Tag: InternationalNews

{At least 1,600 buildings destroyed and more than 80,000 people forced to flee Fort McMurray as fire sweeps through it.}

A state of emergency has been declared in the Canadian city of Fort McMurray as a massive blaze prompted the biggest evacuation in the history of Alberta state.

Officials warned on Wednesday that the fire had the potential to destroy much of the town with a few neighborhoods already destroyed.

Wind-whipped wildfires, which broke out on Sunday, have destroyed at least 1,600 homes and other buildings and forced more than 80,000 residents to flee.

Danielle Larivee, Alberta’s minister of municipal affairs, said the fire was actively burning in residential areas, with more than 250 firefighters battling the blaze.

An update from the Municipality of Wood Buffalo later in the evening indicated the fire was continuing to claim homes and had destroyed a new school.

Authorities said there had been no known casualties from the blaze itself, but fatalities were reported in at least one car crash when people were evacuating.

Chelsie Klassen, a spokeswoman for The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said all large oil sands facilities would be properly shut to minimise the damage.

{{‘Heartbreaking’}}

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley flew up to survey the situation, while officials in the evacuation center had to bolt to the south of the city as flames edged closer.

Notley tweeted pictures of the fire from above. “The view from the air is heartbreaking,” she wrote.

Notley said about 10,000 evacuees moved north where oil sands work camps were being pressed into service to house evacuees. The bulk of the evacuees fled south to Edmonton and elsewhere, and officials said they eventually would like to move everyone south.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, while the full extent of the damage wasn’t yet known, he called it “absolutely devastating” and said there was loss on a scale that was hard to imagine.

Trudeau said he had offered the province his government’s full support.

{{Watch: Playing with fire}}

Fort McMurray is surrounded by wilderness in the heart of Canada’s oil sands – the third largest reserves of oil in the world behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

It was the second major blaze in the oil sands region in a year. Last May, wildfires led to the evacuation of hundreds of workers from the region, and a 9 percent cut in Alberta’s oil sands output.

{Court orders 72-hour shutdown of messaging service but reasons remain unknown due to legal secrecy in an ongoing case.}

A Brazilian judge has ordered mobile-phone carriers to block access to WhatsApp for 72 hours throughout the country, the second such move against the messaging application in five months.

Monday’s decision affects WhatsApp’s 100 million-plus users in the country. The reason for the order is not known due to legal secrecy in an ongoing case in the court.

It is the second time since mid-December that WhatsApp has been the target of a blocking order.

The service was shut down for 48 hours on December 15 last year after Facebook failed to comply with an order, although another court interrupted that suspension shortly afterward.

Judge Marcel Maia Montalvao of Sergipe state is the same judge who in March ordered the imprisonment of a Brazil-based Facebook executive for failing to comply with an attempted block on WhatsApp.

He was jailed and subsequently freed.

Twitter user Acaua Tavares reacted with the Portuguese acronym “PQP”, roughly equivalent to “WTF?” in English, an agency reported.

“WhatsApp blocked again, PQP! That’s Brazil,” he wrote.

Many commenters reacted with a single question: “Again?”

Officials blamed the company of continuously failing to share information on WhatsApp users for an investigation into drug trafficking and organised crime.

Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, was “stunned” by the “extreme decision”.

In a statement, WhatsApp said the company is “disappointed at the decision” after doing the utmost to cooperate with Brazilian tribunals.

In 2013, Google too found itself under fire. The search engine giant’s top Brazil executive was accused of breaking election laws when he refused to remove YouTube videos that were critical of a mayoral candidate in Mato Grosso do Sul state.

Reported non-cooperation from media companies is not that uncommon.

Last year, Apple refused to cooperate with the FBI in unlocking an iPhone used by one of the shooters in a mass killing by a couple in San Bernardino, California.

{Hundreds “still in detention” after nearly 2,000 were held before anniversary of Papua’s incorporation into Indonesia.}

Nearly 2,000 people were arrested over the past week by police in Indonesia’s Papua province for “illegal” pro-independence demonstrations before most of them were released, reports say.

The mass arrests coincided with the run-up to the anniversary of the resource-rich territory’s controversial incorporation into Indonesia in 1969.

Veronica Koman, a lawyer based in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, told Al Jazeera dozens of people were arrested on Tuesday, with at least 19 children detained in the town of Fakfak, about 1,500km from Jayapura, the provincial capital of Papua province.

“Six have been admitted to hospital today,” she said citing sources on the ground but providing no reasons for the hospitalisation.

In the largest mass arrests known so far, 1,449 people were arrested on Monday in Jayapura, 200 in Merauke, 45 in Semarane, 42 in Makaffar, and dozens more across the region, Koman said.

Victor Yeimo, chairman of the West Papua National Committee (KNPB), which organised the pro-independence rally, told Al Jazeera that most of the nearly 2,000 people arrested had been released but hundreds were still in detention.

