Iran will target any country used as a launchpad for attacks against its soil, the deputy Revolutionary Guards commander said, expanding Tehran’s range of threats in an increasingly volatile stand-off with world powers over its nuclear ambitions.
Last week, Iran’s supreme clerical leader threatened reprisals for the West’s new ban on Iranian oil exports and the U.S. defence secretary was quoted as saying Israel was likely to bomb Iran within months to stop it assembling nuclear weapons.
Hundreds have lost their lives in eastern Europe as freezing weather sweeps across the continent.
Bitterly cold weather sweeping across Europe claimed more victims on Sunday, brought widespread disruption to transport services, and left thousands without power with warnings that low temperatures would continue into next week.
Hundreds have lost their lives in eastern Europe as freezing weather sweeps across the continent westwards, while major airports warned that services would be delayed or cancelled.
Steven Keates, a weather forecaster at Britain s Met Office, said the severe wintry conditions were expected to last, and spread to other areas.
“It will still be very cold, maybe not quite the exceptional temperatures we ve seen this last week, but still very cold,” he told Reuters.
“(It will be) perhaps turning increasingly unsettled across southern and eastern Europe, so that will probably bring a risk of snow for Italy across to Greece and up round the Balkan countries.”
A state of emergency was declared in Bosnia after the cold snap claimed its seventh victim, and avalanches and strong winds cut off hundreds of villages in eastern parts.
Helicopters were needed to deliver aid packages to mountainous areas and take the sick to hospital.
Greece also declared an emergency situation in the western Peloponnese peninsula after heavy rain caused flooding and an 82-year old woman drowned while trying to escape her house.
Nine more deaths from freezing temperatures were registered in Ukraine overnight, emergency services said, taking the death toll to 131 from a nine-day cold spell, the most severe in the country for six years with night temperatures down as low as minus 33 Celsius (minus 27 Fahrenheit) in parts.
Many of the dead were homeless people with bodies being found in the streets under snow, in rivers and in doorways. More than 3,000 heated tents have been set up around the country to provide makeshift accommodation for the homeless.
In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk asked local authorities to waive the ban on admitting inebriated individuals to homeless shelters as eight more people died taking the death toll to 53, PAP news agency reported.
The extreme cold also caused the death of at least three people in Hungary, national news agency MTI said, and at least five people froze to death in Lithuania over the weekend in Lithuania as the temperature fell below -30 Celsius overnight.
Transport networks were also badly hit as the chilling weather moved west, prompting severe weather warnings to be issued across much of France and Britain.
London s Heathrow, Europe s busiest airport, said it had cancelled about half of its normal services as more than 15cm (6 inches) of snow fell in parts of England overnight and temperatures dropped to almost -10 Celsius.
Many of Britain s other airports were forced to shut runways overnight and warned of further disruption, while rail services were affected and motorways near London were brought to a standstill, forcing some divers to abandon their vehicles.
In Paris, the Eiffel Tower received a coating of snow and more downfalls were expected to bring problems to the French capital s main airports.
The French death toll rose to five, after a 12-year old boy died of hypothermia after falling into a frozen pond in eastern France and two homeless people were found dead.
Meanwhile about 86,000 Italians were left without power because of trees falling on power lines, Livio Gallo, head of state power company Enel told SkyTG24 television. The deaths of 13 people were blamed on the bad weather,
Italian police said, including three men who died of heart attacks while shoveling snow.
Two highways in central Italy that cross the Apenines remained closed, the Interior Ministry said, while in Rome, schools and public offices are to remain closed until at least Tuesday, Mayor Gianni Alemanno said.
He urged people to get out and clean sidewalks, and said the city had handed out 2,350 free shovels. While the cold snap has brought death and misery across Europe, some made the most of the conditions.
Snowboarders took to the streets of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo after it was blanketed by a record snowfall of 107 cm.
The traditional Sartai horse race on ice also went ahead in Lithuania and local media reported more than a dozen men and women from a health club went swimming in a lake near Vilnius.
Meanwhile in Belgium, police found that overnight temperatures of about -10 Celsius were so low that machines to test motorists alcohol levels did not work.
Australian state raced to complete the largest evacuation in its history.
