24 killed in road accident in western India

AHMADABAD, India - Police say a truck carrying workers has overturned on a slippery road after overnight rains in western India, killing 24 people and injuring another 25.

Police officer Bharat Bhai says the workers were on their way to Sanand, an automobile hub nearly 20 kilometres (12 miles) south of Ahmadabad, the Gujarat state's main city.

The accident occurred early Thursday. The 25 injured have been hospitalized in the area, Bhai told The Associated Press Road accidents are common in India.

Many are due to negligence, bad roads and aging vehicles.

Most of the victims were laborers transporting salt.

Thursday 14 June 2012

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/714962.shtml

11 killed after Haitian boat capsizes

CMC - The death toll from Monday’s boat accident filled with Haitian immigrants, which capsized in waters off North Abaco is expected to rise. 

Police officials in the Bahamas said that the search and rescue operations will resume today for at least 12 missing bodies. 

It’s reported that at least 28 people had boarded the boat “Glory Time” on Monday. However, 11 bodies had been recovered, while 12 other passengers were still missing. 

The police said five other passengers were able to swim to shore. 

The police said that the Haitians were heading to Florida from Abaco, when a distressed call was made after the boat encountered rough seas and was taking in water before capsizing. 

The authorities said that “officers from the Royal Bahamas Police Force, the Royal Bahamas Defence Force, the US Coast Guard, BASRA and other concerned citizens” responded to the call that had been received late Monday. 

The U.S. Coast Guard dispatched a plane based in Miami and a helicopter based on Andros Island, Bahamas, to help search for survivors. 

Haitian migrants have been coming to the Bahamas for years, fleeing severe poverty in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country. The migrants mostly try to reach the US, though some stay in the Bahamas to form a low-income workforce. 


Thursday 14 June 2012


http://go-jamaica.com/news/read_article.php?id=37805

New technology set to 'revolutionize' the identification of disaster victims

 New online tooth atlas will enable experts to assess people's teeth Forensics across the world will be better equipped to identify the age of people who die in natural disasters.

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London have developed an online interactive tool which will enable experts to assess people's teeth and accurately estimate their age.

The London Tooth Atlas is a culmination of years of research from Dr Helen Liversidge and her team at Queen Mary dedicated to dental development. Dr Liversidge said: "This interactive tool builds on the creation of our London Tooth Atlas hard copy version which was used in a number of disasters such as the New Zealand earthquake (2011). "We expect the new software will revolutionise the way forensics determine the age of victims."

Thursday 14 June 2012

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-06/qmuo-nts061212.php

The London Tooth Atlas was underpinned by the need to estimate the ages of victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami using dental data. It enables experts and students to see how teeth change between the ages of 30 weeks in utero to about 23 years.

Dr Sakher AlQahtani who works with Dr Liversidge at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry (part of Queen Mary), developed the London Tooth Atlas for his post-graduate research project. "The interactive version enables people to better understand and see the differences in tooth development up to the age of 23," he said. "It will be extremely useful for educating dental students, and assisting forensic odontology, disaster victim identification teams and archaeology, as well as in estimating the age of asylum seeking minors."

The software is available at www.atlas.dentistry.qmul.ac.uk and an app to support this will soon be available for downloading.

Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at the University of Dundee, Sue Black, said: "When working in a forensic environment, immediate access to information can be vital.

The Tooth Atlas app will prove to be invaluable as a ready source of instant detail for the forensic odontologist, forensic anthropologist and forensic pathologist."

Professor Jules Kieser, Head of the Department of Oral Sciences at the University of Otago, said: "The Atlas has been a superb help to myself and my forensic odontology colleagues. Not only do we now use it routinely, but we used it to identify victims of the Christchurch earthquake.

Importantly, if it were available as an app, it will clearly be more accessible. This is an exciting prospect that I support fully and enthusiastically!"

Quake-hit Afghan village could become mass grave

Afghanistan - An Afghan village where more than 70 people are believed to have been buried in an earthquake-triggered landslide could be declared a mass grave, an official said Wednesday.

Two shallow tremors less than half an hour apart on Monday unleashed a deluge of rock and earth that smashed into the remote village of Mullah Jan, in the mountainous Hindu Kush region.

Villagers say 71 people, all women and children, were trapped in the landslide, and a disaster management official has described the chances of anyone surviving as "slim or non-existent".

Mechanical diggers were at the site trying to clear rubble to find bodies or survivors, but Nasir Kohzad, the head of the natural disaster agency of Baghlan province, said the scale of the task made it difficult. "Part of a mountain has collapsed on a part of Mullah Jan village and there is over 60 metres of dirt to remove," he told AFP.

Pictures from the scene showed earthmovers digging through mounds of brown dirt and rock with no visible signs of buried buildings. Only three bodies have been recovered from Mullah Jan, Kohzad said, while a fourth was found in a neighbouring district.

Mullah Jan, the chief of the eponymous village, suggested declaring the site a mass grave and leaving the other victims' bodies to rest, Kohzad said.

