Why are some victims more important than others?

A headline in the Daily Mail last week read: 'Two Americans among 1,700 killed in Philippines Typhoon". An estimated 2,000 Filipinos have perished, but it's the loss of two western lives that may trigger the deployment of expensive DNA technology to the region.

Forensic identification is required to identify those bodies that have been destroyed beyond recognition by any other means.

A recent study by Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh highlights the human rights incongruity in access to vital DNA technology. Researchers exposed an unofficial, unspoken, global hierarchy, where some human remains are deemed more worthy than others when it comes to investing in DNA identification.

The technology was deployed, for example, in Bosnia and in the aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks, but not in Rwanda, or Haiti.

The authors highlight the fact that, in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, DNA technology was employed to identify victims in Thailand – the area with the highest proportion of western tourists. Non-western victims in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and other areas were not, it seems, deemed worthy of such investment.

The CMU study calls for international structures to be put in place to promote more equal access to forensic identification, ensure their fair and efficient use and provide uniform protections to participants following large-scale conflict and disaster.

In April, the collapse of the Rana Plaza Factory in Bangladesh made international headlines. More than 1,130 workers, mainly women, were killed as a result, some would argue, of corporate manslaughter.

In spite of allegations of overcrowding and human rights abuses, the owners of Rana Plaza are unlikely to pay the price. A few weeks ago, Primark announced that it had authorised a second wave of payments to victims and their families. The first installment came to the princely sum of £130 per victim.

Those who received the paltry compensation said it ran out within weeks; others say they have received nothing.

Matalan, Benetton and Bonmarche were also reportedly operating from Rana Plaza. Apparently, these companies have not offered any compensation.

According to Action Aid, six months on, 94% of Rana Plaza victims are still awaiting compensation, 92% of survivors have not gone back to work, with 63% of those reporting physical injuries including amputations, paralysis and severe pain.

Exacerbating the families' battle for justice is the lack of bodies, which, if presented, would trigger their compensation. Although the technology has been made available to identify Rana Plaza victims, problems with incompatible software have plagued the process.

Apart from the obvious emotional implications of this, there are also legal, social and economical ramifications.

Death benefits are being withheld on the grounds that the government has not been able to formally identify all the victims.

For the victims of conflict and disaster, the nightmare doesn't end when the world's media averts its gaze.

For the survivors and the destitute, despairing families of the deceased, the cost of being a third-class global citizen is never ending.

Human rights are for all – not just those who can afford to buy them.

Monday 18 November 2013

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/news-analysis/why-are-some-victims-more-important-than-others-29762494.html

Forensic team identifies Tacloban dead

Three pathologists struggled yesterday to identify dozens of fast-decomposing bodies at a mass grave, victims of the strongest typhoon ever recorded, illustrating the scale of the task the Philippines faces in the hardest-hit city of Tacloban.

More than 3,900 people are believed to have been killed when Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in the central Philippines on Nov. 8 and the sea surged ashore like a tsunami.

The pathologists from Manila’s University of the Philippines worked with three morticians to identify bodies laid out in the dirt on the edge of the pit in the evening sunlight.

It is on the tenth day after the disaster, that the meticulous process of identifying the bloated and rotting corpses has taken place at the grave, the main site for bodies collected from the debris of Tacloban.

Identification is especially important to Catholics in the predominantly Roman Catholic country.

As the pathologists overturned the bodies, they took photographs and notes of features, dimensions and other details like clothes, jewellery and mobile phones.

They had worked at a rate of 15 bodies-an-hour since sunrise with no shelter from the blazing sun.

With more than 300 bodies delivered to the site since Sunday, good-humoured but frustrated pathologist Raquel Del Rosario-Fortun said identifying all victims would be impossible without more staff and facilities.

She pleaded to Alfred Romualdez, Tacloban’s mayor who was visiting the grave, for more help.

“Everything actually is very difficult, given the resources that we have,” she said.

“There’s just a few of us right now. The thing is, we just want to start a system. And we’re hoping that this could go on. The idea is to try and examine all the bodies here, and not just dump them in a common grave.”

Romualdez said he was exasperated by the speed of the central government’s response to the storm and said his city lacked the facilities and expertise for responses like identification of bodies.

“It’s going very slow,” he said. “It’s a process that was not studied or thought of ... Every year we’re hit by strong typhoons. There must be a template already for this. It’s about time our government prepares for the next storms.”

Beside the pit, people unloaded a coffin made from scavenged debris from the top of a van and clambered through the graveyard to push it into narrow hole in a concrete wall.

Mourners said the dead man had been shot five times. They did not say why.

Tension has run high in Tacloban as desperate residents have looted and fought for scarce supplies.

