■ TOURISM
Tourists injured in Taroko
Two Chinese tourists got hit by falling rocks during a tour of the Taroko National Park yesterday afternoon, the Tourism Bureau said yesterday. Bureau Deputy Director-General Steven Kuo Su (郭蘇燦洋) said the two injured tourists were 56-year-old Shi Jinhong (施金訇) and 57-year-old Si Yuying (蘇玉英). Si suffered a slight injury to the face, but Shi was heavily wounded and was being operated on at press time. Both were being treated at Tzu Chi Hospital in Hualien. The accident happened when the tour group from Fujian Province was on their way to Jiuqiu Dong (九曲洞), one of the scenic sights at Taroko.
■ HORTICULTURE
Taiwan orchids win at expo
Taiwan-grown butterfly and Oncidium orchids presented by the Taipei City Government took first place in the Judges' Prize at an international flower exhibition in South Korea, a city official said yesterday. Taipei City is one of 121 exhibitors from 21 countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas, which competed for the prize in the Korea Floritopia 2009, said Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文), head of the Department of Economic Development. The city has a 36m² booth displaying a wide array of flower species endemic to Taiwan, including the butterfly orchid, Oncidium orchid, flamingo flower, peace lily and pleomele. The city said the exhibition in South Chungcheong Province could serve as a warm-up to its 2010 Taipei International Gardening and Horticulture Exposition, Chen said.
■ POLITICS
Tsai Chi-fang summoned
Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator Tsai Chi-fang (蔡啟芳) yesterday said he had been summoned by the Chiayi Prosecutors' Office for questioning over allegations he had incited others to commit crime and threaten the public last month by calling on people to break into the Tucheng Detention Center on April 4 “to liberate” former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁). Tsai said he did not understand why prosecutors would accuse him of “threatening the public” as his remarks would at most be billed as “threatening the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). DPP Secretary-general Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬), a trained lawyer, argued yesterday that since nothing happened on April 4, the charges against Tsai could not be established, adding that judges should not be wasting their time.
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
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
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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