Wednesday 24 April 2013

Afghan earthquake kills at least 3; toll may rise as remote districts hit


A tremor jolted Afghan capital Kabul and eastern provinces of Nangarhar, Laghman and Nuristan at 01: 55 p.m. local time on Wednesday, claiming the lives of three people and injuring 70 others, an official said.

“So far three dead bodies and 70 injured people, 23 of them in critical conditions, have been taken to hospitals,” Doctor Baz Mohammad Shirzad, head of public health department in Nangarhar province, told Xinhua.

He also noted that the casualties might go up as the quake hit several districts in Nangarhar, Nuristan and Laghman provinces.

The earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale was also reportedly felt in neighboring Pakistan.

Meanwhile, officials with Afghanistan Natural Disaster Management Authority have said that assessment is underway to figure out the exact casualties and properties damages in the quake.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://www.nzweek.com/world/earthquake-kills-3-afghans-wounds-70-61641/

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Rescue workers continue search for survivors in Bangladesh building collapse; toll may be higher as bodies taken away by relatives


Rescue workers were searching for survivors late into the night Wednesday after a building containing five garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh, killing at least 113 people.

Only the ground floor of the eight-storey Rana Plaza in Savar town just outside the capital Dhaka remained intact when the block - which one minister said was illegally constructed - imploded at about 9am.

Armed with concrete cutters and cranes, hundreds of fire service and army rescue workers struggled in the hope of finding more survivors in the mountain of concrete and mangled steel, which resembled the aftermath of an earthquake.

Corpses and the injured were pulled from the higher reaches of the pile of flattened floors via makeshift slides made from cloth that just hours earlier was being cut into shirts and trousers for export to Western markets.

"The whole building collapsed like a pancake within minutes. Most workers did not have any chance to escape," national fire department chief Ahmed Ali told AFP. "Many people are still trapped".

Fire fighters and soldiers cut through the building's collapsed sixth floor and managed to rescue 20 people eight hours after the accident, he said.

"We will continue searching for survivors through the night, for as long as it takes," he said.

Deputy chief of Dhaka police A.B.M Masud Hossain told AFP that at least 113 people have died in the disaster. "But the toll will be higher because some relatives took bodies without informing police," he said.

The cries of people inside the rubble begging for rescue could be heard as thousands of relatives waited anxiously nearby, some chanting the name of Allah.

"Save us please!" a woman worker cried from inside. "We're 30 people here. Please save us."

Survivors complained that the building had developed cracks on Tuesday evening, triggering an evacuation, but they had been ordered back to the production lines.

"The managers forced us to rejoin and just one hour after we entered the factory the building collapsed with a huge noise," said a 24-year-old worker who gave her first name as Mousumi.

Mustafizur Rahman, head of a police unit created to handle industrial troubles, told reporters the owners, who have gone into hiding, ignored a warning not to open their factories.

"Industrial police told the factory owners not to open their plants. The owners ignored our call and opened their factories anyway," he said.

Two of the factories in the building - New Wave Style and New Wave Bottoms - were making clothing for retailers Mango of Spain and Benetton of Italy, according to campaign group Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity.

A spokesman for Benetton however said they "are not suppliers for Benetton".

A spokeswoman for Mango, Marta Soler Morera, told AFP by email that it did not have any suppliers at the building, "although we did have contacts with one of them to produce a test production, as we do with several suppliers".

Tessel Pauli, a spokeswoman for the Amsterdam-based Clean Clothes Campaign, said the accident was "symptomatic" of problems in Bangladesh where foreign buyers often overlook safety problems in their hunt for higher profits.

The accident will likely pile more pressure on the bargain-hunters as the disaster came just months after a blaze in the Tazreen factory, which was making apparel for Walmart and others, left 111 people dead.

In the wake of that tragedy, the US threatened to cut some duty-free facilities for Bangladeshi products.

The Muslim-majority country has the second-biggest clothing industry in the world, but it is plagued by regular accidents and demonstrations by workers demanding better wages and working conditions.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina announced a national day of mourning for Thursday when flags will fly at half-mast in memory of the victims.

