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U.S. NEWSApril 21, 2013, 8:13 p.m. ET Firefighters Recount Blast In First Interviews, Volunteer Responders Give Accounts of Texas Explosion

The mayor of this city said 35 to 40 people are believed to be dead in a massive fertilizer plant explosion “because they are unaccounted for and still missing.” “We are out there searching the rubble, looking in each and every house. We are trying to locate each and every citizen,” Mayor Tommy Muska said in a telephone interview with The Times. Muska said he arrived at the count of 35 to 40 dead because all other residents and first-responders in the area have been identified. Among those who were missing and believed dead, he said, were as many as...

A senior Obama administration official said a series of briefings overnight have produced concern the Texas blast could have been at least criminal in nature. Authorities are trying to contain their speculation for fear of causing a panic, but the official told The Post the cause of the blast is "suspicious." Authorities suspect the blast was set off by a truck or rail car holding a large quantity of ammonia that somehow caught fire or blew up. Ammonia, under certain conditions, can become combustible or explosive. "It's 50-50," the source said. "Some sort of explosion caused the ammonia truck/rail car...

WACO (April 17, 2013)--West EMS Director Dr. George Smith says as many as 60 or 70 people died and at least 100 were injured Wednesday night in a fertilizer plant explosion in West. A rescuer earlier said he knew of five deaths. West Mayor Tommy Muska said at a news conference however, that he doesn't yet know how many people were hurt or killed in the blast explosion. He said there was a fire at the West Fertilizer plant before the explosion.

Emergency crews were responding Wednesday night after a report of a major explosion at a burning fertilizer plant in West north of Waco. West firefighters were dispatched to the plant earlier in the evening after an earlier fire rekindled. The explosion was reported at around 7:50 p.m. in a frantic radio call from the scene of the fire at West Fertilizer at 1471 Jerry Mashek Dr. just off Interstate 35. Numerous injuries were reported and multiple ambulances were requested. Several buildings were reported destroyed and a nearby nursing home was damaged.

A large explosion rocked the town of West, Texas, 19 miles north of Waco, on Wednesday evening. A source tells News 8 that a large swath of the small town with a population of 2,800 has been leveled. According to initial reports, the blast was at the West Fertilizer plant at 1471 Jerry Mashek Drive, about a half-mile east of Interstate 35.

North Koreans are being forced to make fertilizer for the regime. A source in Beijing on Sunday said, "Fertilizer is essential for the spring sowing season, but North Korea has almost no chemical fertilizer, so the government ordered every person to produce hundreds of kilograms." In North Korea, fertilizer is usually made by mixing human feces with straw, but the excrement is harder to come by than one might expect. The source said, "There are cases of theft of squat toilets because of this, and people are putting locks on their lavatories to prevent this." Until 2007, South Korea gave...

"Pakistani fertilizer firm to expand in U.S., but balks on controlling bomb materials" SNIPPET: "The Pakistani corporation that has refused the Pentagon’s urgent appeals to control the flow of explosive materials to bomb-makers who kill U.S. troops is expanding its fertilizer manufacturing into the United States. And it is being done with the help of U.S. taxpayers through the municipal bond market."

Last Updated: Fri Oct 05, 2012 07:26 am (KSA) 04:26 am (GMT) Film ‘Stolen’ exposes modern-day slavery in Polisario camps Friday, 05 October 2012 The film, Stolen, the story of a Sahrawi girl called Fatim Sellami, herself a slave, who was reunited with her mother after 35 years of separation with the help of the United Nations. (Image grab from film Stolen By KHADIJA FATHI AGADIR / MOROCCO A controversial documentary film that exposes slavery in the Western Sahara camps controlled by the Polisario front has been screened in Morocco’s coastal resort city of Agadir. The film, directed by Violeta...

The coming new year brings intensified shipping difficulties for barge operators on the stretch of the Mississippi River just south of St. Louis. With ice on the river's northernmost stretch reducing water levels already seriously affected by the drought, traffic on the nation's largest waterway could come to a halt by Friday of next week. "While the drought is at the core of the current issues on the Mississippi, this situation also highlights the dire need for infrastructure improvements," said National Corn Growers Association Chairman Garry Niemeyer, a grower from Auburn, Ill. "At NCGA, we have been pushing for upgrades...

