DIPLOMACY
Ambassador pans crime
Taiwan’s ambassador to Panama expressed concern on Tuesday over a series of crimes targeting his compatriots and said he would ask the Central American nation to improve security. “In general terms the Chinese [sic] community is very concerned,” Simon Ko (柯森耀) said during a meeting with international journalists in the capital. Ko said there was to be a “peaceful” march in Panama yesterday that would “not be a protest, but as a repudiation and in solidarity” with the families of the victims. The comments came a week after a Dominica national was arrested on suspicion of last year’s kidnapping and killing of five young people of Chinese descent, who were buried in a house west of the capital. In addition, a Taiwanese was shot dead at his home last week in Chepo, east of the capital, creating more fear among the Asian community of about 150,000 people.
ENTERTAINMENT
‘Seediq’ subtitled in English
The production firm responsible for the Taiwanese film Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale decided yesterday to release a version of the film with English subtitles so foreigners in Taiwan would be able to enjoy the movie. The film took more than NT$120 million (US$4 million) in the four days after its debut on Sept. 9, breaking the box-office record for a local film. Its gross earnings to date total more than NT$250 million. The movie was made mostly in Sediq, which is the language of one of Taiwan’s officially recognized Aboriginal tribes, while there is also some dialogue in Taiwanese and Japanese. It is currently shown with Chinese subtitles. Director Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖) said he had originally thought it would be troublesome for the audience to read four lines of subtitles, including English and Chinese.
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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