Philippine forensic workers begin identifying typhoon victims (with video)

The heartbreaking task of identifying the victims of Typhoon Haiyan begins.

More than 100 body bags line this city hall in Tacloban in the central Philippines, which bore the brunt of Friday's super typhoon.

These forensic investigators say they need fingerprints, dental records and DNA.

"We will try our best to maximize the DVI (Disaster Victim Identification) but we know that the task could be overwhelming because of the sheer number. And we are running out of time," said Emanuel Aranas, deputy director for operations at Philippine National Police Crime Lab.

Decomposing flesh may make fingerprint identification more difficult and many dental records have been lost in the devastation.

All the bodies that have not been identified will be buried in mass graves.

The Philippines has been overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and 10,000 are estimated to have died in Tacloban alone.



Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://www.trust.org/item/20131112101707-9h7du/

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Why typhoon Haiyan caused so much damage

The deadly typhoon that swept through the Philippines was one of the strongest ever recorded. But storms nearly this powerful are actually common in the eastern Pacific. Typhoon Haiyan's devastation can be chalked up to a series of bad coincidences.

Typhoons — known in our part of the world as hurricanes — gain their strength by drawing heat out of the ocean. Tropical oceans are especially warm, which is why the biggest storms, Category 4 and Category 5, emerge there. These storms also intensify when there's cool air over that hot ocean.

"The Pacific at this time of year is very ripe and juicy for big typhoons," says Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Once or twice a year we get a Category 5 typhoon out there."

"But it's a great rarity, fortunately, that a storm just happens to reach peak intensity when it's making landfall. And that's what happened in this case."

As it approached one large island in the Philippines, the storm pushed up into a broad bay. That created a 13-foot storm surge that caused widespread devastation at the head of that bay, in the city of Tacloban. Typhoon Haiyan struck the Leyte Gulf, in the Philippines, nearly dead-on, creating a 13-foot storm surge that funneled water into Tacloban city.

Typhoon Haiyan struck the Leyte Gulf, in the Philippines, nearly dead-on, creating a 13-foot storm surge that funneled water into Tacloban city.

Mountains also wring rainwater out of storms like these. And then there's the wind.

"So we had a triple whammy, of surge, very high winds and strong rainfall," Emanuel says.

Super Typhoon Haiyan could be the strongest on record, but scientists can't say for sure because they don't have direct measurements of the wind speed. Hurricane scientists usually fly into storms heading toward the United States to measure wind speed and barometric pressure. And the U.S. Navy used to do that for storms in the western Pacific. But Emanuel says budget cuts ended that practice decades ago.

"Since then, we've had to rely on satellites, mostly, to estimate typhoon intensity," he says. "And satellites are very good at detecting the presence of typhoons but they're not so great when it comes to estimating how strong they are."

Scientists at the U.S. Navy/Air Force's Joint Typhoon Warning Center infer that Haiyan produced sustained wind speeds of around 190 or 195 mph at its peak. John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist at Texas A&M University, says gusts blew up to 230 mph, which is as fast as a speeding race car.

YouTube "Imagine instead of having just one car, imagine millions of raindrops and debris moving at the same speed past you, and you're trying to stand in the middle of it," Nielsen-Gammon says. "That's the kind of force such a hurricane can generate."

The strongest hurricane or typhoon winds on record were from Camille, which struck the U.S. Gulf Coast in 1969. But its 190 mph winds don't tell the whole story. The diameter of the storm matters as well.

"Camille was a very small storm, maybe about one-fifth the size of Haiyan," he says. "So it caused a lot of devastation but over a relatively limited area."

To find out whether Haiyan had record-breaking winds, scientists may turn to amateurs for information.

"Any major storm will attract storm chasers, and Haiyan was no different," Nielsen-Gammon says. "So there were people who traveled to Tacloban specifically to get footage of the storm, and they took along some instruments. So we'll probably get some data out of that."

Of course, that number is only one way to measure the overall severity of a typhoon. The mounting death toll will be another.

And climate scientists like Nielsen-Gammon and Emanuel say that as the planet continues to heat up, so will the oceans. And that means there will be more energy available for storms — and likely more Class 4 and 5 typhoons.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/11/244572227/why-typhoon-haiyan-caused-so-much-damage

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Typhoon Haiyan: Removing dead bodies 'not a priority'

The World Health Organisation has said that the bodies of victims of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines do not pose a public health risk.

WHO said that removing the dead was important after a natural disaster, especially for the psychological recovery of survivors, but that spending vital time and resources on removing and disinfecting the dead should not be a priority yet.

Haiyan was reckoned to be the worst storm in recorded history, with an estimated 10,000 people dead and the toll expected to grow as more victims are discovered. Large parts of the country have been devastated and relief efforts were hampered by wrecked or blocked roads and bridges.

WHO said it is working with the Department of Health in the Philippines to organise aid for survivors.

Getting aid to survivors was the main priority, said WHO. Julie Hall, Philippines representative, said: "We are working closely with the Philippine government and local authorities to assess and rapidly address the life-saving needs of the people affected by this typhoon.

"WHO has an assessment team on the ground in Bohol, and we are sending teams to Cebu and Tacloban with the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination teams in support of national response efforts. WHO is flying in more than two dozen health emergency relief experts and emergency health kits for the initial response."

Medical supplies to cover the basic health needs of 120,000 people for a month have been shipped in and there are enough equipment and medicines to perform 400 surgeries, she said. Supplies to treat 3,000 cases of acute diarrhoea have also been sent.

WHO has re-emphasised the findings from a report it produced in 2006 - that relief efforts should be focused first on helping the living rather than the dead.

"Governments are frequently overwhelmed by large numbers of dead and may order mass burials in the interests of protecting public health," the report said. "Initial media focus is often on the dead and graphic images of dead bodies among the debris creates pressure on governments to 'do something'.

"There is a widespread and erroneous belief, even among some health professionals, that dead bodies are a source of disease and therefore a threat to public health. This is untrue. There has never been a documented case of an epidemic occurring after a natural disaster that could be traced to exposure to dead bodies."

WHO said misconceptions about corpses often led to the "unnecessary diversion of staff and resources at a critical time".

"Pressure from misinformed journalists and media organisations can cause governments to behave inappropriately, for example, spraying the area around dead bodies with disinfectant or covering dead bodies with lime. These operations are costly, time-consuming, require complicated logistics and coordination, take staff away from caring for survivors and are totally unnecessary.

"Care of the dead and missing is an important area of work after a disaster and is clearly a major social responsibility of government. It is very important for the psychological recovery of survivors to have their dead relatives returned to them for culturally appropriate rites and disposal.

"A well-organised system for the retrieval, storage, identification and disposal of the dead is an essential part of a national disaster management structure, but like other parts of that structure, it must be properly planned and resourced."

Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/521600/20131112/typhoon-haiyan-world-health-organisation-removing-dead.htm

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Single morgue copes with Karachi's death toll

As Ghulam Hussain prepares for another day at work as manager of the Edhi Morgue, the only functioning morgue in Karachi -- a city of more than 18 million and the explosive nerve center of Pakistan -- on the other side of town a large bundle wrapped in a white shroud is loaded by two men into an ambulance.

The red-stained shroud does a poor job of hiding the bloodied corpse inside.

On arrival at the morgue, the bundle is gingerly carried inside. On a good day, this would be the first of five bodies Hussain receives.

"Sometimes, there are as many as 10 bodies in a day and other times even more," he told UPI Next.

As the police officer rattles off details about the corpse -- where it was picked up, the clothes it was wearing, bullet wounds, any identifying features -- Hussain jots them down in the register in front of him.

He writes the number 138,289 on a piece of paper and pulls it under the string holding the shroud in place. The body is then sent to cold storage, where other wrapped corpses lie side by side on steel bunks.

"If we wash the body at once it changes the way they look and families have a hard time recognizing their loved ones," explains Hussain.

The port city of Karachi accounts for about 40 percent of the country's gross domestic product, 73 percent of its income tax and 64 percent of sales tax revenues.

Hardly a day goes by when someone is not robbed or killed, or a trussed-up body is not found by the side of the road. City newspapers carry stories of such violence daily.

Through June of this year, 1,726 killings were recorded by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. About eight people have died each day this year, on average.

Last year -- the deadliest in two decades, with 2,000 fatalities, according to the commission -- it took nine months to reach 1,800 bodies. Of the total killed this year, more than half were killed by robbers or bomb blasts.

The morgue has certainly been busier this year, Hussain said.

In March, a deadly bomb attack ripped through the city's Abbas Town area, killing 48 people.

"Even the morgue's floor was covered with charred bodies," another morgue worker, Mohammad Siddique, recalled. Siddique bathes bodies before they are sent for burial.

Hussain says of every five victims of violence, two are claimed by their families, while the rest are buried in the Edhi graveyard. The morgue charges about $10 for keeping a body in its cold storage, $6 for pre-burial bathing and $23 for an austere wooden coffin.

The fee is hardly enough to cover the cost of the electricity bill, which amounts to about $4,700 a month. Maintenance of air conditioners alone costs up to $187 per month.

The morgue was set up in 1984 by the Edhi Foundation, Pakistan's largest charity organization, after founder Abdul Sattar Edhi saw the need for somewhere unclaimed dead could be buried with customary religious honor.

