Cleansing ceremonies held at Chitungwiza’s “house of death”

Hundreds of people drawn from different Christian denominations yesterday descended on Chitungwiza’s “house of death” for a cleansing ceremony, blaming traditional healers for the death of five people in a suspected bomb blast.

Church leaders described traditional healers, popularly known as n’angas or sangomas, as agents of the devil. One of the dead was a traditional healer who was in the midst of working on a client when the blast went off.

The once peaceful Ndororo Street in Chitungwiza’s Zengeza 2 suburb is now a hub of activity as curious Zimbabweans take turns to visit the scene of the blast.

As first reported by the Daily News, a bomb is the most likely cause of the explosion which killed traditional healer Speakmore Mandere, an infant and three others who included a soldier and an ex-policeman.

The blast left close to 20 families homeless. Touched by the plight of the families now living in tents donated by Red Cross International, churches drawn from the Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC) yesterday donated food, which is the immediate need for the now homeless families.

The case has deepened the rift between the church and traditional healers with churches yesterday saying n’angas were behind much of the evil in the country.

Many Zimbabweans patronise both churches and traditional healers resulting in a tussle for loyalty.

Anglicans, Methodists and Salvation Army “soldiers” danced to “songs of hope” which were played with finesse by a percussion band.

A short prayer and then a sermon by Godfrey Gaga, the head of ZCC, targeted traditional healers for criticism.

“What happened here is a reminder to all of us that we should not trust in traditional healers. The Bible says the devil comes to steal, kill and destroy.

“What happened here is an example of what happens when people associate themselves with the devil.

Whatever it is, this is the work of the devil. Ndozvinoitika kana vanhu vakaisa pfungwa ne tariro yavo pavanhu (This is what happens if people put their trust in other people),” said Gaga.

Located 30 km southeast of Harare, Chitungwiza is a bustling town infamous for disease outbreaks and vice but the blast has put it on the international map.

“We must go back to God, Chitungwiza go back to God. I know that this area is known for believing in traditional healers. Some people move from one house to another, one n’anga to another, from Zengeza 2 to Zengeza 4, up and down St Mary’s,” thundered Gaga.

A petrified neighbourhood and traumatised victims were assured that the “spirits of darkness” that were haunting them since the explosion on Monday last week had been eliminated.

“We are going to mobilise resources from the private sector to assist these families rebuild their houses, it is written that faith without works is dead. We must show our faith by doing something for these families.

“Ndororo Street from now on is a saint street because it is now a redeemed street. No more fear because the spirits of darkness have been removed,” said Gaga.

With traditional healers conspicuously absent, Gaga urged Zimbabweans to shy away from old “pagan” practices.

Residents of Ndororo Street say they are now inundated by inquisitive people daily.

“I think we should put a toll gate and collect the proceeds from people who are coming here now and again. Some of the people who come here drive top of the range vehicles but don’t leave us anything,” said a local, Dumi Kapfeni.

Monday 28 January 2013

6 dead, 7 hurt as van falls into 300-meter ravine in Benguet

Six people were killed while seven others were injured when a van fell into a ravine in Atok, Benguet, on Sunday, the state disaster agency said.

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said the van driven by Wilbert Galino fell into an approximately 300-meter deep ravine between 1 to 2 a.m. Sunday.

The vehicle came from Mt. Province and was headed to Baguio City, the agency added.

The fatalities were identified as Lawrence Bondad, Raquel Galino, Melanie Rondalis, Kyla Rondalis, Jynnahrie Galino and Claring Abalos.

Galino, the driver, was among those injured identified as Howard Rondalis, Elmer Galino, Panganiban Galino, Fevelyn Garcia, Fritzi Bondad, and Travish Galino.

The passengers were rushed to Atok District Hospital and Benguet General Hospital, the NDRRMC said.

Monday 28 January 2013

http://www.sunstar.com.ph/breaking-news/2013/01/28/6-dead-7-hurt-van-falls-300-meter-ravine-benguet-265189

8 die when Russian fishing boat sinks in Sea of Japan

Six crewmen were killed and nine were still missing after a Russian fishing vessel sank off the coast of the Russian Far East, the emergency situations ministry said on Monday.

Rescuers found a second lift craft with five people surviving from the sunken vessel on the morning of Monday, the ministry said, adding the bodies of six crewmen were also found.

