At least 10 killed in heavy Sudan flooding

Widespread flooding in Sudan has claimed the lives of at least 10 people as authorities warned of a looming humanitarian crisis.

Property has also been destroyed and thousands displaced, while the main road between the capital Khartoum and the key port of Sudan on the Red sea has been cut.

"Six states have been badly affected by the flood in West, North, East of the country and even in the capital Khartoum," state radio said on Friday.

The affected states are, Khartoum, Red Sea, Northern state, Sinnar and North and South Darfur.

The governmental statement did not give an exact number but said that thousands of houses, hundreds of shops and many governmental institutions had been destroyed.

Eye witnesses from Dordaib area in Red Sea state (500 kilometers from Khartoum) said that the main road which linked capital Khartoum with Port Sudan- the only gate for Sudanese exports and imports- has been cut by the flooding.

"We found six bodies and around 3,000 families were displaced from the area without any food or shelter," they told Africa Review by phone.

Meanwhile the North Darfur local government has called an emergency and urged immediate help from the central government and international aid organisations working in the region, after four people died.

The governor of North Darfur Mohammed Yousif Kibir told journalists in Fashir on Thursday that widespread areas in his state have been hit by the flood.

He added that more than 2,000 families had been displaced and traders lost 10 billion Sudanese pounds ($2 million) and warned of a humanitarian disaster threatening his state unless urgent aid was delivered.

The meteorological administration in a press release Friday said that the rate of rain in the past two days is the first of its kind in the country in the last 20 years, warning that the situation was very alarming.

The administration expects that more heavy rain will fall in coming days. The government has been urged to evacuate people living near the Nile River and other nearby valleys.

Friday 2 August 2013

http://www.africareview.com/News/At-least-10-killed-in-Sudan-floods/-/979180/1934912/-/lxc61gz/-/index.html

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The cave with a thousand coffins: Chinese leave wooden caskets to rot away in the belief it will allow the souls of the departed into heaven

Hundreds of thousands of wooden coffins are left to slowly rot away in dank Chinese caves in the belief it will let the souls of the departed ascend into heaven.

The curious tradition, which sees the caskets stacked in caves on the steep cliffs of Anshun, in southwest China's Guizhou Province, is believed to have been practised since ancient times.



In one of cave alone there are more than 500 coffins stacked, layer upon layer in various stages of decay. It's been the ‘coffin cave’ for residents surnamed Liu from the neighbouring five villages since ancient times.

According to local folk stories, the people who live in the area moved from the plains in central China to mountainous Guizhou Province many centuries ago to avoid war.

One legend maintains that because they hoped to one day move back to their homeland they didn’t bury their dead but instead stacked their coffins in the caves.



According to other stories the tradition started because the area is often subject to floods and the coffins were stored in caves to prevent them from being affected.

Being in caves also means that the coffins are closer to the sky and therefore closer to heaven.



Friday 2 August 2013

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2382736/Anshun-caves-The-hundreds-thousands-wooden-coffins-left-rot-away-Chinese-caves-belief-allow-souls-departed-heaven.html

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Day after Punjab bus tragedy, relatives look for bodies

A day after at least 27 people were feared drowned when a Delhi-Amristar bus crashed into the Bhakra Main Line (BML) canal near Sirhind in Punjab's Fatehgarh Sahib district, many people spent hours driving along the banks looking for clues about their missing relatives. Divers managed to fish out two more bodies on Thursday, taking the count to four, but refused to continue with the search operations after 1pm, alleging non-payment.

About half-a-dozen people also waited on the canal banks about 2km downstream from where the Punjab Bus Stand Management Company Limited vehicle had plunged into the waters.

Among them was Harjinder Singh looking for the body of his brother Surinder Singh, the driver of the ill-fated bus. "Lok taan kehnde ne hun Khanauri jaake hi milu (People are saying now the body will be found at Khanauri only)," Harjinder said. He was referring to his conversation with villages, who told him to look for Surinder's body near Khanauri headworks, about 70km from the mishap spot.

The kin of the dead and the missing also tried to get some clues from the 10 bags police had recovered from the bus on Wednesday.

