Last 'president-in-exile' reburial after misidentification

Smolensk disaster victim Ryszard Kaczorowski has been re-buried at Warsaw's Temple of Divine Providence after exhumation confirmed he was originally buried in the wrong grave.

After a mass celebrated by cardinal Kazimierz Nycz, the Metropolitan Bishop of Warsaw, the remains of Ryszard Kaczorowski, Poland's last president-in-exile, were interred in the Pantheon of Prominent Poles.

Ryszard Kaczorowski was one of ninety six victims of the plane crash in Russia in April 2010, in which President Lech Kaczynski was also killed.

Last month it was revealed that as a result of a mistake in the identification of the bodies of the victims, the body that had been buried in the Temple of Divide Province in 2010 was not that of President Kaczorowski.

His remains were mixed up with the body of another victim, buried at Warsaw’s Powązki cemetery. The two exhumations were carried last month.

The re-burial follows a similar mix-up over the remains of Anna Walentynowicz – one of the initiators of the 1980 Solidarity strikes – who also died in the Smolensk disaster.

The Royal Sigismund Bell, which hangs from the tower of the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, tolled during the ceremony on Saturday. Regarded as one of Poland’s national symbols, the bell tolls on religious and national holidays, as well as on very special occasions.

Among those attending the re-burial ceremony, apart from the late President’s family, were the First Lady Anna Komorowska and the Head of the Presidential Chancellery Jacek Michalowski.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk expressed his deepest sympathies for those who had to endure such dramatic and sorrowful moments in connecetion with the necessity for exhumations and reburials. An apology was also made by Jacek Najder, former deputy foreign minister, who was directly responsible for the wrong identification of Ryszard Kaczorowski’s body.

Ryszard Kaczorowski was born in 1919. In 1940 he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD police and sentenced to death for his activities in the Polish Scouting Association. The sentence was later changed to ten years in a concentration camp in Siberia.

Following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement of 1941, Kaczorowski was set free and joined the General Anders’s Army and fought in most battles of the Polish Second Corps, including the Battle of Monte Casino.

After the war, he settled in Britain as a political émigré.

In July 1989, he was appointed Poland’s president-in-exile and held the post for seventeen months.

On 22 December 1990 he handed over the insignia of the presidential power to Lech Wałęsa, the first democratically elected president after World War Two.

Saturday 3 November 2012

http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/117302,Last-presidentinexile-reburial-after-botched-remains-identification

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18 die in fire caused by gun attack on bus

At least 18 people were killed and five others injured when a bus was attacked by gunmen on the outskirts of Khuzdar on Friday.

The attack on the bus which was at a fuel station ignited petrol drums which caused a massive blaze that claimed most of the lives.

According to District Police Officer Fasihuddin, the bus had stopped at the station for refuelling when it came under attack.

The fire also engulfed adjoining shops and other vehicles.

The dead included eight women and four children.

Passengers who suffered burn injuries were admitted to hospital. A woman who was in a serious condition was taken to Karachi.

Some of the deceased who were identified are Dawood, Rehan, Waris, Haji Mohammad, Yasir, Reza Mohammad, Gul Bano, Hureen, Rashida, Kulsoom Bibi and Khatoon Bibi.

Chief Minister Nawab Aslam Raisani called the Khuzdar deputy commissioner and sought a report.

According to a statement issued here, the chief minister expressed displeasure over growing lawlessness in the district and directed the provincial home secretary and Inspector General of Police to visit the city.

AFP adds: Senior local official Abdul Mansoor Kakar said four gunmen had opened fire on the van with automatic rifles.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

A number of stalls selling petrol smuggled from Iran were engulfed in the fire, Mr Kakar said, with stallholders among the dead.

“Four attackers riding motorbikes opened fire on these petrol stalls and ran away after the attack,” he said.

Dr Akbar Harifal, the top administrative official in Khuzdar, confirmed the death toll.

Eleven of the 18 bodies have been identified, Mr Kakar said, but hospital officials reported that some were burned so badly that recognition was difficult.

Saturday 3 November 2012

http://dawn.com/2012/11/03/18-die-in-fire-caused-by-gun-attack-on-bus/

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Cyclone Nilam: Bodies of all missing sailors found

Chennai: The bodies of two sailors of the ship MT Pratibha Cauvery, which was grounded by cyclone Nilam, have been found near Chennai today. The two were part of the five crew members who went missing on Wednesday after a lifeboat they were using to leave the ship capsized. The bodies of three of their colleagues were found yesterday.

The body of one of the sailors was washed ashore near the Chennai harbour on Wednesday while the other was found near Adyar Estuary. Another body was found at sea later in the afternoon. All the bodies are yet to be identified.

