Tag: InternationalNews

{{An explosion at the office headquarters of Mexico’s state-owned oil company killed 25 people and injured 101 on Thursday as it heavily damaged three floors of a building, sending hundreds into the streets and a large plume of smoke over Mexico City’s skyline.}}

Rescuers continued to search the rubble for victims trapped in the debris late Thursday with the aid of rescue dogs, trucks with mounted lights and an oil company crane.

Interior Minister Miguel Osorio Chong said it was uncertain if there were any people still trapped but that crews would keep searching.

Many of the office workers were outside having lunch when the explosion occurred about 3:45 p.m. local time in a basement parking garage next to the iconic, 51-story tower of Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, one of the tallest buildings in Mexico City.

Osorio Chong said the explosion hit the basement and first two floors, which rescuers said had collapsed.

“It was an explosion, a shock, the lights went out and suddenly there was a lot of debris,” employee Cristian Obele told Milenio television, adding that he had been injured in the leg. “Co-workers helped us get out of the building.”

President Enrique Pena Nieto said authorities have not yet found what caused the blast in the 14-story building in a busy commercial and residential area.

Pemex first said it had evacuated the building because of a problem with the electrical system.

The company later tweeted that the Attorney General’s Office was investigating the explosion and any reports of a cause were speculation.

{Associated Press}

{{Fireworks for Lunar New Year celebrations exploded on a truck in central China, destroying part of an elevated highway Friday and sending vehicles plummeting 30 meters to the ground. State media had conflicting reports on casualties.}}

The huge blast collapsed an 80-meter (80-yard) stretch of a major east-west highway in Mianchi county in Henan Province.

It scattered blackened chunks of debris and shattered the windows of a nearby truck stop. There was no immediate word on the cause of the explosion.

A Communist Party spokesman for the nearby city of Sanmenxia, Nie Jianyin, cited provincial officials as saying that five people were confirmed dead and eight hospitalized.

The Xinhua News agency reported four dead. Earlier reports by China National Radio and some other outlets of up to 26 people killed were later removed from websites.

Photos posted on the website of a Henan newspaper, Dahe Daily, showed a stretch of elevated highway gone, with one truck’s back wheels perched at the edge of a shorn-off section of the highway.

Other photos showed firefighters below spraying water on scorched hunks of concrete, wrecked trucks and flattened shipping containers.

The location is about 90 kilometers (55 miles) west of Luoyang, an ancient capital of China known for grottoes of Buddhist statues carved from limestone cliffs.

AP

Barack Obama, the US president, says he is looking for immigration reform to be completed within six months, adding “now is the time” for action, Aljazeera reports.

“I can guarantee that I will put everything I have behind it,” Obama said in an interview with Telemundo, one of two he conducted on Wednesday with Spanish-language television networks.

Obama said a deal should be attainable this year, but he wants one even sooner. He said that politics, not technical issues, are standing in the way.

A group of Senators, both Democrats and Republicans, has agreed on a framework for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the country.

In the Republican-controlled House, another group of lawmakers is working on its own proposal.

Obama is promoting his own set of principles similar to those included in the Senate plan, but he has not been directly involved in the Senate’s negotiations – perhaps a sign he recognises that too much involvement by the Democratic president could make it harder for Republican lawmakers to sign on.

If Congress delays, he said, “I’ve got a bill drafted, we’ve got language” ready to offer Capitol Hill.

Obama offered his own principles on immigration at an appearance in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

He pushed for a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants that is faster than the one the Senate group proposed.

{{Iran’s Bank Mellat plans to sue European Union governments for damages after a European court ruled to annul sanctions against the company, lawyers said on Wednesday.}}

Europe’s General Court said on Tuesday the EU had failed to provide enough evidence that Bank Mellat was linked to Iran’s disputed nuclear progamme when the bloc targeted it with sanctions in July 2010, and ordered the measures annulled.

EU governments may appeal the decision, and diplomats said broader European sanctions against Iranian banks could still limit Bank Mellat’s ability to function in Europe.

But lawyers for the bank, the biggest private sector lender in Iran, said the ruling meant it could resume trading in Europe.

Bank Mellat “will now be able to commence trading internationally and try and draw back the losses incurred over the last three years since the sanctions were imposed,” law firm Zaiwalla & Co said in a statement.

“Furthermore, the bank will now look to claim damages from the EU Council.”

Sarosh Zaiwalla, who represented Bank Mellat, said being put on the sanctions list resulted in a freeze on all the bank’s assets in the EU and its international trade was effectively suspended for three years.

The EU argued in 2010, when it decided to impose the sanctions, that the bank facilitated Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme and provided financial services to companies or institutions targeted by international sanctions.

Tehran says its nuclear work has only peaceful purposes but the United Nations Security Council has ordered it to suspend uranium enrichment, concerned that its ultimate goal is to provide Iran with an atomic bomb.

