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Landslide triggered by torrential rain kills 11 people at illegal gold mine in Indonesia; 20 missing

Landslide triggered by torrential rain kills 11 people at illegal gold mine in Indonesia; 20 missing
Officials say about 33 villagers were digging for grains of gold on Sunday in a pit at the small traditional gold mine in remote Bone Bolango in Gorontalo. (AFP)
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Updated 08 July 2024

Landslide triggered by torrential rain kills 11 people at illegal gold mine in Indonesia; 20 missing

Landslide triggered by torrential rain kills 11 people at illegal gold mine in Indonesia; 20 missing
  • Officials say about 33 villagers were digging for grains of gold on Sunday in a pit at the small traditional gold mine in remote Bone Bolango in Gorontalo

JAKARTA: A landslide triggered by torrential rains crashed onto an unauthorized gold mining operation on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, killing at least 11 people, officials said Monday.
About 33 villagers were digging for grains of gold on Sunday in a pit at the small traditional gold mine in remote Bone Bolango in Gorontalo province when tons of mud plunged down the surrounding hills and buried them, said Afifuddin Ilahude, Gorontalo’s Search and Rescue Agency spokesperson.
He said rescuers saved two injured people on Sunday and had recovered 11 bodies by Monday. Rescuers are still searching for 20 others who were reported missing, he said.
Informal mining operations are common in Indonesia, providing a tenuous livelihood to thousands who labor in conditions with a high risk of serious injury or death.


Standoff in South Africa ends with 87 miners dead and anger over police’s ‘smoke them out’ tactics

Standoff in South Africa ends with 87 miners dead and anger over police’s ‘smoke them out’ tactics
Updated 13 sec ago

Standoff in South Africa ends with 87 miners dead and anger over police’s ‘smoke them out’ tactics

Standoff in South Africa ends with 87 miners dead and anger over police’s ‘smoke them out’ tactics
  • Authorities had refused to help the miners who were working illegally in the abandoned mine
  • By the time they were compelled to act on orders of a court, dozens of miners have died
  • The mine is one of the deepest in South Africa and is a maze of tunnels and levels and has several shafts leading into it

STILFONTEIN, South Africa: The death toll in a monthslong standoff between police and miners trapped while working illegally in an abandoned gold mine in South Africa has risen to at least 87, police said Thursday. Authorities faced growing anger and a possible investigation over their initial refusal to help the miners and instead “smoke them out” by cutting off their food supplies.
National police spokesperson Athlenda Mathe said that 78 bodies were retrieved in a court-ordered rescue operation, with 246 survivors also pulled out from deep underground since the operation began on Monday. Mathe said nine other bodies had been recovered before the rescue operation, without giving details.
Community groups launched their own rescue attempts when authorities said last year they would not help the hundreds of miners because they were “criminals.”
The miners are suspected to have died of starvation and dehydration, although no causes of death have been released.

South African authorities have been fiercely criticized for cutting off food and supplies to the miners in the Buffelsfontein Gold Mine last year. That tactic to “smoke them out,” as described by a prominent Cabinet minister, was condemned by one of South Africa’s biggest trade unions.
Police and the mine owners were also accused of taking away ropes and dismantling a pulley system the miners used to enter the mine and send supplies down from the surface.
A court ordered authorities last year to allow food and water to be sent down to the miners, while another court ruling last week forced them to launch a rescue operation.

