Foreign News
At least 20 dead as tornadoes tear through southern US
At least 20 people have died in the US – including 12 in Missouri alone – after deadly tornadoes tore through several south-eastern states, flipping cars and flattening homes.
Three people were killed in a car crash during a fierce dust storm in Texas, while deaths have also occurred in Oklahoma and Arkansas.
More than 240,000 properties were without power across six states – including Texas, Missouri and Illinois – on Saturday afternoon, according to tracker PowerOutage.
Further severe weather is expected for the region, with tornado watches issued in central Mississippi, eastern Louisiana and western Tennessee.
Flash flooding and flood warnings have also been issued in the same three states, as well as parts of Alabama and Arkansas, as severe weather continues to track across the south-east.
The National Weather Service (NWS) has said these flash floods could prove deadly.
A tornado warning – the highest level of alert – was also issued in central Mississippi on Saturday morning.
The NWS warned of “multiple intense to violent long-track tornadoes” in those areas, describing the situation as “particularly dangerous”.
The meteorological agency said: “If you live in these areas, get to the sturdiest structure you have access to and remain in place until the storms pass.”
Mike Kehoe, governor of Missouri, said the state had been “devastated by severe storms and tornadoes, leaving homes destroyed and lives lost”.
Missouri’s emergency management agency said initial reports indicated 19 tornadoes had struck 25 counties so far.
Arkansas has seen three deaths and 29 injuries – prompting Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders to declare a state of emergency.
Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, also declared a state of emergency ahead of a predicted severe weather pattern hitting his state.
The NWS expects the threat of tornadoes to spread into Alabama, Florida and Georgia into Sunday.
Meanwhile, one person died on the road in Oklahoma, the BBC’s US partner CBS News reported, citing officials.
The same dust storm that caused three deaths in Texas on Friday night caused a pile-up of an estimated 38 cars.
“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” Sgt Cindy Barkley, of the state’s department of public safety, told reporters.
“We couldn’t tell that they were all together until the dust kind of settled.”
A further death has since been reported in Texas.
In Texas and Oklahoma, the destructive storms fuelled more than 100 wildfires and overturned several semi-trailer trucks, CBS reports.
One of those fires, known as the 840 Road Fire, has already burned 27,500 acres and remains 0% contained, according to the Oklahoma Forestry Service. The agency has issued a “red flag” warning for the state’s panhandle area, signalling a severe fire danger.
Tornadoes form when moist, warm air rises, mixing with cold air above to form thunderclouds. Winds blowing from different directions cause the air to rotate, creating a vortex of air moving upwards.
The four states where tornado-related deaths have been confirmed in the past day lie within a path frequently hit by the weather phenomenon.
It has earned this stretch of the US the unofficial name Tornado Alley, because its geography is ideal for tornado formation.
In 2024, 54 people were killed in tornado-related incidents, according to Noaa, Nine people died in Texas. There were eight in Oklahoma, five in Arkansas and one in Missouri.
Peak tornado season in Tornado Alley is from May to June – but meteorologists caution that tornadoes can occur at any time of year.
[BBC]
More than 200 Venezuelans alleged by the White House to be gang members have been deported from the US to a supermax prison in El Salvador, even as a US judge blocked the removals.
El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele wrote on social media that 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had arrived in the Central American country, along with 23 members of the international MS-13 gang, on Sunday morning.
Neither the US government nor El Salvador has identified the detainees, nor provided details of their alleged criminality or gang membership.
A federal judge’s order prevented the Trump administration from invoking a centuries-old wartime law to justify some of the deportations, but the flights had already departed.
“Oopsie… Too late,” posted Bukele on social media, referring to the judge’s ruling.
A video attached to one of his posts shows lines of people with their hands and feet shackled being escorted by armed officials from the planes.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied the court ruling had been violated.
“The administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order,” she said.
“The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from US territory.”
US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he had signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as he accused Tren de Aragua of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion of predatory incursion against the territory of the United States”.
He said members of the gang would be deported for engaging in “irregular warfare” against the US. The Alien Enemies Act was last used during World War Two to intern Japanese-American civilians.
On Saturday evening, US District Judge James Boasberg in Washington DC ordered a 14-day halt to deportations covered by Trump’s proclamation, pending further legal arguments.
After lawyers told him that planes with deportees had already taken off, Judge Boasberg gave a verbal order for the flights to turn back, US media reported, although that directive did not form part of his written ruling.
The written notice appeared in the case docket at 19:25 EDT on Saturday (00:25 GMT on Sunday), the Reuters news agency reports, although it is unclear when the flights carrying the alleged gang members departed from the US.
In a court filing on Sunday, Department of Justice lawyers said the order had not applied because the deportees “had already been removed from United States territory”.
A senior administration official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner, that 261 people were deported on Saturday, 137 of whom were removed under the Alien Enemies Act over alleged gang ties.
The justice department has appealed against the judge’s ruling.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which was involved in the lawsuit against the Trump administration, said the court’s order may have been violated.
The case raises constitutional questions since, under the US system of checks and balances, government agencies are expected to comply with a federal judge’s ruling.
Venezuela criticised Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act, saying it “unjustly criminalises Venezuelan migration” and “evokes the darkest episodes in the history of humanity, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps”.
Rights groups condemned Trump, accusing him of using a 227-year-old law to circumvent due process.
