Barcelona: Van hits crowds in Ramblas tourist area

A van has ploughed into crowds in Barcelona's Las Ramblas tourist area.
Spanish police say several people have been injured in a "massive crash", while emergency services are urging people to stay away from the area around Plaça de Catalunya.
Reports from the scene say people are taking cover in nearby shops and cafes.
Reuters news agency reports that emergency services have requested the closure of local metro and train stations.
El Pais newspaper said the driver of the vehicle had fled on foot after mowing down dozens of people.
Steven Turner, who works in the area, told the BBC: "People in my office saw a van ramming into people on Las Ramblas.
"I saw about three or four people lying on the ground."
"There are lots of ambulances and armed police with assault rifles around now."
Details of this incident are still unclear, but vehicles have been used to ram into crowds in a series of attacks across Europe since July last year.
Aamer Anwar said he was walking down Las Ramblas, which was "jam-packed" with tourists.
"All of a sudden, I just sort of heard a crashing noise and the whole street just started to run, screaming. I saw a woman right next to me screaming for her kids," he told Sky News.
"Police were very, very quickly there, police officers with guns, batons, everywhere. Then the whole street started getting pushed back.
"Police officers who got there just started screaming at people to move back, move back."

Las Ramblas

  • Central boulevard that runs 1.2km (0.75 miles) through the centre of Barcelona
  • Runs from the city's Plaça de Catalunya (Catalonia Square) to the Christopher Columbus monument at the seafront.
  • Popular with tourists because of its market stalls, bars and restaurants
  • Barcelona city council restricted traffic flow because of heavy pedestrian use of the street
  • BBC NEWS

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Seventeen dead' in Burkina Faso attack


Seventeen people have been killed and eight wounded in a "terrorist attack" in the centre of the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, the government says.
Witnesses were quoted as saying that three gunmen opened fire on customers seated outside a hotel and restaurant.
The city centre has been sealed off by the army, and the US embassy in Ouagadougou has warned its citizens to avoid the area.
A jihadist attack on a cafe nearby left 30 people dead in January last year.
There are fears that the attack is the work of one of the affiliates of al-Qaeda that are active in the Sahel region, the BBC's Alex Duval Smith reports.
The shooting began shortly after 21:00 (21:00 GMT) on Sunday on Ouagadougou's busy Kwame Nkrumah Avenue.
Two locations, Hotel Bravia and the Aziz Istanbul Restaurant, appear to have been at the centre of the shooting.
"The attack claimed 17 victims, their nationalities are yet to be confirmed, and eight injured," said a government statement quoted by the AFP news agency.
A hospital in the city said that one of those killed was Turkish.
The attack is similar to one in January 2016, when the Splendid Hotel and the nearby Cappucino restaurant, also on Kwame Nkrumah Avenue, were targeted.
Over 170 people were taken hostage and 30 were killed. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for that attack.
Burkina Faso is part of the Sahel region, which includes Mali where Islamist groups have been active since 2012.

Australian deputy PM reveals he may be New Zealand citizen

Australia's deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, has revealed that he may hold dual citizenship with New Zealand.
Holding public office as a dual citizen is not allowed under Australia's constitution.
Mr Joyce says he will ask the nation's High Court to rule on the matter, after receiving legal advice that he is not in breach of rules.
He will remain as deputy prime minister in the meantime at the request of PM Malcolm Turnbull.
Mr Joyce is the latest of several Australian politicians to be caught up in dual citizenship scandals.
Two senators, Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters, were forced to resign last month over their citizenship status.
Speaking in parliament, Mr Joyce said he was "shocked" to be contacted by the New Zealand High Commission last week and informed he could be a citizen by descent.
The politician's father was born in New Zealand.
"Neither I, nor my parents have ever had any reason to believe I may be a citizen of another country," he said.

