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      Fuel Tanker Explosion Leaves at Least 90 Dead in Nigeria

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      Residents of a nearby town came to scoop up gasoline that had spilled from an overturned tanker, but then it exploded, setting off an inferno — an echo of several similar disasters in recent years.It’s become an all too common scene on Nigeria’s roads: A truck driver losing control of a fuel tanker. Residents rushing to collect the spilled gasoline, a pricey commodity. An explosion turning into a deadly inferno.Such an incident in northern Nigeria on Tuesday left more than 90 people dead and at least 50 others injured, the latest in a series of similar catastrophes in a country where road accidents with death tolls in the dozens occur nearly every month.Although road-related deaths in Nigeria are below Africa’s average, 5,000 people died and 31,000 others were injured in traffic accidents in the country last year, according to the government’s data. Poorly maintained roads, aging vehicles and loosely enforced safety regulations such as adherence to speed limits or use of safety belts have all been cited among the causes.In early September, at least 59 people died when a passenger truck and two other vehicles hit a toppled-over fuel tanker that had caught fire. In April, more than 100 vehicles burned in a similar explosion. And in July last year, at least eight people died as they were trying to siphon off fuel from an overturned truck in the country’s southwest.The episode on Tuesday night was set off when the driver of a fuel tanker swerved to avoid colliding with a truck on an expressway in the northern state of Jigawa, according to Lawan Shiisu, a police spokesman.The tanker overturned, spilling fuel onto the roadway. Then, residents from the town of Majia rushed to scoop it up, in what seemed like an easy way to collect an increasingly expensive commodity in Nigeria, where fuel prices have spiked in recent months.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Boot Found at Everest Could Be From Sandy Irvine, Who Vanished 100 Years Ago

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      When Sandy Irvine went on a pioneering expedition to Mount Everest’s summit in 1924, he and his partner vanished. The recent discovery may shed light on the ill-fated adventure.A well-preserved boot found by a group of climbers on Mount Everest could be a clue to solving one of the most enduring adventure mysteries in the history of exploration of the world’s highest peak.The climbers who made the discovery in late September have reason to believe that it could contain some of the remains of Andrew Comyn Irvine, 22, whose ascent with an expert climber in an attempt to be the first to reach the summit in 1924 led to their disappearance.The recent explorers, from a National Geographic film crew, were on a glacier below the north face of Everest when they spotted a brown leather boot sticking out of the ice.Looking closer, they noticed a sock with a patch sewed to it that spelled “A.C. Irvine” in stitched red letters.“We just kind of walked around, like for a few minutes, being like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Jimmy Chin, a mountaineer and filmmaker, said of the find. “We just stumbled upon one of the great discoveries of our time.”In April 1924, Mr. Irvine, a talented engineer but inexperienced climber from Birkenhead, England, who was better known as Sandy, joined George Mallory, a British mountaineer renowned for having reached 27,000 feet above sea level on Mount Everest in 1922.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Retirement Community Prepared for a Hurricane. Tornadoes Came Instead.

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      Hurricane Milton’s death toll was highest far from the coast where it made landfall, in a retirement community where few were braced for destructive tornadoes.Victor Linero was watching coverage of Hurricane Milton’s churn toward Florida when, suddenly, he saw a live video of a tornado near his grandfather’s home — hours before the hurricane was supposed to hit on the opposite side of the state.In a panic, Mr. Linero warned his grandfather over the phone that he needed to take cover.“I was screaming, ‘Papi, get shelter now!’” recalled Mr. Linero, 26, who was raised by his grandfather. “And then I start hearing, ‘Oh my God. Ahh!’”He heard his grandfather, Alejandro Alonso, 66, let out a final scream. Then the other end of the line went silent.By the time it was over, what looked to be two tornadoes had plowed through Spanish Lakes Country Club Village, the retirement community north of Fort Pierce where Mr. Alonso lived. They had decimated mobile homes, tossed trucks aside and toppled trees, all while Hurricane Milton was nearly 200 miles away, in the Gulf of Mexico.In the end, Mr. Alonso, his 70-year-old girlfriend and four other people were dead. Roughly 125 houses, all of them mobile homes, were destroyed. It was one of Hurricane Milton’s most perplexing ironies: that an area on the opposite coast from where the brunt of the hurricane hit saw more deaths than any other single spot during the storm.“We were not in an evacuation area,” Anita Perrotta, who lives in the community with her husband, said as she described the two of them hiding in their home at Spanish Lakes while the tornado threw debris against it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Have We Reached Peak Human Life Span?

