The official Xinhua news agency said the explosion rocked the two-storey primary school in Wanzai County in the south-eastern province of Jiangxi yesterday, causing the building to collapse.

The agency said 41 persons were killed and 27 injured in the blast which destroyed four classrooms. It said the cause of the blast was unknown.

However, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said the explosion was caused by fire crackers which were stored illegally inside the school.

A statement from the centre said 41 children, aged between 10 and 12, and a teacher had died in the explosion at the school in the village of Fanglin. It said 25 children were still in hospital.

The blast, sparked by third-graders assembling firecrackers to make pocket money, tore through the centre of the building just before noon on Tuesday, the official website of the state-run Nanfang Daily newspaper said. State television footage showed one side of the two-storey school blown away by the impact of the powerful blast, exposing neat rows of desks. Four classrooms were levelled.

Nearly 200 schoolchildren and teachers were attending class in the village when the blast occurred, officials said.

One official in Wanzai county, where the village is located, denied the report, although other officials have said fireworks were being investigated as the possible cause.

Assembling fireworks is a cottage industry in the area, and neighbouring communities in Jiangxi have suffered two deadly explosions in the past year.

All the bodies had been retrieved from the rubble by Wednesday afternoon, one Wanzai official said.

Cash-strapped Chinese schools sometimes rent space to businesses to raise money.

A spokesman for the local police in Tanbu township, an impoverished rural region some 400 km north of Hong Kong, flatly denied reports that the blast was caused by fire crackers.

However, an official at the Tanbu Local Government said the authorities had received complaints that the school was being used to assemble fire crackers.

“After the accident, some pupils’ parents came to report about the fire cracker-producing activities but the police could not find any clue at the scene,” the official said on the condition of anonymity.

Last month, state television reported that a room rented by one Shanghai school was used as a gambling den. As children played outside, older people played mahjong inside.

The school blast devastated the community and left several children fighting for their lives.

“It’s horrible; it is a tragedy. It is a crime against humankind, and I deplore it,” he said at joint press conference with Swedish Foreign Minister and President of the European Union here yesterday.

He said he did not know the extent of the damage at that time and so he did not know whether the two major Buddhas had been taken down totally.

The demolition of two giant stone monoliths of Buddha was stopped yesterday during the Muslim festival of Id- ul-Adha, but a Taliban official said their destruction was a certainty.

Beijing: Ending a week-long silence, China on Wednesday half-heartedly joined the growing international condemnation of Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban’s wanton destruction of priceless Buddhist statues.

“We have taken note of the relevant reports,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said while taking refuge under an earlier statement made by the state-run Buddhist Association of China (BAC).

Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Omar dismissed the criticism of his destruction call and said Afghan Muslims should be proud of smashing the Buddhist statues.

Analysts say China’s soft-peddling of the “Bamiyan issue’ may have been forced by the Taliban’s potential to export terrorism to China’s restive province of Xinjiang, where Muslims are hoping to create a separate state.

“We will also be especially sensitive to see how this build-up relates to its situation with Taiwan, whether it presents any new threat to Taiwan, and we will look at that carefully,” he added.

United Nations: The UN Security Council has asked Taliban regime to stop the destruction of non-Islamic shrines and artifacts across Afghanistan, saying the decision of the Islamic militia had led to “incomprehensible and wanton acts of violence on the cultural heritage.”

In a statement, the council said the United Nations had not given up the hope of saving the priceless statues. The council President, Ambassador Volodymyr Yu Yelchenko of Ukrain, who read the statement to mediapersons, said the Taliban had started destroying the statues, but no confirmation had been received that they have actually been destroyed.

The blizzard battered parts of Canada and dumped more than 9 inches (23 cm) of snow on Halifax by mid-afternoon, according to Environment Canada. Heavy snow created white-out conditions along parts of the US-Canadian border.

Falling at the rate of one to two inches (2.5 to 5 cm) an hour, the snow downed trees and power lines in Massachusetts. It crippled one giant transmission tower and bent a couple of others, Massachusetts Gov. Paul Cellucci told reporters.

The number of Massachusetts residents without power dropped to 27,000 by mid-afternoon from 80,000, state officials said.

Waves flooded roads and homes in shoreline communities from Portland, Maine, to Hull, Massachusetts. Some coastal residents abandoned their homes for Red Cross shelters. Insurance companies geared up for claims.

Airlines cancelled hundreds of flights at airports from Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire, as winter storm and coastal flooding warnings were posted. The national weather service issued blizzard warnings for Maine.

New York escaped with almost no accumulation of snow in Manhattan and only a few inches in the outer boroughs, but upper New York state and eastern Long Island were walloped with a foot (30.5 cm) of snow.

The storm was expected to blanket parts of New England by more than 2 feet (61 cm) of snow before ending on Wednesday morning, when the threat to the shore would be renewed by unusually high tides combined with an expected storm surge.

“We’re worried about flooding and structural damage,” Peter Judge, spokesman for Massachusetts emergency management, said. The State National Guard was on alert.

Just over the Massachusetts border in Rye, New Hampshire, 20-foot (6.1m) waves tossed sea-wall boulders across roadways.

Both Massachusetts and Connecticut were under a state of emergency, and Maine Gov. Angus King was preparing to issue a similar order.

“We addressed some of the most important issues on the US-EU semi-annual meeting with EU officials yesterday.

Mr Powell met Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, Mr Javier Solana, EU high representative for foreign policy and defence; and Mr Chris Patten, EU commissioner for external affairs.

Later, at a joint news conference, both sides repeated calls for an end to Palestinian-Israeli violence and attacks by militant ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia.

Mr Powell expressed US appreciation of the EU for its financial support to the Palestinian authority, which has been faced with deepening economic difficulties since the clashes with Israeli forces.

The fifth round of the inter-Korean high-level talks will take place in Seoul from Tuesday to Friday, a spokesman for the Unification Ministry said.

The date and venue of the talks were fixed as proposed by South Korean Unification Minister Park Jae-Kyu after his North Korean counterpart, Mr Jon Kum-Jin, accepted the offer.

Stating that the torture of women and girls persists on a daily basis across the globe, the organisation said “in India more than 40 per cent of married women reported being kicked, slapped or sexually abused for reasons such as their husbands’ dissatisfaction with their cooking or cleaning, jealousy or other motives.”

WASHINGTON: Amnesty International released a report slamming misconduct against women in US prisons, timed to coincide with International Women’s Day later this week. PTI, AFP 

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POPSTAR JACKSON BREAKS DOWN
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UK STAMPS TO GET FACELIFT
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RULING MAY OPEN DOOR TO TRIALS
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