US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan on Tuesday, escalating a simmering conflict between the US and China over the democratic island.?
The first visit of a high-ranking US official to Taiwan since 1997 prompted China to undertake military drills around the democratic island.?
Beijing regards Taiwan as part of its territory and sees the visit of Pelosi as support for Taiwan's independence movement.? ?
Just hours after Pelosi landed in Taipei, #WWIII began trending on Twitter.?
Social media users started posting hilarious and witty memes using the hashtags #WWIII and #WW3. Here are some of the memes posted on Twitter by social media users.??
Beijing has responded angrily to Pelosi's trip. The Chinese government announced on Wednesday morning it would ban imports of Taiwanese citrus fruit and two types of fish, and stop exporting natural sand to Taiwan, Nikkei Asia reported.
Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan piqued the interest of people the world over.?On Tuesday, the US Air Force¡¯s Boeing C-40C - SPAR19, which was carrying? Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, was tracked by more than 7,00,000 people online.? ?
Flightradar24, a popular flight-tracking site, said its server was under heavy load on Tuesday morning because so many people were tracking Pelosi's flight.? ?
"Because of unprecedented sustained tracking interest in SPAR19, Flightradar24 services are under extremely heavy load. Some users may currently experience issues accessing the site, our teams are working on restoring full functionality to all users as quickly as possible," Flightradar24 said on Twitter.
At the time of the tweet, 345,000 people were tracking the?flight. Later, when the plane entered Taiwan's airspace, Flightradar24?said?632,000 people were watching. At the time of publication, it was unclear how many people were watching the plane as it made its final descent.??
Flightradar24 later said in a?statement?that SPAR19 was the "most tracked live flight" in the site's history by the time it landed, being watched by over 708,000 people.? ??
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