Tag: InternationalNews

{At least three killed and over 100 others injured in blast at state-run petrochemical plant in southern Veracruz state.}

A massive explosion at an oil facility in southeastern Mexico has killed at least three workers, injured 136 and triggered evacuations, officials and state-run energy giant Pemex said on Wednesday.

A huge plume of toxic grey smoke could be seen spewing from the plant, known as Pajaritos, in the city of Coatzacoalcos, in Veracruz state. The blast, which was felt from as far as 10km away, forced the evacuation of nearby schools and businesses.

The cause of the explosion at the Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo plant, jointly owned by Pemex, was not immediately known.

Javier Duarte, the Veracruz state governor, told Milenio Television that the blast killed three people at the plant. Another 58 people were hurt, according to Pemex.

Duarte rushed to the scene of what he said was “a very strong explosion,” where fire crews had the blaze under control.

People living in the vicinity should remain indoors as the “cloud of chemicals” dissipates, Duarte said.

School classes in Coatzacoalcos and five nearby communities were suspended.

President Enrique Pena Nieto said on Twitter that the government would help the “affected workers and neighbours of the area”.

Fires at oil facilities in Mexico are fairly regular occurrences.

In February, two people were killed and at least seven injured in a blaze at a Pemex oil platform off the coast of Campeche, also in the southeast.

Pemex provides a fifth of the Mexican government’s revenue but has posted huge losses amid crumbling production and oil prices.

{Thursday’s celebrations will be low-key, with the main public events taking place as part of her official birthday celebrations in June.}

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth celebrates her 90th birthday Thursday with a family gathering and a cake baked by a reality television star, as a new poll finds Britain’s longest serving monarch is as popular as ever.

The queen has reigned for more than 63 years and shows no sign of retiring, even if she has in recent years passed on some of her duties to the younger royals.

A new poll suggests the British public want it to stay that way, with 70 per cent saying she should reign for as long as possible, the highest proportion since 1981.

Support for the monarchy remains high at 76 per cent, according to the Ipsos-Mori poll for King’s College London.

“The queen is hugely popular, she is liked personally and is felt to have done an excellent job,” Roger Mortimore, a professor at the Institute of Contemporary British History at King’s College London, told AFP.

Thursday’s celebrations will be low-key, with the main public events, including a military parade and lunch for 10,000 guests on The Mall outside Buckingham Palace, taking place as part of her official birthday celebrations in June.

With her husband Prince Philip, she will meet members of the public near Windsor Castle, her weekend residence, before lighting the first of a chain of beacons stretching across Britain and its overseas territories.

At an event in Windsor’s town hall, the queen will be presented with a cake baked by Nadiya Jamir Hussain, the winner of the Great British Bake Off, a hugely popular television cooking competition.

The Muslim mother of three will present the orange drizzle cake, with orange curd and orange butter cream, to the queen personally — a prospect she said has left her “so nervous I can’t even look at the oven”.

FOUR GENERATIONS

The queen will also attend a family birthday dinner organised by her heir Prince Charles, emphasising her role as the head of four generations of the House of Windsor.

Charles and his son William are increasingly taking over the queen’s duties, although she still carried out 341 engagements last year, including state visits to Malta and Germany.

William, who with his wife Kate and two young children has brought fresh energy to the royals, paid tribute to the matriarch he and his brother Harry describe as “the boss”.

“I am incredibly lucky to have my grandmother in my life. As she turns 90, she is a remarkably energetic and dedicated guiding force for her family,” William said.

The queen has seen 12 prime ministers pass through Downing Street since she ascended to the throne in 1952, meeting them once a week at the palace and still receiving daily updates of the workings of parliament.

LUNCH WITH OBAMA

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron will pay tribute to the monarch in parliament Thursday while US President Barack Obama will also pay his respects when he joins the queen for lunch at Windsor on Friday.

The queen is widely viewed as a constant and stabilising presence in a turbulent world, a status she has cultivated by refusing to make public her personal views.

Her determination to remain above politics has come under pressure ahead of Britain’s EU referendum on June 23, after a newspaper reported that she favoured a vote for Britain to leave the 28-nation bloc.

The claim in The Sun, under the headline Queen backs Brexit, prompted a rare and strongly worded denial from Buckingham Palace, emphasising that she has and will always be politically neutral.

