One killed, 38 missing as Typhoon Labuyo hits Philippines

At least one person died and 38 others were declared missing as typhoon Labuyo (international name Utor) hit the northern part of the Philippines today.

The 22-year-old victim, named Joemar Salicon, died in a landslide in Benguet, a province in northern Luzon island. He was declared dead upon arrival at a local hospital, said National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council Executive Director Eduardo del Rosario.

Meanwhile, 13 fishermen, seven from Camarines Norte province and six from Pangasinan province, were reported missing, said Cordillera Regional Police Spokesman Davy Vicente Lim-mong.

Pangasinan provincial police spokesman Ryan Manongdo said 25 more fishermen, who aboard hree fishing boats, were missing in Infanta town. They failed to return home after going on fishing.

After Typhoon Labuyo made a landfall in Aurora province early this morning, it weakened its strength and left the country in the afternoon, according to Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa).

At least 244 families with 1,003 persons from Central Luzon and Southern Tagalog have been affected by the typhoon. They are staying at evacuation centers, said del Rosario.

About 8,927 passengers have been stranded in various ports in Bicol and Visayas areas as the authorities suspended sea travel due to the typhoon.

Monday 12 August 2013

http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2013/08/12/1083141/update-one-killed-38-missing-typhoon-labuyo-hits-philippines

Auschwitz death march victims regain identities

In the Polish town of Miedzna, roughly 15 kilometers southwest of Auschwitz, is a mass grave containing the bodies of 42 camp inmates who were murdered during the death march in January 1945. The mass grave is in the local cemetery, near a large wooden church. Until last month, the victims’ identities were unknown. At the end of last month, in a special ceremony attended by a rabbi, a priest, town residents and a delegation from Israel, a new marker bearing the names of those victims who had been identified was placed over the grave.

The identification of the victims and the placing of the stone were made possible after months of research into the victims’ identities by Gil Paran, a guide for Israeli delegations to Poland. The research and the new grave marker were funded by the Israeli telecommunications company, Bezeq. “The victims went from being anonymous casualties to people with an identity and sometimes a face as well,” Paran said. Bogdan Tarnowski, the mayor, said during the ceremony that “the choice between good and evil, between light and darkness, is up to us alone and the Nazi period is a warning light for us about the abysses we must never reach again.”

The victims were part of a group of roughly 25,000 inmates from Birkenau and Auschwitz who were marched through the village on their way to the trains that took them to Germany, where the intention was to use them for the war effort. Forty-two of the victims set out on January 18, 1945 and were murdered that same day or the next at the latest. Their corpses were retrieved from the road and the forest by local residents, by order of the Germans. Thirty-nine of them were buried in the cemetery on January 19, and three more were buried later.

The commemoration of the names of death-march victims is part of a large-scale project that began several years ago. So far, the project has collected the names of victims from five sites along the death-march route. A different group of Israelis, including retirees from the Mossad, the Shin Bet, the Airports Authority and Bezeq, worked at each site. Yaki Ganz, who also works as a guide for delegations to Poland, got Bezeq on board, which made the new grave marker in the Miedzna cemetery possible.

Jozef Cieply, a survivor of the death march, wrote in his memoirs: “In the vicinity of Rajsko, not far from the camp, I noticed the hunched figure of a woman at the side of the road. It was the corpse of a prisoner, shot by SS guards. I saw the greatest number of corpses of shot prisoners between the localities of Miedzna and Cwiklice. One of our friends, who came from Poznan, counted 114 corpses. These were the bodies of those marching ahead of us. The corpses lay scattered on the road and we had to step around them. I remember that a German kapo tried to move a corpse that was lying at the side of the road, causing a delay. The entire contents of the skull, which evidently had been blown to bits by a gunshot, lay on the road. The sight was so shocking that the kapo gave up and left the corpse as it had been.” Another survivor, Oswald Gruszczyk, recalled: “We walked on the road, which was full of snow. Clogs, mugs and blankets fell onto the road. Ahead of us walked a group of women from Birkenau. After a walk of several hundred meters we saw, just a few meters away, bleeding corpses of women lying in the ditch.”

