Death toll from Brazil floods at least 91

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Written by northsouth

Category: Americas

Published: 01 June 2022

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BRAZILIA - Authorities in northeastern Brazil's Pernambuco state said Monday that 91 deaths have been confirmed from flooding over the weekend, with more two dozen people still missing.

Hundreds of state and federal rescue workers were searching for 26 people currently unaccounted for, according to the official statement.

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro on Monday flew over the affected area of Pernambuco's capital, Recife, and neighboring Jaboatao dos Guararapes. Speaking to reporters afterward, he said that landing in the helicopter wasn't possible due to the soaked soil.

He also noted the country has recently experienced similar disasters in the mountains above Rio de Janeiro, in southern Bahia state and in Minas Gerais state.

“Unfortunately, these catastrophes happen in a continent-sized country,” he said. “We're all obviously sad. We express our sympathy to family members. Our bigger objective is to comfort families and also, with material means, attend to the population.”

The government is moving to make funds available to municipalities that have declared a state of emergency, Daniel Ferreira, the minister of regional development, said at the press conference. He also highlighted a new credit line available to cities afflicted by such disasters.

Experts say climate change contributes to more intense rainfall, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has classified Recife’s metropolitan region as one of the world’s most vulnerable cities. The low-lying metro region is set at the delta of three rivers, features floodplains and a network of dozens of canals and is home to some 4 million people.

In March, Recife became the first Latin American city to sign on for participation in a program to that will create insurance against climate disasters created by a network of local and regional governments and financed by German development bank KfW.

The state’s civil defense authority said in a statement that the flooding has displaced 5,000 people from their homes, and has reinforced its alert about still-high risk of landslides. Rain has continued, albeit with less intensity.

Gunman kills 10 in live-streamed racial attack on New York state supermarket

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Written by northsouth

Category: Americas

Published: 15 May 2022

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NEW YORK - An 18-year-old white gunman shot 10 people to death and wounded three on Saturday at a grocery store in a Black neighborhood of upstate New York, before surrendering after what authorities called an act of "racially motivated violent extremism."

Authorities said the suspect, who was armed with an assault-style rifle and appeared to have acted alone, drove to Buffalo from his home several hours away to launch the afternoon attack that he broadcast in real time on social media platform Twitch, a live video service owned by Amazon.com.

Eleven of the 13 people struck by gunfire were Black, officials said. The two others were white. The racial breakdown of the dead was not made clear.

Court papers named the suspect as Payton Gendron of Conklin, a town of about 5,000 people in New York's Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border.

He was arraigned hours after the shooting in state court on first-degree murder charges, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole, said Erie County District Attorney John Flynn. New York has no capital punishment.

Flynn said the judge also ordered Gendron to remain in custody without bail and to undergo a "forensic examination." Gendron was scheduled to return to court on May 19.

SURRENDERED TO POLICE

Authorities said the teenager, reported by local media to have been a student at the State University of New York's Broome Community College near Binghamton, had come close to taking his own life before he was arrested.

When confronted by officers at the store, the suspect held a gun to his own neck, but they talked him into dropping the weapon and surrendering, Buffalo police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told a news briefing.

Gramaglia said the gunman shot and killed three people in the parking lot of the Tops Friendly Markets outlet before exchanging fire with a retired police officer working as a security guard for the store, but the suspect was protected by his body armor.

The guard was one of the 10 people shot to death, the nine others all being customers. Three other employees of the store, part of a regional chain, were wounded but are expected to survive, authorities said.

Shonnell Harris, a manager at Tops, told the Buffalo News she thought she heard as many as 70 gunshots and that she fell several times as she ran through the store to a rear exit.

"He looked like he was in the army," she told the newspaper, describing the camouflage-clad assailant.

Retired firefighter Katherine Crofton, who lives nearby, said she witnessed the start of the bloodshed from her porch.

"I saw him shoot this woman," Crofton told the paper. "She was just going into the store. And then he shot another woman. She was putting groceries into her car. I got down because I did not know if he was going to shoot me."

'PURE EVIL'

Stephen Belongia, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau's Buffalo field office, said the attack would be investigated both as a hate crime and as an act of "racially motivated violent extremism" under federal law.

"This person was pure evil," Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said at a news conference, his voice quaking with emotion. "It was a straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community."

U.S. President Biden decried the shooting as "abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation" in a statement issued late Saturday. "Hate must have no safe harbor. We must do everything in our power to end hate-fueled domestic terrorism."

New York Governor Kathy Hochul told a late-evening news conference she was dismayed that the killer managed to live-stream his attack on social media, which she blamed for hosting a "feeding frenzy" of violent extremist ideology.

"The fact that that can even be posted on a platform is absolutely shocking," Hochul said. "These outlets must be more vigilant in monitoring social media content."

Twitch said in a statement that it removed the livestream less than two minutes after it started and was working to ensure no other accounts re-posted the content. Hochul said it should have been taken down "within a second."

Screenshots of the broadcast were posted on social media, including some that appeared to show the shooter holding a gun and standing over a body in the grocery store.

A document circulating online that appeared to have been written by the killer sketched out a to-do list for the attack, including cleaning the gun and testing the livestream.

