A Taiwanese fishing boat skipper imprisoned in Tanzania on charges of poaching in 2009 has returned home, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Hsu Ching-tai (許清泰) was released from prison on Friday last week and returned home to Greater Kaohsiung safe and sound on Wednesday, the ministry said.
Hsu, the skipper of an Oman-flagged boat, was arrested for fishing illegally in Tanzania’s economic waters and sentenced to 20 years in prison and a US$14.33 million fine, the ministry said.
He was the only Taiwanese on the ship, it said.
The ministry issued a news release on March 28 announcing that the Tanzanian Court of Appeal had decided Hsu was to be freed, but he was not allowed to leave the jail.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator DPP Legislator Liu Chien-kuo (劉建國) held a news conference in June to criticize the ministry for its premature announcement. Liu said the ministry was trying to grab credit for Hsu’s release.
Asked about the delay during a ministry press conference yesterday, Department of West Asian and African Affairs Director-General David Wang (王建業) said that when ministry officials were preparing to collect Hsu from the prison in March, Tanzanian authorities demanded an additional document. He did not say what the document was, only that it was not immediately available.
Additional reporting by Shih Hsiu-chuan
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