The US led calls on Friday for action against Syria after a UN investigator implicated top Syrian officials in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
The report by UN investigator Detlev Mehlis is to be discussed by the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday when possible new moves could be discussed.
US President George W. Bush called the report "deeply disturbing" and said that the US would seek a meeting of the UN Security Council "as quickly as possible to deal with this very serious matter."
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, said: "This is a very serious matter -- that you have Syrian involvement in the assassination of the former prime minister Rafiq Hariri."
"There will have to be some way to ensure accountability for what has already been found here," she said in a joint press conference with UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Birmingham, Alabama.
The chief US diplomat also noted that the report shows "clear indications that the Syrian government had not been cooperating" with the investigation into the Beirut bomb blast in February that killed Hariri and 20 other people.
Straw, on a tour of Rice's southern home state, said that the UK fully backed the US position on the report's findings.
The Mehlis report cited "converging evidence" of Syrian and Lebanese involvement and accused Damascus of blocking and misleading the investigation.
Meanwhile, the son and political heir of the slain former Lebanese prime minister yesterday praised the UN probe and called for an international tribunal to try the alleged killers.
"The hour of truth has come. The blood of the martyr Rafik Hariri and his colleagues in the march toward freedom, dignity, sovereignty will not have been shed in vain," Legislator Saad Hariri said.
also see story:
Questions remain about Hariri killing
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),
‘COMING MENACINGLY’: The CDC advised wearing a mask when visiting hospitals or long-term care centers, on public transportation and in crowded indoor venues Hospital visits for COVID-19 last week increased by 113 percent to 41,402, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday, as it encouraged people to wear a mask in three public settings to prevent infection. CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said weekly hospital visits for COVID-19 have been increasing for seven consecutive weeks, and 102 severe COVID-19 cases and 19 deaths were confirmed last week, both the highest weekly numbers this year. CDC physician Lee Tsung-han (李宗翰) said the youngest person hospitalized due to the disease this year was reported last week, a one-month-old baby, who does not
RSS