Winding from Coffeyville, Kan. to Burbank, Okla., is a pipeline project that maybe even Al Gore could love. Chaparral Energy Inc. is building a line that will move carbon dioxide to help with enhanced oil recovery at the historic North Burbank field in Osage County. The project, due for completion early next year, initially will pipe about 23 million cubic feet of CO2 captured from a Coffeyville fertilizer plant. "This is a very green operation," Chaparral CEO Mark Fischer said. "For the life of that (fertilizer) plant, the CO2 has been emitted into the atmosphere." That, of course, is what...

........Late Friday night, the EPA said in a news release that it had approved the state rules for part of the state's waterways, but would still impose the federal rules for the rest. According to David Guest of Earthjustice, that means the state rules cover only 15 percent while the new federal rules cover 85 percent — about 100,000 miles of waterways. State DEP officials said they were disappointed the EPA would impose federal rules on any part of the state and vowed to "work with them to craft solutions" to put the state in charge of all pollution rules....

SNIPPET: "Indonesian anti-terror police, Densus 88 secure a terror suspect's house during a raid in Mojosongo, Solo in Central Java. Indonesian police have arrested 11 members of an Islamic group allegedly planning attacks on American diplomatic missions, a spokesman says." SNIPPET: "The group had planned to hit the US embassy and a US consulate, as well as a building near the Australian embassy in the capital Jakarta that houses the office of American mining giant Freeport-McMoran, police said. Police said they were from a new outfit called HASMI, the Sunni Movement for Indonesian Society, and explosives and a bomb-making manual...

In the hunt for Saddam Hussein's billions, investigators have identified five networks of more than 100 companies used to launder money skimmed from Iraqi oil sales. Saddam's gangster regime set up shell companies in Switzerland, Jordan, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Panama, according to investigators. Those company networks and their banking affiliations were used to enrich the former Iraqi strongman, his sons Uday and Qusay, and other family members. "Ultimately, the money was stolen from the Iraqi people," said Taylor Griffin, spokesman for the Treasury Department, which is heading the government's laundering probe along with U.S. Customs, the Secret Service and various...

This morning police in Washington D.C. arrested Yonathan Melaku, a Muslim, for suspicious activity near Arlington National Cemetery and the Pentagon. The twenty-two-year-old Melaku is a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Ethiopia that also serves in the Marine Corp Reserves. He was found carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer and other materials making reference to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The first reports I saw came from the Drudge Report and neither made reference to Malaku’s religion. Then I remembered the stories about Asan Akbar who killed two members of his platoon and wounded fifteen more and Hasan Nidal who killed thirteen...

Here is your opportunity to ask the candidates your specific questions about income inequality. Let us know and we may include your question in the debate. Click to read Yahoo/ABC loaded question article

Halt of crop farming in Fukushima forces manure to accumulate on cattle farms At his cattle farm, Kazunori Mizunoya looks at a cow knee deep in its own excrement in the Fukushima Prefecture village of Nakajima on Oct. 20. (Mainichi) FUKUSHIMA -- Two months after a government ban on beef was lifted, cattle farmers here are growing increasingly desperate as nearby vegetable farmers have halted production due to the ongoing nuclear disaster, leaving nowhere to take the accumulating manure that was previously used as fertilizer. "When vegetable farmers are pushed into a dead end, there's a domino effect that puts...

Overview Congress has directed DHS to establish regulations to prevent the misappropriation or use of ammonium nitrate in a terrorist attack. Ammonium nitrate is a chemical that exists in multiple concentrations and physical forms, and principally is used as an agricultural fertilizer, as a component in the manufacture of some first aid products (such as cold packs), and as a component of explosives often used in the mining and construction industries. In addition to its many legitimate uses, ammonium nitrate was the primary explosive used in the deadly Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. As a result of Congressional direction,...

Two dogs attacked a 62-year-old woman who was exercising on a track at a senior center on Long Island Thursday morning...The woman suffered serious wounds but was able to call police... Nassau County cops responded to the area, near Brookside Junior High School in North Merrick, and found the dogs attacking the woman at the edge of a parking lot. The dogs, believed to be pit bulls, shifted their focus to the officers, who fired at them. ... In a separate incident not far from this area, some dogs attacked an elderly man around 1 a.m. Authorities believe the same...

Pyongyang demands massive aid at talks on family reunions (Roundup) Oct 27, 2010, 15:48 GMT Seoul - North Korea on Wednesday tied the holding of regular reunions of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War with substantial food aid from South Korea, the Unification Ministry in Seoul said. North Korea sees the aid 'as a kind of condition,' a ministry spokeswoman said. Pyongyang requested 500,000 tons of rice and 300,000 tons of fertilizer at the final day of two-day talks between the two neighbours' Red Cross associations, which ended in the North Korean border town of Kaesong without an agreement....