World

Flights in Nepal will be cleared to fly only if there is favourable weather forecast throughout their route, according to new regulations announced in the wake of a recent crash that killed 22 people, officials said Thursday.

A full investigation into the crash of the Twin Otter aircraft in western Nepal on Sunday is underway, but a preliminary inquiry suggested that bad weather caused the accident.

Air traffic control lost contact with the twin-prop plane shortly after it took off from Pokhara and headed for Jomsom, a popular Himalayan trekking destination. 

The wreckage was found a day later, with all 16 Nepalis, four Indians and two Germans who were on board killed.

Aviation companies have raised concerns about how to implement the new regulations, citing the country’s limited weather forecasting infrastructure. 

Authorities say flight permits will now only be issued after the aircraft’s operator submits a flight plan with weather information for the destination and the entire route of the flight, according to a Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal notice issued on Tuesday. 

Providing en-route weather information was previously not mandatory. 

Air operators could also be prohibited from conducting flights if the Department of Hydrology and Meteorology forecasts adverse weather conditions for a certain time in any area. 

Aircraft operators say Nepal lacks infrastructure for accurate weather forecasts, especially in remote areas with challenging mountainous terrain where deadly crashes have taken place in the past. 

“Though the decision is essential and plays a vital role in the flight safety, we are confused on how to implement it as there is no clear way to get the en route weather information for domestic flights,” said Yog Raj Kandel Sharma, spokesperson of the Airlines Operators Association of Nepal.

The aviation authority has also formed a committee to look into the possibility of making it mandatory for there to be two pilots on board single-engine helicopters. 

Sunday’s crash was the latest air accident in the Himalayan country, which has some of the world’s trickiest runways to land on and where pilots must deal with capricious mountain weather.

Nepal’s air industry has boomed in recent years, carrying goods and people between hard-to-reach areas. 

In addition to difficult flying conditions, however, it has been plagued by poor safety due to insufficient training and maintenance.

The European Union has banned all Nepali carriers from its airspace over safety concerns.

A gunman has killed at least four people at a hospital building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, police said — the latest in a string of mass shootings across the United States in recent weeks.

The killings come as Texas families bury their dead after a school shooting left 19 young children dead just eight days earlier.

The Tulsa shooting suspect, who was armed with a rifle and a handgun during his attack on the Saint Francis hospital campus, died by suicide, police said Wednesday.

“Right now we have four civilians that are dead, we have one shooter that is dead, and right now we believe that is self-inflicted,” Tulsa Police Department Deputy Chief Eric Dalgleish told reporters.

He said officers responded immediately after emergency calls came in reporting that a gunman had stormed into the second floor of the Natalie Building, which houses a clinic on the Saint Francis campus.

Police “were hearing shots in the building” when they arrived, according to Dalgleish, who said officers then searched each room and floor while trying to clear the building during what authorities described as an active shooter situation.

Police Captain Richard Meulenberg said officers treated the scene as “catastrophic,” with “several” people shot and “multiple injuries.”

It was not clear how many other people might have been wounded. 

Dalgleish said the entire assault — from the moment emergency calls came in, to the time officers engaged the shooter — lasted about four minutes.

He also noted that the suspect had yet to be identified.

US President Joe Biden has been briefed on the shooting, the White House said in a statement, adding that the administration has offered support to Tulsa officials.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 233 mass shootings this year in the United States — more than one such incident per day in 2022 so far.

US media reported the country was hit by a dozen mass shootings over the recent Memorial Day weekend.

The United States generally counts mass shootings as involving four or more deaths.

– ‘Preventable’ –

Elizabeth Buchner, a legal assistant who lives behind the building where the shooting occurred, said she rushed out of her house when she heard helicopters and a loud commotion coming from the direction of the hospital.

“It was the most law enforcement I’ve ever seen at one place in my entire life,” Buchner, 43, told AFP by telephone.

She said she witnessed a tactical team rush inside as part of a response that she described as “fast and strong,” with “no hesitation.”

Melissa Provenzano, an Oklahoma state legislator, also praised the officers’ swift response.

“It could have been so much worse,” she told CNN.

But she expressed frustration at how such tragedies keep happening in the country.

“These things are preventable, and it’s time to wake up and address this.”

– Uvalde funerals –

The shooting is the latest in a spate of deadly assaults by gunmen that have rocked the United States in the past month.

On May 14 a white supremacist targeting African Americans killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. The shooter survived and is facing charges.

Ten days later an 18-year-old gunman armed with an AR-15 burst into an elementary school in the small Texas town of Uvalde and killed 21 people — 19 of them young children — before being shot dead by law enforcement.

On Wednesday one of the two teachers killed in that attack was laid to rest in Uvalde, a day after the first funerals for the children.

Gun regulation faces deep resistance in the United States, from most Republicans and some rural-state Democrats.

But Biden — who visited Uvalde over the weekend — vowed earlier this week to “continue to push” for reform, saying: “I think things have gotten so bad that everybody is getting more rational about it.”

Some key federal lawmakers have also voiced cautious optimism and a bipartisan group of senators worked through the weekend to pursue possible areas of compromise.

