Oil Refinery Explosion Victim Search Suspended

New Orleans, The savior of the U.S. coast to stop the search eleventh offshore refinery employees who are listed as missing, on Friday (23/04/2010)They were missing after an explosion at the refinery, offshore Louisiana, Gulf of Mexico earlier this week.Supposedly Mary Landry, commander of the rescue beaches in the district are likely eleventh victim was near the blast site.”Conditions are very fragile new oil refineries. His position has been tilted, and going to drown,” she said.

Meanwhile, local authorities currently environmental pollution caused by oil that spilled from the refinery building structure which collapsed into the sea.”For a while, not feared. There is no oil leakage and environmental disasters of this incident,” said local official.

MOSCOW Tsunami waves of up to 0.8 meters hit Russia's east coast on Sunday following a major earthquake in Chile

MOSCOW Tsunami waves of up to 0.8 meters hit Russia’s east coast on Sunday following a major earthquake in Chile, but no damage was reported.A series of waves hit the Kamchatka Peninsula, northeast of Japan, peaking at around 80 cm (2 ft 7 in), an official at the Sakhalin Tsunami Center said. Waves were continuing to hit the nearby Kuril islands, she said.

The tsunami alert was lifted on the Kamchatka Peninsula, a spokeswoman for the region’s Emergencies Ministry said. “No damage has been reported,” she said.The volcanic Kamchatka peninsula is Russia’s easternmost region, nine time zones east of Moscow. Heavily militarized during the Soviet Union, it is now a center for mining of platinum, copper, gold and nickel.

Dozens of people were evacuated from coastal homes on the Kuril Islands, the state-run RIA news agency reported, quoting a local official. Most of the residents of the islands live on high land, the official said.The remote archipelago of sparsely inhabited islands stretches northeast from Japan to the Kamchatka peninsula. Japan claims four of the islands, and the territorial dispute has soured relations with Russia since the Second World War.

A number of boats left ports to take refuge from the waves in the open sea to the west of the islands, an official from the regional administration told RIA.Japan evacuated hundreds of thousands of people over fears that 3 meter waves could hit. The tsunami was racing across the Pacific from Chile where the 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck on Saturday, killing more than 300 people.(Reuters)

bomb blast at a mosque in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt killed 29 people including some militants

PESHAWAR, Pakistan A bomb blast at a mosque in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal belt killed 29 people including some militants Thursday, underscoring the relentless security threat here even as Pakistani-U.S. cooperation against extremism appears on the upswing.The attack in Khyber tribal region came as U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke met with Pakistan’s prime minister in Islamabad, the capital. It also followed revelations that Pakistani authorities have been picking up Afghan Taliban leaders on their soil, a longtime U.S. demand.

The explosion tore through a mosque in the Aka Khel area of Khyber, killing at least 29 people and wounding some 50 others, local official Jawed Khan said. Earlier reports had said the blast occurred in the Orakzai area at a cattle market.The two areas border one another, and the market is apparently near the mosque.Officials were still investigating whether the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber or a planted device.No group claimed responsibility, but Khan said the dead included militants from Lashkar-e-Islam, an insurgent group in Khyber that has clashed with another militant outfit known as Ansarul Islam. Both espouse Taliban-style ideologies.Earlier this week, officials confirmed that a joint CIA-Pakistani security operation had captured the No. 2 Afghan Taliban commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.On Thursday, an Afghan official told The Associated Press that around the same time — some two weeks ago — two Taliban leaders from northern Afghanistan also were arrested in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities.The U.S. and Pakistan have said very little on the record about the arrests, but they could signal a shift in Pakistani policy. Pakistan has long frustrated the Americans by either denying that the Afghan Taliban use its soil or doing little to root them out.

The arrests could mean that Pakistan has decided to turn on the Afghan Taliban, a group that it helped nurture as a strategic ally against longtime rival India, though some suspect the Pakistanis were forced to act because the U.S. had solid intelligence on Baradar that it could not deny.The arrests came as Western and Afghan troops fight the Taliban for control of Marjah town in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told Holbrooke that the U.S. should take into account Pakistan’s concerns that the Marjah offensive could lead to Afghan refugees and militants heading to Pakistan’s southwest and northwest, according to Gilani’s office.

The pair also discussed U.S. humanitarian aid efforts, with Gilani pressing for a quicker release of funds. The U.S. has pledged $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over the next five years.Talking with reporters in Kabul on Wednesday, Holbrooke said the U.S. was restructuring the way it doles out aid to Pakistan and intends to consult more with the Pakistanis and pursue more visible projects.”It is very, very time consuming work because of the huge, long lead times of contracts, because of the congressional role,” he said.