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Tag: death toll
West Africa Ebola Death Toll Hits 337: WHO

West Africa Ebola Death Toll Hits 337: WHO

Geneva (AFP) – The death toll in west Africa’s three-nation Ebola outbreak has risen to 337, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, making it the deadliest ever outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever.

Fresh data from the U.N. health agency showed that the number of deaths in Guinea, the hardest-hit country, has reached 264, while 49 had died in Sierra Leone and 24 in Liberia.

The new toll marks a more than 60-percent hike since the WHO’s last figure on June 4, when it said 208 people had succumbed to the deadly virus.

Including the deaths, 528 people across the three countries have contracted Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses known to man, the WHO said.

A majority of cases, 398 of them, have surfaced in Guinea, where west Africa’s first ever Ebola outbreak began in January.

Sierra Leone has registered 97 cases in total, while Liberia has seen 33.

WHO has described the epidemic as one of the most challenging since the virus was first identified in 1976 in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

That outbreak, until now the deadliest, killed 280 people, according to WHO figures.

Ebola is a tropical virus that can fell its victims within days, causing severe fever and muscle pain, weakness, vomiting and diarrhea — in some cases shutting down organs and causing unstoppable bleeding.

No medicine or vaccine exists for Ebola, which is named after a small river in the DRC.

Aid organisations have said the current outbreak has been especially challenging since people in many affected areas have been reluctant to cooperate with aid workers and due to the practice of moving the dead to be buried in other villages.

West African authorities have also been struggling to stop mourners from touching bodies during traditional funeral rituals.

©afp.com / Seyllou

At Least One Killed, 26 Hurt In Nebraska Tornadoes

At Least One Killed, 26 Hurt In Nebraska Tornadoes

By Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times

At least one person was killed and 26 others were injured when tornadoes struck parts of Nebraska on Monday, according to local hospitals.

Images televised by CNN showed two tornadoes moving through a predominantly rural area in Stanton County.

A large tornado had caused “significant damage” near Stanton, the Weather Channel reported on its Twitter feed. The National Weather Service reported that several homes had been destroyed in Pilger.

“We saw a couple people get pulled out of their house, pretty covered in blood, looked like the guy broke his arm,” resident Bryan Mendlik said. “Anybody that was on Main Street, if they weren’t in their basement, they would be hurt.”

Faith Regional Health Services in Norfolk said it had received 16 patients in critical condition, with four more patients on the way. It also reported the one fatality.

Providence Medical Center in Wayne said it had two patients with cuts, with a third patient on the way.

Pender Community Hospital said it had three patients in noncritical condition.

Much of eastern Nebraska and parts of Iowa were under a tornado watch. The entire region was under a “moderate” risk of severe storms through the rest of the day, the Storm Prediction Center reported.

AFP Photo/Tasos Katopodis

Turks’ Anger Builds As Mine Death Toll Hits 282

Turks’ Anger Builds As Mine Death Toll Hits 282

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times

CAIRO — As public fury mounted Thursday along with the casualty toll in what officials were describing as Turkey’s deadliest mine accident, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan found himself on the defensive in the wake of a seemingly tone-deaf response to the disaster.

The number of confirmed dead rose to 282, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported, citing Energy Minister Taner Yildiz. Outside the town of Soma in western Turkey, the families of miners still missing kept a grief-suffused vigil, even as prospects dimmed for finding any survivors.

Yildiz said that as of Thursday morning, no one had been found alive for the past 12 hours. About 150 miners were still unaccounted for. Throughout the day on Wednesday, relatives and other onlookers sobbed or looked on numbly as one body after another was borne up out of the depths.

With a round of funerals now underway, the government has declared three days of mourning for the victims of the catastrophic underground fire, which broke out Tuesday afternoon and was thought to have been sparked by an explosion in a power distribution unit.

Yildiz told reporters Thursday morning that the fire had still not been extinguished, and said most of the deaths were due to carbon monoxide poisoning.

The disaster cast a spotlight on harsh and dangerous working conditions endured by miners in Turkey, and raised troubling questions as to whether cozy relationships between mine owners and the government had quashed stricter safety standards. Two weeks ago, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, had rejected calls for a parliamentary probe of safety practices in the Soma mines.

Angry demonstrations broke out Wednesday in cities including Istanbul and the capital, Ankara, where police fired tear gas and water cannon to try to contain the protests. On a visit to Soma, Erdogan, under police protection, was heckled by a hostile crowd, and a widely circulated photo showed a man identified as a senior Erdogan aide kicking a prone demonstrator.

The mine tragedy could carry damaging political repercussions for the prime minister, who is thought to be positioning himself for a presidential run in August.

Erdogan has promised a thorough investigation of the accident, but drew criticism for comments Wednesday in which he invoked mine disasters in other countries, some of them more than a century earlier, and said such accidents were “the nature of the work.”

“The government and the ruling party … ignored the warnings about the Soma mines,” Murat Yetkin wrote in a commentary for Thursday’s editions of the Hurriyet newspaper. “But the miners paid the price with their lives.”

AFP Photo/ Bulent Kilic

Government Airstrikes Kill 40 In Aleppo, Syria

Government Airstrikes Kill 40 In Aleppo, Syria

By Raja Abdulrahim and Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times

BEIRUT — At least 40 people were killed in the Syrian city of Aleppo on Thursday when government forces dropped barrel bombs on a busy market, according to opposition activists.

The bombs, dropped in quick succession from several military helicopters, tore through the market at a time of day when residents of the war-torn city crowd the remaining commercial areas. Activists at the scene disagreed on the number of bombs dropped.

Dozens of people were wounded.

Video from the scene showed vegetable stalls blown apart and rubble from two destroyed buildings scattered along the street.

Barrel bombs, oil drums filled with TNT, are crude and highly destructive weapons that have been used extensively against opposition-held parts of Aleppo for more than four months.

The blasts came a day after activists reported more than two dozen people killed when a warplane fired a missile at an Aleppo elementary school during a children’s art exhibit. Most of the dead were students.

The attacks came just days after the government and rebels reached agreement to restore electricity to the city in exchange for an end to attacks on civilians from either side — particularly government use of barrel bombs.

Rebels had responded to Wednesday’s school attack by cutting off electricity to Aleppo province around the city of Aleppo.

“We cut it off because the regime did not comply with the cease-fire in general, including the school attack,” said Yaser Ataee, spokesman for the Sharia Committee in Aleppo, which reached the agreement with the government Monday.

Both sides have targeted civilians in the conflict, now in its fourth year.

Elsewhere, a child was killed and 22 people were wounded Thursday when more than a dozen mortar shells fell on Jaramana, a largely pro-government suburb of the capital, Damascus, state media reported. Damascus has experienced more frequent mortar attacks in recent weeks as government forces have pushed to oust rebels from the outskirts of the city.

AFP Photo/Jack Guez