Texas tornado outbreak kills at least 6

A rash of tornados whirled through small communities in North Texas overnight, leaving at least six people dead, dozens more injured and hundreds homeless. The violent spring storm threw trailers onto cars, blew windows from houses and scattered bodies far from their homes.

In Granbury, the worst-hit city, a tornado tore through two neighborhoods around 8 p.m. Wednesday. Resident Elizabeth Tovar described the fist-sized hail that heralded the tornado's arrival and prompted her and her family to hide in their bathroom.

"We were all, like, hugging in the bathtub, and that's when it started happening. I heard glass shattering, and I knew my house was going," Tovar said, shaking her head. "We looked up and … the whole ceiling was gone."

Local authorities had a news conference scheduled for 8 a.m. CT to outline the extent of the damage visible after daybreak.

Behind one house in the storm's path, a detached garage was stripped of much of its aluminum siding, the door caved in and the roof torn off. A tree behind the house was stripped of most of its branches and a vacant doublewide mobile home on an adjoining lot was torn apart.

Daniel and Amanda Layne initially thought they were safe sheltering under their carport. But then "it started getting worse and worse," and the couple took shelter in their bathroom, Daniel Layne said.

"The windows and the cars are gone. Both our cars are messed up. I had a big shop. Ain't a piece of it left now," Layne said with a shrug.

Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds described the devastating aftermath and the hunt for bodies.

"Some were found in houses. Some were found around houses," Deeds said. "There was a report that two of these people that they found were not even near their homes. So we're going to have to search the area out there."

He said officials were trying to account for 14 people.

About 50 people were taken to a Granbury hospital, where 14 were admitted for treatment of injuries and two were transferred to a hospital in Fort Worth, about 35 miles to the northeast, Deeds said. Yet more gathered at a local elementary school where paramedics provided on-site treatment. Matt Zavadsky, a spokesman for MedStar Mobile Healthcare, estimated that as many as 100 people were injured.

Another tornado that storm spotters told the National Weather Service was a mile wide tore through Cleburne, a courthouse city of about 30,000 about 25 miles southeast of Granbury.

There were no reports of deaths in that storm, Cleburne Mayor Scott Cain said, "but we do have the potential for some injuries." In one neighborhood, a trucking company trailer that had been parked on the street was picked up and dropped onto a nearby car and garage.

Cain estimated that dozens of homes were damaged.

Another tornado hit the small town of Millsap, about 40 miles west of Fort Worth. Parker County Judge Mark Kelley said roof damage was reported to several houses and a barn was destroyed, but no injuries were reported.

Hail as large as grapefruit also pelted the area around Mineral Wells on Wednesday evening. A police dispatcher reported only minor damage.

Thursday 16 May 2013

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/05/15/texas-tornado.html

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Rescuers struggle to reach trapped Indonesian miners

Rescuers on Wednesday struggled to reach 25 people trapped in a collapsed mine tunnel in remote eastern Indonesia, as hundreds of angry workers protested to demand better safety.

Four dead bodies have so far been recovered and 10 people rescued following Tuesday's accident at US firm Freeport-McMoRan's Grasberg, one of the world's biggest gold and copper mines in rugged Papua province.

Freeport Indonesia, the local subsidiary of the US firm, suspended all operations at Grasberg as anger grew among workers at the mine, which in recent years has suffered a major strike and a spate of deadly shootings.

Rescuers are finding it difficult to reach the Indonesian workers who were trapped by the collapse during a safety training course, as the site -- which is not part of the mining area -- remains unstable.

The 50-strong team, which includes Freeport and police personnel, were using heavy machinery including bulldozers, as well as saws, wheelbarrows and jacks to clear debris.

"They have been working non-stop night and day to get to the workers, but the process is tedious and time-consuming," said local police spokesman I Gde Sumerta Jaya.

"Each time they dig, there are small landslides, so they have to put wooden planks on the tunnel walls and roof to prevent rocks from falling."

Oxygen was being piped into the tunnel, which is cut into a mountainside, but it was impossible to know whether those inside were dead or alive, he added.

