An agreement between Taiwan and the Philippines on law enforcement cooperation on fishery matters in their overlapping economic waters is expected to be inked “soon,” a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official said yesterday.
The two sides have reached a consensus on signing the agreement and are in the final stages of concluding it, Elliot Charng (常以立), director-general of the ministry’s Department of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said at a news briefing.
Only some of the wording remains to be resolved, he said when asked about the pact’s progress.
Taiwanese and Philippine officials had previously estimated that the agreement would be signed by the end of this month, but when asked whether this was still the case, Charng refused to be drawn, saying only that it would be finalized “very soon.”
Since last year, Taipei and Manila have been discussing an agreement on maritime law enforcement cooperation, after a Taiwanese fisherman was shot dead on May 9 last year by Philippine Coast Guard officers in waters overlapping the exclusive economic zones of the two countries.
The shooting and Manila’s handling of the incident caused bilateral relations to plunge to their worst in years, with Taiwan imposing a freeze on hiring Filipino workers, among other sanctions.
Bilateral relations returned to normal in August last year, after the Philippines met four Taiwanese demands that included a formal apology and the start of talks on fishery cooperation.
During a subsequent series of fishery meetings, the two sides reached consensus on several issues. These include a ban on the use of force or violence when patrolling fishing grounds, the establishment of a mechanism to inform each other in the event of fishery incidents and the release of detained fishermen and boats as soon as possible.
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