At least 50 flooded houses destroyed by NYC fire

NEW YORK (AP) — A huge fire has destroyed at least 50 homes in a flooded neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens.

More than 190 firefighters were trying to contain the blaze in the Breezy Point section and two people have suffered minor injuries, a fire department spokesman said.

The fire was reported around 11 p.m. Monday in an area flooded by the superstorm that began sweeping through the city earlier, officials said.

Firefighters told WABC-TV that the water was chest high on the street, and they had to use a boat to make rescues. They said in one apartment home, about 25 people were trapped in an upstairs unit, and the 2-story home next door was ablaze and setting fire to the apartment's roof. Firefighters climbed an awning to access the trapped people, and took them downstairs to the boat in the street.

Video footage of the scene shows a hellish swath of tightly packed homes fully engulfed in orange flames as firefighters hauled hoses while sloshing in ankle-high water. Many homes appeared completely flattened by the wind-whipped flames.

The neighborhood sits on the Rockaway peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean.

Syria launches 60 airstrikes, activists say 500 killed in 4 days when truce was to be in force

BEIRUT - Syrian warplanes launched 60 airstrikes against rebel targets around the country on Monday, the most intense air raids across the country since the uprising began 19 months ago, according to anti-regime activists. The suburbs of the capital Damascus were particularly hard hit.

Activists said at least 500 people were killed over the four-day period ending Monday when a U.N.-backed truce was supposed to be in effect. They said the death toll for Monday so far has reached 80 and would likely rise further. In the period leading up to the truce, there was an average of about 150 deaths per day in the civil war, according to activists.

A government official said a car bomb killed 10 people on the outskirts of Damascus and TV footage showed firemen fighting the blaze amid wide destruction after parts of balconies fell on cars parked on a residential street. As smoke billowed, a woman was seen running away with children from the area of the blast and electricity cables dangled from poles. Activistssaid the air raids were launched both before and after the car bomb and were still under way.

Another car bomb exploded in a Damascus neighbourhood where rebels are active, and state-run news agency said there were many casualties.

Monday was supposed to be the fourth and final day of a U.N.-backed cease-fire to coincide with the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest periods on the Muslim calendar. But the truce was violated almost as soon as it was supposed to take effect on Friday and violence continued unabated over the holiday weekend.

The army warned late Sunday night that it will strike "remnants of terrorists with an iron fist" after they "repeatedly violated the cease-fire." The regime of President Bashar Assad often refers to those waging the uprising as "terrorists."

Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said airstrikes on Monday were by far higher than on any other day since the conflict began in March last year.

"Today has seen the most intense air raids across Syria since the start of the uprising," he said, estimating there were more than 60 airstrikes nationwide by early afternoon Monday.

He said the Syrian military was trying to compensate for recent losses on the ground with airstrikes.

Muhieddine Lathkani, a London-based member of the Syrian National Council opposition group, said the air attacks were a result of the regime's "total despair" and reflect the military's inability to recapture areas it lost to the rebels.

Mohammed Saeed, an activist based in the Damascus suburb of Douma, said members of the rebel Free Syrian Army were shooting at the planes but failing to bring them down.

A Syrian official said the car bomb in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana also wounded 41 people and heavily damaged shops and apartments in the area heavily inhabited by Christians and members of the Druse minority sect.

The Observatory also reported clashes and shelling in other parts of the country including the northwestern province of Idlib that borders Turkey, where it said warplanes carried out 11 air raids on several villages. Amateur videos showed warplanes in the skies, then giant mushroom clouds of smoke after the missiles hit.

On Friday, at least 15 people were killed in a Damascus car bomb, state media said.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed deep disappointment at the collapse of the cease-fire and urged more unity from the international community. Speaking in South Korea, he said the U.N. is trying to ease Syria's humanitarian woes and find a political solution to the crisis.

He called for an immediate halt to the fighting and said other countries and the United Nations need to do more to help.

"I am deeply disappointed that the parties failed to respect the call to suspend fighting. This crisis cannot be solved with more weapons and bloodshed," he said. "I remain committed to doing all I can to make this happen. As long as the international community remains at odds, the needs, attacks and suffering will only grow."

