Mystery chemical cloud sickens dozens
LONDON — A mysterious chemical haze that left scores of people on the English coast with running eyes, sore throats and breathing problems has dissipated, but its cause remains a mystery, police and emergency services said Monday.
The gas cloud appeared Sunday, sending people fleeing from the beach and cliffs at Birling Gap, a popular coastal spot 100 km south of London.
Life boats were dispatched to help clear people from the beaches there, and Eastbourne District General Hospital said it had treated more than 130 people. Sussex Police said the injuries were mostly minor.
“Whatever it was, it smelled like burnt plastic,” said Bob Jefferey of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s Eastbourne division. “It hung about and didn’t move yesterday because there was no wind. The cloud seems to have dispersed today, though.”
Pollution has been known to drift to Britain from industrial plants in France, but police said the wind direction made that unlikely in this case.
“Neither the gas nor its source have been established, but agencies are continuing to investigate and have not ruled out either on-shore or off-shore locations,” Sussex Police said.
Meteorological Office weather forecaster Jay Merrell said a ship in the English Channel may have been responsible, but stressed nothing conclusive had been proven yet.
Toxicologist John Hopkins said the haze might have been photochemical smog caused by sunshine reacting with vehicle pollution.
“It’s just a function of we’ve got too much traffic on the roads and too much sunshine,” he told Sky News. The Associated Press
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The founder of the internet’s oldest white supremacist site said he was trying to get back online Monday after a company revoked its domain name following complaints that it promotes hatred and is linked to dozens of murders.
Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who has operated stormfront.org since 1995, said he didn’t receive any warning before Network Solutions blocked the use of the stormfront.org name on Friday.
Stormfront.org had more than 300,000 registered users, Black said, with traffic increasing since a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.
“I’m talking to my lawyers, and that’s about all I can do right now,” Black, of West Palm Beach, Fla., said in a telephone interview. “I can switch to another domain, but it might wind up the same way.”
Another major white supremacist website, The Daily Stormer, was previously shut down by the web-hosting company Go Daddy and then Google after the violence in Charlottesville.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said the stormfront.org shutdown followed complaints it filed with Network Solutions alleging the site promotes not only hate speech, but deadly violence.
Users of Black’s website have been implicated in more than 100 murders, according to the complaint, including 77 people slain by neo-Nazi Anders Breivik at a camp in Norway in 2011.
Black has been involved in the white supremacy movement since the 1970s and was convicted in 1981 for his role in a right-wing plot to overthrow the government of Dominica.