Live-fire drills are to be held from July 25 to 29 to simulate the defense of the Port of Taipei against a Chinese attack, a military officer said yesterday.
The drills are part of the annual Han Kuang military exercises and would focus on defense scenarios of the port in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里) and the nearby Tamsui River (淡水河) estuary, the officer said on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak to the media.
If the port and the estuary were to be captured by invading Chinese forces, they could unload military equipment near the capital, the officer said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The drills would simulate Chinese forces attacking with fighter jets and helicopters, as well as a joint counterattack by Taiwan’s armed forces, they said.
Another military source earlier said that if Chinese forces were to capture the mouth of the Tamsui River, which is 8km from the Guandu Bridge connecting Taipei and New Taipei City, they could advance toward the headquarters of the nation’s major political institutions and farther into northern Taiwan.
Blowing up the bridge has been part of defense simulations over the past few years, the second source said.
The annual exercises are intended to improve the military’s’ capability to engage in asymmetric, cognitive, information and electronic warfare, and mobilize reserve forces to enhance overall defense readiness by incorporating civilians, said Major General Lin Wen-huang (林文皇), who is in charge of combat and planning affairs at the Ministry of National Defense.
This year’s live-fire drills would also focus on eliminating invading forces at sea and along the coastline, Lin told a news conference in May, adding that the three branches of the military and a wide range of weapons systems would be deployed.
The Han Kuang exercises, first held in 1984, are Taiwan’s most important military drills and seek to test the country’s combat readiness in the event of a Chinese attack.
This year’s tabletop wargames phase, the first of the two-part exercises, took place from May 16 to 20.
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