A doctoral student in marine science died on Tuesday after being pulled from waters off the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea, despite an extensive rescue effort by the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) involving 46 people.
The student from National Sun Yat-sen University in Greater Kaohsiung, identified by the authorities only by his surname, Ho (何), was snorkeling off the largest island of the Pratas chain along with a professor and three foreign researchers to collect seawater and seaweed samples for research, the coast guard said.
The coast guard’s Dongsha management station received a call that Ho was missing, including a request for help, at about 10am on Tuesday, CGA Southern Coastal Patrol Office Deputy Chief Hu Chung-an (胡忠安) said.
The coast guard deployed a total of 46 people, a helicopter and several patrol boats in the search for Ho, who was found two hours into the rescue operation.
He was still conscious when he was pulled from the water.
He was rushed to the hospital on Dongsha Island, where he later died, Hu said.
Dongsha is 450km south of Greater Kaohsiung.
The waters surrounding the island are quite calm at this time of year, the rescuers said, adding that it was unclear how Ho had gotten into trouble.
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