"We had reached here last night," Harjinder said. "Police had told us to wait till they located any body in the main canal or its branches. I don't know where and for how long I should wait. Police told us to see the bags. But there is no point since we know Surinder was driving the bus."

Hargobind, a resident of Etah district of Uttar Pradesh, said: "My brother-in-law Yashpal, a resident of Aligarh, is missing. I came here after seeing the news on TV. I couldn't find Yashpal's bag among those recovered from the bus. What brought me here was the possibility that I could find some of his belongings." He said Yashpal ran a small business of supplying henna in Punjab.

The family members of the bus conductor, Raman Kumar, were also there. "We had no luck in finding Raman's body here," said his uncle Dalwinder Bhalla. "Hoping the bodies will ultimately find their way to the cross-regulators at Khanauri, some of our relatives have gone there."

The rescue operations ground to a halt in the afternoon when the team of about 15 divers refused to fish out the bodies from the Bhakra canal and its tributaries because they had not been paid.

"Our team of 15 divers has refused to conduct searches," said Ashu Khan, leader of the divers' team. "We stopped the work at 1pm today. The authorities are not paying us despite repeated our demands since yesterday. We can't continue the search operations by putting our lives in danger, that too without payment."

The divers had been roped in by the Fatehgarh Sahib administration. They conducted searches from Saundha to Khanauri in Sangrur district.

Khan alleged the administration was not serious about the rescue work. "So far nobody from the authorities has requested us to resume the search operations," he said. Khan also said the water current was very strong and the chances of finding any body in the area seemed bleak. "We can only find those bodies here that might have got stuck in any of the floodgates," he said.

Police said six of the people on board the bus, including the conductor and driver, had been identified and their relatives informed about the accident.

Friday 2 August 2013

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Day-after-Punjab-bus-tragedy-relatives-look-for-bodies/articleshow/21543408.cms

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Seven decades after World War II, the search for Germany’s War dead continues

This weekend, German officials will travel to Russia for the opening of the latest in a long line of war cemeteries containing the graves of Wehrmacht soldiers killed on the Eastern Front during World War II. The cemetery, located near the western Russian city of Smolensk, will eventually be the final resting place of 70,000 soldiers and is just one of 20 similar sites in Russia, commonly known as “concentration cemeteries,” that have been created in the country since the fall of the USSR two decades ago.

The cemetery is operated by The German War Graves Commission, or Volksbund, which was founded in the wake of World War I and authorized to locate and identify the graves of German dead under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. With nearly 90 percent of Germany’s 1.9 million fallen soldiers buried outside of the country, the commission’s early work was mostly limited to organizing commemorations and decorations at foreign-based cemeteries. However, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which saw more than 4 million German military deaths (with some estimates as high as 5.3 million), the Volksbund’s work intensified and its aim shifted to the arduous search for the dead in Western Europe and North Africa. This work eventually led to the establishment of more than 400 cemeteries in Germany and nearly 500 cemeteries in 45 other countries.

Similar efforts in what was the war’s 1,000-mile long Eastern Front were stymied for nearly 50 years because the West German-based Volksbund was denied access to Soviet records documenting the burial sites of the nearly 3 million Wehrmacht soldiers (and 1.4 million German citizens) who were killed during the brutal fighting that followed Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the opening of the formerly sealed off Eastern Bloc nations finally gave the Volksbund the opportunity to locate and, in many cases, identify its long-lost dead. In the last 20 years, it has repaired more than 300 cemeteries in the former USSR and has reburied more than 800,000 soldiers in 82 massive war cemeteries where internments number in the tens of thousands.

The Volksbund had relied on both governmental assistance and the help of local citizens to locate and identify the graves of German soldiers, but the process has not been without controversy. Seven decades after the war, anger and resentment still lingers over the Nazis’ vicious treatment of a Slavic population that they considered both racially and morally inferior. Hitler may have failed in his ultimate goal of complete obliteration of the Untermensch (or “sub-humans”), but more than 11 million Soviet soldiers and 15 million civilians were killed. Unlike Germany, however, Soviet officials paid little attention to the commemoration of individual war dead, instead erecting mass monuments and cemeteries honoring collective groups. One example is the enormous Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in St. Petersburg where just 186 mass graves contain the bodies of nearly 500,000 civilians and soldiers who died during the legendary siege of the city during World War II.

