Two elementary schools were destroyed in the EF-5 twister that killed at least 24 people on Monday and injured hundreds of others. Seven children were found dead in the debris of the Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla.Authorities believe that everyone who was at Briarwood Elementary School survived the deadly tornado, which ravaged the building with 200 mph winds.“You could just feel the pressure just building like you were in an airplane, just the pressurization of the cabin and your ears popping and the debris starts flying and the roof falling in,” Briarwood’s first-grade teacher Sheri Bittle told ABC. “And everything in your classroom falling in on you.”Both of the destroyed schools lacked tornado shelters, which would have potentially prevented many of the casualties and fatalities that occurred on May 20. More than 100 Oklahoma schools currently have metal safe rooms, which can be built above ground or underground and sustain winds up to 250 mph.These rooms may be the difference between life and death in states where the tornado risk is high, but lack of funding to build them has prevented elementary schools like Plaza Towers and Briarwood from constructing shelters of their own.Retrofitting a school with a safe room shelter costs an estimated $600,000 to $1 million per building, Bloomberg News reports. Albert Ashwood, director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency, told the news agency that his department can’t afford to provide every school with a shelter, but that he is looking into whether the two schools had ever even applied for federal funding to build safe rooms.“You have a limited amount of funds,” he said. “You set priorities. It’s not a matter of they were being left out.”But Oklahoma residents refer to Moore as “Tornado Alley”, since the area has been struck by devastating twisters more than any other region in the US. In May 1999, a tornado took a similar path, ravaging Moore, killing 41 people, and costing the US $1 billion in damages.Some residents believe that safe rooms should be a priority in Oklahoma – particularly in Moore, since it has a history of falling victim to tornadoes.“If they can afford a $5 million football stadium, they can afford a safe room,” 67-year-old John Lemmon, a Moore resident who lives near Plaza Towers Elementary School, told Bloomberg. “They should have done it right after they had the last big one.”While both elementary schools were reduced to rubble, students at Plaza Towers Elementary School were worse off. This traditional school building was constructed with a long line of classrooms that were all under a single roof. When the tornado caused the building to crumble, students were trapped in the wreckage of the structure, and at least seven of them died. Briarwood Elementary School was divided into four sections, with several classrooms in each pod. Between these pods were openings that led students outside, which allowed students to escape the collapsing walls and ceilings.No children died at Briarwood as they escaped the falling debris with backpacks over their heads. But both schools could have ensured the safety of their students if they had metal safe rooms to retreat into during natural disasters.Now that children have died in the May 20 twister that ravaged Moore, Okla., the Federal Emergency Management Agency may reconsider providing the funding for safe rooms. The city of Moore has long been trying to acquire funds to buy them, and the city in February wrote on its website that FEMA requirements have held them back.“If you don’t have disasters, you don’t have additional money for mitigation for safe rooms, but without disasters there’s not a set funding source just for safe rooms,” FEMA director Craig Fugate told ABC, indicating that changes may only occur when it’s too late to reverse the damage. … Read More
Evolving: Deadly H7N9 virus develops drug-resistance to Tamiflu
With new H7N9 cases waning, the worst thing humans can do right now is let their guard down about the potential dangers of this deadly new virus. The microbe is always mutating and evolving, as a virulent living force of nature and natural selection. … Read More
‘Chaos and destabilization as a way to maintain control in Libya’
Libya is in turmoil, as was evident in the latest deadly blast in the city of Benghazi on May 13. As all hell breaks loose and armed militias run amok, Western diplomats are pulling out of a chaos they had helped create. Freeman discusses their pullout and further Mid-East strategy with RT.RT: British and American embassies are withdrawing some of their staff from Libya right now, so why the powers who actually helped to topple Colonel Gaddafi are feeling vulnerable in Tripoli?Lawrence Freeman: They created a monster that they can no longer control, and it’s turning against them in a way that was absolutely foreseeable. The fact hath the Tony Blair policy which Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy followed implementing – the overthrow of Gaddafi in August 2011 – created this condition which was understandable, anyone could’ve known what was going to happen. We worked directly with Al Qaeda militias all throughout Benghazi and other parts of Libya, so now it’s become ungovernable. So even