A US military reconnaissance aircraft yesterday reportedly flew near Taiwan’s southern airspace, the same day the Ministry of National Defense confirmed that Chinese military aircraft had been seen southwest of the nation.
A US RC-135U Combat Sent was operating in the South China Sea, a flight chart posted on Twitter yesterday morning by military flight tracker Aircraft Spots showed.
Ministry spokesman Major General Shih Shun-wen (史順文) said that the armed forces are closely monitoring the nation’s surrounding waters and airspace, but did not confirm the aircraft’s movements.
Charts released by Aircraft Spots and Taiwan’s own records show that the latest mission sortie was the sixth time since March 25 that a US military aircraft was found to have been operating near Taiwan’s airspace.
The first three occurrences happened between March 25 and 27, while the fourth and fifth took place on March 31 and Wednesday.
Institute of National Defense and Security Research senior analyst Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said that the RC-135U’s flight near the Bashi Channel, between Taiwan and the Philippines, and into the South China Sea might have been to monitor unusual activity by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in the area.
Also yesterday, the ministry confirmed that several Chinese J-11 fighters, KJ-500 airborne early warning and control aircraft, and H-6 bombers earlier in the day flew over waters southwest of Taiwan and then into the Bashi Channel.
Soon after entering the airspace over the channel, the aircraft returned to their base along the same route, the ministry said, but it did not disclose where the planes were based.
The sortie was the sixth time this year that Chinese military aircraft were seen operating near Taiwan’s airspace this year.
BILINGUAL PLAN: The 17 educators were recruited under a program that seeks to empower Taiwanese, the envoy to the Philippines said The Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines on Thursday hosted a send-off event for the first group of English-language teachers from the country who were recruited for a Ministry of Education-initiated program to advance bilingual education in Taiwan. The 14 teachers and three teaching assistants are part of the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which aims to help find English-language instructors for Taiwan’s public elementary and junior-high schools, the office said. Seventy-seven teachers and 11 teaching assistants from the Philippines have been hired to teach in Taiwan in the coming school year, office data showed. Among the first group is 57-year-old
Police have detained a Taoyuan couple suspected of over the past two months colluding with human trafficking rings and employment scammers in Southeast Asia to send nearly 100 Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia. At a media briefing in Taipei yesterday, the Criminal Investigation Bureau presented items seized from the couple, including alleged victims’ passports, forged COVID-19 vaccination records, mobile phones, bank documents, checks and cash. The man, surnamed Tsai (蔡), and his girlfriend, surnamed Tsan (詹), were taken into custody last month, after police at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport stopped four jobseekers from boarding a flight to Phnom Penh, said Dustin Lee (李泱輯),
‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’: A man watching Taiwanese military drills said that there would be nothing anyone could do if the situation escalates in the Taiwan Strait Many people in Taiwan look upon China’s military exercises over the past week with calm resignation, doubting that war is imminent and if anything, feeling pride in their nation’s determination to defend itself. After a visit to Taiwan last week by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, China has sent ships and aircraft across an unofficial buffer between Taiwan and China’s coast and missiles over Taipei and into waters surrounding the nation since Thursday last week. However, Rosa Chang, proudly watching her son take part in Taiwanese military exercises that included dozens of howitzers firing shells into the Taiwan Strait off
TRAPPED IN CAMBODIA: A woman said that a job offer in Cambodia led to her being imprisoned in a fenced industrial park, where she was sold four times in a week An inter-ministerial task force has been set up by the Executive Yuan to tackle the issue of Taiwanese being lured to Cambodia with promises of high-paying jobs, but getting stuck there as targets of human trafficking, Executive Yuan spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said on Thursday. Legislators, including Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) of the Democratic Progressive Party, told a news conference that a task force should be set up to address problems exposed by reports of Taiwanese being lured to Cambodia, Myanmar and other countries with promises of lucrative jobs before being forced into illegal work while being subject to abuse. Later in the
RSS