Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Kinmen County’s Shi Islet is pictured in an undated photograph with the skyline of China’s Xiamen in the background.
Photo courtesy of retired Kinmen teacher Hung Ching-chang

Taiwan yesterday downed a civilian drone after weeks of complaints about incursions by uncrewed aerial vehicles from China, a sign Taipei is pushing back against Beijing’s efforts to encroach on its territory.

Taiwanese troops shot the drone down near Kinmen’s Shi Islet (獅嶼) at about noon after attempts to repel it failed, a statement from the garrison on the Taipei-held outpost just off China said.

The Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — in 1940 were invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Joseph Stalin and the auspices of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty between Germany and the Soviets signed in 1939.

Conducting illegal surveillance, detention and execution, the Soviet Union carried out the June Deportation of 1941, in which 95,000 people were exiled to Siberian labor camps for “re-education.”

The victims included civil servants, military personnel, police officers, teachers, wealthy businesspeople, elderly people, women and children. Most of these “class enemies” never lived to see their homeland again.