The foundation was provided with 10 acres of land in Mawach Goth, an area on the outskirts of the city by Mayor Abdul Sattar Aghani, burial site administrator Anwar Kazmi told UPI Next.

The land soon filled up and the government gave the foundation 20 more acres.

Now, at least six unclaimed bodies are buried there each day.

In the first six months of the year, the foundation buried 828 unclaimed bodies. Last year, it buried more than 1,500; the previous year, more than 1,700.

"Since 1985 we have buried at least 217,000 bodies here," Kazmi said.

Two government hospitals in Karachi also have cold storage facilities, but they are seldom used, the city's chief medical examiner, Jalil Qadir, said.

"Often when bodies, including those of high-profile criminals, are kept in the hospital morgues, their relatives often come and wreck the facilities and injure doctors on duty. This is perhaps why the hospital authorities are not interested in keeping their morgues functional," the chief of forensics at Karachi's Sindh Jinnah Medical University, Dr. Muhammad Ali Mondhra, told UPI Next.

Meanwhile, corpse No. 138,289 lies on the cold steel bunk in the morgue. No. 138,281 lies beside it.

People come and go. Some have brought their late loved ones in for final burial rites. Others come searching for their loved ones.

Though Hussain's job is to guard the dead, he said it gives him a deeper appreciation of life and its fluidity.

"Once we received the body of a girl who had been raped. Her body had been found lying on the street. But her father refused to own his daughter and take her body home because he was angry at his daughter for running away," Hussain said.

"I kept the body for 11 days thinking that the father would change his mind and come back to claim it. But when it started to turn blue and decompose I had to send it for burial."

Meanwhile, two men arrive at the morgue. The younger man is looking for his older brother, missing for the past three days. He is taken inside the cold storage room to see if he can recognize someone. He does.

Corpse No. 138,281 has been identified as the victim of a shooting in the troubled south zone of Karachi.

Three days after arriving at dawn, corpse No. 138,289 is taken out of cold storage with five others. A photo is taken of the face, with the body number placed below.

Night shift workers give him his final ablution. The stained shroud is replaced. He is loaded back into an ambulance and taken to his final resting place in Mawach Goth, in the graveyard for the unknown.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://www.upi.com/UPI-Next/2013/11/11/Single-morgue-copes-with-Karachis-death-toll/91375451955667/

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BAHID conference programme and registration form now ONLINE

The conference of the British Association for Human Identification (BAHID) will take place on Saturday 30 November & Sunday 1 December at Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre in Manchester (UK).

We are pleased to announce that the conference programme and registration form for the BAHID conference are now ONLINE. The conference will take place on Saturday 30th November at Chancellors Hotel and Conference Centre in Manchester (UK). The British Association for Forensic Anthropologists (BAFA) will jointly organise a meeting and workshop on Sunday 1st December.

The usual 'welcome reception' will take place on Friday evening 29 November. The theme of the conference will be centred around ‘Preparing for Disasters’ with invited talks from forensic experts and disaster planners. BAFA will hold a meeting and a workshop on Sunday 1 December.

The registration form can be found here: http://www.bahid.org/conference/conference-registration/

The conference programme can be viewed here: http://www.bahid.org/conference/programme/

Details of the conference venue, travel directions and accommodation bookings can be found here: http://www.bahid.org/conference/venue/

Accommodation is still available at the venue. Please note that a limited number of pre-reserved rooms are available so book at your earliest convenience to avoid disappointment. To access the discounted BAHID room booking rates, delegates must quote BAHID and Booking Reference 147800 and reserve with their own debit or credit card. Twin room availability is limited, so booking early is advisable.

Single room - £50/night (incl VAT and full English breakfast)
Double room (single occupancy) - £60/night (incl VAT and FEB)
Twin room (double occupancy) - £75/night per room (incl VAT and FEB)
To book a room, delegates need to telephone Chancellors directly on 0161 306 7578 Monday - Friday between 9.00 am. and 5.00 pm., or 0161 306 7414 (main reception) outside those times.

Please note that the deadline for conference registration is Wednesday 27th November 2013.

If you have any questions, please contact j.bikker@dundee.ac.uk (BAHID Membership Secretary & conference organiser) or info@bahid.org

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DOH rejects mass burial for 'Yolanda' typhoon victims, bodies should be properly documented and identified

The fatalities in last week's onslaught of Typhoon Yolanda should be properly identified and their loved ones notified before their remains are buried in a common grave, Health Secretary Enrique Ona said Monday.

Ona said there is no need to rush the burial of the victims because dead bodies do not pose immediate health risk.

“Those are cadavers and when you die, you are no longer infected. The bacteria dies with you,” he said.

It was estimated that as many as 10,000 people may have died in Tac-loban City alone when Yolanda’s strong winds triggered a storm surge that inundated the city.

A mass burial for Philippines Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) victims, local officials planned one mass grave of between 300 to 500 bodies in one area of Tacloban.

“They can bury the dead in a mass grave only after they have been identified by the NBI (National Bureau of Investigation). It is important for the bereaved families to know where they can find their dead relatives,” he added.

Health Assistant Secretary Eric Tayag said being able to retrieve and give proper burial to the remains of their loved ones would greatly ease the anguish of survivors in the tragedy.

“It is not just about burying the dead. It is tormenting if you do not know whether your loved one is just missing or dead. So it is very important for them to be able to give the last rites for their dead relatives,” Tayag said.

Tayag said the department is set to release guidelines for mass burial to concerned local government units.

The guidelines include setting up of a “collection point” for dead bodies.

“While the dead are being documented and identified, mass grave should be prepared. Authorities in charge should know how many bodies will be placed in a grave,” he added.

More grimly, the airport has been turned into a makeshift morgue for the growing number of bodies, found stacked in churches, snagged on tree branches or underneath rubble. Mass graves have been dug to accommodate the corpses, with police chief Elmer Soria reckoning that most victims either drowned or were crushed to death by crumbling buildings.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/regions/11/11/13/doh-rejects-mass-burial-yolanda-victims

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Typhoon reaches Vietnam; 13 killed, 600K displaced

Tropical Storm Haiyan, which killed thousands as a typhoon in the Philippines, has made landfall in north Vietnam, near the border with China.

It still carried gusts of up to 157km/h (98 mph) as it arrived close to the Ha Long Bay tourist destination.

Nearly 900,000 people have been evacuated from regions at risk. Reports say at least 13 people have been killed and 81 injured.

China issued a typhoon alert for Hainan island and other southern provinces.

Chinese rescuers found two bodies off Hainan on Monday, the state-run Xinhua agency reported. They are believed to be sailors from a cargo vessel missing in the South China Sea since Sunday.

Another five crew members are still unaccounted for.

'Intense rain'

Vietnamese state media said that although at least 13 people had died, the fatalities appeared to have taken place during preparations for the storm, before it made landfall.

One of those killed was a journalist who died in an accident on her way to cover the storm, reports said.

The typhoon has decreased markedly in strength from the Category Five storm that swept through the Philippines in a day, causing mass destruction.

It is now classified as a severe tropical storm.

By 21:00 GMT on Monday, as it heads into China, it will have become a tropical depression.

Rainfall will be the main hazard. A 48-hour accumulation of 100mm to 200mm is expected, with up to 400mm over high ground.

Widespread flooding is a possibility, including in Vietnam's capital, Hanoi.

Oxfam's Vietnam director, Andy Baker, told the BBC: "We've had fairly intense rain across much of northern Vietnam, including here in Hanoi where I'm based, and there are concerns about flooding... there's been something of a storm surge of perhaps 3-4m (13ft) higher than usual."

International Federation of Red Cross representative Francis Markus, who is in Hanoi, told the BBC: "We need to be thankful that this storm system has weakened as it's hit Vietnam.

"But at the same time we also can't be complacent because having travelled over such a wide expanse of sea, it's picked up a huge amount of moisture and so we can expect very heavy rainfall with potential flooding and landslides and other dangers."

A resident of Hanoi, Nguyen Thi Uyen, told AFP he had dashed to the supermarket to stock up.

"There was not much left on the shelves... people are worried, buying food to last them for a few days."

There are reports of rising prices in the capital.

Haiyan makes landfall

Haiyan earlier swept over Vietnam's Con Co island, 30km (18 miles) off the coast of central Quang Tri province.

"All 250 people on the island, including residents and soldiers, were evacuated to underground shelters where there is enough food for several days," the Tuoi Tre newspaper said.

Boats have been ordered back to port along many coastal regions. Several hundred domestic and international flights have been cancelled. Schools have been closed for Monday in many parts of the north.

The authorities have moved 883,000 people in 11 central provinces to safe zones, according to Reuters.

Some people have complained that the warnings have come too late.

In China, Xinhua reported that the National Meteorological Center had issued a red typhoon warning - the highest alert in its four-colour typhoon warning system.

More than 13,000 people were evacuated from the major tourist resort of Sanya on Hainan.

More than 200 flights at Hainan's airports have been cancelled or delayed.

The typhoon passed by the south-western tip of Hainan as it headed for landfall on the Vietnam coast close to the China border, the Hong Kong Observatory's typhoon tracker showed.

