At least 26 dead after tornadoes rake US Midwest, South

Update At least 26 dead after tornadoes rake US Midwest, South
Family and neighbors look through debris on Ed Whestine’s farm southwest of Wellman, Iowa on Saturday, April 1, 2023. (AP)
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Updated 02 April 2023

At least 26 dead after tornadoes rake US Midwest, South

At least 26 dead after tornadoes rake US Midwest, South
  • Debris and memories of regular life lay scattered inside the shells of homes and on lawns: clothing, insulation, roofing paper, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered

WYNNE, Arkansas: Storms that dropped possibly dozens of tornadoes killed at least 26 people in small towns and big cities across the South and Midwest, tearing a path through the Arkansas capital, collapsing the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois and stunning people throughout the region Saturday with the damage’s scope.
Confirmed or suspected tornadoes in at least eight states destroyed homes and businesses, splintered trees and laid waste to neighborhoods across a broad swath of the country. The dead included at least nine in one Tennessee county, four in the small town of Wynne, Arkansas, three in Sullivan, Indiana, and four in Illinois.
Other deaths from the storms that hit Friday night into Saturday were reported in Alabama and Mississippi, along with one near Little Rock, Arkansas, where city officials said more than 2,600 buildings were in a tornado’s path.
Residents of Wynne, a community of about 8,000 people 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Memphis, Tennessee, woke Saturday to find the high school’s roof shredded and its windows blown out. Huge trees lay on the ground, their stumps reduced to nubs. Broken walls, windows and roofs pocked homes and businesses.
Debris lay scattered inside the shells of homes and on lawns: clothing, insulation, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered.
Ashley Macmillan said she, her husband and their children huddled with their dogs in a small bathroom as a tornado passed, “praying and saying goodbye to each other, because we thought we were dead.” A falling tree seriously damaged their home, but they were unhurt.
“We could feel the house shaking, we could hear loud noises, dishes rattling. And then it just got calm,” she said.
Recovery was already underway, with workers using chainsaws and bulldozers to clear the area and utility crews restoring power.
Nine people died in Tennessee’s McNairy County, east of Memphis, according to Patrick Sheehan, director the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.
“The majority of the damage has been done to homes and residential areas,” said David Leckner, the mayor of Adamsville.
Gov. Bill Lee drove to the county Saturday to tour the destruction and comfort residents. He said the storm capped the “worst” week of his time as governor, coming days after a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people including a family friend whose funeral he and his wife, Maria, attended earlier in the day.
“It’s terrible what has happened in this community, this county, this state,” Lee said. “But it looks like your community has done what Tennessean communities do, and that is rally and respond.”
Jeffrey Day said he called his daughter after seeing on the news that their community of Adamsville was being hit. Huddled in a closet with her 2-year-old son as the storm passed over, she answered the phone screaming.
“She kept asking me, ‘What do I do, daddy?’” Day said, tearing up. “I didn’t know what to say.”
After the storm passed, his daughter crawled out of her destroyed home and over barbed wire and drove to nearby family. On Saturday evening, baby clothes were still strewn about the site.
In Memphis, police spokesman Christopher Williams said via email late Saturday that there were three deaths believed to be weather-related: two children and an adult who died when a tree fell on a house.
Tennessee officials warned that the same weather conditions from Friday night are expected to return Tuesday.
In Belvidere, Illinois, part of the roof of the Apollo Theatre collapsed as about 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert. A 50-year-old man was pulled from the rubble.
“I sat with him and I held his hand and I was (telling him), ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I didn’t really know much else what to do,” concertgoer Gabrielle Lewellyn told WTVO-TV.
The man was dead by the time emergency workers arrived. Officials said 40 others were hurt, including two with life-threatening injuries.
Crews cleaned up around the Apollo on Saturday, with forklifts pulling away loose bricks. Business owners picked up glass shards and covered shattered windows.
In Crawford County, Illinois, three people were killed and eight injured when a tornado hit around New Hebron, said Bill Burke, the county board chair.
Sheriff Bill Rutan said 60 to 100 families were displaced.
“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Rutan said at a news conference.
That tornado was not far from where three people died in Indiana’s Sullivan County, about 95 miles (150 kilometers) southwest of Indianapolis.
Sullivan Mayor Clint Lamb said at a news conference that an area south of the county seat of about 4,000 “is essentially unrecognizable right now” and several people were rescued overnight. There were reports of as many as 12 people injured, he said.
“I’m really, really shocked there isn’t more as far as human issues,” he said, adding that recovery “is going to be a very long process.”
In the Little Rock area, at least one person was killed and more than 50 were hurt, some critically.
The National Weather Service said that tornado was a high-end EF3 twister with wind speeds up to 165 mph (265 kph) and a path as long as 25 miles (40 kilometers).
Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi was lunching at home when it roared through his neighborhood, causing him to hide in the laundry room as sheetrock fell and windows shattered. When he emerged, the house was mostly rubble.
“Everything around me is sky,” Shahed-Ghaznavi recalled Saturday. He barely slept Friday night.
“When I closed my eyes, I couldn’t sleep, imagined I was here,” he said Saturday outside his home.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard. On Saturday, Sanders requested a major disaster declaration from President Joe Biden to support recovery efforts with federal resources.
Another suspected tornado killed a woman in northern Alabama’s Madison County, officials said, and in northern Mississippi’s Pontotoc County, authorities confirmed one death and four injuries.
Tornadoes also caused damage in eastern Iowa and broke windows northeast of Peoria, Illinois.
The storms struck just hours after Biden visited Rolling Fork, Mississippi, where tornadoes last week destroyed parts of town.
It could take days to determine the exact number of tornadoes from the latest event, said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations at the Storm Prediction Center. There were also hundreds of reports of large hail and damaging winds, he said.
“That’s a quite active day,” he said. “But that’s not unprecedented.”
More than 530,000 homes and businesses were without power as of midday Saturday, over 200,000 of them in Ohio, according to PowerOutage.us.
The sprawling storm system also brought wildfires to the southern Plains, with authorities in Oklahoma reporting nearly 100 of them Friday. At least 32 people were said to be injured, and more than 40 homes destroyed.
The storms also caused blizzard conditions in the Upper Midwest.
A threat of tornadoes and hail remained for the Northeast including in parts of Pennsylvania and New York.