As the rescue efforts dragged on anger grew among workers, around 1,000 of whom staged a protest near the mine.

They blocked a road near their dorms with trucks, heavy machinery and pieces of wood from late afternoon, only allowing ambulances and other vehicles involved in the rescue effort to pass.

"This is for our colleagues who haven't yet been evacuated," miner Ronald Waromi, who coordinated the demonstration, told AFP. "We expect the company to pay more attention to safety and the welfare of its employees."

Mining accidents are common in Indonesia, but they normally happen in illegal and unregulated mines, not at sites run by large companies.

Neither Freeport nor police have said what might have caused the accident.

The company said that production was first partially suspended at Grasberg to help with evacuation and rescue efforts, but they later decided to halt operations entirely.

"We temporarily suspended operations," said Freeport Indonesia president Rozik B. Soetjipto, adding he was heading to the mine to decide himself whether production should be resumed.

The tunnel collapse is just the latest problem to hit the mine. In 2011, a three-month strike by thousands of workers crippled production and only ended when the firm agreed to a major pay rise.

The industrial action sparked a wave of deadly clashes between police and gunmen around the mine, with at least 11 people, all Indonesians, killed.

Earlier this month, some 1,100 workers employed by Freeport contractors staged a three-day strike over pay but it caused only minimal disruption to production.

Thursday 16 May 2013

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asiapacific/rescuers-struggle-to-reach-trapped-indon/676200.htmlpapua

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Mass grave unearthed at Tawergha

A mass grave site with up to 25 bodies has been found in Tawergha, west of Misrata.

Misrata prosecutors were able to direct police to the location in the Subkha area of Tawergha, after questioning an officer from the Qaddafi regime.

Hamed Malki,the media manager at the Ministry of Martyrs and Missing People told the Libya Herald that there were three graves and that six bodies has so far been exhumed by the ministry’s specialist researchers.

Their initial finding showed that the corpses they were unearthing were handcuffed and wore either military or civilian clothing. It is not yet known, said Malki, if the dead were rebels, Qaddafi’s troops or civilians. However the team believes that one mass grave contains four members of the same family.

The exhumation has required official permission from the Attorney-General. Once all the remains have been recovered, the ministry’s specialists will start work matching the DNA of the corpses with the 12,000 samples they have collected from living relatives of people who went missing during the revolution.

Where matches are made,the Attorney-General will authorise the handover of the bodies to their families. The ministry runs a cemetery at Beer Usta Milad, east of Tripoli, which is given over to the burial of victims of the conflict.

Thursday 16 May 2013

http://www.libyaherald.com/2013/05/15/mass-grave-unearthed-at-tawergha/

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Texas town becomes the tomb of the unknown immigrant

Mounds of dirt decorated with fake flowers sit at the northern edge of the cemetery in this town about 80 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Small metal placards mark the graves of the unknown, generally by gender, while others simply say “bones” or “skull case.”

It is here that more than 50 unidentified immigrants were buried after dying in heat and punishing terrain while they tried to seek new lives in the United States. As legislators in Washington debate bipartisan proposals for an immigration overhaul, Texas officials say this small town, the seat of Brooks County and part of the U.S. Border Patrol region known as the Rio Grande Valley sector, is emerging as an epicenter of death and misery.

Sheriffs’ deputies in the county - population less than 5,000 - found 129 bodies in 2012, about double the number from the year before and six times that recorded in 2010. This year so far - before the hot summer months, when the majority of deaths occur - they’ve found 17, said Brooks County Judge Raul Ramirez.

In the Rio Grande Valley sector as a whole, which comprises 17,000 square miles of southeast Texas, Border Patrol agents also are recording a rise in deaths and apprehensions. Enrique Mendiola, the USBP spokesman for the area, said 78 immigrant deaths and 357 rescues have been recorded in the sector since the government fiscal year began last Oct. 1. In the same period the year before, he said there were 42 deaths and 137 rescues.