U.N. International peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi told reporters in Moscow that the failure of the cease-fire will not discourage him and his supporters.

"So we will continue to work as hard as we possibly can, in co-operation with everybody inside of Syria and outside of Syria to bring the level of violence, put an end to it," he said.

In Turkey, state-run Anadolu news agency said the Turkish forces fired artillery in response to a stray shell fired from Syria that landed across the northern border. The shell landed some 300 metres (yards) away from the Turkish border village of Besaslan. No one was injured, but a power line was destroyed.

With the unraveling of the cease-fire, it's unclear what the international community can do next. The holiday truce marked the first attempt in six months to reduce the bloodshed in Syria, where activists say more than 35,000 people have been killed in 19 months.

In Turkey, about 150 members of the Syrian opposition met Monday to plan for a post-Assad future, discussing the immediate challenges of managing parts of the northern Idlib province, sections of the city of Aleppo, the country's largest, and other areas that are held by rebels. Long-term planning will focus on constitutional and legal reform, laws on elections and political parties and how to build a modern national army.

Delegates to the three-day meeting at a hotel on the outskirts of Istanbul included members of Syrian rebel groups as well as the country's Kurdish minority. Abdelbaset Sieda, president of the Syrian National Council, said the Syrian regime, which he described as a "criminal group," was losing its grip on power and that the opposition must be prepared to rebuild the devastated country.

"The transitional phase has started now," Sieda said. "That's what we're witnessing clearly today in many of our cities and villages."

Report: Iran has drone pictures of Israeli bases

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran has images of sensitive Israeli military bases taken by a dronethat was launched by Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and downed by Israel earlier this month, a senior Iranian lawmaker claimed Monday in the latest boast from Tehran about purported advances in the capabilities of its unmanned aircraft.

The announcement gave no details about the photos — other than calling the Israeli bases "forbidden sites" — but it suggested Iranian drones have the ability to transmit data while in flight. It also appeared aimed at warning Israel about the options for retaliation for any possible strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

A prominent lawmaker, Ismaeil Kowsari, also was quoted as saying that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah possesses more sophisticated Iranian-made drones than the one that was downed, including some that could carry weapons.

"These drones transmit the pictures online," Kowsari he told the semiofficial Mehr news agency. "The pictures of forbidden sites taken and transmitted by this drone are now in our possession."

The lawmaker, who heads the parliament's defense committee, said Hezbollah is "definitely" equipped with more sophisticated drones, but gave no further details.

A senior Israeli military official in Israel's northern command said he did not believe the drone possessed a camera, though he noted an Israeli investigation is continuing. He spoke on condition of anonymity under military guidelines.

Hezbollah "won't announce it as long as it doesn't see the need to do so ... That's why we say we will respond to Israel inside (its) territory, should it take any action against us," said Kowsari, a former commander of the powerful Revolutionary Guard.

Iran has claimed that Iranian-made surveillance drones have made dozens of apparently undetected flights into Israeli airspace from Lebanon in recent years. Israel has rejected the account.

Iran's Defense Minister Ahmad Vahid also claimed on Sunday that Tehran has drones far more advanced than the Ayub unmanned aircraft launched by Hezbollah, saying it was not the "latest Iranian technology, definitely." He did not elaborate.

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has said the Ayub drone was manufactured in Iran and assembled in Lebanon.

Iran routinely announces technological breakthroughs in its defense program. Last month it claimed to have started producing a long-range missile-carrying drone with a range of 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles).

The Shahed-129, or Witness-129, covers much of the Middle East including Israel and nearly doubles the range of previous drones produced by Iranian technicians, who have often relied on reverse engineering military hardware with the country under Western embargo.

But it's unclear whether the new drone contains any elements of an unmanned CIA aircraft that went down in eastern Iran last year. Iran said it has recovered data from the RQ-170 Sentinel and claimed it was building its own replica.

Iran's claims are impossible to independently confirm because the country's arsenal is not open to widespread international inspection with multinational war games or other cooperation.

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