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      After decades of rising life expectancy, the increases appear to be slowing. A new study calls into question how long even the healthiest of populations can live.The oldest human on record, Jeanne Calment of France, lived to the age of 122. What are the odds that the rest of us get there, too?Not high, barring a transformative medical breakthrough, according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Aging.The study looked at data on life expectancy at birth collected between 1990 and 2019 from some of the places where people typically live the longest: Australia, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Data from the United States was also included, though the country’s life expectancy is lower.The researchers found that while average life expectancies increased during that time in all of the locations, the rates at which they rose slowed down. The one exception was Hong Kong, where life expectancy did not decelerate.The data suggests that after decades of life expectancy marching upward thanks to medical and technological advancements, humans could be closing in on the limits of what’s possible for average life span.“We’re basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we’re going to live,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Chicago at Illinois, who led the study. He predicted maximum life expectancy will end up around 87 years — approximately 84 for men, and 90 for women — an average age that several countries are already close to achieving.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Instructor at Troubled Skydiving Spot Gets 2 Years After Faking Credentials

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      The facility near Lodi, Calif., where he trained people in tandem jumping, has come under scrutiny amid more than two dozen deaths since 1985.A skydiving instructor who used someone else’s credentials to train people in tandem jumping at a troubled facility near Lodi, Calif., was sentenced this week to two years in prison.The instructor, Robert Pooley, 49, was convicted in May of wire fraud after using another instructor’s digital signature on paperwork that allowed him to train and certify students in tandem skydiving, which involves an experienced sky diver jumping with a novice, the authorities said. In 2016, one of Mr. Pooley’s students died along with a first-time sky diver, after their parachutes failed to open.That episode placed renewed scrutiny on the center where he worked, which is now known as the Skydive Lodi Parachute Center. The facility, about 30 miles south of Sacramento, in San Joaquin County, has been the site of more than two dozen deaths since 1985, including the 2016 deaths of Yong Kwon, 25, Mr. Pooley’s student, and Tyler Turner, 18, a first-time jumper who died in a tandem leap with Mr. Kwon.Mr. Pooley has not been charged in connection with either man’s death. He has also not been alleged to have had any involvement in the other deaths at the facility. In an emailed statement, lawyers for Mr. Pooley told The New York Times that the court had made it clear during the sentencing hearing on Monday that it did not find Mr. Pooley legally responsible for the deaths.Mr. Pooley’s arrest in 2021 came several years after the deaths of Mr. Kwon and Mr. Turner.Mr. Turner’s mother, Francine Turner, said in a telephone interview that it was “significant” to see Mr. Pooley, who she believed played a role in her son’s death, go to prison. Ms. Turner, who filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the Parachute Center, said in the interview that she wished that the authorities could have also gone after the facility’s founder, William Dause, who she said had largely escaped responsibility despite the many deaths at his skydiving outfit.Francine Turner with her son, Tyler, who was killed in 2016 while skydiving. Francine TurnerWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Israel Targets Hezbollah as Khamenei, Iran’s Leader, Warns of Retaliation

