Saturday 12 April 2014

10 die in bus-truck crash on Interstate 5 in Sacramento Valley


Ten are dead after a FedEx truck crossed over a grassy median on a Northern California freeway and slammed into a tour bus carrying more than 40 high school students Thursday evening, authorities say.

The students were headed on a college visit to tour Humboldt State University. One student, Steven Clavijo, 18, was trying to take a nap when he felt the bus shaking from left to right before hearing a loud boom.

Both the driver of the bus and the semi were among those killed.

Clavijo said that someone kicked one of the windows open and many escaped that way, running to the other side of Interstate 5. Many escaped just before hearing an explosion and seeing the bus burst into flanes.

Huge flames could be seen coming from both vehicles and black clouds of smoke entered the air before firefighters were able to put out the fire.

Inside the charred bus, bodies were draped in blankets. Among the dead were three adult chaperones and five students.

An investigation team from the National Transportation Safety Board is expected to arrive Friday.

Humboldt State University had chartered two buses from various Southern California high schools to tour their campus in Arcata, Calif.

Silverado Stages, who owns the bus involved in the crash, is assisting authorities with the investigation.

Several different schools in the Los Angeles County Unified School District were among those invited on the tour of the college. It was a scheduled three day visit.

The California Highway Patrol says that the bus and the truck were on opposite sides of the freeway when the truck allegedly tried to avoid collision with a white sedan. It hit the car on the side before heading across the grassy median and into the bus. No one in the white sedan was injured.

In addition to the deceased, a first responder on the scene noted that there were 36 or 37 injuries.

"The victims were teenage kids. A lot of them were freaked out. They were shocked. They still couldn't grasp what happened," Jason Wyman of the Orland Volunteer Fire Department said.

At least four people are listed in critical condition at various hospitals.

FedEx is cooperating with authorities according to a statement from a spokesperson.

Official says identifying bodies from Thursday's bus-Fed Ex truck collision in California will be difficult, partly because many suffered burns. Dental records will be used to identify some of the bodies; if that isn't sufficient, officials will use DNA, which would be a longer process, Glenn County Chief Deputy Coroner Richard Warren told reporters Friday morning.

Saturday 12 April 2014

http://www.kspr.com/news/nationworld/URGENT-California-Bus-Crash-Body-Identification/21051646_25435428

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Abkhazia: The hope that never dies


Bella Zaldastanishvili’s world shattered on September 22, 1993, when a plane carrying over 110 people from Tbilisi was shot down while landing in Babushera airport in Sokhumi. Around 20 people are known to have survived, but they did not include Bella’s two sons – Zurab and Temur – and her twin brothers – Vasili and Nukri – who were on board.

She last saw Zurab and Temur a few hours before boarding on that plane.

“They came home on the early hours of the 22nd,” she sobs, pointing at a picture on the wall of four men in their 20s. “Zurab asked me to play the opening to Daisi (“Sunset” in Georgian, a famous opera by Zakaria Paliashvili) on the piano. We can’t, I told him, it is 4am. Besides, it is very mournful. Why do you want me to play it?”

Eventually, she gave in – but she has not played the piano since. When tragedy struck hours later, this family of nine women – the oldest of whom, Bella, was 46 at the time, the youngest merely 10 months – was left to assume the worst. They have spent two decades mourning their loved ones and longing for the chance to bury them. Only Zurab was clearly identified; there was no news about the others, and none of the bodies was ever returned to her. Twenty years on, Bella’s grief is as raw as if it had happened yesterday.

She is not alone. The four men are among the 2,000 people whom the International Red Cross Committee (ICRC) says are unaccounted for from the 13-month war in Abkhazia in 1992-1993. About 150 of them are Abkhazians, including the famous poet Taif Adzhba.

No Dividing Lines

Parents from both sides began to search for their missing relatives immediately after the conflict ended.

Mothers and fathers used their personal connections – friends, neighbors, and surviving soldiers – to gather information to track down their children. They visited prisons and hospitals, travelled to potential gravesites, often at considerable risk and financial burden, to rummage through clothes looking for details that could help identify their loved ones – a tag, the corner of a photo, a shoe.

