Tag Archives: Death

Super typhoon hits Taiwan, cutting power and transport

Damage from Typhoon Nepartak

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Super typhoon Nepartak hit Taiwan on Friday, driving thousands of people from their homes, disrupting power supplies and grounding more than 600 flights, authorities said.

Television showed toppled motorcycles and signboards being ripped from buildings and swept across roads in southeast Taiwan, where the year’s first typhoon made landfall.

By afternoon, the typhoon had moved into the Taiwan Strait, weakening as it headed towards China’s southeastern province of Fujian, but flooding and strong winds continued to lash the island’s central and southern areas.

More than 17,300 people were evacuated from their homes, and over 517,000 households suffered power outages, emergency officials said.

“The wind is very strong,” said a resident of Taitung, the eastern Taiwan city where the typhoon landed.

“Many hut roofs and signs have been blown off.”

Three deaths and 172 injuries were reported, bullet train services were suspended and over 340 international and 300 domestic flights canceled, an emergency services website showed.

The typhoon halted work in most of Taiwan. There were no reports of damage at semiconductor plants in the south.

Tropical Storm Risk had rated the typhoon as category 5, at the top of its ranking, but it was weakening and should be a tropical storm by the time it hits Fujian on Saturday morning.

More than 4,000 people working on coastal fish farms in Fujian were evacuated and fishing boats recalled to port, the official China News Service said.

The storm is expected to worsen already severe flooding in parts of central and eastern China, particularly in the major city of Wuhan.

Typhoons are common at this time of year in the South China Sea, picking up strength over warm waters and dissipating over land.

In 2009, Typhoon Morakot cut a swathe of destruction through southern Taiwan, killing about 700 people and causing damage of up to $3 billion.

(Reporting by Faith Hung and J.R. Wu; Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Doctors turn militant over Venezuela’s health crisis

Patients lie in hospital beds in the hallway of Venezuelan hospital

By Corina Pons

MERIDA, Venezuela Reuters) – A dozen doctors hold a hunger strike in the corridors of an Andean city hospital. In another provincial city, hundreds of protesting medics suspend appointments.

In the capital, staff from a pediatric hospital wave placards at the entrance to a hospital pleading for aid.

Not usually active in politics, many of the OPEC nation’s 40,000 doctors are becoming increasingly militant over drastic shortages of medicines, equipment and personnel amid a punishing economic crisis.

With eight out of 10 medicines now scarce, according to the main pharmacy group, protesting doctors are demanding that President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government declare a national health crisis and allow foreign humanitarian aid.

“I started to see patients, both in the operating theater and in the emergency ward, dying for lack of medicines,” said David Macineiras, a 30-year-old orthopedic surgeon and one of 12 doctors who went on hunger strike at the main state hospital in the western highland city of Merida.

“They arrive in bad conditions and we can’t even get adrenaline to deal with a cardiac arrest,” he said, describing the case of a woman who died for lack of adrenaline. Macineiras himself was hospitalized for four days after his hunger strike.

The protests involve a small percentage of doctors, in part because medics – especially younger ones – depend on the state to complete their residencies and studies and so have good reason to avoid conflict.

Doctors who hold high-ranking positions in public health acknowledge there are problems, but insist that none are sufficiently severe as to put patient lives at risk.

Christian Pino, a surgeon at the Merida hospital who also joined the strike, insists the opposite is true.

He recently operated on an elderly woman who due to chronic hospital shortages had to bring her own supplies, including saline solution. It ran out before the operation finished.

“In post-op, we didn’t have any serum to hydrate her, so the patient died,” he said at the hospital where stretchers packed corridors and incubators stood abandoned with handwritten signs saying they were out of service.

In June, Pino read a list of doctors’ demands in Venezuela’s National Assembly before the opposition-led legislature declared a state of medical emergency and approved channels for foreign humanitarian aid.

“I prefer to raise my voice with my colleagues than be an accomplice to this,” Pino said.

But the government-leaning Supreme Court shot down the assembly’s proposal. Government officials deny Venezuela is facing a humanitarian crisis and say there is no need for humanitarian assistance.

