23, November 2021
At least 45 people killed in bus blaze in Bulgaria 0
At least 45 people, including a dozen minors, were killed after a bus caught fire south of the Bulgarian capital early Tuesday morning, officials said.
A cause has yet to be determined but officials believe a fire broke out on board and the bus crashed into guardrails.
There were no other vehicles involved in the accident, which occurred around 2:00 am (2400 GMT) on a highway about 40 kilometres (26 miles) from Sofia, near the village of Bosnek.
“Of the victims … 12 in total were under the age of 18,” national police chief Stanimir Stanev said.
He told bTV television that 45 of the 52 people on the bus were killed.
Nikolay Nikolov, head of the Fire Safety and Civil Protection department at the interior ministry, told public broadcaster BNT that “seven passengers survived”.
They were taken to a hospital in the capital with serious burns, he added.
According to bTV, the bus was travelling from Turkey’s main city of Istanbul to Skopje in North Macedonia.
North Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev said the victims were probably fellow Macedonians.
“We don’t know if all the victims are from North Macedonia, but we assume so because the bus is registered in the country,” he said in an interview with Nova TV.
But police chief Stanev said while the two drivers of the bus were Macedonian, the passengers were Albanian.
“Initial information shows that 52 people were travelling in the bus, including two drivers with Macedonian nationality and 50 passengers with Albanian nationality,” he said.
Bulgaria’s interim Prime Minister Stefan Yanev and Interior Minister Boyko Rashkov rushed to the site of the crash Tuesday morning, while local media said that the North Macedonian and Albanian premiers were also on their way.
“It’s a terrifying picture in there. I haven’t seen anything like that before,” Rashkov told journalists at the site.
“Nobody can say for certain how many are there and who they were. The bodies are badly burned and have to be identified one by one,” he added.
Bulgaria has a history of deadly bus accidents. Seventeen Bulgarian tourists died in 2018 when their bus skidded on a wet road and overturned.
A total of 628 people died in road accidents in 2019 and 463 in 2020 in the country of 6.9 million people, according to official data. The accidents were often attributed to poor road conditions, outdated cars and speeding.
Source: AFP
9, December 2021
UK’s Johnson welcomes second child with wife Carrie 0
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday became a father again, after his wife, Carrie, gave birth to a girl, Downing Street said.
The “healthy baby girl” was born at a London hospital in the early hours and “both mother and daughter are doing very well”, a spokeswoman for the couple said.
“The couple would like to thank the brilliant NHS (National Health Service) maternity team for all their care and support,” she added.
The announcement comes as Johnson faces a backlash over the imposition of new coronavirus restrictions designed to curb the spread of the new Omicron variant.
He is also under pressure from the public after claims that Downing Street staff held a Christmas party last year in defiance of restrictions on social gatherings.
Thrice-married Johnson, 57, has four children from his second marriage to the lawyer Marina Wheeler, and now two with Carrie, 33, a former Conservative Party media adviser whom he wed in May.
The couple’s first child, Wilfred, was born in April last year, not long after Johnson was treated in hospital intensive care for Covid.
The prime minister has another child, a daughter, from an extra-marital affair.
In September, after years of speculation about how many children he had, he told NBC in an interview that he had six.
Source: AFP