A resident of the town testified: “After I arrived at the police station, two wagons were waiting.... They collected inmates who had been murdered on their way from the bridge to the Miedzna junction. The second wagon collected bodies from the forest to the Miedzna junction. Together, 42 corpses were collected in both wagons. They were later buried in a mass grave in the cemetery.” Another resident testified: “Together with a few other men, we collected the bodies and they were buried in a mass grave.... The picture of the prisoners who were found shot in the forest is particularly etched in my memory. One woman prisoner survived for two freezing days after crawling into the forest, but she died during efforts to resuscitate her. She was buried with the other victims.” Paran says that “in almost every village, the inhabitants were summoned to collect the bodies, and they buried them in mass graves. Each village has its own story.”

In some places, the victims’ names were written down in the cemetery records, in the Germans’ documents or slips of paper. In this case, the victims were identified when an archived document was discovered. On January 19, 1945, the commander of the German police station in Miedzna reported the discovery of 39 bodies of the Auschwitz inmates — 29 women and ten men. Only 25 of them were identified by their prison number. “Others had no identifying marks,” the commander wrote.

When Paran began checking and cross-checking the numbers on the commander’s telegram, he found that most of the inmates buried there were Jews from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands. Of the Jews buried in the mass grave, three men were identified by name. Of the Poles buried there, one woman and one man were identified by name. Another prisoner was identified by name as well, but his origin remains unknown. In addition, five inmates of Auschwitz whose inmate numbers are known are buried there, together with 17 other victims about whom nothing is known.



Among the victims who have now been identified: Sandor Wohl, 16, a Jewish teenager from Hungary, born May 12, 1928. He was deported to Auschwitz in August 1944.

Israel Hershson Kogen, 55, a Jewish man born in 1890 in Lublin, Poland, who worked as a waiter. He was deported to Auschwitz in 1941.

Zeiwel Giser, 33, of Poland, born December 1, 1912. He was deported to Auschwitz from the Grodno Ghetto on December 8, 1942.

Balbina Kruk, 53, of Poland. Born in 1882, she was deported from Warsaw to Auschwitz in 1944 after the Polish uprising.

Josef Jankowski, of Poland. He arrived at Auschwitz as part of a group deported there by the Gestapo in Lodz on August 3, 1943.

Monday 12 august 2013

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/.premium-1.540885

For Delhi's destitutes, he is the last hope

In dark streets, every night, he appears as a beacon of hope to those left for dead. He takes drug overdose and accident victims to hospital and gives the dead the dignity of a decent end - all this simply because, once an addict himself, he knows what it is to be one of them.

Khushi Ram, 52, a resident of north Delhi's Mori Gate, repairs metallic shop shutters by day. But by night, he becomes a messiah and walks a 4-km radius that reports more than one-fifth of the total number of dead bodies recovered across Delhi annually.

As per Delhi Police records, he has taken 34 unclaimed dead bodies to the Bara Hindu Rao Hospital between April 2008 and October 2012. Eight more were wheeled in just in the nick of time.

"Though I don't have the papers to prove it, I've helped 60 people in four years," he says, "But there's a long way to go before I can say I've fulfilled the promise I made to my father."

On a winter night in 2005, Ram's father was livid after he found him vomiting in a drain with a needle in his arm.

"He told me he was ashamed of me - I wasn't the son he had. Those words made me turn my life around. I promised him I'd change and help clean the streets in whatever way I can."

After a year at a rehab centre, a different Khushi Ram returned to the streets. According to locals, he's a godsend.

"Given the staff crunch, whatever help we get from the public is invaluable. Sometimes, the only difference between a fresh accident victim and an unidentified dead body is a minute's delay. Khushi Ram has helped tilt that balance for the better at least half a dozen times," said an official from the local police station.

The state government's public grievances cell has also instructed the Delhi Police's vigilance department to help Khushi Ram in whatever way possible.

According to Delhi Police records, 1,808 dead bodies were found in different parts of the Capital till August 9 this year, with 374 of these being found in the north Delhi district. As many as 147 were discovered in the Kashmere Gate area.