Hiralal Roy, a senior emergency ward doctor at the nearby Enam Hospital where victims were being taken, said at least 1000 injured people had been treated at the hospital.

"The toll will rise as the condition of some of the injured was critical," he told AFP, adding the hospital had appealed for emergency blood donations.

Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association said five factories were inside the building and together they employed around 3000 workers.

Local media said the owner of the building was a local youth wing chief of the ruling party. He was rescued alive from the rubble.

Building collapses are relatively common in Bangladesh as developers often flout construction regulations when erecting multi-storey structures.

More than 70 people were killed when a multi-storey garment factory collapsed in the Savar area in 2005.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/eight-storey-building-collapses-near-bangladesh/story-e6frg6n6-1226628907600

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Announcement BAHID Conference dates


The next Conference of the British Association for Human Identification (BAHID) will be held at Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre in Manchester on Saturday 30 November & Sunday 1 December 2013.

A welcome reception will be organised on Friday evening 29 November. Write those dates down in your diary! More details will be announced shortly..

For updates go to www.bahid.org

You can also follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/BritAssnHumanID

And Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BritishAssociationforHumanIdentification

More announcements will be made soon...

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First dental implant identification mobile APP


Have you ever found yourself staring at a new patient’s radiograph puzzled, asking yourself the question, “What implant is that?”

whatimplantisthat.com is a free reference that is working to collect a comprehensive database of implant radiographs to assist dental practitioners in answering this question.

Here you will find a database of implant radiographs categorized by common characteristics. Is your implant threaded or non-threaded? Are there any holes in the apex? Through answering some of these simple questions, you can quickly filter out the radiographs you know are not what you’re looking for, leaving you with similar radiographs to compare yours against. This is designed to make implant radiographic identification easy and practical.


Website: http://whatimplantisthat.com

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://whatimplantisthat.com

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11 confirmed dead in SW China landslide


The death toll following a landslide on Monday night in southwest China's Guizhou Province rose to 11 when two more bodies were retrieved on Wednesday morning, sources with the local emergency command center said.

The landslide occurred around 10 p.m. on Monday, burying construction workers who were repairing a road damaged by a previous landslide in Sinan County.

The accident also left two workers injured, one of them seriously. Both of the injured workers are now in non-critical conditions, sources said.

Search and rescue work ended on Wednesday, and scores of villagers nearby have been relocated to safety, according to the sources.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/777167.shtml

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No more bodies recovered in West fertilizer factory explosion


Authorities are confident no more bodies will be found in West and the death toll will stay at 15. Mayor Pro Tem Steve Vanek said this afternoon "No more victims. Everything is searched" in the daily press briefing at West City Hall.

Vanek also said the south side of town has water than can be used for cleaning, showers and household uses, but not for consumption. A boil order is still in effect for West.

The city has 100-thousand bottles of water for residents and Vanek encouraged people to use them.

We're also learning more about the investigation into how and why that fire started last week at the West Fertilizer Company.

Assistant Fire Marshal Kelly Kistner said some 70 state and federal agents are on the ground looking for clues, working from the outside in, or from the least damage to the most damaged.

TCEQ Chairman Bryan Shaw told a Texas Tribune forum in Austin Monday he suspected a rail car full of a fertilizer chemical started the fire and exploded, but Kistner Tuesday said that possibility has been ruled out. "The rail car is not the cause of the fire and explosion, it's a victim," he said.

ATF Special Agent Robert Champion said his team measured the crater created by the explosion and it is 93-feet wide and 10-feet deep.

Experts do not know what chemicals were at the plant that day, or the quantities present.

The investigation is looking at four possibilities for what sparked the fire. The first, a natural fire from an act of God or the weather, has been eliminated. The fire could have been accidental in nature, incendiary (which means it was intentionally set) or have an undetermined origin.

Kistner said investigators interviewed between 60 and 70 people Monday trying to piece together clues.

While that probe continues, preparations for Thursday's memorial service to honor 10 fallen firefighters and two civilians are moving forward. That public service at Baylor's Ferrell Center is at 2 p.m., with a firefighter procession beforehand at 11 a.m.

McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara had a stern warning for protestors from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, who have said they will be at Thursday's service.

"Make no mistake, any attempt by a group to disrupt the funeral services for victims of this tragedy will be dealt with swiftly and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," he said.

McNamara added he has the full support of District Attorney Abel Reyna on that matter.

City and county officials as well as representatives from federal and state agencies will be at a town hall meeting tonight at 6 p.m. at the West Knights of Columbus Hall to answer questions from residents about the recovery efforts.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://www.kxxv.com/story/22056969/no-more-bodies-in-west-explosion

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Woman’s body brings death toll in Mahakam boat sinking to 20


Search-and-rescue officers have recovered another body from a boat that sank in the Mahakam River in East Kalimantan last Wednesday, raising the death toll in the incident to 20.

Wahyu Widi Heranata, head of the provincial disaster mitigation agency, or BPBD, said the body found on Tuesday was that of an unidentified woman.

“Search officers found the body floating in the river about three kilometers from the site of the sinking,” he said.

Twenty people have now been confirmed dead in the incident in which the boat, the KM Arinda, carrying timber company workers, sank during a crossing to Samarinda, the provincial capital.

Twenty-one people survived, while three are missing and feared dead.

Wahyu said the search for bodies would continue, but stressed officials held out no hope of finding survivors at this point.

Separately, police said they were deepening their investigation into the incident to build their case against Tedi Noor Arifin, the 21-year-old captain of the boat who has been charged with criminal negligence for overloading the vessel.

“We’ve questioned various people as witnesses, including representatives from the timber company that hired the boat, the company that owned the boat and others,” Sr. Comr. Antonius Wisnu Sutirta, a spokesman for the provincial police, said on Tuesday.

“To date, we’ve only named the captain as a suspect. The local harbor master states the vessel had a maximum capacity of 38 people, but there were at least 44 we know of at the time of the sinking, so clearly this is a case of overloading.”

Under the criminal negligence charge against him, Tedi could face up to five years in prison. Police are considering charging him for operating a passenger vessel without a license.

Wednesday’s sinking was the latest deadly transportation accident in the Mahakam, Indonesia’s largest river, and has prompted calls for an overhaul of transportation management in and across the river.

Last September, 21 people died as a ferry capsized after hitting a log in the river just a few hours after leaving Samarinda.

The river also claimed the lives of 38 people who fell to their death when the Mahakam II Bridge in Kutai Kartanegara district collapsed in November 2011.

Hetifah Sjaifudian, a member of the House of Representatives from East Kalimantan, said the high death tolls there indicated ensuring safety was not a high priority for local transportation operators.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/womans-body-brings-death-toll-in-mahakam-sinking-to-20/587654

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Bangladesh building collapse kills at least 76 garment workers


At least 76 garment workers have been confirmed dead in Bangladesh after an eight-storey building containing clothing manufacturing units collapsed.

Mohammed Neazuddin, the health secretary, confirmed the death toll and police said hundreds of people remain trapped under the rubble.

The building in Savar, about 12 miles (20km) north of Dhaka, the capital, collapsed about 8:30 a.m. and since garment factories in the area routinely work 24 hours a day, it appeared likely that the four housed in the building were staffed at the time.

Firefighters and soldiers using drilling machines and cranes worked together with local volunteers in the search for other survivors from the building, which pancaked onto itself and stood only about two stories tall.

An official of a nearby hospital, where most of the injured were taken, said most of the dead appeared to be female workers.

Bangladesh army units and fire service personnel are conducting rescue operations with the help from local volunteers. An official of the fire service said they had rescued about 1,000 people from under the rubble.

Locals complained that the owner of the building had kept it open even after engineers had ordered the building to be evacuated on Tuesday.

Tens of thousands of people gathered at the site, some of them weeping survivors, some searching for family members. The collapse stirred memories of a fatal fire in a garment factory in November that killed 112 people and raised an outcry about safety in the nation's garment industry.

