Turkey stepped up pressure yesterday on northern Iraq, imposing economic sanctions over the safe haven Kurdish rebels enjoy in the region, as the US said it was supplying Ankara with intelligence on the separatists' positions.
"We have prepared a list of economic measures targeting the financial resources of the terrorist organization and its supporters," Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan told a press conference.
"Some measures have already been put into force," he said. "These measures will not be announced beforehand, so that they do not lose their efficiency."
Ankara accuses the autonomous Kurdish government in northern Iraq of harboring and aiding the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which uses bases in the mountainous region for cross-border attacks as part of its 23-year campaign for self-rule in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast.
Turkey has reportedly massed up to 100,000 troops on the border with Iraq and has threatened a military incursion to strike PKK bases unless Baghdad and Washington make good on promises to crack down on the rebels.
"We have no time to lose. All instruments -- diplomatic, political, socio-cultural and military -- are on the table," Babacan said.
The NTV news channel said Turkey had closed its air space to flights bound for northern Iraq, but Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan quickly denied it.
The sanctions, agreed in a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, came as the Pentagon announced that it was giving Ankara more intelligence on PKK positions along the border with Iraq.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due in Ankara today for talks with Turkish leaders over the mounting tensions, while Erdogan will meet with US President George W. Bush in Washington on Monday.
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
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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
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