BBC.CNN WORLD NEWS
Showing posts with label World News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World News. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Honduras prison fire kills more than 350 inmates

Honduras prison fire kills more than 350 inmates
An injured man lies on a stretcher at Escuela hospital in the capital Tegucigalpa
(Reuters) - A massive fire raged through an overcrowded prison in Honduras, killing more than 350 inmates, many of them trapped and screaming inside their cells.

It was one of the world's worst prison fires and was apparently started by one of the inmates late on Tuesday night at the jail in Comayagua, about 75 km (45 miles) north of the capital Tegucigalpa.

By the end of it, 359 people were dead, said Danelia Ferrera, a senior official at the attorney general's office.

"It's a terrible scene ... Our staff went into the cells and the bodies are charred, most of them are unrecognizable," Ferrera told Reuters, adding officials would have to use dental records and DNA in many cases to identify those killed.

A convict was suspected of starting the blaze, said the governor of Comayagua province, Paola Castro.

"One inmate got in touch with me just after 11 p.m. to say another inmate had set fire to the prison in block number 6, presumably by setting fire to a mattress," she said, noting she had met the prisoner during her social work at the prison.

Jails are stuffed full of convicts in Honduras, which is ravaged by violent street gangs, brutal drug traffickers and rampant poverty. According to the United Nations, the country has the highest murder rate in the world.

Violence on the streets is mirrored by frequent riots and deadly clashes between rival gangs behind bars.

But the carnage in the Comayagua prison was shocking even by Honduran standards. Chaos erupted after the blaze took hold.

"We heard screaming from the people who caught on fire," one prisoner told reporters, showing fingers he fractured escaping the blaze. "We had to push up the roof panels to get out."

Injured inmates were filmed being carried out of the jail, some crawling with visible burns.

By the time Red Cross volunteer Jose Manuel Gomez arrived, all he could do for many was gather up their remains.

"We're placing them into bags in parts because when we grab them, they disintegrate," he said.

The inferno was the third major prison fire in Honduras since 2003 with dilapidated jails packed at more than double their capacity across the Central American nation.

Worried and angry relatives surrounded the prison on Wednesday morning, at one point throwing rocks at police and trying to force their way inside the prison.

Police responded by firing shots into the air and shooting tear gas at protesters, most of whom were women.

President Porfirio Lobo said he had suspended the director of the Comayagua prison and the head of the national prison system to ensure a thorough investigation.

He promised to "take urgent measures to deal with this tragedy, which has plunged all Hondurans into mourning."

Police reported that one of the dead was a woman who had stayed overnight at the prison and the rest were inmates, but noted some of those presumed dead could have escaped.

VIOLENT GANGS, DRUGS

Honduras' violent street gangs, known as 'maras', gained power inside Hispanic neighborhoods in the United States in the 1980s and then spread down into Central America. Their members wear distinctive tattoos and are involved in drugs and weapons trafficking, armed robbery and protection rackets.

A local police chief read out the names of 457 survivors outside the prison on Wednesday, but relatives still clamored for more information.

"This is desperate, they won't tell us anything and I think my husband is dead," a crying Gregoria Zelaya told Canal 5 TV as she stood by a chain link fence.

Officials are still investigating the cause. They said earlier on Wednesday that a short circuit might have been behind the blaze at the Comayagua prison, which housed more than 850 inmates, well above its limit of around 500.

The country's penitentiaries are meant to hold 6,000 but the prison population is more than 12,500.

In 2003, a fire broke out after a riot in another prison in northern Honduras, killing 68 people. A scandal ensued when an investigation found that police and prison staff had shot and stabbed inmates in the melee.

The government pledged to improve the crumbling prison system but just a year later more than 100 prisoners were killed in a fire in San Pedro Sula. Survivors of that blaze said guards fired on inmates trying to escape or left them locked up to die.

Honduras had more than 80 homicides per 100,000 people in 2009, a rate 16 times that of the United States, according to a United Nations report last year. A slow and inefficient justice system has stretched jails to bursting point.

