The Japanese Coast Guard yesterday said it spotted a Taiwanese boat near disputed islands in the East China Sea that raised Sino-Japanese tensions last year.
A Taiwanese activist boat was seen at about 6:43am yesterday morning near Japanese territorial waters close to the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) — known as the Senkaku Islands in Japan — Japanese coast guard spokeswoman Mariko Inoue said. The boat had left Japanese waters by late morning, Japan’s coast guard said later.
The islands are claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan. The collision between a Chinese fishing boat and the Japanese Coast Guard near the chain sparked a dispute between the two and helped prompt Tokyo to shift the focus of its defense policy toward China and away from Russia.
Photo: AFP/JAPAN COAST GUARD via JIJI PRESS
Control over the area would give the holder rights to undersea natural gas and oil reserves.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said at a press conference in Tokyo that the government has asked Taiwan not to enter Japanese waters.
In related news, in Beijing yesterday, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Yang Yi (楊毅) said that it has “indisputable sovereignty” over islands in the South China Sea after the US pledged to help the Philippines, which has its own claims in the area.
He also repeated the Chinese government’s position that safeguarding the sovereignty of the area’s potentially resource-rich islets was a “common responsibility” for Beijing and Taipei.
“China has indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands and their surrounding waters,” Yang told reporters, according to an official transcript.
When asked for comments on Yang’s remarks, Presidential Office spokesman Fan Chiang Tai-chi (范姜泰基) said in Taipei that the government has repeatedly stated authority over the area in the past and that the government will continue to safeguard the area and promote peace in the region.
Fan Chiang said the principles on the sovereignty issue of the islets remained the same, in which the government insisted on authority over the islets and set asides disputes over the area while seeking peace and reciprocal interests in the region.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY MO YAN-CHIH
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