■ EDUCATION
NCCU to host prize winners
Pulitzer Prize winners Steve Fainaru and Liu Heung-shing (劉香成) will visit National Chengchi University (NCCU) tomorrow and on Saturday, the school said yesterday. Liu, the winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and a former photographer for The Associated Press, will give a speech titled “Keeping Record of China through Photography” at 3:40pm tomorrow, NCCU said. Fainaru, a reporter for the Washington Post, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, will deliver a speech on reporting international conflicts and wars at 9am on Saturday, the school said.
■ CRIME
Chen defends former aide
Former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) office yesterday jumped to a former aide’s defense, saying that former Presidential Office deputy secretary-general Ma Yung-cheng (馬永成) did not pocket the “state affairs fund” or use fake receipts to claim funds. Ma was taken into custody on Tuesday for suspected embezzlement of public funds during Chen’s presidency. Chen’s office issued a statement yesterday saying that the president’s discretionary fund did not all come from the budget of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the fund was used for public purposes only. Chen did not pocket any of the money, either, the statement said. The statement said that some expenses used for secret diplomatic missions were not recorded, but this did not mean the money was not spent. To find out the truth of the matter, the statement said, prosecutors must conduct a thorough investigation into the spending of the fund to see whether the money was actually spent on public affairs as Chen claimed.
■ CRIME
Drug ring busted by police
A mobile investigation unit made up of Coast Guard Administration officers and local police busted a drug ring in Kaohsiung City on Tuesday, arresting four suspects and seizing weapons and an assortment of illicit drugs. The unit said it seized 4.4kg of heroin, 14kg of amphetamines, 0.7kg of marijuana, and 172g of ketamine, along with three guns. Members of the ring had been selling drugs in the city and had rented an apartment in the area to carry out their drug operations, according to the unit. After following and monitoring the drug ring members’ activities for several days, officers from the unit decided to intercept them while driving in the city and proceeded to detain them while a search of their apartment was carried out.
■ HEALTH
Organ donation ranks high
The organ donation rate in Taiwan is the second highest in Asia and the Middle East, behind Israel, but still lags far behind that of Western countries, the Department of Health’s Bureau of Medical Affairs said yesterday. According to the bureau, a yearly average of 6.8 people per million people in Taiwan donated organs in the past three years, while the number for Israel was 8.8 per million. But that rate is much lower than those in Western countries. Spain had a yearly average of 34.4 donors during the same three years; the US had a rate of 25.1 and France’s rate was 23.6, according to the bureau. Nonetheless, Taiwan’s rate is increasing rapidly, officials said. This year, 161 people who passed away in Taiwan donated their organs to help 597 people, an increase of 41 percent from last year, Louis Liu (劉在銓), chief executive officer of the Taiwan Organ Registry and Sharing Center, told a news conference.
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
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