Eleven Vietnamese nationals who were trying to enter the country illegally were arrested off the coast of Miaoli yesterday, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) reported.
Responding to a tip-off, the CGA launched a pre-dawn raid on a Chinese fishing boat off the coast of Tunghsiao in Miaoli County and found 11 Vietnamese aboard.
The 11 Vietnamese — nine men and two women — were crammed into a small, wooden-hulled boat that had been built to accommodate only three to four people.
PHOTO: CHANG HSUN-TENG, TAIPEI TIMES
The coast guard found extra fuel aboard the vessel as well as instant noodles the illegal immigrants said they bought in Chaozhou City in China’s Guangdong Province.
The Vietnamese were taken to a police station in Tunghsiao for questioning, where they admitted to paying US$6,000 each for a ticket from Vietnam to China and then to Taiwan.
“It’s been two days since we left Chaozhou,” one of the illegals said, adding that they planned to sneak into Taiwan to seek employment.
CGA authorities said they also arrested nine Vietnamese nationals off the waters of Tunghsiao on June 5.
The nine said they had first traveled to China from northern Vietnam and then boarded a fishing boat heading for Taiwan.
In August 2003, 26 young Chinese women were thrown overboard by human traffickers, commonly known as “snakeheads,” off the waters of Tunghsiao. Six of the women drowned, while the remaining 20 were rescued by coastguard officers.
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