Residents of the Midwest cleared away wreckage on Saturday following a wave of powerful storms that splintered homes, knocked out power to thousands and killed six people.
Hundreds of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed on Friday in Kansas, Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri and 150,000 Missouri utility customers lost power. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency.
In southern Illinois, more than 56,200 customers of the utility Ameren still had no electricity late on Saturday, the company said.
Illinois Governor Pat Quinn on Saturday declared three southern counties disaster areas.
Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear declared an emergency in central and southeastern sections of his state on Saturday and West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin made the same declaration for six counties in that state.
Trees were down and windows were broken on the campus of Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale campus, but the school said weekend commencement ceremonies would go on scheduled. Friday’s graduation ceremonies were canceled.
Two people were killed near Poplar Bluff, Montana, when wind knocked a tree onto their sport utility vehicle. In Missouri’s Dallas County, a man in his 70s had a fatal heart attack after he and his wife were sucked from their home by a tornado and thrown into a field up to 30m away, said county emergency management director Larry Highfill. The wife was hospitalized in fair condition.
A 54-year-old woman was killed in southeast Kansas in a mobile home that was blown off its foundation. And in central Kentucky, officials blamed a tornado with winds of 193kph for the deaths of two people whose bodies were found in a pond near a mobile home community.
On Saturday, a line of thunderstorms stretched from Arkansas and northern Mississippi across Tennessee and Kentucky.
Some homes were evacuated early Saturday in southern West Virginia because of flooding caused by more than 5cm of rain, state Homeland Security Operations Director Paul Howard said. High water also closed several main roads. No injuries were reported.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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