Nepalese police have asked local television and radio stations and guides to help search for a young Taiwanese couple missing in the Himalayas since March 3, a Nepalese police officer said on Monday.
Liang Sheng-yue (梁聖岳), 21, and Liu Chen-chun (劉宸君), freshmen at National Dong Hwa University, arrived in Nepal last month and went hiking in Tamang on Feb. 22.
They last contacted their families on March 3 and were scheduled to call again on March 10, but did not do so, and on March 15 family members requested official help to locate the pair.
The officer at Nepal Police Headquarters said helicopters had also been dispatched.
A deputy police chief on Sunday met with the family members who had traveled to Nepal to help the search, along with by India-based Taiwanese officials, the officer said.
With consent from the family members, police hired three guides to search for Liang and Liu on possible routes leading to Langtang Village, where they were supposed to meet up with some Taiwanese friends, the officer said.
Taiwanese officials in India have also contacted the Himalaya Rescue Association and Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal to help in the search.
However, continued snow and occasional avalanches in the target areas have made it difficult to expand their search, local travel agencies have said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
‘GROWING UP TOGETHER’: Jensen Huang celebrated the nation’s role in the formation of the tech firm at a Silicon Valley gathering, saying ‘Taiwan saved Nvidia’ Taiwan is in the center of the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told a gathering with Taiwanese on Thursday in Silicon Valley’s largest city, San Jose. Tainan-born Huang said it must be celebrated that “Taiwan is right in the middle” of a new industrial revolution in which “something new is being made, and made in a new way.” Huang recalled the manufacturing process of the RIVA 128 graphics processing unit, Nvidia’s first commercial success, describing it as the “most complicated chip at the time.” As Nvidia did not have the budget, he wrote a letter to Taiwan