The ship had run aground near the Besant Nagar beach in Chennai on Wednesday. While 16 managed to escape from the ship that had 37 crew members on board, one drowned while five others went missing.

Coast Guard helicopters had on Thursday rescued 15 more sailors who were trapped in the ship. The initial rescue operations on the day of the cyclone were carried out by fishermen.

When the cyclone made its landfall, the ship's captain had sent out a distress call, but got no response. The Coast Guard and the Tamil Nadu government's Coastal Security Group were unable to launch rescue operations immediately; they said the gusty winds and bad weather didn't allow it.

A Coast Guard official had said: "We do not monitor ships at ports, not even on a cyclone day. We rescue only when there is a call."

Chennai Port officials said the ship's captain had ignored instructions to leave for safe waters following the cyclone alert.But the family of one of the sailors who died while trying to abandon the ship has filed a petition in court alleging that the vessel was not sea-worthy and had no food or fuel on board. The family has also demanded an interim compensation of Rs. 25 lakh and an eventual payment of Rs. 1 crore in its petition. Following this petition, the Madras High Court yesterday ordered that the ship not be moved from its current location, off the Besant Nagar beach. An emergency tow vehicle though is on its way to Chennai to pull out the ship when it can.

Saturday 3 Novemeber 2012

http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/cyclone-nilam-bodies-all-missing-sailors-found-287880

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Remains of Pinoy truck driver in Riyadh explosion may be repatriated next month

Philippine Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Ezzedin Tago said the remains of the Filipino truck driver who was killed in a fuel tanker explosion in Riyadh may be repatriated to the Philippines in four to five weeks.

In an interview over GMA Network’s “News To Go” program on Friday, Tago said the family of the victim — Florentino Santiago — has been informed about the procedure for repatriating his remains.

“Hindi po kami ang unang nagbigay ng impormasyon [sa kanyang pamilya] kung ‘di yung kamag-anak niya rin dito at yung mga kasamahan niya sa trabaho,” Tago said.

He explained that the documents needed for the repatriation, which usually takes four to five weeks to be processed, are:

Police reports

Report of death

Morgue report, and

Approval of the Office of the Emir

Tago also said the next of kin in the PHL must fill-up an affidavit of acceptance of remains.

“This could be done at the DFA-Office of the Undersecretary for Migrant and Workers Affairs or in regional consular offices,” he said.

Meanwhile, in a text message to GMA News Online, Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) spokesperson Raul Hernandez, said Santiago ”was positively identified by his brother in law. His remains is now in Riyadh Central Mortuary at Shumeisy Hospital.” Hernandez also said Santiago was “just in the area when the explosion occured.”

Massive explosion

A report of the Reuters news agency said at least 23 people were killed when a fuel truck crashed into a flyover in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Thursday, triggering an explosion that brought down an industrial building and set fire to nearby vehicles. State-owned Ekhbariya television news channel reported on that the death toll had risen to 23 and emergency workers were still searching the collapsed building for more victims or survivors. Health ministry spokesman Saad al-Qahtani said 135 people were injured, mostly men and including some foreigners.

Although the incident took place near the headquarters of the Saudi Arabian National Guard and the Prince Nayef Arab University for Security Studies, officials speaking on state television said it was an accident.

Neither the guards’ complex nor the security university appeared to be damaged in the blast, which flattened a showroom for tractors, bulldozers and other industrial vehicles as well as damaging a busy flyover.

US ally Saudi Arabia is seen as a prime target for the al Qaeda branch based in neighbouring Yemen but the last successful attack inside the conservative Islamic kingdom was in 2006. Riyadh has cracked down on Islamist militants over the past decade, detaining thousands of suspects.

The civil defense department said a gas tanker had hit the Khureis Road flyover in eastern Riyadh, causing a gas leak and an explosion in the Zahid Tractor company’s showroom and warehouse, according to the state news agency SPA.

“The truck driver was surprised by a road accident on its route, causing it to crash into one of the pillars of the bridge,” spokesman Captain Mohamed Hubail Hammadi said.

Driver blamed

The civil defense chief, Saed al-Tweijri, said the fire had been brought under control. He blamed the tanker driver for the accident.

The warehouse, several storeys high, was levelled by the blast, which also caused severe damage to neighbouring buildings. Rubble, twisted metal and shattered glass littered a wide stretch of the surrounding area.

“I was inside the building when the blast came. Then boom, the building collapsed. Furniture, chairs and cabinets blasted into the room I was in,” said survivor Kushnoo Akhtar, a 55-year-old Pakistani worker, who was covered in dirt and bleeding from multiple cuts on his face and hands.

“My brother is still inside under the rubble. There are lots of people in there,” he said.

