Taiwan's Tao community recreates historic sea voyage to Philippines Battling huge waves, twenty Austronesian men in orange lifejackets set off on a hand-carved longboat into the western Pacific Ocean, destined for the home of their ancestral kin for the first time in 300 years. The indigenous Tao people, native to the tiny Orchid Island 90 kilometers (56 miles) off Taiwan's southeast coast, have close cultural, linguistic and historic ties with the Philippines' Batanes islands and its Ivatan com

El Niño has officially begun, and it is forecast to intensify into a very strong or