In spite of being mostly knocked offline, the Web site of Arab satellite news network Al-Jazeera was among the most sought-after on the Internet last week.
The Web portal Lycos reported that "Al-Jazeera" and variant spellings became its top search term last week, with three times more searches than "sex."
Al-Jazeera drew intense interest from Web surfers after it carried Iraqi TV footage of dead and captive US soldiers in Iraq. US TV networks had decided not to air footage of the corpses. Al-Jazeera later honored a US request to stop until families could be notified, a statement from the network said.
The Internet's leading search engine, Google, said "Al-Jazeera'' was the term that showed the greatest increase in the week ending March 31. Google does not report absolute rankings of search terms.
Hackers also homed in on Al-Jazeera, bringing down its Web site early last week in what the Web host called an attack characterized by a flood of bogus traffic. Hackers calling themselves the "Freedom Cyber Force Militia" diverted visitors to the English site to a page with a US flag.
The managing editor of Al-Jazeera's English site, Joanne Tucker, said it would be back up by yesterday and that steps were being taken to make the pages impervious to hacking attempts.
Al-Jazeera is based in Qatar. It is funded by Qatar's government but is an unusually independent voice in the Arab world. Its English Web site launched last week with the aim of giving Western audiences an Arab perspective.
Taiwan is projected to lose a working-age population of about 6.67 million people in two waves of retirement in the coming years, as the nation confronts accelerating demographic decline and a shortage of younger workers to take their place, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan experienced its largest baby boom between 1958 and 1966, when the population grew by 3.78 million, followed by a second surge of 2.89 million between 1976 and 1982, ministry data showed. In 2023, the first of those baby boom generations — those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s — began to enter retirement, triggering
One of two tropical depressions that formed off Taiwan yesterday morning could turn into a moderate typhoon by the weekend, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Tropical Depression No. 21 formed at 8am about 1,850km off the southeast coast, CWA forecaster Lee Meng-hsuan (李孟軒) said. The weather system is expected to move northwest as it builds momentum, possibly intensifying this weekend into a typhoon, which would be called Mitag, Lee said. The radius of the storm is expected to reach almost 200km, she said. It is forecast to approach the southeast of Taiwan on Monday next week and pass through the Bashi Channel
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