Georgian and Abkhazian parents soon realized they had to cooperate. Two associations – Georgia’s Molodini (Expectation) and Abkhazia’s Mothers of Abkhazia for Peace and Social Justice – led the way.

“We agreed we had to trust each other,” explains Vladimir Doborjginidze, Molodini’s energetic 86-year old chairman. “We were not enemies, just parents, equals in our grief,” says the historian, whose only son was last seen in Sokhumi on September 27, 1993. “I lost Zurab but I can’t be angry at them [the Abkhazians].”

Molodini has taken that message to heart. Inside the organization’s Missing Persons Museum in Tbilisi, the walls are covered by the personal belongings that parents shared to keep their memories alive – blurred black-and-white photos of young men smiling at the camera, boxing gloves, sport medals, diplomas, Soviet military cards from the Afghan war.

A big banner lists the missing Abkhazians, because “their parents are waiting as well,” explains Nineli Andriadze, Molodini’s deputy chairwoman and the museum’s caretaker, in her soft voice. She is still waiting to know the fate of her son Konstantin, whom she last saw on September 22, 1992.

In front of the museum is the Vashlijvari Fraternal Cemetery where some of the missing persons’ remains have been reburied over the years.

Eventually, the parents’ public diplomacy paid off, as over 314 people returned to Abkhazian and Georgian families over the years, recalls Vladimir.

That makes a huge difference. “In the Caucasus, visiting the grave is keeping the memory alive,” says Guli Kichba, who chairs Mothers of Abkhazia.

Turning the pages of “Hope Never Dies”, a book published by her organization that is full of faded photos of missing Abkhazians, she says: “If you light a candle, the soul will find peace.”

Guli knows this all too well. On the eve of St. Valentine’s Day this year, she was told that her son, Arzamet Tarba, had been identified. She had seen him last on March 14, 1993.

For twenty years she laid flowers in the courtyard of a green-painted house in Achadara, a village outside Sokhumi, where Abkhaz soldiers had told her that a few men, including possibly her son, were buried.

In fact, Arzamet was among the 64 bodies that Argentinean forensic scientists exhumed in Park Slavy (Park of Glory), in Sokhumi, last summer in an ICRC-led operation. A specialized laboratory in Zagreb, Croatia, is comparing DNA samples from the remains with the DNA of the missing persons’ relatives. So far 13 have been identified.



Humanitarian Dialogue

“The family of a missing person faces an ambiguous loss,” explains Jelena Milosevic-Lepotic, ICRC regional coordinator on the issue of missing persons. “There is no body, no physical proof of the death. They live in limbo, moving between hope their beloved might come back and despair that they might not.”

Families end up waiting, feeling like nothing is happening and that nobody is helping. In the aftermath of the war, psychological support and counseling for the families was not a priority in both sides. The parents’ associations eventually managed to get the authorities involved and both Sokhumi and Tbilisi set up State Commission on the Missing. The last meeting among parents happened in 2003 in Ochamchire, breakaway Abkhazia.

Thanks to the parenting network, a few exchanges still happened, including also the living. In one example, in 2006, the missing people were still alive: two girls on the Abkhaz list who got lost in the war chaos, were tracked down in Khoni, western Georgia, living with their Georgian relatives and reunited with their Abkhaz mother.

Politics eventually got in the way, the meetings stopped, and the dialogue faded.

The 2008 conflict revived the urgency of tracking down the missing. As ICRC set up a mechanism to search for missing people between Georgia and South Ossetia, Tbilisi and Sokhumi approached ICRC to act as a mediator.



That led to a coordination mechanism being set up in 2010. Under ICRC's auspices, participants from Sokhumi and Tbilisi meet once a year to exchange information that could shed light on the fate of missing persons. That includes collection of detailed ante-mortem data, as even the smallest clue can be vital. It also includes biological reference samples for DNA analysis, and information about grave-sites – how the bodies were buried, their conditions, names of any witnesses of the death or the burial.

A major challenge is tracking down the family members, since people, especially those displaced from Abkhazia, have moved over the last twenty years, sometimes several times.

“The real break-through was that both sides decided to work together,” stresses Djordje Drndarski, who heads up ICRC in Abkhazia. “The Abkhazians asked to start with the exhumation in Park Slavy, and the Georgians asked for Babushera airport. Both were good projects to start with as they are precise sites, and the process proved to be a good learning curve.”

