Rome petrol station explosion leaves 40 injured
Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri said that local police and firefighters rushed to the area after receiving a report of a gas leak. Two explosions followed after they arrived, he added.
'Local police immediately evacuated a sports centre nearby, while other officers evacuated buildings on the other side of the gas station, avoiding a much more serious tragedy,' Mr Gualtieri said.
Residents were evacuated (Cecilia Fabiano/LaPresse via AP)
Elisabetta Accardo, Rome's police spokeswoman, said that 24 residents were injured, including two who were in 'severe conditions' at Rome's Casilino hospital.
Eleven of the injured are from law enforcement bodies — police and carabinieri — and one is a firefighter but they are not in life-threatening conditions.
Rome prosecutors have begun an investigation into the cause of the explosion, which could be related to a previous gas leak during the unloading phase of liquified petroleum gas at the station.
The sports centre was evacuated swiftly by police following the first explosion, with several children brought to safety. Police said they checked the surrounding area for people who were injured or trapped in nearby buildings.
Barbara Belardinelli said that she and her daughter were slightly injured when they heard the first explosion and left their home to investigate before the next explosion struck them.
'As soon as we heard the second explosion, we were also hit by a ball of fire. I thought that a car near us exploded, metal fragments were flying in the air,' she said. 'We felt the fire on the skin, the arm of my daughter is still red, it was horrible.'
Other residents said the explosion was so loud and violent it struck nearby buildings 'like an earthquake', breaking windows and ripping off shutters.
Pope Leo XIV said that he was praying for those affected by the explosion, which happened 'in the heart of my Diocese'.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she was closely following the developments.
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The National
an hour ago
- The National
20 years on from the Gleneagles G8 summit protests
Weeks earlier chancellor Gordon Brown spearheaded an African debt relief programme, 'Make Poverty History'. Protesters travelled to Scotland and established a camp in Stirling. The anti-G8 movement had debuted in Genoa in 2001, ending in extreme violence from Italian police towards protesters sleeping at night. READ MORE: Craig Murray: I've been left questioning real purpose of Alba Party The stakes for participants were high, but as British activist Jay Jordan says: 'In Europe, there is confrontational policing. In the UK, policing is cleverer – the bosses have read their Foucault.' Protest at the time was divided into two main 'blocs', pink and black. The pink bloc used non-confrontational, artistic, musical, mocking and playful approaches to get their message across, while the black bloc would sometimes resort to confrontation, rioting and destruction of buildings. In 2005, I was part of the pink bloc, as a member of a samba band called Rhythms of Resistance based in London. I took my 11-year-old daughter, a drummer in the band, to Scotland. The anti-G8 organisers had hired a train from London to Edinburgh for protesters – 'for about £2000', according to one of the leaders, Amy Stansell. Rhythms of Resistance occupied a carriage. We practised drums while speeding through England. I'd brought a picnic, including a large trifle containing Malibu as well as wild strawberries from my garden. King's Cross station was crammed with police looking wary as excited protesters assembled to get on the train. On the platform, I spied Helen Steel, a defendant in the 'McLibel' court case against McDonald's, the longest running libel trial in British history, in which she was represented by Keir Starmer. As a well-known protester, she had been tricked into having a long-term relationship with an undercover 'spy cop'. Many of the interviewees for this piece are participants in the ongoing Mitting Inquiry into the spy cop scandal. All of them talked about the phenomenon of being infiltrated by undercover police. Mark Kennedy, one of the spy cops, was present in Gleneagles and organised most of the protesters' transport. One Scottish activist, whom I'll call Fraser, said: 'I knew Mark Kennedy quite well. I thought I had some sort of 'spy sense', but I didn't know. I was a bit humbled. All I knew was I didn't like him.' The anti-G8 protest at Gleneagles was well organised. Amy Stansell explains the preparation: 'We moved to Scotland six months before, sofa surfing and staying in communities such as Bilston Glen protest camp.' Amy and her partner Robin spent months trying to find a piece of land where they could set up a convergence camp, which, inspired by a No Borders camp in Schengen, was divided into small local 'barrios' each with a kitchen. The idea was to create a horizontal democracy: 'Providing space for people to meet, network, connect – a safe non-capitalist space, where people can be without having to spend money, where people can dream and have ideas. We wanted to change people's hearts by creating a miniature vision of the world we wanted to see.' Fraser recalls the difficulties that arose when they met with farmers: 'There were a number of sites where we had handshake agreements, we had a site and then … we didn't.' Amy explains: 'We had a big pot, around £5000, for renting some land. We were looking at land, assessing it on the basis of accessibility, of drainage, of water, the flatness. One person intimated that they had been basically pressured not to make a deal with us. 