Deadly fire rips through Saudi hospital
At least 25 killed and more than 100 injured in blaze in Jizan, which began on floor housing ICU and maternity ward.
| Saudi Arabia, Middle East
At least 25 people have been killed and 107 injured in a fire at a hospital in Jizan, Saudi Arabia, authorities said.
The Saudi civil defence directorate said in a post on Facebook that the fire at the Jizan General Hospital started at about 2.30am local time.
It is not yet known what caused the blaze, which began on the first floor of the hospital.
The intensive care unit and maternity ward are both on the first floor.
Saudi Arabian authorities are on the scene investigating.
At least 20 brigades from the civil defence directorate were deployed to fight the blaze, which has now been brought under control.
Dr. Ahmad Alsum, an emergency doctor at Jizan's King Fahd Hospital, told Al Jazeera that most of those injured in the fire were patients.Inside Eritrea: conscription and poverty drive exodus from secretive African state
Residents explain why so many risk death to reach Europe, as the Guardian gains rare access to report from inside the country
David Smith in Asmara
The shrill blast of a whistle still makes Almaz Russom wince. “You’re sleeping nicely, dreaming something, then it wakes you at 4.30am,” he said, clenching his teeth and mimicking the pitch. “I still don’t like the sound of that whistle.”
Russom, whose name has been changed here for his own protection, was giving a rare account of a military bootcamp in Eritrea, one of Africa’s most secretive totalitarian states. It forms part of a compulsory “national service” for young men and women, an indefinite purgatory that robs them of the best years of their lives and is the key to understanding why so many flee its borders.
Eritreans are now the third biggest group of people embarking on the risky Mediterranean crossing to Europe, with an estimated 5,000 leaving every month, behind only Syrians and Afghans. As the first British newspaper for a decade to gain access to this little-understood nation, the Guardian interviewed citizens, diplomats and government ministers about the motivating forces behind the mass exodus.China demands that US repatriate economic fugitives
Chinese diplomat says efforts to cooperate with US law enforcement are underway
Beijing on Wednesday reiterated demands that the United States repatriate what it calls economic fugitives back to China.
The call is part of President Xi Jinping’s ongoing campaign to root out corruption — a bid that has unseated all level of the ruling elite since he came to office in November 2012.
“The Chinese government pays great attention to anti-corruption. We are now reinforcing domestic efforts to crack down on corruption, and at the same time cooperating with relevant countries to go after overseas corrupt officials, retrieve their illicit gains, punish the corrupt and leave them no place to hide,” the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Zhu Haiquan, told The Independent in an exclusive interview.
2015: A year of debunking fake 'news'
In 2015, the Observers team debunked more fake “news” relayed on social media than any other year. From claims that Saudi Arabia bulldozed bodies in Mecca, to using photos of innocent people and describing them as the Paris attackers, a huge amount of misinformation was circulated on social networks – and some of it was even repeated by news outlets. We take a look at just a few of the most striking cases.
Conspiracy theories following the Charlie Hebdo attacks
After the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo and on a kosher supermarket in Paris, conspiracy theorists had a field day on social networks. Their goal: to show that the truth was being hidden, either by the authorities or by the media.
A few hours after the first amateur images of the Charlie Hebdo attack started to circulate, conspiracy theorists started “analysing” them. Among the details they used as “proof” of a conspiracy, one was particularly popular: the “inconsistent” colour of the rearview windows of the car used by two of the attackers, the Kouachi brothers. As they brothers fled, several people managed to film their car, a black Citroën C3 of the model Sélection.
Hassan Aboud's journey from Syrian rebel leader to Islamic State enforcer
December 24, 2015 - 2:37PMC.J. Chivers
Beirut: Hassan Aboud's practiced baritone belied the malevolence in his words. "O Darraji!" he sang. "Our state provided us ammunition and sent us to assassinate you."
That state is the self-proclaimed Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, the terrorist group that controls territory in Syria and Iraq and has recently projected violence to Ankara, Beirut, Paris and San Bernardino, California.
A soft-spoken double-amputee sometimes carried to meetings by fellow gunmen, Aboud is an Islamic State commander who also directs a network of assassins, including those who killed Darraji, a former subordinate.
The recording of his singing circulated among past associates this year. A taunting dark requiem, it serves as evidence and confession. Aboud, who defected from Syria's rebels to IS last year, was admitting to the previously unsolved killings of former friends.
Newly released documents reveal U.S. Cold War nuclear target list
By Eric Bradner, CNN
U.S. plans for nuclear war in 1959 included the "systematic destruction" of major urban centers like East Berlin, Moscow and Beijing -- with the populations of those cities among the primary military targets.
The National Archives and Records Administration has released a detailed study produced in 1956 that includes a list of the United States' targets were nuclear war to break out between the superpowers in three years.
The Strategic Air Command's study offers new insight into the Cold War planning -- and worries that United States warplanes would have to unleash overwhelming destruction in an all-out war with the Soviet Union.
The list was made public as a result of a 2006 records request by William Burr, a senior analyst at George Washington University's National Security Archive who directs the group's nuclear history documentation project. It is titled the "SAC (Strategic Air Command) Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959."
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