The country is a major narcotics trafficking transit point for South American cocaine moving north to consumers in the United States, and authorities say they are grappling with a growing presence of violent Mexican drug cartels.

A political crisis ripped through Honduras in mid-2009 when a widely-condemned coup toppled the democratically elected president but the country has been trying to heal divisions since Lobo was elected later that year.


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Friday, February 10, 2012

Syria Forces Attack Homs, UN Condemns 'Appalling Brutality'

Syria forces attack Homs
A grieving relative kissing a dead man on the back of a truck at Homs
By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Angus MacSwan
AMMAN/BEIRUT, Feb 9 (Reuters) - Syrian forces bombarded opposition-held neighbourhoods of the city of Homs with rocket and mortar fire on Thursday, activists said, as divided world powers struggled to find a way to end the violence.

The United Nations chief condemned the ferocity of the government assault on Homs, heart of a revolt against President Bashar al-Assad that broke out nearly a year ago and is getting bloodier by the day.

"I fear that the appalling brutality we are witnessing in Homs, with heavy weapons firing into civilian neighbourhoods, is a grim harbinger of things to come," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told reporters after briefing the Security Council.

Activists and residents report hundreds of people killed over the last week as Assad's forces try stamp out opposition in Homs, and as dawn broke on Thursday, rocket and mortar fire rained down again on Baba Amro, Khalidiya and other districts. Armoured reinforcements also poured into the eastern city.

Concern was growing over the plight of civilians and the United States said it was considering ways to get food and medicine to them - a move that would deepen international involvement in a conflict which has wide geopolitical dimensions and has caused division between foreign powers.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said before flying to Washington for talks on Syria that Turkey, which once saw Assad as an ally but now wants him out, could no longer stand by and watch. Turkey wanted to host an international meeting to agree ways to end the killing and provide aid, he said.

"It is not enough being an observer," he told Reuters, though Russia and China have warned against "interference".

Foreign ministers of the Arab League, which the U.N.'s Ban said was planning to revive an observer mission it suspended last month because of the violence, are due to meet in Cairo on Sunday. They may want to hear other governments' ideas by then.

U.S. officials said they expected to meet soon with allies to discuss ways of helping Syrian civilians. And China, cool to Western lobbying for international involvement, nonetheless reported its first formal contact with the Syrian opposition.


HOMS UNDER FIRE

The Syrian Revolution Coordinating Commission said at least 30 civilians in Homs were killed in bombardment on Thursday morning on mainly Sunni Muslim neighbourhoods that have been the focus of attacks by the government forces led largely by members of Assad's Alawite religious minority.
Such sectarian divisions have been coming to the surface as killings have increased on either side of the conflict.

The main street in Baba Amro was strewn with rubble and at least one house was destroyed, according to YouTube footage broadcast by activists from the district who said troops had used anti-aircraft cannon to demolish the building.

The video showed a youth putting two bodies wrapped in blankets in a truck. What appeared to be body parts were shown inside the house.

The Syrian Human Rights Organisation (Sawasiah)said in a statement that this week's assault on Homs had killed at least 300 civilians and wounded 1,000, not counting Thursday's toll.

International officials have estimated the overall death toll in Syria since last March at over 5,000.
Activists said neighbourhoods of Homs remained without electricity and water and basic supplies were running low.

There was no comment from the Syrian authorities, who have placed tight restrictions on access to the country and it was not possible to verify the reports of local activists.

Mazen Adi, a prominent Syrian opposition figure in Paris, said rebels loosely organised under the Free Syrian Army were fighting back and staging hit-and-run guerrilla attacks against government forces in Homs.

"The regime cannot keep tanks for long inside opposition neighbourhoods because they will be ambushed," he said.

"It is retaliating by hysterical bombing that is killing mostly civilians and with mass executions."
The role of the Free Syrian Army, largely made up of soldiers who have defected from the government forces, highlighted the slide in the uprising against the Assad family's 42-year dynastic rule from civilian demonstrations to armed insurgency over the past few months.