Brig. Gen. Mohammed Siddiqul Alam Shikder said "We had sent two people inside the building and we could rescue at least 20 people alive. They also told us that at least 100 to 150 people are injured and about 50 dead people are still trapped inside this floor," said Mohammad Humayun, a supervisor at one of the garment factories.

Dilara Begum, a garment worker who survived the accident, said workers were ordered to leave after a crack appeared in the wall of the building on Tuesday. But on Wednesday morning supervisors had asked them to return to work, saying the building had been inspected and was safe.

"The whole world seemed to shake and then all was dark," said Begum, who worked at the Phantom apparels factory on the fourth floor of the building. She said she was pulled out by locals.

The commercial building called Rana Plaza had developed cracks at about 9am on Tuesday. The building housed four garment factories, where an estimated 5,000 workers were employed, a bank and some shops. The bank had pulled its employees on Tuesday, locals said.

The incident is the latest in a series of industrial accidents in Bangladesh. In November, a fire at the Tazreen Fashions Limited factory killed 111 workers. An inquiry committee blamed the factory management for criminal negligence. The November fire at the Tazreen garment factory drew international attention to the conditions workers toil under in the $20 billion-a-year textile industry in Bangladesh. The country has about 4,000 garment factories and exports clothes to leading Western retailers. The industry wields vast power in the South Asian nation.

Tazreen lacked emergency exits and its owner said only three floors of the eight-story building were legally built. Surviving employees said gates had been locked and managers had told them to go back to work after the fire alarm went off.

In 2005, the Spectrum sweater factory in Dhaka collapsed, killing 64 and injuring 80.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/24/bangladesh-building-collapse-kills-garment-workers

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Doubt cast over Guatemala ex-dictator's genocide trial


The trial of a former dictator accused of genocide has divided the country and pitted judge against judge, becoming the biggest test yet of Guatemala's fragile justice system.

Until a few days ago, a panel of judges was nearing a verdict in the trial of Efraรญn Rรญos Montt, who ruled Guatemala for 17 months in 1982 and 1983.

He is accused of ordering the massacre of hundreds of indigenous Mayans in this highlands region during military campaigns against leftist guerrillas. Mr. Rรญos Montt maintains he is innocent.

Last week, another judge issued a surprise ruling to nullify the trial on technical grounds. That sparked a fight with the trial's presiding judge, who refused to accept it and insisted the case would go on. This week, the country's top court was weighing in as the final arbiter, with a decision likely in coming days.

The uncertainty has stirred anxiety in Guatemala, where the trial has conjured anew memories of the Cold War-era civil war that claimed some 200,000 lives over 36 years.

Perhaps as important, experts say, the case is testing Guatemala's ability to try war-crime cases.

"There are islands of democracy here, but it remains a sea of impunity," said Anita Isaacs, a political-science professor who studies Guatemala at Haverford College, near Philadelphia.



The current president, Otto Pรฉrez Molina—himself a former commander under Mr. Rรญos Montt—had been accused during the trial of also having committed war crimes, something he vigorously denies.



Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department on Tuesday said it was sending a top war-crimes diplomat, Stephen Rapp, to visit alleged victims in the case.

In recent weeks, dozens of people took the witness stand to recall military campaigns, which they said included villages burned to the ground by soldiers and dozens of abductions and killings.

Mr. Rรญos Montt gave a full-throated defense of his de facto presidency, arguing that his targets were armed leftist guerrilla groups, not civilians. He had no knowledge of the worst events, his attorneys said.

The case centers on the killings of hundreds of civilians in an area called the Ixil Triangle, where the main town of Nebaj is surrounded by mountains that were inhabited by guerrilla fighters in the 1980s.

Mr. Rรญos Montt entered office in 1982 after a coup and vowed to stamp out the guerrilla presence in Nebaj and surrounding towns.

He was a controversial figure both then and now, feared by rebels and many indigenous people but supported by others who felt he was turning the tide in Guatemala's long war.

Last week, a team of forensics experts began an exhumation of victims killed during Mr. Rรญos Montt's tenure at a military base on the outskirts of Nebaj. Signs along the road offer Guatemalans free services for DNA testing on the remains of loved ones recovered from clandestine graves as a means of positively identifying the bodies.