In September last year, the queen broke Queen Victoria’s record to become Britain’s longest reigning monarch.

{The death toll from the country’s worst earthquake in decades passes 500, with at least 231 people still missing.}

Ecuadorians started burying loved ones who died in the country’s worst earthquake for decades as hopes faded that more survivors will be found.

In the small town of Montecristi, near the city of Manta, two children were among those buried on Tuesday. They were killed with their mother while buying school supplies when the magnitude-7.8 quake struck on Saturday night.

The funeral had to be held outside under a makeshift awning, because the town’s Roman Catholic church was unsafe due to structural damage.

Family members wailed loudly and one man fainted as the children were laid to rest in an above-ground vault.

The scenes of mourning were replicated along the normally placid Pacific coastline, where towns were flattened and hundreds killed.

Funeral homes were running out of coffins for the dead, and local governments were paying to bring them in from other cities.

The government put the death toll at 507 late on Tuesday, of whom 499 have been identified, according to the Attorney General’s office.

Yet, officials expected more bodies to be found, with the Defence Ministry reporting that 231 people were still missing.

The final toll could surpass those from earthquakes in Chile and Peru in the past decade.

Even as grief mounted, there were glimmers of hope.

In several cities on Tuesday rescuers with sniffer dogs, hydraulic jacks and special probes that can detect distant breathing continued to search for survivors under the rubble. At least six people were found in Manta.

One of the most hopeful stories was that of Pablo Cordova, who held out for 36 hours beneath the ruins of the hotel where he worked in Portoviejo, drinking his own urine and praying that mobile service would be restored before his phone battery died.

He was finally able to call his wife on Monday afternoon and was pulled from the wreckage soon after by a team of rescuers from Colombia

Cordova’s wife had given up on ever seeing him again and managed to buy a casket.

“They were organising the funeral, but I’ve been reborn,” Cordova said Tuesday. “I will have to give that coffin back because I still have a long way to go before I die.”

Rescuers who have arrived from Mexico, Colombia, Spain and other nations said they would keep searching for survivors on Wednesday, but cautioned that time was running out and the likelihood of finding more people alive grew smaller as time passed.

Even as authorities begin to shift their attention to restoring electricity and clearing debris, the earth continued to move. Late on Tuesday afternoon, a magnitude-5.5 tremor rattled buildings in the region.

It was the second strongest of more than 400 aftershocks since the weekend quake and was felt 170kms away in the capital, Quito.

Saturday’s earthquake destroyed or damaged about 1,500 buildings, triggered mudslides and left some 20,000 people homeless, the government said. It was the worst quake in Ecuador since one in 1949 killed more than 5,000 people.

Some 13 nations are involved in the relief effort. Cuba sent doctors, Venezuela has flown in food and the US government said that it was sending a team of disaster experts as well $100,000 in assistance.

The UN World Food Programme sent a convoy with enough food to feed 8,000 people for 15 days.

President Rafael Correa has spent the past days overseeing relief efforts and delivering supplies. He said the quake caused $3bn worth of damage, about 3 percent of gross domestic product, and that rebuilding would take years.

“It’s going to be a long battle,” he said.

{Assault near ministry marks the first major Taliban attack in the capital this year.}

At least 30 people were killed and hundreds wounded when a Taliban truck bomb tore through central Kabul and a fierce firefight broke out Tuesday, a week after the insurgents launched their annual spring offensive.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a densely crowded neighbourhood, which sent clouds of acrid smoke billowing into the sky and rattled windows several kilometres away.

The brazen assault near the defence ministry marks the first major Taliban attack in the Afghan capital since the insurgents announced the start of this year’s fighting season.

“One of the suicide attackers blew up an explosives-laden truck in a public parking lot next to a government building,” Kabul police chief Abdul Rahman Rahimi told reporters.

“The second attacker engaged security forces in a gun battle before being gunned down.”

Interior ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said 30 people, including women and children, were killed in the attack and warned that the toll could rise further.

He added that more than 320 were wounded, with many of them battling for their lives in hospital.

The pitched firefight appeared to die down several hours after the powerful explosion, but some security officials expressed concern that other bombers may still be on the loose.

“I saw wounded people lying on the road and screaming helplessly,” said Sadiqullah, who runs a tea stall near the building which was attacked.

“It was devastating. We are fed up with such attacks. How long must ordinary civilians suffer like this?”

