After nearly two days of searching, rescuers yesterday recovered a body from Sun Moon Lake (日月潭) that was later confirmed to be that of a man who went missing during a mass swim on Sunday.
Sin Chin Hong (沈政宏), 27, was a Malaysian engineer at an electronics company in Miaoli County.
His body was found about 400m from the finish line at the Nantou County lake’s Ita Thao Pier (伊達邵碼頭).
Sin and eight colleagues were taking part in the annual 3,300m swim for the first time.
Rescue efforts were launched after Sin’s teammates reported to organizers that he was missing.
Sin was the fourth swimmer to die at the event in its 28-year history. A swimmer died of a suspected heart attack in 1996 and two others drowned in 2007.
Sin’s death may prompt the use of advanced technology to follow the swimmers’ movements, especially as the number of participants has soared. This year’s event attracted 27,123 people.
Organizers said they are mulling the possibility of asking participants to wear a cap with an embedded identification chip or GPS device.
This would help quickly establish if a participant had failed to reach shore, allowing a rescue operation to begin immediately.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
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