A report that a group of Taiwanese marines have been sent on a one-month training program in Guam as part of a Taiwan-US defense cooperation and exchange program is correct, Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) said yesterday.
The program is one of a number of “long-standing” bilateral exchange projects between Taipei and Washington, Chiu said, without elaborating.
Chiu made the comments on the sidelines of a hearing at the legisature in Taipei when asked by reporters to comment on a report about the program in the Chinese-language Apple Daily.
Photo: CNA
The Marine Corps has sent a platoon of 40 marines for month-long amphibious landing training at the US military base in Guam to enhance their combat capabilities, the report said.
Taiwanese and US marines would also undergo training for joint operations to learn the latest US Marine Corps tactics, it added.
Chiu’s comments came after President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on Thursday last week confirmed for the first time the presence of US troops in Taiwan helping to train the military to counter threats posed by China.
Taiwan has “a wide range of cooperation with the US aiming at increasing our defense capability,” Tsai told CNN.
She did not specify how many US service personnel were in Taiwan, saying only that the number was “not as many as people thought.”
International media last year reported that the US had been rotating a small number of US Marines and Special Operations Forces to train the Taiwanese military amid rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
At that time Chiu denied that US troops had been deployed to Taiwan, describing US military personnel as being in Taiwan for military training “exchanges” with their Taiwanese counterparts.
China said that it had long been aware that US military personnel regularly visited Taiwan, but accused Tsai of provocation by making such visits public.
Chiu yesterday reiterated his stance that US military trainers and consultants were in Taiwan only on short-term assignments and have not been posted or deployed.
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