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Deadly Explosion Rocks Mexico Oil Giant HQs

A powerful explosion rocked the Mexico City headquarters of state-owned oil giant Pemex on Thursday, killing at least 25 people, injuring more than 100 and trapping others inside.
The mid-afternoon blast in a neighboring building shattered the lower floors of the downtown tower, throwing debris into the streets and sending frightened workers running outside, Reuters reported.
A government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a preliminary line of investigation was that the blast came from a gas boiler that exploded in the adjacent Pemex building. But the cause was still being determined, the official added.
The explosion at the building complex, where thousands of Pemex employees worked, was the latest in a series of serious safety problems to hit Mexico’s national oil monopoly.
Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said the blast killed at least 25 people, injured over 100, and that the number of casualties could rise.
Rescue workers were still searching for employees trapped inside the Pemex skyscraper on Thursday night. At least one person had been rescued alive, Osorio Chong said.
Mauricio Parra, a paramedic at the scene, said that as many as 100 people could be trapped at the offices of Pemex, a national institution that President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration has pledged to reform this year.
Police quickly cordoned off the building, and television images showed the explosion caused major damage to the ground floor and blew out windows on the lower floors of the tower.
“You could feel it all through the building,” said Mario Guzman, a Pemex worker who was on the 10th floor of the building, which is more than 50 stories high.
First mistaking the blast for an earthquake, Guzman, who said he escaped after running down the stairs, feared the building would collapse on top of him and his colleagues, “and that we would end up like a sandwich.”
Pemex has experienced a number of deadly accidents in recent years and lesser safety problems have been a regular occurrence. In September, 30 people died after an explosion at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico.
More than 300 were killed when a Pemex natural gas plant on the outskirts of Mexico City exploded in 1984.

Armenia Presidential Hopeful Shot

A fringe candidate for the Armenian presidency was recovering from surgery on Friday after being shot in the chest by an unidentified gunman, officials said.
Paruir Airikian was reported in stable condition as police searched for the shooter, while the speaker of Parliament suggested the election could be delayed, AP reported.
Airikian, an also-ran in three previous presidential elections, was shot outside his house in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, just before midnight. A neighbor who heard gunshots and cries for help called the police.
Another presidential candidate who visited Airikian in hospital told Armenian TV that the assailant first shot him in the back. Airikian then started struggling with the attacker, who fled.
Airikian, a former dissident who spent 17 years in Soviet prisons, is one of eight candidates in the Feb. 18 presidential vote, which incumbent Serge Sarkisian is expected to easily win despite the nation’s economic problems.
Recent opinion surveys show Airikian getting just over 1 percent of the vote.
Yerevan Clinical Hospital’s chief doctor, Ara Minasian, said that the 63-year-old Airikian was being treated for a single gunshot wound and remained in stable condition. Doctors later performed a surgery to remove a bullet that got stuck in his shoulder.
Eduard Sharmazanov, a deputy speaker of Parliament, said the attack on Airikian was a “provocation against democratic, free and transparent elections.” Education Minister Armen Ashotian, who is deputy chief of the ruling Republican Party, described it as an “attempt to destabilize the situation in the country and compromise the vote.”
Armenian parliament speaker Ovik Abramian, who visited Airikian at the hospital, said the assault could be an attempt to thwart the election.
He said the vote could be postponed if Airikian’s condition prevents him from taking part, but the nation’s election chief refused to comment on the possibility.
Armenia’s constitution requires the vote to be postponed for two weeks if one of the candidates is unable to take part due to circumstances beyond his control.
It envisages a further 40-day delay if the problem isn’t solved.

