Appeals for calm in the row over a series of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed went unheeded yesterday as police shot dead four more protesters during rioting in Afghanistan, bringing the worldwide death toll to 13.
The re-printing of the 12 offending caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in a French satirical weekly yesterday, along with a fresh batch of related cartoons, was likely to deepen Muslim anger against what is perceived as an act of blasphemy.
Also yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin slammed the cartoons -- first published in Denmark and later reproduced in dozens of mainly European papers -- as a provocation, equating them with child pornography.
PHOTO: EPA
"When we condemn child pornography, we don't hide behind freedom of expression," Putin saidd in an interview, as he called on Denmark to "ask for forgiveness."
In other developments, the EU's foreign policy chief plans to travel to Arab and Muslim countries in an attempt to calm anger over the cartoons, an EU official said yesterday.
Javier Solana's trip, which is still being finalized, will include a visit to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Saudi Arabia, the official said.
In Pakistan, thousands of protesters burned an effigy of US President George W. Bush in a remote Pakistani tribal area, the third day of large-scale demonstrations in different cities.
Around 3,000 demonstrators shouting "Allahu Akhbar" (God is great) in Dara Adamkhel, near the Afghan border, accused Bush backing the caricatures.
"Bush is behind this, he heads the gang which is against Islam," Said Wazir, the leader of a local Islamic group called Quami Tehreek, told the crowd.
"We condemn Bush and we condemn Denmark for publishing blasphemous cartoons," he said.
In the West Bank city of Hebron, scores of Palestinians hurled stones and bottles at the offices of a team of international monitors yesterday to protest the cartoons.
Denmark, meanwhile, continued to close diplomatic outposts and ensure the safety of its nationals abroad, pulling out 11 Danish members of a peace-monitoring team in the West Bank, officials said yesterday. Its embassies and consulates have been fire-bombed and stormed in Tehran, Beirut and Damascus in recent days.
The latest deaths in Afghanistan occurred as protesters and police clashed in Qalat, the capital of southern Zabul Province. About 400 protesters hurled stones as they tried to storm the police headquarters, before moving to a US-led military coalition base where they torched four fuel tankers, witnesses said.
A provincial official said police had opened fire to control the crowd.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
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