Insurgents killed at least 58 people in a wave of attacks against Iraqi security forces yesterday, gunning down soldiers at an army post and bombing police recruits waiting in line to apply for jobs, officials said.
The violence, which struck at least 11 cities and also wounded nearly 240 people, highlighted militant attempts to sow havoc in the country and undermine the government.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks, but security forces are a frequent target of al-Qaeda’s Iraq branch, which has vowed to reassert itself and take back areas it was forced from before US troops withdrew from the country last year.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi judge yesterday sentenced fugitive Iraqi vice president Tareq al-Hashemi to death by hanging for the murder of a lawyer and a brigadier general, a correspondent reported.
Hashemi, tried in absentia, has dismissed all charges against him as politically motivated. His secretary and son-in-law, Ahmed Qahtan, was also tried in absentia and sentenced to death.
The trial, which began in May, covered the first of about 150 charges leveled against Hashemi, one of Iraq’s most senior Sunni officials, and his bodyguards, who have been accused of running a death squad.
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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