Six dead, over 300 hurt in China pipeline blast

BEIJING: At least six people died and more than 300 others were injured in an explosion when a chemical pipeline ignited in eastern China on Wednesday, state media reported.

The blast occurred in the city of Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, at about 10:00 am (0200 GMT), China National Radio said on its website. It said a pipeline carrying ethylene blew up on the grounds of an abandoned plastics factory.

The official news agency said its reporters had seen six people recorded as dead at nearby hospitals. More than 300 people, including 52 with serious injuries, were rushed to local hospitals for treatment, the China News Service said.

Authorities were still trying to determine the total number of casualties from the blast, which blew out windows in buildings up to 300 meters (yards) away, reports said. The explosion hit a bus passing through the area, injuring many passengers, agency said.

Israel rejects Abbas terms for direct talks

JERUSALEM: Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas has laid down “impossible” conditions for moving to direct peace talks, Israel”s vice prime minister charged on Wednesday.

“The Palestinians have set three impossible conditions: that the negotiations start from the point they left off at the end of 2008 when Ehud Olmert was prime minister, that they be based on a total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and that the freeze of (settlement) construction continue,” Silvan Shalom told Israeli public radio.

His remarks came ahead of a scheduled meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on Thursday to decide whether to endorse a move to direct negotiations after nearly three months of US-brokered indirect talks that have shown little sign of progress.

Washington has been pressing the two sides for more than a year to relaunch direct talks which were suspended after the start of the Gaza war in December 2008.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he is ready to meet with Abbas at any time but the Palestinians have demanded certain guarantees they say are necessary to ensure that these talks succeed where past rounds have failed.

Specifically, they want Israel to accept the 1967 borders, demarcating the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, as the basis for the negotiations, as well as a complete halt to all settlement activity on Palestinian land.

Israel approved a limited moratorium on the construction of settler homes in the West Bank that expires in September and which was rejected as insufficient by the Palestinians because it did not include east Jerusalem.

Israel occupied the mostly Arab half of the city in the 1967 Six Day War and annexed it in a move not recognised by the international community. It views the entire city as its “eternal, undivided” capital.

The Palestinians view east Jerusalem as the capital of their promised state, and the city”s fate has been one of the most intractable issues in past rounds of negotiations going back to the early 1990s.

9 Hajj Swine Flu Cases so far: Saudi Minister

RIYADH: 9 Hajj Swine Flu Cases so far: Saudi Minister, Nine people out of more than half a million who have arrived for the annual hajj pilgrimage have been diagnosed with swine flu, Saudi Health Minister Dr Abdullah al-Rabeeah said on Wednesday.

‘The situation from the point of health, we are very happy. Out of the 600,000 arriving so far, we have only seen nine suspected cases of A(H1N1), and only two of those are in the hospital.

‘The rest were treated and they were discharged,’ he said.

Rabeeah said that altogether 70 people had died in the kingdom this year from swine flu, none of them pilgrims.

The fatalities figure is up from 62 reported at the beginning of November, and the total number of proven cases is about 7,000, the minister said.

Concern has mounted about the possibility of a major outbreak of the disease during the hajj, when more than three million Muslims converge on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in western Saudi Arabia in the second half of November.

The Riyadh government has deployed about 20,000 health workers to deal with flu and other health emergencies among pilgrims, Rabeeah said.

More than 6,000 deaths from A(H1N1) flu had been reported worldwide as of November 1, according to the World Health Organisation.

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9 Hajj Swine Flu Cases so far: Saudi Minister was first posted on November 11, 2009 at 9:52 pm.