Sierra Leone mourns 100 children among dead in massive flooding

Began a week of mourning on Wednesday as it emerged that 105 children were among more than 300 people who perished in mudslides and torrential flooding, in one of the country's worst natural disasters.

With 600 people still missing in Freetown, President Ernest Bai Koroma described the humanitarian challenge ahead as "overwhelming".

He said flags would fly at half-mast and called for urgent help after visiting the devastated hilltop community of Regent on Tuesday.

Aid organizations meanwhile warned that the rainy season was not yet over and that more flooding could arrive at any moment in the west African coastal city of around a million people.

Officials at Freetown's central morgue said Wednesday that 105 of the more than 300 officially dead were children. An independent but unofficial morgue estimate put the toll at 400 dead.

The government of Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world, has promised relief for what the Red Cross says is more than 3,000 people left homeless by the disaster.

The authorities have opened an emergency response centre in Regent and registration centres to count those left on the streets.

Several UN agencies have ramped up efforts in Freetown, including the World Food Programme's (WFP) distribution of two-week rations of rice, pulses and cooking oil to 7,500 people. The first Israeli aid packages arrived and west African governments delivered cash and rice.

Speaking to AFP at the mortuary at the Connaught Hospital, technician Mohamed Sinneh Kamara said his team lacked equipment to process and identify the bodies still piling up.

"We have logistical constraints including a lack of gloves, PPE (personal protective equipment) and rain boots," he said as families gathered to identify their loved ones' bodies.

Mabinty Sesay's family had gone to Regent for an all-night prayer session when their church was buried in the mudslide. "I have lost 13 of my family members but was only able to identify two," she told AFP at the morgue.

One woman collapsed after seeing her husband's dead body among the piles of corpses, amid a powerful stench of decomposing flesh.

The Red Cross clarified that burials which took place on Tuesday were of body bags filled with missing parts of corpses. The government said mass burials of unidentified bodies still at the morgue would take place on Thursday and Friday.

"The situation with all the dead bodies now... No one is able to identify anyone. So as the president said, let the mass burials go ahead," said Adizah Conda at the morgue after losing seven members of her extended family.

The victims will be laid to rest in graves alongside those of the country's last humanitarian disaster, the Ebola crisis, in nearby Waterloo.

Adele Fox, national health coordinator for Sierra Leone at the charity Concern Worldwide, told AFP that the search for bodies continued but that survivors were facing difficult conditions.

"There is basic need for food, water, sanitation equipment and medical assistance. Since it is still the rainy season, further flooding is also a possibility," she said.

The prevailing sentiment among those in the disaster areas had shifted from shock and grief to anger at what is an annual problem in Freetown, she said, though never before on this scale.

The British charity Oxfam said it was trying to prevent a cholera outbreak by distributing clean water and hygiene kits to 2,000 households.

"These are some of the poorest areas in Freetown. Water and sanitation in homes is at best very basic, but at worst nonexistent.

"Overcrowding is a serious health risk and a potential breeding ground for the spread of disease," said Daniel Byrne, part of the Oxfam team in the city.

Britain's international development ministry said it was supplying tents and generators, while its military personnel had helped with relief efforts. Food and medicine would follow, it added.

The European Union released 300,000 euros ($353,000) in emergency funds, while Senegalese and Ivorian delegations handed over cash and food to President Koroma, following the lead of Guinea's president on Tuesday.

There was growing concern that the warning signs had been missed in a city where illegal construction on precarious ground is common.

President Koroma said in a statement released by his office that "relocation and opening up of a new settlement around the Freetown peninsula" would be considered.

Many homes are now without a water supply due to damage to a reservoir near Regent, according to the Guma Valley Water Company.

Three days of torrential rain culminated on Monday in the Regent mudslide and torrential flooding elsewhere in the city, one of the world's wettest urban areas.

Freetown is hit each year by flooding during several months of rain, and in 2015 bad weather killed 10 people and left thousands homeless.

Sierra Leone ranked 179th out of 188 countries on the UN Development Programme's 2016 Human Development Index, a basket of data combining life expectancy, education and income and other factors.

A day after Ladakh scuffle, India & China Army officers to meet in Leh

NEW DELHI: Army officers of India and China will hold a meeting in Chushul area of Leh, a day after Indian border guards foiled an attempt by Chinese soldiers to enter Indian territory along the banks of Pangong lake in Ladakh.
Official sources said the meeting is expected to deliberate on maintaining peace and tranquility along the Sino-India border in Ladakh.
Soldiers of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) tried to enter the Indian side in two areas — Finger Four and Finger Five — twice between 6 am and 9 am yesterday. But on both the occasions their attempts were thwarted by alert Indian troops.
Chinese troops had managed to enter up to Finger Four area in the region from where they were sent back. This area has been a bone of contention between India and China as both claim it to be a part of their territory.
There was stone pelting also that caused minor injuries to people on both sides.
When asked about yesterday's incident in Ladakh, Defence Minister Arun Jaitley told reporters, "This is not a subject on which the government makes a comment on."
Two-thirds of the Pangong Lake are controlled by China while one-third of it is controlled by India.

The incidents in Ladakh took place amid a face off between Indian and Chinese armies in Dokalam in India-Bhutan-China trijunction, which has entered the third month.

Official sources said notwithstanding the standoff, sweets were exchanged between the Indian Army and PLA troops in multiple border locations including in Dokalam.

Exchange of sweets on the Independence Day and the Republic Day has been a tradition for last several years.

