Rosario explosion: rescue works continue, 11 people still missing

Rescue teams continue with rubble removal works coming closer to the site of the explosion, Rosario city Mayor Mónica Fein confirmed two-days after disaster struck at the Santa Fe province locality resulting in at least 12 people dead and 11 still missing.

“We have not found major structural damages and in most cases neighbors asked us to focus on the building works; we are very grateful,” Fein told reporters as she went over the accident site at 2000 Salta Street in downtown Rosario where a gas leak caused a major explosion and collapse of a 10-storey building early on Tuesday.

Gas technician repairman Carlos Osvaldo García and his assistant who were trying to repair the building’s gas system were detained for questioning in connection with the explosion.

Around 25 teams of catastrophe and rescue experts continue to work on the disaster area with main focus on the search for missing people as well as on safety issues to determine impacts and risk of collapse in nearby buildings also hit by the explosion.

Meanwhile, the national government announced a two-day national mourning with President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner visiting the victims of the worst tragedy in Rosario's recent history on Wednesday.

Thursday 8 august 2013

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/137986/rosario-explosion-rescue-works-continue-11-people-still-missing-

Vietnam war victims missing for 40 years found alive in jungle, central Vietnam

An 82-year-old man and his 41-year-old son have been found living in a forest in central Vietnam after they went missing during the country's war with the US, an official says.

The older man could communicate a little in the Cor ethnic minority language, but his son only knew a few words, an official at Tay Tra commune in Quang Ngai province said on Thursday on condition of anonymity.

Ho Van Thanh was last seen running into the woods with his then-infant son Ho Van Lang after a bomb exploded in his home, killing his wife and two other children in 1973, newspaper Dan Tri reported.

They were discovered when two people from a nearby village ventured 40 kilometres into the forest looking for firewood and spotted the two men's tree house. The villagers reported the find to local authorities who recovered the pair on Wednesday.


The two men survived by cultivating forest vegetables and hunting animals. They had no contact with the outside world, the report said.

Photographs in local media showed the younger man with dishevelled hair wearing a loin cloth made from tree bark.

Thanh, who was fighting for North Vietnam when the bomb exploded, left behind another son, Ho Van Tri.

"My father is very weak and the doctors are taking care of him, but my brother's health is fine even though he looks very thin," said Tri, who was six months old when his father fled into the jungle.

Thanh is being treated at a medical centre while his son is being looked after by his nephew, Ho Ven Bien.

"My uncle doesn't understand much of what is said to him, and he doesn't want to eat or even drink water," Bien said.

"He's very sad. He doesn't say anything now," he said. "We know he wants to escape my house to go back to the forest so we have to keep an eye on him now."

Hoang Anh Ngoc, chairman of the district, said local authorities had visited Thanh at the medical centre and given him food.

"I asked officials to keep a close eye on the two men to make sure they don't escape back into the forest," he said.

The discovery has shaken the small community, which thought the two men dead.

"No one could imagine Thanh and his son could live 40 years in isolation in the hard conditions of the jungle," said villager Ho Van Xanh.

Thursday 8 August 2013

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/vietnam-war-victims-found-in-jungle/story-fn3dxix6-1226693737409

Florida: Exhumations approved at Reform School where boys disappeared

The Florida Cabinet gave the go-ahead Tuesday for dozens of unmarked graves, buried deep in the woods near a now-defunct reform school, to be exhumed, in an attempt to return the bodies to their families.

Gov. Rick Scott along with the rest of the Florida Cabinet voted to allow University of South Florida researchers to begin exhumation at the site of the former Dozier School for Boys in the panhandle city of Marianna.

"It's a relief. The real work has yet to begin, but now we can now move forward," said Erin Kimmerle, a University of South Florida anthropologist who is leading the effort. "We will go slow and test our methods and really be able to make progress when it dries off."

Many of the families were present in Tallahassee at the Cabinet meeting. Attorney General Pam Bondi voted in favor of the effort.

"From the beginning, I have supported efforts at the Dozier School for Boys in order to provide family members who lost loved ones with closure," she said in a written statement.

The small cemetery dates back to the early 1900s. For years, former inmates say children who were sent to the reform school were beaten and mysteriously disappeared.

Rusting white steel crosses mark the graves of 31 unidentified former students. Using ground-penetrating radar, Kimmerle's team have located what she says appears to be 18 more remains than previously thought. All are unidentified.

