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Explosion destroys apartments, injures several in Dutch city
An explosion and fire rocked a neighborhood in the Dutch city of The Hague early Saturday, destroying several apartments and injuring multiple people, police said.
The cause of the disaster is unclear but police said a car drove away from the scene “at very high speed” shortly after.
It is still unknown how many people may be missing, though CBS News partner BBC reported emergency first responders are looking for up to 20 people thought to be in the destroyed apartments. Authorities said four people have been rescued from the rubble and taken to the hospital.
Local media reported that one of those hospitalized was a child. They also reported that at least five apartments were destroyed in the blast.
“The fire is releasing a lot of smoke in the immediate vicinity… Residents are advised to close windows and doors and turn off ventilation,” authorities said, according to AFP.
A line of ambulances could be seen waiting nearby in anticipation of more victims. The local hospital spokesperson said they were on standby to deal with injuries.
Residents of the northeastern neighborhood of Mariahoeve in The Hague heard a huge bang and screams before dawn. One woman told local media that she thought an earthquake had happened.
“I was asleep and suddenly there was this huge bang,” 14-year-old Adam Miller told AFP. “I looked out of the window and just saw flames. It’s a massive shock.”
Dutch authorities deployed a specialized urban search and rescue team to the scene, with four dogs trained to find victims. The team was previously used during the devastating earthquake in Turkey in 2023.
Prime Minister Dick Schoof said in a statement he was shocked by the images of the disaster. “My thoughts go out to the victims, all other people involved and the emergency services who are now working on the scene,” he said.
The Dutch royal family expressed similar sentiments.
“Our thoughts are with those affected in The Hague after the explosion and fire this morning,” including those “who are afraid of the fate of their loved ones,” King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima said in a statement.
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Trump’s “border czar” claims Mexican cartels killed a quarter-million Americans with fentanyl. Here’s a fact check.
President-elect Donald Trump has said halting fentanyl trafficking across the southern border is a top priority for his administration, vowing to impose 25% tariffs on all imports from Mexico until the flow of “drugs, particularly fentanyl, and illegal immigrants” into the United States is stopped to his liking.
Trump has claimed fentanyl overdoses kill 300,000 people annually, a toll he said is “probably much more,” while incoming “border czar” Tom Homan alleged in a Fox News interview this week that Mexican cartels have “killed a quarter of a million Americans with fentanyl.”
Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have become the leading cause of overdose deaths since 2016, devastating communities across the U.S. and causing a major public health challenge, according to the National Institutes of Health. Mexican cartels are the main source of finished fentanyl in the U.S., officials say.
However, both Trump and Homan cite inflated figures, and Trump often makes a misleading connection between migrants illegally crossing the border and the flow of fentanyl.
According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 334,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses involving synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, over a nearly 10-year period from 2013 to 2022. As of July, the CDC’s latest provisional data recorded over 73,000 fentanyl overdose deaths in 2023.
More than 86% of people convicted of fentanyl trafficking during the 2023 fiscal year were American citizens, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Researchers say drug trafficking organizations hire U.S. citizens because they are subject to less scrutiny.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
The fentanyl crisis
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a pain reliever and anesthetic, is about 50 times more powerful than heroin, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. It is frequently mixed with heroin and other substances and has been found in pills mimicking pharmaceutical drugs, such as oxycodone, the agency said.
Mexican cartels are the main source of finished fentanyl that is distributed into the U.S., with China being the main supplier of the precursor chemicals and pill presses the cartels use to produce the drugs, according to a report released in May by the DEA.
The Department of Homeland Security found that as of December 2023, more than 90% of fentanyl is stopped at ports of entry, which are designated areas where people can legally enter the country.
Customs and Border Protection data analyzed by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found 80% of people caught with fentanyl at ports of entry from 2019 to 2024 were U.S. citizens.
Analysis of CDC data showed opioid overdose deaths increased year-over-year by 56% in 2020, and then rose by another 22% in 2021 when most migrants were prohibited from crossing the border under Title 42, a pandemic-era measure.
Combating drugs smuggled across the border
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has urged Trump against addressing migration and drug consumption in the U.S. through tariffs, vowing to retaliate with its own.
The CBP reported record fentanyl seizures in 2023 and 2024 and launched Operation Plaza Spike in April, a multi-agency effort targeting Mexican cartels and their logistics hubs to disrupt fentanyl trafficking.
Drug policy experts say preventing all drugs from being brought across the border may be difficult.
“We want to make it difficult for criminal organizations to conduct their business, but we have to be realistic about how difficult it would be to make it truly impossible,” said Dr. Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy.”Fentanyl is so extraordinarily potent that very small quantities can be sold for enormous sums of money.”
The flow of synthetic drugs is also difficult to stop because traffickers can easily replace any drug that is lost, according to Caulkins.
“If we prioritize attacking the most violent and corrupting organizations, we can reduce the harms that the overall drug supply chain creates in a matter that is also valuable to efforts to restrict the total quantity of fentanyl that comes into the country,” Caulkins said.
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