A Coast Guard Administration (CGA) vessel began towing a Taiwanese deep-sea fishing boat, from which the skipper and chief engineer have been reported missing, at 8am yesterday.
The Te Hung Hsing No. 368, which was 4,870 nautical miles (9,010km) away from Nanfangao Fishing Harbor when the rescue operation started, is expected to return to Taiwan after Aug. 20, CGA officials said.
The towing speed is very slow because the fishing boat’s main engine and steering engine were damaged by crewmembers, the officials said. The CGA intends to send another coastguard vessel carrying components to repair the boat as a backup measure, the officials added.
The CGA vessel caught up with the Te Hung Hsing No. 368 in the early hours of Saturday, nearly two weeks after its owner lost contact with the boat.
The Suao, Yilan County-based boat was 623 nautical miles southwest of the Republic of Kiribati when it was found by the CGA patrol ship. On boarding the vessel, Coast Guard personnel found no signs of the boat’s skipper, Chen Te-sheng (陳德昇), or chief engineer, Ho Chang-lin (何昌琳), the only two Taiwanese on the roster, according to media reports.
None of the nine Indonesian crew aboard the ship could explain what had happened to the skipper and chief engineer, the reports said.
The Indonesian government expressed regret on Saturday over the disappearance of the two men.
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:
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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