State and school records show that out of nearly 100 children who died while at the school, there are no burial records for 22 of them, Kimmerle said.

"This decision puts us a step closer to finishing the investigation," said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida. "Nothing can bring these boys back, but I'm hopeful that their families will now get the closure they deserve."

Only 10 families have been identified as having descendants who are buried here. Many are seeking to claim the bodies of their loved ones so they can be buried properly in family cemeteries. DNA has already been collected from many of them.

Glenn Varnadoe says his father, Hubert Varnadoe, and Hubert's brother, Thomas Varnadoe, were sent to Dozier for stealing. A month later, administrators allegedly woke up Hubert Varnadoe and took him to a place in the woods where men had just buried Thomas Varnadoe.

The cause of death was listed as pneumonia. Glenn Varnadoe wants his uncle's body found so his uncle can be buried properly.

"I think this is a banner day for every kid who ever went through Dozier, for the kids who are dead, buried and forgotten," he told CNN. "They will finally be remembered and given a proper burial and finally respected as human beings."

Former students said the deaths were at the hands of abusive administrators, but a 2009 state investigation determined there was no evidence of criminal activity.

In the wake of that investigation, more former students -- now senior citizens -- have come forward with stories of abuse, including alleged beatings, killings and the disappearance of students,during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

"These are children who came here and died, for one reason or another, and have just been lost in the woods," Kimmerle said in an interview earlier this year. "When there's no knowledge and no information, then people will speculate and rumors will persist or questions remain."

Kimmerle, who worked on an international forensics team that amassed evidence used in Yugoslavian war crimes trials, called the Florida project a humanitarian effort for the families of the former students and for the community.

Many wonder if the tales of beating and murder are true or if anyone can be charged with any crimes.

Glenn Hess, the state attorney for Jackson County, Florida, where Marianna is located, said, "From a prosecutor's point of view, these things happened so far in the past, the probability that they're going to be able to put a probable cause with a homicide with a probable cause that somebody did it, are probably remote."

Researchers are hoping to begin the exhumation process later this month. It will be a tedious scientific process which the families hope, may one day, answer the mysteries of what really happened at Marianna.

Thursday 8 August 2013

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/06/us/florida-reform-school-exhumations/index.html

European Commission - Directorate-General for Ente : Results of EU research project could help align international standards for the identification of missing persons and victims of large-scale disasters

Finding and identifying victims after a natural disaster is not just a matter of deploying sophisticated technology such as detection devices. It also depends on quickly matching up circumstantial information with the victim to confirm the latter's identity. Yet post-disaster investigative techniques and approaches across the globe are far from standardised.

Any delays in this regard mean agony for the families of missing persons or victims as witnessed after the December 2004 tsunami that struck southeast Asia. It left humanitarian and law enforcement authorities overwhelmed by the scale of the victim identification required. As a result, on-site cooperation was ad-hoc and hugely challenged by all the different operational methodologies, training and instances of duplication, with national disaster victim identification teams focused on identifying their own nationals.

One EU-funded Security Research project known as FASTID ("FAST and efficient international disaster victim Identification") aims to change that.

Currently, international police cooperation to identify disaster victims is supported by Interpol's "Disaster Victim Identification" (DVI) forms. Running 17 pages or more in length, the forms contain a massive amount of paperwork that is hard navigate quickly for research and investigative purposes.

To improve the ability of international police cooperation to better identify unclaimed bodies FASTID has developed a prototype database system to simplify and accelerate the cross-matching ability of DVI information. The new prototype system was implemented on Interpol's hosted platform at its headquarters in Lyon, France.

The prototype's database offers decentralised access for use in conjunction with mass fatality events. However, according to FASTID's research team, their protoype's conversion into operational use would aid not only international police cooperation for disaster victim identification but also support the daily requirements of policy forces as they carry out domestic investigative work on missing persons or unidentified bodies. The team also developed training material to support and encourage global common operational methodologies for identification tasks and similar approaches to data recording across Interpol's 190 member countries.