The first quake on Monday, with a magnitude of 5.4, struck at 9.32am (0502 GMT) at a depth of 15 kilometres (10 miles) with the epicentre around 160 kilometres southwest of the town of Faizabad. A more powerful tremor, measured at 5.7 magnitude, hit around 25 minutes later in almost exactly the same place, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said.

Northern Afghanistan and Pakistan are frequently hit by earthquakes, especially around the Hindu Kush range, which lies near the collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.

A 7.6-magnitude earthquake in Pakistan in October 2005 killed 74,000 people and displaced 3.5 million

Thursday 14 June 2012

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/1207373/1/.html

Nigeria air crash: Two families lay claim to same corpse

Two families on Tuesday laid claim to the same corpse of the Dana air crash which degenerated into abusive exchanges at the Lekan Ogunsola Memorial mortuary of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) Ikeja.

This came as an unidentified relation of one of the deceased attacked LASUTH officials with a machete.

Trouble started when relations of late Mr. Jones Ifekanwa and that of another victim, identified a body of one of the deceased as theirs.

Findings by Vanguard revealed that earlier, Chief Medical Examiner, LASUTH and Consultant Pathologist and Forensic Medicine expert, Prof. John Obafunwa, had invited the Ifekanwa family to identify their late brother’s corpse which they did with some difficulty. 

The other family, it was gathered, after being invited to identify its corpse, eventually picked the same corpse earlier selected by the Ifekanwa family, as their late brother who died in the same air crash. An argument ensued and Obafunwa was forced to deny both families any claim to the body. He rather urged them to wait for a DNA test result that would be available in about four weeks.

Verbal war 
Enraged, the two families engaged in verbal war and came close to exchanging blows but for the intervention of security men.

It was gathered that while the Ifekanwas were very sure the body they identified was their late brother’s, members of the other family told Obafunwa they were not so sure that the body was actually theirs.

The Ifekanwa family, however, complained of the deplorable state of the corpse who they said was their youngest sibling, saying yesterday was the third time they had come to identify him. In their view, the corpse was getting worse with time.

A visibly shaken Jennifer Enanana, elder sister to the late Jones Ifekanwa told newsmen:”I am testifying just for my brother, Mr. Jones Ifekanwa. He was identified at the crash site. He wasn’t burnt. He had his identity card with him and some other documents in his pockets, with that they identified him.

“When we were there last Tuesday, it did not take them up to five minutes to get him to us. They even told us that we were very lucky, so they wrote his name on the body bag he was in. When we went in there, we identified his clothes and birth marks on him and everything was okay. They told us that within 48 hours he would be released. But that was not to be because they said they wanted to do DNA.

“So on Saturday we went back to check if he was properly taken care of, we found out that he was getting worse. His face was peeling off, he was deteriorating and I expressed my grievances and I told them that I did not like this and asked them when they were going to release his body to us.

“Luckily enough, Fashola said we should meet him on Sunday, which most of us did. The place was packed with people. It was agreed there that all identified bodies should be released. Can you imagine as at last Friday, they had released six bodies without us knowing.

“Meanwhile, they were claiming to us that they need DNA but they were releasing bodies without people knowing. Six bodies have gone out. It was yesterday (Monday) that we got to know about it.

Another identification
“So this morning (yesterday) I and my family came to claim our body that had been identified by them and confirmed by us to be our brother, only for us to get there, Prof. Obafunwa took us in again, traumatising my family to identify the body that had already been identified by them and confirmed and identified by us.

“They took us in and they wrapped him up as if it was a gift pack showing just his face not his ears, not his head and wrapped him up, can you imagine? And we were telling them that this is our brother whom we had identified. He has a mark on his lips and on his fore head; it is just a unique feature of him and all that.

“Could you believe that another family went inside and identified the same Jones’ body? A body that has been identified by them and confirmed by us twice, they took another family to go and identify the body, the family was already devastated and the girl came out. Because she wasn’t sure of the body, she asked him to bring out his hands because their own person has a mark in his hands. The professor refused.

“The professor came out to tell us that there was a problem on our body, that there was a contention. He said because of this he would not release the body. That means they did not store the bodies properly, that means there is something fishy going on.”

Relation attacks LASUTH officials
In another development at the same venue, drama ensued when an angry relation of the victims of the crash attacked LASUTH officials with a machete. Luckily, the unprovoked assault was aborted by a special squad of the Rapid Respond team of the Police who held on to the angry man as he shouted: “You people can eat my brother’s body if you want, since you don’t want to release him to us.”

In anticipation, the Police have stationed a special squad of the Rapid Respond team to man the mortuary for 24 hours because of such unpleasant development.

Officials of the hospital have maintained stoic silence over the matter and rebuffed overtures by media men to get his response on the development.

Two more bodies were claimed yesterday, bringing the number of claimed bodies to eight.


Wednesday 14 June 2012


http://world.myjoyonline.com/pages/nigeria/201206/88245.php