Serbia's top state prosecutor said yesterday that authorities were hunting for participants in riots that targeted the US and other embassies and Western commercial interests.
"We are collecting evidence and are identifying the culprits," Slobodan Radovanovic said in a statement.
Police said they had arrested nearly 200 rioters on Thursday night during the worst violence seen on Belgrade streets since the ouster of former strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
MISSIONS ATTACKED
Rioters protesting international recognition of Kosovo's independence torched several offices of the US embassy's consular section and attacked the missions of Germany, Belgium, Turkey, Croatia and other countries. One person died and more than 150 were injured in the violence, in which nearly 100 stores were looted.
On Friday, the US State Department ordered nonessential embassy employees and families of US diplomats in Belgrade to leave Serbia.
"We are not sufficiently confident that they are safe here," US Ambassador Cameron Munter said in an interview.
The decision to implement what is known as an "ordered departure" would affect some of the 80 to 100 Americans who work at the embassy, but it was not clear how many family members would be affected.
Current plans call for them to remain abroad for seven to 10 days, the embassy said.
Other embassies said they had no plans to withdrawal dependents or staff from Belgrade.
The US and the EU have warned Serbia to boost protection of foreign diplomats and missions, and the UN Security Council has unanimously condemned the attacks.
Serbian leaders have appealed for calm and President Boris Tadic convened the National Security Council to consider how to prevent further outbreaks of violence.
"We are intensively engaged with a large number of personnel [in finding] the culprits and expect the work to be completed soon," Radovanovic said.
But hardline nationalist ministers continued to condemn the US and other nations that have recognized the independence of Kosovo, which Serbs consider to be their historical heartland.
CULPRIT
"The United States is the main culprit ... for all those violent acts," said Serbian Minister for Kosovo Slobodan Samardzic.
Protests over Kosovo's declaration of independence have increased tensions throughout the region.
On Friday, angry demonstrators confronted UN police in Kosovska Mitrovica, an ethnically divided town in northern Kosovo. Mobs chanting "Kosovo is ours!" hurled stones, bottles and firecrackers at the UN forces, who were protecting a bridge that divides Serbs from ethnic Albanians in the town. No one appeared to be injured.
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,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
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
RSS