A car bomb hit a Baghdad hotel used by foreigners and US tanks fought Shiite militia yesterday.
The holiest Shiite Muslim shrine, the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, was slightly damaged by what appeared to be rockets or mortars. Anti-American militia said several people were hurt in an incident that will upset believers across the Middle East.
Around nearby Kufa, at least 11 people died in early morning fighting, hospital staff said.
US tanks were in action before dawn south of the capital, battling Shiite Mahdi Army fighters around the town of Kufa.
At least 11 people were killed and 22 wounded, hospital staff in Kufa and the nearby holy city of Najaf said.
Radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr launched an uprising last month against the US occupation. A sharp US offensive in recent days has contained the fighting to the Najaf area.
Damage to the Imam Ali shrine, dedicated to the 7th-century leader whose followers founded the Shiite branch of Islam, is a sensitive issue for the Shiite majorities in Iraq and Iran.
It was not clear which side fired the explosives. US commanders say they are doing all they can to spare holy sites.
At least two people were wounded in Baghdad, police said, when a car blew up outside the Karma hotel, frequented by foreigners and near the embassy of Australia, a close US ally in Iraq.
Iraqi witnesses also said a US military convoy had been attacked near the turbulent Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah. There was no US comment. It was not clear if there were casualties.
A soldier whose death on Monday was announced yesterday was at least the 580th American to die in combat since the invasion.
A leader of Iraq's Turkmen minority was assassinated in a drive-by shooting in the northern city of Kirkuk, police said.
Meanwhile, Iraqi interim defense minister Ali Allawi said in London yesterday that Iraq expects foreign troops to remain in the country for "months rather than years."
"In terms of time for the presence of the international forces to help us establish security and stability, I think it will be a question of months rather than years," Allawi told a joint press conference with British counterpart Geoff Hoon.
"The multinational force, in as much as its presence is needed to maintain security, will need ... to be replaced by indigenous forces, by Iraqi forces," Allawi said.
He was responding to a question about how long foreign troops might remain in the country following the handover of sovereignty by the US-led coalition on June 30.
Also see story:
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS