Tag Archives: Death

Insured losses from deadly California wildfires could hit $3 billion

Insured losses from deadly California wildfires could hit $3 billion

By Keith Coffman

(Reuters) – Insured property losses from wildfires that raged through Northern California wine country this month, killing at least 42 people and destroying thousands of businesses and homes, could total $2 billion to $3 billion, a risk-modeling firm said on Thursday.

The analysis by Boston-based AOR Worldwide, encompassing anticipated claims for destroyed residences, automobiles, commercial properties and other economic losses, is at least double a preliminary tally estimated last week by the California Department of Insurance.

The AOR report said losses would be dominated by devastation in residential areas, especially in Sonoma County, where entire neighborhood blocks were reduced to ashes.

Since erupting on Oct. 8, the wind-driven wildfires have consumed some 245,000 acres across several California counties north of the San Francisco Bay area, leaving at least 8,700 structures destroyed.

Most of the property loss was concentrated in California’s celebrated wine country, including Sonoma County, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, said this week.

Authorities have confirmed 42 fatalities in Sonoma and three other Northern California counties, among them a volunteer firefighter who was killed when his water-tender truck crashed. The death toll marked the greatest loss of life from a single wildfire event in the state’s history.

The $1 billion gap between the low- and high-end estimates was due to uncertainty surrounding how many claims will be filed for living expenses from residents forced to flee their homes, as well as for smoke damage and business disruptions caused by power outages, AOR Worldwide said.

Another unknown factor is the scope of damage that may have occurred during fire suppression efforts, it added.

A preliminary estimate from the California Department of Insurance a week ago put insured losses at just over $1 billion, although it said that figure would likely rise.

A spokeswoman with the department said on Thursday that the agency has not updated its figures.

The October wildfire outbreak was fueled by unseasonably high temperatures, tinder-dry conditions, and gusty winds. As of Thursday, most of the fires were near, or at, full containment, Cal Fire said.

Cooler weather forecast for the region in coming days should ease the wildfire risk, AOR said in its report, although Cal Fire urged the public exercise caution to avoid igniting further blazes as warm, dry weather lingers across parts of the state.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman in Denver; Editing by Steve Gorman and Michael Perry)

Special Report: In the market for human bodies, almost anyone can sell the dead

A coffin, mops and coolers used to transport body parts lie in an abandoned courtyard outside a warehouse once shared by a funeral home and the body broker Southern Nevada Donor Services in suburban Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. July 19, 2016. REUTERS/John Shiffman

By Brian Grow and John Shiffman

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – The company stacked brochures in funeral parlors around Sin City. On the cover: a couple clasping hands. Above the image, a promise: “Providing Options in Your Time of Need.”

The company, Southern Nevada Donor Services, offered grieving families a way to eliminate expensive funeral costs: free cremation in exchange for donating a loved one’s body to “advance medical studies.”

Outside Southern Nevada’s suburban warehouse, the circumstances were far from comforting. In the fall of 2015, neighboring tenants began complaining about a mysterious stench and bloody boxes in a Dumpster. That December, local health records show, someone contacted authorities to report odd activity in the courtyard.

Health inspectors found a man in medical scrubs holding a garden hose. He was thawing a frozen human torso in the midday sun.

As the man sprayed the remains, “bits of tissue and blood were washed into the gutters,” a state health report said. The stream weaved past storefronts and pooled across the street near a technical school.

Southern Nevada, the inspectors learned, was a so-called body broker, a company that acquires dead bodies, dissects them and sells the parts for profit to medical researchers, training organizations and other buyers. The torso on the gurney was being prepared for just such a sale.

Each year, thousands of Americans donate their bodies in the belief they are contributing to science. In fact, many are also unwittingly contributing to commerce, their bodies traded as raw material in a largely unregulated national market.

Body brokers are also known as non-transplant tissue banks. They are distinct from the organ and tissue transplant industry, which the U.S. government closely regulates. Selling hearts, kidneys and tendons for transplant is illegal. But no federal law governs the sale of cadavers or body parts for use in research or education. Few state laws provide any oversight whatsoever, and almost anyone, regardless of expertise, can dissect and sell human body parts.

“The current state of affairs is a free-for-all,” said Angela McArthur, who directs the body donation program at the University of Minnesota Medical School and formerly chaired her state’s anatomical donation commission. “We are seeing similar problems to what we saw with grave-robbers centuries ago,” she said, referring to the 19th-century practice of obtaining cadavers in ways that violated the dignity of the dead.

“I don’t know if I can state this strongly enough,” McArthur said. “What they are doing is profiting from the sale of humans.”

