Thursday 6 June 2013

6 Bangladeshis among 9 killed in UAE factory fire


Six Bangladeshis are among the nine workers killed in a devastating fire at a pesticide factory at Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Bangladesh Embassy in the Gulf state says.

Nasrin Jahan, labour affairs official at the mission, confirmed bdnews24.com on Wednesday night of the causalities on June 2.

The official said the fire broke out at the godown of the pesticide factory from a cylinder explosion on Sunday night. The workers succumbed to the injuries later.

The Gulf News reports that the fire erupted at the factory in the Al Sajja industrial area at around 9pm last Sunday.

All 6 Bangladeshi workers are identified.

Of the eight injured workers, four succumbed to injuries in the hospital on Wednesday while police recovered two charred bodies of workers from the site the same day.

The report says the dead are of Pakistani and Bangladeshi nationalities.

Investigation into the incident is still going on.

“The intensity of the fire was very strong because the materials being burned were extremely flammable,” Gulf News quoted Brigadier Abdullah Al Suwaidi, Director-General of Sharjah Civil Defence, as saying.

“The fire broke out at the pesticide factory and spread to the adjacent wood workshop but the exact cause has not been established until we carry out an investigation. We were able in six hours to get the fire under control,” Brigadier Al Suwaidi said.

All roads were cordoned off by Anjad patrols and the area was evacuated.

Al Sajja Police station is investigating the incident, the report said.



The other four injured workers were receiving treatment at Al Qasimi and Al Kuwaiti hospitals. On Feb 4 this year, at least 22 expatriate workers including 13 Bangladeshis died and many others were injured when the bus they were travelling in collided with a lorry in the city of Al Ain.

And on Jan 12, 13 Bangladesh nationals were killed in a devastating fire in Manama, the capital of Bahrain.

Thursday 6 June 2013

http://bdnews24.com/bangladesh/2013/06/05/6-bangladeshis-among-9-killed-in-uae-factory-fire

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7 killed‚ 4 missing after landslides hit rural Taplejung


Seven including six members of a family are reportedly killed, and four other are missing when a landslide buried a house at Thukimba-6, Taplejung on Wednesday mid-night.

The deceased are identified as Astha Bahadur Siwa (69), his wife, son Salman Siwa (40), daughter-in-law Manamaya Siwa (36), grandsons Nasiram Siwa and Khagendra Siwa.

Also, 10-year-old Naina Siwa, daughter of Tej Man Siwa got killed in the mud-slide.

It is said that the incessant rainfall in the region caused the mud to bury the house resulting in the fatalities.

In the meantime, a team of police from Area Police Office, Dovan , Nepal Army, and locals are carrying on the rescue process.

Likewise, a team under command of Police Inspector Yam Bahadur Paudel have left for the disaster area which is about a day walk from the district headquarters.

In another incident in the same region at Thukimba-6, Taplejung, three persons got injured when the landslide buried the house of Kuber Singh.

Sukman Siwa is rescued in the critical condition. However, five other survived as they were able to run away when the disaster hit the house.

According to the police, the continuous rainfall in the region has been hindering the rescue process.

Thursday 6 June 2013

http://www.thehimalayantimes.com/fullNews.php?headline=7+killed%E2%80%9A+4+missing+after+landslides+hit+rural+Taplejung+&NewsID=379035

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Death toll hits 120 in deadly China fire; 90 percent of victims women; 17 unaccounted for


Authorities raised the death toll Wednesday by one to 120 in this week’s disastrous fire at a northeast China poultry processing plant, with another 17 people unaccounted for.

The State Administration of Work Safety said a total of 395 people were at work during Monday’s tragedy, the country’s worst industrial accident in almost five years.

State media reports said about 90 percent of the victims were women recruited from nearby farming villages to work part time at the sprawling Jilin Baoyuanfeng Poultry Co. plant.

Workers said all but one of the plant’s exits were locked at the time of the fire, in a clear violation of Chinese laws and safety regulations.

