Taiwan is considering Paraguay’s request to transfer 11 UH-1H troop transport helicopters to the South American country, a decision that would be subject to approval by the US government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday.
Central and South American Affairs Department Director-General Wu Chin-mu (吳進木) said the matter was “still under discussion” at the ministry, which was in consultations with the Ministry of National Defense.
Wu said Asuncion had made the request, but did not specify how many it needed.
The government has yet to make a decision on that matter because it needed to look into its helicopter replacement plan, Wu said.
“If possible, we will do our best,” Wu said in response to a report published by the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color on Monday.
The paper said Taiwan would donate 11 UH-1H helicopters to Paraguay, provided the US authorized the transfer and the Paraguayan Congress approved it.
General Miguel Christ Jacobs, commander of the Paraguayan Air Force, told the newspaper the process was under way to transfer the Vietnam War-era Huey helicopters.
Taiwan has previously given Paraguay 10 UH-1H helicopters in 2004 and in May it donated a Bell 427 twin-engine helicopter for use by the country’s president, the paper said.
Taiwan’s Aerospace Industrial Development Corp assembled 118 UH-1Hs under contract with Bell Helicopter in the 1970s. By 2009, about 60 remained operational.
Under the US$6.4 billion arms sale notified to the US Congress in January last year, Taiwan is set to acquire 60 UH-60M Black Hawk utility helicopters.
Additional reporting by Staff writer
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