Amnesty International USA wrote on X that the deportations were “yet another example of the Trump administration’s racist targeting” of Venezuelans “based on sweeping claims of gang affiliation”.
President Bukele, a Trump ally, wrote that the detainees were immediately transferred to El Salvador’s notorious mega-jail, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot).
The El Salvadoran president said they would be held there “for a period of one year”, and that could be “renewable”.
El Salvador’s Cecot jail is part of Bukele’s effort to crack down on the country’s organised crime.
The newly built maximum-security facility, which can hold up to 40,000 people, has been accused by human rights groups of mistreating inmates.
The arrangement between the US and El Salvador is a sign of strengthening diplomatic ties.
El Salvador was the second country that Rubio visited as the US’s top diplomat.
During that trip, which took place in February, Bukele made an initial offer to take US deportees, saying it would help pay for the massive Cecot facility.
The latest deportations under Trump’s second term are part of the president’s long-running campaign against illegal immigration in the US.
In January, Trump signed an executive order declaring Tren de Aragua and MS-13 foreign terrorist organisations.
He won over voters on the campaign trail, in part, by promising to enact the largest deportation operation in US history.
While illegal border crossings have plummeted to the lowest number in decades since Trump took office, the Republican president has reportedly been frustrated by the relatively slow pace of deportations so far.
[BBC]
United States President Donald Trump’s administration is mulling a new travel ban that is expected to affect citizens from dozens of countries to varying degrees, The New York Times reported.
Quoting anonymous officials, the report published on Friday said the US government’s draft list featured 43 countries, divided into three categories of travel restrictions.
The first group of 10 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Cuba and North Korea, would be set for a full visa suspension.
In the second group, five countries – Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Myanmar and South Sudan – would face partial suspensions that would affect tourist and student visas as well as other immigrant visas, with some exceptions.
In the third group, a total of 26 countries that includes Belarus, Pakistan and Turkmenistan would be considered for a partial suspension of US visa issuance if their governments “do not make efforts to address deficiencies within 60 days”, the draft memo said.
A US official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Reuters news agency there could be changes to the list and it was yet to be approved by the administration, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Trump issued an executive order on January 20 requiring intensified security vetting of any foreigners seeking admission to the US to detect national security threats.
The order directed several cabinet members to submit by March 21 a list of countries from which travel should be partly or fully suspended because their “vetting and screening information is so deficient”.
The US president’s directive is part of an immigration crackdown he launched at the start of his second term. He previewed his plan in an October 2023 speech, pledging to restrict people from the Gaza Strip, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and “anywhere else that threatens our security”.
The latest travel ban proposal, however, harkens back to Trump’s first-term ban on travellers from seven Muslim-majority nations, a policy that went through several iterations before it was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018.
That ban targeted citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen and ignited international outrage and domestic court rulings against it. Iraq and Sudan were later dropped from the list, but in 2018 the Supreme Court upheld a later version of the ban for the other nations as well as North Korea and Venezuela.
[Aljazeera]
The US has launched a “decisive and powerful” wave of air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, President Donald Trump has said, citing the armed group’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea as the reason.
“Funded by Iran, the Houthi thugs have fired missiles at US aircraft, and targeted our Troops and Allies,” Trump wrote on his Truth social platform, adding that their “piracy, violence, and terrorism” had cost “billions of dollars” and put lives at risk.
The Houthi-run health ministry said at least 13 people were killed and nine others injured in the strikes.
The group – which began targeting shipping in response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza – said its forces would respond to US strikes.
In a statement, the Houthis blamed the US and the UK for “wicked” aggression targeting residential areas in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa – though it is understood that the UK was not behind Saturday’s strikes on the Middle Eastern country.
The Iranian-backed rebel group, considers Israel its enemy. It controls Sanaa and the north-west of Yemen, but it is not the country’s internationally-recognised government.
Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, it has launched hundreds of attacks on commercial vessels travelling through the Red Sea.
These attacks, Trump said, “will not be tolerated”. “We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective.”
Initially, the group said it was attacking ships connected with, or that had docked in, Israel. However, many of the vessels have no connection with Israel.
Trump said that it had been more than a year since a US-flagged ship had sailed safely through the Suez Canal – which the Red Sea leads to – and four months since a US warship had been through the body of water between east Africa and the Arabian peninsula.
The Suez Canal is the quickest sea route between Asia and Europe, and is particularly important in the transportation of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG).
Addressing the Houthis directly, Trump wrote that if they did not stop, “HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE”.
But the Houthis were unwavering in their response, saying the aggression would not wane their support for Palestinians.
“This aggression will not go without response and our Yemeni armed forces are ready to answer escalation with further escalation,” the group said.
Meanwhile, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the Houthi’s “benefactor”, Iran, was “on notice”.
For more than a year, major shipping companies were forced to stop using the Red Sea – through which almost 15% of global seaborne trade usually passes – and used a much longer route around southern Africa instead.
The Houthis launched 190 attacks in the Red Sea between November 2023 and October 2024, according to the US Congress.
Previously, the UK and US conducted joint naval and air strikes against the group. Israel has also targeted sites linked to the Houthis in separate strikes.
Trump urged Iran to cease its support for the Houthis, warning that Washington would hold Tehran “fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it”.
He also accused the previous White House administration, under Joe Biden, of being “pathetically weak” and allowing the “unrestrained Houthis” to keep going.
[BBC]
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