Papua province and West Papua make up the western half of an island north of Australia, with independent Papua New Guinea to the east.

Foreign journalists have been banned from reporting in Papua and local journalists barred from covering the latest protests.

Police told Al Jazeera there were no reports of violence but that the protesters did not have a permit to hold the rally.

“At least two people were arrested while handing a petition to the police,” Koman said.

“It’s unclear what legal justification the Indonesian authorities could have for the arrests. We are currently investigating what the reasons could be.”

Separatist conflict

Papua has seen a long-running and often violent separatist conflict since being incorporated into Indonesia after a widely criticised UN-backed referendum in 1969. Dutch colonial rule ended on May 1, 1963.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has made several trips to Papua since taking office in 2014 and has promised to bring development to the impoverished region after decades of neglect.

His government has also released several political prisoners and pledged to resolve cases of human rights violations.

But security forces still maintain a strong presence in the restive region and are often seen as taking a heavy-handed approach to peaceful demonstrations, activists say.

{Adonia’s arrival in Havana harbour marks start of commercial travel between the two neighbours after years of animosity.}

The first American cruise ship in nearly 40 years to set sail for Cuba has docked in Havana harbour with more than 700 passengers on board.

The arrival of the Adonia on Monday evening marks the restart of commercial travel between the US and the island-state after five decades of hostile relations brought on by the Cold War.

The ship was the first US cruise ship in Havana since president Jimmy Carter eliminated virtually all restrictions of US travel to Cuba in the late 1970s.

Travel limits were restored after Carter left office and US cruises to Cuba only become possible again after Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro declared detente in December 2014.

The Adonia’s arrival is the first step towards a future in which thousands of ships a year could cross the Florida Straits, long closed to most US-Cuba traffic due to tensions that once brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

The straits were blocked by the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis and tens of thousands of Cubans have fled across them to Florida on homemade rafts, with untold thousands dying in the process.

Al Jazeera’s Andy Gallacher, reporting from Miami, said the Adonia’s journey marked a new stage in US-Cuban relations.

“During this entire normalisation process between the US and Cuba, there have been plenty of moments that few people thought they would see in their life time: one being a US president setting foot on Cuban soil, another being the Cuban flag atop its embassy in Washington DC,” he said.

{{Hard-currency need}}

The number of Cubans trying to cross the straits is at its highest point in eight years and cruises and merchant ships regularly rescue people on rafts from the straits.

US cruises are expected to bring Cuba tens of millions of dollars in badly needed foreign hard currency if traffic increases as expected.

More than a dozen lines have announced plans to run US-Cuba cruises and if all actually begin operations Cuba could earn more than $80m a year, the US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council said in a report Monday.

“But on Sunday here in Miami, a new chapter in US-Cuba relations begins with this cruise ship.”

Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman, reporting from Havana, said many observers saw the arrival of the Adonia as a “momentous” occasion.

“I asked the hundreds of people here [in Havana] who’ve been waiting for hours to catch a glimpse of the boat why they are so excited, and they are telling me they feel more separated by sea than by air.”

{Australian minister accuses refugee advocates of inciting self-harm after second incident of self-immolation in a week.}

A refugee has set herself on fire at an Australian-run detention centre on the Pacific island of Nauru, just days after an Iranian man died in a similar act in protest against his treatment.

Australian officials said a Somali woman was in a critical condition after she set herself alight on Monday.

The incident sparked debate on social media with the hashtag #Only19, the purported age of the Somali woman, trending in Australia, with users uploading and tweeting photos of when they were 19.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton acknowledged there had been a rise in cases of self-harm in the camps and accused refugee advocates of giving the asylum seekers false hope that they would one day be settled in Australia.

Some advocates were “encouraging some of these people to behave in a certain way”, he said on Tuesday.

However, the top UN body for refugees said such incidents in the camps, which hold asylum seekers fleeing violence and hardship in the Middle East, Afghanistan and South Asia, were a result of Australia’s tough offshore detention polices.

“These people have already been through a great deal. Many have fled war and persecution, some have already suffered trauma,” the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Australia said in a statement.

“The consensus among medical experts is that conditions of detention and offshore processing do immense damage to physical and mental health,” it said.

Last week, a 23-year-old Iranian man known as Omid set fire to himself on Nauru during a visit by UN representatives, an act the Nauru government said was a “political protest”.

Under Australia’s immigration policy, asylum seekers attempting to reach the country by boat are intercepted and sent to camps on the Nauru, about 3,000km northeast of Australia, or on Manus island in Papua New Guinea.

The harsh conditions and reports of systemic child abuse at the camps have drawn wide criticism inside and outside Australia and have become a major headache for Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull during campaigning for July national elections.

The government argues that the approach, which also includes turning back boats, has prevented drownings by stopping people from making the dangerous journey, often from Indonesia.

Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court last week found its centre on Manus Island, which has some 850 detainees, to be unconstitutional, prompting the government in Port Moresby to order it closed.