For reasons that remain unclear - law enforcement authorities refuse to speculate - the number of deaths in the Rio Grande region is rising while those in Arizona - which typically records the highest immigrant death toll in the entire southern border region - dropped from 253 in fiscal year 2009-10 to 77 since last October, according to the Coalicion de Derechos Humanos. (The human rights group tracks immigrant deaths in Arizona.) Mendiola said immigrants can easily lose their way in the flat, Texas brush country. In Arizona they can use the mountains and other natural landmarks in Arizona that immigrants use as directional markers.

Most of the bodies recovered in Brooks County were buried without a forensic examination, which the county cannot afford. Texas law offers guidelines on how to handle remains, but how that is carried out depends on the county.

“They’ve never had an autopsy,” said Lori Baker, a physical anthropologist at Baylor University, of those in the cemetery.

Ramirez said the ongoing discoveries of deceased immigrants have put a strain on local authorities. Each time someone finds a body, a deputy must respond to the scene, often miles from any roadway, and the justice of the peace must officially declare the person dead.

Each body bag alone costs $740, Ramirez said, an extra $95,000 burden on the county last year.

Local authorities are still trying to learn more about the dead. Baker is leading a team that will exhume 54 marked graves in Falfurrias to collect DNA samples and perform tests to uncover the immigrants’ age, sex and causes of death. The DNA will be sent to a lab to be cataloged in missing-person databases.

“I’m concerned as to how they’re making these identifications because none of them have training in forensic science,” Baker said.

The Border Patrol’s Mendiola said that as smugglers, or “coyotes,” have continued to capitalize on the demand for guides into the United States, the number of people caught has grown.

Most immigrants pay several thousand dollars to gain passage across the border and the checkpoint south of Falfurrias, he said. “These smugglers are just ruthless,” Mendiola said. When someone falls behind as a group threads its way through private ranch land, “they’re just going to leave them behind, because that’s lost revenue for them.”

Even those already familiar with the dangers and hardship involved remain willing to take the risk.

Honduran citizen Olebin Rivera, 32, told Reuters he was trying to return to the United States after being deported 10 years ago. He wants to go to Houston, where he can work as a painter or roofer to support his 3-year-old son and wife back in Honduras.

Rivera said he’s hopeful that Washington will reform its immigration policies, but for now “there’s no promise.” He said he has heard the stories of immigrants losing their lives on the journey north but is not afraid.

Maria Carmen Ruiz Rocha, 34, is equally determined. At the Casa del Migrante in Reynosa, Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas - a shelter, run by Catholic nuns, where immigrants can stay for a few days before moving on - she talked of how she missed her husband and two children in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she says she lived for 15 years working as a housekeeper. (While her husband had a work visa, she did not. Their children were born in the United States.)

Ruiz Rocha returned to her native Guanajuato state in Mexico in February to take care of her mother, who died at the end of March. Two days after her mother’s death, Ruiz Rocha said authorities arrested her in Progreso, Texas, downstream from Reynosa - one of the unlucky members of her group who was not able to escape the authorities. After appearing before an immigration judge, she said she was deported to Reynosa.

“The judge told me I didn’t have a right to be there,” she said. A few days after she was deported, she crossed again and was again caught and returned. Each time she said she paid a coyote $4,000.

Ruiz Rocha’s family has exhausted their means to pay for another crossing, something she says is difficult to explain to her 12-year-old son when he calls, asking why she won’t come home. “I want to go another time,” she said. “I need to cross. I don’t have anything here. My life is there.”

Thursday 16 May 2013

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Features/2013/05/15/20823796.html

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Six Russian sailors killed in fire on crab boat in Japan

The bodies of six Russian sailors were recovered on board the ship that burned this morning in a port on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Seventeen people managed to escape, three of them were rushed to hospital.

The crab boat Taigan under the flag of Cambodia caught fire in the morning of May 16th. The crew consisted of Russian and Ukrainian sailors. Six people found themselves trapped on the boat.

Six fire brigades and vessels of Japanese maritime security took part in the operation to extinguish the fire.

Thursday 16 May 2013

http://english.pravda.ru/news/hotspots/16-05-2013/124578-russian_sailors_japan-0/

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