Monday, October 24, 2011

Turkey earthquake: More aid pledged to worst-hit areas

The Turkish government has pledged more aid to thousands of people affected by Sunday's deadly earthquake in the east.

Officials said 12,000 more tents would be delivered to the cities of Ercis and Van and also to nearby villages.

Ankara has been accused of failing to help some of the most needy, who spent the second night in freezing conditions without heating and tents.

At least 279 people are now known to have died and some 1,300 were injured after the 7.2-magnitude earthquake.

Rescue teams with sniffer dogs continued through the night to search for survivors under the rubble of hundreds of collapsed buildings.

Cranes and other heavy equipment have been lifting slabs of concrete, and many residents have been joining in the rescue effort, digging with shovels.

But hopes of finding more survivors are fading, with no-one being pulled alive in the last seven to eight hours, the BBC's Tim Willcox in Ercis reports.

In one building, our correspondent adds, there are fears that up to 50 are missing - buried under the rubble.

Turkish officials are now warning that the death toll is expected to rise further.

'We're freezing'

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay, in charge of the relief operation, said late on Monday that "from today there will be nothing our people lack".

Officials were also setting up more field hospitals and kitchens to help the thousands left homeless or too afraid to return to their homes amid continuing aftershocks.

But some survivors in the ethnic Kurd areas complained that not enough help was reaching them.

"Tents will not be enough - we do not have food, no rescue teams have reached here yet," said Serif Tarakci, an official from the village of Halkali, about 50km (30 miles) from Van.

"It's cold at night, everybody is outside and we're freezing here," the New York Times quoted him as saying.

Another resident of Van said that even tents were in short supply.

"All the nylon tents are on the black market now," Ibrahim Baydar, a 40-year-old tradesman from Van, told Reuters news agency.

"We cannot find any. People are queuing for them. No tents were given to us whatsoever," he said.

Opposition politicians earlier decried what they called "a lack of crisis management", saying that many people still lacked food, heating and tents.

They also said Ankara was wrong to refuse offers of foreign aid.

Ercis, with a population of about 75,000, has been the worst hit - some 80 buildings have collapsed there.

The BBC's Daniel Sandford, in Ercis, says most of those destroyed buildings are apartment blocks with dozens of people missing at each site.

Both Ercis and the larger city of Van, about 100km (60 miles) to the south, lie on a high plateau surrounded by snow-capped mountains.

'Primitive tools'

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office said 970 buildings in the earthquake zone had been destroyed.

Mr Erdogan visited the area on Sunday and said many villages made of mud brick had been almost completely destroyed.

Some of the rescue workers have complained of a lack of adequate equipment, said the Hurriyet Daily News.

"We are working with primitive tools, we have no equipment," one rescuer told the Turkish newspaper.

Despite the difficulties, five people were pulled from the ruins of one collapsed building in Ercis on Monday after one of them called for help on his mobile phone, Anatolia news agency said.

Another man was rescued later on Monday, some 30 hours after the earthquake struck.

The earthquake struck at 13:41 (10:41 GMT) on Sunday at a depth of 20km (12 miles), with its epicentre 16km north-east of Van in eastern Turkey, the US Geological Survey said.

About 200 aftershocks have hit the region, it added, including one of magnitude 6.0 late on Sunday.

Turkey is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes because it sits on major geological fault lines.

Two earthquakes in 1999 with a magnitude of more than 7 killed almost 20,000 people in densely populated parts of the north-west of the country.

Source http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15440505

Friday, July 29, 2011

Rot in hell daughter to mother who killed brother

As a young girl, Melissa Ashfield watched as her brother John was murdered by her mother, Gunn-Britt Ashfield.

This morning at her mother's Sydney parole hearing, Ms Ashfield told her mother: "You're sick and twisted and you can go to hell."

Ashfield, now known as Angelic Karstrom, and her then boyfriend, Austin Allan Hughes, beat John Ashfield, 6, to death with a hammer in August 1993 at their home in Nowra in southern NSW.

Ms Ashfield was three when she and her three other brothers saw her mother and Hughes beat the boy with a hammer and a phone book over a period of several hours.

He suffered a retinal haemorrhage and extensive bruising to his whole body, and died in hospital the next day.

Karstrom was sentenced to 19 years in jail.

