Foreign News
State of emergency declared in Iceland after volcanic eruption
A state of emergency has been declared in Iceland after lava from a volcanic eruption damaged key hot water pipes.
Thousands of people in the Reykjanes Peninsula have been urged to limit their hot water and electricity use as the pipes could take days to fix.
There are concerns that other crucial pipelines close to the Svartsengi power station could be affected if the lava flow does not ease soon.
It is the third such eruption on the peninsula since December.
Aerial video of the area shows a new 3km-long (1.8 mile) fissure – a crack in the Earth’s surface – spraying streams of lava high up into the air.
Smoke illuminated by the lava could be seen in the capital, Reykjavik – roughly 40km (25 miles) away.
The Blue Lagoon, one of Iceland’s top tourist attractions, has been forced to close again due to the lava flows. It is expected to remain closed on Friday.
Iceland’s Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management said it was trying to figure out how to guarantee the hot water supply to more than 20,000 people who have reportedly had their access disrupted.
Schools in the areas affected by the lack of hot water will also remain shut, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service (RUV) reported. RUV also said that the Keflavik Airport had been impacted but that its services were running as usual.
Volcanologist Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya told the BBC that while the Svartsengi power station itself is protected to some extent by barriers that have been built around it, there are pipes providing hot water to a further 30,000 people across the peninsula that are at more immediate risk.
However, she said the hope was that the speed of the lava flow would soon drop off, in a similar way to earlier eruptions, and the pipeline would be undamaged.
According to the Icelandic Meteorological Office, the strength of the eruption is decreasing.
All of the recent eruptions in southern Iceland have involved lava pouring from fissures, rather than volcanic explosions that cause ash to be sent into the atmosphere – such as the country saw in 2011.
Dr Ilyinskaya, an associate professor of volcanology at Leeds University, said Thursday’s eruption was in the same general area as one in December – meaning it is unlikely to cause more damage to the abandoned town of Grindavik. Three homes in the town were destroyed last month when molten lava spewed through two other fissures.
Some of the around 4,000 residents of Grindavik have told the BBC they do not expect to ever return to live in their homes.
Iceland has 33 active volcano systems and sits over what’s known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the boundary between two of the largest tectonic plates on the planet. The last time the Reykjanes Peninsula had a period of volcanic activity was 800 years ago – and the eruptions went on for decades. This is now the sixth eruption since 2021, and scientists believe that the area is entering a new volcanic era.
“This is proceeding as expected at the moment,” Professor Tamsin Mather, a volcanologist from the University of Oxford, said of the volcanic activity.
“What we’re expecting is a series of these relatively small, relatively short-lived eruptions, pushing out lava flows through fissures and building up the peninsula further.”
The question is how long such activity will go on for. Scientists think it could last for many years or even centuries.
(BBC)
Singapore has carried out its third hanging of a convicted drug trafficker in a week despite appeals for clemency from the United Nations.
Rosman Abdullah, 55, was executed for trafficking 57.43 grams of heroin into the Southeast Asian city-state, Singapore’s drug enforcement agency said on Friday.
Rosman, a Singaporean, was “accorded full due process under the law, and was represented by legal counsel throughout the process,” the Central Narcotics Bureau said in a statement.
“Capital punishment is imposed only for the most serious crimes, such as the trafficking of significant quantities of drugs which cause very serious harm, not just to individual drug abusers, but also to their families and the wider society,” the CNB added.
UN experts had called on Singaporean authorities to spare Rosman, arguing that the death penalty does little to deter crime and that authorities had not made proper accommodations for his intellectual disabilities.
“We are gravely concerned that Mr. Rosman bin Abdullah does not appear to have had access to procedural accommodations, including individualised assistance, for his disability during his interrogation or trial,” the experts said in a statement released by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Wednesday.
Amnesty International had condemned Rosman’s scheduled execution as “chilling” and “extremely alarming”.
Rosman’s hanging at Singapore’s Changi Prison comes exactly a week after the execution of a 39-year-old Malaysian and a 53-year-old Singaporean for drug trafficking.
Despite its reputation as a modern city-state and international business hub, Singapore ranks among only a handful of countries, including China and North Korea, that impose the death penalty for drug offences.
Under the country’s laws, anyone trafficking more than 500 grams of cannabis or 15 grams (0.5 ounces) of heroin faces mandatory capital punishment.
Since resuming executions in March 2022 following a hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Singaporean authorities have carried out 24 executions, including eight so far this year.
Singapore’s government, which keeps a tight rein on public protest and the media, has defended the death penalty as a deterrent against drug abuse, citing surveys that show most citizens support the law.
[Aljazeera]
A video of a fashion shoot in India has gone viral and unexpectedly turned a group of underprivileged school children into local celebrities.
The footage shows the children, most of them girls between the ages of 12 and 17, dressed in red and gold outfits fashioned from discarded clothes.
The teenagers designed and tailored the outfits and also doubled up as models to showcase their creations, with the grubby walls and terraces of the slum providing the backdrop for their ramp walk.
The video was filmed and edited by a 15-year-old boy.
The video first appeared earlier this month on the Instagram page of Innovation for Change, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the city of Lucknow.
The charity works with about 400 children from the city’s slums, providing them free food, education and job skills. The children featured in the shoot are students of this NGO.
