The skipper of a Taiwanese fishing boat urged local fishermen to shy away from waters near the northernmost island of the Philippines to avoid being detained.
Chou-Huang Ke-sheng (
The 43.75-tonne Haihung was on its way home when a 450-tonne white Philippine vessel began chasing it around 11am Monday, Chou-Huang said.
The Haihung lost contact with the Pingtung Fishery Association-operated radio station at one point and didn't resume contact until 8pm on Monday.
Chou-Huang said the Philippine vessel had opened fire but didn't hit his boat during the hot pursuit.
"My boat managed to escape the Philippine vessel mainly because it made an emergency detour from the Philippine island," he said.
According to the skipper, the Philippine vessel was manned by customs officers.
Many Pingtung fishing boats have cooperated with the private Philippine fishing sector through brokerage houses in order to operate in waters which overlap the economic zones of Taiwan and the Philippines.
If a Taiwanese fishing boat is detained by Philippine authorities, the Taiwanese shipowner and the brokerage house each pay for half of the fine for the ship's release.
Those which have not joined the cooperative project have to pay the fines on their own.
The period from mid-April through mid-July is the peak season for catching Black Tuna.
During the season, hundreds of fishing boats from Pingtung and Kaohsiung operate in fishing grounds which overlap the economic zones of Taiwan and the Philippines near the Bashi Channel and the Philippine Sea.
Philippine fishing authorities have begun to pay close attention to Taiwanese fishing boats ever since some Pingtung fishermen made a fortune from sales of their Black Tuna catches last year, fishery sources said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater