Hunt for hundreds killed in typhoon
DARAGA, Philippines (Reuters):
Distraught survivors searched piles of bodies for the faces of their loved ones in the central Philippines yesterday after landslides triggered by Typhoon Durian left hundreds dead.
Durian moved into the South China Sea on Friday after affecting 800,000 people in the Philippines and was expected to weaken into a tropical storm before hitting Vietnam on Monday.
Villages were engulfed on Thursday around Mount Mayon, an active volcano about 320 km (200 miles) south of Manila, when driving rain and winds of up to 225 kph (140 mph) dislodged tonnes of mud and boulders from the slopes.
The governor of Albay province, the worst-hit area, said a wall of water six feet (1.8 metres) high crashed down the volcano.
"We lost everything," Fernando Gonzales told Reuters, adding 100 people had been killed by the torrent.
The national disaster agency said a total of 303 people had died in eastern provinces, 285 in Albay alone. At least 293 people were missing.
The toll was rising sharply as rescue workers, some using their bare hands, pulled corpses and body parts from the mud.
Hamas dismisses call for PM to quit
GAZA, (Reuters):
Palestinian Islamist group Hamas yesterday dismissed a call for the resignation of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh made by the Palestine Liberation Organisation, a body dominated by the rival Fatah party.
The call followed the apparent breakdown of talks between governing Hamas and Fatah over the formation of a unity government that could lift an economic siege on the Palestinian territories brought on by Hamas's refusal to recognise Israel.
"Hamas rejects the statement of the PLO Executive Committee which is a call for a coup against the legitimate Palestinian government," Hamas official Ismail Rudwan said.
Hamas won Palestinian elections last January, trouncing Fatah, but has been unable to govern effectively because its refusal to recognise Israel has led to an aid cut-off by Western powers and a freeze on the handover of tax receipts by Israel.
President Mahmoud Abbas, who belongs to Fatah and heads the PLO, has given up months of efforts to form a Hamas-Fatah unity government, saying this week the talks had reached a dead end.
Rudwan said that Hamas had wanted to continue dialogue of the formation of a unity government but Abbas repeated on Saturday that talks had reached an impasse.
Saudi Arabia denies interferrence in Iraq
RIYADH (Reuters):
Saudi Arabia said there was no truth in an article by a Saudi security adviser suggesting the world's top oil exporter would back Iraq's Muslim Sunnis in the event of a wider sectarian conflict.
Nawaf Obaid, a security adviser to the Saudi government, said on Wednesday the kingdom would intervene with funding and weaponry to prevent Shi'ite militias attacking Iraq's Sunnis once the United States begins pulling out of Iraq.
He also suggested Saudi Arabia could bring down world oil prices to squeeze Shi'ite power Iran, which Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab countries accuse of meddling in Iraq.
"There is no basis in truth to the article by the writer Nawaf Obaid in the Washington Post of November 29," the state Saudi Press Agency quoted an "official source" as saying.
"The writer does not represent any official body in Saudi Arabia. What he published only represents his personal opinion and does not in any manner at all represent the policy or positions of the kingdom," it added on Friday.
Prime Minister not a suspect in probe
PARIS (Reuters):
French judges will interview Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin as a witness, not a suspect, in their investigation of an apparent campaign to smear his rival Nicolas Sarkozy, Villepin's office said yesterday.
The announcement that Villepin is not suspected of wrongdoing in the long-running scandal lifts a possible barrier to him challenging Interior Minister Sarkozy to become the right's candidate in next year's presidential election.
Villepin could have had to stand down for the duration of the investigation if the judges had placed him under formal examination over his role.
The affair began when the names of Sarkozy and other prominent public figures appeared in a list of accounts at Clearstream, a Luxembourg finance house linked to kickbacks in the bribe-ridden sale of naval frigates to Taiwan in 1991.
The list quickly proved bogus but investigations into its authorship continued, leading to complaints by Sarkozy and others that it was an elaborate attempt to discredit them.
