Bissan Fakih @BissanCampaigns A video I received on WhatsApp of the scalr of explosion in #Beirut, confirming it was at the port. 1:29 AM · Aug 5, 2020 55.1K 35.1K people are Tweeting about this
Att crossball, Two ships collided in Halifax Harbor. One of them was a floating, 3,000-ton bomb.
"Terrible news: Massive explosion rocks Lebanon's capital Beirut, killing 78, and at least one Australian"
Video shows aftermath of Halifax Explosion of 1917 The Halifax Explosion of 1917 happened when a French cargo ship collided with another ship on Dec. 6 in Halifax Harbour, killing more than 2,000 people. (Nova Scotia Archives)
By Steve Hendrix Dec. 6, 2017 at 8:00 p.m. GMT+11
On the bright, freezing morning of Dec. 6, 1917, a French captain steered his ship, the SS Mont Blanc, up the channel leading to the piers of Halifax, Canada’s major Atlantic port. Just after 8:30, as the ship steamed into the bottleneck between the ocean and the inner harbor, he looked up to see something that shouldn’t have been there: the SS Imo, a Norwegian freighter, heading straight toward him on his side of the skinny narrows.
The two massive ships blasted their whistles, attempted a few futile evasive maneuvers and then collided, bow to bow. It was not a fatal blow.
“In marine terms, what happened was a fender bender,” said historian Roger Marsters. “It was only the character of the cargo that made it what it was.”
What the Imo had rammed was a 3,000-ton floating bomb. The Mont Blanc was crammed with munitions, bound for the war raging in Europe. Its holds were crammed with 2,500-tons of TNT and picric acid. The decks were crowded with barrels of high-octane benzole.
The resulting blast was the biggest man-made explosion of the pre-atomic age, according to analysts. It devastated the busy port city, leveling more than a square mile of the waterfront, killing more than 2,000 people and injuring 5,000 more, almost 12 percent of Halifax’s population. The massive iron hull disappeared, blown into shrapnel that tore through neighborhoods miles from the harbor. A half-ton chunk of its anchor still lies where it landed 2.5 miles away. “Halifax” became the standard of blast comparisons for decades, unsurpassed as an explosive disaster until Hiroshima replaced it in 1945.
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An area of more than a mile was leveled in the Halifax explosion and more than 1,600 houses destroyed. (Bettmann Archive)
There is reportedly a single living survivor from the day of the blast, Marsters said, a 106-year-old woman. But the event is being well remembered with ceremonies, major exhibits and a new time-capsule to be buried near the waterfront.
A police officer was killed during clashes between protesters.(Reuters: Hannah McKay)
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'Resignation or hang'
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PM calls to introduce draft bill proposing early elections
During a televised speech amid the protests, Lebanon's Prime Minister Hassan Diab announced he would introduce a draft bill proposing early elections for the crisis-stricken country.
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In a show of anger, the President of the Christian opposition Kataeb Party said its three legislators had decided to resign from Parliament over the disaster.
Sami Gemayel called on every "honourable" member of Parliament to step down and work for the "birth of a new Lebanon." A senior Kataeb Party official was killed in the blast.
Documents that surfaced after the blast showed that officials had been repeatedly warned for years that the presence of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate at the port posed a grave danger, but no-one acted to remove it.
Officials have been blaming one another, and 19 people have been detained, including the port's chief, the head of Lebanon's customs department and his predecessor.
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The ammonium nitrate, a chemical used in fertilisers and explosives, originated from a cargo ship called MV Rhosus that had been traveling from the country of Georgia to Mozambique in 2013.
It made an unscheduled detour to Beirut as the Russian shipowner was struggling with debts and hoped to earn some extra cash in Lebanon.
Unable to pay port fees and reportedly leaking, the ship was impounded.
In 2014, the material was moved from the ship and placed in a warehouse at the port where it stayed until the explosion.
Proposal for new prime minister fails to quell protests in Lebanon "Rival protests in Lebanon over embattled President Aoun "Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri quits as anti-government protests turn violent"" Hassan Diab could be in post at weekend despite unpopularity with those demanding change https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=152922814
Democracy, Lebanese-Style Melani Cammett August 18, 2009 [...] Such rhetoric, however, misinterprets the import of the elections because it misreads what democracy in Lebanon means. Lebanon’s electoral system is designed to ensure that some voters receive greater weight than others and its majoritarian district-level system means that even a small margin of victory grants the winner control over all seats in a district. Thus it was possible for the governing March 14 alliance to be declared the “winner” of the election, despite losing the popular vote by almost 10 percent, while the Hizballah-led opposition was deemed the “loser” despite gaining in total seats. In fact, Hizballah won seats in all 11 districts where it fielded candidates and, where it prevailed. the Hizballah-led opposition won by higher margins than March 14. [...] Institutionalized Sectarianism Lebanon’s 128-member Parliament is equally divided between Christians (all denominations) and Muslims (Sunnis, Shi‘a, Druze and Alawites). Each of Lebanon’s 26 multi-member districts has pre-established quotas for candidates from different sects. Voters cast ballots for candidates from all sects -- not just from their own sect -- and the candidates with the highest number of votes win the seats allotted to their respective sects. In theory, candidates who run in districts with religiously mixed populations must appeal to voters from diverse sects. In practice, however, they rely on pre-election bargains with elites from other sects and create multi-sectarian lists, obviating the need to expend significant time or resources to actually woo members of other sects in most districts. As a result, competition is most intense among members of the same sect who run on competing lists. For example, in the largely Christian district of Jazzin in southern Lebanon, both the Shi‘i Amal Movement and the Christian Aounists ran Christian candidates for the district’s Christian seats -- a fact that exposed cracks in the opposition given that both parties were technically allies in the March 8 alliance. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=47857676
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