The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) was criticized for the delay in launching a search for a Taiwanese fishing boat that has been missing in seas near Indonesia since May 4.
"The presence of Typhoon Chanchu and mechanical failure of a CGA ship caused the delay. The CGA ship has now reached the waters where the boat lost contact," said a CGA press statement yesterday.
The CGA said the ship was currently searching for the boat with Indonesian help.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Liou Wan-ju (
"The CGA has ignored the safety of Taiwanese fishermen," added Liou.
Chinese-language newspaper the Apply Daily yesterday quoted a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) source as saying "the ministry was discontented with the CGA's handling of the incident."
The MOFA yesterday said it had contacted the Indonesian government in an attempt to learn whether families of Indonesians working on the missing boat knew where they were.
The Pingtung-based vessel went missing on May 4 in high seas near Indonesia.
The MOFA, the CGA and Council of Agriculture believed that the Taiwanese captain and first mate might have been kidnapped by 11 Indonesians working on the boat.
The CGA said the fishing boat seemed bound for Indonesia before it lost contact.
Although the government asked the CGA to rescue the boat, the CGA failed to send a vessel to look for the boat until May 10.
However, the ship returned to Taiwan on May 11 because of mechanical problems and the impending arrival of Typhoon Chanchu in the seas south of Taiwan.
The CGA said it possesses few ships capable of reaching the region where the fishing boat disappeared due to its distance from Taiwan, and that it was unfortunate that the vessel assigned to the rescue job had to return to port after developing mechanical problems.
The CGA said the ship was repaired and set out again for Indonesian waters again on May 14, and it had just reached waters near Indonesia yesterday morning.
Taiwanese fishing boats usually hire foreign workers, but disputes or incidents have occurred between Taiwanese and their foreign crews.
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
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
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