The case is one of a handful involving Iranian companies that the EU has lost in the court in the last year and will add to concerns among many European diplomats that legal rulings could undermine the bloc’s sanctions policy against Iran.

Iranian companies and individuals have nearly 50 cases outstanding in the court.

In preparing sanctions listings, EU diplomats face a challenge of providing sufficient justification while not compromising intelligence sources.

Beside failing to prove that the bank knowingly committed wrongdoing, the court said that the Council of the European Union failed to show the bank reasons for its listing, hampering its defence, and had erroneously claimed it was a state-owned bank in its original sanction decision.

The General Court also ordered the Council to pay Bank Mellat’s legal costs.

The EU side has two months to appeal Tuesday’s ruling.

EU authorities declined to detail the impact of the decision on the bank’s business in Europe.

“We take note of the judgment and we will study it in great detail,” said a spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

Bank Mellat was formed through the merger of 10 banks in 1980 and boasts 1,800 branches in Iran as well as branches in Turkey, South Korea, London and Dubai. It has also appealed to the UK Supreme Court to overturn a ban on its operations.

That case is due to be heard in March.

{Reuters}

{{A cache of weapons seized from a ship off the coast of Yemen had markings that indicate they came from Iran, a U.S. official said Tuesday.}}

The markings on those weapons — which included surface-to-air missiles, potent explosives and rocket-propelled grenades — indicate they came from Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities, said the official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the information.

The weapons were believed to be headed for Shiite Muslim insurgents in Yemen, the official told press. The country’s government has fought periodic battles against the Houthis, a Shiite rebel movement in northern Yemen, in a conflict seen as both separatist and sectarian.

Yemen accused Shiite-majority Iran of supporting the Houthis during their last major revolt, in 2009, which saw Sunni-led Saudi Arabia launching airstrikes against suspected Houthis on its side of the border.
Iran denied the allegations and criticized the Saudi strikes.

Yemen’s government announced the arms seizure on Monday, saying the ship had been boarded in Yemeni territorial waters in the Arabian Sea on January 23.

The American destroyer USS Farragut was working with Yemeni authorities when they spotted the vessel in question, an Obama administration official said Monday.

The ship had several flags onboard, but no reliable documentation showing where it came from, the official added.

The firepower included anti-aircraft missiles, C4 military-grade explosives, ammunition and bomb-making equipment such as circuits, remote triggers and various handheld explosives, the Yemenis said.

The vessel carried a crew of eight Yemenis, they said.

{wirestory}

{{A resident of the southern region of Orenburg has demanded that part of a famous fountain at Moscow’s All-Russia Exhibition Center be dismantled for “promoting drug use” because of what he sees as a hemp leaf in the sculpture, news reports said Tuesday.}}

Vladimir Savinkov filed a complaint with the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service alleging the “promotion of drugs” in the geology pavilion and the Friendship of Nations Fountain at the exhibition center, as well as in advertisements for a range of well-known brands, including Coca-Cola and Krasny Oktyabr (Red October) chocolates, Izvestia reported Tuesday, citing a copy of the complaint.

Apart from the “promotion of drugs” that Savinkov sees in the capital’s architecture, he also thinks the problem stems from rampant marketing efforts by Coca-Cola, Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium perfume, Rasta guitar straps, Krasny Oktyabr’s Krasny Mak (Red Poppy) chocolates and several kinds of hemp-seed oil.

As the basis for his complaints, Savinkov cited violations of Statute 6.13 of the Administrative Code: “promotion of drugs” and causing “personal offense and concern for loved ones.”

Izvestia reported that a source in the Orenburg branch of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said the complaints are under review.

Savinkov says the very name of the brand Coca-Cola promotes the growth of the South American coca plant, which is used to produce cocaine. He also noted that coca extract was previously included in the recipe for the famous soft drink.

Yves Saint Laurent is cited in the complaint for its Opium perfume, the slogan for which Savinkov considers highly provocative: “Opium, for those addicted to Yves Saint Laurent.”

Levi Strauss also promotes the use of narcotics, Savinkov says, with the depiction of a hemp leaf on its Rasta guitar straps.

“These products are offered to musicians, both young beginners and famous musicians with thousands of fans, on whom they will have a strong psychological influence,” the complaint says.

Savinkov told Izvestia that he’s already so sick and tired of complaining about the issue that his “mouth is sore, and things still haven’t budged an inch.”

Sergei Vanin, executive director of a Russian perfume and cosmetics manufacturers’ association, said Savinkov’s fight with lawyers of such major corporations is doomed.

“This perfume [Opium] has been out in many countries since 1977, and it’s never had to change its name,” he said.

“The only time sales of it were banned was in Communist China, and even then it was either because of promotion of drug use and because the name reminded the Chinese of the Opium Wars, or it was because the perfume contained the ingredient musk ketone, which was considered harmful.”

{Moscow times}