Seven senior retired US Air Force (USAF) officials on Tuesday sent a letter to US senators John Cornyn and Robert Menendez in support of a bill to upgrade Taiwan’s airpower and in favor of selling Taiwan the 66 F-16C/D aircraft it has been requesting since 2006.
In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Taipei Times, the signatories expressed “strong support” for bill S. 1539, Taiwan Airpower Modernization Act of 2011, introduced by the senators on Sept. 12.
Providing the F-16C/Ds to “our friend and ally, Taiwan” is “in the security interests of Taiwan and the United States alike. As the [US] Department of Defense ... has consistently reported in recent years, the cross-Strait balance continues to shift in China’s favor. At the same time, Taiwan’s aging air force has resulted in an erosion of the qualitative military advantage Taiwan has historically enjoyed and which has long served as a strong deterrent against Chinese military aggression,” the letter says.
The sale of the F-16C/Ds would “significantly help” restore the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait, increase stability in the region and decrease the likelihood that the US would one day be forced to intervene in the region, it says.
The letter, signed by Lieutenant General David Deptula, Lieutenant General Michael Dunn, General John Loh, General William Looney III, General Lester Lyles, General Lloyd Newton and former secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne, was issued to coincide with the “Why Taiwan Matters” hearings at the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs the same day.
Then-US secretary of defense Robert Gates fired Wynne in June 2008 over embarrassing incidents involving the USAF, including the shipping by mistake of four classified electrical fuses — designed to trigger nuclear and non-nuclear Minuteman III ballistic missiles — to Taiwan rather than helicopter batteries.
It took nearly two years for the USAF to realize its mistake.
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
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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