Thousands Join Effort to Clean Up Catastrophic Spanish Floods

Rescue workers walk, following heavy rains that caused floods, in Paiporta, near Valencia, Spain, November 1, 2024. REUTERS/Nacho Doce
Rescue workers walk, following heavy rains that caused floods, in Paiporta, near Valencia, Spain, November 1, 2024. REUTERS/Nacho Doce
TT

Thousands Join Effort to Clean Up Catastrophic Spanish Floods

Rescue workers walk, following heavy rains that caused floods, in Paiporta, near Valencia, Spain, November 1, 2024. REUTERS/Nacho Doce
Rescue workers walk, following heavy rains that caused floods, in Paiporta, near Valencia, Spain, November 1, 2024. REUTERS/Nacho Doce

An arts and science center which normally plays host to opera performances was on Saturday transformed into the nerve center for the clean-up operation after catastrophic floods in eastern Spain which have claimed at least 207 lives.
Volunteers went to Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences for the first coordinated clean-up organized by regional authorities, Reuters reported.
On Friday, the mass spontaneous arrival of volunteers complicated access for professional emergency workers to some areas, prompting authorities to devise a plan on how and where to deploy them.
Carlos Mazon, Valencian regional president posted on X on Friday: "Tomorrow, Saturday, at 7 in the morning, together with the Volunteer Platform, we will launch the volunteer center to better organize, (and) transport the help of those who are helping from the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia."
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was due to address the nation on Saturday morning.
In some of the worst-hit areas, people have resorted to looting because they have no food or water. Police said on Friday they had arrested 27 people for robbing shops and offices in the Valencia area.
More than 90% of the households in Valencia had regained power on Friday, utility Iberdrola said, though thousands still lacked electricity in cut-off areas that rescuers struggled to reach.
Some 2,000 soldiers were deployed to search for people who are still missing and help survivors of the storm, which triggered a new weather alert in the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia, where rains are expected to continue during the weekend.
Officials said the death toll is likely to keep rising. It is already Spain's worst flood-related disaster in more than five decades and the deadliest to hit Europe since the 1970s.



Ukraine’s Zelenskiy Urges Allies to Stop Watching, Start Acting on North Korea

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks at the opening of the Nordic Council session in Reykjavik, Iceland October 29, 2024. (Magnus Froederberg/norden.org/Nordic Council/Handout via Reuters)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks at the opening of the Nordic Council session in Reykjavik, Iceland October 29, 2024. (Magnus Froederberg/norden.org/Nordic Council/Handout via Reuters)
TT

Ukraine’s Zelenskiy Urges Allies to Stop Watching, Start Acting on North Korea

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks at the opening of the Nordic Council session in Reykjavik, Iceland October 29, 2024. (Magnus Froederberg/norden.org/Nordic Council/Handout via Reuters)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy speaks at the opening of the Nordic Council session in Reykjavik, Iceland October 29, 2024. (Magnus Froederberg/norden.org/Nordic Council/Handout via Reuters)

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on Ukraine's allies to stop "watching" and take action to tackle the presence of North Korean troops in Russia before they start confronting his country in combat.

Zelenskiy, in a video posted on Telegram, said North Korea had made progress in its military capability, missile deployment and weapons production and "now unfortunately they will learn modern warfare".

"The first thousands of soldiers from North Korea are near the Ukrainian border. Ukrainians will be forced to defend themselves against them," he said. "And the world will watch again."

Zelenskiy said Ukraine had pinpointed every location where North Korean soldiers were posted in Russia. But Kyiv's Western allies, he said, had not supplied the long-range weapons needed to strike them.

"But instead of such necessary long-range capability, America watches, Britain watches, Germany watches...," he said.

"Everyone in the world who truly wants the Russian war against Ukraine not to expand....must not just watch. They must act. Words about the inadmissibility of escalation and expansion of war must be matched with actions."

The slick three-minute video interspersed his comments with images of North Korea's soldiers and missile launches as well as images of the war and the United Nations.

The video follows an interview with South Korea's KBS television on Thursday in which Zelenskiy blasted what he described as his allies' "zero" response to Russia's deployment of North Korean troops.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday there were 10,000 North Korean troops in Russia, including as many as 8,000 in the southern Kursk region where Ukrainian forces launched an incursion in August.

North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui told his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Friday that his country would back Russia until it achieved victory in the Ukraine war.