Authorities have detained the plant’s owner and managers, and a special commission appointed by China’s Cabinet is investigating the fire. Initial reports said it appeared to have been sparked by an explosion caused by leaking ammonia, a chemical kept pressurized as part of the cooling system in meat processing plants.

The provincial government in northeast China's Jilin Province announced on Tuesday that it will form a work team to help bereaved families following the fire that claimed at least 120 lives in Jilin's Dehui City on Monday.

Psychologists have been sent to counsel the workers.

A team of officials from Dehui arrived at the plant on Monday evening to comfort relatives of the deceased, according to officers at the scene.

Some victims' families have arrived at the scene and have demanded a government investigation into the cause of the accident as soon as possible.

Wang Rulin, secretary of the provincial Party Committee, said the government will deal with the aftermath of the accident, in part by forming a working group for each family to provide compensation and grief counseling and cater to their needs.

The disaster highlighted continuing worker safety problems in China, where about 70,000 people are killed on the job each year, due partly to corruption, poor training and lax enforcement by regulators.

It came almost 20 years after a similar fire in a toy factory in the southern city of Shenzhen where 87 young workers were killed because exits also were locked, allegedly to prevent theft.

Thursday 6 June 2013

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/locked-doors-that-trapped-fire-victims-show-work-safety-failings-in-chinas-mighty-economy/2013/06/04/f2fa4982-cd85-11e2-8573-3baeea6a2647_story.html

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-06/04/c_132429912.htm

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9 killed in Egypt's traffic accident


At least nine people were killed and six others injured on Wednesday when a microbus collided with two trucks on a main road in Giza governorate near Egypt's capital Cairo, state-run MENA news agency reported.

The security forces rushed to the scene, and the injured, as well as the bodies of the dead were taken to nearby hospitals.

Over the past two days, similar accidents have left at least 15 people dead and scores injured nationwide in Egypt.

Traffic accidents are common in Egypt, killing at least 10,000 people each year, according to recent official statements.

Lack of highway monitoring systems, poor road maintenance and negligence of traffic rules are behind the high rate of road accidents in Egypt.

Thursday 6 June 2013

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/article_xinhua.asp?id=145747

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New study shows that migrant deaths remain high in Arizona


When people’s bodies, often merely skeletons, turn up in the remote and harsh reaches of southern Arizona’s desert, it can be hard to say how or when they died, let alone who they were or where they were from.

But a comprehensive new study of 2,238 migrant deaths in Arizona over the past 23 years tackles such questions head-on and tracks the ways the answers to these questions have changed over the past two decades.

Among other findings, the study, which was released Wednesday by the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute and the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office, found that:

• One in eight migrants who have died trying to cross the border into southern Arizona since 1990 were under 19 years old.

• Many deaths are among the relatively young. About 43 percent of those who died were under 29 years old.

• Migrants increasingly are likely to die.

• Migrants in Arizona were twice as likely to die last year as in 2009, when deaths are compared with the rate of apprehensions by the Border Patrol. In the patrol’s Tucson Sector, migrants were five times as likely to die last year as in 2004.

An increasing proportion of those dying are from Central America. Over the past six years, 17 percent of migrants who died were from Central America and countries other than Mexico, up from 9 percent of those who died from 2000 to 2005.

In recent years, migrants are dying in more remote areas. Consequently, their bodies are more often decomposed when they’re found, making it harder to figure out why they died. In 46 percent of the deaths since 2006, medical examiners couldn’t determine the cause of death. By contrast, from 2000 to 2005, examiners couldn’t determine the cause of death in 20percent of the cases.

The proportion of migrants dying in auto accidents has dropped from 20 percent of deaths in the 1990s to 7 percent.

“Has there been another time in our history when government agencies have had to deal with this level of death outside of disasters?” Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, an adjunct professor at UA and one of the study’s authors, asked rhetorically. “In a sense, we are dealing with a disaster ... but politicians don’t like to talk about it. How many politicians in Washington right now are discussing deaths on the border?”

She noted that measuring or ameliorating deaths hasn’t been a major topic in the ongoing immigration-reform and border-security debate. An immigration and border-security bill is expected to be taken up on the floor of the U.S. Senate next week.

