The Taiwan Strait is international waters and US warships have the right to pass through the waterway, US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson said on Monday.
Richardson was responding to questions at a forum held by Washington-based think tank the Brookings Institution about how the US interacted with China when two US Navy ships passed through the Strait last week.
When US warships pass through the Strait, all parties concerned have responded professionally, he said, adding: “There is no concern there.”
Photo: AP
Asked whether the US would send aircraft carriers through the Strait, Richardson sidestepped the question, saying only that the Strait is international waters and anything that can be done in international waters applies to it.
The US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS McCampbell and fleet replenishment oiler USNS Walter S. Diehl transited the Strait on Thursday last week.
The Ministry of National Defense said that it was the fourth time the US Navy has sent vessels through the Strait since July last year, following similar operations in October and November.
Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Logan later that day confirmed in an e-mailed response to the Central News Agency that two US Navy ships had transited between the South China Sea and East China Sea via the Taiwan Strait.
“This routine transit through international waters of the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Logan wrote.
“The US will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows,” he added.
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