Thursday 23 August 2012

10 die in Jaipur of rain-triggered disasters

Jaipur, Aug 22 (IANS) Rains continued to create havoc as the death toll rose to eight in this Rajasthan capital in incidents of wall collapses and electrocution, an official said Wednesday.

Two more deaths were reported from rural areas in Jaipur district, he added.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh telephoned Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and took stock of the situation. An officials said that Manmohan Singh had assured all possible help in tackling the situation.

Over 100 colonies in low-lying areas and the Walled City are inundated since Tuesday night, theofficial said.

“In view of the situation, the chief minister took a meeting of senior administration officers and instructed them to launch the relief work on a war footing. He has asked the district collectors to arrange and use all disaster management equipment to bring relief to the people across the state who were affected due to rains,” a senior administration official told IANS.

He added that the district collectors have been asked to arrange for sacks of sands and use them in low-lying areas, so that water does not gather in residential colonies. Control rooms have also been set up at district headquarters where affected people can call and seek help.

“Jaipur and some other districts in northern and eastern parts of the state have been asked to remain extra alert as warning of another spell of heavy rains have been made by the meteorology department,” said the officer.

Normal life and vehicular traffic came to a standstill in several districts, including Sikar, Dausa, Jhunjhunu and Dholpur due to the heavy rains.

The Jaipur district administration had announced a holiday for all government and private schools Wednesday.

Heavy rains, that began lashing the city from 11 p.m. Tuesday, were estimated at 148.4 mm Wednesday morning.

With the rains continuing for nearly four hours, people spent a sleepless night as water gushed into their houses, damaging belongings.

In several slum areas, people were forced to take shelter on rooftops.

Mayor Jyoti Khandelwal told reporters that markets in the walled city and the slum areas in Jawahar Nagar, Shashtri Nagar and Sodala were the worst-affected.

“All senior officials and disaster management staff of Jaipur Municipal Corporation are in the field assessing the situation and pumping water out of the inundated colonies,” said Khandelwal.

But residents complained of poor management by JMC.

“Rains have been continuing for one week. However, municipal officials did not take precautionary measures,” Shilpa Kumawat, living in the low-lying Johari Bazaar said.

She and her family have been trying to pump accumulated water out of their house since morning.

Electricity supply too had snapped in almost half of the city in the morning due to the rain.

Thursday 23 August 2012

http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/enviornment/10-die-in-jaipur-of-rain-triggered-disasters-lead_100640051.html

continue reading

Most Fukushima quake deaths were elderly

TOKYO, Aug. 22 (UPI) -- Most of the people who died in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis were elderly, an agency report says.

The Reconstruction Agency study found about 90 percent of the 1,263 disaster-related deaths were of people at least 70 years old, The Mainichi Shimbun reported.

More than half of the victims, or 638 people, died from effects of the triple disaster in March 2011, the agency said. Of those, 433 died in Fukushima Prefecture, the location of the nuclear energy facility heavily damaged by the quake and tidal wave.

Of the total deaths, about half died within one month of the disaster. About 80 percent died within three months.

Fatigue from living in evacuation centers was cited as the single biggest cause of post-disaster death.

Many of the Fukushima victims died after being forced to move from hospitals or nursing homes after the reactor was damaged.

The report said 283 died because hospitals were not able to function or because the victims' illnesses worsened.

The report recommended upgrading existing laws to ensure adequate emergency food supplies, proactive action against bad weather and prevention of disaster-related deaths by providing appropriate health care.

Thursday 23 August 2012

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2012/08/22/Most-Fukushima-quake-deaths-were-elderly/UPI-44801345658506/#ixzz24MuqzAhX

continue reading

Heavy rain, floods kill 14 in Pakistan: Officials

ISLAMABAD: Flash floods triggered by heavy rain have killed at least 14 people and destroyed dozens of houses in northern Pakistan, officials said on Thursday.

Irshad Bhatti, a spokesman for the country’s National Disaster Management Authority said the death toll may rise as survey teams have reported more deaths but are still assessing the extent of damages.

Most of the deaths were reported in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where nine people died and more than 50 houses were destroyed. In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, six people were killed after a roof collapsed.

“The death toll may rise, we are assessing the damages. Rescue work is continuing and relief activities have started,” Bhatti said.

Adnan Khan, an official from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa confirmed the death toll and said he feared more deaths.

“Dozens of families have suffered and their houses were destroyed, several people are still missing” Khan told AFP.

Floods in Pakistan in the summer of 2011 affected 5.8 million people, with floodwaters killing livestock, destroying crops, homes and infrastructure as the nation struggled to recover from record inundations the previous year.