Militants kill Pakistani soldier guarding polio team

Militants kill Pakistani soldier guarding polio team
Updated 31 May 2023

Militants kill Pakistani soldier guarding polio team

Militants kill Pakistani soldier guarding polio team
  • Attempts to eradicate polio in Pakistan have been hit by attacks targeting inoculation teams that have claimed hundreds of lives
  • Extremist opposition to all forms of inoculation grew after the CIA organized a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistani soldier was killed on Wednesday when militants opened fire on a polio vaccination team, the country’s military said, in the latest attack claimed by the Pakistani Taliban.
Attempts to eradicate polio in Pakistan have been hit by attacks targeting inoculation teams that have claimed hundreds of lives in over a decade.
“Terrorists attempted to disrupt the ongoing polio campaign by firing on the members of the polio team,” the military said in a statement about the assault in the former tribal areas that border Afghanistan.
A soldier deployed to protect the vaccination team was killed during an exchange of fire, it added.
Extremist opposition to all forms of inoculation grew after the US Central Intelligence Agency organized a fake vaccination drive to help track down Al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which is waging a campaign against security forces, claimed the attack in a statement to media.
Pakistan is grappling with an uptick in militancy since the Afghan Taliban returned to power in neighboring Afghanistan.
North Waziristan has historically been a hive of militancy and was the target of a long-running Pakistani military offensive and US drone strikes during the post-9/11 occupation of Afghanistan.


Iraqi killed fighting for Russia’s Wagner in Ukraine, says group founder

Iraqi killed fighting for Russia’s Wagner in Ukraine, says group founder
Updated 31 May 2023

Iraqi killed fighting for Russia’s Wagner in Ukraine, says group founder

Iraqi killed fighting for Russia’s Wagner in Ukraine, says group founder
  • Abbas Abuthar Witwit died on April 7, a day after arriving at a Wagner hospital in the Russian-controlled, eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk
  • Prigozhin confirmed he had recruited Witwit from prison, saying he was not the first native of an Arab country to have joined from jail

