The breathtakingly scenic Yushan National Park in central Taiwan will not be reopened to the public until Oct. 15, more than two months after it was closed due to Typhoon Morakot, park officials said yesterday.

A township chief in Nantou County defended herself against accusations of dereliction of duty.

Prosecutors in central Nantou County have indicted two officials in charge of land and earth conservation and a fruit grower for causing the death of seven people in a mudslide in mid-September last year.

Visitors to the central country of Nantou who become familiar with Chungliao township after the devastating 9/21 earthquake will have no trouble finding the building that houses A-mom's Dyeing Workshop, as it stands in the town as it did 10 years ago.

The police yesterday uncovered Taiwan's largest-ever marijuana plant-growing scam in Xinyi Township in the central county of Nantou, and arrested two men and two women as suspects, according to Nantou county police.

Police found seven foreign workers who were staying in Taiwan illegally working at a National Highway No. 6 construction site off the Guoxing exit ramp, local media reported.

Twenty-seven-year-old Lin Wen-hung was an office worker until he decided to return home to his rural village in central Taiwan and help his aging parents with their betel nut plantation.

Nantou County's annual Hot Spring Festival, which this year will showcase four hot spring centers, has been tentatively scheduled to be held from Oct.17, 2009 to Jan. 3, 2010, the landlocked county announced Wednesday.

A woman was sent to a hospital yesterday after being injured from a fall on her return journey from the top of Jade Mountain, local media reported.

An indigenous children's choir from the central county of Nantou was honored Thursday by the county magistrate for having recently won a Golden Melody Award, a local award sometimes described in Taiwan as the “Taiwan Grammys.”