The interior ministry said hundreds of kilogrammes of explosives were used in the bombing, the deadliest so far this year in the Afghan capital.

The scene of the attack was littered with upturned cars, many of them mangled and charred.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed their fighters had managed to enter the offices of the National Directorate of Security, the main spy agency.

Sediqqi conceded that one of the attackers managed to breach the compound.

{Israeli police say “some sort of explosive device” has wounded 16 people on a bus near West Jerusalem’s Hebron Street.}

A bomb explosion and subsequent fire has ripped through a bus in West Jerusalem, Israeli police said, with medics reporting that at least 16 people were wounded.

Police were initially uncertain whether Monday’s explosion was caused by a bomb, saying all causes of the blast were being investigated.

Later it confirmed that it was “some sort of explosive device” that caused the blast.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the apparent attack.

A police spokesman said two people on board the bus that exploded were seriously wounded, while the other wounded people had been in a nearby bus and car that were also damaged.

According to the police commissioner, it was too early to know the identity of the attacker or whether it was an attempted suicide bombing.

Police officials had earlier said all options were being examined, including a possible mechanical problem.

The rescue service Magen David Adom reported that the explosion wounded at least 16 people, two seriously.

Most of the injuries were said to be burn wounds or from smoke inhalation.

An AFP news agency journalist at the scene said that one bus was completely burned out while another was partially burned, with a large contingent of firefighters battling to extinguish the blaze.

The incident came as Israelis prepared for the Passover holiday, with tensions already high after a wave of violence that began in October which has killed more than 200 Palestinians and 28 Israelis.

Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, according to Israeli authorities.

The violence has steadily declined in recent weeks.

{More than 400 people die in 7.8 magnitude quake that prompted humanitarian crisis.}

Guayaquil, Ecuador – In the largest Ecuadorean city seriously hit by Saturday’s earthquake, citizens are acting together to deal with the chaos caused by the natural disaster.

Al Jazeera went to Guayaquil’s Red Cross centre to witness the city’s efforts to deal with the humanitarian crisis.

“We just set up this area to enlist the many volunteers this morning,” Maria Rojas, a Red Cross coordinator, told Al Jazeera. “There have been doctors, nurses, students, between 200 and 300, who have offered their help just today,” she said at 10:30 on Monday morning.

The magnitude 7.8 quake struck Ecuador’s coastal late on Saturday evening, and at least 413 Ecuadoreans have been killed.

“The death toll is sure to rise … the loss is great, but we shall overcome,” President Rafael Correa said at a short press conference on Sunday night.

The tremors were felt both in the southern coastal city of Guayaquil, killing at least once citizen when an overpass fell on a car, and injuring five others.

Dr Carlos Burneo Aguirre, the secretary-general of the Red Cross in Guayaquil, told Al Jazeera that “many people were coming from other cities, Portoviejo – which was about 30 percent destroyed – and Chone, for treatment”.

Portoviejo is the capital of the Manabi region of Ecuador, the hardest hit. It has a population of over 200,000. Chone is a smaller, nearby city.

Burneo said that the Red Cross building in nearby Portoviejo was completely destroyed, and Choni lost its hospital to the quake. The organisation is working with under “tarps and other temporary structures to treat the many wounded in the area”.

Along with volunteers, The Red Cross of Guayaquil is receiving plenty of food and blood donations. “There are two locations for blood donation in Ecuador. Here, and in Quito [the capital],” Borneo explained. “Usually, we operate at a deficit of blood, but I think with the increased support from the people, we’ll be fine”, he continued, noting that the amount of blood needed is not yet known.

Makeshift donation centres have been set up in Guayaquil, with nurses and doctors assisting in collection.

Marianna Serrano, a 19-year-old student, was on October 9 avenue, assisting doctors and nurses.

“It’s the least I can do,” she told Al Jazeera. “Especially since my home and family are safe.”

The many historic Catholic churches in the city are also serving as collection points, with one even reminding Ecuadoreans that “animals also need support”, one volunteer, who declined to give his name, told Al Jazeera.

Those responding to the crisis are doing so with both hope, determination and worry, both for those injured and for their own safety.

“We’ve had 250 small aftershocks since Saturday,” Red Cross Secretary General Burneo said in his office. “This was the worst earthquake in my lifetime, and I’m 53. We hope there’s not another.”