'We'd lost our first two choices due to what we termed at the time 'dark forces'. I remember ringing up the chief executive of Stirling Council at 8pm one night and saying, 'In a few weeks' time, you're gonna have 5000 activists descending on your town, and if there's not anywhere for them to go, they're just going to be around in the town, and it's just going to be really hectic'. READ MORE: Kate Forbes: Bigger-picture switch is proving key in tackling tourism issues 'The next morning, the people at the council who we were liaising with contacted us and said, 'We've got a bit of land for you'.' But the land was not ideal, Amy remembers, 'One of the things that we really worried about was that the site was completely surrounded by a brook. There was one road in and the rest of it was surrounded by a river. We felt a bit like, 'are we in a trap now?'.' Fraser agrees: 'It wasn't what we wanted. There was the danger of getting kettled and the danger of when we got kettled, people jumping in the river.' On July 2, 2005, some 2000 people and the samba band marched through Edinburgh in a carnival atmosphere. The weather was hot; the buildings tall, grand and grey. I played a surdo, a huge drum (in general, the smaller the woman, the bigger the drum) for miles, which was exhausting. Then the band made our way to the camp in Stirling, the nearest large town to Gleneagles. I'd already attended an anarchist anti-G8 camp in Evian in 2003, which was the political equivalent of the Glastonbury Festival. Organised along the barrio system, it had music, workshops, tents, food stalls, activities and meetings. I cooked meals for the camp using donated and waste food from dumpsters for the Manchester barrio kitchen. I blogged at the time: 'Have attended more meetings in a week than ever before in life.' Meetings used hand signals, eg waving hands for agreement (silent clapping). Much of the language started in 1960s protest movements and has since been used in civil rights, Reclaim the Streets, climate camps, anti-globalisation movements and Occupy. Protest hand signals were added to the basic samba vocabulary, as players cannot hear each other. This is also a good way to cross language barriers for international participants. Sister protest samba bands travelled from Belgium, Germany, Holland. The camp was multilingual. I was surprised by the efficiency and organisation of the Stirling convergence camp. There were toilets, food stores and a sophisticated ecological greywater system for wastewater. Kate Evans, a political cartoonist who was present, recalls: 'There was an impromptu Highland Games. I won the caber toss!' We even had a camp witch – an American called Starhawk who cast spells over the campsite to protect it from the police. On Wednesday, July 6, the main day of protest against the Gleneagles summit, many activists walked through the undergrowth overnight, hiding in the heathery hills, to reach Gleneagles. I wrote at the time: 'The call came through at about 5am that the M9 had been taken by us. Big cheer. This was the least likely blockade to succeed. 'By 7am, the A9 was blocked, and many B roads. I was standing next to the medics as they received news: 'Lancaster took the B2499, Nottingham have taken this other road' and so on. It was like the Wars of the Roses!' Starhawk had been doing invisibility spells for the walkers who blockaded the roads. 'I think magic doesn't work in theory, only in practice,' Jay says. I spent the rest of the day on the 'baby bloc', a children's protest convoy headed by a London double-decker red bus (maximum speed 30mph). Once we arrived at the police lines, near Auchterarder, close to the Gleneagles hotel, we set up a 'terrorist toddlers' picnic, which included a sound system, clowns, bubbles, rain, banners, colour and an enormous umbrella under which we played samba. Entertainment was provided also by the Geishas of Gaiety (white-faced, dressed in kimonos and waving fans) and the Radical Cheerleaders, as well as the award-winning poet Kae Tempest (at that time Kate Tempest). The police appeared nonplussed. Jay, who led the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (Circa), which used clowning, satire and absurdity to critique the establishment, remembers with amusement: 'Bored cops were convinced to play a game similar to paper scissors rock, called wizards, goblins, giants. At the end, they couldn't help but laugh and we hugged.' That night in the camp, we were on high alert, blockaded by police. From time to time, people would run about, screaming, 'we are going to be raided'. Others sneaked out slowly, avoiding police lines. On July 7, the morning after the confrontation at Gleneagles, we heard the news – terrorist bombings on public transport in the centre of London. We gathered for a large meeting. People were sombre and concerned. I was holding back tears. My sister lived in King's Cross and I was terrified she'd been caught up in it. Our protest and the Make Poverty History message were wiped off the front pages. As Amy explains: 'That took the attention from us, which is terrible to say but that was our experience. 