Maduro is fiercely proud of health advances under the 1999-2013 rule of socialist leader Hugo Chavez, and he says adversaries are exaggerating the problems now.

“There is no humanitarian crisis, I say it with absolute responsibility,” Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez recently told an Organization of American States meeting on Venezuela.

DEPRESSING DATA

Up-to-date data is hard to find, but what little is available points to a severe deterioration.

Health ministry statistics show that in 2015 for every 100 people discharged from state hospitals, 31 died – a rate six times higher than the previous year. Infant mortality was 2 percent of births last year, 100 times worse than 2014.

It is a huge challenge for the ruling Socialist Party which, under Chavez, ran enormously popular free health projects such as Cuban-staffed clinics in the slums but is now finding its welfare programs stretched.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Venezuela and Guyana were the only countries in South America to see maternal death rates worsen last year.

Health Minister Luisana Melo recently recognized health sector problems but said authorities are working to reduce the rates of infant mortality and death during childbirth.

She said shortages only affect around 15 percent of medicines and that Venezuelans tend to consume more medicine than they need to.

The government says a U.S.-backed “economic war” by political opponents and hostile business groups has caused the crisis, exacerbated by a plunge in the price of oil, which accounts for 95 percent of export revenues.

Huge lines snake around most pharmacies from before dawn, with some people staying all night to stake a place. Rowdy scenes are common, and soldiers guard the crowds.

In Merida, orthopedic surgeon Carlos Hidalgo said he joined the hunger strike after a patient arrived with an open fracture of the tibia and femur and there was no saline solution to clean the wound.

“They went to a kiosk and bought water to wash him with that,” he said. An infection set in and the patient’s leg was amputated.

“That’s why we protested, not because of our working conditions,” said Hidalgo, who makes 16,000 bolivars a month, equivalent to about $25 at the weaker of two official exchange rates and just $16 on the black market.

Some doctors are also worried about their legal liability. Medics in the city of Barquisimeto decided to ask patients’ relatives to sign a permission slip acknowledging the poor conditions they were working under.

At hospitals there, medics have held two strikes this year. Surgeries were halted on a recent day due to lack of gloves.

Idabelias Arias, the head of the emergency ward at a pediatric hospital in Barquisimeto, has had to use basic CPR (Cardiopulmonary resuscitation) to revive children for lack of adrenaline. “Doctors are doing war medicine here.”

(Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Kieran Murray)

At least 35 killed in attack on Shi’ite mausoleum north of Baghdad

Soldiers gather at site of suicide attack

TIKRIT, Iraq (Reuters) – Islamic State claimed a triple suicide attack on Thursday evening near a Shi’ite mausoleum north of Baghdad, which killed at least 35 people and wounded 60 others, according to Iraqi security sources.

The attack on the Mausoleum of Sayid Mohammed bin Ali al-Hadi reignited fears of an escalation of the sectarian strife between Iraq’s Shi’ites and Sunnis.

The Shi’ite form a majority in Iraq but Sunnis are predominant in northern and western provinces, including Salahuddin where the mausoleum is located.

Prominent Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his militia, the Peace Brigade, to deploy around the mausoleum, near Balad, about 93 kilometers (58 miles) north of Baghdad.

Sadr’s militia is also deployed in Samarra, a nearby city that houses the shrine of Imam Ali al-Hadi, the father of Sayid Mohammed whose mausoleum was attacked on Thursday.

A 2006 bombing destroyed the golden dome of the shrine of Ali al-Hadi and his other son, Imam Hasan al-Askari, setting off a wave of sectarian violence akin to a civil war.

Pictures posted on social media showed a fire burning in the market located at the entrance of the Sayid Mohammed mausoleum. It was not clear if the site itself was damaged.

A man detonated an explosive belt at the external gate of the mausoleum at around 11 p.m., allowing several gunmen to storm the site and start shooting at worshippers on the occasion of the Eid al-Fitr festival, according to the security sources.

At least one gunmen blew himself up in the middle of the crowd while another was gunned down by the guard of the mausoleum before he could detonate his explosive belt.The site also came under rocket fire during the attack that was claimed by Islamic State. The ultra-hardline Sunni group said in a statement the attack was carried out by three suicide bombers wearing explosive belts.