The industry’s business model hinges on access to a large supply of free bodies, which often come from the poor. In return for a body, brokers typically cremate a portion of the donor at no charge. By offering free cremation, some deathcare industry veterans say, brokers appeal to low-income families at their most vulnerable. Many have drained their savings paying for a loved one’s medical treatment and can’t afford a traditional funeral.

“People who have financial means get the chance to have the moral, ethical and spiritual debates about which method to choose,” said Dawn Vander Kolk, an Illinois hospice social worker. “But if they don’t have money, they may end up with the option of last resort: body donation.”

Few rules mean few consequences when bodies are mistreated. In the Southern Nevada case, officials found they could do little more than issue a minor pollution citation to one of the workers involved. Southern Nevada operator Joe Collazo, who wasn’t cited, said he regretted the incident. He said the industry would benefit from oversight that offers peace of mind to donors, brokers and researchers.

“To be honest with you, I think there should be regulation,” said Collazo. “There’s too much gray area.”

“BIG MARKET FOR DEAD BODIES”

Donated bodies play an essential role in medical education, training and research. Cadavers and body parts are used to train medical students, doctors, nurses and dentists. Surgeons say no mannequin or computer simulation can replicate the tactile response and emotional experience of practicing on human body parts. Paramedics, for example, use human heads and torsos to learn how to insert breathing tubes.

Researchers rely on donated human body parts to develop new surgical instruments, techniques and implants; and to develop new medicines and treatments for diseases.

“The need for human bodies is absolutely vital,” said Chicago doctor Armand Krikorian, past president of the American Federation for Medical Research. He cited a recent potential cure for Type 1 diabetes developed by studying pancreases from body donors. “It’s a kind of treatment that would have never come to light if we did not have whole-body donation.”

Despite the industry’s critically important role in medicine, no national registry of body brokers exists. Many can operate in near anonymity, quietly making deals to obtain cadavers and sell the parts.

“There is a big market for dead bodies,” said Ray Madoff, a Boston College Law School professor who studies how U.S. laws treat the dead. “We know very little about who is acquiring these bodies and what they are doing with them.”

In most states, anyone can legally purchase body parts. As an upcoming story will detail, a Tennessee broker sold Reuters a cervical spine and two human heads after just a few email exchanges.

Through interviews and public records, Reuters identified Southern Nevada and 33 other body brokers active across America during the past five years. Twenty-five of the 34 body brokers were for-profit corporations; the rest were nonprofits. In three years alone, one for-profit broker earned at least $12.5 million stemming from the body part business, an upcoming Reuters report will show.

Because only four states closely track donations and sales, the breadth of the market for body parts remains unknown. But data obtained under public record laws from those states – New York, Virginia, Oklahoma and Florida – provide a snapshot. Reuters calculated that from 2011 through 2015, private brokers received at least 50,000 bodies and distributed more than 182,000 body parts.

Permits from Florida and Virginia offer a glimpse of how some of those parts were used: A 2013 shipment to a Florida orthopedic training seminar included 27 shoulders. A 2015 shipment to a session on carpal tunnel syndrome in Virginia included five arms.

As with other commodities, prices for bodies and body parts fluctuate with market conditions. Generally, a broker can sell a donated human body for about $3,000 to $5,000, though prices sometime top $10,000. But a broker will typically divide a cadaver into six parts to meet customer needs. Internal documents from seven brokers show a range of prices for body parts: $3,575 for a torso with legs; $500 for a head; $350 for a foot; $300 for a spine.

Body brokers also have become intertwined with the American funeral industry. Reuters identified 62 funeral operators that have struck mutually beneficial business arrangements with brokers. The funeral homes provide brokers access to potential donors. In return, the brokers pay morticians referral fees, ranging from $300 to $1,430, according to broker ledgers and court records.

These payments generate income for morticians from families who might not be able to otherwise afford even simple cremation. But such relationships raise potential conflicts of interest by creating an incentive for funeral homes to encourage grieving relatives to consider body donation, sometimes without fully understanding what might happen to the remains.

“Some funeral home directors are saying, ‘Cremation isn’t paying the bills anymore, so let me see if I can help people harvest body parts,’” said Steve Palmer, an Arizona mortician who serves on the National Funeral Directors Association’s policy board. “I just think families who donate loved ones would have second thoughts if they knew that.”

Some morticians have made body donation part of their own businesses. In Oklahoma, two funeral home owners invested $650,000 in a startup body broker firm. In Colorado, a family operating a funeral home ran a company that dissected and distributed body parts from the same building.

When a body is donated, few states provide rules governing dismemberment or use, or offer any rights to a donor’s next of kin. Bodies and parts can be bought, sold and leased, again and again. As a result, it can be difficult to track what becomes of the bodies of donors, let alone ensure that they are handled with dignity.

In 2004, a federal health panel unsuccessfully called on the U.S. government to regulate the industry. Since then, more than 2,357 body parts obtained by brokers from at least 1,638 people have been misused, abused or desecrated across America, Reuters found.

The count, based on a review of court, police, bankruptcy and internal broker records, is almost certainly understated, given the lack of oversight. It includes instances in which bodies were used without donor or next-of-kin consent; donors were misled about how bodies would be used; bodies were dismembered by chainsaws instead of medical instruments; body parts were stored in such unsanitary conditions that they decomposed; or bodies were discarded in medical waste incinerators instead of being properly cremated.

Most brokers employ a distinctive language to describe what they do and how they make money. They call human remains “tissue,” not body parts, for example. And they detest the term “body brokers.” They prefer to be known as “non-transplant tissue banks.”

Most also insist they don’t “sell” body parts but instead only charge “fees” for services. Such characterizations, however, are contradicted by other documents Reuters reviewed, including court filings in which brokers clearly attach monetary value to donated remains.

A lien filed by one body broker against another cited as collateral “all tissue inventory owned by or in the possession of debtor.” In bankruptcy filings, brokers have claimed body parts as assets. One debtor included as property not only cabinets, desks and computers, but also spines, heads and other body parts. The bankrupt broker valued the human remains at $160,900.

“There are no real rules,” said Thomas Champney, a University of Miami anatomy professor who teaches bioethics. “This is the ultimate gift people have given, and we really need to respect that.”

Last December, Reuters reported that more than 20 bodies donated to an Arizona broker were used in U.S. Army blast experiments – without the consent of the deceased or next of kin. Some donors or their families had explicitly noted an objection to military experiments on consent forms. Family members learned of the 2012 and 2013 experiments not from the Army but from a Reuters reporter who obtained records about what happened.

In another case, Detroit body broker Arthur Rathburn is scheduled to stand trial in January for fraud, accused of supplying unsuspecting doctors with body parts infected with hepatitis and HIV for use in training seminars. U.S. officials cited the case as an example of their commitment to protect the public. But Reuters found that, despite warning signs, state and federal officials failed to rein in Rathburn for more than a decade, allowing him to continue to acquire hundreds of body parts and rent them out for profit. He has pleaded not guilty.

Given the number of body brokers that currently operate in America, academics and others familiar with the industry say regular inspections of facilities and reviews of donor consent forms wouldn’t place a big burden on government.

“This isn’t reinventing the wheel,” said Christina Strong, a New Jersey lawyer who co-wrote a set of standards that most states largely adopted for the organ transplant industry. “It would not be a stretch to envision a uniform state law which requires that those who recover, distribute and use human bodies adhere to uniform standards of transparency, traceability and authorization.”

But without consistent laws or a clear oversight authority – local, state or national – “nobody is accounting for anything,” said Todd Olson, an anatomy and structural biology professor at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “Nobody is watching. We regulate heads of lettuce in this country more than we regulate heads of bodies.”

“RAW MATERIALS FOR FREE”

Body brokers range in size from small, family-operated endeavors to national firms with offices in several states. Brokers also vary in expertise.

Garland Shreves, who founded Phoenix broker Research for Life in 2009, said he invested more than $2 million in quality-control procedures and medical equipment, including $265,000 on an X-ray machine to scan cadavers for surgical implants.

But other brokers have launched their businesses for less than $100,000, internal corporate records and interviews show. Often, the largest capital expenses are a cargo van and a set of freezers. Some brokers have saved money by using chainsaws to carve up the dead instead of more expensive surgical saws.

“You have people who want to do it in a pretty half-assed way,” Shreves said. “I have really grown to dislike the business.”

Brokers can also reduce expenses by forgoing the meticulous quality control procedures and sophisticated training called for by a national accreditation organization, the American Association of Tissue Banks.

In Honolulu, police were called twice to storage facilities leased by body broker Bryan Avery in 2011 and 2012. Each time, they found decomposing human remains. Both times, police concluded that Avery committed no crimes because no state law applied.

Steven Labrash, who directs University of Hawaii’s body donation program, said the Avery case illustrates the need for laws to protect donors.

“Everybody knows that what he did was unethical and wrong,” Labrash said of Avery. “But did he break any laws? Not the way they are written today.”

Avery defended how he ran his business and said the incidents were the result of misunderstandings. He said he is now raising capital for a new company, Hawaii BioSkills, which he said will use body parts to train surgeons.

“I’m all for oversight, and companies that are doing this need to be transparent,” Avery said. “As long as it doesn’t infringe upon the flow of business, that’s fine.”

Walt Mitchell, a Phoenix businessman involved in the startup of three brokers, said one reason the industry attracts entrepreneurs is that businesses can profit handsomely from selling a donated product.

“If you can’t make a business when you’re getting raw materials for free,” Mitchell said, “you’re dumb as a box of rocks.”

Even so, a third of the 34 brokers Reuters identified went bankrupt or failed to pay their taxes, according to court filings. When failing businesses in the industry cut corners to save money, the consequences for the families of donors can be emotionally wrenching.

“THE LAST SELFLESS THING”

Harold Dillard worked with his brother resurfacing bathtubs and kitchen countertops in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer the day after Thanksgiving in 2009.

“He was 56 years young, active, healthy, had a great life, and one night – bam!” said his daughter, Farrah Fasold. “He wanted to do the last selfless thing he could do before he died, and so he donated his body.”

As her father lay dying, Fasold said, employees from Albuquerque broker Bio Care visited father and daughter, and made a heartfelt pitch: The generous gift of his body to science would benefit medical students, doctors and researchers. Fasold said Bio Care cited several sample possibilities, including that her father’s body might be used to train surgeons on knee replacement techniques.

Fasold’s view of Bio Care soon changed. It took weeks longer than promised to receive what she was told were her father’s cremated remains. Once she received them, she suspected they were not his ashes because they looked like sand. She was correct.

In April 2010, Fasold was told by authorities that her father’s head was among body parts discovered at a medical incinerator. She also learned – for the first time, she said – that Bio Care was in the business of selling body parts.

“I was completely hysterical,” she said. “We would have never have signed up if they had ever said anything about selling body parts – no way. That’s not what my dad wanted at all.”

Inside Bio Care’s warehouse, authorities said they found at least 127 body parts belonging to 45 people.

“All of the bodies appeared to have been dismembered by a coarse cutting instrument, such as a chainsaw,” a police detective wrote in an affidavit.

Bio Care owner Paul Montano was charged with fraud. According to the police affidavit, Montano denied abusing bodies and told detectives that he ran Bio Care with “five volunteer employees,” including his father. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Prosecutors later withdrew the charge against Montano because they said they could not prove deception or any other crime. No other state law regulated the handling of donated bodies or protected the next of kin.

Confused and outraged, Fasold spoke by phone with Kari Brandenburg, then the district attorney in Bernalillo County. Fasold recorded a portion of the call.

“What happened was horrible, but New Mexico law is silent on this kind of activity,” Brandenburg told Fasold. The prosecutor said that, although Montano was perhaps “the worst businessman in the world,” his failures were due in part to deals that fell through.

“So,” Fasold replied, “because other people reneged on their agreements, it’s OK for him to go ahead and chop up my dad’s body and have it incinerated?”

“No, it’s not OK,” the prosecutor replied. “But it doesn’t make it a crime. There’s no criminal law that says this is wrong.”

In a recent interview, Brandenburg said that she, too, was frustrated to find that no law protects people like Fasold and her father. “It was outrageous,” the former prosecutor said. “These families were devastated and injured in a deep way.”

Authorities ultimately recovered the other body parts of Fasold’s father and returned them to her for proper cremation. Some had been found in tubs at the incinerator and some at the Bio Care facility.

Fasold said in an interview she is surprised that the law hasn’t been changed to protect relatives.

“They could have done something long ago, passed new laws,” she said of the body broker industry. “It’s just so shady and devious.”

LUCRATIVE PARTNERSHIP

Partnerships between body brokers and funeral homes can sometimes yield sizeable businesses.

In 2009, Oklahoma funeral home owners Darin Corbett and Hal Ezzell invested $650,000 for a 50 percent stake in a company created by former executives of a large Phoenix-based body broker, court records show. According to an investor prospectus reviewed by Reuters, the new firm’s five-year revenue forecast was $13.8 million based on 2,100 donated bodies.

“Darin and I felt like we had, through our funeral home ties, the ability, if we wanted, to encourage donors,” Ezzell said in an interview.

The Norman, Oklahoma firm, United Tissue Network, converted to nonprofit status in 2012 to comply with a change in state law. But a for-profit company co-owned by Ezzell, Corbett and United Tissue President David Breedlove is paid to provide management services, leased equipment and loans. In 2015, for example, their nonprofit paid their for-profit $412,000 for services, tax records show.

Ezzell and Corbett said they are passive investors. But, Corbett added, “we suggest families consider (United Tissue) first because they are local and time delay is critical,” obliquely referring to the fact that bodies decompose quickly.

The nonprofit United Tissue also has supplied donated human remains to Breedlove’s for-profit company, Anatomical Innovations. That company sold authentic human skulls, elbows, livers and eyeballs, among other body parts. Online, it advertised free shipping on purchases over $125. After inquiries from Reuters, Breedlove closed Anatomical Innovations.

Breedlove said consent forms signed by United Tissue donors permitted the dissection and transfer of body parts to for-profit entities, including the one he owned. The forms allow United Tissue, at its “sole discretion,” to use a body as deemed necessary “to facilitate the gift.”

“Our consents are pretty clear about what the anatomical uses may be,” he said.

According to Oklahoma state filings obtained under public records laws, United Tissue has grown steadily. From 2012 through 2016, United Tissue received 3,542 bodies. Almost half were referred by funeral homes. Ezzell said that last year, no more than 10 percent came from mortuaries owned by Corbett or him.

During that five-year period, the records show, United Tissue distributed 17,956 body parts to clients. Supply has sometimes exceeded demand. In late 2015, the broker sent an email in which it offered customers a price break to help move surplus arms, pelvises and shoulders.

“I wanted to let you know of a few specimens we have an overstock that we are trying to place before the end of the year,” United Tissue Executive Director Alyssa Harrison wrote to a bone research organization. “We are offering these as a discounted fee for December.”

Harrison said in an interview that while she always respects the dead, she has a duty to sustain the operation.

“It is a product, a very precious product,” she said. “I still have to make enough money to pay my employees and keep our doors open. Yes, it is human tissue, but there is still a market value.”

THE FROZEN TORSO

The 2015 incident outside Las Vegas involving the frozen torso was also the product of a partnership between a body broker and a funeral home.

Both the broker, Southern Nevada Donor Services, and the funeral home, Valley Cremation and Burial, were struggling financially. Valley agreed to allow Southern Nevada to dissect and prepare cadavers and body parts at its funeral home. The remains and related paperwork would be kept at Valley’s warehouse in the suburban industrial park, a few miles away.

Southern Nevada’s owner, Joe Collazo, had a decade’s experience selling body parts. Court records show he also served nearly two years in prison in the late 1990s for forgery. And a former employer once accused him in a lawsuit of stealing donated body parts valued at $75,000 and selling them to a customer in Turkey.

Collazo said his forgery conviction is irrelevant and the theft allegation untrue. His business followed industry best practices, he said, and served an important public service to the medical community.

Local and state officials reported that they found other troubling signs, beyond the torso, at the storage facility. These included a bloody, motorized saw typically used by construction workers, and moldy body parts inside an unplugged freezer.

Valley is no longer in business, and the owner died, according to state records. Southern Nevada also dissolved – in a trail of debt and desecrated body parts.

Seven months after health officials inspected the place, the courtyard remained littered with empty coolers bearing Southern Nevada’s initials. Nearby stood a rusted kiln, a pair of filthy mops and a gunmetal gray coffin, broiling in the desert sun.

The only person charged in the incident was Gary Derischebourg, a funeral home employee who said his duties included helping prepare body parts for Collazo. Derischebourg said he was too busy to defrost the torso, so he asked an unemployed friend to do it. Derischebourg pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor pollution citation for the stream of water that contained human tissue.

Someone, he said, needed to take responsibility. “I’m a stand-up guy,” he said.

As for the defrosted torso? Collazo said he rented it to a group of surgeons, then had it cremated.

Today, Collazo is a manager at a car dealership. Derischebourg drives for Uber.

(Reported by Brian Grow and John Shiffman; Additional reporting by Adam DeRose, Elizabeth Culliford, Mir Ubaid and Sophia Kunthara; Edited by Blake Morrison.)

Two fatally shot at Louisiana’s Grambling State University

(Reuters) – Two men were shot and killed at Grambling State University in Louisiana, and police searched on Wednesday for the assailant who fled the scene, school and law enforcement officials said.

A student, Earl Andrews, 23, and Monquiarious Caldwell, 23, who was not enrolled at the university, were fatally shot during an altercation in a campus courtyard shortly after midnight Wednesday, the officials said.

The shooting came after an argument in a dormitory room, said Major Chad Alexander of the Lincoln Parish Sheriff’s Department, the agency investigating the incident.

Grambling spokesman Will Sutton said in an email, “Our prayers go out to the victims and their families. Violence has no place on our campus.”

Classes were scheduled on Wednesday, Sutton said.

“It is homecoming week, a normally joyful time,” he said. “We would never have anticipated anything like this. It’s such senseless violence.”

Both of the shooting victims were from Farmerville, Louisiana, Sutton said.

Grambling State University is a historically black college attended by about 4,800 students in Grambling in northern Louisiana.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee and Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Texas father changes story about toddler’s death: police

By Bernie Woodall

(Reuters) – The Texas father who told police his 3-year-old daughter disappeared after he sent her outside at 3 a.m. as punishment for not drinking milk has now told police she died from choking on the drink, according to an arrest warrant issued on Tuesday.

Wesley Mathews reported that his daughter Sherin went missing on Oct. 7 from the family’s home in Richardson, Texas, outside Dallas. Her body was found on Sunday and has been positively identified by the local medical examiner, police said on Tuesday.

Mathews, 37, changed his story about the incident during a meeting on Monday with his attorney and detectives, according to police documents.

He told detectives that the child, who was born in India and adopted by the family, would not obey his instruction to drink the milk while they were in the family’s garage but eventually complied with his help.

She then “began to choke. She was coughing and her breathing slowed,” the affidavit said. “Eventually, Wesley Mathews no longer felt a pulse on the child and believed she had died.”

The suspect admitted moving her body from the home, the affidavit said.

Mathews was charged on Monday with injury to a child, a first-degree felony that carries a maximum punishment of 99 years in prison, police said.

Sergeant Kevin Perlich of the Richardson Police Department said in a phone interview on Tuesday that investigators were seeking answers to many questions, including why the two were in the garage as the child was asked to drink milk.

“By no means do we consider this investigation completed,” Perlich said, adding there could be additional charges and arrests.

Mathews’ attorney did not return a call on Tuesday requesting comment.

Mathews previously was charged with suspected child endangerment after telling police that he punished the child for not drinking her milk by making her stand next to a tree by an alley near their home.

At the time, he said he checked on her 15 minutes later and she was gone. Police said that he reported her disappearance about five hours later.

Sherin Mathews was identified by dental records after officers using search dogs found her body in a culvert under a road, police said.

(Reporting by Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Peter Cooney)

Top U.S. military officer seeks to address criticism of fatal Niger operation

Top U.S. military officer seeks to address criticism of fatal Niger operation

By Idrees Ali

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The top U.S. military officer sought on Monday to tamp down criticism the Pentagon had not been forthcoming about the death of four U.S. soldiers in an ambush in Niger, providing a timeline of the incident and acknowledging unanswered questions remained.

General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that the United States Africa Command was conducting an investigation into the Oct. 4 attack. Some lawmakers have criticized the Pentagon for being slow to provide answers.

Dunford acknowledged that a number of issues were still under investigation, including why U.S. forces on the ground waited an hour until they called for support, what type of intelligence was used in the mission and why it took as long as it did to recover a U.S. soldier’s body.

“There has been a lot of speculation about the operation in Niger and there’s a perception that the Department of Defense has not been forthcoming and I thought it would be helpful for me to personally clarify to you what we know today, and to outline what we hope to find out in the ongoing investigation,”

Dunford said in an hour-long news conference.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s handling of condolence messages to the families of the dead soldiers has been criticized by lawmakers in Washington and has raised the profile of the deadly incident.

Dunford said for the first time that U.S. forces on the ground in Niger waited an hour before calling for support.

Within minutes, a U.S. drone located nearby was moved over the firefight and provided intelligence and full-motion video.

French fighter jets arrived above the scene about an hour after that, said Dunford.

“It is important to note that when they didn’t ask for support for that first hour, my judgment would be that that unit thought they could handle the situation without additional support,” Dunford said.

The French fighters did not drop bombs when they arrived, something Dunford said was under investigation.

QUESTIONS FROM LAWMAKERS

Republican John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said last week he may consider issuing a subpoena because the White House had not been forthcoming with details of the attack.

On Monday, McCain said lawmakers were getting cooperation and information from the Pentagon and expected a “formal hearing” on Thursday about the ambush.

The attack threw a spotlight on the little-known counterterrorism mission in the West African country, which has about 800 U.S. troops, out of a total of 6,000 U.S. troops in Africa. The United States says it is there to support Niger in fighting Islamist extremists.

The Pentagon said at the time that three soldiers had been killed in the ambush. The body of a fourth soldier, Sergeant La David Johnson, was recovered about two days later.

Dunford said that on Oct. 3, a dozen U.S. soldiers accompanied 30 Nigerien forces on a reconnaissance mission near the village of Tongo Tongo.

After spending the night near the village, the forces were moving back to their base when they came under attack from about 50 enemy fighters, who appeared to be from a local Islamic State affiliate. The militants attacked with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, Dunford said.

“It was planned as a reconnaissance mission,” Dunford said. “What happened after they began to execute, in other words, did the mission change? That is one of the questions that’s being asked,” he said.

CONSIDERED A LOWER-RISK MISSION

The mission had been seen as a relatively lower-risk endeavor for elite U.S. commandos and there was no armed air cover at the time that could carry out air strikes if necessary.

He added there was no indication the soldiers had taken too many risks.

“I don’t have any indication right now to believe or to know that they did anything other than operate within the orders they were given,” Dunford said.

U.S. forces were conducting normal operations in Niger again and the plan was for them to continue to train and advise local partners. Dunford said there had been no discussions about increasing U.S. troops.

A controversy has swirled for a week over how Trump has handled the task of consoling relatives of slain service members.

Myeshia Johnson, the widow of the Army sergeant killed in Niger, said on Monday that Trump had “made me cry even worse” in a condolence call when he said her husband “knew what he signed up for.”

“We owe the families as much information as we can find out about what happened, and we owe the American people an explanation of what their men and women were doing at this particular time,” Dunford said.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali; Additional reporting by David Alexander, Eric Walsh and Amanda Becker; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Peter Cooney)

Recovering from severe malnutrition in Yemen

Recovering from severe malnutrition in Yemen

By Abduljabbar Zeyad

HODEIDAH, Yemen (Reuters) – Smiling and sitting down to bread and milk with her family, Yemeni teenager Saida Ahmed Baghili is barely recognizable a year on from the photo of her emaciated frame that came to symbolize the country’s humanitarian crisis.

Baghili now weighs 36kg (80 lb), according to her father, more than triple the 11kg she weighed last October when Reuters first met her at the al-Thawra hospital in Sana’a, where she was undergoing treatment for severe malnutrition.

There the 19-year-old was unable to talk, let alone carry her ghostly, skeletal frame, which is now stronger after weeks of specialist care and time at home.

“Saida’s body got better because she’s eating better, but she’s still having trouble swallowing,” her father Ahmed Baghili said at their home in Hodeidah this month.

“She can only eat milk, biscuits and juice.”

Baghili’s plight reflects that of many families in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country, where a two-and-a-half-year war between a Saudi-led Arab coalition and the Iran-allied Houthi movement has claimed 10,000 lives.

A quarter of the 28 million population are starving, according to the United Nations, with half a million children under the age of 5 severely malnourished and at least 2,135 people killed by cholera.

Ahmed Baghili is only able to supply the basics for his family of 10, who live in a parched village on the Red Sea coast.

Saida, whose illness began before the war, is able to help her father tend to a farmer’s cattle in exchange for milk, with their income boosted by Ahmed making deliveries on his motorcycle and donations from humanitarian organizations.

However, he says he doesn’t have enough money to send Saida for further treatment and still fears for her health. Her last appointment with a doctor was in December.

“We’re worried she might relapse and then we wouldn’t be able to do anything because we have nothing. We don’t have the transportation fee, we don’t have the fee for anything,” he said.

Click on http://reut.rs/2gxeJkK to see a related photo essay

(Writing by Patrick Johnston in LONDON; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Suicide bombers attack two Afghan mosques, at least 72 dead

By Hamid Shalizi

KABUL (Reuters) – Suicide bombers attacked two mosques in Afghanistan on Friday, killing at least 72 people including children, officials and witnesses said.

One bomber walked into a Shi’ite Muslim mosque in the capital Kabul as people were praying on Friday night and detonated an explosive, one of the worshippers there, Mahmood Shah Husaini, said.

At least 39 people died in the blast at the Imam Zaman mosque in the city’s western Dasht-e-Barchi district, interior ministry spokesman Najib Danish said.

No group claimed responsibility. But Shi’ite Muslims have suffered a series of attacks in Afghanistan in recent months, many of them claimed by the Sunni Muslim militants of Islamic State.

Separately, a suicide bombing killed at least 33 people at a mosque in central Ghor province, a police spokesman said.

The attack appeared to target a local leader from the Jamiat political party, according to a statement from Balkh provincial governor Atta Mohammad Noor, a leading figure in Jamiat.

Again, no one immediately claimed responsibility.