The Volksbund, which relies on private donations and thousands of volunteer workers to supplement its full-time staff, has said that the Smolensk cemetery will be the last cemetery to be constructed in Russia, but that it plans to continue its work elsewhere. It expects to recover an additional 150,000 bodies and continue the search for 250,000 more believed to be buried in remote locations or scattered throughout the Eastern European countryside. (The commission is only able to investigate burial sites believed to contain the remains of more than 50 soldiers). Last May, the commission launched an online database that contains records of more than 4.5 million German soldiers who were killed or went missing in action during both World Wars, providing family members with new insight into how and where their loved ones died.

Germany is not alone in their ongoing efforts to commemorate their war dead. The United Kingdom and its Commonwealth member states have a similar war graves commission. France’s Ministry of Defense maintains cemeteries containing the graves of French, German, English and American soldiers; and since 1923 the American Battle Monuments Commission has established nearly 60 overseas military cemeteries, containing more than 120,000 graves—including the nearly 10,000 Americans buried in Normandy, France.

Friday 2 August 2013

http://www.history.com/news/seven-decades-after-world-war-ii-the-search-for-germanys-war-dead-continues

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Ghana’s dancing pallbearers

Benjamin Aidoo has brought his dancing pallbearers to more than 200 funerals in Ghana, easing loved ones to their final resting places to the strains of anything from reggae to gospel music.

“Customers say, ‘Papa loved dancing when he was alive, let him dance more one time’,” said Aidoo, 27, who charges as much as 800 cedis ($387) a ceremony. “This is a new business where we dance the coffin to the grave instead of marching solemnly.” Aidoo founded his business in 2010 and is now having to turn customers away.

Funerals, among Ghana’s most important social events, are placing growing financial demands on the country’s expanding middle class as a fashion for extravagant ceremonies leads to calls for restraint from religious and ethnic leaders.

An oil production-led boom boosted economic growth to 15.9 percent in 2011 from 3.1 percent in 2007 and increased gross national income per capita almost fivefold to $1,550 over the last decade. In addition to entrepreneurs like Aidoo, the country’s biggest insurers including Enterprise Life and SIC Insurance Co. are benefiting, Anastacia Arko, an analyst at Accra-based Databank Financial Services Ltd., said in July 29 interview.

Stretching over days, funeral ceremonies, typically called celebrations in Ghana, involve church services, receptions and burials. Families spend thousands of cedis on food and drink, shaded seating, a disc jockey or band, traditional drummers, brochures, posters, photographers and often, a videographer capturing mourners filing by the casket.

Insurance Opportunity

“Our funerals have become a big drain on families,” said Vicky Wireko, who writes the ‘Reality Zone’ column for the biggest selling Daily Graphic newspaper, which has classified pages filled every day with full-color obituaries that list “chief mourners” and far-flung relatives. “No wonder families are turning to the banks to seek funds.”

While traditionally relatives have contributed to meet funeral costs, those donations are no longer enough and insurance companies are stepping in to cover the gap.

“When the burden to finance funerals became so high that people began taking out bank loans, we saw there was space for insurance,” C.C. Bruce, executive director of Enterprise Life, a unit of Enterprise Group Ltd., the second-biggest listed insurer, said in an interview in Accra.

The funeral insurance policy is now the company’s “flagship product,” accounting for more than 65 percent of revenue, Bruce said. The insurer covers as many as 900,000 Ghanaians, out of a population of 24.7 million, with a majority aged 30 to 45. Lump sums of as much as 5,000 cedis are paid out.

Peaceful Sleep

Enterprise’s shares have more than tripled this year and have posted the second-best performance on the 35-member Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index (GGSECI), which has gained 62 percent. The stock gained 4.3 percent to 1.46 cedis by the close in Accra. “Funeral costs are high,” Databank’s Arko said. “People are becoming sensitized to take up life policies.”