'We'd put in months of our lives to do this, and no-one noticed, apart from a few delegates who couldn't get to a few meetings. We wanted it to be big news and it wasn't because of the bombing. READ MORE: Pat Kane: The powerful vision of Adam Curtis has an obvious blind spot So, do participants in the 2005 anti-G8 camp at Stirling think protest works? What did they learn? Giovanna Speciale, a music leader in the samba band, reflects: 'The change is us. Politicians are very rarely changed by protesters coming up and saying, 'You should change, you should change your attitude. You're really bad'. 'Protest rarely changes anyone's mind, but it does change what is politically feasible to talk about. 'Nothing changes someone more than having gone out, taken, done an action, got a placard, written on it saying what their attitude is, then showing that to everyone else. There is a massive problem with protest in that often we're othering ourselves, so we make ourselves look different, sound different. 'There is nothing less likely to change a politician's mind than a bunch of people who are clearly outsiders.' Amy says: 'That question actually makes me well up a little bit – that's quite an emotional question. I variously go through phases where I'm just like, 'there's no point', right? It does nothing. Years and years of doing massive protests like the Stop the War march in London and they just still invaded the next day. 'You do all of these massive events and then the only coverage we'd get would be the traffic news. I gave up the whole of my 20s, pretty much, to fight capitalism and be an activist.' Jay says: 'Stirling was the end of a cycle. It was a symbolic victory. Protesters were saying, 'This isn't normal. This isn't democracy.' But there is a burnout culture in activism. I teach regenerative activism now to combat it.' Fraser says of direct action: 'Obviously there is a sort of bravado – of youth or masculinity.' Giovanna adds: 'There were huge amounts of courage and, yes, sacrifice and creativity.' Amy says: 'I don't want to categorise my life in a hierarchy of excitingness, but they definitely were very exciting times. There was a sense of heroism, we're the ones who are standing up. Danger intertwined with righteousness – which is what makes heroism, isn't it?' It is often wondered whether there is really a point to protest, not least by activists themselves. There is little doubt, though, that the Stirling camp and anti-G8 protest at Gleneagles was a deeply meaningful experience for those involved.
Glasgow Times
7 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
Rome petrol station explosion leaves 40 injured
The explosion was heard across the Italian capital shortly after 8am on Friday and sent up a huge cloud of dark smoke and fire that was visible from several areas of the city. Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri said that local police and firefighters rushed to the area after receiving a report of a gas leak. Two explosions followed after they arrived, he added. 'Local police immediately evacuated a sports centre nearby, while other officers evacuated buildings on the other side of the gas station, avoiding a much more serious tragedy,' Mr Gualtieri said. Residents were evacuated (Cecilia Fabiano/LaPresse via AP) Elisabetta Accardo, Rome's police spokeswoman, said that 24 residents were injured, including two who were in 'severe conditions' at Rome's Casilino hospital. Eleven of the injured are from law enforcement bodies — police and carabinieri — and one is a firefighter but they are not in life-threatening conditions. Rome prosecutors have begun an investigation into the cause of the explosion, which could be related to a previous gas leak during the unloading phase of liquified petroleum gas at the station. The sports centre was evacuated swiftly by police following the first explosion, with several children brought to safety. Police said they checked the surrounding area for people who were injured or trapped in nearby buildings. Barbara Belardinelli said that she and her daughter were slightly injured when they heard the first explosion and left their home to investigate before the next explosion struck them. 'As soon as we heard the second explosion, we were also hit by a ball of fire. I thought that a car near us exploded, metal fragments were flying in the air,' she said. 'We felt the fire on the skin, the arm of my daughter is still red, it was horrible.' Other residents said the explosion was so loud and violent it struck nearby buildings 'like an earthquake', breaking windows and ripping off shutters. Pope Leo XIV said that he was praying for those affected by the explosion, which happened 'in the heart of my Diocese'. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she was closely following the developments.