KURDISH PRECEDENT

Exile activist Massoud Akko said Turkey and Western countries should organise an airlift to Homs and other stricken cities and towns that have borne the brunt of the crackdown.

"This could be done by air drops into Homs similar to what the United States did in Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1990s," Akko said, of help for Iraq's ethnic minority during its fight against Saddam Hussein.

Syria's position at the heart of the Middle East, allied to Iran and home to a volatile religious and ethnic mix, means Assad's international opponents have ruled out the kind of military action they took against Libya's Muammar Gaddafi.

Russia and China, which let the United Nations support the air campaign in Libya, provoked strong condemnation from the United States, European powers and Arab governments when they vetoed a resolution in the Security Council last week that called on Assad to step down.

Moscow, for whom Syria is a buyer of arms and host to a Soviet-era naval base, wants to counter U.S. influence and maintain its traditional role in the Middle East.

For both Russia and China, Syria is also a test case for efforts to resist international encroachment on sovereign governments' freedom to deal with rebels as they see fit.

PUTIN SAYS NO INTERFERENCE

Campaigning for next month's presidential election that he is certain to win, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, said: "A cult of violence has been coming to the fore in international affairs ... This cannot fail to cause concern.

"Help them, advise them, limit, for instance, their ability to use weapons but not interfere under any circumstances."

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who had described the Russian and Chinese veto at the U.N. as a "fiasco", telephoned outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday.

The Kremlin said Medvedev told Erdogan the search for a solution should continue but that foreign interference was not an option.

The U.N.'s Ban said it was more urgent than ever to find common ground. In an implicit criticism of the Assad government, he said: "Such violence is unacceptable before humanity ... We have heard too many broken promises, even within the past 24 hours."

In Washington, officials said the United States planned to meet soon with its allies to discuss ways to halt the violence and provide humanitarian aid to civilians under attack.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the talks, which would include the opposition Syrian National Council, were aimed at helping the process "move toward a peaceful, political transition, democratic transition in Syria".

Any international move to bring in humanitarian aid could open a dangerous and complicated new chapter in the crisis, with air drops seen as expensive and ineffective and any land routes open to attack from Syrian forces. But the White House stressed it was not actively considering military intervention.

"We never rule anything out in a situation like this," Carney said. "But we are pursuing a path that includes isolating and pressuring the Assad regime so that it stops its heinous slaughtering of its own people." (Additional reporting by Simon Cameron-Moore and Tulay Karadeniz in Ankara, Steve Gutterman in Moscow, Erika Solomon in Beirut, John Irish in Paris, Yasmine Saleh and Ayman Samir in Cairo and Alister Bull, Matt Spetalnick and Andrew Quinn in Washington; Writing by Angus MacSwan in Beirut; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)

Monday, February 06, 2012

Barack Obama's Step-Grandmother, Sarah Obama, Injured In Kenya Car Accident

women
Sarah Obama
NAIROBI, Kenya -- President Barack Obama's 91-year-old step-grandmother suffered bruises and shock after a car she was traveling in rolled over, a relative and a hospital official said Monday.

The relative said Sarah Obama was traveling to her home in the village of Kogelo, in western Kenya, when the accident happened Saturday night.

He said the vehicle lost control and rolled as the driver attempted to overtake a truck near the Kisumu airport. The relative asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak for the family.

Najim Mawji, the chief operating officer of the Agha Khan hospital in Kisumu, said doctors discharged her Saturday night after she had gone through several tests.

Mawji said she coped well with the shock that came from the accident.

Sarah Obama is the second wife of Obama's paternal grandfather. Obama referred to her as "Granny" in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father," and described meeting her during his 1988 trip to his father's homeland and their awkwardness as they struggled to communicate.

Barack Obama has visited his Kenyan relatives three times in Kogelo, and his step-grandmother has gone to the U.S. at least three times. In a 2008 interview she said they are close, although they have to speak through an interpreter.

Kenya has a special regard for President Obama, the son of a Kenyan economist and an American anthropologist. Children, shops and dozens of minibuses – which carry names in Kenya – are named after the president.

News by Huffingtonpost


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