The biggest insurance company in Ghana, SIC Insurance, plans to increase the payout of its funeral policy as customers complain of rising expenses, Alfred Ankrah, funeral policy manager at SIC said in an interview.

“We have a policy targeting the so-called upper class that pays out 10,000 cedis, but still people say it’s not enough,” Ankrah said. “There is a call from society to prevent expensive funerals, but it’s not working because people want to make sure that the person they lost sleeps in peace.”

Social Pressure

Stanbic Bank Ltd., the Ghanaian unit of South Africa’s Standard Bank Group (SBK), introduced funeral insurance plans last year, offering a lump sum of 1,000 cedis at monthly premiums of as little as 2.50 cedis. Ghana’s minimum daily wage is 5.24 cedis.

“Ghanaians spend too much on funerals,” said David Dogbe, a 30-year-old telecommunications worker who had to borrow 2,000 cedis from a friend to meet his 5,000-cedi share of a 20,000-cedi funeral for his father-in-law in March. “It’s because of the social pressure. People will come and look at the funeral and say ‘oh, he didn’t want to pay for this or that,” said Dogbe, who spent two weeks traveling repeatedly between Accra and the eastern town of Ho to organize the event.

While funerals have always been extravagant, with coffin-carvers on the streets of the capital Accra charging up to 2,500 cedis for caskets in the shape of anything ranging from a catfish to a soccer boot, people like Dogbe are now being stretched beyond their means.

Death, Money

Death and money are inextricably linked in Ghana because funerals are meant to both celebrate the life of the deceased and show the success of a family, and flamboyant funerals carry more social prestige than any other ceremony, said Marleen de Witte, an anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who has researched Ghana’s funeral economy.

“Most Ghanaians agree that they are spending too much money on funerals, but as soon as somebody in their own family dies, the social pressure to hold an impressive funeral proves very hard to resist,” she said.

To curb costs, tribal chiefs have issued funeral guidelines ranging from prohibiting all-night wakes to restricting the amount of traditional drummers. Their pleas haven’t been heeded, she said.

Deliberations on the date and location of a ceremony and the subsequent preparations mean that bodies spend an average of two months in a mortuary, said Jacob Konlan, a clerk at the Korle-Bu Hospital Mortuary, the country’s biggest morgue, as dressers in scrubs applied make-up and cotton wool to corpses on cement slabs. Outside, groups drummed and wailed while relatives waited to retrieve the bodies.

With the arrival of refrigerated morgues, even the length of stay of the body has become an indicator of the family’s wealth, he said. The cost of storing a body is 400 cedis a month.

“People boast about how much they spend on a funeral,” Aidoo, the dancing pallbearer, said. “They say with pride: ’I spent 10,000 cedis.’ Ghanaians spare no expense because we care more about the dead than the living. Just die and you will see how many loved ones you have.”

Friday 2 August 2013

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-01/ghana-s-dancing-pallbearers-insurers-lead-funeral-boom.html

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Sirhind bus mishap: Death toll rises to 4

The death toll in Sirhind bus mishap has risen to four with divers retrieving two more bodies from the canal on Thursday even as chances of survival of other passengers are "very bleak," police said.

While two bodies were recovered yesterday, two more were taken out from the canal today, Fatehgarh Sahib SSP Gurmeet Singh Chauhan said.

At least 42 passengers were feared drowned after a Punjab roadways bus fell into a canal near Sirhind in Fatehgarh Sahib district of Punjab in the wee hours yesterday.

The ill-fated bus was on its way from Delhi to Amritsar when the mishap took place.

Meanwhile, seven families have approached the police confirming that their near and dear ones were in the bus, SSP said.

Asserting that the chances of survival of those feared drown are "very bleak", he said it is difficult to come to conclusion on the death toll in the mishap.

He said that the current of water is very fast and bodies might have swept upto some places in Delhi, Rajasthan and Haryana from where the tributaries of canal passes.

The search operations are continuing and Punjab police had alerted its Haryana and Rajasthan counterparts as well, SSP said.

He said that teams from National Disaster are carrying out search operations at Khanouri in Patiala.

