■ LITERATURE
Fair to showcase France
Next year’s Taipei International Book Exhibition, scheduled to open on Jan. 27, will play host to a record-setting number of French guests and events as it showcases France as the theme country. The Taipei Book Fair Foundation, the organizer of Asia’s biggest book fair, said France was chosen as the theme country because books in French and those translated from French into Chinese have enjoyed increasing popularity in Taiwan in recent years. Foundation chairman Linden Lin (林載爵) said France would send 40 people to participate at the exhibition, including renowned writers Muriel Barbery and Philippe Claudel, and the number of special activities being held to celebrate the theme country would also be the highest in the show’s history. Some 2,500 French publications will be on display and the National Library of France is preparing to exhibit some of its volumes from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The fair will take place from Jan. 27 to Feb. 1 at the Taipei World Trade Center’s three exhibition halls.
■ TRADE
WTO terms explained
Seven years after the nation joined the WTO, Taiwan has unveiled the first reference book of terms related to and associated with the regulatory body. The book, Decoding WTO — WTO Glossary, was compiled and published by the Chung Hwa Institution for Economic Research at the behest of the Bureau of Foreign Trade. Bureau Deputy Director-General Hsu Chun-fang (徐純芳) said the 372-page book includes more than 6.7 million terms and should become a handy and useful reference for civil servants, academics and professionals. The book’s editor, Hsu Tseng-chi (徐遵慈), said the reference work took a full year to compile. Hsu Tseng-chi first focused on trade-related entries so that the public could grasp WTO jargon.
■ EMPLOYMENT
Activists fear for jobs
The government should reconsider its plan to ease restrictions on hiring foreign caregivers and maids because such a move could deprive local middle-aged and older women of job opportunities, an advocacy group said. The Council of Labor Affairs is considering allowing families that have two members in their 80s or one member older than 90 and a toddler under one year to apply to hire foreign caregivers. “On the surface, the proposed liberalization is not large, but in effect, its impact on local women, particularly those in middle or senior age groups, would be great,” said Lin Shih-chia (林世嘉), chairman of the Peng Wan-ju Foundation. Lin said foreign caregivers usually have to do all sorts of household chores, such as cleaning the house, washing clothes and cooking, jobs that in many cases are currently done by middle-aged local women. As a result, middle-aged and senior women’s job opportunities could be affected, Lin said.
■ ECONOMY
Ministry to convene meeting
The Ministry of Economic Affairs will convene an inter-ministerial meeting before the end of the year to discuss ways of further improving Taiwan’s investment climate for capital from China. Vice Minister of Economic Affairs Huang Chung-chiu (黃重球) said yesterday the ministry would invite officials from the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Education for discussions that are expected to focus on simplification of entry-exit procedures for Chinese investors and their employees, greater access to Taiwan’s schools and other matters, Huang 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
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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