Border-crosser deaths in southern Arizona began rising sharply in 2000 as increased enforcement pushed migrants to more remote areas.

More fencing and border security was supposed to deter crossings by making them more difficult, said Robin Reineke, coordinator of the Missing Migrant Project, another of the six co-authors of the study.

“(But) they haven’t been deterred,” she said. “They have taken long, dangerous treks through the desert, and they are dying in very high numbers.”

The Medical Examiner’s Office and the Binational Migration Institute started collaborating in 2005 to track migrant deaths. Gregory Hess, Pima County’s chief medical examiner, said his office works to identify remains found in the majority of southern Arizona counties but not, with some exceptions, Yuma County.

Medical examiners work to identify the cause of death (if it hasn’t been determined by a doctor) and to identify remains. Medical examiners and forensic anthropologists use a coding system to label unidentified remains as border crossers and compare them to missing-persons reports from foreign consulates or families.

About two-thirds of remains are identified, Reineke said.

The office is a national leader in tracking bodies found in the desert. There is no federal effort to systematically collect data across counties or states, Hess said.

He said the Border Patrol does cooperate with his office and the Binational Migration Institute in compiling the data and has regularly requested data from the study’s authors to help the agency record migrant deaths, many of which are reported by local law-enforcement officers.

In response to queries from The Arizona Republic, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector office issued a written statement that its information-sharing with the university and Medical Examiner’s Office “is useful in helping us to determine where to dedicate resources specifically aimed at reducing migrant deaths and injuries along the Arizona-Mexico border.”

By contrast, Texas has nearly four times as many border counties as Arizona, each of which tracks migrant deaths separately, if they are tracked at all.

Migrant death counts from Texas are considered less reliable because of the lack of coordination among the counties, several of the study’s authors said.

Across the entire southwestern U.S. border last fiscal year, 463 migrants died, the second-highest total in the previous 15 years.

But, based on Border Patrol apprehensions, only one-third as many people crossed last year as in 2005, when 492 bodies were found.

The Tucson Sector, with 102 migrant deaths reported since the beginning of October, is still the deadliest.

Just last week, Border Patrol agents discovered the remains of five people near the town of Sells on the Tohono O’odham Reservation. Hess said that they may have been homicide victims and that personal effects found at the scene suggest they were migrants.

But rising death counts in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley may soon lead that sector to overtake the Tucson Sector.

Last year, while deaths in the Tucson Sector fell by 18, to 177, deaths in the Rio Grande Valley jumped to 150 from 66 the year before. Texas is seeing significant increases in border crossers from Central America, according to Border Patrol data.

Rail routes from southern Mexico make Texas the most direct crossing point for migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and other Central American countries.

Although the study doesn’t recommend specific steps to reduce migrant deaths, other human-rights advocacy groups have done so.

Thursday 6 June 2013

http://www.azcentral.com/news/arizona/articles/20130605arizona-border-deaths-report-migrants.html?nclick_check=1

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Jilin slaughterhouse blaze site off limits as relatives mourn


Police in Dehui, Jilin, have tightened security around a poultry slaughterhouse where at least 120 workers were killed in a fire, as bereaved relatives prepare to mark a burial day without the bodies of their loved ones.

Much of the main road leading to the Jilin Baoyuanfeng Poultry Co in Mishazi town had been off limits since yesterday. Authorities were wary of social unrest breaking out today - the third day after the deaths, which is considered a day to lay the dead to rest, according to traditions in much of northern China.

Quoting official sources, state-run media outlets such as Xinhua reported that authorities had identified 67 of the 120 bodies recovered as of late Tuesday, and nearly 80 people had been taken to hospital. Many people were still frantically searching for their loved ones yesterday.

Business owner Niu Fubiao , 36, went to the site for the second day yesterday, seeking information about his wife, Liu Fang . But riot police beat him up and detained him for several hours, Niu's brother-in-law Liu Biao said.

"We just want to talk to someone to get information about my sister to get some peace of mind, but no one is willing to talk to us," Liu said. "What did we do to deserve this? We have already lost a loved one."