(Additional reporting by Jalil Ahmad Rezaee in Herat; Writing by Josh Smith; Editing by Catherine Evans and Andrew Heavens)

Suspect in Maryland shooting that killed three arrested in Delaware

By Ian Simpson

(Reuters) – An employee of a Maryland kitchen countertop company suspected of fatally shooting three co-workers and critically wounding two others on Wednesday was arrested in neighboring Delaware, a Maryland county sheriff said.

The suspected gunman, Radee Prince, 37, was apprehended by U.S. agents and others, the Harford County Sheriff’s Office said on Twitter, without providing further details. Prince was also being sought for a shooting in Delaware that took place after the Maryland shooting.

Prince entered Advanced Granite Solutions in Edgewood, Maryland, just before 9 a.m. and fired multiple shots from a handgun, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told reporters.

Three people died at the company’s premises in a business park northeast of Baltimore. Two people were taken to a hospital, one of whom had come out of surgery, he said.

Those killed were identified as Jose Romero, 34; Enis Mrvoljak; and Bayarsaikhan Tudev, the Harford County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. Two other people shot in the attack were in critical condition at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, it said.

Gahler called the shooting a “targeted attack.” Asked about the gunman’s possible motive, he said: “We believe he’s tied into a relationship here at work.”

Prince had worked for Advanced Granite Solutions for the past four months and had been scheduled to work on Wednesday, the sheriff said. The suspect fled in a black GMC Acadia with Delaware license plates.

Police in Wilmington, Delaware, about 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Edgewood, said Prince was also being sought for a shooting there at 10:46 a.m. that injured a man.

Wilmington police spokeswoman Stephanie Castellani said the victim identified the shooter as Prince, who fled in the same vehicle. Prince had been arrested 42 times in Delaware and had 15 felony convictions, she said.

“He is a dangerous individual,” said Castellani, adding that the motive was not yet known but that Prince was associated with all six victims. “We do not know if there is a beef going on between the victims and the suspect.”

(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Additional reporting by Chris Kenning in Chicago, Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas and Keith Coffman in Denver; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Peter Cooney)

Portugal’s interior minister resigns after deadly wildfires

Smoke and flames from a forest fire are seen near Lousa, Portugal, October 16, 2017. REUTERS/Pedro Nunes

LISBON (Reuters) – Portugal’s Interior Minister Constanca Urbano de Sousa resigned on Wednesday after wildfires killed more than a hundred people in the past months.

Hundreds of fires have raged across northern and central Portugal since Sunday after the driest summer in nearly 90 years, killing at least 41 people and overwhelming firefighting and rescue services. In June, a forest fire killed 64 people.

The Interior Ministry is in charge of firefighters, the police and civil protection agency, which have all faced criticism after the fires.

In her resignation letter, the minister said: “I didn’t have the political and personal conditions to continue in my post.”

Prime Minister Antonio Costa said in a statement he accepted the minister’s resignation.

An opposition politician launched a motion of no-confidence in the Socialist government on Tuesday.

This year’s fires have burned a total of 350,000 hectares, the worst since 2003.

(Reporting By Axel Bugge; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Taliban attacks kill at least 69 across Afghanistan

Smoke rises from police headquarters while Afghan security forces keep watch after a suicide car bomber and gunmen attacked the provincial police headquarters in Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, Afghanistan October 17, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer

By Mirwais Harooni

KABUL (Reuters) – Taliban militants struck government targets in many provinces of Afghanistan on Tuesday, killing at least 69 people, including a senior police commander, and wounding scores of others.

The deadliest attack hit a police training centre attached to the police headquarters in Gardez, main city of Paktia province.

Two Taliban suicide car bombers paved the way for a number of gunmen to attack the compound, officials and militants said. At least 21 police officers were killed, including the Paktia provincial police chief, with 48 others wounded, according to government officials.

The attack also left at least 20 civilians dead and 110 wounded, the Interior Ministry said. Security forces killed at least five attackers.

Dozens of dead and wounded were taken to the city hospital, even as many more lay where they fell during the fighting, deputy public health director Hedayatullah Hameedi said.

The Taliban, seeking to reimpose strict Islamic law after their 2001 ouster by U.S.-led forces, claimed responsibility.

The militant group also attacked a district centre in neighbouring Ghazni province on Tuesday, detonating an armoured Humvee vehicles packed with explosives near the provincial governor’s office.

Provincial officials said at least 15 government security forces were killed and 12 wounded in the Ghazni attacks, with 13 civilians killed and seven wounded.

The Taliban said they had killed 31 security forces and wounded 21 in those clashes.

Fighting was also reported near local government centres in Farah and Kandahar provinces.

 

(Additional reporting by Mustafa Andalib in Ghazni; Writing by Josh Smith; Editing by Nick Macfie)