Sabotage

An oil refinery near Iraq's southern port city of Basra probably will remain shut for days after a large fire Tuesday that highlighted the vulnerability of the country's energy infrastructure to criminal and political power struggles. Five men suffered severe burns, and the sky was clotted with thick smoke until the two-hour fire was extinguished. The refinery provides petroleum products to consumers in southern Iraq. "There was severe damage to the refinery," said Basra Gov.

Who greenlighted \o7this\f7 traffic-signal project? That was the question flashing through the traffic-control center beneath Los Angeles City Hall on Friday as two high-ranking city transportation engineers were accused of sabotaging intersection signal lights during a labor union contract dispute four months ago. They have been charged with multiple counts of illegally hacking into traffic-control computers and disabling signals at four busy intersections Aug. 21.

Back in August, the union representing the city's traffic engineers vowed that on the day of their work action, "Los Angeles is not going to be a fun place to drive." City officials took the threat seriously. Fearful that the strikers could wreak havoc on the surface street system, they temporarily blocked all engineers from access to the computer that controls traffic signals. But officials now allege that two engineers, Kartik Patel and Gabriel Murillo, figured out how to hack in anyway.

With a name meaning understanding and agreement, the Samjhauta Express linking India and Pakistan was a symbol of hope that the two nations might finally trade decades of enmity for friendship. That ideal of cooperation seems to have been a target in the firebomb attack that killed scores of passengers trapped in two of the train's burning carriages as it sped toward the Pakistani border.

A cable news program was temporarily replaced with hard-core pornography, shocking viewers who had been watching a health show featuring former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. The incident on KPPX-TV was "an act of human sabotage" at the Phoenix-area station, said Ion Television, which operates the station. "We have launched a rigorous investigation, and any implicated employees will face strict disciplinary action and termination," spokeswoman Leslie Monreal said.

A methane gas explosion that killed 108 people at a Siberian coal mine was caused by a deliberate blockage of safety equipment, investigators said Monday. Konstantin Pulikovsky, head of the industrial watchdog Rostekhnadzor, which is investigating the March 19 disaster, said the mine's methane gas detection system had been blocked, allowing the gas to build up to unsafe levels. "The automatic system showing methane levels was rendered nonoperational ...

A contract technician accused of sabotaging computers at the agency that controls most of California's electrical grid was able to enter the building and high-security inner rooms -- allowed in by electronic card readers and a handprint scanner -- even though his employer had warned days earlier that he should be denied access to the facility, authorities said.

A leftist guerrilla group claimed responsibility Tuesday for a series of bombings of pipelines operated by Pemex, Mexico's national oil company, and authorities moved quickly to protect the nation's oil and gas industry from further attacks. The Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, said in a communique that it would continue its bombing campaign until the government disclosed the whereabouts of two EPR members said to have disappeared last year in the southern state of Oaxaca.

A computer scheduled to be delivered to the International Space Station next month was sabotaged, possibly by a worker at a Texas subcontractor's plant, although NASA officials said Thursday that the damage would have posed no danger to the station. Several wires were cut inside the briefcase-sized unit and two identical devices, said Edmund Memi, a spokesman for Boeing Co., the main contractor for the space station.

A computer sabotaged by a disgruntled worker of a NASA supplier has been repaired and loaded aboard the space shuttle Endeavour for Wednesday's liftoff. Space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said that it was apparently an isolated event and that there was no reason to believe anyone had tampered with anything else on the spacecraft. "We have found no other areas of concern," Hale said at Cape Canaveral. "We have thoroughly reviewed all the parts made by that contractor."