Source :swissinfo.ch – 27.02.2018 MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Up to 14 people were killed in landslides and by collapsed buildings during a powerful earthquake in the remote Papua New Guinea highlands, police and a hospital worker said on Tuesday, with unconfirmed reports of up to 30 people killed. The 7.5 magnitude quake that rocked the region early on Monday also damaged mining and power infrastructure and led ExxonMobil Corp to shut its $19 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, the country’s biggest export earner. Two building collapses and a landslide killed 12 people in Mendi, the provincial capital of the Southern Highlands, said Julie Sakol, a nurse at Mendi General Hospital, where their bodies were brought to the morgue. “People are afraid. The shaking is still continuing. There’s nowhere to go but people are just moving around,” she said. Dozens of aftershocks rattled the area, including a 5.7 quake on Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. Police in Mendi said 14 people were killed in the initial quake, including three in Poroma, south of Mendi. “They were killed by landslides destroying families sleeping in their houses,” said Naring Bongi, a police officer in Mendi. Provincial Administrator William Bando said more than 30 people were believed to have been killed in the rugged region, about 560 km (350 miles) northwest of the capital, Port Moresby, the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier reported. The PNG disaster management office said it was verifying the reports but it could take days to confirm a death toll. ExxonMobil said communications with nearby communities remained down, hampering efforts to assess damage to facilities that feed the PNG LNG plant.

source :swissinfo.ch -26.03.2018 The United States has issued a new round of sanctions targeting oil smugglers in Libya aimed at blocking exploitation of natural resources that is driving instability, the U.S. Treasury Department said on Monday. In a statement, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said it was sanctioning six people, 24 companies and seven vessels in a move that prohibits Americans from engaging with those targeted and freezes any related property under U.S. jurisdictions. The sanctions target people from Libya, Malta and Egypt, according to the statement. Issued under the authority of a 2016 executive order by then U.S. President Barack Obama, companies based in Italy, Libya and Malta are also targets, the statement said. The United Nations Security Council has condemned illicit exploitation of oil from Libya, which has been mired in conflict since an uprising in 2011 that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, who led the country for more than 30 years. “Oil smuggling undermines Libya’s sovereignty, fuels the black market and contributes to further instability in the region while robbing the population of resources that are rightly theirs,” OFAC’s statement said. Libya’s oil production has steadied but is still well below the 1.6 million barrels per day it was pumping before the insurgency seven years ago and is suffering from theft, abduction and other security threats. Production from at least one Libyan oil field has also been disrupted by a dispute over security guards’ pay.

Previous price of LPG in Switzerland: 0.725 €/L*
New price of LPG in Switzerland: 0.726 €/L*