Norway police say bomb seems to have caused blast (Reuters)

OSLO (Reuters) – Norwegian police said that a blast that rocked central Oslo Friday seemed to have been a bomb and that explosives may have been placed in a car.

"It was a bomb," Sveinung Sponheim, acting police chief at Oslo police, told a news conference. He later said, however, that it was an explosion, adding that "explosions are caused by explosives."

Another senior police officer, Thor Langli, told Reuters that "it may have been a car bomb."

Oslo police Friday also confirmed that a shooting incident had occurred at Utoeya, an island south of Oslo where Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's Labor party's youth section's yearly gathering was taking place.

Norwegian daily VG said on its website a man dressed as a policeman was shooting wildly and had hit many. It was unclear if the shooting was linked to the blast in Oslo.

(Reporting by Oslo newsroom)

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Cypriot defense min resigns after blast kills 12 (AP)

MARI, Cyprus – A massive explosion ripped through a Cypriot naval base Monday after a brush fire detonated gunpowder stored in containers, killing 12 people, wounding 62 and prompting the resignations of the country's defense minister and top military chief.

Bodies covered with white sheets lay scattered on a charred hillside near the Evangelos Florakis Naval Base on the Mediterranean island's southern coast, while ambulances ferried the injured to hospitals in Larnaca and Limassol. The bodies of the dead where taken to a morgue at Nicosia hospital in the Cypriot capital.

The blast occurred in the early hours of the morning when a brush fire approached dozens of storage containers holding gunpowder that had been confiscated in 2009 from a ship heading from Iran to Syria.

With criticism mounting over how the material had been handled and stored, Defense Minister Costas Papacostas and the country's top military official, National Guard chief Brig. Gen. Petros Tsalikides, resigned over the incident.

Government spokesman Stefanos Stefanou said investigators had ruled out sabotage as a cause for the blast, but wouldn't elaborate further. He said experts will be called from abroad to assist police and national guard investigators to determine the exact cause of the explosion.

Greece's National Defense General Staff said it was sending "specialized military and security force personnel" to Cyprus to help with investigations following a Cypriot request.

Asked about concerns that the base commander had reportedly expressed fears over the safety of the gunpowder's storage area, Stefanou said officials convened a meeting last week at the Defense Ministry to discuss the matter followed by an onsite inspection of the storage area.

He said certain decisions were made but weren't implemented in time to prevent the incident.

Fifty of the 62 people injured had been treated and released from hospitals, Stefanou said. Two of those still hospitalized had suffered serious injuries.

President Dimitris Christofias had asked Tsalikides and Papacostas to remain in their posts until replacements were found.

Stefanou said the government has declared a three-day mourning period with all flags at public buildings flying at half staff. State funerals would be held for those killed, he said.

The concussion wave from the blast damaged houses in nearby villages, and knocked out the island's main power station, leading to power cuts in several areas. Authorities appealed to the public to limit their electricity consumption, which has spiked amid a three-day heatwave that has led to temperatures of about 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).

Airport authorities said both Paphos and Larnaca airports were reducing power consumption to the minimum possible and had turned on their generators.

The Agriculture Ministry also urged the public to reduce water consumption as much as possible because desalination plants had been taken offline due to power problems.

The blast occurred just one day shy of the ninth anniversary of a fatal national guard helicopter crash that killed then National Guard commander Evangelos Florakis — for which the naval base is named — and four other officers.

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Feds: Mine faked reports before fatal W.Va. blast (AP)

By TIM HUBER and VICKI SMITH, Associated Press Tim Huber And Vicki Smith, Associated Press – 1?hr?6?mins?ago

BEAVER, W.Va. – Coal company managers pressured miners to generate a second set of reports omitting chronic safety problems to mislead inspectors before an underground explosion killed 29 men last year, federal regulators said Tuesday.

Kevin Stricklin, coal administrator for the Mine Safety and Health Administration, said top management at the Upper Big Branch mine was required to countersign safety inspection books that collect miners' daily reports on conditions. The mine was owned by Massey Energy until Alpha Natural Resources bought its rival this month.

"The investigation team concluded that the managers were aware that chronic hazardous conditions were not recorded," he said during a briefing on the federal investigation. Testimony from some of the 266 witnesses MSHA has interviewed also "indicated that management pressured examiners to not record hazards in the books."

Federal investigators first revealed they had found two sets of books — one focused on safety, the other on production — during a private meeting with the victims' families Tuesday night. It's one of the few revelations to come from the ninth briefing since the investigation began last summer into the deadliest U.S. coalfield disaster in four decades.

Alpha Natural Resources spokesman Ted Pile said Wednesday the company was hearing about the faked reports for the first time.

"It's a claim I'm sure we'll look into as we conduct our own review of what happened," Pile said in an email to The Associated Press.

In a public briefing Wednesday, Stricklin showed side-by-side comparisons of records that purported to document the same shift on three different dates in the month before the accident. In each case, the official book that inspectors would have seen showed few, if any, hazards, while the production reports indicated various problems with faulty machinery, explosive methane gas and bad roof conditions.

"If a coal mine wants to keep two sets of books, that's their own business," Stricklin said. "They can keep five sets of books if they want. But what they're required to do is list all the hazards in the official book.

"This is the book that not only MSHA looks at ... but it should be the book that miners and other people who are going into the mine should look at so they would be aware of any conditions in the mine before they go in," Stricklin said.

On April 5, 2010, the day of the blast, a pre-shift inspection report identified very few hazards. But Stricklin says other documents showed six of 10 conveyor belts needed to be coated with pulverized limestone to prevent coal dust from exploding, and five belts needed cleaning.

Bobbie Pauley, the only woman who worked underground at Upper Big Branch, said she was not surprised by MSHA's revelation.

"You put in an inspection report what you wanted the inspectors to see," said Pauley, who lost fiance Howard "Boone" Payne in the blast.

"Zero, zero, zero deters MSHA from coming back. If they see a potential problem recorded in a book, then they're going to come back and investigate it time after time after time," she said. "Well, no coal operator wants to be pounded by MSHA every day.

Pauley returned to Upper Big Branch only briefly after the explosion and now works aboveground at another former Massey operation bought out by Alpha. She was among some 200 people attending Wednesday's briefing.

MSHA has drafted its final report but told victims' families it likely won't be delivered until October.

The explosion also remains the subject of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, and MSHA has said it won't release some information to avoid hindering that probe. It largely reiterated its past public statements, offering more detail but no new theories.

So far, only one Massey employee has been indicted. Security chief Hughie Stover is charged with three federal crimes for allegedly lying to the FBI and MSHA and obstructing justice by ordering a subordinate to throw away thousands of pages of security documents from the mine.

MSHA contends the explosion started with a small, naturally occurring release of methane or natural gas that was then fueled by coal dust into a devastating inferno that tore through the mine in a series of explosions over a few minutes. The agency has blamed a poorly maintained cutting head on a piece of mining equipment for sparking the blast and a malfunctioning water sprayer for failing to douse it.

An independent investigation commissioned by former Gov. Joe Manchin reached the same conclusion last month.

That study accused Massey of ignoring the most basic safety practices in the industry, allowing highly explosive coal dust and methane gas to accumulate, and failing to provide either enough fresh air flow or enough pulverized limestone on the mine's walls to render coal dust inert.

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