Monday 12 August 2013

http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/For-Delhi-s-destitutes-he-is-the-last-hope/Article1-1106769.aspx

Rosario death toll rises to 18, three people remain missing

Rescuers working at the site of a major gas leak explosion which this week caused a building to collapse, found three more victims making the death toll reach 18. Three people were still missing, the Santa Fe province authorities informed today.

Rosario's Health Secretary Leonardo Caruana said two female bodies were found in the last hours and they were identified as 76-year-old Oclides Eraceli Ceresole, and 65-year-old Ana Rizzo.

Tuesday's tragedy left more than 60 people injured, 11 of them still hospitalized. Meanwhile, rescue workers continued a frantic search for the missing ones.

Monday 12 August 2013

http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/138224/rosario-death-toll-rises-to-18-three-people-remain-missing

Forensic anthropologist says he can identify unknown dead on USS Oklahoma

A forensic anthropologist is confident his research lab can identify hundreds of USS Oklahoma servicemen buried as unknowns in Hawaii. He just needs permission from the Department of Defense to do so.

John Byrd, director of the Central Identification Laboratory, became involved with the USS Oklahoma project in 2003 when Pearl Harbor survivor Ray Emory showed the lab critical information about the nearly 400 remains.

More than 600 U.S. servicemen killed during the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor are buried as unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Roughly two-thirds of these belong to the USS Oklahoma. The commingled, unidentified remains may not be as unknown as they appear, Emory claimed.

Unknown graves

Emory, now 92, first visited the cemetery in Honolulu more than 20 years ago to honor those killed at Pearl Harbor. Dubbed the Punchbowl for resembling the serving dish, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific is tucked away within a volcanic crater. The burial ground is home to 34,000 military veterans.

Emory expected to find an organized area dedicated to the hundreds of servicemen who lost their lives in the battle.

Instead he found nothing.

After failing to locate them himself, Emory, who was stationed on the USS Honolulu in 1941, asked the caretaker where he could find the Pearl Harbor graves. The answer horrified him. They were spread all over the area, the caretaker told him.

The graves were listed only as “unknown,” making it impossible for visitors to distinguish which grave held remains from which ship or from which war.

Emory scoured through Army and Navy records, finding whatever information he could about the burials.

The results were startling.

In 1950, 61 caskets carrying the remains of about 400 unknowns from the USS Oklahoma were buried in the Punchbowl.

He dug further and discovered a deceased personnel file listing the names of 27 servicemen from the ship whose remains were believed to be identified in 1949. An anthropologist didn't approve the identifications, however, and the remains were buried with the rest.

For more than a decade, Emory tried convincing officials to exhume these remains so they could be re-identified and returned to their families. He won a small victory after officials finally relented and added the ship names to the grave markers.

In 2003, he caught a bigger break.

Identification difficult

The Central Identification Laboratory is run by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a Department of Defense task force charged with accounting for all Americans listed as prisoners of war and missing in action. Byrd and other representatives sat down with Emory and found his information credible.

The scientists decided to unbury a casket believed to be holding the remains of five of the 27 servicemen. They found what they were looking for, but not what they expected.

“What we thought we were going to find were discrete sets of remains packaged in the normal nurturing manner,” Byrd said. “Instead, what we found was that all of the remains of the sailors were commingled.”

Along with the scrambled remains of the five sailors, the team found bones belonging to about 100 servicemen.

The Central Identification Laboratory eventually identified the five sailors, and the remains were delivered to their families. USS Oklahoma Fireman 3rd Class Alfred Livingston's body was pulled out of the ocean and was believed to have belonged to the USS Arizona. He was identified in 2007.

The identifications will end there, however, if the laboratory is not permitted to recover the rest of the buried remains.

After a series of failures in the late 1940s, researchers realized they could not identify individual sailors with the technology they had, he said. The order was given to separate the remains according to parts — such as legs, arms and heads — and then bury them in 61 caskets in the Punchbowl.