22 Dead in Pakistan Blast

A suicide bomber targeted a Shiite Muslim mosque in northwest Pakistan on Friday, killing 22 people and wounding dozens as worshippers poured out of weekly prayers, officials said.
The bomber detonated explosives packed into a motorcycle in a narrow lane containing both the Shiite and a Sunni Muslim mosque in the town of Hangu, the latest bloody sectarian attack in a country where such violence is on the rise.
“It was a suicide attack which targeted Shiites but Sunni Muslims also fell victim since their mosque and some shops were also very close to the site,” district police chief Mian Muhammad Saeed, AFP reported.
“We have found the head of the bomber, who came there on a motorbike,” he said, putting the death toll at 22 with 33 others wounded.
Police said the bomb exploded as Shiites were leaving Friday prayers and Sunnis were going into their mosque for the main weekly sermon.
Hangu has long been a flashpoint for violence against minority Shiites, who make up an estimated 20 percent of Pakistan’s population of 180 million.
It is close to Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt on the Afghan border where Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants have carved out strongholds.
“The Shiite and Sunni mosques are very close to each other, and the explosion took place just as Shiites were coming out of the mosque and Sunnis were going into their mosque to say Friday prayers,” said police official Imtiaz Shah.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
On January 10, a twin suicide attack killed 92 Shiites from the Hazara ethnic community in the southwestern city of Quetta--the worst single attack on Shiites in Pakistan.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Pakistan’s most extreme Sunni terror group, claimed responsibility for the attack.
It is linked to both Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, Sunni fundamentalists who have fought an insurgency against the government since 2007.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says it documented a sharp escalation in persecution of religious minorities in Pakistan in 2012, which it called the deadliest year on record for Shiites, with well over 400 killed in targeted attacks.
Activists accuse the government of failing to protect Shiites and say the perpetrators operate with impunity because the judiciary fails to prosecute them.
“Pakistan’s human rights crisis worsened markedly in 2012 with religious minorities bearing the brunt of killings and repression,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director at HRW, said in the group’s annual report.
“The government needs to show some backbone and act urgently to protect vulnerable communities such as the Hazara, or risk appearing indifferent or even complicit in the mass killing of its own citizens,” he added.

More US Veterans Commit Suicide

From Page 1
“The mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation is the highest priority for VA, and even one suicide is one too many,” he said in a statement.
The study follows long-standing criticism that the agency has moved far too slowly even to figure out how many veterans kill themselves. “If the VA wants to get its arms around this problem, why does it have such a small number of people working on it?” asked retired Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist. “This is a start, but it is a faint start. It is not enough.”
Bossarte said much work remains to be done to understand the data, especially concerning the suicide risk among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. They constitute a minority of an overall veteran population that skews older, but recent studies have suggested that those who served in recent conflicts are 30 percent to 200 percent more likely to commit suicide than their ¬non-veteran peers.
An earlier VA estimate of 18 veterans’ suicides a day, which was disclosed during a 2008 lawsuit, has long been cited by lawmakers and the department’s critics as evidence of the agency’s failings. A federal appeals court pointed to it as evidence of the VA’s “unchecked incompetence.” The VA countered that the number, based on old and incomplete data, was not reliable.
To calculate the veterans’ suicide rate, Bossarte and his sole assistant spent more than two years, starting in October 2010, cajoling state governments to turn over death certificates for the more than 400,000 Americans who have killed themselves since 1999. Forty-two states have provided data or agreed to do so; the study is based on information from 21 that has been assembled into a database.
Bossarte said that men in their 50s--a group that includes a large percentage of the veteran population--have been especially hard-hit by the national increase in suicide. The veterans’ suicide rate is about three times the overall national rate, but about the same percentage of male veterans in their 50s kill themselves as do non-veteran men of that age, according to the VA data.

Amnesty: Mali’s Army ‘Killing Civilians’

From Page 1
Once the bodies had been thrown and were in the well, [the soldiers] fired two or three bursts of machine gun fire into the well,” one witness said.
People spoke of how the Malian security forces apparently targeted people they suspected of ties to armed groups--often on very tenuous grounds, such as the clothes they were wearing or their ethnic origin.
It also claims that the Malian army has also carried out arbitrary arrests of people suspected of ties to the militants. Amnesty has spoken to several detainees who reported being beaten or otherwise ill-treated while in detention.
Amnesty International’s Mali researcher Gaëtan Mootoo said: “As fighting is continuing in Mali, all parties to the conflict must ensure that they respect international humanitarian law--and in particular to ensure the humane treatment of captives while taking all necessary precautions to minimize harm to civilians.“Many people are genuinely afraid of being arrested, or worse, by the military. The security forces must ensure that people are protected from any reprisals based on ethnicity or perceived political sympathy.

Calls for Independent Probe
“The authorities should also immediately launch an independent and impartial investigation into any reports of extrajudicial executions by the armed forces, and suspend any security personnel suspected of involvement in human rights violations.”
Amnesty has also documented reports of extremist armed groups carrying out extrajudicial executions. Eyewitnesses described how militants summarily killed five injured Malian soldiers as well as one civilian in the town of Diabaly on 14 and 15 January, following its capture by militant groups.
There is also mounting evidence that militants have been forcibly recruiting and using child soldiers in their ranks.
In Diabaly, several people described how they had seen children, some as young as ten years old, armed with rifles together with extremist fighters. In Ségou, Amnesty was able to interview two captured child soldiers - one of whom showed signs of mental illness.

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