Category World News

At least 65 people have died in the deadliest and most devastation fire in the Chinese territory’s history, which is now being put out by firefighters in Hong Kong for a second day.

Officials reported on Thursday that fires were raging in the Tai Po neighborhood and that four buildings in the Wang Fuk Court housing complex had been extinguished.

However, rescuers are still frantically trying to rescue those who are feared trapped on the complex’s upper floors, where at least 279 people are missing.

Lawrence Lee, a resident, claimed to still not hear from his wife, who he believes is cooped up in their apartment.

“I told her to leave when the fire started,” she said on the phone. But once she left, the hallway and stairs were strewn with smoke and were dark, leaving her with the choice to return to the apartment,” he said.

The Hong Kong Fire Services Department estimates that there are 65 victims of the disaster, including one firefighter. The Hospital Authority claims that more than 70 people have been injured, many of whom have been burned and inhaled by smoke.

People in mainland China have been watching aghast as the tragedy unfolds, according to Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, who is a reporter from Beijing.

“I believe that many Chinese people have deep compassion and empathy for the affected.” According to Yu, hundreds of millions of them reside in dense urban areas, in high-rise structures like those that caught fire in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district.

Construction managers are being detained on suspicion of manslaughter.

On Wednesday, the fire started on bamboo scaffolding and construction netting and spread quickly to seven other buildings in the complex.

Authorities believed that some of the materials used to create the high-rise buildings’ exteriors did not meet fire resistance standards, which caused the fire to spread surprisingly quickly.

Additionally, according to police, they discovered styrofoam, which is extremely flammable, on the windows in one unaffected tower near the elevator lobby.

On suspicion of manslaughter, three construction workers who were in charge of the site’s maintenance have been detained. According to senior superintendent of police Eileen Chung, the men, who were company directors and an engineering consultant, were suspected of being “grossly negligent.”

Hong Kong’s CEO, John Lee, announced plans to phase out bamboo scaffolding in response to concerns about construction safety and said all housing estates that are undergoing significant improvements would be inspected right away.

The disaster, according to Alex Webb, a fire safety engineer at CSIRO Infrastructure Technologies in Australia, is “quite shocking” because building spacing is typically required to prevent fires from spreading from one building to another. According to Webb, “they don’t typically spread beyond the building of origin.”

Review fire safety with caution.

According to analysts, the government’s building and fire safety regulators could experience public outcry.

According to Chau Sze Kit, the chairman of the Hong Kong Construction Industry Employees General Union, “I think we need to seriously review fire safety and site safety management across the entire industry, including government oversight.”

Nearly 2, 000 apartments are housed in the housing complex, which includes many older people who may have had trouble evacuating quickly.

The anticorruption agency of Hong Kong said it would look into any potential corruption related to the 1980s renovation project that it had been carrying out.

Lee claimed that to assist residents, the government would establish a $300 million (US $ 38.6 million) fund.

Numerous Chinese businesses and organizations have pledged millions in cash to the fire victims, including Xiaomi, Xpeng, and Geely as well as the Jack Ma Foundation, an organization that supports Chinese charities.

Meet Formula One’s first-ever Arab driver, Isack Hadjar. He enters a grid that has been dominated by European drivers and teams for decades. And he rises as a result of Arab nations’ recent reshaping of the sport. On and off the grid, Hadjar is disregarded by Samanna Johnson.

San Francisco, California, as Tashina Banks Rama steps onto the ship, brings back vivid memories: the ink-black night, the shivering cold, and the shivering waves.

Tashina’s beginnings were as young as a child. But on Thanksgiving Day in November, she and her younger sister would awaken to her parents on the edge of San Francisco Bay, where they were a couple.

At first, it was always quiet and freezing.

Tashina recalls hearing the water splash below as she hopped off the ferry from the pier. As families piled on board, pendleton blankets and star quilts, which had radial bursts of color, would rustle out from bags. A sudden drumbeat would break the silence as the city’s towers and streetlights faded behind them.

A jutting rock, Alcatraz Island, appeared out of the waves before them. As the boat advanced, the air lurched forward with intention.

Tashina, now 51, recalls that “all of a sudden, you have this feeling, this presence of spirituality and ceremony.”

You feel very safe because you are all there for the same reason, even if you may not know who you are with.

An annual Indigenous custom is a sunrise ceremony to welcome the morning’s first rays of light, which Alcatraz, best known for its notorious prison, has hosted for nearly 50 years.

Some people celebrate the continuing survival of tribal nations throughout the Americas by observing their ancestors as a day of thanks.

It is an “un-Thanksgiving” moment for some, an Indigenous response to the cliched colonization stories associated with the Thanksgiving holiday.

However, as the sun rises once more on Alcatraz, long-time attendees are concerned that a new threat could permanently end the gathering on Thursday.

President Trump announced on social media in May that he had ordered the Bureau of Prisons to “reopen a significantly expanded and rebuilt ALCATRAZ, to house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”

The idea has been criticized by many as being unpractical. Due to its astronomical operating costs, which were triple those of other US federal prisons, the island’s final penitentiary closed in 1963.

Basic supplies must arrive by boat because there is no local source of fresh water on the island. According to one estimate, $ 2 billion would be required to redevelop Alcatraz.

Trump has maintained that he intends to proceed, even ordering his interior secretary and attorney general to conduct a terrain survey in July.

However, Tashina would lose a spiritual tradition that has shaped her generations of indigenous activists, including her father, Dennis Banks, the founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM). She is grieving for herself just because of the thought.

Three construction company employees have been detained in Hong Kong after a deadly fire that is still burning at a residential complex and still leaves hundreds of people missing. Laura Westbrook, a reporter, is present.