In addition, a 180-page manifesto outlining 'The Great Replacement Theory' - the idea that white people are being replaced by minorities in the United States and other countries - also circulated online, reportedly authored by Gendron.

A spokesperson for Flynn's office declined to comment on the documents. The FBI could not immediately be reached for comment.

The governor also said she would introduce a previously planned "comprehensive" gun control package on Tuesday to "address further loopholes that exist in our (state) laws."

Hochul said the firearm used in the killings was legally purchased but had been illegally modified with a high-capacity magazine, which she said could easily have been purchased legally in Pennsylvania.

The Buffalo shooting follows a pattern of other racially motivated mass murders in recent years, including a Pittsburgh synagogue attack that left 11 congregants dead in October 2018, and the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021 in which a white man killed eight people, targeting Asians.

Saturday's shooting spree was also reminiscent of the attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, when the killer live-streamed the murders on Facebook.

Buffalo Mayor Bryon Brown called for unity on what he called a "day of great pain for our community."

"Many of us have been in and out of this supermarket many times," he told reporters. "We cannot let this hateful person divide our community or our country."

Explosion at luxury Havana hotel kills 22, injures dozens

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Written by northsouth

Category: Americas

Published: 07 May 2022

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By ANDREA RODRÍGUEZ

HAVANA — A powerful explosion apparently caused by a natural gas leak killed at least 22 people, including a child, and injured dozens Friday when it blew away outer walls from a luxury hotel in the heart of Cuba’s capital.

No tourists were staying at Havana’s 96-room Hotel Saratoga because it was undergoing renovations, Havana Gov. Reinaldo García Zapata told the Communist Party newspaper Granma.

“It’s not a bomb or an attack. It is a tragic accident,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who visited the site, said in a tweet.

Dr. Julio Guerra Izquierdo, chief of hospital services at the Ministry of Health, told reporters that at least 74 people had been injured. Among them were 14 children, according to a tweet from Díaz-Canel’s office.

Díaz-Canel said families in buildings near the hotel affected by the explosion had been transferred to safer locations.

Cuban state TV reported the explosion was caused by a truck that had been supplying natural gas to the hotel, but did not provide details on how the gas ignited. A white tanker truck was seen being removed from the site as rescue workers hosed it down with water.

Tourism Minister Juan Carlos García said the hotel was scheduled to reopen Tuesday.

The blast sent smoke billowing into the air around the hotel with people on the street staring in awe, one saying “Oh my God,” and cars honking their horns as they sped away from the scene, video showed. It happened as Cuba is struggling to revive its key tourism sector that was devastated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Cuba’s national health minister, José Ángel Portal, told The Associated Press the number of injured could rise as the search continues for people who may be trapped in the rubble of the 19th century structure in the Old Havana neighborhood of the city.

“We are still looking for a large group of people who may be under the rubble,” Lt. Col. Noel Silva of the Fire Department said.

A 300-student school next to the hotel was evacuated. García Zapata said five of the students suffered minor injuries.

Police cordoned off the area as firefighters and rescue workers toiled inside the wreckage of the emblematic hotel about 110 yards (100 meters) from Cuba’s Capitol building.

The hotel was first renovated in 2005 as part of the Cuban government’s revival of Old Havana and is owned by the Cuban military’s tourism business arm, Grupo de Turismo Gaviota SA. The company said it was investigating the cause of the blast and did not immediately respond to an email seeking more details about the hotel and the renovation it was undergoing.

The Hotel Saratoga has been used frequently by visiting VIPs and political figures, including high-ranking U.S. government delegations. Beyoncé and Jay-Z stayed there during a 2013 visit to Cuba.

Photographer Michel Figueroa said he was walking past the hotel when “the explosion threw me to the ground, and my head still hurts.... Everything was very fast.”

Worried relatives of people who had been working at the hotel showed up at a hospital in the afternoon to look for them. Among them was Beatriz Céspedes Cobas, who was tearfully searching for her sister.

“She had to work today. She is a housekeeper,” she said. “I work two blocks away. I felt the noise, and at first, I didn’t even associate” the explosion with the hotel.

Yazira de la Caridad said the explosion shook her home a block from the hotel: “The whole building moved. I thought it was an earthquake.”

Besides the pandemic’s impact on Cuba’s tourism sector, the country was already struggling with the sanctions imposed by the former U.S. President Donald Trump that have been kept in place the Biden administration. The sanctions limited visits by U.S. tourists to the islands and restricted remittances from Cubans in the U.S. to their families in Cuba.

Tourism had started to revive somewhat early this year, but the war in Ukraine crimped a boom of Russian visitors, who accounted for almost a third of the tourists arriving in Cuba last year.

The explosion happened as Cuba’s government hosted the final day of a tourism convention in the iconic beach town of Varadero aimed at drawing investors.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is scheduled to arrive in Havana for a visit late Saturday and Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said the visit would still take place.

García Zapata said structures adjacent to the hotel were being evaluated, including two badly damaged apartment buildings. The neighboring Martí Theater, the Yoruba Association and the Capitol had broken glass and damaged masonry.

Mayiee Pérez said she rushed to the hotel after receiving a call from her husband, Daniel Serra, who works at a foreign exchange shop inside the hotel.

She said he told her: “I am fine, I am fine. They got us out.” But she was unable to reach him after that.