■ KAOHSIUNG
Free transportation offered
Kaohsiung City residents and visitors will enjoy free bus rides on national holidays next year, the city’s Transportation Bureau announced yesterday. The free rides will be offered on a total of 41 days, including the New Year holiday this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the six-day Lunar New Year holiday, Lantern Festival, Women’s Day, Tomb Sweeping Day, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival and Double Ten National Day, the bureau said. The offer begins at midnight on Thursday, the bureau said.
■ TRAVEL
MOFA defers fee raise
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday decided to give the public two more months to apply for, or to renew their passports with an embedded computer chip at NT$1,200, delaying a planned fee hike to NT$1,600 from Jan. 1 to March 1. To encourage the public to replace their 10-year passports with chip passports, the government initially said the preferential rate would expire at the end of this year. However, the Bureau of Consular Affairs and the ministry’s offices in central, southern and eastern Taiwan have been swamped with passport applicants, with the number reaching more than 10,000 per day. The ministry’s decision came after lawmakers across party lines made a resolution on the issue at the Foreign and National Defense Committee meeting yesterday.
■ ENVIRONMENT
EPA inks waste deal
The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) yesterday announced a partnership with a number of electronics manufacturers to reduce packaging material by at least 10 percent next year. The move is expected to save up to 870 tonnes of packaging annually.
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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