The Chance-101 fishing boat had 30 crew members on board - 19 Russians and 11 Indonesians - when it sank in Japan’s waters 50 kilometers (31 miles) east of the Svetlaya village, in Russia's Primorye Territory, on Sunday.

“As of now, 21 crew members were found [15 alive and six dead], while nine crew members are still missing,” a statement from the prosecutor’s office said.

Two life rafts were discovered near the sunken ship on Sunday. The first raft carried six Russians and four Indonesians. Five more people were later rescued from the second raft.

The search operation for the missing people continues and involves several rescue ships as well as an amphibious Beriev Be-200 aircraft and a Mil Mi-8 helicopter.

Nine ships and five airborne vehicles have been deployed to search for the missing crew members.

Monday 28 January 2013

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_01_28/8-die-when-Russian-fishing-boat-sinks-in-Sea-of-Japan/

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20130128/179069883/Six-Found-Dead-15-Rescued-From-Russian-Sunken-Ship--------.html

7 dead in NE China train-bus collision

Seven people died after a cargo train and a passenger bus collided on Monday morning in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, local government sources said.

The collision happened at 7:36 a.m. in the city of Heihe. Six people died at the scene and another died on the way to hospital. All of the victims were passengers on the bus.

The injured have been rushed to local hospitals.

The train was operated by a local railway company in Heihe.

The cause of the collision is being investigated.

Monday 28 January 2013

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-01/28/c_132132593.htm

Coalmine gas kills 8 in Balochistan

At least eight laborers were killed as toxic gas filled a coalmine in Dakki area of Loralayi in Balochistan.

Quoting rescue sources, Geo News reported on Monday morning that at least eight coalmine workers were killed.

Correspondent says as many as nine workers hailing from Swat were working in a coalmine when poisonous gas filled it. He said eight workers were killed while another fell unconscious.

Locals rushed to the spot and shifted the dead to a nearby hospital.

Monday 28 January 2013

http://www.thenews.com.pk/article-85587-Coalmine-gas-kills-8-in-Balochistan

Death toll rises to 7 in Sirnak collapse

Death toll rises to seven in Turkey's south eastern province of Sirnak following the collapse of the sustaining wall on Sunday.

Fire brigade and search and rescue teams have continued their search all night to save the people trapped in the wreckage where the sustaining wall in the football field collapsed.

The identification works are continuing for the dead and wounded.

On the other hand houses in the neighbourhood are emptied due to danger of landslip.

Monday 28 January 2013

http://www.worldbulletin.net/?aType=haber&ArticleID=102431

8 bodies found in Mexico where band went missing

At least eight bodies were pulled from a well in northern Mexico on Sunday near the site where 20 people went missing late last week, including members of a Colombian-style band, according to a state forensic official.

The Nuevo Leon State Investigative Agency was still working late into the night at the well in a vacant lot in the town of Mina near the northern city of Monterrey, and the body count could rise, said the official.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he w+as not authorized to discuss the case.

The official could not confirm whether the bodies belonged to 16 members of Kombo Kolombia and their crew, who were reported missing early Friday after playing a private show in a bar late Thursday in the next town, Hidalgo.

Authorities had been searching for two days when they came upon the well Sunday afternoon.

People living near the bar in Hidalgo municipality north of Monterrey reported hearing gunshots about 4 a.m. Friday, following by the sound of vehicles speeding away, said a source with the state agency. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be quoted by the news media.

The officials added that gunfire is common in the area, and said investigators found spent bullets nearby.

Relatives filed an official report about their missing loved ones on Friday, after they lost cellular telephone contact with them following the Thursday night performance. When family

members went to the bar to investigate, they found the band members' vehicles still parked outside.

For three years, Kombo Kolombia has played a Colombian style of music known as vallenato, which is popular in Nuevo Leon state. Most of the group's musicians were from the area, and have held large concerts in addition to bar performances.

Nuevo Leon state officials said one of those missing is a Colombian citizen with Mexican residency.

Members of other musical bands, usually groups that performed "narcocorridos" celebrating the exploits of drug traffickers, have been killed in Mexico in recent years. But Kombo Kolombia did not play that type of music and its lyrics did not deal with violence or drug trafficking.