Xinhua also said that eight people had died after being swept out to sea in northern Taiwan by waves attributed to Haiyan.

The typhoon killed up to 10,000 people in one area of the Philippines alone, with rescuers as yet unable to reach many other cut-off regions.

It brought sustained winds of 235km/h (147mph), with gusts of 275 km/h (170 mph), with waves as high as 15m (45ft), bringing up to 400mm (15.75 inches) of rain in places.

Deadly typhoons

Sept 1937 Hong Kong typhoon - 11,000 dead

Sept 1959 Typhoon Vera - deadliest to hit Japan, killing 5,238 people

Aug 1975 Typhoon Nina - about 229,000 die in China after collapse of Banqiao dam

Nov 1991 Typhoon Thelma - deadliest in the Philippines to date, killing 5-8,000

Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24890114

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29 killed in South Africa bus accident

A bus collision in South Africa killed 29 people and severely injured 11 others, on a road notorious for deadly accidents, a government spokesman said.

"The number is now 29," said Mpumalanga province safety department spokesman Joseph Mabuza, updating an earlier tally of 26 dead in yesterday's accident.

The bus collided with a truck near the town Kwaggafontein 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of the capital Pretoria.

Three of the injured had died in hospital, while eight others were still critical and another 12 slightly hurt.

The bus was traveling from Pretoria when it collided with a truck which had swerved out of its lane, said Mabuza.

"The truck driver was trying to avoid a stationary vehicle and collided with the oncoming bus," he told AFP.

"We are not sure if the truck driver and the bus driver survived the accident," he added.

The injured were taken to hospital in nearby KwaMhlangu.

The bus company's name was not immediately available.

Known as the Moloto road for one of the towns along its way, the route is notorious for deadly collisions.

Around 50,000 people commute to work in Pretoria daily along the narrow and potholed route, using 635 buses.

Transport vehicles using the road are often overloaded and unroadworthy while drivers are prone to speeding.

Last month 18 people were injured in a collision on the route, while news reports about deadly accidents are frequent.

Last year religious leaders held a prayer service for the safety of the road. A radio station also dedicated a day to profile its dangers during which a provincial minister committed to improve conditions.

In September 27 people died when a heavy-duty truck crashed into traffic near eastern city Durban, while 24 were killed when a double-decker bus crashed into a mountainous pass near Cape Town in March.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/29-killed-in-south-africa-bus-accident-government-113111200053_1.html

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Two dead, five missing from cargoship hit by typhoon Haiyan

Two seafarers are dead, and five are missing after Chinese cargo vessel disappeared in typhoon Haiyan when it struck the southern Chinese island of Hainan.

Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that a Guangxi-registered cargo vessel had broken free from its mooring on 9 November in the port of Sanya and vanished at sea after the typhoon struck the port.

Rescuers found two bodies suspected to be seafarers from the missing in the vessel. Search and rescue operations were underway for five seafarers still missing.

The typhoon Haiyan has left more than 10,000 feared dead in the central Philippines, and pictures show vessels driven ashore flattening homes in in Anibong town near Bacolod city which bore the worst of the impact of the super tyhoon when it made landfall.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://www.seatrade-global.com/news/asia/two-dead-five-missing-from-cargoship-hit-by-typhoon-haiyan.html

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Worst plane crash in RCAF history frozen in time

Seventy years later, it is still the worst accident in the history of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

On Oct. 19, 1943, an Ottawa-bound B-24 bomber crashed into a mountain just north of Montreal, killing 24 military men who were headed for some well-deserved time off.

The wreckage of the B-24 Liberator that crashed during a snowstorm still rests near the summit of Black Mountain, outside of St. Donat.

After the plane disappeared during the flight from Gander, Newfoundland, the RCAF sent more than 700 search flights to locate the wreckage.

Friends and family of those on board waited for news of survivors, but as time passed and the plane was not found, hope began to fade.

The RCAF eventually had to call off the search.

Nearly three years later, a pilot noticed a flicker of light coming from a forest, far north of where the original search had taken place, and the wreckage was discovered on the remote mountain top.

For families of the deceased, the agony of never knowing what happened had finally ended and personal belongings recovered from the crash site were sent back to grieving next of kin.

As Canadians mark Remembrance Day, the family of one of the deceased airmen, Corporal Ronald Douglas Marr, is recalling their own tragic story of loss.

“To think family didn’t know anything for 32 months about where the crash was, where his remains were… that’s a long time,” said Karen Valley, Marr’s grandniece.

It took several days for officials to make the trek to the crash site. Some family members, including Marr’s father, travelled there to hold a funeral and bury the remains of the men on the mountain.

Marr’s nephew, Graham Ingram, said although officials debated sending bodies back to families, there was no way to individually identify the remains because the wreckage was so badly burned.

“These are people who lived together, who worked together… for eternity, let them be together. I think it was a good decision,” Ingram said.

Marr was a wireless operator and armourer with the RCAF and his family still has precious personal items of his, including a helmet, photos and letters that depict some of the horrors of war.

“We’ve had a very busy three weeks, mom. The squadron is credited with nine kills on submarines and we alone made two attacks with one confirmed kill. It was pretty grim. Ships all over the ocean basically and all over the Atlantic, but one night alone we saw five ships on fire. Sickening is no word for this sight,” Marr wrote to his mother.

The family has also kept letters from the RCAF and one from King George Vl.

On this Remembrance Day, sharing their story is a way for Marr’s family to honour his sacrifice and the contributions of others who defended the freedom of all Canadians.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://globalnews.ca/news/960017/worst-plane-crash-in-rcaf-history-frozen-in-time/

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Family tracing services activated following deadly typhoon

The American Red Cross is providing support to the Philippine Red Cross for its response to Typhoon Haiyan, which caused significant damage and a rising death toll.At this time the American Red Cross can accept tracing inquiries for missing loved ones in relation to Typhoon Haiyan.

Inquiries that will be accepted that meet the following criteria:

** Sought persons living in the affected area who were in regular contact with their relatives in the United States before the event occurred.

** For family members who are not U.S. citizens.

Inquiries concerning U.S. citizens should be referred to the U.S. Department of State, Office of Overseas Citizens Services, at 1-888-407-4747.

Those concerned about a missing family member in the Philippines should remember that many phones lines are down. As a result they should continue trying to reach their loved one. If, after several attempts, persons cannot be reached, contact the local chapter of the American Red Cross to initiate a tracing case.

People who want to donate to the American Red Cross to support the response for this typhoon can go to redcross.org or call 1-800-REDCROSS. 


The Northeast Ohio Region of the American Red Cross is comprised of 13 community chapters. Together, the organization serves 22 counties and their 4.5 million residents by preventing, preparing for and responding to emergencies 24 hours per day, seven days a week.

With the vast scale of death and destruction slowly coming into focus, international relief teams rushed toward the central Philippines, where one of the strongest storms on record left bereft survivors looting food and water or scrambling for a way out.

Aid agencies said they were hurrying supplies to the area hit early Friday by the typhoon. U.S. Marines were en route from bases in Okinawa, Japan, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel directed the Pacific Command to deploy helicopters, logistics officers and cargo planes to assist the effort.

Initial reports suggested that the Philippines had escaped widespread loss of life from fast-moving Typhoon Haiyan, called Yolanda by Filipinos. But as reports trickled in Sunday from areas that had been cut off from the rest of the country, it became increasingly clear that the country had suffered a major natural disaster.

The storm weakened over the South China Sea after leaving the Philippines.

In the Philippines, police superintendent Elmer Soria told reporters that officials on the island of Leyte had estimated 10,000 deaths. The U.S. Agency for International Development said that in some parts of the central Philippines, 90 percent of the housing had been destroyed.

“There was death everywhere,” said Danny Larsen, a 35-year-old Dane, who arrived Sunday at a military airbase in Manila from Leyte’s main city, Tacloban.

With few if any cars around and no gas available, Larsen said he walked about 10 miles to the airport from a village where he had ridden out the typhoon in a basement. The road was like “death row,” he said. Multi-story buildings had been reduced to heaps of broken concrete rubble, and bodies were strewn about.

“There were people — babies, children, old people — lying out on the street, with blisters over their bodies ... hundreds of them,” said Larsen.

Television footage showed wooden houses in splinters, cars floating on their sides through floodwaters, upended trees and telephone polls and houses with their roofs blown off.

Many of the most desperate remained trapped in remote, mud-choked coastal towns without power, transportation or telephones.

In Tacloban, a city of 220,000, officials said that more than 100 bodies had been found on the airport grounds alone. The homeless and injured crowded around the airport hoping to escape, or at least to find food or fresh water.

Larsen, who had moved to Tacloban two weeks earlier with his girlfriend, said he had waited eight hours with about 1,000 people to get on a cargo plane back to Manila. Their main concern was not the typhoon damage but the lawlessness.

“Everything is being looted. ... There is no law enforcement — it’s a free-for-all,” he said. “Hotels, everything, cash registers, even McDonald’s. ... It is World War III.”

As reports trickled in from more far-flung areas, there were more tales of death and destruction.

“We just made a mass grave for 57 people,” Mayor Edgar Boco from the small coastal town of Hernani told reporters.

While survivors tried to escape, dozens of others in Manila were hoping to catch a ride on a transport plane from Manila’s Villamor Air Base to the scene of the disaster in hopes of finding out what happened to loved ones.

