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A HUGE FIRE has broken out in a storage tank at one of Lebanon’s main oil facilities in the country’s south, sending orange flames and a thick black column of smoke into the sky.
Firefighters rushed to the scene and are battling the blaze in a giant petrol tanker in the coastal town of Zahrani.
The state-run National News Agency said it is not immediately clear what caused the fire that was still raging more than two hours after it broke out.
The report said no workers were nearby when the fire started. Lebanese troops have closed the main road linking Beirut with southern Lebanon that passes through Zahrani.
The Zahrani Oil Installation is about 30 miles south of Beirut. It is close to one of Lebanon’s main power stations, which stopped functioning two days ago due to a fuel shortage.
Lebanon is struggling through a serious power crisis that has resulted in electricity cuts lasting up to 22 hours a day.
The head of the civil defence, Raymound Khattar, told the local MTV station that they believe there were 300,000 litres of petrol in the tanker.
Khattar added that work is focused on extinguishing the fire and cooling down a nearby tanker, to keep it from igniting.
In August 2020, a blaze at Beirut’s port triggered a massive explosion that killed at least 215 people, injured thousands and destroyed the facility and nearby neighbourhoods.
The explosion at Beirut’s port was caused by hundreds of tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive material used in fertilisers, which had been improperly stored for years.
Earlier this year, a German company found dangerous nuclear material stored at the facility in Zahrani.
Eight small containers that weighed less than 4.4lbs containing depleted uranium salts were removed shortly afterwards.
The material has been stored at the facility since the 1950s, when it was run by the Mediterranean Refinery Company, or Medreco.
Medreco was an American company whose main shareholders were Mobil and Caltex and it was active in Lebanon for four decades until the late 1980s.
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So in the end, Epic wants to use the Apple logistics system to deliver their apps to the users, but not to share their profits then.
Like when you ask Tesco to provide you with a few squaremeters in all of their shops for free to sell your products, use their trucks to deliver your goods to the shops for free and then sell vouchers for your products online and demand Tesco to accept those vouchers on their tills. And of course, if Tesco won’t advertise your product in their leaflets or try to charge you any fees for using their infrastructure, you’d sue them because of their monopolist behaviour.
@Claudia Varell: apple are taking far too big a cut of the profits and it has a knock on affect for the whole gaming industry, apple made more money off there 30% cut of ingame purchases than Nintendo xbox playstation and stadia combined did on there total sales, its madness and epic were right to stand up to them as it can be make or break for so many of the small companies that are losing all the profits to apple, the gaming industry is in danger of becoming only for the big guys and indie games have to fight so hard to even be seen never mind available to purchase
@Claudia Varell: I don’t think Tesco make a 30% profit on anything they sell, they work on a low margin model.
@Claudia Varell: In fairness, consumers own the hardware and apple have monopolized the only means of getting an app into it
Is anyone of you aware what Apples services include? Let’s say you write a book and sell it in Argentina. Do you know that you are liable for paying the correct VAT there and follow all regulations of the Argentinian market? The same applies if a German buys your book, someone in Australia, and so on. Especially for small content providers or the “Indie game developers” this is a huge barrier. You probably need to hire tax consultants in several countries or pay an agent.
If you sell through Apple, you don’t need to care. You can also give away your content for free without needing to care about distribution or anything and make yourself a name in the industry.
On top, you don’t need to sell through Apple, if you like to go on your own.
@Claudia Varell: Yeah you don’t need to care about all that as Apple don’t pay tax.. Apple taking a 30% cut, or whatever it is, just for providing the backend infrastructure for downloading to Apple device’s is absolutely extortionate. Should be done on some of sliding scale.
Apple have become very proprietary. I love their products. Hate their ecosystem.
Apple has always been proprietary. I worked there in the 1980’s and it was exactly the same then. In fact their completely integrated ecosystem is one of the things I love.
I understand that Apple are an extremely rich company that made some significant innovations years ago and have a fantastically loyal customer base but I’m not sure what their play is here.
If people can’t get the latest versions of Fortnite on their iPhone, surely they’ll get an Android or ask their parents for one?
But I guess it’s more about the principal of being able to squeeze app developers for all they’re worth so they can add more Money to their cash pile.
@Fifty Shades of Sé: You are aware that Google kicked Fortnite out of their Android Google Playstore as well?
@Claudia Varell: it’s still possible to download it onto an Android device though.
@Claudia Varell: You are massively missing the point. The entire issue here is not that they were kicked out of the store, but that the store is the only way for Iphone users to download it.
With android, that’s not the case so Google removing it from the play store doesn’t stop you from selling it on the android platform.
It’s the equivalent of not being able to download photoshop on your PC because Mocrosoft banned it from their store.
@Gavin Conran: No it’s not Gavin. When you buy a PC it’s running MS operating system, so of course you know it will run MS, Adobe applications etc. When you buy a Mac you know it will run Apple apps and ‘probably’ third party ones too, but if you expect it will run them all you didn’t sign up for the right hardware. Same with iOS. If you don’t want to part of the Apple offerings just go buy some other krap instead.
AAA gaming should have crashed in the 2010s, one of the greediest industries around.
have your say