A 36-month project coordinated by Interpol, FASTID was launched in April 2010 and concluded its work in March 2013. It had a total research budget of nearly EUR 3 million of which the EU provided 75 percent. For more information, see FASTID's website at: http://www.interpol.int/Projects/FASTID

Thursday 8 August 2013

http://www.4-traders.com/news/European-Commission-Directorate-General-for-Ente-Results-of-EU-research-project-could-help-align--17174538/

DNA tests on Neruda remains to be done out of Chile

Chilean justice ordered that DNA tests on the remains of poet Pablo Neruda, as part of the probe to know the causes of his death, be carried out abroad.

This was ordered by judge Mario Carroza, who in his previous resolution invested the Legal Medical Service (LMS) of Chile to carry out the probe, declared today Neruda's nephew and lawyer of that family, Rodolfo Reyes to daily El Mercurio.

According to the lawyer, the new order does not specify the place where samples will be sent, but it establishes that he and his two brothers will be subject to genetic exams in order to confirm that the exhumed bones from the tomb in Isla Negra, Valparaiso, belong to the writer.

Last July, judge Carroza decided that if identification results do not coincide with those tests, they would be made from the bones of Neruda's parents, buried in the South.

The study is being made to determine if his death was due to natural causes or murdered on dictator Augusto Pinochet's orders.

The Chilean Communist Party (PC), organization to which the intellectual belonged all his life, member of its Central Committee, senator and candidate to the presidency of the Republic.

Reyes is also part of the criminal lawsuit filed by the PC to determine if the cause of death were substances administered to him.

The lawyer Eduardo Contreras, representing the PC, has insisted the first thing to determine in all this process is if the remains exhumed on April 8 really correspond to the poet.

The cause was opened in 2011, after Neruda's driver, Manuel Araya, revealed that a strange injection was put on the abdomen of the Nobel Literature laureate in 1971, while he was in the Santa Maria clinic.

The poet, who suffered from cancer, died on September 23, 1973, 12 days after the coup against president Salvador Allende.

In a recent interview with Prensa Latina about the investigation process, Contreras insisted there was no guarantee that the bones in the tomb of Isla Negra belonged to Neruda.

In the opinion of the plaintiff lawyer, the procedure is very necessary if we take into account that in the 80s, Pinochet ordered the so-called Televisores operation.

This action implied that the military took remains of arrested disappeared persons and threw them to the sea, burned them and changed their tombs so if in the future, there would be a judicial probe the bodies could not be found.

"If they did that with many persons, why could they not do that too with Neruda?", asked the jurist.

Thursday 8 August 2013

http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1743891&Itemid=1

People of Guinsaugon seek record of existence 7 years after devastating landslide

After half of a mountain collapsed and buried the entire village in 2006, the government also virtually erased from its records the community that once thrived in Guinsaugon, a farming area.

For years, residents of the village who lived through the tragedy and moved to another area were nonexistent as far as government census records are concerned.

Erasing the people of Guinsaugon from government records could have been done as simply as this—census takers visit the landslide site, take a look around and, finding no house standing, write down zero on their population tally forms.

After seven years, the people of Guinsaugon may finally be able to put themselves back in official existence.

A $27,000 donation was given to them to help them build homes, restore farms and make government see that there are people again on what many had thought is now just a graveyard covered by tons of boulders, soil and debris that collapsed on homes and bodies that have never been recovered.

The money would be used, according to village chief Beauty Cabacungan, to resurvey Guinsaugon.

Cabacungan said the donation gave survivors of the landslide, who cling to their identities as the people of Guinsaugon, hope in reclaiming their farms and their IRA, the village’s share in national income.

Cabacungan said while the survivors of the landslide kept returning to the original village site to farm, they had not been allowed to build homes there. She is now asking authorities to allow the people to build even shacks on top of the landslide site.

“Most of us are farmers,” Cabacungan said.

According to Nap Cuaton, the mayor of St. Bernard, the donation came from various sources. The money is being held in trust in bank.

Cuaton said he would seek advice from the Mines and Geosciences Bureau and Department of Interior and Local Government over Cabacungan’s request for the people to be allowed to build houses again where Guinsaugon originally stood.

More than 1,000 people, including more than 200 children trapped in their classrooms, had been buried alive when a portion of Mt. Kan-abag collapsed after several days of heavy rains, sending tons of boulders and soil hurtling down Guinsaugon on Feb. 17, 2006.

Survivors had been transferred to the village of Magbagakay, also in St. Bernard, near the boundary of San Juan town, which refuses to cede jurisdiction over the relocation site, leading to a boundary dispute.

