MARINE AFFAIRS
Fishing boat missing
The Fisheries Agency on Friday said that a Kaohsiung-registered fishing vessel was missing in the Indian Ocean. The Lien Sheng Fa (聯昇發), registered in Kaohsiung as CT4-2896 with radio call sign BJ4896, sailed from Port Louis in Mauritius on Oct. 7 last year, the agency said in a statement. The 98-tonne ship measures 29.7m and has a crew of one Taiwanese and 15 Indonesians, it said. Family members of the ship’s crew on Thursday updated the agency on the vessel’s operations, but by noon the same day it received notice from the same people that they had lost contact with the ship, the agency said. The last update from the ship’s Vessel Monitoring System was at noon on Sunday last week, it said. In addition to seeking the assistance of seven other Taiwanese vessels operating in the region to look for the ship, the agency said it has contacted nearby nations to assist in the search.
COVID-19
Case total tops 10 million
Taiwan yesterday reported 13,526 new cases of COVID-19, which pushed the total number of those infected by the disease since the start of the pandemic to more than 10 million, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said. Among the new cases reported yesterday, 13,281 were contracted domestically, a 10.2 percent drop from the same day a week earlier, CECC data showed. Taiwan also reported 53 new deaths from the disease, bringing the total number of confirmed COVID-19 fatalities in the country to 17,818. The nation has recorded 10,012,276 COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began in early 2020. The CECC is no longer providing daily information on the age distribution, health status and vaccination records of those who die, nor is it releasing daily infection numbers from each administrative region.
MILITARY
Balloon detected in north
The military on Friday detected a balloon in the nation’s north, the air force said in a statement, without indicating whether the balloon came from China. The object was determined to be a weather balloon, but an air force aircraft was still diverted mid-mission to observe the balloon until it left Taiwan’s airspace, the statement said. The military also informed the Civil Aeronautics Administration of the balloon to ensure it posed no risk to civilian aircraft, it said. This is not the first time Taiwan’s military has detected a weather balloon believed to have come from China. On Feb. 16, the army’s Dongyin Area Command, which is responsible for guarding Lienchiang County’s Dongyin Island (東引), said that soldiers found the wreckage of a suspected weather balloon believed to have originated in China.
TOURISM
Visitors to Japan spike
The number of travelers entering Japan from Taiwan last month spiked to almost 260,000 following the removal of COVID-19 border restrictions by both countries late last year, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official said on Thursday. The number of visitors was up from a year earlier and the same month in 2019, Taiwan-Japan Relations Association Secretary-General Chou Shyue-yow (周學佑) said. The 259,300 outbound tourists to Japan last month was up 67 percent from the number in January 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chou said, citing statistics from the Japan National Tourism Organization. After the pandemic began, travel among Taiwanese to Japan all but vanished and in January last year totaled just 492, Chou said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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