Philippines President Benigno Aquino III toured the area by helicopter Sunday, landing in Tacloban. Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said the storm destroyed everything in its path.

“From a helicopter, you can see the extent of devastation. From the shore and moving a kilometer inland, there are no structures standing,” Reuters news agency quoted him as saying. “I don’t know how to describe what I saw. It’s horrific.”

An initial USAID survey said the cities of Tacloban and Ormoc were “wiped out,” Jeremy Konyndyk, the agency’s director of foreign disaster assistance, said in a statement.

UNICEF said it was sending supplies for 3,000 families from stocks already in the Philippines, and that its warehouse in Copenhagen was airlifting $1.3 million worth of water purification tablets, soap, medical kits, tarpaulins and nutritional supplements for an additional 10,000 families. The World Food Program said it was preparing to send 40 metric tons of high-energy biscuits from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Mammoth Medical Missions, a nonprofit based in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., that provides health services to underserved communities, said a 16-member team had arrived in Tacloban after being diverted from a mission in Chiapas, Mexico.

As part of their mutual defense treaty, the U.S. and Philippines conduct multiple training exercises to prepare for scenarios including disaster response.

The U.S. Navy was flying two P-3 Orion surveillance planes above the islands to help rescuers locate the most severely damaged areas and find survivors.

On Sunday, about 80 Marines from the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Brigade stationed in Okinawa boarded two KC-130 cargo planes bound for the Philippines, Col. Brad Bartelt, a Marine Corps spokesman, said in a statement. They brought supplies and communications equipment.

The Marine Corps will also be sending MV-22 Osprey aircraft. The Osprey is shaped like a cargo plane, but can rotate its propellers vertically like a helicopter to land and take off without a long runway.

In a statement released Sunday, President Barack Obama said that he and first lady Michelle “are deeply saddened by the loss of life and extensive damage done by Super Typhoon Yolanda.”

“I know the incredible resiliency of the Philippine people, and I am confident that the spirit of Bayanihan will see you though this tragedy,” Obama said, adopting a term commonly used in the Philippines that means communal cooperation.

Tuesday 12 November 2013

http://www.norwalkreflector.com/article/3769341

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Typhoon Haiyan: reports of mass graves in Iloilo, difficulty coping with the number of deaths

There is no functioning morgue here, so people have been collecting the dead from Typhoon Haiyan and storing them where they can — in this case, St. Michael The Archangel Chapel.

Ten bodies have been placed on wooden pews and across a pale white floor slick with blood, debris and water. One appears to have foamed at the mouth. One has been wrapped in a white sheet, tied to a thick green bamboo pole so that people could carry it, and placed on the floor.

One body is small, and entirely covered in a red blanket.

"This is my son," says Nestor Librando, a red-eyed, 31-year-old carpenter. "He drowned."

Librando had taken refuge in a military compound nearby by the time the typhoon's storm surge poured in Friday morning. For two hours, the water rose around him. He held his 2-year-old son in one arm, his 3-year-old son in the other.

But the torrent proved too strong, and swept the family out of the building. The water rose above Librando's head and he struggled to swim. His younger son slipped from his hands and was immediately pulled under the water.

"I found his body later, behind the house" in the courtyard, sunken in the mud, he says.

"This is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life, the worst thing I could imagine," Librando says. "I brought him to this chapel because there was nowhere else to take him. I wanted Jesus Christ to bless him."

The chapel is close to the Tacloban airport, in an area where the storm felled and shredded a vast bank of trees. The water moved with such force that light poles beside a dirt road are bent to the ground at right angles.



The airport partially reopened on Monday 11 November, three days after the typhoon, but only for flights carrying relief supplies and equipment. The airport has also become a makeshift morgue for the growing number of bodies.

At a lakeshore west of the airport terminal, three bodies lay among the rocks. A man, wearing blue shorts and lying face down. A child with yellowed arms grasping skyward. A tiny baby, sprawled on its back.

More bodies lay along a muddy beach nearby. A dead man in jeans leans forward, his head in the water, his back feet somehow perched frozen above the sand and mud behind. Beside him, a child in a diaper lays partially covered by a palm frond, beside wood, debris and a green crate labeled San Miguel Brewery.

There are survivors here, too, including 22-year-old Junick de la Rea. He says the water swept him and five of his relatives off a rooftop where they had fled, but they all survived by grabbing a bunch of plastic and metal containers that happened to float by.

"Please, can you help me?" de la Rea asks a reporter. "I want you to send a message to a friend of mine," a friend who works for the German Red Cross Union.

His message: "We survived. I want to say we survived. ... We lost everything. But we are still alive — and we need help."

Bodies recovered in Iloilo buried in mass graves

“I just want to find my husband and bring him home,” said Margie Molina.

But she was also hoping that her search would not end at the morgue of Crisme Funeral Services where 20 unclaimed cadavers of victims of “supertyphoon Yolanda” (international name Haiyan) have been brought since Friday.

Margie failed to find her husband Eliseo Molina Jr. and was told to look for him at the municipal cemetery where mass graves were being dug for the decomposing bodies.

She rushed to the cemetery along with Edgie Francisco who was also looking for his father Eduardo Francisco. She feared the worst for her husband and worried how she would cope with such a loss, with three children aged 8, 7, and 4 years old to raise.

Eliseo Molina and Eduardo Francisco were crew members of the fishing boat “Segundo Wheeler,” which capsized near Apad Bay in Estancia at the height of the onslaught of the typhoon last Friday.

The crew had sought refuge at the bay but the strong winds threw the boat up three times before it was slammed upside down, according to Margie, quoting accounts of surviving colleagues of her husband.

Estancia, 153 kilometers northeast of Iloilo City, was among the worst hit towns in Iloilo.

Municipal officials have reported the recovery of 71 bodies as of Monday morning, more than half of the 133 fatalities reported for the entire Iloilo province.

The unclaimed bodies, including about 25 fishermen believed to be from Masbate, were buried in mass graves on Sunday. The fishermen died after their boats anchored at the port of Estancia were thrown up and slammed against the port by a storm surge.

“We are still picking dead bodies from the sea,” said Erol Acosta, municipal budget officer.

At the coastline, the smell of decomposing bodies mingled with diesel fuel odor. A hand stuck out from the debris.

The storm surge broke moorings of a power barge of the National Power Corp. (Napocor) and slammed the barge against the coastline, crushing several houses. Residents said bodies were still pinned under the barge.

The barge leaked diesel fuel, which coated the coastline and has been threatening the health of residents and marine life.

The barge has a maximum capacity of 1.2 million liters of diesel fuel, according to James Abayon, Napocor maintenance officer.

Coast Guard personnel were rushing the putting up of more oil spill booms to prevent the spread of the oil spill.

Estancia Mayor Cordero said they did not know where to evacuate the residents affected by the oil spill because even schools and other buildings, which were supposed to be evacuation centers were destroyed.

The town, known as the “Alaska of the Philippines” because of its seafood industry and popularity as a fish trading center, has been paralyzed after the typhoon cut off electricity and communications.

The first relief assistance started to arrive only late Sunday afternoon, two days after the supertyphoon, because roads were blocked by uprooted trees and electric posts.

Only a few roads have been cleared of debris, fallen trees and electric posts even in the town center as town officials grappled with the overwhelming destruction and the number of residents seeking assistance. Many villages were still inaccessible from the town center.

Residents were dependent on two water refilling stations for potable water and rice and food was running out.

“At least 99 percent of houses and other structures were destroyed or damaged,” Cordero said.

Several other northern towns of Iloilo have been devastated and are desperate for food, water and other relief assistance. Most of the province was still without electricity and access to communication.

The delivery of relief assistance has also been hampered by impassable roads, with many portions of the national highway from Iloilo City littered with fallen trees.

Many electric posts were toppled and thrown from one side of the highway to the other. Electric lines were being used to hang clothes by residents who lost their homes and were staying along the road.

Government agencies have sent initial food assistance to island-barangays by helicopter and by Navy boats because thousands of motorboats were destroyed, cutting off the island-barangays from the mainland.

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/nov/11/in-wrecked-chapel-10-bodies-and-a-fathers-pain/

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/525393/71-dead-in-iloilo-buried-in-mass-graves

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APFSL sets record with relentless work

The Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Laboratory (APFSL) had a point to prove in the aftermath of the horrendous Mahbubnagar bus inferno that charred 45 bodies beyond recognition.

Sharada, the in-charge director of the laboratory which will become four decades old the next year, proudly claims, “We had to do the tests under a lot of pressure and we did it in a record time of seven days.”

The government had said the process of DNA testing would take as many as 15 days.

According to the director, her team worked day and night to solve one of the most challenging tasks. “No one had any Deepavali leave or even the weekly offs. We worked relentlessly. In fact, some of us fell ill too but the work did not halt. We were relieved only after all the bodies were identified,” said the in-charge director.

APFSL which mostly investigates crime cases, had to divide its resources into five teams in for this case-collection of clues and samples from the mishap scene, a team working from the lab, one for results and interpretation, one for preparation of DNA report and for dispatch. “In previous cases that we had handled, we could gather clues like clothes, ornaments, etc. Here, we were strictly directed only to consider DNA and not any preconceived notions,” she pointed out.