The State Council yesterday vowed to conduct a thorough investigation into the tragedy, after hearing from Minister of Public Security Guo Shengkun , who had just returned from a visit to the site.

As authorities made slow progress in identifying victims' remains amid the public's frantic scramble for answers, the tragedy could be seen taking a heavy toll on the victims' relatives.

Some family members were so traumatised that they had to be admitted to hospital for problems such as heart attacks and hypertension, said Jiang Xiuling , who was tending to his elderly mother at Dehui People's Hospital. He said his daughter, a line worker in her early 20s, remained unaccounted for.

Jiang said he was angry at the authorities for not approaching families about counselling or compensation. But he added that he was currently focused on caring for his mother, who suffered a heart attack after learning that her granddaughter was among those missing.

Line worker Zhao Yaqin , 40, was fortunate to survive Monday's blaze. She was admitted to Dehui's Fuyang Hospital with a sore throat. Zhao said she and several co-workers in the hospital had not received medication for nearly a day, and had been told to wait indefinitely for respiratory equipment to be shipped in for treatment.

"We've been told not to worry about anything, including our hospital bills. But how could we possibly not worry if they start treating us like this just two days after our ordeal," she said.

Thursday 6 June 2013

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1254382/blaze-site-limits-relatives-mourn

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6 confirmed dead in Philadelphia building collapse


A woman was found alive in the rubble 13 hours after a building collapsed in Center City -- killing at least six people and injuring more than a dozen others.

The collapse at 2140 Market Street happened around 10:40 a.m. on Wednesday when a four-story building came down on top of a two-story building, which housed a Salvation Army Thrift Store. Early reports from Philadelphia Police indicate that the collapse may have been the result of an industrial accident, as construction crews were working on the nearby structure.

One woman was found dead and 13 people were rescued from the rubble during the day. Mayor Nutter says the woman was 35-years-old. Sources close to the investigation say the woman was a cashier at the thrift store and that Wednesday was her first day on the job.

"I ask all Philadelphians and all who care to keep that Philadelphia woman and her family in your prayers," Nutter said.

Crews continued to dig with the help of search dogs to see if anyone else remained trapped beneath the rubble. They found five more people dead, a man and four women, in the rubble Wednesday night. According to officials, all six people who died were inside the store at the time of the collapse. Darby Borough Police Chief Robert Smythe identified one of the victims as 68-year-old Borbor Davis of the Darby Borough. Davis, originally from Liberia, West Africa, worked at the thrift store and spoke to his wife on the phone at 10:30 a.m., 15 minutes before the building collapsed.

As crews continued to search the rubble, officials say 61-year-old Myra Plekam, who was trapped underneath, reached out and grabbed the hand of a firefighter. She was pulled out around midnight, making her the 14th person rescued. She was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania where she is currently in critical condition.

"She was talking to the firefighters as they were recovering her," said Michael Resnick of the Philadelphia Fire Department.

Nutter said the search is still active and will continue until crews are absolutely certain no one else is inside the rubble.

The fourteen rescued victims were taken to local hospitals. Most of the injuries are minor. The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania treated six of the 14 victims. A spokeswoman from the hospital says five of those victims are stable while Plekam is in critical condition. Two of those victims have been released.

Rescue crews could be seen digging through the debris and brought in at least two pieces of heavy machinery to help move debris.

"I've never encountered anything like this before anytime in my life, and I don't want to see it again," said Vey, who was driving down 22nd Street right before Market and saw the building come down. "I feel really lucky. That brick landed in my passenger seat. Lucky for the rainguard on my window that saved me from getting hit."

Ordinary people took part in the rescue efforts as well. Roofers from a nearby building hustled over after the collapse and started pulling people out of the basement.

Documents "They were pretty banged up," one of the roofers said.

The Salvation Army sent its own disaster response team to the site to help survivors and first responders. The organization sent out a statement saying, "Our number one concern is for the safety of our customers and the employees who were involved."

Market Street is closed from 18th to 30th Street right now.

Thursday 6 June 2013

http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/national_world&id=9128223

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