Wales Online
7 hours ago
- Wales Online
The unsolved village murder of the mysterious Madame X
The unsolved village murder of the mysterious Madame X The victim was known by a number of names over the years including Madame le Grys, Mary Kathleen Douglas Hamilton, Holly Ingram, and Madame X She was found gravely injured at her home in Mumbles (Image: John Myers ) After a night out at the local cinema Kate Jackson was found gravely injured and bleeding outside her Mumbles bungalow. The 43-year-old was taken to hospital but could not be saved, and police launched a murder investigation. But there are even questions as to who exactly Kate Jackson was, for she seemed to have lived a colourful life and been known by a number of names over the years including Madame le Grys, Mary Kathleen Douglas Hamilton, Madame Humber, Ethel M Dell, Holly Ingram, and Madame X. Kate Jackson, known to friends as Molly, spent the evening of February 4, 1929, at the cinema in Mumbles with her neighbour Olive Dimmick. After the film they walked home, reaching their bungalows on Plunch Lane at around 10pm. Shortly after getting home Mrs Dimmick heard screams and when she went outside to find her friend lying on the floor in a pool of blood close to the back door of her bungalow which was known as Kenilworth. Her husband, Thomas, was beside her trying to pick her up. Together they were able to get the injured woman inside the bungalow and Mr Jackson went to find a phone to call for a doctor while Mrs Dimmick dressed her friend's head wounds. When Dr Taylor arrived at the scene he began to treat Mrs Jackson and asked her what had happened and who had done it to her. Her only reply was "Gorse", which she repeated a number of times. Mr Jackson told the doctor his wife had been receiving threatening letters. Read about the mystery death of a 'respectable' young maid which has never been solved Article continues below Mrs Jackson was subsequently taken by taxi to Swansea Hospital where she survived for anther six days slipping in and out of consciousness before passing away. She was never able to give an account of what happened to her. Police began a murder investigation, and detectives from Scotland Yard were drafted in to assist. The death 'Madame X' as reported in the South Wales Daily Post - the original name of the Evening Post (Image: Reach ) Press reports at the time note that Mr Jackson seemed keen to talk to the police and reporters - and he provided quite a tale. He said the couple had met in the Lyons Corner House cafe in Piccadilly, London in 1919, and had married a short time later at Camberwell registry office. He said his new wife was fluent in French and was also familiar with Russian, Italian and Dutch. He said: "I am convinced my wife must have been brought up in luxurious surroundings, and large sums on money expended on her education. She often told me of her days as a girl at a college in Brussels". He said his wife had a "a peculiar vanity" and insisted he have a title, so he assumed the name Captain Gordon Ingram for the marriage and she became Mrs Ingram. The husband said he believed his wife had been born in India and was the youngest daughter of the Duke of Abercorn. Never miss a Swansea story by signing up to our newsletter here It appeared the couple moved to a farm in the country where "Mrs Ingram" led people to believe she was the reclusive romantic novelist Ethel M Dell. She was noted to receive regular envelopes containing cash, though the source of the payments was unknown. The couple married for a second time in 1922 in Cardiff - this time under their real names - and adopted a child, Betty, who Mr Jackson said was the "great passion" of his wife's life. He said he had no idea who the parents of the child were but said when she was small a parcel of "woollies" had arrived for her through the post from "a prominent peer of the realm". In 1924 the couple moved to Swansea and lived initially in Rhondda Street before moving to a large and well-appointed bungalow in Mumbles - The Laurels - where Mrs Jackson liked to entertain. When police found Mrs Jackson's birth certificate showing she was actually called Kate Atkinson and was the daughter of a labourer from Lancashire, Mr Jackson said his wife had told him she had bought that certificate and identify from a woman who was emigrating to Australia. He told police "My wife is a mystery to me." He also said his wife "lived a life of terror" and there was "someone of whom she went in perpetual fear". He produced anonymous letters she had received over the previous 18 months which said "we are watching you and we will get you" and called her "a robber of worker's money" and which threated to "tar and feather" her. The letters referred to Mrs Jackson as "Piccadilly Lilly" and were noted to have been posted in Swansea. Read about the brutal murder of a Swansea man which has been unsolved fore 70 years It appeared neither person in the marriage worked and the couple's only source of income were those envelopes of cash which continued to arrive until 1927 when a man Mrs Jackson knew by the name of Mr Harrison went on trial at the Old Bailey for embezzling funds from the union he ran, the National Association of Coopers. Mrs Jackson gave evidence at the trial though her name was never revealed in court and she was only referred to in proceedings as "Madame X". Following the conviction and jailing of Harrison, the Jacksons sold The Laurels to realise assets for the Coopers union and the couple purchased the more modest Kenilworth bungalow. At the time Limeslade was a rather remote part of Swansea and Plunch Lane was a rough and unmade road with the fields on either side dotted with bungalows. It was around this time that Mr Jackson - who up to that point did not appear to have a job - found employment in Swansea as a "fish hawker". The bungalow on Plunch Lane, Limeslade, where Kate Jackson was murdered in February 1929 (Image: Reach ) Police gathered evidence from friends and neighbours of the Jacksons, some of whom testified to Mrs Jackson's fear of some unknown person and to her concern at an unknown car seen on Plunch Lane. Mrs Dimmick said she knew her friend had a revolver which she kept for protection. Meanwhile an examination of the crime scene had turned up broken glass from a large flask or jar near the back door - which it was presumed was the murder weapon - but few other leads. But it was Thomas Jackson who was the police's prime suspect, and he was subsequently arrested and charged with the murder of his wife. In July 1929 he went on trial at the Glamorgan Assizes sitting in Swansea's Guildhall. Press reports at the time noted the large public interest in the case, with people queuing for hours to secure a seat in the public gallery. Article continues below After a week-long trial the jury took just half-an-hour to find Jackson not guilty, a verdict which was met applause, a "rousing cheer" and "cries of 'Good Old Tom!'" from the gallery. At the close of the trial the acquitted man apparently hoped on a train to Cardiff to attend a greyhound racing event. The murder of Kate Jackson remains unsolved.