The militants have lost ground since last year to U.S.-backed government forces and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias, but recent bombings showed they still have the ability to strike outside the territory they control in northern and western Iraq.

A massive truck bomb killed at least 292 people in a mainly Shi’ite shopping area of central Baghdad over the weekend, in the deadliest single bombing since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

(Reporting by Ghazwan Hassan and Ahmed Rasheed; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by G Crosse and Leslie Adler)

Police seeking man in killing of two homeless men in San Diego

Person of interest in three attacks

By Alex Dobuzinskis

(Reuters) – Police in San Diego on Tuesday were seeking a man possibly connected to the slaying of two homeless men and the wounding of a third over the holiday weekend, officials said.

Police were calling the man a “person of interest” and not a suspect and they provided few details on what connects him to the attacks on the three men.

Witnesses saw the “person of interest” near where the first attack occurred on Saturday, and he was captured on surveillance video inside a local store wearing a backpack, San Diego police Captain David Nisleit said in a phone interview.

In that first attack, the body of a homeless man was discovered on fire between a highway and train tracks in the Mission Bay area of San Diego, police said.

The victim, a 53-year-old man, was pronounced dead at the scene.

On Monday before dawn, a 61-year-old man was discovered bleeding with trauma to his upper body, less than 4 miles (6 km) south of the first attack, police said.

He was rushed to a hospital with life-threatening injuries, and was still listed in critical condition on Tuesday, Nisleit said.

On Monday morning, just over an hour after the discovery of the badly wounded man, a third victim was discovered near some tennis courts in the Ocean Beach neighborhood about 3 miles (5 km) to the west of the second attack, police said.

He had trauma to his upper torso and was already dead when police arrived, said Nisleit, who declined to provide further details on the victim’s injuries. Investigators have not been able to identify the man or establish his exact age, he said.

The names of the other two men have not been released.

All three homeless men appeared to have been sleeping when they were attacked, Nisleit said. A single person is believed to have carried out the two slayings and the wounding of the third victim, he said.

“Obviously this is somebody we want to locate and get out of the community,” Nisleit said.

San Diego police have been warning homeless people about the attacks and are seeking potential tips from them, he said.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Frances Kerry)

China floods kill 128 , 1.3 million evacuated, 40,000 buildings collapse

An aerial view shows that houses are flooded in villages in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China, July 4, 2016.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Severe flooding across central and southern China over the past week has killed almost 130 people, damaged more than 1.9 million hectares of crops and led to direct economic losses of more than 38 billion yuan ($5.70 billion), state media said on Tuesday.

Premier Li Keqiang traveled on Tuesday to Anhui, one of the hardest-hit provinces, where he met residents and encouraged officials to do everything they could to protect lives and livelihoods. Li was also to visit Hunan province.

Heavy rainfall had killed 128 people across 11 provinces and regions and 42 people are missing, state news agency Xinhua reported.

More than 1.3 million people have been forced out of their homes, it said.

Weather forecasts predicted more downpours during what is traditionally China’s flood season.

Xinhua said more than 1.9 million hectares (4.7 million acres) of cropland had been damaged and another 295,000 hectares had been destroyed, resulting in direct economic losses of 38.2 billion yuan.

More than 40,000 buildings have also collapsed, it added.

It was not clear how that would affect the summer grain harvest, which was expected to reach 140 million tonnes this year.

The stormy weather also took a toll on farm animals.

In Anhui, the flooding killed some 7,100 hogs, 215 bulls and 5.14 million fowl, the China News Service reported.

In the southern province of Hunan, torrential rain and flooding had forced more than 100 trains to stop or take detours since midnight on Sunday, Xinhua reported.

In one city, about 3 tonnes of gasoline and diesel leaked from a petrol station on Monday, contaminating floodwater that flowed into a river, it said.

Water in 43 rivers in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River had exceeded warning levels and patrols were monitoring dykes, Xinhua quoted Chen Guiya, an official with the Yangtze River Water Resources Commission, as saying.

(Reporting by John Ruwitch; Addititional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Paul Tait, Robert Birsel)

Gunmen take hostages at cafe in Dhaka’s diplomatic quarter

Gulshan area in Dhaka, Bangladesh

DHAKA (Reuters) – Gunmen attacked a restaurant popular with expatriates in the diplomatic quarter of the Bangladeshi capital on Friday and took hostages, including several foreigners, police said.

Eight to nine gunmen attacked the Holey Artisan restaurant in the upscale Gulshan area of Dhaka, and police were preparing to start an operation to rescue the hostages, said Benjir Ahmed, the chief of Bangladesh’s special police force.

CNN said 20 people were being held in the restaurant.

Ahmed said the assailants had hurled bombs at police. One policeman was dead and two others wounded by gunfire that erupted as they surrounded the restaurant, police said.

A resident near the scene of the attack said he could hear sporadic gunfire nearly three hours after the attack began. “It is chaos out there. The streets are blocked. There are dozens of police commandos,” said Tarique Mir.

Bangladesh has seen an increase in militant Islamist violence over the last year. Deadly attacks have been mounted against atheists and members of religious minorities in the mostly Muslim country of 160 million people, with attackers often using machetes.

Militants killed two foreigners last year, leading several Western firms involved in the country’s $25 billion garment sector to temporarily halt visits to Dhaka.

Both Islamic State and al Qaeda have claimed responsibility for militant attacks in the country. But the government denies foreign militant organizations are involved and blames two local groups, Ansar-al-Islam and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen.

The U.S. State Department said all Americans working at the U.S. mission there had been accounted for. A spokesman said in Washington the situation was “very fluid, very live”.

(Reporting by Serajul Quadir; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Andrew Roche)

Record number of Migrants die trying to cross Mediterranean last six months

People stand next to the dead body of a migrant on the beach of Siculiana, in Western Sicily, Italy,

By Lin Taylor

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Nearly 2,900 migrants have died trying to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea, making the first six months of 2016 the deadliest on record, according to figures published Friday by an international migration group.

Between the months of January and June, there were 2,899 recorded deaths at sea, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported, around a 50 percent increase in the number of deaths when compared with the same period in 2015, when 1,838 migrants went missing or drowned at sea. In 2014, there were 743 deaths at sea by mid-year.

“We’ve had almost 3,000 people dead which is really alarming,” said Joel Millman, spokesman for the IOM, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Europe’s done a remarkable job, they’ve saved thousands of lives this year alone. But almost 3,000 people dead means they’re not doing everything that needs to be done.”

Millman said he was not expecting migrant arrivals to decrease as insecurity in Libya, Syria and other war-torn countries is not likely to improve in the coming months.

In first six months of this year, 225,665 migrants arrived in Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Spain by sea, with the central Mediterranean route to Italy claiming the most lives, accounting for nearly 2,500 deaths. This time last year, the number of arrivals by sea was just over 146,000, the IOM said.

On Thursday, 10 women died in a sinking rubber boat off the coast of Libya and an Italian ship rescued hundreds of other migrants, the Italian coastguard said.

The latest deaths came as Italy raised the wreck of a fishing boat that sank in April last year. The disaster is feared to have killed up to 800 people, making it one of the deadliest shipwrecks in decades of seaborne migration from North Africa towards Europe.

(Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian issues, conflicts, global land rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, women’s rights, and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories)

Two bodies found in area burned by California wildfire

An American flag flies above wreckage at a residence leveled by the Erskine Fire in South Lake

y Dan Whitcomb

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Two bodies were found on Wednesday in a rural area of San Diego County charred by a major wildfire, sheriff’s officials said, as firefighters increasingly gained control over a larger blaze that also killed two people in central California.

The remains were discovered on private property in the Potrero area, which had been subject to a mandatory evacuation order as flames from the so-called Border Fire approached, San Diego County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said.

Caldwell said coroner’s investigators were trying to determine the identities of the deceased.

Two people who had been living in an outbuilding on the property and acting as caretakers were reported missing earlier this week.

The Border Fire, which broke out on June 19, has blackened more than 7,600 acres in southern San Diego County near the Mexican border. It was 97 percent contained by late Wednesday.

In central California, crews had cut containment lines around 70 percent of the so-called Erskine fire, which was burning in the drought-parched foothills near Lake Isabella in Kern County, about 110 miles (180 km) north of Los Angeles, fire managers said.

A major highway through the area had been reopened and more evacuees had been allowed to return home, authorities said.

On Wednesday, some 1,300 firefighters were battling the blaze that has burned about 47,000 acres, killed two people and destroyed more than 250 structures since it erupted a week ago, becoming the largest and most destructive in an already intense California fire season.

Crews will work to strengthen containment lines and extinguish spot fires started by potentially strong winds through the day, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said on its Inciweb website.

The two victims of the Erskine fire, found on Friday just beyond the ruins of their home, were identified by the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin as a priest and his wife, Byron and Gladys McKaig.

Authorities have said more victims could be found once crews were able to inspect fire-ravaged areas more closely.

The California wildfire season officially began in May but the nine major fires that have started in the state over the past week marked the first widespread outbreak of intense fires this year.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien, Laila Kearney and Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Frances Kerry, David Gregorio and Paul Tait)

IKEA recalls 36 million chests and dressers after six deaths

Flags and the company's logo are seen outside of an IKEA Group store in Spreitenbach

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Swedish furniture company IKEA Group [IKEA.UL] is recalling almost 36 million chests and dressers in the United States and Canada but said the products linked to the deaths of six children are safe when anchored to walls as instructed.

The recall covers six models of MALM chests or dressers manufactured from 2002 to 2016 and about 100 other families of chests or dressers that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said could topple over if not anchored securely to walls, posing a threat to children.

“It is simply too dangerous to have the recalled furniture in your home unanchored, especially if you have young children,” CPSC Chairman Elliott Kaye said in a statement on Tuesday.

Tipped-over furniture or television sets kill a U.S. child every two weeks, he added.

IKEA said that the recall was based on a standard applicable in North America for free-standing clothing storage units and that the products meet all mandatory stability requirements in Europe and other parts of the world.

“When attached to a wall the products are safe. We have had no other issues with that in any other country,” said Kajsa Johansson, a spokeswoman for IKEA in Sweden.

IKEA said it had no details on potential costs stemming from the recall.

A recall summary from the company said that the chests and dressers are unstable if not properly anchored to a wall, posing a serious tip-over and entrapment hazard that could result in death or injury to children.

Two U.S. toddlers died in separate 2014 incidents when MALM chests fell on them. A 22-month-old boy was killed last year in a similar incident, which occurred after IKEA had announced a repair program including a free wall-anchoring kit.

None of the furnishings in the fatal incidents had been anchored to a wall.

IKEA had received reports of 41 tip-over incidents involving non-MALM chests that caused 19 injuries and the deaths of three children from 1989 to 2007.

As part of the recall, IKEA is offering refunds or a free wall-anchoring kit.

The U.S. recall covers about 8 million MALM chests and dressers and 21 million other models of chests and dressers. About 6.6 million are being recalled in Canada.

Ikea has sold approximately 147.4 million chests of drawers globally since 1998.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington DC and Mia Shanley in Stockholm; Editing by Dan Grebler and David Goodman)

Three missing in fiery Texas freight train collision

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – Three railroad workers are missing after two freight trains they were on collided in northern Texas on Tuesday, causing a huge fire, officials said.

The accident near Panhandle, about 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Amarillo, happened when the lead locomotives of two Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Co [BNISF.UL] trains crashed into each other, said company spokesman Joe Faust.

There was no information available as to what caused the accident or the fire, he said.

There were four workers aboard the two trains. One was found and taken to an area hospital. That person’s condition is unknown, he said.

“Rescue efforts are under way at the scene with respect to the three other railroad employees involved in the incident,” Faust said. Local rescue officials said the three were missing.

The Carson County Sheriff’s office issued a mandatory evacuation for an area near the accident.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz Editing by G Crosse and James Dalgleish)