The blast at around 7:20 a.m. local time occurred on one of the capital’s busiest roads but because Saudi Arabia is still observing the Eid al-Adha holiday, traffic was lighter than normal.

An hour after the explosion, fires still raged in cars and trucks nearby and a column of black smoke billowed over the area.

By Thursday evening state television was still showing a large emergency operation at the site as workers picked through the flattened building with the aid of digging machinery.

Dozens of burnt-out vehicles surrounded the scene of the blast, including a small bus and other cars on top of the flyover, which was left buckled by the explosion.

Television footage and pictures posted on social media showed a body lying beside smoking vehicles and at least two charred bodies seated in a car. Another blackened corpse was visible in the remains of a truck.

More than 100 emergency personnel were combing through the wreckage on the flyover and searching for victims in the rubble of the building, one of two Riyadh outlets listed on the website of Zahid Tractor, a distributor of heavy machinery.

Saturday 3 novemebr 2012

http://pinoyoverseas.net/news/saudi-arabia/remains-of-pinoy-truck-driver-in-riyadh-explosion-may-be-repatriated-next-month.html

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Death toll from India cyclone rises to 20

The death toll from a cyclone that hit southern India rose to 20 on Friday as people started to return to their homes after the storm died down.

Cyclone Nilam, packing winds with speeds of up to 65 mph, made landfall Wednesday at Mahabalipuram in the Tamil Nadu state. About 13,000 people from low-lying areas in Tamil Nadu and the neighboring Andhra Pradesh state were evacuated.

Tamil Nadu disaster management chief Jatindra Nath Swain said five more deaths had been reported in rain-related incidents in the state since Thursday.

Separately, bodies of three of the five missing sailors of an oil tanker that ran aground off Chennai, were found washed ashore, the broadcaster NDTV reported.

On Thursday, the death-toll had stood at 12.

Swain said the impact of the storm had not been as serious as expected. He rejected reports that 150,000 people were displaced, saying the number would at most be a few hundreds.

"The cyclone toppled 5,000 electric poles and damaged 250 transformers causing blackouts in some areas. We are also assessing agricultural losses, as large areas of paddy crop was destroyed," he said.

"The situation is normal now with most people from coastal areas returning to their homes and schools and colleges opening today," he said.

The Indian Metereological Department in its final bulletin on the cyclone, said the storm had weakened into a "low pressure area" that would bring rains in Andhra Pradesh and neighboring states.

Saturday 3 November 2012

Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2012/11/02/2752822/death-toll-from-india-cyclone.html#storylink=cpy

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In disaster, Google and Twitter become tech first responders

The first wave of terror struck shortly before 3 p.m. on a Friday. "The ground, the thing that doesn't move, was moving," recalled Tomoko Sudo, who was at work when the magnitude-9.0 earthquake hit Japan last year. "It felt like it was a living creature."

Then the second shock hit: She couldn't reach family members for days in some of the hardest-hit regions in the disaster that caused some 16,000 deaths.

So Sudo, 28, turned to Google's Person Finder, which the company's engineers had up and running within two hours after the shaking stopped. The service, created after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, is a tool to help track down the missing after a disaster. When the earth convulsed that March day, the Internet was for millions of Japanese the only link to critical information and to one another.

Google, Twitter, Cisco Systems and other technology companies were thrust into the role of technological first responders, underscoring a new dimension to the services offered by Silicon Valley tech companies as the Internet becomes ubiquitous and is often more reliable than other communications systems.

One by one, Sudo tracked down loved ones, including a cousin whose house was swept away by the tsunami. She said she was "shivering" with joy as she got word that they were all right.

This help, said Gisli Olafsson, emergency response director at NetHope, a nonprofit that promotes collaboration between major tech companies and global aid organizations, is worth much more than corporate cash donations. "You have really smart people working on really difficult problems," Olafsson said. "That becomes extremely valuable."

Google employees, themselves shaken up by the quake and their inability to reach family members, immediately set about deploying services for a traumatized nation from the company's Tokyo high-rise headquarters. Some worked on their laptops throughout the night.

Saturday 3 November 2012

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-11-disaster-google-twitter-tech.html#jCp

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Staten Is. has grim Sandy aftermath

Nineteen of the city's 40 deaths are attributed to Sandy were on Staten Island.

Development on New York's Staten Island made the borough more vulnerable to the wrath of Hurricane Sandy, an educator said.

Nineteen of the city's 40 deaths attributed to the storm were on Staten Island, where roads, houses and bridges took away natural elements that would have helped absorb some of the shock when Sandy made landfall Monday, The New York Times reported.

William J. Fritz, interim president of CUNY College of Staten Island, said the borough no longer had what he called "sponges that absorb the energy of hurricanes."