Flood waters rose Monday in parts of Queensland as the Australian state raced to complete the largest evacuation in its history with police boosting their presence to prevent looting.
Thousands of Australians have been forced to abandon their homes as a record deluge sweeps through areas still reeling from last year s devastating flooding.
The area in most danger Monday was the town of St George, in Queensland s south, with most of its residents fleeing Sunday evening, although some 400 have stayed to help limit the damage despite a mandatory evacuation order.
Local mayor Donna Stewart said the swollen Balonne River in St George, flooding for the third time in less than two years, had reached 13.48 metres (44 feet) and was expected to keep rising until at least Tuesday night.
Forecasters have estimated it could top 15 metres, breaching the town s 14.5-metre levee, with fears mounting for other small towns south of St George, including Cunnamulla and Dirranbandi.
State Premier Anna Bligh said it was not looking good.
“The town of St George has no prospect of holding back that water with the levee that they built,” she told ABC radio, but said there had been no “panic or disorderly behaviour”.
It had been the largest ever evacuation of a town in Queensland, she added.
“The heartbreaking job of calculating the loss is still in its early stages,” she said.
Reports said about 30 houses and business had been inundated so far.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation said the Moonie Highway on the outskirts of town was now flooded and the only way out was by air.
“There will be more planes and we expect to take about another 400 (residents) out today, so in a town of just under 3,000 people we don t expect to see very many people stay,” added Bligh.
While most residents have fled, Queensland Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson said officers would stay to prevent looting.
“We are going to do everything we can to make sure people s homes are safe,” he told reporters. St George has seen major flooding twice in the past two years, once in March 2010 and again last year during Queensland s flooding disaster, which claimed 35 lives and swamped vast tracts of farmland and tens of thousands of homes.
Flooding has been hitting parts of Queensland over the past week but has claimed just one life, a woman whose car was swept from a roadway in Roma, further north of St George.
An 18-month-old baby girl drowned in a dam on a property south of St George, although authorities said it was not directly linked to the floods.
Iraq is considering a waiver from the United States in order not to violate any sanctions.
Iraq could seek a waiver from the United States on sanctions on Iran because of its high trade with the neighbouring country and to protect its foreign reserves from penalties, an Iraqi government spokesman said on Friday.
The U.S. government in December signed a law imposing sanctions on financial institutions dealing with Iran s central bank, the main channel for its oil revenues and the European Union has also announced a ban on Iranian oil shipments.
Iraq government has moved closer to Tehran since the 2003 invasion and Iran is now Iraq s main trade partner after neighbouring Turkey.
Tehran said last year it planned to boost bilateral trade to $10 billion in 2011 from $6 billion in 2010.
“Iraq is considering a waiver from the United States in order not to violate any sanctions,” Iraq government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said. “We are exposed to any penalties on countries not following U.S. sanctions.”
Japan is also weighing a possible waiver on the new U.S. sanctions and is seeking ways to reduce its reliance on Iranian crude shipments.
Iran’s supreme leader threatened on Friday to retaliate against the West for sanctions, a day after a U.S. newspaper said defense secretary Leon Panetta believed Israel was likely to bomb Iran within months to stop it building a nuclear bomb.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s defiant televised speech marking the anniversary of the 1979 Iranian revolution was the first time the top authority has spoken publicly about the impact of the new sanctions, which have strangled the Iranian economy since the start of the year.
The long-simmering confrontation between the West and Iran over its nuclear program entered a decisive phase last month. Iran began enriching uranium at a deep underground bunker and the United States and Europe imposed new sanctions to prevent Tehran selling oil, putting its economy in a downward spiral.
Iran holds a parliamentary election in a month – its first since a 2009 presidential vote triggered a failed popular uprising – and its tightly-controlled political system will have to cope with the economic hardship caused by sanctions.
“In response to threats of oil embargo and war, we have our own threats to impose at the right time,” Khamenei told worshippers in his televised speech.
“Sanctions will not have any impact on our determination to continue our nuclear course,” he said.
“Such sanctions will benefit us. They will make us more self-reliant … We would not achieve military progress if sanctions were not imposed on Iran’s military sector.”
The last substantial snowfall in Rome was in 1986.
