Six In The Morning

Fears for missing firefighters as China toll climbs

  Nearly 100 people missing from Tianjin blasts, including 85 firefighters, officials say, as death toll rises to 112.

16 Aug 2015 05:54 GMT

Scores of Chinese firefighters are still missing following the massive explosions that hit an industrial area in Tianjin, officials have said.

At an official press conference on Sunday, authorities announced that the death toll had risen to 112, but added that 95 people had been confirmed missing – including 85 firefighters.

Al Jazeera’s Adrian Brown, reporting from Tianjin, a port city in the country’s northeast, said it was now possible that the death toll will climb past 200, “making it one of China’s worst industrial accidents”.

 How developing countries are paying a high price for the global mineral boom

 Soaring worldwide demand for the minerals used in electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops has left a legacy of social conflict and human rights violations across Asia, Latin America and Africa

 John Vidal, graphic by Pete Guest

A 200ft deep pit gapes where three years ago stood a mountain. Fields where small farmers planted rice and grew fruit are now an industrial site, and wooden houses in the old village of Didipio have been abandoned – the community moved to make way for a large-scale gold mine owned by a New Zealand company.

The Filipino mine, guarded by high fences and bitterly contested by the indigenous Bugkalot people who fear pollution, spills and ill-health, is just one of scores of major new gold and copper mines opened in the last few years to meet soaring world demand for minerals used in electronic devices such as smartphones and laptops.

 Opinion: The failure of the political elite in Balkans

 Almost half of Germany’s asylum applicants come from the Balkans. Why are they coming, and what are they fleeing from? DW’s Verica Spasovska writes that the region’s political elites are to blame for the exodus.

DW-DE

War, hunger and torture are no longer commonplace in Kosovo, Albania, Serbia and Macedonia. For a decade and a half now, the states of the former Yugoslavia and their neighbors have been living in peace. Croatia and Slovenia have joined the European Union. The other Balkan countries have been working toward membership for years.

There is no basis for comparison with Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, where people are dying every day because of war and terrorism. And yet, people are leaving the Balkans to seek asylum in Germany. They’re fleeing from poverty and a lack of opportunity, disappointed and frustrated by the political and economic stagnation in their countries. And it’s mainly the political elite who are responsible for this lack of growth.

  World without Water: The Dangerous Misuse of Our Most Valuable Resource

Amid climate change, drought and mismanagement, our world’s most valuable resource is becoming scarce. Much of the crisis is man-made — and even water-rich countries like Germany are to blame.

 By SPIEGEL Staff

Men like Edward Mooradian are saving California. Indeed, there would hardly be any water left without them. And without water California, now in the fourth year of an epic drought, would be nothing but desert. That’s why it’s such a cynical joke and, most of all, a tragic reality, that men like Mooradian are also destroying California. In fact, they are actually aggravating the emergency that they are trying to mitigate. The Americans call this a catch-22, a situation in which there are no good alternatives. Either way, the game is lost.

On a Sunday morning in July, Mooradian is standing between rows of orange and lemon trees near Fresno in the Central Valley, the stretch of land in the heart of California that supplies the United States, Canada and Europe with fruit, vegetables and nuts. It is shortly before 8 a.m., but the temperature is already high and there is no wind. Mooradian, tanned and muscular, wearing a helmet and sunglasses, switches on the drill mounted on his truck. It gurgles furiously for a moment and drives a long pipe into the earth.

I live in Iran. Here’s how sanctions have shaped my life.

 

 by Pedestrian

It is 2007, and I am an undergraduate at the University of Tehran. I’m very particular. I take notes with Staedtler Triplus Fineliner pens, in purple and green, and on this particular day I’ve run through the stash I keep in my desk at home. There is a small office supply store next to the university cafeteria, I’ve bought my pens there before. Before lunch I go to pick up some more Fineliners.

“We’re out,” says Farid, the young Kurdish boy who works in the store. “The supplier says there won’t be anymore at all.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“They say because of sanctions, but I’m not sure,” he says.

 Unexploded ordnance linger long after wars are over

 

By Sarah Kaplan and Nick Kirkpatrick Washington Post  August 15, 2015

The knock came after residents of the east London apartment complex had already gone to bed. They opened their doors to find someone in uniform standing before them: a police officer, a firefighter, a member of the Army.

A 500-pound bomb had been found a few hundred feet away, the officers said. They needed to get out.

It’s an alarming message for anyone to receive while standing in their pajamas, but especially so for someone in a city that hasn’t seen active conflict in seven decades. How did an explosive wind up beneath this leafy London neighborhood?