the people who initiated the mess have to leave to protect themselves because nobody will protect them and the situation is completely out of control.RT: And who is behind the violence – one particular group, or are there various elements?LF: Well, there are various militias. The largest umbrella group is the Islamic Fighting Group, which – if not a part of – is completely one with Al Qaeda. This grouping was at war with Gaddafi and he was trying to defeat them. And we carried out the most idiotic policy, which was to work with these groups to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gadaffi. And this goes all the way back to the policy that Tony Blair had in 1999 for the Iraq war: “if we want to get rid of leaders, we’re going to have a regime change”. And this fellow, Blair, is probably the biggest criminal on the planet right now. And Obama – because he’s carried out these policies – is in deep, deep trouble in his own second term in the US.RT: What about the political situation in Libya? Is the current government incompetent or just simply unable to control the violence, and why isn’t it getting help from Western powers?LF: The government, really, has been removed. They passed this law that said that anybody in the last 30-40 years that had any role in the former Libyan government had to be removed. So, basically, we’ve created the closest thing yet to an Al Qaeda controlled state. And these fools in the West are now planning and thinking of doing the same thing in Syria. Except for military-political leadership from the United States, from people like former Defense Secretary Gates, current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, we would be in war already in Syria, and it would look like Libya, except several orders of magnitude worse.RT: Of course some would say that those who kicked off the situation in Libya should go back and sort it out and get the country back on track. After all they were responsible. So is another intervention simply not realistic?LF: No. I don’t think there’s going to be another intervention. I think there are some people in the British circles who want to see uncontrollable states, who want to see people die, who want to see genocide. And this thing has already spread: the fall of Gaddafi was directly related to the toppling of northern Mali and the coup in Bamako. And there are articles and reports which I’ve known for months, that the Boko Haram have received weapons via Mali and others, from Gaddafi’s weapon caches. So we’re seeing the destabilization of the whole Sahel and North and West Africa, as well as Gaddafi. Whether you say it was done by ignorance or by intention. I say – both.RT: But why is it that you’re creating rogue states run by Islamic fundamentalists who are anti-Western, creating a hotbed of militia threatening the region and the rest of the world? Why the intention to create such chaos?LF: You have an alliance of British royal family, the Saudi royal family…and they would rather see chaos and destabilization as a way to maintain control than allow sovereign nation states to exercise their rights. They’ll have more power if there’s un-governability than if there are actually stable nations. And this is increasingly the sign of the times as this financial crisis is careening out of control, especially throughout the European sector. The transatlantic regions are in a state of such dire collapse that war and chaos are looking more and more like their alternative survival.RT: The oil company BP has decided to pull some of its staff out. Does this mean that international ambitions to exploit resources there are failing? Because, after all, many are claiming that oil was the reason for the Western intervention.LF: I never thought it was oil. I think oil plays a role, I think resources play a role. But from my standpoint, my own historical view of things, it’s much more the age-old imperialist, colonialist policy of having weak nation-states that are easy to manipulate and govern. … Read More
Libya: The government has got to go, say protesters
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Security concerns grow in Libya after deadly Benghazi… 13/05/2013 18:25 CET
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After hearing news of a deadly car bombing at a hospital in Benghazi, Libyans took to the streets in the capital of Tripoli.
They had one simple message: the government has to go and safety must to be restored the country, which 18 months after the uprising against deposed leader Muammar Gaddafi, continues to be shaken by sporadic violence.
The number killed in the Benghazi blast varies between three and 15, with doctors registering a child amongst the dead.
Commentators have noted that this incident marks a change in the nature of the attacks. Previous targets were police stations, and government or diplomatic missions.
According to reports, hundreds of people gathered at the scene blaming armed militias who reign over the streets and called for order in a country on a rocky path to democratic rule.
A two-week siege of government ministries in the capital ended on Sunday when armed militia left their posts. Intimidation has become routine, and foreign interests are beginning to pull out of the country.
