At least 20 people were killed when a boat carrying scores of wedding guests collided with a river barge in western Myanmar, authorities said yesterday, with more feared drowned as rescuers searched for the missing.
The boat, called Silver Star in Burmese, sank on Friday evening in a river near Pathein, a port city west of the commercial capital, Yangon.
It was believed to be carrying about 60 passengers on their way home from a wedding ceremony, a local police officer said.
Of the dead, officials said 16 were women and four were men.
“They were crossing to the other side of the river after attending a wedding in Pathein. Most of them were relatives from the same village,” said the policeman, who requested anonymity.
Both ships were unlit when they collided in the middle of the river, he added.
“We estimate nine people are still missing,” regional lawmaker Aung Thu Htwe told reporters, adding that about 30 people had been rescued alive on Friday night.
Local media photographs showed frenzied scenes as rescuers worked in the dark on Friday night to wheel stretchers away from the river and lay bodies onshore.
Authorities yesterday morning resumed the search operation, the police officer said, but added that no bodies had been found by midday.
“We will do search and rescue for the whole day,” he told reporters.
Fatal boat accidents are common in Myanmar, a poor country with rudimentary transport and weakly-enforced safety regulations.
Vessels ferrying people along the country’s coastline and rivers are often dangerously overcrowded, and accidents can have staggering death tolls. It can also take several days for all bodies to be retrieved.
In October last year, 73 people, including many teachers and students, drowned when their overloaded vessel capsized in central Myanmar on the Chindwin River.
About 60 people also died in March 2015 when their ferry sank in rough waters off of Myanmar’s western Rakhine State.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has