They reportedly were focusing on laws to raise the minimum age for gun purchases or to allow police to remove such weapons from people considered a threat to themselves or others — but not on an outright ban on high-powered rifles like those used in Uvalde and Buffalo.

Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine:

– Street fighting in Severodonetsk –

Ukrainian forces pledge to fight “until the end” in Severodonetsk but with Russian forces in control of most of the key eastern city, their prospects of success appear slim.

“Street fighting continues,” Lugansk regional governor Sergiy Gaiday says on Telegram, estimating that 80 percent of the city is in Russian hands.

Lugansk is one of two regions, along with Donetsk, that make up Ukraine’s industrial heartland Donbas which Russia has vowed to “liberate”.

Once in control of Severodonetsk, Russian forces will likely try cross the Donets river, which flows through the city, to try take nearby Donetsk, Britain’s defence ministry wrote in an intelligence note Thursday.

Ukrainian forces have destroyed bridges across the river.

“It is likely Russia will need at least a short tactical pause to re-set for opposed river crossings and subsequent attacks further into Donetsk Oblast,” the British intelligence memo said.

– AU chief to meet with Putin on food – 

The head of the African Union, Senegalese President Macky Sall, will meet President Vladimir Putin in the southwestern Russian city of Sochi on Friday to discuss food shortages caused by the conflict, which are exacerbating hunger in parts of Africa.

Both Ukraine and Russia are major suppliers of wheat and other cereals to Africa, while Russia, which is under export-limiting Western sanctions, is a key producer of fertiliser.

Sall’s office says the visit, which was proposed by Putin, is aimed at “freeing up stocks of cereals and fertilisers” and easing the Ukraine conflict.

During the week, Sall criticises the decision by EU members to expel Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system, which has made it harder for them to process international payments for Russian goods.

– Danes vote to join EU defence policy – 

Danes vote overwhelmingly in a referendum to join the EU’s common defence policy 30 years after the NATO member opted out.

Almost 67 percent of people in the traditionally eurosceptic country back the move, which comes hot on the heels of neighbouring Finland’s and Sweden’s historic applications for NATO membership.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen says Denmark is “showing that when Putin invades a free country and threatens the stability in Europe, we others pull together.”

– War-weary Ukrainians get football boost –

Ukraine’s football team beat Scotland in their first competitive match since the Russian invasion to set up a World Cup play-off final against Wales on Sunday.

Ukraine manager Oleksandr Petrakov dedicates his side’s 3-1 win to those fighting in the trenches of his war-torn homeland.

“This victory was not for me or for the team members, it was for our country. This was a huge victory for Ukraine.

“They did everything for the people they play for, the Ukrainians.

“For the people watching them back home: the armed forces in the trenches, the people working in the hospitals. They say thank you to us, and we say thank you to them.”

burs-cb/spm

While firefighters search for missing people under thick mud, residents in the Brazilian city of Recife can barely sleep: they fear landslides like the ones that claimed 120 lives in recent days. 

“We have children, we have all our things inside the house. We stay up until dawn, afraid that the hill will fall on us,” Claudia do Rosario told AFP on Wednesday, standing at the door of her modest home with its sheet-metal roof and pink walls stained by damp.

A few streets away from her neighborhood of Vila dos Milagres, the torrential rains of last weekend caused landslides that destroyed everything in their path and buried several houses. 

If it rains so heavily again, as the National Institute of Meteorology forecasts for the next few hours, the 43-year-old fears the same thing will happen to her house. 

The neighbors who lost their homes “called the Civil Defense many times and they never came. They only came after the deaths occurred. Are they waiting for the same thing to happen here to come?” said Rosario, who is unemployed. 

Storekeeper Maria Lucia da Silva, 37, was also worried. 

“Whenever it rains, the hill gives way a little… we are all very nervous here. We call the authorities but so far they have not given us a solution, they say that the priority is in the part of the neighborhood that was most affected,” she said. 

In the areas where the landslides swept in, firefighters, municipal workers and other officials were searching Wednesday for three people who remained missing, an AFP videographer confirmed.

The mayor’s office of Recife — the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco — set up telephone and WhatsApp lines for neighbors to report incidents, and said more than 200 officials were in the area for “cleaning, social assistance, civil defense and health.” 

It said a shelter had also been set up in Vila dos Milagres to provide medical assistance, clothing and basic necessities to those who had been impacted by the disaster. 

The landslides struck overnight Friday and Saturday morning, when 70 percent of the average rainfall for the entire month of May fell in some parts of the regional capital.

On Wednesday, the Pernambuco government updated the death toll to 120 and said that 7,312 people had been left homeless.

The images from Recife recalled the drama that occurred in February in Petropolis, in the southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro, where 233 people died after torrential rains and landslides.

Experts attribute such tragedies to a combination of heavy rains exacerbated by climate change and the construction of large neighborhoods with precarious housing in high-risk areas, such as hillsides. 

The National Center for Monitoring and Alerts of Natural Disasters (Cemaden) estimates that some 9.5 million people live in areas at risk of landslides or flooding, many of them in favelas — poor neighborhoods — without basic sanitation.