Thursday 23 august 2012

http://tribune.com.pk/story/425167/heavy-rain-floods-kill-14-in-pakistan-officials/

continue reading

Mass grave raises ghosts from the past

DO DONTREI, Cambodia — It was four grey skulls resting on a bed of jumbled bones that again triggered Chea Nouen's memories: breast-feeding her baby with her hands and feet shackled; her husband thrown into a pit to be turned into human fertilizer, her own marches to the killing fields — where she was saved three times by an executioner.

The past came hurtling back earlier this month when a new mass grave was discovered in this village in northwestern Cambodia, one of the bloodiest killing grounds in the country. Like most of Cambodia's some 300 known mass grave clusters, it is not being investigated or exhumed to find out what happened.

More than three decades after the Khmer Rouge ultra-revolutionaries orchestrated the deaths of nearly 2 million people, or one out of every four Cambodians, this country has not laid its ghosts to rest. Cambodia's regime prefers to literally bury the past, especially since some of its current leaders, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, were once Khmer Rouge.

But 63-year-old Chea Nouen and other survivors in this small, farming community cannot forget, hold their tears in check or banish the nightmares when they daily tread over the unexamined bones of 35,000 victims and live among restless souls that still hover, they believe, over homes and rice fields. Also unfinished is the pursuit of justice: Neither the three top Khmer Rouge leaders nor local executioners have been punished, with the exception of a controversial jail sentence of 19 years for the former prison chief known as Comrade Duch.

In April, Chea Nouen was invited to the capital, Phnom Penh, to hear a top Khmer Rouge official, Nuon Chea, offer his defense to a U.N.-backed tribunal: I didn't know. I was just carrying out orders. It's an exaggeration. The U.N. and the tribunal say they are following the law. But Chea Nouen calls the trial "an absurdity," incredulous that it has taken six years, $160 million and mountains of documents to prove a case against three now feeble octogenarians when all seems so starkly clear to the villagers at Do Dontrei.

"At my age and health, I cannot confront the Khmer Rouge, " says the 63-year-old woman. "But I would be pleased to tell my story."

Her body is almost skeletal and wracked by persistent illnesses from the Khmer Rouge years, but Chea Nouen's animated face, striking poses and still supple hands conjure up the past in powerful pantomime.

She contorts her body, demonstrating how her legs and arms were bound to an iron bar. Her face grimaces in remembered pain. A soldier points a pistol to her temple, another searches her body for hidden valuables. In shock, she drops her 2-month-old son to the prison floor. For seven days, almost sleepless and surviving on just water, she cradles her child, twisting her body to allow him to suckle at her breasts. Chea Nouen, back in the present, brushes tears away with a yellow towel.

Their family, with two children, had been arrested one morning while riding in an ox-cart. A day after her release, her husband was taken away to the foot of a hill, close by the recently discovered grave, where the Khmer Rouge vented their hatred of former government soldiers like him with singular fury.

Blindfolded, hands tied behind their backs, they were savagely beaten, slashed with machetes and pushed into pits stocked with rice husks that were set ablaze. The ashes and decomposed bodies fused into fertilizer to be scattered over the rice fields.

Although still under official arrest, Chea Nouen was released to a Khmer Rouge complex that included dormitories, a warehouse and communal dining. She grew vegetables, worked grueling hours in the rice paddies and kitchen. One of her sons succumbed to illness, the other died of starvation.

Of the hundreds of workers who passed through the center, all of them women, only seven survived the deprivation and a methodical killing machine not unlike those at Nazi concentration camps. Executions took place once or twice a week, with batches of 60 to 80 prisoners, and often timed to the fertilizer production.

"We are all just like fish in the water. One day they will hook us all," she told a co-worker who sensed her own time had come and asked Chea Nouen to take gold she had secreted to pass on one day to her children. Chea Nouen declined, believing she herself wouldn't survive. The following day, after the evening meal, her friend disappeared.

Chea Nouen rises, head bent to the ground, her arms clasped behind her as if pinioned by ropes. She is trudging off with a line of others toward the pits. The killers await them, naked torsos sweating. She hears shouts, wailing and cursing from those about to die. Then, the chief of the execution squad, a man she had provided with bath water, halts the file of prisoners.

"I don't know why he was so kind and saved my life. He did it three times. Maybe he felt sympathy for me. Maybe he loved me," she says. Nhorn was the only name she knew him by, and after the Khmer Rouge downfall she never saw him again.

"Whenever I think of the Khmer Rouge time I don't feel hunger or thirst," she says, sinking into her chair in a ramshackle hut open to the rains and mosquitoes. "I feel nothing except the feeling that I am already dead."

She has a proper house in the village, home to some 600 people, but prefers the forest retreat where she can better raise chickens, ducks and four cows, and where there is a peace and quiet for which she longs.