“That's a very unusual thing to do, and I don't know of any other cases where they've done that from that era,” Byrd said.

Technology has drastically improved since the '40s, but the segregated bones make it impossible for Byrd's team to identify the other remains from the casket without the rest.

He said the Central Identification laboratory has applied to recover the 60 remaining caskets from the Punchbowl, and he's still waiting for an answer.

Navy spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Sarah Flaherty told The Oklahoman the Department of Defense initiated a working group to examine the challenges and issues associated with recovering the remains. It is unknown how long it will take to reach a decision, she said.

While the working group convenes, the Department of Navy is seeking support to conduct a memorial and burial ceremony for the remains currently held by the laboratory. If approved, the ceremony would be Dec. 7, 2014, at the USS Oklahoma Memorial on Ford Island.

“The consideration for us for having the ceremony is that people who are survivors of the USS Oklahoma are not getting any younger,” Flaherty said. “The memorial ceremony ... offers temporary closure and a cogent place for survivors to treat as a final resting place in the interim.”

She said the ceremony would not hinder identification efforts if the working group approves the project to retrieve the buried caskets. The Central Identification Laboratory has already collected the needed DNA from the remains in its possession.

“There's nothing else that can be pulled,” Flaherty said. “That doesn't mean that identities have been recovered, but the information has been pulled from those remains.”

Closure for comrades

If the request to disentomb the 400 remains is approved, the outcome would be significant, Byrd said.

“We don't want to be overly optimistic, and we don't want to build unrealistic expectations, so we hedge a little bit when we think we can identify at least three quarters of them,” he said. “Maybe more.”

Byrd estimates these results would take about five years to be reached.

After two decades of arguing with officials, Emory has accepted he may not live to see closure for his comrades. But he doesn't keep fighting for himself. He does it for the families of the unidentified servicemen whom he believes have been neglected by the government.

“I'm 92, so I'll be dead before they get a lot of this done, but I just keep going along and doing my own thing,” he said. “And maybe someday something will happen, something will get done. But there's nothing I can do except maybe scream at some congressman or senator and say, ‘Hey. What do you intend for these people to do?'”

Monday 12 August 2013

http://m.newsok.com/forensic-anthropologist-says-he-can-identify-unknown-dead-on-uss-oklahoma/article/3868823

Six Egyptian migrants drown on 20-metre swim from boat to Sicily beach

Italy was shaken over the weekend by the deaths of six young Egyptians who drowned while trying to swim 20 metres from a wooden fishing boat to the shore, and whose bodies were laid out in bags beside sun umbrellas on a popular Sicilian beach.

The prosecutor of Catania, Sicily's second city, opened an investigation after the boat, which had been carrying more than 100 migrants from Egypt and Syria, ran aground on a sandbar near the Lido Verde resort.

Roberto D'Arrigo, a spokesman for the Catania coast guard, told the Guardian that some of the passengers had jumped into the water to try to swim to safety, while others had remained on board.

Among the 98 survivors were about 50 minors, many of them small children, he said.

It was suspected that the six men who died, and who were identified on Sunday as Egyptians between 17 and 27 years old, may not have known how to swim. The Ansa news agency reported that the youngest was to have turned 18 this month.

According to the UN, about 8,400 migrants and asylum seekers landed on the coasts of Italy and Malta during the first six months of this year, many of them from Egypt, Syria and countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

It is rare, however, for boats to approach populated shorelines near Italian cities, and investigators were reported as saying they thought the vessel may have taken a wrong turn. At about the same time as the migrants arrived, so too did three large cruise ships carrying some 12,500 tourists keen to view Mount Etna from the port.

Police have arrested two Egyptians, aged 16 and 17, on suspicion of assisting illegal immigration, but are said to fear that the smugglers may have managed to flee from the boat.

The Catania prosecutor, Giovanni Salvi, is looking into possible charges of multiple manslaughter in relation to the disaster. He told the Catholic newspaper L'Avvenire that the fishing boat may have been towed most of the way by a larger ship and said he suspected links to an "organised network".

Separate investigations had already indicated that local crime organisations were involved in the people smuggling, he said.