Charlottesville: White House defends Trump response

The White House has defended President Donald Trump's reaction to deadly violence over a white supremacist rally in Virginia, amid criticism he did not explicitly condemn far-right groups.
But a spokesman said his condemnation included white supremacists.
A woman was killed on Saturday when a car rammed into a crowd protesting against the rally in Charlottesville.
Separately, a rally organiser was chased away by protesters as he tried to give a press conference on Sunday.
Jason Kessler, who organised the controversial "Unite the Right" march, was heckled and booed as he blamed the police for not preventing the violence, which he also condemned.
Nineteen people were injured in the car-ramming incident, and another 15 people were wounded in separate clashes related to the far-right march on Saturday afternoon.
Protests and vigils in support of Charlottesville were held in many US cities on Sunday. In Seattle, police used pepper spray to stop anti-fascist protesters approaching a pro-Trump rally.

How did Trump initially respond?

Hours after the violence erupted, Mr Trump said he condemned "in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides".
"The hate and the division must stop right now," he told reporters in New Jersey, where he is on a working holiday. "We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation."
But his comments did not explicitly condemn the white extremist groups involved in the rally, an omission that was strongly criticised by Republicans and Democrats alike.
Many, including senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, echoed the sentiment of Colorado Senator Cory Gardner, who tweeted: "Mr President - we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism."
The president's national security adviser, HR McMaster, went further by commenting: "Anytime that you commit an attack against people to incite fear, it meets the definition of terrorism."
Mr Trump's daughter too also appeared to offer stronger condemnation than her father.
In response, the White House issued a statement on Sunday clarifying that Mr Trump's condemnation had included white supremacists.
"The president said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred. Of course that includes white supremacists, KKK, neo-Nazi and all extremist groups," a spokesperson.

Should we be surprised by Trump's response?

Anthony Zurcher, BBC North America reporter
Clues for how the president would react to such a situation were scattered across his presidential campaign.
In February 2016, Mr Trump initially declined to disavow support from the Klu Klux Klan and David Duke, the former Klan leader who became a Louisiana Republican politician.
"Any candidate who cannot immediately condemn a hate group like the KKK does not represent the Republican Party, and will not unite it," Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the first black Republican elected from a Southern state since 1881, said.
After a week, Mr Trump gave a firm statement denouncing the KKK, but his initial hesitance would be an issue for the remainder of his presidential race.
If, as Mr Trump's critics suggest, his statements following the Charlottesville incident were yet another "dog whistle" to white supremacists, there's evidence that the message was clearly heard.
"Trump comments were good," one poster on the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer wrote. "He didn't attack us. He just said the nation should come together."

How did the violence unfold?

Hundreds of white nationalists converged for Saturday's "Unite the Right" march, called to protest against the removal of a statue of a general who had fought for the pro-slavery Confederacy during the US Civil War.
The far-right demonstrators, who included neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members, clashed violently with counter-protesters.
A 32-year-old woman, Heather D Heyer, was later killed when a car was driven into a crowd of dispersing counter-protesters.
Ms Heyer's mother paid tribute to her daughter, who was a civil rights activist and lawyer.

"She always had a very strong sense of right and wrong, she always, even as a child, was very caught up in what she believed to be fair," she told the Huffington Post.
"I'm proud that what she was doing was peaceful, she wasn't there fighting with people."
Twenty-year-old James Fields from Ohio, the alleged driver, is in detention on suspicion of second-degree murder and the FBI has opened a civil rights investigation.
Some observers say that Mr Trump's election to the White House has re-energised the far right across the US.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organisation, says that "Trump's run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man's country."


