Parts of the 29-metre (95 ft) Torre dei Conti crashed to the ground on at least two occasions, videos posted on social media and Reuters footage showed

International News via Reuters:

Italian emergency services were battling on Monday to rescue a Romanian worker trapped for hours under rubble following the partial collapse of a medieval tower in central Rome, near the Colosseum.

“We are trying to get him out alive but the situation is complex because of the risk of further collapses,” national fire department spokesman Luca Cari told Reuters.

Parts of the 29-metre (95 ft) Torre dei Conti crashed to the ground on at least two occasions, videos posted on social media and Reuters footage showed. The first took place at around 1030 GMT, the second about 90 minutes later.

Clouds of dust came billowing out of the windows, along with the sound of collapsing masonry. The second incident took place while firefighters were working on the structure with aerial ladders.

None of the firefighters were injured.

LONG AND DIFFICULT RESCUE

The trapped worker survived the second collapse, but operations to get him out “will be very long and difficult because of the very high risk of (more) collapses,” Rome police chief Lamberto Giannini told reporters.

“The situation remains critical. We have colleagues present to provide consular assistance and communicate with the Italian authorities. The work of the firefighters is vital at this moment,” Romanian Foreign Minister Oana-Silva Toiu said on X.

A second worker, also Romanian, was pulled out almost immediately and hospitalised with serious but not life-threatening head injuries, while two more workers suffered minor injuries and declined hospital treatment.

TOWER BUILT BY 13TH CENTURY POPE

The tower, which was due to be converted into a museum and conference space, is located halfway along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, the broad avenue that leads from central Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum.

The building was still standing, but showing significant internal damage.

It once hosted city hall offices but has not been in use since 2006 and was being worked on as part of a four-year renovation project due to end next year, according to Rome city authorities.

Due to the EU-funded restoration work, the area around the tower was closed off to pedestrians.

The building was erected by Pope Innocent III for his family in the early 13th century, and was originally twice as high, but was scaled down after damage from earthquakes in the 14th and 17th centuries.

Reporting by Angelo Amante, additional reporting by Alan Charlish in Warsaw, writing by Alvise Armellini, editing by Keith Weir and Gavin Jones

The RSF’s capture of al-Fashir – the Sudanese army’s last holdout in Darfur – marked a milestone in Sudan’s civil war

International News via Reuters:

The head of the Red Cross says history is repeating itself in Sudan’s Darfur region after reports of mass killings during the fall of the city of al-Fashir to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary last week.

The RSF’s capture of al-Fashir – the Sudanese army’s last holdout in Darfur – marked a milestone in Sudan’s civil war, giving the paramilitary force de facto control of more than a quarter of the country’s territory.

Hundreds of civilians and unarmed fighters may have been killed during the city’s fall, the U.N. human rights office said on Friday. Witnesses have described RSF fighters separating men from women and children, with gunshots ringing out afterwards. The RSF denies harming civilians.

CIVILIANS TRAPPED WITHOUT FOOD AND WATER

The situation in Sudan is “horrific,” International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Mirjana Spoljaric told Reuters in a weekend interview during a visit to Riyadh.

She said tens of thousands of people had fled al-Fashir after the RSF seized the city and it was likely that tens of thousands more were trapped there without access to food, water or medical assistance.

“It’s history repeating, and it becomes worse every time a place is taken over by the other party,” she said.

A crackdown on Darfur rebels in the 2000s led to years of ethnically driven violence that killed hundreds of thousands in what was widely labelled genocide. The RSF has its roots in the “Janjaweed” militias mobilised by the government at the time.

Spoljaric also said the ICRC was “extremely concerned” about reports of a suspected massacre at the Saudi Hospital, the last-known functioning medical facility in al-Fashir, although it could not yet substantiate what happened there. 

ICRC staff in the nearby town of Tawila had heard reports that people fleeing were “sometimes collapsing and even dying out of exhaustion or because of their wounds,” Spoljaric said, calling the situation “absolutely beyond what we can consider acceptable.”

The United States has said the RSF had committed genocide in the Darfur city of Geneina during an earlier stage of the two-and-a-half-year civil war, which the group denies. Rights groups and U.S. officials have also accused the RSF and allied militias of ethnic cleansing in the region.

APPEAL FOR RESTRAINT AND PROTECTION OF CIVILIANS

Asked about her messaging to alleged foreign backers of parties to the conflict, Spoljaric said: “Especially those states that have an influence on parties to conflict are under responsibility to do the necessary to restrain them and to make sure that they protect civilian populations.”

The United Arab Emirates has been accused of sending the RSF substantial military support but has repeatedly denied doing so. The rival Port Sudan-based authorities have foreign backers including Egypt and deployed Iranian-made drones to try to turn the tide of the conflict last year. 

More than 70,000 people have fled al-Fashir since October 26, according to the International Organisation for Migration, but little is known about the fate of almost 200,000 others thought to have remained there during the 18-month RSF assault and siege of the city.

Spoljaric said the world was living through a “decade of war,” with armed conflicts doubling in the past 15 years to approximately 130, and urged parties to conflicts from the Gaza Strip to Ukraine to uphold the rules of war.

She said the proliferation of conflicts was being accelerated by rapidly evolving military technology, particularly drones, which “create an environment where nowhere is safe anymore.”

In the lead-up to the RSF’s takeover of al-Fashir, residents told Reuters they had been taking refuge in underground bunkers to try to protect themselves from drones and shells after intensifying attacks on displacement shelters, clinics and mosques.

Reporting by Timour Azhari in Riyadh; Editing by Alex Dziadosz and Timothy Heritage