Mehak Kannojia, one of the models in the video, told the BBC that she and her fellow students closely followed the sartorial choices of Bollywood actresses on Instagram and often duplicated some of their outfits for themselves.
“This time, we decided to pool our resources and worked as a group,” the 16-year-old said.
For their project, they chose wisely – a campaign by Sabyasachi Mukherjee, one of India’s top fashion designers who has dressed Bollywood celebrities, Hollywood actresses and billionaires. In 2018, Kim Kardashian wore his sequinned red sari for a Vogue shoot.
Mukherjee is also known as the “king of weddings” in India. He has dressed thousands of brides, including Bollywood celebrities such as Anushka Sharma and Deepika Padukone. Priyanka Chopra married Nick Jonas in a stunning red Sabyasachi outfit.
IMehak said their project, called Yeh laal rang (the colour red), was inspired by the designer’s heritage bridal collection.
“We sifted through the clothes that had come to us in donation and picked out all the red items. Then we zeroed in on the outfits we wanted to make and began putting them together.”
It was intense work – the girls stitched about a dozen outfits in three-four days but, Mehak says, they had “great fun doing it”.
For the ramp walk, Mehak says they studied the models carefully in Sabyasachi videos and copied their moves.
“Just like his models, some of us wore sunglasses, one drank from a sipper with a straw, while another walked carrying a cloth bundle under her arm.”
Some of it, Mehak says, came together organically. “At one point in the shoot, I was supposed to laugh. At that moment, someone said something funny and I just burst out laughing.”
It was an ambitious project, but the result has won hearts in India. Put together on a shoestring budget with donated clothes, the video went viral after Mukherjee reposted it on his Instagram feed with a heart emoji.
The campaign won widespread praise, with many on social media comparing their work to that of professionals.
The viral video has brought enormous attention to the charity and its school has been visited by several TV channels, some of the children were invited to participate in shows on popular FM radio stations and Bollywood actress Tamannah Bhatia visited them to accept a scarf from the children.
The response, Mehak says, has been “totally unexpected”.
“It feels like a dream come true. All my friends are sharing the video and saying ‘you’ve become famous’. My parents were full of joy when they heard about all the attention we are getting.
“We are feeling wonderful. Now we have only one dream left – to meet Sabyasachi.”
The shoot, however, also received criticism, with some wondering if showing young girls dressed as brides could encourage child marriage in a country where millions of girls are still married off by their families before they turn 18 – the legal age.
The Innovation for Change addressed the concern in a post on Instagram, saying they had no intention to encourage child marriage.
“Our aim is not to promote child marriage in any way. Today, these girls are able to do something like this by fighting against such ideas and restrictions. Please appreciate them, otherwise the morale of these children will fall.”
[BBC]
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is on course to win a landslide majority in India’s richest state of Maharashtra, trends show.
The BJP and its allies are leading on close to 220 out of 288 seats, comfortably placed above the halfway mark needed to form a government.
Maharashtra, which has India’s financial hub of Mumbai as its capital, is one of the most politically crucial states in the country.
The BJP, however, is staring at a defeat in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, where main opposition Congress and its allies are on course to win.
This was the first regional election in Maharashtra since the crucial parliamentary polls earlier this year, in which Modi returned for a historic third term but lost his majority, having to depend on regional allies to form a government.
Maharashtra was one of the states where the BJP suffered a setback and opposition parties won two-thirds of the parliamentary seats.
Modi’s party currently runs the incumbent government in Maharashtra along with breakaway factions of two regional parties, the Shiv Sena and the National Congress Party (NCP).
Political analysts say the BJP’s retention of the state will give a much-needed boost to the party, which also won regional elections in the northern state of Haryana last month.
“This result has taken us by surprise. We knew we would win but never expected such an overwhelming result,” BJP spokesperson Pravin Darekar told reporters in Mumbai.
The outcome will also decide the fate of regional heavyweights, many of whom switched parties overnight in both states.
In Maharashtra, Modi led his party’s campaign from the front, announcing several welfare schemes, many of which were aimed at farmers. The state is a major agricultural belt and producer of crops like onions, soybean and cotton.
The opposition also made similar promises, including waiver of farm loans and financial assistance for women and senior citizens.
Critics have pointed out that the competing poll promises would mean the new government would face a serious fiscal challenge in delivering them, or risk facing voters’ anger.
The state has undergone significant political turmoil in recent years. The BJP-led coalition stayed in power after some lawmakers from the Shiv Sena and the NCP broke away from their parties and joined the government.
Meanwhile, Jharkhand, where seven chief ministers have ruled since the state’s formation in 2000, has also witnessed political upheaval in recent months after its chief minister Hemant Soren was arrested in February on corruption charges, which he denied.
After his release in June, Soren soon hit the road, trying to capitalise on sympathy votes.
While the BJP called Soren corrupt, he alleged that the the federal government was unfairly targeting a tribal chief minister.
Tribal communities make up nearly 9% of India’s population and remain one of the country’s most marginalised groups.
Like Maharashtra, Jharkhand also saw parties promising cash incentives, free power, jobs and health insurance.
[BBC]
Singapore hangs drug trafficker, third such execution in a week
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