Climate change has shifted the timing of European floods


Climate change has had a significant impact on the timing of river floods across Europe over the past 50 years, according to a new study.
In some regions, such as southern England, floods are now occurring 15 days earlier than they did half a century ago.
But the changes aren't uniform, with rivers around the North Sea seeing floods delayed by around eight days.
The study has been published in the journal Science.
Floods caused by rivers impact more people than any other natural hazard, and the estimated global damages run to over a $100bn a year.
Researchers have long predicted that a warming world would have direct impacts on these events but until now the evidence has been hard to establish.
Floods are affected by many different factors in addition to rainfall, such as the amount of moisture already in the soil and other questions such as changes in land-use that can speed up water run-off from hillsides.
This new study looks at this issue in some depth, by creating a Europe-wide database of observations from 4,262 hydrometric stations in 38 countries, dating back to 1960.
The analysis finds a clear but complex impact of climate change on river flooding.

The most consistent changes are in north-eastern Europe around Scandinavia where earlier snow melt due to warmer temperatures is leading to earlier spring floods. Around 50% of monitoring stations are seeing floods eight days earlier than they did 50 years ago.
The biggest changes are seen along the western edge of Europe, from Portugal up to Southern England. Half the stations recorded floods at least 15 days earlier than previously. A quarter of the stations saw flooding more than 36 days earlier than in 1960.
In these regions, the issue isn't snow melt - it's more about saturated soils. Maximum rainfall tends to occur in the autumn and gets stored in the soils. Heavier and earlier rain means that the groundwater reaches capacity earlier.
"It's the interplay between extreme rainfall and the abundance of rainfall," lead author Prof Günter Blöschl, from the Technical University of Vienna, told BBC News.
"In southern England, it has been raining more, longer and more intensely than in the past. This has created a rising groundwater table and higher soil moisture than usual and combined with intense rainfall this produces earlier river floods."
However, around the North Sea, in the Netherlands, Denmark and Scotland, the trend is towards later floods.

The scientists believe this is due to changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the weather phenomenon that pushes storms across the ocean into Europe.
The NAO is driven by differences in atmospheric pressure between the North Pole and the Equator. Recent, rapid changes in temperatures in the Arctic are interfering with these pressure levels and changing the track of the oscillation and storms as well.
According to this study, the storms are arriving later and as a result some river flooding happens later too.
Prof Blöschl says that this study shows clear evidence of the impact of human-induced climate change in many regions - but there are still some areas of uncertainty.
"Where the human imprint is obvious is in the northeast of Europe. It is quite a direct link, with a warming climate and earlier snow melt," he said.
"However, the areas impacted by the NAO are more difficult to attribute to anthropogenic global warming. The jury is still out on that aspect."
The study foresees subtle but significant impacts that could arise from the change in flood timing. There could be effects on river ecosystems with salmon spawning later in the year. There could also be implications for hydropower stations, and for agriculture if fields stay wetter for longer.
The more serious concern is that if warming impacts the seasonality it may also impact the scale of flooding," said Prof Blöschl.
"You could think of timing changes as the harbinger of future changes of flood magnitude. That is the more serious concern. If that happens, flood risk management will have to adapt and that will be different in different parts of Europe."
Other experts believe that the changes in flood timing identified by this study have significant implications for how we understand the risk of river floods and how we deal with them.
"Nearly every major city and town in Europe is built on a river and we protect this urban infrastructure by using past floods as a gauge of the potential risk," said Mark Maslin, Professor of Climatology at University College London.
"The study shows that this approach underestimates the risk, as climate change has made European floods occur earlier in the year, increasing their potential impact.
"This means all the infrastructure that we have built to protect our cities needs to be reviewed as much of it will be inadequate to protect us from future climate change-induced extreme flooding."

China transport: Deadly coach crash in road tunnel

A coach has crashed into the wall of a tunnel in China, killing at least 36 people and injuring 13, state media report.
The coach had left the city of Chengdu en route to Luoyang when it crashed in Shaanxi province just before midnight (16:00 GMT Thursday).
Rescue work was still under way as the injured people were taken to hospital.
Possible causes of the crash was not given. Deadly road accidents are common in China.


Apple to scan iPhones for child sex abuse images

  Apple has announced details of a system to find child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on customers' devices. Before an image is stored on...