Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte has welcomed the government’s “new southbound policy” and said he hopes that Taipei and Manila can deepen bilateral exchanges.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has proposed the policy aimed at improving relations with Southeast Asian countries to reduce economic dependence on China and create opportunities for Taiwanese businesses in Southeast Asia and India.
The Philippines, with its fast-growing economy, is considered an important partner in the plan.
Duterte, the outgoing mayor of Davao, Philippines, told reporters that he welcomed the policy and said he saw an opportunity for agricultural cooperation between the two nations.
The Philippines has large swathes of land and has great agricultural development potential, the 71-year-old politician said, eyeing the opportunity to cooperate with Taiwan’s advanced agriculture sector.
Duterte visited Taiwan several times during his time as mayor of Davao.
His impression of Taiwan is of a peaceful and safe place where people can walk city streets even at midnight, he said.
In 2012, he visited Taiwan to promote police exchanges with Davao.
During Duterte’s presidential election campaign, he paid a three-day visit to Taiwan in January to observe the nation’s transportation infrastructure, including the high-speed rail system and the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit system.
On that trip, he called on officials at the Philippines’ National Police Agency, the Investigation Bureau and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss bilateral law enforcement cooperation in combating crime, the drug trade and gun smuggling.
Duterte, known for his efforts to fight crime and drug trafficking, has long supported continued cooperation between Taiwan and the Philippines in law enforcement.
Duterte is to be sworn in as president of the Philippines on June 30.
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
RSS