"Water is being screened at Sangrur, Patiala and several areas of Haryana to locate the bodies," he added.

Besides, divers from police, administration and Army are searching bodies at different places.

Friday 2 August 2013

http://zeenews.india.com/news/punjab/sirhind-bus-mishap-death-toll-rises-to-4_866017.html

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Search for Lac-Mégantic victims ends with 5 still missing

The search for victims in the epicentre of the explosions in Lac-Mégantic is ending, although work will continue to identify more victims though elements found at the scene, a spokeswoman for Quebec's coroner's office confirmed.

"We conclude this work today with sincere and profound conviction that we did everything humanly possible to locate the missing," spokeswoman Geneviève Guilbault said at a news conference Thursday morning in the small town in Quebec's Eastern Townships.

Over the last 27 days, the remains of 42 people were located. Of those, 38 have been officially identified by the coroner's office.

In total, 47 people were put on the official list of those deceased or presumed dead.

"We're still in contact with the families," said Lt. Guy Lapointe of the Sûreté du Québec.

"Families of the victims that have yet to be located were allowed on the scene — have seen people at work, doing the search, seeing the kind of efforts that were deployed to find these people."

Marie-France Boulet, who lived and worked in downtown Lac-Mégantic, has been missing ever since the disaster, and her remains have so far not been identified.

Her sister, Martine Boulet-Pelletier, said the reason was not that search teams didn’t try hard enough, but because the destruction was so massive.

She added that it helped to see with her own eyes the site where so many people perished.

“It helps us understand how Marie-France could have been lost in it,” she said.

The criminal investigation is continuing, said Lapointe of the provincial police, but the so-called red zone around the blast site is no longer considered a crime scene.

That doesn't mean the area will be reopened to the public.

Health and environmental concerns still have to be addressed and the police will maintain a perimeter until the proper authorities have determined it’s safe to return, Lapointe said. He could not say what time the barriers would be lifted.

Train safety investigation moves to the lab

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is also wrapping up its field investigation into the Lac-Mégantic train disaster, and insists that finding out what went wrong when the train cars derailed and exploded in the town remains a top priority.

“We will find out how and why this happened so that it will hopefully never happen again,” Donald Ross, the lead TSB investigator, said at a news conference this morning.

The focus will now shift to the TSB’s laboratory in Ottawa, where tests are being conducted on samples of the oil taken from the scene, the train’s brakes, as well as other evidence gathered over the four weeks the agency was on the ground in the red zone of the disaster.

The TSB cautioned that the process could take months, but said that any pertinent findings that could affect safety would be communicated to Transport Canada, the industry and the public.

'Crude oil acted in an abnormal manner'

The blast produced by the crude oil carried in the cars was shocking even to officials on the scene, the TSB investigators said.

“Certainly for crude oil, based on the experts’ views, it would seem that the crude oil reacted in an abnormal manner,” said Ed Belkaloul, the TSB's manager for Eastern Region Rail Operations.

"Analysis is being carried out to help us determine why the oil created such a fierce fire that night."

Samples collected are being tested to determine the exact composition of that oil, he said.

The tanker cars themselves and their viability in the crash, an issue that the TSB has already raised with Transport Canada earlier in their investigation in the disaster, will also be part of that investigation.

Several changes have already been instituted in the wake of the derailment in Lac-Mégantic.

Last week, Transport Canada issued an emergency directive requiring at least two crew members to work trains that transport dangerous goods.

It also says no locomotive attached to one or more loaded tank cars transporting dangerous goods can be left unattended on a main track.

Canadian Pacific Railway also updated its general operating instructions, which now require that any locomotive left unattended outside a station or yard be locked and prohibiting any tankers containing regulated commodities from being left unattended on main line tracks.

The TSB has already disclosed that its early findings showed the train was unmanned when it rolled down a 1.2 per cent incline from the nearby town of Nantes and derailed in Lac-Mégantic.

That train, when in operation, also had only one engineer on board, something only two rail carriers in Canada are permitted to do under federal regulations.

Friday 2 August 2013

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/08/01/lac-megantic-train-disaster-investigation-tsb-oil.html

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