“The mechanism is a purely humanitarian forum, and participants try to safeguard it from politics,” adds Milosevic-Lepotic.

This is a point on which everybody agrees.

“The only purpose of this format is to help Georgians and Abkhazians to clarify the fate of missing persons,” highlights Nino Chavchavadze, Deputy Minister of Refugees and Accommodation (MRA), which is leading the process for Tbilisi.

Viacheslav Chirikba, the Foreign Minister of breakaway Abkhazia, echoes her words, adding that the program “is giving justice to the victims of the war, and we are ready to collaborate fully.”

Alongside the ICRC-led process, in 2013 two bodies were returned to their Georgian families “as a result of mutual benevolence,” says Chavchavadze.

That approach is yielding progress. As the identification process is underway for Park Slavy, the mechanism is now proceeding with Babushera.

To date, 58 bodies have been transferred from the grave site(the last transfer happened in 2002), 14 of which have been reburied by the families. 44 lie in the Vashlijvari Cemetery, but 23 of them remain unidentified.

Argentinean forensic scientists will arrive in Georgia in late spring to exhume the rest of them and support the identification process. They will also try to identify the remaining 35 bodies from Babushera. According to Chavchavadze, the transfer of the remains to Tbilisi will happen over time, starting in May.

For Bella, this may be good news. She has been wearing black mourning clothes for twenty years. “Now my boys are finally coming home,” she says. “I promised my grand-daughter I’ll wear a different color on her wedding day.”

Saturday 12 April 2014

http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=27128

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Bodies of 17 'border jumpers' found in Zimbabwe


The bodies of 17 so-called “border jumpers” were recovered this week from the Limpopo River, which separates Zimbabwe from South Africa.

Most of them had been partially eaten by crocodiles.

Desperate Zimbabweans, trying to escape a worsening economic crisis, regularly risk life and limb to swim the Limpopo in hope of finding unskilled work in South Africa’s homes, farms and mines.

Zimbabwean and South African police found 15 bodies yesterday in a crocodile-infested cave three kilometres east of the Old Limpopo Bridge, which marks the official Beitbridge border crossing, best known for its chaotic queues. Two other bodies were found earlier this week, one missing its legs.

Police spokesman chief superintendent Patrick Majuta said: “The body was spotted by some villagers trapped in sand and they alerted the police. We have intensified patrols in the light of an upsurge in irregular migration and smuggling.”

The bodies were taken to the Musina mortuary in South Africa. Fourteen were identified as Zimbabweans. The other three are likely to be Zimbabweans travelling without papers. Villagers reported another man missing in the Limpopo last Friday: it was not immediately clear if his body was among those recovered this week.

Desperate Zimbabweans pay up to £90 to middlemen who promise to help them make the treacherous crossing into South Africa.

Peter Moyo, acting chairman of the Beitbridge district civil protection unit, which often helps recover bodies, told the official Herald newspaper: “People should stop this illegal migration. How can someone pay $150 (£90) to be transported to South Africa through an illegal entry point when they can get a passport for $53 (£32)? We need to work hard in educating our children to shift from this mindset.”

But most migrants do not want to be traced by the authorities in South Africa, which has tried for years to stem the flood of Zimbabwean illegals. At the height of the pre-2009 economic and political crisis there were an estimated two to three million Zimbabweans in South Africa, most of them illegally. In 2010 Pretoria offered an amnesty on condition they registered. Only 275,000 took up the offer. Last month South Africa’s home affairs department indicated all of them would have to go back to Zimbabwe when their permits expire this November.

Eight months after president Robert Mugabe’s election victory over Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Zimbabwe is spiralling back into crisis. At least 75 companies shut down in the first two months of 2014, rendering another 8,000 jobless, trade unions said.

The official unemployment rate stood at 85 per cent before the latest lay-offs. Analysts say Mr Mugabe’s indigenisation programme, which compels white and foreign-owned firms to hand over 51 per cent of their shares to blacks, is stopping much-needed investment.

Saturday 12 April 2014

http://www.scotsman.com/news/world/crocodiles-feasted-on-bodies-of-migrants-1-3374080

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