Her face still flushed, Chea Nouen ends her story on a lighter note, relating how a ghost appeared in the dream of the businessman who bought the land with the skulls from a farmer, one day after the remains were found. The spectral visitor recommended he go for the number 50 in a lottery. He won $1,500 and paid for a ceremony at the newly-found grave.

"My husband never comes to see me or give me a winning lottery number, so I'm still poor," she laughs. "I didn't even pray for a lottery number at the ceremony. I just thanked the spirits for saving my life."

The remains from the grave were placed in a makeshift shrine under the shade of three palm trees, and the villagers of Do Dontrei brought soup, rice, desserts and a little money to the crude altar as offerings.

They worry that the spirits are troubled. There is a widespread belief in Cambodia that the bones of the deceased — especially those who met violent deaths — should be collected, cremated and prayed over lest they remain in the place they died to haunt the living.

But rural folk — the "little people," as they have been called — still have little voice or legal recourse in face of rich power-brokers, and the businessman who purchased the land for $4,700 for construction has close connections in the nearby provincial capital of Siem Reap. So the digging continues.

Khung Leang, a handsome 53-year-old woman with a ready smile, says she may never know where her entire family lies. She conducted rites for their souls, but they still return to her in disturbing dreams.

"They stood here. But they refused to come up," she says, sitting on steps leading to the first story of her stilt-propped house. "My father said, 'I can't enter because there is a stick in the house and I will be beaten.' I didn't know, but there was actually one there. I threw it away, and a few days later they came again. And again they refused to come into the house. My father just stood on these steps, crying."

Khung Leang thinks of the "crimes" that led to the slaughter of her mother, her father and all six of her siblings. They had been damned as "rich capitalists" because they sold sweets in the market. Later, they were discovered eating chicken soup one night as a family, violating bans on private property and eating outside communal quarters. The last of her father's three "crimes" was "destroying Khmer Rouge property" by failing to stop cows he was ordered to herd from grazing in a rice field.

Her father was taken away first. She doesn't know how he died. Later she was told that before his execution, he pleaded with friends: "Please take care of my daughter. She will soon be alone."

And she was. They all followed him, even the youngest, her four-year-old sister, because the Khmer Rouge liked to say: "If you don't want grass to grow you have to pull out all the roots underneath."

Like Chea Nouen, she regards her cheating of death — twice — as miraculous.

Like many women and despite protest, she was forced into marriage with a man the Khmer Rouge had chosen for her. And like many young couples, they were assigned to a mobile brigade, tasked with back-breaking work in remote areas after separation from their families. She was away when her family was exterminated.

Sometime later, she and others were being herded to an execution site when a Khmer Rouge cadre suddenly barked, "That is enough. We have reached our quota today. Take the others back."

A cooling evening breeze sweeps through the garden around Khung Leang's home as she finishes her tale, one with a happy ending. A sprightly little girl, one of six grandchildren, rushes into her arms. A handsome 23-year-old son returns from teaching school.

Their family makes ends meet, growing rice and vegetables and still selling the traditional sweets from rice and palm sugar that once precipitated the tragedy. Her husband — the same she once adamantly rejected — drives a motorcycle taxi.

"He is a very kind-hearted man," she says.

Pools of stagnant, milky green water lay at the bottom of the burial pits. The backhoe gouged out more earth.

"If the investigators don't come and conduct a proper search, all the remains will soon disappear," said farmer Chhorn Kry, standing at the grave's edge, near where nine members of his wife's family were executed.

The survivors of Do Dontrei believe the spirits are still trapped. They say the graves must be opened, with proper rites, so that the spirits can fly, look for their relatives and ascend to heaven. Chea Nouen compares it to water flowing out after a bottle is opened.

Khung Leang adds a contemporary, political twist to the ancient belief: "There are many souls still with us here. They are wandering around our village, hovering above us, because they are still waiting for justice."

Thursday 23 August 2012 http://www.waxahachietx.com/apnews/world/mass-grave-raises-ghosts-from-the-past/article_d7877476-ecb3-11e1-8257-0019bb2963f4.html

continue reading

One body retrieved Nine feared drowned in Chenab

MUZAFFARGARH - Nine people were feared drowned in the River Chenab at Head Punjnad on Tuesday.

Rescue 1122 officials said on Wednesday that a boat carrying 13 people capsized due to strong river current.

Locals said these people got onto the boat along with five motorcycles after traffic on the bridge got clogged due to an influx of picnickers at the recreational place.

Of the 13 people, six were rescued by local divers or they swam out of the river, while seven were missing till Wednesday evening.

Illegal boat operators offer their services to people to take them to other side of the river when traffic on the bridge gets stuck up.