Today, after serving 18 years, Karstrom was granted parole by the NSW parole authority under strict conditions that will apply for 12 months following her release next month.

The conditions include being electronically monitored, prevented from attending her victim's grave and forbidden from being in the company of children under 16.

The authority said it elected to release Karstrom a year before the end of her sentence so she could be closely monitored for the next 12 months.

Ms Ashfield opposed such a decision when giving an emotional witness impact statement at the hearing today.

Karstrom was on screen via video link from jail as her daughter yelled at her.

"She can rot in hell," she said. "The day I'll jump for you is the day you drop dead. And you can go to hell."

Ms Ashfield expressed disgust as the parole board chairman read his decision, holding up a picture of her dead brother and declaring to her mother "Look what you did you f---ing dog" before running, crying from the court.

Outside the parole hearing, Ms Ashfield, her aunt Annette and other family members gathered to speak to a throng of waiting media.

Ms Ashfield said she was angry and frustrated, denying that her mother was truly remorseful.

"They say this is in the best interests of everyone, but I want her to serve her full sentence," she said.

She was haunted daily by the memories of her brother's bashing and eventual death, she said.

"The day that - way before my brother's come home from school, it was a lot of tension, a lot of yelling, a lot of flaring.

"And before you know it, my brother was the target.

"They started hitting him, punching him.

"They both took turns putting the phone book on his head, smashing it with a hammer.

"They both bashed him for 2½ hours.

"My brother's screaming, saying: 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' and she kept going.

"She could've easily said: 'Stop.'

"But it went further. She let Austin put one of my dresses on my brother and mocked him before he got, before he was dead."

A long-standing family friend Annena Hallcroft said: "The memories live day to day as new as they were yesterday, as new as the day when her little brother was killed."

Source http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/rot-in-hell-daughter-to-mother-who-killed-brother-20110729-1i39c.html?from=smh_sb

Friday, May 6, 2011

SMS service could have warned Lockyer

LOCKYER Valley residents could have been warned of a deadly creek surge if the council had used an alert system operating in Brisbane at the time, an inquiry has been told.

Early Warning Network's Kerry Plowright on Friday told the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry his service could have devised a warning for the Lockyer Valley before the freak flood which killed at least 17 people in January.

Brisbane City Council has a contract with Mr Plowright's company to send alerts by SMS, email and telephone to participating ratepayers warning them of coming storms and tidal surges.

Unlike the national alert system operated by Telstra, which waits for authorities to order SMS messages to be sent, Early Warning Network monitors the weather around the clock and can alert councils to developments as they arise.

The alerts it sends to subscribers are based predominantly on Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) warnings.

But it also uses private meteorologists including Anthony Cornelius, whose Weather Watch service predicted the January 10 Lockyer Valley flash flood but had no powers to warn the public, Mr Plowright said.

"Our guys are monitoring those sort of events continuously," he said.

"Several of them were quite alarmed by what was starting to occur."

The company could thus have put out an alert in cooperation with Lockyer Valley Regional Council to warn residents in the area.

However, at the time of the January floods, only 19,000 Brisbane ratepayers had taken up the service.

The inquiry has also looked at how Brisbane residents fared when floodwaters hit the city from January 11, swamping more than 14,000 properties.

Brisbane City Council regional operations manager Sean Hodgson recounted how it became "impossible" for 250 council staff to warn people at every home that was at risk once the Wivenhoe Dam ramped up releases of water.

On January 11, staff set out to doorknock 10,000 properties at risk of flooding.

But the dam releases were scaled up the next day, and the number of properties blew out to 30,000.

Assistant Police Commissioner Peter Martin appeared at the inquiry on Friday to give his side of an exchange with Moggill MP Bruce Flegg about a food drop Mr Flegg organised for his flooded constituents on January 14.

The area was cut off from the rest of Brisbane by floodwaters, one of its supermarkets was flooded, and the other had been shut down by police after a scuffle between panic buyers.

Dr Flegg on Thursday told the inquiry he organised a private helicopter pilot to fly in supplies from the Sunshine Coast and he didn't understand why Mr Martin scuttled the plan.

Mr Martin said he was unsure he had the power to approve such a flight, which was "quite problematic", as he had no say over the flight path, or knowledge of the aircraft or pilot.

