A US soldier was killed and another wounded in a roadside bombing of their vehicle in Baghdad, the US-led coalition said yesterday.
The soldier who died in the attack at 10:30pm on Saturday has not been named.
The death brings to 782 the number of US soldiers who have been killed or died in accidents since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March last year.
Meanwhile, Shiite militiamen clashed with coalition troops in both central and southern Iraq yesterday as the month-old uprising led by radical cleric Moqtada Sadr showed no sign of abating while the US military came under new fire over the abuse of prisoners.
Three Iraqis were killed in an early morning rocket attack that targeted a British camp near the main southern city of Basra while two Iraqis were killed and 15 wounded in clashes in the central holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.
Twenty people were also wounded when a shell exploded in a market in Nasiriyah.
Dozens of people have been killed in clashes between Sadr's Mehdi Army militia and the US-led coalition since Friday.
Ground forces commander Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez Saturday demanded a swift end to the Sadr insurgency, with fewer than 50 days to go to the coalition's June 30 deadline for the handover of power.
Interim foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari said yesterday that the uprising was causing great "harm to the aims and aspiration of the Iraqi people."
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
GAINING STEAM: The scheme initially failed to gather much attention, with only 188 cards issued in its first year, but gained popularity amid the COVID-19 pandemic Applications for the Employment Gold Card have increased in the past few years, with the card having been issued to a total of 13,191 people from 101 countries since its introduction in 2018, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Those who have received the card have included celebrities, such as former NBA star Dwight Howard and Australian-South Korean cheerleader Dahye Lee, the NDC said. The four-in-one Employment Gold Card combines a work permit, resident visa, Alien Resident Certificate (ARC) and re-entry permit. It was first introduced in February 2018 through the Act Governing Recruitment and Employment of Foreign Professionals (外國專業人才延攬及雇用法),
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
RSS