Tag: Evening Edition

But despite the progress, emergency workers had not yet made contact with the men and relatives faced continued uncertainty about whether their loved ones were still alive.

The Ecuadoran miners became trapped in the early hours of Friday morning, after the collapse blocked their exit from the mine, leaving the four men stuck some 150 meters (492 feet) below ground in the Casa Negra mine.

But even as officers forced open the barricades at some depots, strikers threw up new pickets at other fuel distribution centres across the country to fight against moves to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62.

Riot police made 16 arrests and used tear gas as they fought running battles with youths who pelted them with stones and overturned cars during street protests by high-school students in the central city of Lyon.

Pupils blockaded their schools and some near Paris threw stones at police who responded with non-lethal riot guns as officials warned protests against raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 could get out of hand.

With eight of France’s 12 refineries shutting down operations, the petrol industry association urged the government to release emergency fuel stocks and called for protestors blocking fuel depots to be removed.

Four of the soldiers were killed in a single bomb attack in the south, where the Taliban have concentrated their nine-year fight against the Western-backed government and where Western troops are suffering the most casualties.

The US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said a fifth soldier was killed in another bomb attack in the south and a sixth while fighting rebels in eastern Afghanistan, another insurgent stronghold.

Students and school pupils joined the movement for the first time and staff in several sectors threatened to make the strikes open-ended, escalating the toughest battle of Sarkozy’s presidency, as the government dug in its heels.

“Sarko, you’re screwed, the young are on the streets,” chanted students as they marched beside trade unionists and their supporters on the fourth major nationwide demonstration against pension reform in just over a month.

Linda Norgrove, 36, was abducted on September 26 in eastern Afghanistan and killed in the failed US-led operation on Friday. British officials had earlier said she died when one of her captors blew up a suicide vest.

Cameron said an immediate investigation had been launched into Norgrove’s death but he defended the attempt to rescue her, saying that she had been in “grave danger” from the moment she was captured.

Scores of people were injured in the violence as protestors, dressed mainly in black and with hooded tops, hurled rocks and molotov cocktails at security forces trying to ensure Belgrade’s second ever Gay Pride event could go ahead.

Rioters also managed to set fire to the headquarters of President Boris Tadic’s Democratic Party (DS) to protest his support for the march. The flames were quickly put out and no one was hurt.

They were evacuated at dawn from Kolontar, a village close to the reservoir that burst in western Hungary Monday, killing seven people, injuring scores more and poisoning rivers in the country’s worst ecological disaster.

The despairing and angry villagers were taken by bus to Ajka, the nearest major town which is 160 kilometres (100 miles) from the capital Budapest. Many placed the blame on MAL Hungarian Aluminium Production and Trade Company, which runs the plant whose sludge had swept through their homes.

The death toll from Monday’s disaster meanwhile rose to seven, officials said, and one person was still missing.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who declared a state of emergency in three counties earlier this week, insisted there remained little risk of the pollution running into the Danube, Europe’s second-longest river.

“I can confirm that we have seen sporadic losses of fish in the main branch of the Danube,” regional chief for the disaster relief services Tibor Dobson told AFP.

“The fish have been sighted at the confluence of the Raba with the Danube,” where water samples had shown a pH value of 9.1, he said.