Boat operators Qasim Borani and Jamil charged Rs200 per head from people crossing the river by boat despite the fact that the district government has imposed a ban on boat operations in Chenab and Indus rivers.

The ban was imposed in 2008 when eight people drowned in the River Chenab near Sher Shah Bridge on Aug 14 the same year.

Civil Defence and police have failed to implement the ban.

Acting DCO Muzaffar Ali Sial said rescues were searching for the bodies and police had arrested a boatman and two boat contractors.

Journalist from Alipur Syed Hasan said local divers were also taking part in the rescue operation on the request of the families of missing persons. He said divers had been promised Rs20,000 to Rs50,000 for recovery of each body.

Wednesday 22 August 2012

http://dawn.com/2012/08/23/one-body-retrieved-nine-feared-drowned-in-chenab/

continue reading

10 pupils feared dead in dormitory inferno

At least ten pupils of Asumbi Boarding Primary School, in Homa Bay County, are feared dead after a fire razed their dormitory on Wednesday night.

Initial reports indicate that the ten were among class seven and eight pupils attending August holiday tuition in the school. The institution is run by the Asumbi Catholic Church parish.

The fire is suspected to have been caused by an electricity surge after a daylong power blackout in the area.

Unconfirmed reports also indicate the dormitory's door may have been bolted from outside.

Parents whose children were at the school began streaming at the institution as soon as word on the fire went out. They were however frustrated by the school's administrators who were not forthcoming with details of the inferno.

Not even the efforts by the Police and Red Cross to get the school's administrators to give an official statement worked, as the Catholic nuns and teachers went in hiding at the convent.

Rangwe DO Daniel Cheruiot, who spoke at the scene, said he counted at least eight charred remains of girls.

“Eight bodies have been recovered from the scene and taken to the Homa Bay District Hospital Mortuary,” he said.

Mr Cheruiyot said the girls had been trapped inside the dormitory, which appeared to have been locked from outside.

Homa Bay OCPD Francis Kumut also said about ten girls were feared dead in the fire.

Parish Priest Reverend Aloise Okumu said the pupils were under the care of Catholic nuns.

Thursday 23 August 2012

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/10+orphans+feared+dead+in+dormitory+inferno/-/1056/1485326/-/v4xu26/-/index.html

continue reading

DNA Test Results Identify Phuket Fire Victims

BANGKOK – Authorities are awaiting DNA test results to confirm the identity of a third victim who died in an August 17 fire at a Phuket discotheque.

At the Office of the National Police Bureau, Pol. Lt. Gen. Jarumporn Suramanee, Assistant Commissioner, confirmed the identities of two Thai victims. A fourth victim is also being identified through forensic investigation.

The two Thai women were identified as Ms. Niphapak or Sumalee Soodtasorn, and Ms. Duangporn Bootkro.

The four charred bodies were “burnt beyond recognition” and require DNA testing to determine their identities. A total of 11 people were also injured in the fire at the Tiger Discotheque.

The other two bodies are believed to be males. One victim awaiting confirmation by DNA testing is believed to be Mr. Emmanoel Becard, a Frenchman.

To help identify Mr. Emmanoel, his nail-cutting scissors and toothbrush were retrieved from his room by the forensic Evidence Verification unit, to compare with DNA samples from his burnt body. But it is difficult to find DNA from such toiletry items, an EVU officer said.

The police are coordinating with the France embassy to compare Mr. Emmanoel’s dental records with his dentist, along with the DNA of his parents.

As for the cause of the deadly fire in the 2-story building, Pol. Lt. Gen. Jarumporn said a preliminary inspection indicated it may have started from an electric cable.

The fire appears to have started in the ceiling of a second-floor room reserved for dancing, he said. There may have been more oxygen in that area to feed the flames and cause the fire to spread rapidly, he speculated.

Other media accounts report that witnesses saw sparks coming from a lighted sign outside the building before the fire started.

The police spokesman was asked if the deadly Phuket fire had any similarities to the 2009 fire at the Santika nightclub in Bangkok. That fire on New Year’s Eve killed 66 people and injured 222 others.

Pol. Lt. Gen. Jarumporn Suramanee replied that the Phuket building had similar flammable Styrofoam material that covered 20 percent of its interior. After the Santika fire, new regulations were passed to limit the use of Styrofoam to 10 percent of a building’s interior.

The Phuket building had six fire exits to comply with regulations, the police spokesman said. But the exits appeared inadequate for the size of the building. Also, not all the exits were accessible from the ground floor.

The design of the building’s interior also does not match the application form submitted to the municipal office to operate the nightclub, he said.

Thursday 23 August 2012

http://www.pattayadailynews.com/en/2012/08/23/dna-test-results-identify-phuket-fire-victims/

continue reading