Thick snowflakes are falling on Rome, a rare occurrence for a capital usually blessed by a temperate climate, and other parts of the country are experiencing frigid temperatures unseen in years.
The last substantial snowfall in Rome was in 1986, though there have been other cases of lighter snow since then.
Snow began falling in the late morning Friday, leaving a light dusting on trees and cars. It wasn t clear if there would be any significant accumulation on the ground. The north of the country has also been gripped by snow and ice that is disrupting train travel.
Temperatures plunged as low as minus 22 Celsius (minus 7 Fahrenheit), in Trepalle, a village in the Italian Alps.
A railway official says a train hit a bulldozer and derailed in northeastern India, killing three passengers.
S. Hajong says at least 16 people were injured when nine coaches of the train derailed after the crash at an unmanned crossing in Assam state.
The bulldozer got stuck while crossing the track, Hajong said Friday.
Local villagers and police have pulled all the passengers from the derailed cars.
The injured have been taken to hospitals in nearby Gauhati, Assam’s capital.
India’s Supreme Court scrapped 122 telecom licences awarded in a 2008 sale that has become a major corruption scandal rocking the government.
“Licences after January 2008 are quashed,” Justice G.S. Singhvi told the court in Delhi on Thursday. “The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India will make fresh allocations by auction.”
Mis-selling of the second-generation (2G) mobile licences was estimated by the country’s public auditor to have cost the treasury up to $40 billion in lost revenue.
The minister in charge of the sale, A. Raja, is currently on trial accused of fraud and cheating, one of several corruption cases to have buffeted the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Raja, a member of the DMK, a regional party in the Congress party-led national coalition, is suspected of rigging rules over the sale of the licences to favour some firms in return for kickbacks.
Heavy snow that has blanketed northern Japan for weeks, triggering avalanches and affecting transport networks, has left at least 55 people dead, officials said Thursday.
In one of the country’s coldest winters in recent years, 43 people have died as they removed snow from roofs or roads, while seven more were crushed by heavy loads of snow falling from buildings or other structures, the disaster management agency said.
Four people have died in avalanches, with the latest snow slide reported in northern Akita prefecture at a popular mountain resort known for therapeutic hot-spring baths, which left three holidaymakers dead.
The 40-metre-wide (130 feet) avalanche crushed three tents near a naturally heated rock site Wednesday.
Local police and rescuers continued their search Thursday “to confirm there are no others buried in the snow”, a local police spokeswoman said.
The extreme weather, which has filled evening news reports for weeks, has also claimed one other life, the government agency said.
Heavy snow has covered the northernmost island of Hokkaido and much of the north of the main Japanese island of Honshu, particularly affecting the country’s eastern side.
In Sukayu, in northern Aomori prefecture, where the temperature went down as low as minus 9.2 degrees Celsius (15.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on Thursday, 4.29 metres (14 feet) of snow is lying.
Yamagata and Niigata prefectures have more than three metres of snow, the weather agency said.
Atrocious conditions have led to the cancellation of flights and numerous train delays, including to parts of the shinkansen bullet train system.
In Aomori prefecture, a heavy snowstorm on Wednesday night stranded more than 100 cars on one road, forcing 250 people to seek shelter for the night in local schools, reports said.
France’s foreign minister said on Wednesday he hoped U.N. Security Council members could produce a compromise resolution on Syria by next week and sought to allay Russian concerns by warning military intervention could lead to civil war.
France is pushing hard for adoption of a U.N. resolution condemning the Syrian government’s crackdown on 11 months of protests and backing an Arab League peace plan that would see power transfer from President Bashar al-Assad.
“We’re trying to bring positions closer together and we hope that during the course of next week it will be possible to have a Security Council text that could … avoid the veto,” Alain Juppe said during a talk at a Paris university.
Russia has threatened to use its veto and Moscow’s envoy to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, says there is no chance the Western-Arab draft text could be accepted unless it explicitly rejects armed intervention in Syria.
Juppe, who returned from a Security Council meeting on Tuesday, said there had been a little progress in talks.
“We are trying to create movement. The exchanges (at U.N. headquarters in New York) yesterday gave us some grounds for positive thinking. The Russian representative did not say ‘niet’ (no),” he said.