A US Navy guided-missile warship and two military reconnaissance aircraft were operating near Taiwan over the past two days, after Chinese warplanes showed up in the area, the Ministry of National Defense confirmed yesterday.
The USS Barry, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, sailed through the Taiwan Strait from north to south, the ministry said in a news release, without specifying when.
However, media reported that the US destroyer transited the Strait on Friday, tailed by the Chinese missile frigate Nantong.
The Barry exited the Strait before dawn yesterday, a military officer said.
The US Pacific Fleet yesterday on Facebook confirmed the Barry’s passage through the Strait.
Accompanied by several photographs, the post was titled: “The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry (DDG 52) conducts underway operations in the Taiwan Strait.”
“Barry is forward-deployed to the US Seventh Fleet area of operations in support of security and stability in the Indo-Pacific region,” a caption read.
Separately, a US Navy EP-3E Aries electronic reconnaissance aircraft was yesterday morning seen flying south of Taiwan, a flight chart posted on Twitter by Aircraft Spots, a tracker of military air movements, showed.
The sortie was the seventh time since March 25 that a US military aircraft has been seen passing near Taiwan, ministry data showed.
The ministry said that it has been closely monitoring the aircraft’s and vessels’ movements when near Taiwan’s territorial waters and airspace, but has detected no irregularities.
On Friday morning, Aircraft Spots showed a US military aircraft — an RC-135U Combat Sent — flying over the South China Sea. The aircraft is typically deployed to locate and identify land, naval and airborne radar signals from foreign military for analysis.
The US vessels and aircraft showed up in the area after Chinese J-11 fighters, KJ-500 airborne early warning and control aircraft, and H-6 bombers on Friday morning flew over waters southwest of Taiwan and then to the Bashi Channel.
The RC-135U’s sortie might have been to monitor unusual activity by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the area, Institute of National Defense and Security Research senior analyst Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said.
Su added that the US might be sending a signal to some countries by allowing flight trackers such as Aircraft Spots to record the movements of its aircraft.
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
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,