Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) is scheduled to leave for a four-day visit to Thailand on Thursday to meet with Taiwanese businesspeople and review Taiwan’s economic and investment policy toward the Southeast Asian region, the DPP announced yesterday.
Trade and investment will be high on the agenda for the trip against the backdrop of a cross-strait service trade agreement recently signed with Beijing, which is expected to negatively affect Taiwanese businesses and increase the nation’s economic dependence on China, DPP Department of International Affairs director Liu Shih-chung (劉世忠) told reporters at a briefing.
The trip will be Su’s third overseas visit this year and the fourth since he assumed the party helm in May last year, Liu said.
The DPP chairman visited Japan in February, Singapore in April and the US and Canada in June.
In related news, Su yesterday reiterated his call for President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to order an immediate halt to the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant in Gongliao District (貢寮), New Taipei City (新北市), and downplayed his differences with former DPP chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) over her urging Ma to hold a national affairs conference.
Tsai has called on Ma to convene a conference to deal with a wide range of issues that have divided society, but Su has been tight-lipped about whether he would support Tsai’s appeal.
“Ma would create a positive atmosphere for communication between the opposition and the ruling party by ordering the [power plant’s] suspension,” Su said, adding that he and Tsai shared the same views on the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant.
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
WATCH FOR HITCHHIKERS: The CDC warned those returning home from Japan to be alert for any contagious diseases that might have come back with them People who have returned from Japan following the World Baseball Classic (WBC) games during the weekend are recommended to watch for symptoms of infectious gastroenteritis, flu and measles for two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said. Flu viruses remain the most common respiratory pathogen in Taiwan in the past four weeks and the influenza B virus accounted for 55.7 percent of the tested cases, exceeding the percentage of influenza A (H3N2) infections and becoming the local dominant strain, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said at a news conference on Tuesday. There were 82,187 hospital visits for
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