Monday 18 November 2013

http://www.gulf-times.com/asean-philippines/188/details/371997/three-pathologists-in-struggle-to-identify-dead

The M40 Crash: Day trip to disaster for 11 young musicians 20 years ago

The children of Hagley Roman Catholic High School were in high spirits when they left their lessons behind on Wednesday afternoon and headed for London to see the country's finest young musicians at the Royal Albert Hall.

Hagley's own musicians had performed for Pope John Paul II in Rome and for pilgrims at Lourdes but their teacher, Eleanor Fry, 35, wanted them to see the Schools Proms. She told the excited teenagers that she wanted them to emulate the orchestras at the three-day event.

Miss Fry, who normally taught mathematics and music, was a well- liked, enthusiastic teacher with a love for music. She had often driven the school minibus on trips at home and abroad and was a competent and experienced driver, according to David Stanley, the education officer for Hereford and Worcester. The eight-year-old bus she was driving passed its MoT test only two weeks ago.

Dr Bernard Tedd, 35, a physics teacher, was driving a second minibus, making the total on the trip 28. He said they arrived at the proms at 6.15pm and settled down to enjoy a three-hour performance.

Afterwards, the two satisfied parties took on petrol, searched in vain for fish and chips and, after a final toilet stop in north London, headed home and became separated.

It was the last time Dr Tedd saw the 11 victims of the minibus crash, though, after making his agonising decision to drive on when he saw a vehicle ablaze near Junction 15 of the M40, he said he had a feeling of dread that it was theirs.

Police and fire brigade officials confirmed yesterday that he could have done nothing. Malcolm Tandy, a Warwickshire Fire Brigade public relations officer who was at the scene, said: 'Some people had already pulled seven children clear, but three were dead. The emergency services had arrived, so stopping would have been useless.

'Dr Tedd saved those children from witnessing the worst accident any of us has ever seen. I have to gather video evidence of accidents all the time. I had never seen anything like that.'

The minibus had ploughed into the back of a stationary motorway maintenance 'block vehicle', a 12.5-ton Bedford lorry fitted with a crash cushion made of honeycombed aluminium. Its driver, who has not been named, had stopped on the hard shoulder and was telephoning the police to tell them his crew of nine was moving on to another section.

According to David Lynn, head of engineering services in Warwickshire, the driver was following normal procedure and witnesses had confirmed that the vehicle's safety lights were flashing.

Emergency workers at the scene were quick to notice that a large arrow on the back of the block vehicle was pointing to the left, something which they initially felt may have confused Miss Fry, but Warwickshire County Council officials later said the arrow was obscured at the time of impact by the crash cushion.

'When the block vehicle is protecting workers on the motorway, the cushion is down,' said a spokeswoman. 'When it is not working, it is in the up position and covers the arrow. It must have been up and was probably destroyed in the ensuing blaze. If it had been down, it would have softened the impact for the Transit van, too.'

First on the scene was Patrick Molloy, a motorist from Liverpool. He said he tried to get someone out of the passenger seat but the door was jammed, so he ran to open the rear doors.

'I realised there were loads of people all on top of each other,' he said. 'I jumped into the van and started pulling them out. Everyone was unconscious. While I was doing this, another man started helping me and we noticed that there were flames spreading. Within seconds they were getting bigger.

'We managed to get about seven people out but this other man said 'Get out, the van is going to blow'. The tyres were exploding and the petrol tank was fizzling. There was thick black smoke everywhere. We did the best we could.'

Red Watch from Leamington Spa fire station attended in three fire engines but there was nothing they could do save put out the blaze and cut off the van's roof to remove the charred bodies.

Mr Tandy said: 'It is always difficult attending the scene of road traffic accidents but this was particularly traumatic, particularly because of the age of the children.' He said the firefighters involved had been told post traumatic stress counselling was available for all those who needed it.

Bob Martin, one of the first ambulance officers on the scene, said the minibus was 'an inferno' with flames shooting about 30 feet into the air. 'I have never seen anything like it before in my life,' he said. 'There were seven people laid out at the side of the road and others were standing around crying. It was awful.'

Yesterday, the police named those killed in the crash as James Hickman, 12, Ruth Clark, 12, Nicola Misiolek, 12, Fiona Cook, 12, Richard Pagett, 12, Clare Fitzgerald, 13, Adele Howell, 12, Anna Mansell, 14, Charlotte Bligh, 13, and Louise Gunn, 12. The eleventh victim, Charlene O'Dowd, 12, died in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, last night.

The three surviving children were Polly Caldwell and Bethan O'Doherty, who were described as 'stable', and Katie Murray, who was described as 'critical'. All three are in South Warwickshire hospital, Warwick.

