GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The cruise ship Costa Concordia, which crashed into rocks Friday 13 February off the Italian coast, remains the scene of painstaking searches for survivors, with Manrico Gianpetroni, chief purser, brought out alive and suffering from a broken leg, and a Korean couple on their honeymoon brought out dazed. Checks have now made it possible to ascertain that 17 people remain missing, fewer than earlier thought, but at least five people died, with two bodies found Sunday afternoon, and 70 were injured in the accident to the luxury liner that had 4,000 people on board.
Reuters cites Italian police as saying that “the captain of the luxury 114,500-tonne ship, Francesco Schettino, was under arrest and accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship.”
Links to other sites: BBC, CNN, La Stampa (It), Le Monde (Fr)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The Yaroslavl Lokomotiv ice hockey team was killed when 44 people lost their lives in a plane crash in Yaroslavl, less than 300km northeast of Moscow. One person is reported to have survived the crash but details are sketchy and unofficial numbers for those on the plane vary. The plane appears to have crashed shortly after takeoff.
The team was traveling to Belarus capital Minsk for the first game of the Kontinental Hockey League’s new season. The railway company team came second in the relatively new league last year and has been considered one of Russia’s leading times, a serious contender for the title this season, according to state news agency Ria Novosti.
Foreigners on the team included players from Germany, Sweden and Slovakia.
Links to other sites: Aljazeera, Ria Novosti
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Singer Amy Winehouse, 27, was found dead at her Camden, London home; AP reported the story and the BBC says London Metropolitan police have confirmed that a woman was found and the cause of death is as yet “unexplained.”
The Daily Telegraph says police have confirmed it was Winehouse, and that they received an emergency call from a woman at that address, but Winehouse was declared dead when they arrived.
Winehouse, who has had a long battle to overcome drinks and drugs, began a comeback European tour in June that was to include an appearance at the Paleo Festival, running now in Nyon, near Geneva.
But after she was booed off the stage in Serbia during a concert where she mumbled and appeared to be drunk, she cancelled the tour.
Two US airmen died after a man opened fire on a US Air Force bus in front of terminal 2 at the Frankfurt international airport Wednesday afternoon. Two other airmen were injured.
The driver and a passenger were killed, both of them shot in the head and the chest, apparently after fight broke out on the bus, and while German authorities have not identified the gunman, Kosovo’s interior minister says he was told by German police the man is from Kosovo, although the information was contradicted by others.
The gunman fled the scene of the shooting and a suspect was arrested inside the airport shortly afterwards.
Links to other sites: Guardian, Washington Post
AP video
Al Jazeera TV signal cut, told to shut down, while China blocks “Egypt” Twitter searches
President Hos Mubarak, facing what Reuters refers to as “unprecedented pressure” on his regime, is holding closely watched meetings with military officials in the country, as Egypt has its sixth day of protests against Mubarak’s 30-year-old presidency. Saturday 29 January Al Jazeera TV, which operates out of Qatar, was told it could no longer work in the country, cancelling accreditation for journalists and Nilesat, an Egyptian satellite, cut its signal. The shutdown affected the network’s operations in some other countries as well, but Al Jazeera says it is able to offer viewers its new from other signals. It claims to have some 400 reporters worldwide, and its Arab world coverage is some of the most thorough among news agencies.
In Cairo, thousands of people have continued to gather despite curfews and a ban on crowds, with looting reported and gangs reportedly freeing prisoners from jails. Numbers of people reported to have died in protests vary, but it appears that more than 100 have been killed, and the government claims that it has arrested hundreds of looters.
China, according to Reuters, began blocking “Egypt” as a search term on micro-blogs, the Chinese equivalents of Twitter, in what it says appears to be a sign “aimed at preventing events in Egypt from setting an example of political opposition at home.”
Links to other sites: Al Jazeera, Jerusalem Post, Reuters, Xinhua
A bomb that went off as Christian church-goers left a New Year’s service Saturday 31 December in Alexandria, Egypt, killed 17 people and possibly more, while injuring dozens, Egyptian interior ministry officials say. Initial reports said that a car bomb was responsible for the blast, and the number of dead listed was higher, but conflicting reports are now citing foreign ministry officials, with one version saying that the explosion was probably the work of a suicide bomber who died along with his victims. Egypt has a majority of Muslims but 10 percent of the population is Christian, according to Reuters. The blast was followed by thousands of Christians taking to the streets in protest.
Links to other sites: Al Jazeera, Jerusalem Post, Reuters
Heavy rains in Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland caused flash floods that have thus far killed 11 people.
Hundreds of people had to evacuate the state of Saxony in Germany after several roads and villages were flooded by the Neisse river.
In Poland, the rains destroyed a bridge near Bogatynia and left residents without electricity or running water.
In The Czech Republic two dams threatened thousands of residents which had to be evacuated to protect them from raising waters. Flooding in other parts of the country was such that many had to be rescued from the roofs of their homes by helicopters.