D'Arrigo said coastguards had launched an emergency rescue attempt after receiving an alert via the police from the Lido Verde's owner, who had heard cries coming from the beach.

Rescuers transported those still on the boat back to land and pulled others out of the water, he added.

The resort's beach was closed after the deaths, and Catania's city council called a day of mourning for Wednesday, when the funerals may be held.

Speaking on Italian radio on Sunday, Italy's foreign minister, Emma Bonino, said there was no miracle solution to a phenomenon which often leads to fatalities off the country's coastline. At the end of last month, 31 people were feared to have died while trying to reach the island of Lampedusa, the destination for most migrants and asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East.

"Whether it be a dream or illusion, these people risk ending up in the hands of real merchants of illusions or death," said Bonino.

"But we're talking about people who are fleeing because of hunger or war or a mixture of the two, and therefore there is no miracle solution."

Her words were echoed in the testimony of a survivor in Catania, who said he had decided to leave Syria because he was unable to finish his exams. Yahia Khaddam, 19, told La Repubblica he had paid $1,500 (£1,290) for the journey, which he felt he had no choice but to make.

"Either you fight or your flee," he was quoted as saying. "I had to risk death in order to live. I accepted the risk. I paid, and I'm alive."

Monday 12 august 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/11/egyptian-migrants-drown-sicily-resort

Six killed after Indonesian volcano eruption, search on for children's bodies

Hot lava from an erupting volcano killed six people sleeping in a beach village on a small island in eastern Indonesia on Saturday, after ash and smoke from the volcano shot about a mile into the air, officials said.

Mount Rokatenda in East Nusa Tenggara province erupted early Saturday morning, and nearly 3,000 people have been evacuated from the area on Palue island, according to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency. The volcano has been rumbling since October.

The victims who died included three adults and two children, said agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, adding that the age of the sixth person killed was unclear. He said that the adults’ bodies were recovered from Ponge beach in Rokirole village, but that the children’s remains had not been found.

Officials continued searching Sunday for the bodies of two children buried by the hot lava as rumbling could still be heard from Mount Rokatenda on the small island of Palue in East Nusa Tenggara province.

Nearly 3,000 people have been evacuated from the area since the volcano erupted early Saturday morning, according to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency. The volcano had been active since last October.

Tini Thadeus, head of the local disaster agency, said the six victims, who died while sleeping in a beachside village, were among those who had refused to leave last year when evacuations were carried out to establish a safety zone around the volcano.

"On their belief, if all the old villagers abandoned the red (danger) zone, then lava will destroy the residential area," Thadeus said from Kupang, the provincial capital. Among the dead was a 58-year-old woman, the grandmother of the two children who also died.

"But unfortunately, not like in the past, lava from Saturday's eruption flowed northward and hit them," Thadeus said, adding that during earlier eruptions since the 1930s, volcanic material had always flowed southward.

Thadeus said he was not optimistic about recovering the children's bodies since they were buried under hot volcanic material.

He said small explosions could still be heard coming from the peak, which was still spewing smoke up to 600 meters (656 yards) into the sky.

"But all of the villagers have been evacuated out of the danger zone" near the crater, he said.

Video footage on Indonesia’s TVOne showed giant plumes of white and gray smoke and ash belching from the volcano into a sunny blue sky. Prior to Saturday’s eruption, many residents had already been moved to safer areas.

The disaster agency said the volcano spewed ash and smoke about 2km into the air. The eruption lasted about seven minutes, said Frans Wangge, who heads the volcano’s monitoring post.

He said the hot lava burned trees around the beach and villages, and made it difficult to reach the area where the victims were killed.

Domi Dange, a Catholic priest helping those who fled to the district town of Maumere on nearby Flores island, said some residents, who had refused to leave when the area was earlier cleared, were sleeping under tents near the beach. However, details about the six people who were killed and where they were located at the time of the eruption remained unclear.

Local authorities, including police and army officials along with members of a search and rescue agency, were heading to tiny Palue island to help with evacuations.

