New Zealand held a national remembrance service yesterday for 29 coal miners killed in an explosion last month, with a line of 29 black-draped tables each bearing a fallen miner’s helmet, lamp and name serving as the centerpiece.
Pike River mine was rocked by an explosion Nov. 19, trapping the 29 miners. A second major blast five days later dashed hopes any of the workers had survived, and the men’s bodies have still not been recovered.
Two more explosions have occurred since, including one on Sunday that shot flames into the air, signaling a raging underground coal fire that continues to burn.
Photo: AFP
More than 10,000 mourners attended the somber open-air service for the dead miners under a sunny sky yesterday at Greymouth’s Omoto Racecourse on South Island. People paused for a two-minute silence before the service to remember the dead men. Flags flew at half-staff on government buildings nationwide.
Victims’ families placed photos, tributes and personal items — including clothing, a rugby ball, surfboards, a guitar and a cricket bat — alongside the miners’ helmets on the tables.
Men, women and children, many weeping, filed quietly past the tables to pay their respects.
“In a very real sense, those men are with us because of those tables,” Reverend Tim Mora, who led the service, told the silent crowd.
Grieving father Lawrie Drew said he would not feel a sense of closure until his son Zen’s body was recovered.
“It’s not closure for me. Not until I see the body,” he told the Stuff news Web site ahead of the service.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said the nation’s 4 million people were standing behind the region’s tight-knit community.
“We hoped ... they’d emerge from the depths of the Earth,” he told the mourners. “But they never came home.”
Recovery teams started a jet engine known as the “gag” machine overnight on Wednesday, blowing inert gases and water vapor into the burning mine to quench the fire raging since Sunday.
Police Superintendent Gary Knowles told reporters once the explosive gases are expelled, work will begin to cool soaring temperatures inside the mine to allow for the recovery of the 29 bodies. However, mine experts have warned it would be a slow process, he said.
Foreign diplomats, including high commissioners from Australia, Britain and South Africa — who lost nationals in the disaster — were also at the service.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the