Monday 28 January 2013

http://www.elpasotimes.com/juarez/ci_22464335/8-bodies-found-mexico-where-band-went-missing

Victims of Nazi anatomists named

Liane Berkowitz was just 19 years old when she was executed by the Nazis.

She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 when they caught her putting up posters that displayed messages of protest against an exhibition of Nazi propaganda. She was pregnant at the time of her arrest, but this just led to her execution being postponed until after the birth of her child.

Liane's grim story did not end in her death; her body was one of thousands that were delivered to anatomists and used for dissection and experimentation.

The identity of victims who met this same fate is now coming to light thanks to researchers who are scouring legal records to identify the victims of Nazi terror who ended up on anatomists' dissection tables.

Liane was one of 182 people whose corpses were claimed by the anatomy researcher Hermann Stieve, who, at the time, was a leading anatomist at the University of Berlin.

The full names of the people on "Stieve's list" - the vast majority of whom were women - has now been published by Dr Sabine Hildebrandt, a German-born anatomist based at the University of Michigan.

"Stieve himself put this list together in 1946," explained Dr Hildebrandt, who has been investigating the history of German anatomy for a decade. Stieve's own thorough record of his macabre work has enabled her to identify his victims.

Stieve's crimes have been exposed, but Dr Hildebrandt has now focused her efforts of telling the stories of his victims.

"I wanted to find out who these people were," Dr Hildebrandt told the BBC. "I wanted to make them known again."

Stieve was interested particularly in reproductive anatomy; a key reason why so many victims on his list were women.

"Before 1933, he was able to source the bodies of executed men, but no women; Germany was not executing women."

"Then, suddenly, during the Third Reich, women were being executed too."

About half of these women, including Liane Berkowitz, were executed for treason; some were betrayed to the Gestapo by fellow citizens for airing their anti-Nazi politics.

William Seidelman, former professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, has also spent years uncovering links between "medicine and murder" in the Third Reich.

In a 1999 paper in Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies he revealed some of the details of how Stieve worked closely with the prison in Berlin where prisoners were executed.

"When a woman of reproductive age was due to be executed, Stieve was informed, a date of execution was decided upon, and the prisoner told the scheduled date of her death," wrote Prof Seidelman.

"Stieve was particularly interested in the effects of stress and psychological trauma on the doomed woman's menstrual pattern.

"Upon the woman's execution, her pelvic organs were removed for examination. Stieve published reports based on those studies without hesitation or apology."

Stieve referred to the organs he used as "material". His publications during this time were some of the first to suggest that stress - in the form of being sentenced to death - disrupted a woman's menstrual cycle.

In a mission to reveal the human lives behind this "material", Dr Hildebrandt studied through the personal files of Stieve's victims, which are held at the Memorial Site for the German Resistance in Berlin.

She cross-checked each file against a copy of Stieve's list that is on file at the German Ministry of Justice, identifying every person on the list.

Dr Hildebrandt noted the correct spelling of the names of the 174 women and eight men on the list, their exact dates of birth and death, their nationality, the reason for their execution and any other biographical information she could find.

Some of the files contained personal letters expressing final wishes of condemned prisoners. "Some of them expressed wishes to be reunited with their families in death," said Dr Hildebrandt.

One letter by Libertas Schulze-Boysen, a German-born resistance fighter who was once a member of the Nazi party, but left in 1937 and went on join the resistance and collect photographic evidence documenting National Socialist crimes of violence.

Libertas was arrested in September 1942 and sentenced to death for treason in December of the same year.

In a letter to her mother, she wrote: ''As a last wish I have asked that my 'material substance' be left to you. If possible, bury me in a beautiful place amidst sunny nature.''

Dr Hildenbrandt said that her research made it "painfully clear" how little anatomists at the time were interested in the fate of the people whose bodies they
This left German anatomical research tainted by association.

Of the 31 anatomical departments at universities in Germany and its occupied territories between 1933 and 1945, Dr Hildebrandt found that "all of them - without exception - received bodies of the executed from execution chambers".

The issue only came to public attention in the past two decades.

Prof Seidelman explained that, in 1989, an anatomy lecturer at the University of Tubingen indicated that specimens he was showing were from Russian or Polish slave labourers executed during the Third Reich.

Prof Seidelman told the BBC: "The students were dismayed and demanded an explanation."