The lab had to collect as many as 500 to 600 samples and sub-samples from the 42 charred bodies in order to establish their identities. “We could have finished the task much earlier. But, in one case, only one kin had submitted his samples. Hence, once we identified the DNA, we sent it to CDFD for cross checking to do away with any ambiguity,” she stated.

Funds crunch, which almost every government department complains of, according to her was not a major issue with the state government’s timely response. She said that her technicians efficiently utilised available DNA kits and the government also showed no slackness in supplying them adequate resources.

Speaking about the pressure they underwent while investigating one of the gravest accidents, she opined that the initial chaos among families and their pain also served as the impetus for the technicians to speed up the process.

She said the process of collecting the DNA involved breaking the cell wall, then the nuclear membrane, followed by collecting suitable tissues from skin, bones and muscles. This, she said was the only tedious task as most of the bodies were totally charred. “It was a relentless task of 72 hours without breaks for extracting the DNAs. Rest of the things just followed. With this, we have proved that we are prepared to face any such situations,” she stated.

Monday 11 November 2013

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Zimbabwe: Ethanol tanker fire DNA samples taken

Samples for 13 victims of the Chisumbanje ethanol tanker inferno were transferred to Harare from Mutare last Thursday where the DNA profiling is to be conducted by a team of medical experts.

The team, which is being led by Africa Institute of Biomedical Science Technology (AiBST) founder Professor Collen Masimirembwa, took tissues and blood samples from 19 relatives of the victims.

The team requires six weeks to carry out tests and then release the results.

Acting Manicaland police traffic co-ordinator Chief Inspector Cyprian Mukahanana confirmed that the team had left Mutare.

"They left here (Mutare) this morning for Harare where the tests will be conducted," Chief Insp Mukahanana said.

"The experts said they need six weeks to conduct the process before releasing the results."

Chief Insp Mukahanana said the relatives would be advised when the results were out or if there was need for them to assist during the process.

Police in Mutare said two families, the Muyambos and Mariyas, managed to identify the four victims, bringing the total number of those who have been identified to 12.

Chief Inspector Mukahanana said a post-mortem was conducted on the four bodies and the relatives ferried them to Chipinge for burial.

The Muyambo family identified three of its relatives, while the Mariya family managed to identify one.

Twenty four people were burnt, some beyond recognition, when the ethanol tanker collided head-on with a Mazda T35 truck carrying mourners, resulting in a huge inferno.

There has been confusion in the identification of the charred remains of some of the victims, with their relatives at one stage suggesting mass burial after they failed to identify them.

They later opted for DNA tests, prompting Government to engage the team of experts.

Monday 11 November 2013

http://allafrica.com/stories/201311111031.html

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Two weeks to identify bodies of Indonesian Army copter crash victims

It will take the Indonesian authorities about two weeks to identify the bodies of 13 passengers of an Indonesian Army (TNI-AD) helicopter which crashed in Malinau, North Kalimantan near the Indonesian-Malaysian border on Saturday.

The process to identify the victims involved forensic examination and matching their DNA with that of their next-of-kin, said TNI-AD Flight Centre Commandant, Brig-Jen M. Afifuddin on Monday.

Meanwhile, TNI-AD Chief of Staff General Budiman said the helicopter which was ferrying 19 passengers crashed into a 10-metre deep ravine amidst strong wind.

The dead comprised eight civilians and five military personnel.

The six survivors comprised two Army personnel and four civilians.

“The survivors, who suffered burn injuries, have been evacuated to the Tarakan Naval Hospital,” he said when contacted from Samarinda.

Regarding the removal of the bodies of the dead victims, Legowo said it could not be done on Saturday due to a limited number of helicopters and the fading light. The operation to remove the bodies will resume on Sunday.

Legowo said the helicopter crashed in thick jungle amid strong winds.

The East Kalimantan Police chief spokesman, Sr. Comr. Fajar Setiawan said the ill-fated helicopter took off from Tarakan city at about 10 a.m. local time, initially with six passengers of whom three were civilians.

“The helicopter then landed at Apauping village to take another 10 residents who were to help in the construction of the Malinau-Sarawak border guard post”. Fajar told Antara from Samarinda.

The helicopter left the village at about 10:20 a.m local time carrying 19 people on board, including three crew, and logistics heading to the Malinau-Serawak border.

“The distance between the village and the post is very far and could only be reached in three days if attempted overland,” said Fajar. “Therefore, logistics supply has to be carried out by air.”

The helicopter crashed near the post’s soccer field as it was about to land.

Earlier, Indonesian Military (TNI) chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Iskandar Sitompul confirmed the helicopter had crashed and, based on initial investigations, it was suspected the helicopter had suffered a power loss.

“The helicopter was heading to its destination when it suffered a sudden power loss causing it to crash and burst into flames,” he told Antara in Jakarta.

Iskandar said the helicopter was relatively new, being between two and three years old. There have already been two serious incidents involving Mi-17s this year.

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.nst.com.my/latest/two-weeks-to-identify-bodies-of-indonesian-army-copter-crash-victims-1.398212

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/11/10/chopper-crashes-13-dead.html

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Rescuers race to reach cut-off communities with many missing from Typhoon Haiyan

Rescue workers in the Philippines were on Monday engaged in a desperate struggle to reach areas devastated by 'Super' Typhoon Haiyan, amid fears the estimated death toll of 10,000 people could rise even further.

Even in a country inured to natural disasters, the sheer scale of the destruction wrought by ‘Super’ Typhoon Haiyan has left everyone from the estimated 9.5 million people affected by the storm, to the government and aid agencies, reeling in shock.

“Absolute bedlam” is how the Chairman of the Philippines Red Cross Richard Gordon described the situation in Tacloban City. The worst-hit area so far reached, Tacloban is where the majority of the 10,000 people believed killed are thought to have perished.

“There are an awful lot of dead people all over the place,” said Mr Gordon.

Three days after Haiyan sent tsunami-like, five metre-high waves crashing into Tacloban, destroying virtually every building in the city, corpses of both people and animals litter the streets.

Food, water and medicine are in desperately short supply and shocked survivors wander the city begging for food and water from anyone who might have it.

As the stench of rotting, bloated bodies floats through the air, the chances of disease spreading through the city’s surviving population increase by the hour.

The International Red Cross said the figure of 10,000 deaths is “realistic”. Now, the Philippines media is calling Haiyan the worst disaster to have ever hit their country of more than seven thousand separate islands.

Widespread looting and disorder in Tacloban, as starving and homeless people search for food and water, has only added to the difficulties being experienced by the authorities and aid agencies.

“The unstable security situation is a clear indication of the desperation on the ground,” Marie Madamba-Nunez, Oxfam’s spokesperson in Manila, told the Telegraph. “There have been reports of people attacking relief convoys and even helicopters are not being spared.”

With so many remote communities still cut-off from the outside world, there are real fears that the final death toll will be far higher.

Only now are the first relief teams arriving in eastern Samar province, the first place in the central Philippines to experience the full force of Haiyan’s fearsome winds and raging floods.

Estimates of the dead on Samar are already in the hundreds and thousands more are missing.

“Access has been very difficult and it’s only today that we have managed to get a team into Borongan in eastern Samar. A helicopter was able to land them,” said Mrs Madamba-Nunez.

But the coastal town of Guiuan, where Haiyan first made landfall on Friday, remains completely isolated.

Aerial footage has revealed that much of the town of 40,000 people has been flattened, raising the grim prospect that the number of dead there may match that of the destroyed city of Tacloban.

“The roads are completely impassable and there is no contact with the town, so I believe the navy will have to try and reach Guiuan,” said Mrs Madamba-Nunez.

Other severely-affected areas in the Visayas island group to the west of Tacloban and Samar are also still unreached.

“We’re still unable to get through to Roxas City. The water on the roads is hip-high and electrical posts and trees are across all the roads,” Kendra Clegg, one of a four-person UN disaster and assessment team on Panay Island in the Visayas, told the Telegraph.

The mood of the survivors too, is becoming darker. “Some people are complaining about the lack of supplies,” said Ms Clegg. “People are definitely more sullen than they were yesterday.”

Over 630,000 people have been displaced by Haiyan, and are camping out in makeshift evacuation centres, or simply sleeping in the open.

“98 per cent of the houses are destroyed in parts of northern Cebu Island, but the main problem is the lack of water,” said Tata Abella, an Oxfam worker in the town of Daanbantayan on Cebu’s far northern tip.

“People are drinking from secondary sources like wells, but these are not really safe so there’s a real risk of people falling ill.”

More than anything, the huge calamity in Tacloban means that far fewer resources are reaching the other regions devastated by Haiyan.

“The destruction in Tacloban is appalling,” said the UN’s Ms Clegg, “but it’s overshadowing the other places that were hit by the typhoon.”

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/philippines/10440265/Rescuers-race-to-reach-cut-off-communities-with-tens-of-thousands-still-missing-from-Typhoon-Haiyan.html

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Storms kills 100 in Somalia's Puntland, more missing

At least 100 people were killed over the weekend when a tropical cyclone hit Somalia's semi-autonomous Puntland region, President Abdirahman Mohamud Farole said on Monday, appealing for help from aid agencies.