Many say the unfolding disaster underground was clear weeks ago, when community members sporadically pulled decomposing bodies out of the mine, some with notes attached pleading for food to be sent down.
“If the police had acted earlier, we would not be in this situation, with bodies piling up,” said Johannes Qankase, a local community leader. “It is a disgrace for a constitutional democracy like ours. Somebody needs to account for what has happened here.”
South Africa’s second biggest political party, which is part of a government coalition, called for President Cyril Ramaphosa to establish an independent inquiry to find out “why the situation was allowed to get so badly out of hand.”
“The scale of the disaster underground at Buffelsfontein is rapidly proving to be as bad as feared,” the Democratic Alliance party said.
Authorities now believe that nearly 2,000 miners were working illegally in the mine near the town of Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg, since August last year. Most of them resurfaced on their own over the last few months, police said, and all the survivors have been arrested, even as some emerged this week badly emaciated and barely able to walk to waiting ambulances.
A convoy of mortuary vans arrived at the mine to carry away the bodies.
Mathe said at least 13 children had also come out of the mine before the official rescue operation.
Police announced Wednesday that they were ending the operation after three days and believed no one else was underground. To be sure, a camera was sent down Thursday in a cage that was used to pull out survivors and bodies.
Two volunteer rescuers from the community had gone down in the small cage during the rescue operation to help miners as authorities refused to allow any official rescue personnel to go into the shaft because it was too dangerous.
“It has been a tough few days, there were many people who (we) saved but I still feel bad for those whose family members came out in body bags,” said Mandla Charles, one of the volunteer rescuers. “We did all we could.” The two volunteers were being offered trauma counselling, police said.
The mine is one of the deepest in South Africa and is a maze of tunnels and levels and has several shafts leading into it. The miners were working up to 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) underground in different groups.
Police have maintained that the miners were able to come out through several shafts but refused out of fear of being arrested. That’s been disputed by groups representing the miners, who say hundreds were trapped and left starving in dark and damp conditions with decomposing bodies around them.
Police Minister Senzo Mchunu denied in an interview with a national TV station that the police were responsible for any starvation and said they had allowed food to go down.
The initial police operation last year to force the miners to come out and give themselves up for arrest was part of a larger nationwide clampdown on illegal mining called Vala Umgodi, or Close the Hole. Illegal mining is often in the news in South Africa and a major problem for authorities as large groups go into mines that have been shut down to extract leftover deposits.
Gold-rich South Africa has an estimated 6,000 abandoned or closed mines.
The illicit miners, known as “zama zamas” — “hustlers” or “chancers” in the Zulu language — are usually armed and part of criminal syndicates, the government says, and they rob South Africa of more than $1 billion a year in gold deposits. They are often undocumented foreign nationals and authorities said that the vast majority who came out of the Buffelsfontein mine were from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Lesotho, and were in South Africa illegally.
Police said they seized gold, explosives, firearms and more than $2 million in cash from the miners and have defended their hard-line approach.
“By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners, it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive,” Mathe said Wednesday.
But the South African Federation of Trade Unions questioned the government’s humanity and how it could “allow anyone — be they citizens or undocumented immigrants — to starve to death in the depths of the earth.”
While the police operation has been condemned by civic groups, the disaster hasn’t provoked a strong outpouring of anger across South Africa, where the mostly foreign zama zamas have long been considered unwelcome in a country that already struggles with high rates of violent crime.
 


Former Bank of England governor Mark Carney enters race to be Canada’s next prime minister

Former Bank of England governor Mark Carney enters race to be Canada’s next prime minister
Updated 17 January 2025

Former Bank of England governor Mark Carney enters race to be Canada’s next prime minister

Former Bank of England governor Mark Carney enters race to be Canada’s next prime minister

VANCOUVER, British Columbia: Mark Carney, the first non-Brit to run the Bank of England since it was founded in 1694 and the former head of Canada’s central bank, said Thursday he is entering the race to be Canada’s next prime minister following the resignation of Justin Trudeau.
Trudeau will remain prime minister until a new Liberal Party leader is chosen on March 9.
Carney, 59, is a highly educated economist with Wall Street experience, widely credited with helping Canada dodge the worst of the 2008 crisis while heading the country’s central bank. He also helped the UK manage Brexit during his 7-year tenure as governor of the Bank of England.
“The prime minister and his team let their attention on the economy wander too often,” Carney said in Edmonton, Alberta, of Trudeau where he made his announcement. “I won’t lose focus.”
The front-runners for the Liberal Party leadership are Carney and ex-Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, whose abrupt resignation last month forced Trudeau’s exit.
The next Liberal leader could be the shortest-tenured prime minister in the country’s history. All three opposition parties have vowed to bring down the Liberals’ minority government in a no-confidence vote after parliament resumes on March 24. An election is expected this spring.
Carney said he knows the Liberals are “well behind,” but said he would win the general election.
Trudeau announced his resignation Jan. 6 after facing an increasing loss of support both within his party and in the country.
Carney quickly launched into an attack on opposition Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who the polls show has a large lead over the Liberals.
He also highlighted the threats by US President-elect Donald Trump, who has said Canada should become the 51st state and has threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on all Canadian goods.
“This is no time for life-long politicians such as Pierre Poilievre,” he said. “Sending Pierre Poilievre to negotiate with Donald Trump is the worst possible idea.”
Poilievre painted Trudeau, Carney and Freeland with the same brush during a news conference in Vancouver earlier Thursday.
He blamed the Liberals for high taxes and slammed the government for suggesting it may put tariffs on energy exports to the US, saying it would hurt the oil-rich province of Alberta.
“Not only have the Liberals weakened our economy, now they’re resorting to dividing our people,” said Poilievre. “We don’t need to be divided; we need to be united.”
A major plank in Poilievre’s campaign has been removing the carbon tax, introduced by the Trudeau government as a fee on the amount of carbon emitted by fuels like gas.
Carney said if the carbon tax is removed, it should be replaced by something that is “at least if not more effective” in having the same impact of reducing greenhouse gas emissions while making Canadian companies more competitive and creating jobs.
An official close to Freeland said she would scrap the consumer carbon tax and instead make big polluters pay. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of her announcement.
When Carney, who grew up in Edmonton, was named the first foreigner to serve as governor of the Bank of England it won bipartisan praise in Britain.
“I have helped manage multiple crises and I have helped save two economies,” Carney said. “I know how business works, and I know how to make it work for you.”
More recently he served as the UN’s special envoy for climate change and led an alliance of international financial institutions pushing for carbon-cutting measures. Carney has long championed the notion that making companies accountable for their impact on the planet is the first step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
When Carney led Canada’s central bank he was credited with keeping money flowing through the Canadian economy by acting quickly in cutting interest rates to their lowest level ever of 1 percent, working with Canadian bankers to sustain lending through the crisis and, critically, letting the public know rates would remain low so they would keep borrowing. He was the first central banker to commit to keep them at a historic-low level for a definite time, a step the US Federal Reserve would follow.
Like other central bankers, Carney is a former Goldman Sachs executive. He worked for 13 years in London, Tokyo, New York and Toronto, before being appointed deputy governor of the Bank of Canada in 2003. He has both financial industry and government credentials.
He has long been interested in entering politics and becoming prime minister but lacks political experience. The Liberal Party has tried to recruit him for years.
“Being a politician is quite different from being a policy adviser or a central banker,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at Montreal’s McGill University.