Additional sources: BBC
Calf taking his first steps at Taronga Zoo, Sydney, Australia (photo: Bobby-Jo Vial)
Australia is having a good day: first the news about police killing Dalmatin, the mastermind behind the Bali bombings which killed 100 Australians, and now the cheering news about a little elephant calf at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, born shortly after 03:00 Wednesday 10 March. The calf was declared dead in his mother’s womb three days earlier, but surprised everyone when he was born alive, and first signs are encouraging: with help from the intensive care staff at the zoo he has taken his first steps within just hours of his birth, attempted to suckle his mother, Porntip, and touched the trunks of the other elephants at the zoo, writes the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Advice from world elephant reproduction expert, Dr Thomas Hildebrandt of the Berlin Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Health is that such an outcome after a protracted labour has never been seen before,” according to the zoo’s pages on the new calf. ” He said the birth will completely re-write the elephant birth text books.” The zoo now believes the calf was in a coma during his mother’s lengthy labour, which explains why they were unable to pick up his vital signs.
A blast in the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu, killed three cabinet ministers and at least 18 other people Thursday 3 December, although AllAfrica, picking up the story from a UN humanitarian newsletter which cites a hospital source, puts the figure at 50 dead. The authors of the crime remain a mystery. A bomb exploded during a medical school graduation ceremony and suspicion quickly fell on an Islamist group, al Shabaab, but the group has denied it was involved. The extremist group has been locked in a power struggle with the Western-backed government, which the extremists accused of masterminding the blast, pointing out that the government itself has deep rifts. The US has called al Shabaab a proxy for al Qaeda in the region and Reuters reports that “Western security agencies say Somalia has become a safe haven for militants, including foreign jihadists, who are using it to plot attacks across the impoverished region and beyond.”
Update 18:10 Syrian Interior Minister Said Mohammad Sammour has said on Syrian state television that there was no bomb and that the explosion was due to overinflated tires on the bus, Al-Jazeera reports. He categorically denied that the incident was terrorist-related.
A bomb has gone off in the centre of Damascus, Syria, Thursday morning 3 December, killing several people. The number of dead has not yet been confirmed by Syrian authorities, but the country’s interior minister, Said Mohammad Sammour, told a Lebanese TV station that it appears to have targeted Iranian pilgrims. Initial media reports indicate that 12 people may have died.
It was a rough weekend in Afghanistan for US forces, with eight soldiers killed Saturday 3 October, along with two Afghan soldiers, when an outpost came under fierce attack from militants. This was the worst one-day loss of US troops in over a year, according to CNN and NPR.
Car and truck bombs going off in several parts of Iraq since Friday have killed at least 75 people and injured scores more, as the country struggles to maintain security in the wake of US troops leaving urban areas to local police and Awakening Councils. Reports are still unclear about the magnitude of the lastest attacks, two car bombs in Baghdad and two truck bombs near Mosul Monday morning. Al Jazeera, BBC,
The number of families that cannot afford to claim and bury or cremate their own people is growing, the Los Angeles county in California says. The number of people whose cremation was paid for by taxpayers rose 36 percent in 2008, over 2007, from 525 to 712. Los Angeles Times
Updated 10:15 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Two UN employees were killed Tuesday night 9 June in a bomb blast that killed 16 and demolished the five-star Hotel Pearl Continental in Peshawar, capital of Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan. One, a UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) employee from Serbia, was on mission in Peshawar. Aleksandar Vorkapic, an information technology specialist in the UNHCR office in Belgrade was on his first emergency mission for the organization, the UNHCR office in Geneva announced Wednesday morning. He leaves a wife and three children.
The other death, a woman who is a Philippines citizen, was working for the World Food Programme, a spokesperson at the UNHCR office in Peshawar has told GenevaLunch. Several other UNHCR employees who were staying at the Pearl Continental Hotel have been evacuated to Islamabad, the spokesperson says. The Geneva office of UNHCR cites news reports as saying a Unicef staff person has died.
Police and fire officials in Mexico are investigating a blaze that took the lives of at least 31 young children in a Mexican day care centre in Hermosillo. The centre is next to an automobile warehouse that may have had an electrical short circuit. The Los Angeles Times reports that “Dozens more children were injured in Friday’s blaze, and Mexican authorities said some would be transferred to a special pediatric burn unit at Shriners Hospital for Children in Sacramento for treatment. Other injured children were being treated in hospitals in Hermosillo, the capital of the border state of Sonora, across from Arizona.”
A Dutch man, 38, drove his car into the Queen’s Day parade in east Amsterdam Thursday 30 April killing 5 people and wounding 12 others, say Dutch officials. The car missed his intended target, the bus carrying the queen and royal family, and crashed into a stone monument several meters away. The driver was injured in the crash and has been detained. The government cancelled the remaining official activities for the day. Financial Times
An unknown number of gunmen opened fire in Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in Baku, Azerbaijan Thursday morning killing at least13 and wounding 15 others. According to local officials one of the gunmen shot and killed himself and another has been arrested. Reuters, MSNBC
The Italian government now says that 207 bodies have been found and another 50 people are reported missing, but 1,500 are injured and 17,000 are homeless after the earthquake that hit Aquila in the early hours of Monday. Reuters
Debt collectors in the US, faced with the growing number of unpaid mortgages and credit card bills, are finding the dead are some of their best customers, a situation aided in part by better databases that alert collectors to estates being opened in the probate courts which handle estates and wills, reports the New York Times: “Dead people are the newest frontier in debt collecting, and one of the healthiest parts of the industry. Those who dun the living say that people are so scared and so broke it is difficult to get them to cough up even token payments.”