The university held a formal investigation, and all anatomy specimens of "suspect or uncertain origin" were buried in a special section of the Tubingen cemetery and, on July 8, 1990, a commemorative ceremony was held.

Several universities, have carried out formal investigations into their own anatomy departments' procurement of bodies during the Third Reich.

Many institutes in Austria were also involved, notably the University of Vienna.

"The University of Vienna had a special streetcar hearse that delivered the cadavers from the execution chamber of the regional court to the anatomy institute," explained Prof Seidelman.

Eduard Pernkopf, who was chairman of anatomy there between 1933 and 1945, left a printed legacy in the form of a now infamous anatomy tome. It is now understood that many of the incredibly detailed illustrations in Pernkopf's atlas depicted the bodies of victims of Nazi terror.

Prof Seidelman said that researchers were at the "very early stage of the journey of revealing the stories of those humans who became 'experimental material'".

"They became inanimate objects," he added.

Dr Hildebrandt agrees that the issue still casts a shadow on anatomy today, and while a great deal has been published about the crimes of the perpetrators, "German post-war anatomy was built in part on the bodies of [the] victims".

She added: "It's time to return the names to the numbers - to give faces and biographies to the so far anonymous victims of anatomy in the Third Reich in order to remember and honour their humanity and the iniquities they had to endure.

Monday 28 January 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21086388

Toxic smoke, blocked exit caused Brazil nightclub fire deaths; 3 still unidentified

A fire sparked by a music band’s fireworks swept through a nightclub thronged with University students in Southern Brazil’s Santa Maria, killing at least 233, with most of them dying after inhaling toxic smoke.

There was a university party going on in ‘Kiss nightclub’ in Brazilian city of Santa Maria when the blaze was caused by a pyrotechnics show by a band, filling the space with thick toxic fumes that were inhaled by the people rushing out to escape thus causing a stampede.

Most of the deaths were caused by the inhalation of the toxic smoke and others were crushed in the stampede of people rushing to escape through a single exit.

The single exit way was almost blocked with the bodies so much so that even the firefighters had trouble getting in the nightclub to douse the fire.

The investigation is underway and police officials said to a news agency that the band was to blame for a pyrotechnics show and that manslaughter charges could be filed.

Brazil ha declared three days of national mourning for the fire tragedy whereas in Santa maria a 30-day mourning was declared.

Also, as a sign of mourning, a ceremony due in Brazil's capital on Monday to mark 500 days to Football World Cup 2014, was cancelled.

postponed a ceremony due on Monday in the capital, Brasilia, to mark 500 days to the 2014 football World Cup. With 233 deaths, the fire disaster in the university city of Santa Maria known for its university clusters is one of the deadliest fire tragedies since December 2000, when a welding accident reportedly set off a fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309.

In 2004, at least 194 people died in a fire at an overcrowded nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Seven members of a band were sentenced to prison for starting the flames.

A blaze at the Lame Horse nightclub in Perm, Russia, killed 152 people in December 2009 after an indoor fireworks display ignited a plastic ceiling decorated with branches.

Out of 233 dead, names of 230 victims have been released and remaining three bodies are yet to be identified, the BBC reported.

100 more victims are getting treated in nearby hospitals.

President Dilma Rousseff had to cut short her Chile visit to visit the survivors at the city's Caridade hospital along with government ministers, it was reported.

"It is a tragedy for all of us," Rousseff said.

Bodies of the dead and injured were strewn in the street and panicked screams filled the air as medics tried to help. There was little to be done; officials said most of those who died were suffocated by smoke within minutes.

Within hours a community gym was a horror scene, with body after body lined up on the floor, partially covered with black plastic as family members identified kin.

Outside the gym police held up personal objects — a black purse, a blue high-heeled shoe — as people seeking information on loved ones looked crowded around, hoping not to recognize anything being shown them.

Police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello said by telephone that the toll had risen to 233 with the death of a hospitalized victim. He said earlier that the death toll was likely made worse because the nightclub appeared to have just one exit through which patrons could exit.

Federal Health Minister Alexandre Padhilha told a news conference that most of the 117 people treated in hospitals had been poisoned by gases they breathed during the fire. Only a few suffered serious burns, he said.

Monday 28 January 2013

http://www.itv.com/news/story/2013-01-27/nightclub-fire-in-brazil-kills-90/