World News

international_peoplesdailyng@yahoo.com

Deadly blizzard leaves more than 60 dead across US

The death toll in the New York city of Buffalo has risen to 28, with thousands still without power amid a monster winter storm that has battered North America.

Across the US, at least 62 people have been confirmed dead across nine states.

In Buffalo, a state official said that military police are being brought in to help manage traffic in the city, where a driving ban remains in place.

Looting has been reported in parts of the city during the emergency.

Officials have said conditions are improving, with very little snowfall on Tuesday and slightly warmer weather on the way.

The death toll, however, is expected to rise as search efforts continue.

Earlier, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said that some people had been trapped for more than two days during what was “probably” the worst storm of their lifetime.

New York’s Erie County - which includes Buffalo - is among the hardest hit areas in the winter storm, which has stretched from Canada all the way to the Mexican border. More than 4,000 people in the area remain without power, down from a high of over 20,000.

Wyoming County medical teams respond to a call as Buffalo deals with the winter storm

Antov had set up the Vladimir Standard company in the 2000s and became a well-regarded lawmaker in the city of Vladimir

Mark Poloncarz, executive of Erie County where Buffalo is located, said that 100 military police officers and additional state police were being brought in to help control traffic in the area, where conditions remained “ugly” on many local roads.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gragmalia said that looting is “still going on”. Four people have so far been arrested.

“This isn’t people stealing food and medicine and diapers,” he said. “They’re destroying stores. They’re stealing televisions, couches, whatever else they can get their hands on. They’re opportunists.”

US President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration on Monday allowing federal support for New York State. “My heart is with those who lost loved ones this holiday weekend,” he tweeted.

Neighbouring state New Jersey also sent emergency services to New York state to provide further assistance.

State Governor Kathy Hochul, a native of Buffalo, described the storm as “the blizzard of the century”.

“It is [like] going to a war zone, and the vehicles along the sides of the roads are shocking.”

She added that many emergency vehicles had been unable to reach worst-hit areas or had got stuck in snow themselves.

New York state officials said emergency personnel were going from car to car searching for survivors of the storm, and finding bodies in cars and snow banks.

Mr Poloncarz said others died from cardiac arrest while ploughing snow, with Buffalo state issuing a “Shovel Smart” warning, notifying people that over-exertion from shovelling snow can cause heart attacks or back injuries. While three additional deaths were confirmed by Tuesday morning, two deaths that had been reported earlier were deemed a “non-storm related”, he added.

One local family with young children - aged two to six - had to wait for 11 hours before being rescued in the early hours of Christmas Day (Sunday).

“I was basically just hopeless,” the father, Zila Santiago, told CBS News. He said he managed to stay warm by keeping the engine running, and kept distress at bay by playing games with the children.

Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov dies in Indian hotel fall

Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov has been found dead at an Indian hotel, two days after a friend died during the same trip.

They were visiting the eastern state of Odisha and the millionaire, who was also a local politician, had just celebrated his birthday at the hotel.

Antov was a well known figure in the city of Vladimir, east of Moscow.

Last summer he denied criticising Russia’s war in Ukraine after a message appeared on his WhatsApp account.

The millionaire’s death is the latest in a series of unexplained deaths involving Russian tycoons since the start of the Russian invasion, many of whom have openly criticised the war.

Reports in Russian media said Mr Antov, 65, had fallen from a window at the hotel in the city of Rayagada on Sunday. Another member of his fourstrong Russian group, Vladimir Budanov, died at the hotel on Friday.

Superintendent Vivekananda Sharma of Odisha police said Mr Budanov was found to have suffered a stroke while his friend “was depressed after his death and he too died”. The Russian consul in Kolkata, Alexei Idamkin, told the Tass news agency that police did not see a “criminal element in these tragic events”.

Tourist guide Jitendra Singh told reporters that Mr Budanov may have “consumed a lot of alcohol as he had liquor bottles”. Pavel Antov founded the Vladimir Standard meat processing plant and in 2019 Forbes estimated his fortune at some $140m (£118m) at the top of Russia’s rich list of lawmakers and civil servants.

He played an important role at the legislative assembly in Vladimir, heading a committee on agrarian policy and ecology. The assembly’s deputy chairman Vyacheslav Kartukhin said he had died in “tragic circumstances”.

Late last June he appeared to react to a Russian missile attack on a residential block in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv that left a man dead and his seven-year-old daughter and her mother wounded.

A WhatsApp message on Antov’s account described how the family were pulled out of the rubble: “It’s extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.”

The message was deleted and Antov then posted on social media that he was a supporter of the president, a “patriot of my country” and backed the war.

The WhatsApp message had come from someone whose opinion on the “special military operation in Ukraine” he strongly disagreed with, he insisted. It had been posted accidentally on his messenger and was a highly annoying misunderstanding, he said.

Several high-profile Russian tycoons have died in mysterious circumstances since the war began.

In September the head of Russia’s oil giant Lukoil, Ravil Maganov, apparently fell from a hospital window in Moscow.

Source: BBC