Monday 18 November 2013

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/the-m40-crash-day-trip-to-disaster-for-11-young-musicians-steve-boggan-outlines-the-events-leading-to-the-accident-which-killed-11-pupils-and-a-teacher-after-an-outing-to-london-1505175.html

Egypt train crashes into mini-bus, kills 26

At least 26 people were killed in Egypt when a train ploughed into a truck and a mini-bus at a railway crossing early Monday, the health ministry said.

Another 28 people were injured in the accident, which happened south of Cairo.

Local police chief Kamal al-Dali told state television the mini-bus had been carrying guests home from a wedding.

The head of the Egyptian Railway Authority said the drivers of the vehicles had ignored warning lights and chains blocking entry to the crossing, and tried to go across the tracks.

"The bus stormed the crossing, according to initial reports," Hussein Zakaria told state television.

"The crossing was closed with chains, (and) there were warning lights," he said.

The train, whose driver survived the crash, continued for almost one kilometre (0.6 miles) before coming to a halt, he said.

Egypt's rail network has a poor safety record stemming largely from lack of maintenance and poor management.

In January, 17 people died when a train transporting conscripts derailed, and in November 2012, 47 school children were killed when a train crashed into their bus.

Both the transport minister and the railway authority head were forced to resign as a result of that accident, which was blamed on a train signal operator who fell asleep on the job.

The government formed a panel to investigate, but as with similar tragedies in the past, it did little to shed light on the details and less still to bring about accountability.

In Egypt's deadliest railway tragedy, the bodies of more than 360 passengers were recovered from a train after a fire in 2002.

Egyptians have long complained that the government has failed to deal with chronic transport problems, with roads as poorly maintained as railway lines.

Monday's accident took place days after train services resumed completely across the country, after they were halted due to unrest following the overthrow of president Mohamed Morsi in July.

Monday 18 November 2013

http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-train-crashes-bus-kills-20-010226122.html

Briton among 50 dead in Russian plane crash in Kazan

All 44 passengers and six crew members on board a Boeing 737 that crashed on landing in the Russian city of Kazan have been killed, sources at the scene have confirmed.

The UK Foreign Office has said that a Briton was among the dead. Russian media reports identified the British national as Donna Bull, 53, who was working as an educational consultant at Bellerbys College in Cambridge.

Also on board were the son of Tatarstan's president and the regional chief of the Russian intelligence agency FSB. The crash also claimed the lives of two children.

Forensic experts are working to establish the identities of all the victims. A search and rescue operation in and around the airport has ended as all 50 bodies have now been recovered.

The passenger plane is believed to have encountered difficulties while landing and exploded into a ball of fire on touching down. The jet's nose is reported to have hit the runway when the pilot was making a second landing attempt after the first one apparently failed.

"The plane touched the ground and burst into flame," said Sergei Izvolsky, spokesperson for the aviation monitoring agency Rosaviatsia.

Crash investigators initially said the possible causes of the accident were a technical malfunction or pilot error.

The head of the transportation department of the regional Investigation Committee, Alexander Poltinin, said the pilot made two attempts at landing the aircraft for unknown reasons.

A Kazan airport air traffic controller, Kirill Kornishin, told state broadcaster Rossiya-24 that the pilot reported a problem with the “landing configuration” as he began attempting a second approach.

“He reported that he was performing another circle, and I dictated the data to him, according to procedure, and that was that,” Kornishin said.

The jet belonged to Tatarstan Airlines and was travelling from Moscow to Kazan, the capital of the oil-rich province of Tatarstan.

The authorities have launched an investigation into the cause of the crash. Apart from Boeing officials and Russian authorities, experts from the US National Transportation Safety Board are expected to take part in the investigation.

The flight recorders of the plane, which could give a clue to what went wrong, are yet to be traced.

Speculation on the cause of the crash ranges from pilot error to unfriendly weather conditions to a technical glitch.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his condolences to the relatives of the victims. A day of mourning has also been declared in Tatarstan province.

Monday 18 November 2013

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/522954/20131118/russia-plane-crash-boeing-kazan-pictures-images.htm

Typhoon Haiyan: The grim task of recovering Tacloban's dead

They're doing a job nobody wants to do in a place few want to be.

But their deeply unenviable task is a vital step toward getting Tacloban, the Philippines city decimated by the fury of Super Typhoon Haiyan, back on its feet.

They are the body collectors -- the men who go from one debris-laden street to another, gathering the corpses left by the devastating storm and ferrying them in trucks to the outdoor morgue or mass graves.

Amid the humid heat and the frequent rain, the work is grisly and arduous.

"It's very hard for us," says Don Pomposo, a fireman sent to help Tacloban from another region of the country with 15 of his colleagues. "It's too hard."