SpaceX catches its Starship rocket back at the launch pad, but the spacecraft is destroyed

SpaceX catches its Starship rocket back at the launch pad, but the spacecraft is destroyed
Updated 17 January 2025

SpaceX catches its Starship rocket back at the launch pad, but the spacecraft is destroyed

SpaceX catches its Starship rocket back at the launch pad, but the spacecraft is destroyed
  • For the second time, SpaceX used giant mechanical arms to catch its Starship rocket back at the pad minutes after liftoff
  • The spacecraft was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico on a near loop around the world similar to previous test flights

SpaceX launched its Starship rocket on its latest test flight Thursday, catching the booster back at the pad but losing contact with the ascending spacecraft as engines went out.
Officials for Elon Musk’s company said the spacecraft was destroyed.
The spacecraft was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico on a near loop around the world similar to previous test flights. SpaceX had packed it with 10 dummy satellites for practice at releasing them. It was the first flight of this new and upgraded spacecraft.
Before the loss, SpaceX for the second time used giant mechanical arms to catch the booster back at the pad minutes after liftoff from Texas. The descending booster hovered over the launch pad before being gripped by a pair of mechanical arms dubbed chopsticks.
The 400-foot (123-meter) rocket thundered away in late afternoon from Boca Chica near the Mexican border. The late hour ensured a daylight entry halfway around the world.
Skimming space, the shiny retro-looking spacecraft — intended by Musk as a moon and Mars ships — targeted the Indian Ocean for a controlled but destructive end to the hourlong demo.
SpaceX beefed up the catch tower after November’s launch ended up damaging sensors on the robotic arms, forcing the team to forgo a capture attempt. That booster was steered into the gulf instead.
The company also upgraded the spacecraft for the latest demo. The test satellites were the same size as SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites and, like the spacecraft, meant to drop into the Indian Ocean to close out the mission. Contact was lost about 8 1/2 minutes into the flight.
Musk plans to launch actual Starlinks on Starships before moving on to other satellites and, eventually, crews.
It was the seventh test flight for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket. NASA has reserved a pair of Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. Musk’s goal is Mars.
“Every Starship launch is one more step closer towards Mars,” Musk said via X ahead of liftoff.
Hours hours earlier in Florida, another billionaire’s rocket company — Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — launched the newest supersized rocket, New Glenn. The rocket reached orbit on its first flight, successfully placing an experimental satellite thousands of miles above Earth. But the first-stage booster was destroyed, missing its targeted landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
 


Charities urge UK authorities to ‘hold Israel accountable’ after Gaza ceasefire

Charities urge UK authorities to ‘hold Israel accountable’ after Gaza ceasefire
Updated 17 January 2025

Charities urge UK authorities to ‘hold Israel accountable’ after Gaza ceasefire

Charities urge UK authorities to ‘hold Israel accountable’ after Gaza ceasefire
  • 18 organizations accuse British government of failing to act when UN accused Israel of war crimes
  • Letter calls for permanent end to hostilities and says truce must be a ‘starting point for justice and accountability’

LONDON: UK charities and other organizations have called on the British government to ensure the ceasefire in Gaza marks the start of a process that ends Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories and ensures “justice and accountability.”

An alliance of 18 groups, including the Council for Arab-British Understanding, Oxfam and Amnesty International, on Thursday signed a letter welcoming the Gaza ceasefire agreement, upon which the Israeli parliament was due to vote on Thursday evening.

But the groups said the temporary truce, expected to take effect on Sunday, must become permanent and represent a “starting point for justice and accountability.”