"A heavy storm hit Bandarbeyle and Eyl towns on Saturday and Sunday. About a hundred people died. Hundreds of houses and livestock were swept by the floods into the ocean," Farole told reporters in the capital Garowe.

"We urge United Nations aid agencies to assist the victims. As Puntland, we have established a committee to investigate the loss and damage. Electricity, communication and fishing boats were all destroyed."

The government of Puntland said in a statement that hundreds of people remained unaccounted for and declared a natural disaster emergency.

Puntland spans the relatively calm north of Somalia and has largely escaped the worst of Somalia's upheaval of the last 20 years. Foreign powers advocating a loose federal political system in Somalia have held it up as a possible model.

The area is rich in energy resources and is being sized up by oil explorers. However, Puntland's authorities have said insecurity is growing, and blame the Islamist al Shabaab militia, which has been driven out of many regions that it used to control in the remainder of Somalia.

Monday 11 November 2013

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/11/11/uk-somalia-storm-puntland-idUKBRE9AA0KD20131111

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Bodies of trapped miners found in NCotabato

Rescuers recovered on Sunday the cadavers of six missing illegal gold miners buried alive in a tunnel in Magpet, North Cotabato that collapsed due to heavy rains over the weekend.

The victims were digging for gold inside a tunnel along a mountainside in Sitio Kaumpig in Barangay Temporan, whose entrance was blocked by soil and rocks that fell from its canopy, loosened by heavy rains.

The six miners were identified as siblings Jeneto and Jeyrold Flores, Frigel and Romnel, both surnamed Senados, Marion Catubay and his wife, Aileen.

Police investigators found out that the victims did not have any valid permit for their mining activities, which they kept secret from their local government unit.

The chairperson of Barangay Temporan, Yolly Bernabero, said they learned of the victims’ plight from their companion, Jefrey Flores, who managed to dig his way out of the tunnel.

Flores later died in a hospital while undergoing medication for his injuries.

Bernabero said rescuers had to dig through the tunnel first using farm tools to reach the location of the trapped miners.

The local government unit of Magpet has ordered the immediate closure of illegal mining sites in Barangay Temporan to prevent a repeat of the incident.

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/philippines/10440265/Rescuers-race-to-reach-cut-off-communities-with-tens-of-thousands-still-missing-from-Typhoon-Haiyan.html

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10,000 dead in Tacloban

As many as 10,000 people are believed dead in this city alone when one of the worst storms on record sent giant sea waves washing away homes, schools and airport buildings, officials said yesterday.

Hundreds of bodies have been recovered while thousands remained missing in the wake of the enormous devastation left by super typhoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) in the Visayas, authorities said.

President Benigno S. Aquino III, who landed in Tacloban yesterday to get a firsthand look at the disaster, said the casualties “will be substantially more” than the official count of 151 — but gave no figure or estimate. He said the government’s priority was to restore power and communications in isolated areas to allow for the delivery of relief and medical assistance to victims.

Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said Aquino was “speechless” when he told him of the devastation the typhoon had wrought in Tacloban.

“I told him all systems are down,” Gazmin said. “There is no power, no water, nothing. People are desperate. They’re looting.”

Ferocious winds ravaged several central islands, burying people under tons of debris and leaving corpses hanging from trees.

The typhoon hit the eastern seaboard of the Philippine archipelago Friday and barreled through six eastern and central islands before exiting into the West Philippine Sea, packing ferocious winds of 235 kph and gusts of 275 kph.

On Leyte Island, regional police chief Elmer Soria said he was told by Gov. Dominic Petilla that there were about 10,000 deaths in the province, mostly by drowning and from collapsed buildings. The figure was based on reports from village officials.

Tacloban City Administrator Tecson Lim said the death toll in the city alone “could go up to 10,000.”

Leyte’s capital is the biggest city in the province with a population of 200,000 people.

About 300-400 bodies have already been recovered but there are “still a lot under the debris,” Lim said. A mass burial was planned Sunday in Palo town near Tacloban.

Many corpses hung on tree branches, buildings and sidewalks.

It’s Horrific — Roxas

Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said a massive rescue operation was underway. “We expect a very high number of fatalities as well as injured,” Roxas said after visiting Tacloban on Saturday. “All systems, all vestiges of modern living — communications, power, water — all are down. Media is down, so there is no way to communicate with the people in a mass sort of way.”

“The devastation is, I don’t have the words for it,” Roxas said. “It’s really horrific. It’s a great human tragedy.”

The Philippines has no resources on its own to deal with a disaster of this magnitude, and the US and other governments and agencies were mounting a major relief effort, said Philippine Red Cross chairman Richard Gordon.

US, Europe Assistance

At the request of the Philippine government, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel directed US Pacific Command to deploy ships and aircraft to support search-and-rescue operations and airlift emergency supplies, according to a statement released by the Defense Department press office.

The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said in a message to Aquino that the EC had sent a team to assist the Philippine authorities and that “we stand ready to contribute with urgent relief and assistance if so required in this hour of need.”

Even by the standards of the Philippines, which is buffeted by many natural calamities — about 20 typhoons a year, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions — the latest disaster shocked the nation of 96 million people.

Deadliest Natural Catastrophe

If the typhoon death toll is confirmed, it would be the deadliest natural catastrophe on record in the Philippines. The deadliest typhoon before “Yolanda” was Tropical Storm “Uring” (international name: Thelma) in November 1991, which killed around 5,100 people in the central Philippines. The deadliest disaster so far was the 1976 magnitude-7.9 earthquake that triggered a tsunami in the Moro Gulf in the southern Philippines, killing 5,791 people.

The airport in Tacloban, about 580 km southeast of Manila, looked like a muddy wasteland of debris, with crumpled tin roofs and upturned cars. The airport tower’s glass windows were shattered, and air force helicopters were busy flying in and out at the start of relief operations. Residential homes that had lined up a 7-kilometer stretch of road leading to Tacloban City were all blown or washed away.

The winds were so strong that Tacloban residents who sought shelter at a local school tied down the roof of the building but it was still ripped off and the school collapsed, Lim said. It wasn’t clear how many died there.

The city’s two largest malls and groceries were looted and the gasoline stations destroyed by the typhoon. Police were deployed to guard a fuel depot to prevent looting of fuel.

“On the way to the airport we saw many bodies along the street,” said Philippine-born Australian Mila Ward, 53, who was waiting at the Tacloban airport to catch a military flight back to Manila.

“They were covered with just anything — tarpaulin, roofing sheets, cardboards,” she said. Asked how many, she said, “Well over 100 where we passed.”

One Tacloban resident said he and others took refuge inside a parked Jeep to protect themselves from the storm, but the vehicle was swept away by a surging wall of water.

“The water was as high as a coconut tree,” said 44-year-old Sandy Torotoro, a bicycle taxi driver who lives near the airport with his wife and 8-year-old daughter. “I got out of the Jeep and I was swept away by the rampaging water with logs, trees and our house, which was ripped off from its mooring.”

“When we were being swept by the water, many people were floating and raising their hands and yelling for help. But what can we do? We also needed to be helped,” Torotoro said.

In Torotoro’s village, bodies could be seen lying along the muddy main road, as residents who had lost their homes huddled, holding on to the few things they had managed to save. The road was lined with trees that had fallen to the ground.

Vice Mayor Jim Pe of Coron town on Busuanga, the last island battered by the typhoon before it blew away to the South China Sea, said most of the houses and buildings there had been destroyed or damaged. Five people drowned in the storm surge and three others were missing, he said by phone.

“It was like a 747 flying just above my roof,” he said, describing the sound of the winds. He said his family and some of his neighbors whose houses were destroyed took shelter in his basement.

Aquino Loses Temper

In Tacloban City, President Aquino reportedly blew his top and momentarily walked out of a briefing with disaster relief officials amid growing frustration with the government response to mitigate the tragedy.

National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council chief Eduardo del Rosario reportedly told the President that 95 percent of Tacloban City was devastated by the storm but Aquino questioned the basis of such assessment.

Aquino was reportedly irritated when Del Rosario supposedly claimed the Tacloban jail with damaged roof was just considered a “minor devastation.” The President pushed for a better government system to verify data on death and destruction left by the storm.

Radio reports also disclosed that the Chief Executive was annoyed by a proposal made by a local businessman to declare martial law or a state of emergency to restore peace and order in Tacloban.

Fatalities Elsewhere

While all attention is on the devastation in Tacloban City and the rest of Leyte, the fatalities in other parts of Visayas are also beginning to pile up as authorities begin reaching the other worst-hit areas.

In Samar, a total of 300 people were confirmed dead in the town of Basey alone. Engr. Leo Dacaynos, of the Provincial Risk Reduction and Management Council of Samar, said Basey and nearby towns are among the hardest hit in the province, adding that most of the fatalities are residents of coastal areas who drowned.

“The seawater rose to up to 20 meters because of storm surge, most of the fatalities drowned,” said Dacaynos in an interview over radio station dzBB.

In Central Visayas, a total of 40 people were reported dead in Cebu alone while three others are missing, two in Cebu and one in Bohol.

In Western Visayas, at least 67 people were reported to have died in four provinces of the region while move than 32 others are in the missing list.