Far from being insensitive to the community's needs, official plans were already "well afoot" to get provisions in by army vehicle earlier than Dr Flegg's helicopter, he said.

Dr Flegg denied playing politics over the food drop, organised with another opposition MP.

But Mr Martin said he took a call from an ABC journalist 20 minutes after speaking to Dr Flegg, questioning why the drop had been refused.

"I gave an explanation to the journalist that we were well advanced with respect to our plans," he said.

"The journalist indicated to me that was different to what he had been told."

The inquiry resumes in Brisbane on Monday.

Source http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/sms-service-could-have-warned-lockyer/story-e6frf7jx-1226051331982

Monday, April 11, 2011

Greens win a victory for NSW

Jeremy Buckingham, the man who wrested a NSW upper house seat away from Pauline Hanson, says his win is an important victory for the Greens and the state.

Ms Hanson on Tuesday lost her bid for a seat after the distribution of preferences, more than two weeks after the election.

"Defeating Pauline Hanson was a particularly important task for the Greens," Mr Buckingham said, after the Greens and Nationals nabbed the last two seats up for grabs.
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"It is a great honour to be elected."

Mr Buckingham, an Orange City Councillor, said Ms Hanson's politics focused on dividing the community and "blaming the most vulnerable for the ills of society".

"The last thing we need is an attack on social cohesion," he said.

There will be six Greens MPs in the new parliament, five of whom will sit in the upper house.

Mr Buckingham was elected to the upper house along with sitting Greens MP David Shoebridge and Byron Shire Mayor Jan Barham.

Fellow Greens in the upper house, John Kaye and Cate Faehrmann, were not up for election.

The Greens' Jamie Parker won the lower house seat of Balmain from Labor.

Mr Kaye welcomed Mr Buckingham and Ms Barham to the parliamentary team.

"Despite Labor's failure to recommend upper house preferences for the Greens in at least 30 seats, we were able to see off Ms Hanson and the damage she would have done to NSW politics," he said in a statement.

"The Greens have increased their parliamentary numbers by 50 per cent."

Source http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/greens-win-a-victory-for-nsw-20110412-1dc2j.html

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Man committed to stand trial for murder of Trinity Bates

A Bundaberg man has been committed to stand trial for the murder of eight-year-old Trinity Bates.

Allyn John Slater, 21, stood upright in the dock and quietly answered ‘‘No, your honour,’’ when Magistrate Jennifer Batts in the Bundaberg Magistrates Court asked if he wished to enter a plea.

The crown will allege Slater, a family friend of the Bundaberg schoolgirl, went to her home after days of drinking liquor and playing violent video games in February 2010.
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His fingerprints were found on a chair placed under a window of Trinity’s room, on the window pane and the sill.

Craig Simpson, a prisoner who spent a considerable amount of time with the accused man at the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, told the court that Slater confessed to entering her bedroom, wrapping the girl in a blanket and carrying her to a nearby drain where he allegedly ‘‘squeezed’’ her.

Trinity was last seen by her parents at 9.30pm the night before.

Her body showed 87 bruises, evidence of choking and a blow to her head and indications she may have been dragged the 20 metres up an enclosed stormwater pipe leading from a large drain that was often used as a shortcut by locals in the southeast Queensland city.

In evidence on Wednesday, Detective Sergeant Joseph Hildred said Slater had confessed to police hours after Trinity’s body was found by a police dog in the pipe about 100 metres from her Bundaberg home.

There was no evidence of sexual assault.

‘‘He made full admissions in abducting and strangling the deceased,’’ Det Sgt Hildred said.

Det Sgt Hildred said when eight police arrived at Slater’s home where he lived with his parents, at 6.55am on February 22, the morning Trinity’s body was found, Slater appeared to be extremely nervous.

‘‘He appeared to be anxious, he appeared to have difficulty forming words,’’ the head of Bundaberg CIB said.

‘‘He was nervous about something.’’

He told the court Slater recovered his composure as the day went on.Justice of the Peace David Read, who acted as a support person for Slater at the time, said he twice denied killing the girl.

Mr Read said Slater seemed ‘‘unconcerned’’ and ‘‘totally relaxed’’ when he arrived at the house at 7.30am and during a private conversation denied killing Trinity.

