News in Brief

Date: 04 April 2023 - 22:39

News ID: ۱۱۳۶۵۵

MEMPHIS (AP) -- Forecasters warned of more severe weather, including tornadoes, Tuesday in parts of the South and Midwest hammered just days ago by deadly storms. That could mean more misery for people sifting through the wreckage of their homes in Arkansas, Iowa and Illinois. Dangerous conditions also could stretch into parts of Missouri, southwest Oklahoma and northeast Texas. Farther south and west, fire danger will remain high. Just last week, fierce storms that spawned tornadoes in 11 states killed at least 32 people as the system that began Friday plodded through Arkansas and traveled northeast through the South and into the Midwest and Northeast. The same conditions that fueled last week’s storms — an area of low pressure combined with strong southerly winds — will make conditions ideal for another round of severe weather Tuesday into early morning Wednesday, said Ryan Bunker, a meteorologist with the National Weather Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

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VOORSCHOTEN, Netherlands (Reuters) -- At least one person was killed and 30 injured, many seriously, when a passenger train carrying about 50 people derailed in the Netherlands early on Tuesday after hitting construction equipment on the track, Dutch emergency services said. Rescue teams were seen ferrying away the injured in pre-dawn darkness at the scene of the accident at Voorschoten, a village near The Hague. The accident happened around 3:25 a.m. (0125 GMT), the emergency services said. A fire department spokesperson told Dutch radio that 19 people were taken to hospital. Others were being treated on the spot, the emergency services said. The front carriage of the night train from Leiden city to The Hague derailed and ploughed into a field after the accident, ANP news agency said. The second carriage was on its side and a fire broke out in the rear carriage but was later extinguished, it said.

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NEW DELHI/BEIJING (Reuters) -- India said on Tuesday it rejected attempts by China to rename places in its eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. “Arunachal Pradesh is, has been and will always be an integral and inalienable part of India,” foreign ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said on Twitter. Bagchi was responding to media reports that said China had renamed several places in Arunachal Pradesh. China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs on Sunday standardized the names of 11 places including the names of five mountains in southern Tibet, which shares a disputed border with India. In recent years, Indian and Chinese troops have clashed along parts of their long border in the Himalayas. In December last year, the troops had minor scuffles in the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh, also claimed by Beijing. The poorly demarcated 3,800-km (2,360-mile) frontier between the nuclear-armed countries had stayed largely peaceful after a war in 1962, before clashes in 2020 sent relations nosediving.

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SEOUL (Reuters) -- North Korea criticized the U.S. for refusing to extradite a man who was accused of staging a break-in at North Korea’s embassy in Spain in 2019, saying Washington was protecting terrorism, state media KCNA reported on Tuesday. The North Korean embassy in Madrid issued a statement marking the fourth anniversary of the raid, during which a group of men bound and gagged staff for hours before driving off with computers and other devices. Pyongyang denounced the incident as a “grave breach of sovereignty and terrorist attack” but accused the U.S. of not investigating the group thoroughly and refusing to extradite its leader, Christopher Ahn, calling it a violation of international law. Ahn, a former U.S. Marine who had worked as a human rights activist, was arrested in Los Angeles in April 2019 but freed on $1.3 million bail three months later.

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DHAKA (Reuters) -- Firefighters and army personnel were working on Tuesday to douse a massive fire that raged through a shopping complex with 3,000 shops in Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka, fire officials said. There were no casualties reported so far in the fire, which began in the early hours of Tuesday morning, but army personnel had been called in to help after flames spread rapidly in the cramped, crowded area of Bangabazar, home to the country’s famed cloth markets. Most of the shops were burnt to ashes in the fire, but there was no information on whether any people were trapped inside, given that the fire broke in the early hours of the morning before most shops had opened, Khalid said.

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SYDNEY (Reuters) -- At least four people have been killed and hundreds of houses destroyed in a remote area of northern Papua New Guinea, an official said on Tuesday, a day after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake. Teams from Papua New Guinea’s National Disaster Centre were sent to the quake’s epicenter near Chambri Lakes, a remote and swampy part of East Sepik province, Felix Taranu, a seismologist with the Port Moresby Geophysical Observatory, told Reuters on Tuesday. Four people are confirmed dead and 300 houses destroyed along the Sepik River region, and there are unconfirmed reports of further deaths and several hundred more houses destroyed, he added. The quake struck at a depth of 80km (49.71 miles) early on Monday, according to the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC). Papua New Guinea straddles the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire”, a region known for frequent earthquakes. A 7.6 magnitude quake last September killed seven and triggered landslides across three provinces.