“We will see the best steps to be taken, but clearly they have to be evacuated,” said Yoseph Ansar Rara, chief of Sikka District, which oversees the island. He said those already evacuated had agreed to be relocated to Flores island.

Mount Rokatenda is one of about 129 active volcanoes in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands that’s home to some 240m people.

The country is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity because it sits along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a horseshoe-shaped series of fault lines.

Monday 12 August 2013

http://www.irishexaminer.com/world/indonesian-volcano-erupts-killing-six-239535.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57598009/search-on-for-childrens-bodies-after-indonesian-volcano-eruption/

18 dead in Alexandria traffic pile-up

Eighteen people were killed and three injured on Sunday in a major traffic pile-up in Egypt's Mediterranean city of Alexandria. The accident, which involved five vehicles, took place on the international road to the west of the city, Amr Nasr, head of Alexandria's ambulance service, told Anadolu Agency.

According to Nasr, most of the fatalities died on the spot.

Ibrahim al-Roubi, head of the emergency department, said the three passengers who survived the accident had all sustained serious injuries.

Deadly traffic accidents are common in Egypt due to poor road maintenance and lax supervision and law enforcement by local transportation bodies.

Monday 12 August 2013

http://www.worldbulletin.net/?aType=haber&ArticleID=114959

One more body found under coal heap debris in Sundargarh

The death toll in the Sundargarh coal mine tragedy rose to 10 with the recovery of one more body on Sunday morning. Later in the day, hundreds of agiatated villagers gheraoed the Balinga police outpost with four bodies.

As family members of missing persons and local villagers waited anxiously near the mishap spot at Kulda-Basundhara open cast coal mines of Mahanadi Coalfields Limited (MCL), around 150 km from here, agitated locals marched to the Balinga police outpost and demanded compensation of Rs 25 lakh to the family of each deceased and a permanent job to the victim's family.

The incident took place when some people from nearby villages were collecting coal from the overburdened dump yard located near the mining area, an MCL spokesman said.

Some of them were buried when a portion of the coal dump suddenly collapsed, probably due to heavy rains that lashed the area yesterday, he said, adding search and rescue operation was immediately launched at the site.

Like the previous day, heavy downpour interrupted rescue operations for about an hour on Sunday. But people converged at the site in large numbers expecting recovery of their kin from the coal overburden, which collapsed on Saturday when around 30 locals were collecting remnant coal.

While the confirmed death toll stood at 10, more bodies are feared to be lying below the debris. MCL sources said 60 per cent of the debris had been removed. Rescue operations, which were stopped during the night after recovery of nine bodies, resumed around 10 am. One body was recovered by evening. "Since it is a large patch about 40 to 50-metre long, the operation is taking time," said general manager, Basundhara coal mines, A K Singh.

Four excavators were pressed into service. We have called for one more to expedite operations," he added.

Those dead were identified as Mukteswar Kumar (27), Gurubari Majhi (55), Bhagabati Majhi (50), Sumanta Kharsel (35), Dulari Bhoi (55), Rajesh Dhandi (15), Raimal Seth (50) (all natives of Balinga village), Sukesh Satpathy (29) of Kurla village under Bhasma police station and Deepak Nayak (50) of Gomadera under Belpahar police station of Jharsuguda district. "We have handed over the bodies to the family members after proper identification and post mortem," said SP (Sundargarh) Sanjeev Arora.

Locals accused MCL of ignoring development work under periphery development scheme and demanded improvement of roads and other infrastructure. "The locals are in an agitated mood and might lodge an FIR against senior MCL officials alleging that the company was responsible for the mishap," said a police officer.

Political leaders made a beeline to the mishap spot and met the victims' families. Sundargarh MP Hemananda Biswal and Sundargarh Sadar MLA Jogesh Singh, both from Congress, had visited the spot on Saturday. Commerce and transport minister Subrat Tarai, who represents Raghunathpalli in Sundaragrh, went to the area on Sunday and discussed details of the rescue operation with officials.

Monday 12 August 2013

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bhubaneswar/One-more-body-found-under-coal-heap-debris/articleshow/21771053.cms