In Iloilo, at least 46 people were killed according to Gov. Arthur Defensor, describing the situation in his province as “very bad.”

Capiz followed next with 17 dead. Aklan, on the other hand, has one dead while Antique has five.

In Coron, Palawan, six fatalities have been accounted, but Mayor Clara Reyes said she the number may still increase as several villages have not been reached disaster response teams.

Reyes described the wrath of the storm that hit Coron as “kasing lakas sa Tacloban.”

She said they badly need the assistance from the national government, noting that of the 24 villages in Coron, there are nine that remain isolated.

Pope’s Call For Prayers

Pope Francis on Saturday has called for prayers for the victims of Typhoon “Yolanda” especially in the Philippines. “I ask all of you to join me in prayer for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan / Yolanda especially those in the beloved islands of the Philippines,” said the Pontiff in his Twitter account @Pontifex.

Caritas Manila Appeal

Caritas Manila is appealing for donations to help the victims of “Yolanda” in the Visayas. “Let us share what we can to help Yolanda relief give to Caritas Manila Damayan,” Fr. Anton Pascual, executive director of Caritas Manila, said.

Donations in cash may be deposited at Caritas Manila Inc. Peso Bank Accounts BPI #3063-5357-01, BDO #5600-45905, Unionbank #00-030-001227-5, PNB 10-856-660001-7, Metrobnk 175-3-17506954-3.

Caritas Manila said in cash donations are used to buy contents for the family emergency relief pack, materials and medicines for first aid kits.

The social action arm of the Archdiocese of Manila also appealed for in-kind donations such as canned goods, potable water, rice, medicines, clothes, undergarments, beddings, linens, personal care and hygiene products, cleaning materials among others.

Donations may be brought to Caritas Manila office at 2002 Jesus St. Pandacan, Manila; Radyo Veritas in West Avenue-Edsa Quezon City or the nearest parish.

Evacuation Centers

Cruz said there are some 114,312 families either staying inside the evacuation centers or with their relatives in the entire region.

Iloilo has the most number of affected with 76,225 families followed by Negros Occidental with almost 13,000 and closely followed by Capiz with 11,656 families.

Some 2,990 families are inside evacuation centers in Aklan while while 1,286 in Antique.

No Power, Water

The entire provinces of Aklan, Antique and Capiz remain without power with the Capiz and Antique also suffering interrupted water supply.

In Negros Occidental, 85 percent of the power supply has already been restored while the power supply from the ILECO 1 has been fully restored.

The power supply in the areas being serviced by ILECO 2 and 3 were restored by 70 to 75 percent.

Canada Assistance

Canada announced that it will provide up to P205.9-million (Cad$5 million) in support to humanitarian organizations striving to meet the needs of the people affected by typhoon Yolanda.

According to the Canadian Embassy in Manila, emergency relief activities will include the provision of emergency shelter, food, water, livelihood support, and other essential services.

“Canada is deeply concerned by the impact of this catastrophic typhoon,” said Canadian Minister of International Development and Minister for La Francophonie Christian Paradis said in a statement. “

British Condolences

Simultaneously, British Minister of State for the Foreign Office Hugo Swire offered his condolences to the Philippines following the devastation caused by the strongest typhoon ever to hit the country this year.

A Department for International Development (DFID) team has already arrived in the Philippines to assess, in consultation with the UN and the Philippine government, what assistance the UK can offer as a matter of urgency.

*In addition to the £4 million (P276 million pesos) for the earlier emergency responses, the British government on Sunday announced a further package of up to £6 million (P414 million) for the humanitarian response to Typhoon Yolanda. *

State of Calamity Call

Lawmakers crossed party lines in calling on President Aquino to declare the country under a state of calamity after super typhoon “Yolanda” wrought havoc in Central Philippines.

The House independent bloc, led by Leyte Rep. Ferdinand Martin Romualdez and administrations solons are expected to file today a resolution putting the Philippines under a state of calamity to ensure that the much needed assistance will be extended to the typhoon-stricken provinces, particularly in Tacloban City.

“The needed assistance should be extended immediately to the areas affected by the monster typhoon especially in the hardest hit places. Let us pray for the Filipinos,” said Romualdez, whose province was battered by “Yolanda.”

2-M Families Affected

The number of families affected by super typhoon “Yolanda” has reached two million or 9.53 million individuals in eight regions by mid-Sunday, based on the latest count by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).

The number of displaced families went up to 96,039 families or 449,416 individuals staying in evacuation centers, while 36,627 families or 182,378 persons temporarily sought shelter in their relatives’ houses in Regions 4A, 4B, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 13.

DSWD has initially extended P10.6 million worth of relief assistance to Bicol Region, Western Visayas, Central Visayas, Northern Mindanao, and Caraga Region.

AFP Appeal

The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) appealed to those affected by super typhoon “Yolanda” to cooperate with authorities particularly the Philippine National Police (PNP) and Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) as the government works to restore order amidst ongoing rescue, relief and rehabilitation operations.

On its part, the AFP deployed additional 100 soldiers to help police and existing military forces in their efforts to restore peace and order in the typhoon-struck Tacloban City following the devastation left by the storm.

“As we firmly establish command and control in affected areas, we appeal to the public to be patient. We understand your emotion and frustration due to the lack of information coming out,” said Lt. Col. Ramon P. Zagala, the AFP public affairs office (PAO) chief.

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.mb.com.ph/10000-dead-in-tacloban/

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From Bosnia to Syria: the investigators identifying victims of genocide

The dead body of the man in the blue T-shirt is covered in blood, and has been dumped in a line with tens of others in the courtyard of a building in Syria. In the colour photograph, the sun is shining down on the corpses, all of whom bear the marks of violence, some showing multiple bullet wounds.

Dr Radwan Ziadeh, the director of the Damascus Centre for Human Rights Studies, clicks on to the next slide in his presentation. It shows a trench filled with the dead bodies of those killed in a massacre in Syria in 2012, the corpses lying jumbled, packed tightly on top of one another.

"That man in the blue T-shirt," says Ziadeh, looking at his audience, "is my cousin." He pauses, looking at the assembled Kurds, Iraqis, Libyans, Bosnians, Serbs, Mexicans, Americans and others in front of him, gathered in the airy auditorium of the Peace Palace in The Hague.

"I never thought," says Ziadeh, a soft-spoken man with a neat moustache and black hair, "that I would see mass graves in my country."

Many in the audience nod firmly in agreement, for, like the activist, who has been documenting human rights abuses in Syria since 2011, they have mass graves in their countries too. They have gathered here in the Netherlands to try to establish a workable method of co-ordinating the multiple, highly complex facets of dealing with the rarified and painful world that is missing persons.

"Before I finish, I want to raise the issue of 'never again'," continues Ziadeh, clicking off his PowerPoint, and handing over the podium to the next speaker. This is a quietly determined American woman who knows all too well that those words, uttered at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg more than 60 years ago, have proved somewhat hollow. With an estimated 48,000 people, mostly civilians, missing in Syria alone – victims of forced disappearances, massacres and executions – the map of world conflict nowadays would instead seem to shout "again and again".

The organisation that Kathryne Bomberger heads – the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) – has perhaps done more than any to account for many of the thousands of people missing worldwide from wars, ethnic cleansing and natural disasters. The officials gathered in front of her from multiple conflict areas bear testament to this.

Croatian president Ivo Josipovic, whose country has uncovered about 150 mass graves from the war in the 1990s, said in the auditorium: "The issue of missing persons remains at the heart of every armed conflict."

"Syria," says Bomberger, "is a looming challenge. The challenge to carry out the non-discriminatory search for the missing is the challenge of the former Yugoslavia, is the challenge of Syria, the challenge of Libya, and the challenge of Iraq."

She should know. When, in 1999, the ICMP set out to find and identify the estimated 8,100 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who had gone missing following the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in eastern Bosnia, many people said it could never be done. After all, the bodies of the men killed by the Bosnian Serb forces of General Ratko Mladic – now on trial for genocide in a Hague courtroom, a mile from the ICMP conference – had been buried in dozens of mass graves hidden in the wild Bosnian countryside. One forensic scientist said that finding the victims and giving them back their identities would be akin to "solving the world's greatest forensic puzzle".

Undaunted, Bomberger and the ICMP picked up the gauntlet, and 18 years later, using advanced DNA-identification techniques at their Sarajevo laboratory, have identified nearly 7,000 of the Srebrenica dead, along with another 10,000 people missing from the Balkans conflicts of the 90s. The small organisation, only about 175 strong, is made up of forensic scientists, geneticists, biologists, human rights experts and support staff. A high percentage are from the former Yugoslavia, tenacious and resourceful people recruited in Bosnia after the war.

ICMP has now spread its operational wings: it is helping to identify the missing of Iraq and Libya, and has identified Chilean victims of General Pinochet from the 1970s, hundreds of cases from natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Asian tsunami in December 2004, and even soldiers from the second world war.

When former British foreign secretary David Miliband, visiting their Bosnian headquarters in 2009, branded them a "global centre of excellence", he was not being overgenerous. Danish professor Niels Morling, vice-president of the International Society for Forensic Genetics, gets straight to the point: "The work of the ICMP is almost incredible – its work with DNA is, without doubt, the single most important achievement within the field of human identification with DNA."