LUHANSK, Ukraine: An Iraqi citizen fighting with Russia’s Wagner mercenary force was killed in Ukraine in early April, the first confirmed case of a Middle East native dying in the conflict, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin told Reuters on Wednesday.
Abbas Abuthar Witwit died on April 7, a day after arriving at a Wagner hospital in the Russian-controlled, eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, the RIA FAN news site earlier reported.
Much of the fighting for Bakhmut was done by convict fighters, recruited by Wagner from prisons on the promise of a pardon if they survived six months at the front in Ukraine.
In response to a Reuters request for comment, Prigozhin confirmed he had recruited Witwit from prison, saying he was not the first native of an Arab country to have joined from jail.
Witwit, he said, had fought well and “died heroically.”
RIA FAN said Witwit had been wounded in Bakhmut, the city in Donetsk province that Prigozhin said Wagner had taken in mid-May, after a battle that had raged since last year.
Prigozhin previously said the whole conflict had cost 20,000 of his men’s lives.
In video published by RIA FAN, a man identified as Witwit’s father is shown receiving awards posthumously given to his son, and that he had supported his decision to enlist in Wagner as a “volunteer.”
“Abbas always pursued his freedom and wanted to be a man who defends his freedom and himself, and he told me he found his freedom in Russia,” he is shown saying.
According to court papers seen by Reuters, Witwit was sentenced to four and a half years in prison on drug charges in July 2021 by a court in the Russian city of Kazan. The documents said Witwit was a first year student at a technical university.


UK-based Islamic charities donate $24.4bn a year to good causes

UK-based Islamic charities donate $24.4bn a year to good causes
Updated 31 May 2023

UK-based Islamic charities donate $24.4bn a year to good causes

UK-based Islamic charities donate $24.4bn a year to good causes
  • Contributions came from more than 165,000 groups or individuals, says report
  • Number of Islamic charities has soared in last 20 years says Muslim Charities Forum

LONDON: Islamic charitable groups in the UK donated £20.2 billion ($24.4 billion) to local and international causes last year, according to an official report.
More than 165,000 groups or individuals contributed to the total, according to the study by the National Council for Voluntary Organizations, reported Kuwait News Agency on Wednesday.
According to a separate study by the Muslim Charities Forum, 600 organizations had now met the requirements and regulations set by the UK government for charitable work, up from around 25 at the turn of the century.
The initial Muslim-oriented charitable organizations were established in the early 1980s and mostly contributed to humanitarian causes in Africa and Eastern Europe, the study said.
MCF’s CEO Fadi Itani said his group’s study had shown that 150 Islamic charities geared toward international causes contributed £500 million (around $625 million) annually.
Forty-seven organizations have the capacity to gather £1 million to £20 million annually, said Itani. Approximately 30 more raised about £500,000 ($620,000) a year each, while 450 others contributed more than £150 million a year collectively.
The growing benevolence of British Muslims is backed up by a Walnut Social Research 2021 poll that showed they were the most charitable religious group in the country.
Walnut found that Muslim individuals donated around £370 annually compared to £165 for donors from other faiths.
 


Wildfire on Canada’s Atlantic coast forces evacuation of 16,000 people

Wildfire on Canada’s Atlantic coast forces evacuation of 16,000 people
Updated 31 May 2023

Wildfire on Canada’s Atlantic coast forces evacuation of 16,000 people

Wildfire on Canada’s Atlantic coast forces evacuation of 16,000 people
  • “It’s extensive. It’s heartbreaking,” said Premier Tim Houston, who announced a ban on woodland activity after visiting the disaster area to get a sense of the damage
  • The forest protection manager in the province's wildfire management group said it is safe to say that all of these fires were “very likely human-caused”

