The Canadian government on Tuesday confirmed that a Royal Canadian Navy ship had sailed through the Taiwan Strait, three months after a similar operation and amid strained ties between Beijing and Ottawa.
Beijing in April condemned a French decision to send a frigate through the Strait as illegal, and has also been upset by US Navy ships passing through the same waterway.
Canada’s government said that the frigate HMCS Ottawa passed through the Strait on Monday and Tuesday.
“This route was chosen as it was the most direct route between UN Security Council sanctions monitoring activities in Northeast Asia and engagements in Southeast Asia,” the Canadian Department of National Defence said on Tuesday.
“The Royal Canadian Navy does not conduct so-called ‘freedom of navigation’ operations aimed at challenging the territorial claims of other nations, and the ship’s transit was conducted in accordance with international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea,” it added.
In June, two Canadian ships sailed through the Strait, but the government denied it was trying to make any kind of political point.
The Ministry of National Defense on Tuesday said that the latest ship passed through the Strait in a southerly direction and was monitored throughout by the armed forces.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩) yesterday said that China does not take exception to “normal passage” through the Strait by foreign warships.
“But I don’t know what special purpose the Canadian side had in taking pains to make such a high-profile announcement about this,” she told a daily news briefing. “We hope the Canadian side takes practical actions to show that it respects China’s sovereignty and security.”
Canada-China relations have nosedived in the past year.
China, furious that Canadian police arrested a senior Huawei Technologies Co executive on Dec. 1 last year on a US warrant, has blocked imports of meat products and canola seed from Canada and charged two Canadian men with spying.
However, both nations last week appointed new ambassadors to each other’s capitals, in a sign that ties might be thawing.
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