So is it time to use this expertise to help Syria? And how? For now it is too early to say, as setting up a workable programme to handle missing persons – which means, to start with, finding and exhuming the dead – is obviously impossible while civil war is cracking across the country. And ICMP, as it says in its mandate, "provides assistance to governments", so some sort of post-conflict administration would have to be in place in Syria to request help in dealing with the thorny issue of missing persons.

But suffice to say that ICMP has already received a delegation of interested parties at its Sarajevo headquarters, which included Ziadeh.

So how on Earth, if asked, would it go looking for 48,000 missing people in a place such as Syria? What forensic science and human rights tools would it need, what judicial and legal permissions? How, in short, would it all work? And why is it so important to deal with the problem of missing people?

How it might operate forensically in Syria is reflected by how it is working this week, several hundred miles south of The Hague, in the chilly autumn of north-western Bosnia. In an enormous clay pit set in scrubby woodland outside the hamlet of Tomasica, British, American and Bosnian forensic experts from the ICMP, along with counterparts from Bosnia's Missing Persons Institute, are digging up hundreds of muddy, grey-brown corpses. These are Bosnians executed 20 years ago, painstakingly exhumed from one of the largest mass graves ever found in the country. So far, 247 complete bodies have been recovered.

It is a mammoth feat of engineering and forensics, to start with: the corpses, alleged to be victims of ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serb forces in and around the nearby town of Prijedor in 1993, are buried about 7.5 metres (25 feet) under the surface. In an area larger than a football pitch, 40,000 cubic metres of gluey, hard-packed clay has had to be removed with diggers in order to access the bodies. They lie underneath it in jumbled panoplies of death, teeth exposed, mouths open, skin still attached in greying shrouds to their skeletons, for ever frozen in their moment of mortal truth.

The decomposition of human bodies is slowed by a lack of oxidisation, and the clay in the grave has effectively sealed the bodies from the outside air. The process of saponification, whereby after death the body's tissue turns to a soap-like substance called adipocere, also called grave-wax, has been slowed. Muscular and organ tissue still clings to the skeletons.

Once exhumed, the bodies are taken to a nearby makeshift mortuary, to begin the road through ICMP's DNA laboratory system. Hopefully, for the living relatives of the Tomasica dead, who have waited 20 agonising years to find them, this will see the remains identified and returned to their families for proper burial. The legal, forensic and human rights apparatus that makes this possible – the pathologists, mortuaries, autopsies, associations of living family members, DNA labs, data-matching software, court orders – is a vast operational monolith whose running the ICMP has perfected in Bosnia since the war. Wherever it goes, it must operate within the framework of any given country's laws.



"Science cannot exist in a vacuum," says an ICMP director. "It has to coincide with a rule-of-law approach."

In The Hague, Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans called for the ICMP to be given legal status under international law to enable it to operate worldwide – a motion supported by the UK, whose successive governments have been among the 22 worldwide that have funded the organisation over the past 17 years.



Regardless of whether the victims in question are from Kosovo or Iraq or Libya – or, as at Tomasica, from Bosnia – the identification of missing people is desperately important for human rights, reconciliation and justice. It establishes accurate numbers of casualties, and they prove what happened. On history's card table, they lay down a scientifically precise ace of spades. They put in place an absolutist cornerstone of the process of rule-of-law, as establishing numbers of missing persons is also vital for any war crimes trials.

It helps with natural disasters and terrorist incidents too – ICMP staff are currently in Nairobi, assisting with the aftermath of the Westgate shopping mall attack. Last summer, when a train caught fire off Lac-Mégantic in Canada, killing 50 people, the heavily burned remains of some of the victims arrived in the Sarajevo DNA laboratory.

ICMP's work is also, with the consent of relatives of the victims, used as evidence in war crimes trials, such as those of senior Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic, being tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), also based in The Hague. This provision of evidence can thus contribute to a newly emerging form of "atrocity accountability". It issues a warning to warlords the world over that their crimes can, one day, come back to haunt them in international courts.

But first the remains of missing persons have to be identified. Since the 1970s, thousands of people have gone missing from conflicts in countries including Chile, El Salvador and Iraq, as well as the Balkans. Before the ICMP started using DNA testing in 2000, human remains were mostly identified through artefacts found with them: dentures, blood-stained clothing, documents and fingerprints – the stark, mundane memorabilia of violent human demise. The problem was that this method was unreliable.

Two years after the 1995 Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian war, President Bill Clinton introduced an initiative to found the ICMP. In the dry, formal language of mandate and policy, its job was to provide a proper accounting of the persons missing from the conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia. It then proceeded to revolutionise the process of making large numbers of DNA matches on missing persons' remains. Using blood samples taken from the living relatives of victims, it matched them with the DNA taken from skeletal remains exhumed from mass graves, such as those from Srebrenica. Bomberger says: "In the early days, while mankind had been able to map the human genome, the ICMP was using DNA technology to map a human genocide."

So how does this identification process work, and what makes the ICMP's laboratory system unique? The answer lies partly in the vast numbers of human remains it handles – 40,000 people were missing in the former Yugoslavia alone – which no other commercial or government laboratory could even approach.

Second, it has developed its own matching software and vast databases containing genetic information from nearly 100,000 people, both living and dead. From this, it developed a system that could cross-reference vast numbers of DNA samples, taken from blood given by living relatives, and that extracted from remains exhumed from graves. By November 2008, for instance, ICMP would have collected more than 86,650 blood samples from living Balkans' relatives alone. The more blood samples that were collected, the easier it proved to cross-match DNA samples taken from the bones of exhumed victims.

Third, the ICMP's laboratory system excels at extracting tiny amounts of DNA from heavily "degraded" bone samples. The DNA molecules that are best protected in bone are in the osteocytes – a type of cell – of mineralised cortical portions of hard bone, such as femurs. These are the hardest substances in the human anatomy and the ones that best resist the degradation of time and burial.

It was thus much harder for the ICMP to extract DNA from the human remains of Norwegian soldiers who had been killed on the eastern front north of Leningrad in the second world war than it was to extract DNA from Hurricane Katrina victims from 2005. The Norwegian soldiers had lain where they fell, on the surface of the Arctic tundra, for more than 60 years since 1944, frozen in winter, defrosted in summer, heavily oxidised, with interim interference from animals such as arctic foxes. The Katrina samples were fresh.

ICMP's central DNA laboratory is set in a quiet part of northern Sarajevo. The identification process for DNA profiling, or "fingerprinting", starts with blood and bone samples. Human remains, once they are exhumed from sites such as Tomasica, are washed, autopsied and catalogued. Bone samples, each about 10-15cm (4-6in) long, are cut with electric saws from the long bones, such as the femurs, of the victims.

Electric grinders are then used to scour dirt from the surface of the bone samples, which tend to absorb colouring and stains from the surrounding earth and from the clothing covering the corpse. When the ICMP was exhuming Bosnian mass graves in the years after the war, some of the clothing that sometimes appeared best-preserved was that made by Levi Strauss. A common contaminant that can impede the DNA extraction process is humic acid, a constituent part of many soil types.

Then, ground down into very fine powder, the bone samples are washed, and in a chemical solution, "lysis" takes place. This is the process of breaking down a cell so its constituent parts can be isolated for examination. The resultant liquid sample is then purified to remove any traces of detergents or reagents, spun in centrifuges and treated in devices equipped with silica membranes to which, simply put, the microscopic DNA particles adhere.

The DNA profile of a person is made by the ICMP using the Nuclear Short Tandem Repeat (STR) method. The main building blocks of the DNA molecule are four nitrogen-containing compounds called nucleobases – adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine. The DNA double helix is normally made up of two DNA molecules, whose component parts intertwine like the branches of a weaving vine.

These four nucleobases repeat all along the DNA strand, pairing off and building "base pairs" of adenine with thymine, cytosine with guanine. The patterns in which they repeat and occur on the DNA strand are different in each human being, and form the basis of STRs. If the DNA strand can be amplified millions of times, the patterns of these repeats can be identified, and a profile of them obtained. This is the human DNA profile or "fingerprint".

Yet the scientific successes of the ICMP could never have been realised without the residual human sadness of thousands of relatives of missing people. Kada Hotic is one of these. A Bosnian Muslim woman, she lost her husband, son, two brothers and an uncle at Srebrenica in 1995. Over the subsequent 18 years, as the vice-president of the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica, she has followed ICMP's development, and its exhumation of the dozens of Srebrenica mass graves. These have led to her being reunited with the correctly identified remains of her five male relatives. She sums it up simply: "ICMP has done great things: it gave us back the ones we love."

One exceptional part played in the aftermath of the Balkan wars by the ICMP was to introduce measures to ensure justice. This approach, stresses Adam Boys, the organisation's chief operating officer, a former chartered accountant from Argyll, is about the rule of law. "You simply cannot kill tens, hundreds or thousands of people and expect to get away with it," he says. "I strongly believe that this message will be increasingly reinforced so that military leaders or their governments will consider hard before they commit crimes: ICMP's legacy and the legacies of similar institutions that support the rule of law could be a diminution in the number and scale of atrocities."

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/nov/10/bosnia-syria-victims-of-genocide-dna

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