Saboteurs set ablaze oil pipelines in both northern and southern Iraq yesterday, threatening to further cripple the country's ailing economy and send world prices back upwards.
The attack on a pipeline near the southern port city of Basra came less than two days after the country's key revenue earner was dealt a serious blow by another act of sabotage in the north which halted all exports of Kirkuk crude.
Saboteurs also blew up a secondary pipeline serving the northern oil center of Kirkuk yesterday afternoon, a security official said.
In Basra, oil officials scrambled to contain the blaze and salvage the flow of exports.
"The sabotage damaged two parallel pipelines. The first pumps oil to the Harithah electrical plant and the second from the town of Nahr Omar to the Zubeir oil fields," South Oil Company chief executive officer Jabar Ali al-Luaibi said
A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb yesterday outside the Iraqi police academy in the northern city of Kirkuk as hun-dreds of trainees and civilians were leaving for the day, killing at least 17 people and wounding at least 32, authorities said.
Ambulances raced to the scene, where seven cars were on fire. Rescue personnel ferried the wounded away on stretchers.
The blast was caused by a suicide attacker, said Iraqi National Guard General Anwar Mohammed Amin.
Meanwhile, the militant Islamic Army in Iraq has claimed responsibility for an assassination attempt against Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, in a video shown yesterday by the Arabic-language satellite television network al-Jazeera.
The group, which is believed to have kidnapped two French journalists, also said it captured a bodyguard of Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, during the attack.
The Islamic Army in Iraq said in the video that "the hostage, who was wounded during the attempted assassination of Chalabi, died as a result of his wounds," al-Jazeera reported.
Meanwhile, Nepal yesterday urged its citizens in Iraq to leave the country after 12 Nepalese hostages were executed by insurgents.
The government briefly lifted a shoot-on-sight curfew imposed in the capital four days ago after news of the killings sparked riots.
Foreign Minister Prakash Sharan Mahat said it was unclear how many Nepalese were in Iraq, but the number was in the thousands, adding that the government was working to get its citizens out.
"We have even sought help from groups like the International Organization of Migration," Mahat said. "We have appealed to all the Nepalese in Iraq to come out of there without endangering themselves, and contact the embassies in neighboring countries."
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
COUNTERING HOSTILITY: The draft bill would require the US to increase diplomatic pressure on China and would impose sanctions on those who sabotage undersea cable networks US lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to bolster the resilience of Taiwan’s submarine cables to counter China’s hostile activities. The proposal, titled the critical undersea infrastructure resilience initiative act, was cosponsored by Republican representatives Mike Lawler and Greg Stanton, and Democratic Representative Dave Min. US Senators John Curtis and Jacky Rosen also introduced a companion bill in the US Senate, which has passed markup at the chamber’s Committee on Foreign Relations. The House’s version of the bill would prioritize the deployment of sensors to detect disruptions or potential sabotage in real-time and enhance early warning capabilities through global intelligence sharing frameworks,
RSS