Quantifying the dead

The bodies that remained in the city's streets for days after the typhoon became a grim symbol of Haiyan's destructive power and the temporary breakdown in government operations that followed.

Officials are still struggling to quantify the dead. At the very least, hundreds of people were killed in Tacloban. Nationwide, the death toll from the typhoon stands at 3,976, authorities say, with another 1,598 missing.

Over the past few days, progress has been made in central areas of Tacloban in the gathering and clearing of bodies, whose putrid odor has people constantly covering their noses and mouths and worrying about the possible consequences for their health.

Although those fears may be exaggerated, the continued presence of the bodies -- lined up on the streets in bags, or still buried in large areas of jumbled wreckage where houses once stood -- is a macabre reminder of how far the city still has to go to recover from its horrific ordeal.

Pomposo and his colleague Vincent Albert Garchitorena are among those working hard to help Tacloban move forward. Their team recovered 76 bodies from one street during a single morning this weekend, they say.

Clad in black T-shirts and pants tucked into tall rubber boots, they are stoical as they talk about the stomach-turning sights that confront them.

The main difficulty, they explain, is to keep going for the duration of the roughly 10-hour days they have to endure.

"We just need complete rest after working," Pomposo says, standing near a pile of stinking debris.

He has a face mask, and Garchitorena a scarf, to block out some of the stench. They both wear baseball caps to shield them from the scorching sun. But there is nothing that can protect their eyes from what they see.

The bodies they've collected over the past several days span the age range, from babies to the elderly. On occasion, they've come across dead pregnant women.

The corpses they were finding over the weekend have been festering for more than a week in the baking heat. In certain cases, decomposition is advancing rapidly.

Some of the bodies have lost their eyes, they say. Others are riddled with maggots.

The mental toll

The WHO warns that "anyone in charge of a body recovery team should be aware of the stress and trauma that team members might feel, and provide support for this where possible."

But Pomposo and Garchitorena shrug off concerns about the mental toll the experience may be having on them, even though they've never done this kind of work before.

They say they're not suffering from nightmares. They just want to get the job done and head back to Bicol, the region a few hundred kilometers northwest of Tacloban where they're from.

Their clothes retain the stench of death from one day to the next, and they have to wash themselves over twice to try to get rid of the smell from their skin.

But they show more concern for the stricken people of Tacloban than they do for themselves.

"They will have to start from zero," says Garchitorena, his eyes hidden behind a pair of reflective sunglasses. A state of flux

The two firemen say the situation in the city has changed from the unruly conditions they witnessed when they arrived early last week, a time when law and order had broken down and looting was rife.

Now, Tacloban is in a state of flux. Many residents who survived the typhoon, especially women and children, have left to stay with relatives elsewhere until the situation improves. People from badly hit communities in the surrounding areas have also flowed through the city.

Like the firemen, large numbers of the government employees working to clear up Tacloban and provide aid to storm victims have come in from other parts of the Philippines. And ordinary people from other regions have also rushed there to look for missing relatives and help survivors.

Added to that is the influx of international aid workers and foreign journalists.

Edwin Manaus stands outside the Stephanie Smoke Haus restaurant in the center of town, known locally for its all-you-can-eat buffet. He tries to make sense of the upheaval.

The streets appear to have gotten busier over the weekend, as more debris was cleared and an improved gasoline supply allowed more people to use scooters, motorized rickshaws and a variety of other vehicles to move around and reach food distribution points.

But despite the increased bustle, Manaus says the city feels emptier to him, with so many of the regular residents gone, including many members of his family.

"I need people for my business," he says, gesturing toward the darkened interior.

Shocking devastation

He also needs electricity and running water before he can reopen. He says he heard a rumor that the power could be back on as soon as next week, but city officials said late last week that it could take months.

The businesses that do appear to be thriving in the early days of recovery are improvised market stalls in a northern part of the city, near the poor, severely damaged neighborhood of Paseo de Legazpi.

Some goods on sale, like fresh bananas, appear to have come in from neighboring provinces. But other products -- like umbrellas, cigarettes and coffee -- are most likely taken from the looted stores nearby, locals say.

The devastation in Paseo de Legazpi, where many people lived in flimsy shanties, remains shocking. The creek that runs through the neighborhood is full of the splintered remains of homes and their contents, along with the bloated carcasses of several very large pigs.

The body collectors are likely to have a grueling task ahead of them, gathering what still lies amid the area's tangled wreckage.

Pomposo and Garchitorena say they don't know how long they'll have to stay. But they've already planned what they'll do when they eventually get back to Bicol.

"Rest, sleep and drink a cold glass of water," says Garchitorena.

To which, Pomposo adds, "File for vacation leave."

Monday 18 November 2013

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/18/world/asia/philippines-typhoon-body-collectors/