A US warship sailed through the Taiwan Strait, the US Navy said yesterday, a day after a top US commander warned of the threat to Taiwan of a Chinese invasion within the next six years.
“The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS John Finn conducted a routine Taiwan Strait transit” yesterday, the US Seventh Fleet said on its Web site.
The third such voyage since US President Joe Biden took office “demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” it said in a statement.
US warships periodically conduct navigation exercises in the Strait, often triggering angry responses from Bejing. The US and many other countries view the route as international waters open to all.
The latest transit came the same day Beijing accused US Admiral Philip Davidson, the top US military officer in the Asia-Pacific region, of attempting to “hype up” China’s military threat.
At a US Senate Committee on Armed Forces hearing in Washington on Tuesday, Davidson warned that the US was losing its military edge to China in the Pacific and gave a stark assessment that he believed an invasion of Taiwan by Beijing could be imminent.
“I worry that they’re [China] accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order ... by 2050,” Davidson said.
“Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before that, and I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact, in the next six years,” he said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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