WEATHER
Tropical storm forms
Tropical Storm Malakas formed at 8am yesterday, becoming the first tropical cyclone in the northwest Pacific this year, the Central Weather Bureau said, adding that the chance of the storm directly impacting Taiwan is low. The center of the storm was situated at sea off the southern coast of Guam at 8am, about 2,000km east of Taiwan. It was moving north-northwest at 4kph, the bureau said. The storm had maximum sustained winds of 18m per second, with gusts of up to 25m per second, the bureau said, adding that the storm would most likely move toward the south of Japan.
POLITICS
Eric Chu to visit the US
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday said that KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) is to visit the US at the end of next month, and would speak about the party’s policies on the US, China and cross-strait relations. Chu is to hold discussions on those issues with US government officials, academics and experts in Washington, New York, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles, KMT Department of International Affairs director Alexander Huang (黃介正) said. While in Washington, Chu would unveil a plaque to mark the reopening of the KMT’s liaison office in the US after a hiatus of more than 13 years, said Huang, who is to head the office. Chu’s visit is not for publicity purposes, but rather is aimed at rebranding the party’s liaison office in Washington, which was closed in 2008 after the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was elected president, Huang said. While in the US, Chu plans to give public speeches on the KMT’s policies regarding China, the US, and cross-strait and international affairs, he said.
SEARCH AND RESCUE
Two bodies recovered
Taiwan has recovered two bodies after a ship carrying six South Koreans went missing in the Taiwan Strait, and search and rescue operations were continuing, Taipei and Seoul said yesterday. Taiwanese authorities said they received distress signals from the Kyoto No. 1 at about 9:50am on Thursday about 29km west of Taiwan, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, adding that all six people aboard were South Korean nationals. The Sierra Leone-flagged ship was on its way to Indonesia’s Batam from Busan and it was towing the Kyoto No. 2, which has been found in the area. The National Rescue Command Center in Taiwan said that the ship had sent a distress signal in waters near Penghu, and it had sent ships and aircraft to look for it. Fishers discovered the two bodies, whose identities have yet to be confirmed, and efforts are continuing to find the other four people, it said.
CULTURE
Exhibition opens in NY
An exhibition marking the completion of the Taipei Music Center opened in New York on Wednesday, drawing on the relationship between its American architectural origins and its adoption into Taiwanese culture. “Lyrical Urbanism: The Taipei Music Center” at Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture features mural-sized photographs, architectural models, drawings and audiovisual media that explore the decade-long design process, the center said. The center, which houses a concert hall that can hold up to 5,000 people, a cultural cube presenting the history of popular music in Taiwan and a creative hub, was developed by New York-based Reiser+Umemoto, RUR Architecture. The exhibition runs until April 29.
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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