Thursday 8 August 2013

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/460837/people-of-guinsaugon-seek-return-of-ira-record-of-existence

Serbia and Kosovo search for mass grave together

Belgrade and Pristina plan to hold a joint investigation at the site of a suspected mass grave from the 1999 Kosovo war near the south Serbian town of Medvedja.

Missing persons commissions from both Serbia and Kosovo, along with officials from the Serbian war crimes prosecutor’s office and the EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, are visiting the site of the suspected mass grave near the border on Wednesday.

The Kosovo missing persons commission has said that it has information that there is a possible mass grave in the mainly ethnic Albanian-populated village of Svirce.

Two years ago, the Serbian missing persons commission also examined this area because there were indications that there might be a mass grave in the nearby village of Tupale, but nothing was found.

This is the second suspected mass grave from the Kosovo war that Serbia has promised to probe this year.

The Serbian authorities announced in July that they would again investigate a suspected mass grave in the south-western town of Raska that could contain the bodies of ethnic Albanians killed during the war.

The issue of missing persons and mass graves in Serbia was also raised recently by Belgrade’s war crimes prosecutor after a confession from a top Serbian official charged by Hague Tribunal, Vlastimir Djordjevic, who said last month that he knew about graves containing the bodies of Albanian civilians on Serbian territory.

The Serbian prosecutor then filed a request to the Hague court to interrogate Djordjevic about the subject.

Several international organisations, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, expressed concerns earlier this year that the search for more than 1,700 people who remain missing since the conflict between Serbian forces and Kosovo rebels had “stalled”.

In his recent quarterly report on the situation in Kosovo, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon welcomed recent efforts to normalise relations between Belgrade and Pristina, but also said that more must be done to find out what happened to people who disappeared during wartime and whose bodies have not yet been found.

Thursday 8 August 2013

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serbia-and-kosovo-search-for-mass-grave-in-medvedja-1

21 bodies cremated from tonnes of debris lying in Kedarnath

Twenty-one bodies were extricated on Wednesday from tonnes of debris lying in Kedarnath and consigned to flames after necessary rituals.

This takes the number of bodies disposed of at the Himalayan shrine to 140 since the start of operations over a month ago, police said.

The process of extricating the bodies from under heaps of rubble lying close to the shrine which witnessed massive devastation in the June calamity was frequently hampered by bad weather and lack of heavy stone cutting equipment with the police and NDRF personnel engaged in the operation.

However, with a slight improvement in the weather on Wednesday, the exercise gained momentum at the shrine with the disposal of 21 bodies after necessary religious rituals and completion of other formalities like their DNA sampling, police sources in Dehradun said.

Police and NDRF personnel are jointly carrying out the exercise under the supervision of DIG G S Martoliya, they said.

Ornaments like rings, earrings, bangles and necklaces found on the bodies have been preserved to help their kin identify them, police sources here said.

While the number of bodies cremated so far at Kedarnath is 140, the total number of bodies disposed of in the entire Kedar valley since the start of operations has risen to 215.

Over 6,000 were feared killed in devastating floods, landslides and cloudbursts in the state in June this year.

Thursday 8 August 2013

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/21-bodies-cremated-from-tonnes-of-debris-lying-in-kedarnath/412617-3-243.html

12 die in building explosion in Argentina, dozen missing

Leaking gas was likely to blame for an explosion that killed at least 12 people, injured 60 more and brought down part of a building in Argentina on Tuesday, state media reported Wednesday.

A man who was working at the scene in the city of Rosario before the blast ignited at 9:15 a.m. local time has been taken into custody, said the Telam news agency, which cited investigator Juan Curto.

The explosion gutted one multi-story residential building, and destroyed at least one other building next to it, while blowing out the windows of surrounding structures, images broadcast by CNN affiliate Canal 9 showed.

A swath of white smoke and dust dominated the skyline of the city, located about 200 miles northwest of the capital, Buenos Aires. Firefighters swung extended ladders around to upper balconies and windows to rescue residents stranded on top floors.

Rubble and shards of glass filled the streets below, as fire engines arrived Tuesday to douse the blaze, and medical teams tended to bleeding victims.

Rescuers are still searching for over a dozen people who were in the residential building at the time of the blast, local newspaper Clarin reported.

Thursday 8 August 2013

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/07/world/americas/argentina-building-collapse/index.html?hpt=hp_t3