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia’s leader begged people to stay out of the woods and avoid any activity that could start more fires after a wildfire on Canada’s Atlantic coast damaged about 200 houses and other structures and prompted the evacuation of 16,000 people.
“It’s extensive. It’s heartbreaking,” said Premier Tim Houston, who announced a ban on woodland activity after visiting the disaster area to get a sense of the damage.
Many residents were eager to return Tuesday to see whether homes and pets had survived, while fire officials expressed concern that dry, windy conditions could cause a “reburn” in the evacuated subdivisions. The extended forecast is calling for hotter weather on Wednesday and no rain until Friday at the earliest.
Houston said the ban extends to all travel and activity in all wooded areas. That includes all forestry, mining, hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, off-road vehicle driving and all commercial activity on government lands, he said.
“Don’t be burning right now. No burning in Nova Scotia. Conservation officers reported six illegal burns last night. This is absolutely ridiculous with what’s happeniung in this province — three out-of-control fires, eight fires yesterday, 12 on Sunday. Do Not Burn!” Houston said Tuesday. “We have to do what we can to make sure we don’t have new fires popping up.”
Scott Tingley, the forest protection manager in the province’s wildfire management group, said it is safe to say that all of these fires were “very likely human-caused.”
“Much of it probably is preventable. Accidents do happen and so that’s why we certainly appreciate the premier’s message,” Tingley said.
Firefighters have been working to extinguish hotspots in the fire that started in the Halifax area on Sunday, Halifax Deputy Fire Chief David Meldrum said. He said Tuesday that it was too early to give an exact count of homes damaged or destroyed, but the municipal government put the toll at about 200 buildings.
Dan Cavanaugh was among two dozen people waiting Tuesday in a Halifax-area parking lot to learn if their suburban homes had been consumed.
“We’re like everyone else in this lot,” said the 48-year-old insurance adjuster. “We’re not sure if we have a house to go back to.”
Police officers wrote down names of residents and were calling people to be escorted to see what had become of their properties.
Sarah Lyon of the Nova Scotia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said an eight-member team was going into the evacuation zone to retrieve animals left behind.
In all, about 16,000 people were ordered to leave their homes northwest of Halifax, most of which are within a 30-minute drive of the port city’s downtown. The area under mandatory evacuation orders covers about 100 square kilometers (38 miles).
Sonya Higgins, who runs a cat rescue operation in Halifax, said she and more than 40 others waited in a nearby supermarket parking lot to be led into the evacuation area. They hoped to retrieve seven cats from two homes. She said the pet owners contacting her have been “frantic” to find their animals and get them to safety.


Pakistan ex-PM Khan in court as rights watchdog issues warning

Pakistan ex-PM Khan in court as rights watchdog issues warning
Updated 31 May 2023

Pakistan ex-PM Khan in court as rights watchdog issues warning

Pakistan ex-PM Khan in court as rights watchdog issues warning
  • The Islamabad High Court and a specialist corruption court granted Khan bail on Wednesday in the same graft case
  • Thousands have been rounded up since the Supreme Court declared that detention illegal and allowed him to walk free

ISLAMABAD: Embattled Pakistan opposition leader Imran Khan returned to court on Wednesday, as the nation’s human rights watchdog warned all sides are to blame in a rapidly deteriorating democratic crisis.
Khan’s brief arrest earlier this month sparked days of deadly unrest before Islamabad orchestrated a crackdown on his party, including mass arrests and a pledge to try some protesters in army courts.
The Islamabad High Court and a specialist corruption court granted Khan bail on Wednesday in the same graft case which prompted his arrest on May 9, his lawyers said.
Thousands, including grassroots supporters and key Khan aides, have been rounded up since the Supreme Court declared that detention illegal and allowed him to walk free.
Islamabad says the arrests are justified because it was targeted by anti-state terrorism, while Khan claims his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party is being quashed ahead of elections due by October.
But Hina Jilani, the head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), issued a stark warning to “all political stakeholders.”
“Unless they desist from any further measures that could imperil the country’s fragile democracy, they may find themselves unable to steer the country safely through the multiple crises it is facing.”
Since he was ousted from office in a no-confidence vote last spring, Khan has waged an unprecedented campaign of defiance against Pakistan’s powerful military establishment, which analysts say was behind his rise and fall from power.
His arrest was widely seen as payback ordered by top brass after he repeated incendiary allegations that they plotted an assassination attempt against him.
The HRCP said “civilian supremacy has emerged as the greatest casualty” from the deepening political crisis, which comes as Pakistan suffers from a flatlining economy and worsening security situation.
“The government’s inability — or unwillingness — to safeguard civilian supremacy” and PTI’s “incessant humiliation of law... has led to making military interference in politics inevitable,” Jilani said.
Meanwhile on Wednesday, Human Rights Watch criticized Islamabad for agreeing to try 33 civilians in military courts for allegedly attacking army installations during the unrest.
“Pakistan’s military courts, which use secret procedures that deny due process rights, should not be used to prosecute civilians,” said associate Asia director Patricia Gossman.
As the clampdown on PTI continues, several senior figures have defected, leaving former cricket star Khan increasingly isolated.
He says arrests are being used to force resignations. Nonetheless he remains far and away Pakistan’s most popular politician.

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