their concerns about Beijing’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. Also missing were references stressing the desire for “constructive and stable relations with China” and
‘CROWN JEWEL’: Washington ‘can delay and deter’ Chinese President Xi Jinping’s plans for Taiwan, but it is ‘a very delicate situation there,’ the secretary of state said US President Donald Trump is opposed to any change to Taiwan’s “status quo” by force or extortion and would maintain that policy, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Hugh Hewitt Show host on Wednesday. The US’ policy is to maintain Taiwan’s “status quo” and to oppose any changes in the situation by force or extortion, Rubio said. Hewitt asked Rubio about the significance of Trump earlier this month speaking with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) at the White House, a meeting that Hewitt described as a “big deal.” Asked whether the meeting was an indication of the
RSS