‘‘[Slater] said he did not murder her, in a low voice,’’ Mr Read said.

Police found no DNA evidence linking Slater to the crime despite extended forensic analysis of Trinity’s room, his clothes and body, and of the deceased girl.

Forensic pathologist Dr Nathan Mill told the court that Trinity died of drowning in the drain where she was found face down about 6.15am on February 22, 2010, and not of choking or a blow to the head allegedly inflicted by Slater.

A trial date is yet to be fixed.

Outside the court Trinity’s uncle, Aaron Mattner, who sat through the three days of evidence, said the family had faith justice would be served.

He thanked the police involved in the case, SES volunteers who searched for clues and the dozens of members of the public who offered shreds of information.‘

‘Something like this never goes away,’’ Mr Mattner said. ‘‘She was a bright spark, a beautiful child with an aura about her.’’

Source http://www.smh.com.au/queensland/man-committed-to-stand-trial-for-murder-of-trinity-bates-20110330-1cfi4.html

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Australian firebrand Hanson attempts comeback

Australian anti-immigration firebrand Pauline Hanson confirmed Wednesday she is attempting a political comeback by standing in a state election this month.

In a surprise move, Hanson -- who once famously warned that Australia was at risk of being "swamped by Asians" -- is running for an upper house seat with a group of independents in the New South Wales poll on March 26.

The former One Nation party chief told Fairfax Radio Network that it was "in the people's interest of New South Wales to ensure that I am on the floor", though she conceded that it would be a "battle" to get elected.

Hanson drew international condemnation but briefly won domestic support in the 1990s with her anti-immigration and trade protection policies, before losing her seat in 1998.

She spent several weeks in jail in 2003 for fraudulently spending electoral funds before the judgment was overturned.

She insisted on Wednesday that she was "not racist".

"No one can ever comment or make a comment on any racist statement I have ever said," she told the radio show.

"I have... as an Australian... a right to question immigration and multiculturalism, which I don't believe is helping our country."

Hanson said she believed in "people coming here, assimilating, becoming Australians" and abiding by Australian laws. "I don't think there's anything wrong with that," she said.

The 56-year-old said Australia's major political parties feared her because "they know I've always spoken out, I expose them for what they are".

In 2007, she ran unsuccessfully for a national Senate seat, calling for an end to immigration by Muslims to protect "Australian culture".

Two years later, Hanson blamed her failure in the Queensland state election on the publication of raunchy photos purportedly taken by an ex-boyfriend. The pictures turned out to be of another woman.

Hanson announced in November that she had decided to stay in Australia, abandoning plans to move to Britain because "it's overrun with immigrants and refugees". She also said France was also inundated with foreigners.

The former fish and chip shop owner had earlier said she was emigrating to Britain due to disillusionment with Australia's immigration and trade policies.

Source http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5huZIOlTuOuiS-6n9HcDKrOPl6AAQ?docId=CNG.0f22dda0f0c294a4d2cc6009ec5d466e.f1

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Borders, Angus & Robertson parent Redgroup Retail in voluntary administration

REDGROUP Retail, the parent of Angus & Robertson and Borders, has collapsed amid a massive downturn in consumer discretionary spending.

The parent of the two leading bookstore chains in Australia was today placed into voluntary administration by Pacific Equity Partners, the private equity fund that has owned the business since 2004.

Redgroup Retail employs about 2500 staff across 169 Angus & Robertson stores and 26 Borders stores in Australia, as well as the Whitcoulls bookstore chain in New Zealand, the Supanews newsagency chain and the seasonal Calendar Club calendar business.

The company's financial woes are unrelated to those of the US Borders chain, which this month filed for bankruptcy.

Redgroup warned last year it was close to breaching its banking covenants following a downturn in sales.

The Redgroup board has appointed corporate recovery specialists Ferrier Hodgson to handle the administration, which is expected to see a number of underperforming stores closed.

Ferrier partner Steve Sherman said the bookstore chains would continue operating as normal while the administrators conduct an urgent assessment of the company's financial status.

A first meeting of creditors is expected to be held in the first week of March.

Source http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/borders-angus-robertson-parent-redgroup-retail-in-voluntary-administration/story-e6frg8zx-1226007712326