Approached by a reporter during the trial, Mr. Rรญos Montt declined to comment. But his attorney, Francisco Palomo, said Mr. Rรญos Montt could not be held accountable for the actions of his soldiers at the time.

Mr. Palomo said that while villages had been burned and civilians were killed by soldiers during Mr. Rรญos Montt's tenure, it didn't qualify as genocide and happened without his client's knowledge.

"Just as the president of the United States might not know the specifics of what his troops have done…he didn't either," Mr. Palomo said.

Guatemala's Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who brought the case to trial, had called the decision last week to annul the case illegal and said that she was confident of getting a conviction.

She says two military documents entered into evidence showed that Mr. Rรญos Montt had knowledge of civilian massacres and suggest that they came at his orders.

"They used the words 'extermination' and 'liquidation' in their documents" when referring to the Ixil people, Ms. Paz y Paz said. "This is a strong case."

Mr. Rรญos Montt's trial was many years in the making.

Charges were first brought to a Spanish judge in Madrid in 1999 by Rigoberta Menchรบ, an indigenous activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ms. Menchรบ's father was killed by authorities while hiding in the Spanish Embassy in 1980 when Mr. Rรญos Montt was a high-ranking military official.

In a recent interview, Ms. Menchรบ said she took the case to Spain "because here in Guatemala they didn't try war crimes." That case remains in court.

But as the investigation in Spain developed, so did Guatemala's attempts to build its own institutions.

In late 2006, it established the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, known as the CICIG in Spanish, a joint venture with international prosecutors and judges sponsored by the United Nations.

The CICIG's mandate—to specifically target top-level Guatemalan officials who had escaped prosecution—was a major step in clearing the way to begin war crimes trials in the country, said Ms. Isaacs, the political-science professor.

U.N. jurists also trained many of the Guatemalan prosecutors who are now involved in Mr. Rรญos Montt's case.

Mr. Rรญos Montt, who had returned to political life as a congressman in the 1990s, was at first shielded from prosecution under Guatemala's immunity laws.

But when his term ran out last year, prosecutors filed the charges against him.

Residents interviewed in Nebaj recently described some brutal scenes from those years involving villages destroyed and relatives lost after the arrest by soldiers.

Nicolรกs Corio, a community organizer who was 10-years-old when Mr. Rรญos Montt took office, remembered his village being bombed by government aircraft. He said soldiers later arrived, burned the villagers' homes, destroyed corn crops and killed livestock.

Elena de Paz, 42, who testified during the trial, said soldiers abducted her mother in 1983 and she never heard from her again. Her grandparents and father had previously disappeared in military custody, she said.

"I am the only one who survived," she said, standing near the remnants of a bomb dropped in 1983. "There are people who say [Mr. Rรญos Montt] is old, let him out. But he still can think, and he knows he's guilty."

Mr. Palomo said that contrary to the trial testimony, Mr. Rรญos Montt still enjoys support in Nebaj. His political party, the Guatemalan Republican Front, still garners many votes there, as it did during Mr. Rรญos Montt's long term in the Congress, although he never represented the area personally.

"If it were true that the military had been so bad, would they still vote for him years later?" he said.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323551004578437013856080192.html

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Another avalanche body of Shaheed soldier recovered from Gayari


The body of another Shaheed soldier was recovered from the Gayari sector of Siachen on Monday, bringing the total number of bodies recovered so far to 123.

According to an ISPR press release issued here, it was the second body of a Shaheed soldier which was recovered after the resumption of the search operation at Gayari. On 7 April 2012, 140 soldiers and civilians of the 6 Northern Light Infantry Battalion came under a huge snow slide at Gayari and embraced Shahadat. In all, 121 bodies of Shuhada were recovered before the suspension of Operation Gayari due to the winter on 27 November 2012.

After an improvement in weather and melting of snow, the search for remaining 19 Shuhada commenced on 15 April,2013 by employing 228 military personnel and 29 heavy engineering equipment pieces including excavators, dozers and drill machines.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-2-173001-Another-body-of-Shaheed-soldier-recovered-from-Gayari

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