The letter stated: “This deal alone will not end Palestinian suffering in Gaza, and therefore must be the beginning, and not the end, of a process that will rapidly bring a comprehensive ceasefire, with a lifting of the 17-year long blockade, and end of Israel’s occupation of Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

The agreement to end 15 months of devastating war in Gaza, during which at least 46,000 Palestinians were killed, was reached on Wednesday. It calls for a six-week ceasefire, the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and the freeing of hostages taken by Hamas during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel during which 1,200 people were killed. Palestinian prisoners detained in Israel will also be released and a mammoth humanitarian aid operation launched in Gaza.

The letter calls for a halt to deliveries of arms to Israel, “including components for F-35 fighter jets sent indirectly,” as part of a series of actions that would “ensure accountability and justice for Palestinians.”

It outlines the terrible suffering endured by Palestinians during the war, including the forced displacement of more than 1.9 million people, representing nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s population.

It also accuses the UK government of failing to act in any meaningful way in response, despite a UN Commission of Inquiry accusing Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict.

The UK, the letter says, “has neither secured a permanent ceasefire nor shown willingness to hold Israel accountable.”

Israeli authorities were repeatedly accused during the conflict of restricting deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza that could have alleviated the suffering of the civilian population. The organizations that signed the letter called for full humanitarian access now to be granted “to avert the risk of famine.”

They continued: “This is a moment of truth for the UK. To continue shielding Israel from accountability is to abandon the principles of justice and human rights that it claims to uphold.”

The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, welcomed the ceasefire agreement and said the focus should turn now to humanitarian aid and efforts to secure a better, long-term future for the region.

"After months of devastating bloodshed and countless lives lost, this is the long-overdue news that the Israeli and Palestinian people have desperately been waiting for,” he said.

The UK, the US and other European allies of Israel faced criticism throughout the conflict for failing to put pressure on Israel to end its military operations.


Morocco’s ambassador to UK meets his 400-year-old predecessor

The current Moroccan Ambassador to the UK, Hakim Hajoui views the
The current Moroccan Ambassador to the UK, Hakim Hajoui views the "Moroccan Ambassador" portrait at the Barber Institute of Fine
Updated 17 January 2025

Morocco’s ambassador to UK meets his 400-year-old predecessor

The current Moroccan Ambassador to the UK, Hakim Hajoui views the "Moroccan Ambassador" portrait at the Barber Institute of Fine
  • Envoy views famous portrait of Moroccan emissary sent to Britain to meet Queen Elizabeth I in 1600
  • Painting, displayed at Birmingham University gallery, considered a powerful symbol of historic ties

LONDON: Morocco’s ambassador to the UK has come face to face with his predecessor — from 400 years ago.

During a visit to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham this week, Hakim Hajoui took time to reflect on how the job he does has changed over the centuries when he viewed a historic portrait of the Moroccan ambassador Abd El-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun. The masterpiece is thought to be the earliest known surviving British painting of a Muslim.

The ambassador led a diplomatic mission to London in 1600, to the court of Queen Elizabeth I, with the aim of enhancing trade and diplomatic ties between Britain and Morocco. He also hoped to forge an alliance against Spain, which had launched a failed attempt to invade Britain with the Spanish Armada in 1588.

The subject of the painting is believed by some historians to have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s “Othello,” which the playwright began working on within a year of the ambassador’s arrival in Britain.

“This portrait is a powerful symbol of the deep historical ties between Morocco and the United Kingdom, dating back over eight centuries,” Hajoui said.

“Seeing it here at the Barber Institute at the University of Birmingham underscores the vital role academic and cultural institutions play in preserving and celebrating our shared history.”

The portrait was painted by an unknown artist during the ambassador’s stay in London, which lasted almost a year. He was sent by the ruler of Morocco, Ahmad Al-Mansur, who was also keen to garner support for an invasion of Algerian territories held by the Ottoman Empire.

Historians say that despite his efforts and the attention his party attracted in London, the ambassador failed to secure the British support his country sought. Both the Moroccan and British rulers died just a few years later, in 1603.

Still, the portrait presents a powerful image of the ambassador, with his stern gaze, flowing robes, turban and ornamental sword, from a time when relations between Britain and Muslim regions were growing.

“Abd El-Ouahed’s visit to the court of Queen Elizabeth I represented a major event in the history of diplomatic and cultural exchanges between Europe and the Islamic world,” said Clare Mullett, Birmingham University’s head of research and cultural collections.

“His arrival highlighted a shift in foreign policy and demonstrated England’s willingness to engage with nations outside Europe.”

She described the paining as one of the most vivid souvenirs of British history at the turn of the 17th Century.

Hajoui viewed the painting on Tuesday during a visit to the university to learn about its connections with Morocco and the wider Middle East and North Africa region. It opened a campus in Dubai in 2018.