More about: Attack, Car bomb, Libya, Protest
Copyright © 2013 euronews
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‘Turkey won’t act on Syria without US blessing’
Turkish authorities have detained nine people in connection with Saturday’s deadly car bombings in a town near the Syrian border.Two blasts killed 46 and injured over 100 as Turkey was quick to blame Syrian intelligence for the attack, but the government in Damascus denies all the accusations.Middle Eastern history and politics professor at Bilkent University in Turkey, Jeremy Salt, says it’s the Islamists among the Syrian rebels, who look the only party to benefit from the attacks.RT: Why did the Turkish government label the Syrian government as the “usual suspects” in the bombings – before the investigation even started?Jeremy Salt: The Turkish government claims it arrested nine people and it claims to have evidence that they’re connected with the Syrian intelligence service. We haven’t seen that evidence yet. We’ll have to wait and see what it says. At this stage, it seems to me quite inconceivable that Syria would do that because if we look at what’s happening on the ground right now. The Syrian army is rolling back the insurgency. The insurgents have taken huge losses in the last few months, in particular, around Damascus, near the Lebanese border, and even around Halab – Aleppo – and in the North Syria. And along with this is the fact that the Americans are changing pace and are going into negotiations with Russia to come out with a solution. So it doesn’t make any sense that Syria would do that right now. RT: Just in the last few hours, Syria’s information minister said that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s responsible for this by playing a “dangerous game with al-Qaeda”. What did he mean by that?JS: We know for a fact that – because the main Islamist fighting group in Syria has admitted this – al-Qaeda in Iraq and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria are one in the same. And all the fighting groups in Syria are Islamist and they’re working tactically with Jabhat al-Nusra. So, al-Qaeda is in Syria. We know that. It’s now confirmed, but this was more or less suspected from the start. What we’re seeing now is kind of charge and counter-charge as people try to put the blame for this on to someone else. My feeling about this – and obvious kind of guess is that the party responsible for this is one of the armed groups because if anyone has a reason to try to heat up the situation and drag outside countries it would be them. They’re in very serious problems right now. RT: Turkey’s Interior Minister urged the international community to get involved against Syrian President Assad. Doesn’t this undermine the peace efforts proposed by Russia, US and the UK? JS: The whole point is that they (the international community) have been deeply involved for more than two years and they haven’t succeeded in their objective, which is ultimately to overthrow the Syrian government – to bring it down. And so they’re still kind of chanting the same refrain, but there’s actually no possibility that the Syrian government can be brought down without direct intervention from outside governments. And the emphasis on Bashar al-Assad takes the emphasis where it should be, which is the Syrian army. Because the Syrian army is fighting – this is a national project. The foot soldiers in the Syrian army are mainly Sunni Muslims and, so, they have a national spirit. And that kind of refrain that the outside government should do more, should send in arms, should declare a no-fly zone are only going to worsen the situation.What we clearly need now is progress towards negotiating a solution, which is the path Obama has taken. And I think, in spite everything we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks – the chemical weapons propaganda, the Israeli attack – that I don’t think Obama is going allow himself to be drawn into this.RT: Turkey says it will take “every kind of measure” in response. What could that be?One has to take it seriously, but the fact is that [Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan is going to Washington this week and Syria will be on top of the agenda and my feeling is that Turkey won’t do anything by itself – that if Obama won’t bite, if he won’t commit America to take a more involved position over Syria, I don’t think that Turkey will do anything. Now, the key issue here is what kind of evidence are they going to come up with. Will they come up with any evidence that’s going to convince us that this, in fact, was an action carried out by the Syrian intelligence services. So there are many many unknowns right now and, of course, everything is going to depend on the outcome of the talks in Wahington between Obama and Erdogan. … Read More
‘The Onion’ hacked by Syrian Electronic Army
The Twitter feed of satirical US news website The Onion was hacked Monday by a Syrian group aiming to inject its own sardonic spin on the deadly conflict. Screenshots posted by eHacking News indicated a group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army took control of the feed and posted comments and…