"Jamaica Bay is a natural sponge with dunes and marshes that can do that," Fritz told the Times. "Barrier islands in North Carolina did that. What have we done on Staten Island? We've hardscaped our sponge. We've made roads and parking lots and houses and paved over the sponge. We've created an urban area, and you no longer have a sponge."

Fritz said the development was "one of the reasons we have that much property destruction, and I think some of the deaths."

Among the 19 dead were two neighbors who drowned in their homes, the Times said, and two boys who were wrenched from their mother's grasp by a wave as they tried to flee.

In a wooded lot, rescuers found the bodies of an 89-year-old man and his 66-year-old wife on Thursday -- the couple lived less than 500 yards away from where the bodies were found, the Times said.

Dr. Alan Benimoff, a geology lecturer at CUNY-Staten Island, said Staten Island was geographically in the wrong place when Sandy hit the Times said.

"The water didn't have anywhere else to go," he said.

Some residents of Staten Island were upset with what they perceived as a slow effort to get help into the borough, the Staten Island Advance reported.

Resident Donna Solli said she's happy that relief arrived but "I wish they had been here yesterday."

"This is a start," she said.

Saturday 3 November 2012

http://www.disasternews.net/news/article.php?articleid=5224

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Cyclonic grief for sailors’ parents running pillar to post

If death is hard to come to terms with, identifying dead kin is probably harder.

On Friday, families of the crew of beleaguered ship MT Pratibha Cauvery, rushed from one government hospital mortuary to another, to identify the bodies of their relatives. The bodies of three of the five missing sailors, who had jumped ship reportedly on their captain’s orders on Wednesday, were washed ashore and recovered by police and sent to the hospitals.

A few families at the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (GGH) were in denial, leading to some confusion over identification.

For several hours Namrata, Raj Ramesh Khamitkar’s mother, maintained that one of the bodies was not that of her son, as his hair had been shorter.

“He passed HSc. and did a course in nautical science. He spoke to us a few days before the cyclone. I used to work but gave up after he started working. He had taken a loan for his education and he told me he would take me around the world,” Ms. Namrata said amid sobs. “Now he will never come back. There is no one here and we have been sitting on the road from morning.” like beggars.” The shock of losing her son and not being comforted by familiar people was too much for her. She and her husband had their first cup of tea around noon.

Raj’s body was found around 3.30 a.m. by the family of another sailor, Jomon Joseph, and a few fishermen. “We had been searching for Jomon and we saw a body in an orange uniform under the bridge. It was wedged beneath the Napier bridge, and was finally brought it to the hospital around dawn,” said Jomon’s uncle.

As news of the recovery of the second body came, Jomon’s family arrived. His father K.J. Joseph works in a sea food company and his uncles waited as Mr. Joseph tried to bring himself to enter the mortuary and identify the body. Once in, he was relieved that it was not his son. “He worked in an oil tanker in the Gulf for a year and took up this job six months ago,” Mr. Joseph said. Jomon’s uncle said he loved cricket and was a fun-loving person person who wanted to become a sailor.

Around 7.30 a.m., Tiruvottiyur residents informed the police about a body on the beach. It was shifted to Government Stanley Hospital.

Sailor Niranjan’s father K. Kothandapani, went there to see if the body was that of his son’s. Born in Arakonnam, Niranjan completed his maritime engineering in Coimbatore. “His father is an agriculturist. Niranjan always wanted to study maritime engineering,” said his cousin, T. Satish, a software professional in the city. “He called me on Tuesday and told his mother that the ship had come ashore and he was getting into a lifeboat. He said he would be home soon,” Mr. Kothandapani added later. “There was a lot of wind and because of it we could not hear much. Then the line went dead.”

After seeing the drifting ship on a TV channel, the family came to Chennai. Mr. Kothandapani who was dressed in white dhoti and shirt, was later escorted to the Royapettah GH mortuary where he identified his son. “Niranjan was a very easy going guy with no bad habits,” said Satish, before moving on to console his uncle.

Kshitij Jadhav and his family realised that the body at the GGH was not that of Rushub Jadhav. He had stayed with his cousin, Dr. Kshitij’s family in Mumbai to finish a course in electronics. Rushub was a deck cadet.

The search is on for two more sailors – Jomon Joseph and Krishna C.P. Purayil, a trainee seaman. Krishna’s uncle Sunil Kumar described him as a happy youngster who enjoyed being on the ship. He last spoke to his family on Tuesday around 3.30 p.m. The family is still hoping Krishna will return home.

Saturday 3 November 2012

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/cyclonic-grief-for-sailors-parents-running-pillar-to-post/article4059186.ece

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