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      Israel is drastically widening its fight against the Lebanese militant group that is backed by Iran, whose supreme leader said that “any strike on the Zionist regime is a service to humanity.”Less than a week after Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Israeli warplanes bombarded areas south of Beirut around midnight on Thursday, this time targeting his presumed successor.It was unclear on Friday whether the strikes in Lebanon had succeeded in killing the group’s potential next leader, Hashem Safeiddine, who is also a cousin of Mr. Nasrallah’s. And it was difficult to assess the scale of the damage from the bombardment, described as the heaviest of the rapidly escalating war in Lebanon.But it was clear from the images of destroyed buildings, now merely broken concrete and twisted metal, along with Israel’s ground invasion in the south, that Israel was determined to take the fight against Hezbollah to a new level.It’s doing so not just in southern Lebanon, where its ground invasion is seeking to halt Hezbollah’s rocket fire into northern Israel, but also with its systematic targeting of the Iran-backed group’s remaining leaders, whose movements Israeli intelligence apparently still track.Many people in Lebanon and the broader Middle East had long feared that such a war was coming, even before the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that began the war in Gaza. Hezbollah began firing on northern Israel shortly afterward in solidarity with Hamas, an ally.Over the past three weeks, Israel has stepped up attacks on Hezbollah, detonating pagers and walkie-talkies owned by its members, dropping bunker-busting bombs on Lebanese sites where the group’s leaders were thought to be meeting and assassinating Mr. Nasrallah and other Hezbollah commanders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Retrial, Man Convicted of Murder of Transgender Woman

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      Rasheen Everett strangled Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar in her Queens apartment. His 2013 conviction was thrown out because of a judge’s error.For the second time, a Manhattan man has been found guilty in the 2010 murder of a transgender woman.The man, Rasheen Everett, was first convicted in 2013 of murdering Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar, 29, but a mistake by the judge overseeing the case led an appeals court to toss the conviction in 2021, forcing prosecutors to retry the case.On Thursday, a jury in Queens found Mr. Everett, 43, guilty of second-degree murder and of tampering with evidence. The killing was just one example of what the American Medical Association has declared an “epidemic” of violence against people who are transgender.In a statement, the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said that prosecutors had been determined to pursue the case regardless of the years that had passed since Ms. Gonzalez-Andujar’s killing.“Upon a reversal of a conviction through no fault of the prosecutors, my office built a strong case against this individual once again, and we successfully proved that he callously murdered a young woman 14 years ago,” Ms. Katz wrote.On a March morning in 2010, Mr. Everett strangled Ms. Gonzalez-Andujar, who had advertised her services as a prostitute, in her apartment in Glendale, Queens. Then, prosecutors said, he doused her body in bleach in an attempt to destroy evidence of his crime and stayed in her apartment for more than a dozen hours. He also stole a camera, a laptop, a coat, a cellphone and keys from her apartment and fled to Las Vegas, according to prosecutors, where he was arrested days later. Prosecutors said that his DNA was found under Ms. Gonzalez-Andujar’s fingernails.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mexican Military Fatally Shoots Six Migrants

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      The country’s defense ministry said the military officers who opened fire might have mistaken the migrants for cartel members.At least six migrants were killed in southern Mexico on Tuesday night after military officers shot at the vehicle they were traveling in. The episode called attention to a growing concern in Mexico — ever more powerful armed forces that operate with little oversight — and a continuing one, the dangers faced by migrants in the country.Mexico’s defense ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that the officers were doing “ground reconnaissance” in the state of Chiapas when they spotted a pickup truck traveling fast, and that the truck’s driver tried to evade the soldiers. Behind the pickup truck were two vehicles that the military said were similar to those organized crime groups in the region use: stakebed trucks, small flatbeds with fencing in the cargo area.The officers may have mistaken the migrants for cartel members, according to the ministry defense ministry.The military said the officers “heard explosions,” so two of them opened fire, bringing one of the trucks to a stop. It was carrying a group of 33 migrants from around the world. Four people died at the scene and two at a hospital, officials said. Ten others were injured. The rest were handed over to Mexican immigration officials.The military did not say whether the migrants were armed.The authorities did not immediately release the identities of the victims. A collective of migrant rights groups said in a statement that among the dead were four men, a woman and a girl. The targeted migrants, the statement added, came from Nepal, India, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Cuba.“These facts are neither accidental nor isolated,” the collective said. “They are a direct consequence of ordering military deployment to contain migratory flows under a logic of persecution and not of protection.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More