Lebanese protesters enraged by official negligence blamed for Beirut’s enormous and deadly explosion yesterday vowed to rally again after a night of street clashes in which they stormed several ministries.
“Prepare the gallows because our anger doesn’t end in one day,” said one message circulating on social media in response to Tuesday’s earthquake-strength blast of a huge pile of industrial chemicals.
The calls for renewed protests came as French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris was to oversee a UN-backed virtual donors conference to raise aid for Lebanon, a country already mired in a painful economic crisis.
Photo: EPA-EFE
In Beirut, the fury on the streets has further shaken the embattled government of Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab, which saw its first Cabinet resignation when Minister of Information Manal Abdel Samad quit yesterday.
“After the enormous Beirut catastrophe, I announce my resignation from government,” she said, apologizing to citizens for having failed them.
The revelation that Lebanese state officials had long tolerated a ticking time bomb in the heart of the capital has served as shocking proof to many Lebanese of the rot at the core of the state apparatus.
The death toll from the explosion of a long-neglected pile of ammonium nitrate yesterday stood at 158 people, with 60 still reported missing, and a 6,000 wounded, many by flying glass as the shockwave tore through the city.
The blast, whose mushroom cloud reminded many of an atomic bomb, left a 43m deep crater at Beirut’s port, a security official said, citing French experts working in the disaster area.
The mood was one of grief and fury in Beirut, a day after many of the dead were laid to rest and when thousands demonstrated in the biggest anti-government rally the country has seen in months.
The army on Saturday used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear hundreds of protesters from the Martyr’s Square, once more the epicenter of Lebanon’s protest movement.
The street violence left 65 people injured, the Red Cross said.
Demonstrators temporarily occupied the Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigrants building before being forced out by the army three hours later.
Protesters, some brandishing nooses, also stormed the Lebanese Ministry of Economy and Trade, the Ministry of Energy and Water and the Association of Banks, before they were pushed out by soldiers.
Diab said on Saturday that he would propose early elections to break the impasse that is plunging the nation ever deeper into political and economic crisis.
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
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
‘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
RSS