A little more than two months after retiring as US Army chief of staff, four-star General George Casey Jr is visiting Taiwan at the invitation of the Republic of China Army, sources have confirmed to the Taipei Times.
Among other activities, Casey was scheduled to address National Defense University sometime this week. Although the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) would neither confirm the visit nor provide an itinerary, Casey is believed to have visited the AIT’s office as well as the site of its future home in Neihu (內湖). Unconfirmed reports say Casey has also visited a number of military bases and is being escorted around by a Defense Intelligence Agency official from the institute.
A spokesman for the Ministry of National Defense, who also would not confirm Casey’s visit, said it was not unusual for Taiwan to extend invitations to recently retired senior US military officers. One such recent high-level visit was that of Admiral Timothy Keating, who came a few months after retiring as commander of the US Pacific Command in October 2009.
The visits, though low profile, are nevertheless perceived as a symbol of continued US involvement, both at the official and unofficial level, in the defense of Taiwan.
As a general rule, the US -government is supportive of such visits, though Taiwan often prefers to keep the visits under the radar as a courtesy to the visitor, US sources said.
The Sendai, Japan-born Casey, who was the top US commander in Iraq from June 2004 to February 2007, was sworn in as US Army chief of staff on April 10, 2007. After his retirement in April, he was replaced by General Martin Dempsey.
Casey, whose military career had little to do with East Asia, got a taste of the politics of the Taiwan Strait when, during a visit to Beijing in August 2009, he was berated by Chief of General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army Chen Bingde (陳炳德) over US arms sales to Taiwan.
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
CHANGING LANDSCAPE: Many of the part-time programs for educators were no longer needed, as many teachers obtain a graduate degree before joining the workforce, experts said Taiwanese universities this year canceled 86 programs, Ministry of Education data showed, with educators attributing the closures to the nation’s low birthrate as well as shifting trends. Fifty-three of the shuttered programs were part-time postgraduate degree programs, about 62 percent of the total, the most in the past five years, the data showed. National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) discontinued the most part-time master’s programs, at 16: chemistry, life science, earth science, physics, fine arts, music, special education, health promotion and health education, educational psychology and counseling, education, design, Chinese as a second language, library and information sciences, mechatronics engineering, history, physical education
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
RSS