Crude oil rose for the first time in three days after White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said it was "unacceptable" for Iraq to bar scientists from talking with UN weapons inspectors.
Concern that the US will soon invade Iraq comes as a strike in Venezuela has caused that nation's exports to plummet. Iraq and Venezuela in November pumped about 7 percent of the world's oil.
Crude oil for March delivery rose US$1.03, or 3.2 percent, to US$33.28 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was the biggest one-day gain since Jan. 9. Prices were up 1 percent this week and 69 percent from a year ago.
In London, the March Brent crude-oil futures contract rose US$0.77, or 2.6 percent, to US$30.49 a barrel on the International Petroleum Exchange.
Hussein may try to blow up Iraq's 1,500 oil wells if the US and its allies invade, a senior defense official said at the Pentagon on condition of anonymity.
"There are a variety of intelligence sources that leave us with the impression or belief that the regime has the capability and intent to cause destruction to the oil fields," the official said.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Hussein ordered the destruction of more than 700 of 1,000 oil wells in Kuwait as his army retreated. It took 18 months and about US$20 billion to repair the damage.
The strike in Venezuela, which began on Dec. 2, is giving union officials, business leaders and former oil executives the chance to pressure President Hugo Chavez to step down or hold elections. Chavez has refused both alternatives.
As of Wednesday, Venezuela's production was about 714,000 barrels a day, striking oil workers said. The government says production is above 1 million barrels a day. Output has plunged from about 3 million barrels before the strike.
Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Canada and Mexico normally vie to be the largest supplier to the US In October the four supplied 65 percent of US oil imports, according to the Energy Department.
Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, pumps about 10 percent of global supply.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
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