'Hundreds' dead in Sierra Leone flooding and mudslides

President Ernest Bai Koroma has declared a national emergency, with the military and Red Cross deployed to search for survivors.

At least 312 people have died and more than 2,000 are homeless after a series of floods and mudslides hit the outskirts of Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown.

President Ernest Bai Koroma declared a national emergency as the military, police and Red Cross were deployed in an effort to search for survivors.

A Red Cross spokesperson said the number of dead was likely to rise further as more bodies are recovered.

Storms swept through the capital of the West African country on Monday, leaving streets under water and causing landslips in rural areas.

TV pictures showed people using their hands to dig through mud to find their loved ones.

One of the worst mudslides occurred in the mountain town of Regent where a hill partially collapsed, according to local media.

Social media images showed bodies lying in the street being collected by emergency personnel as the rain continued to fall.

Save the Children said it was likely that dozens of children will be among the casualties and that whole families were missing.

"We are still in the rainy season and must be prepared to respond in the event of further emergencies to come," the charity's country director Sasha Ekanayake said.

The number of corpses brought in has overwhelmed Freetown's Connaught Hospital mortuary, according to staff member Mohammed Sinneh.

"I counted over 300 bodies and more are coming," he said.

The country's vice president, Victor Moh, has blamed the high number of deaths partly on illegal construction.

He said: "It is likely that hundreds are lying dead underneath the rubble.

"The disaster is so serious that I myself feel broken. We're trying to cordon (off) the area (and) evacuate the people."

Deputy information minister Cornelius Deveaux said the government was still trying to compile accurate casualty figures.

The original estimate was that 21 people had died.

Many of Sierra Leone's poorest areas are close to sea level, making them vulnerable to flooding in the rainy season.

One resident, Fatmata Sesay, described being woken by rain beating on the mud house her family lives in, and escaping by climbing on to the roof.

"We have lost everything and we do not have a place to sleep," she said.

In January, Defence Secretary Michael Fallon announced a training programme for British forces in Sierra Leone to help "ensure stability in the region", and up to 700 UK soldiers were deployed in the response to the Ebola virus in 2014.

Heavy rains seasonally affect Sierra Leone and 10 people were killed by flooding in Freetown in 2015.

About 60% of the country's population live below the national poverty line, and it is ranked 179th out of 188 countries on the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index.

Trump condemns far-right groups over Charlottesville violence

The US President describes racism as "evil" as he bows to pressure to address white supremacist groups following clashes.

     

Donald Trump has condemned white supremacists and other hate groups following violent clashes in Virginia over the weekend in which a woman was killed.

The US President was under increasing pressure to address the violence in Charlottesville, with politicians from both sides criticising his failure to condemn far-right organisations.

At a news conference at the White House on Monday, Mr Trump said: "Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.

"Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans."

Mr Trump said anyone found to have acted criminally would be held "fully accountable", adding that: "No matter the colour of our skin we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God."

At the weekend, Mr Trump had claimed "many sides" were involved in the violence, but stopped short of condemning white supremacists.

The US President has been at his New Jersey golf club on a "working vacation", but returned to Washington on Monday to sign an executive action on China's trade policies.

Richard Spencer, president of white nationalist think tank the National Policy Institute, dismissed Mr Trump's condemnation.

He told Sky News: "It has a lot of kumbaya and a lot of nostalgia to it, 'we need to rediscover these bonds we've had together', does anyone really believe that?

"I do think there was an American nation that did act as one, that had fewer divisions, that emerged probably by the time of the Great War.

"No one identifies as a white supremacist or anything like that. I'm not the KKK, I don't engage in violence and I don't want to rule over other races.

"It's very easy to say things like 'racism is evil'. Everyone throughout world history had a sense of who they were, they had a sense of maintaining their community and their family and their nation and their civilisation etc.

"It's very silly to say things like that and I just can't take it seriously."

On Monday, attorney general Jeff Sessions said the death of paralegal Heather Heyer, 32, who was killed when a car ploughed into a group of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, "does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute".

He told ABC: "You can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation towards the most serious charges that can be brought, because this is an unequivocally unacceptable and evil attack that cannot be accepted in America."

The man arrested over Ms Heyer's death - 20-year-old James Fields - appeared in court on Monday on a second-degree murder charge. He was held without bail.

It comes as Merck chief executive Kenneth Frazier - one of America's most prominent black executives - quit the US President's American Manufacturing Council over Mr Trump's response to the violence.

:: Leaders condemn 'repulsive' far-right protests

In a tweet announcing his resignation, Mr Frazier said: "America's leaders must honour our fundamental views by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal."

The US President hit back, saying that now that "Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from the President's Manufacturing Council, he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!"

Several executives from top US companies have stepped down from a number of presidential advisory councils in protest over Mr Trump's policies.

:: Quitting boss encapsulates American Dream

:: Neo-Nazi site given 24 hours after Heyer post

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Walt Disney chief executive Robert Iger quit the Strategic and Policy Forum in June after Mr Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

Ticks are here to stay. But scientists are finding ways to outsmart them

Thanks, Holly Gaff. Soon, anyone straining to tweeze off a mid-back tick can find answers to the obvious question: What if humankind just went after the little bloodsuckers with killer robots?

Gaff, who calls herself a mathematical eco­epidemiologist, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., is one of the few people collecting real field data on the efficacy of tick-slaying robots. This summer, she’s been supervising a field test of a terminator named TickBot deployed to try making mowed grass safe for children. Researchers will start analyzing results in early fall.

Ticks make formidable enemies. “Almost every control measure that has been tried has failed, and has failed miserably,” Gaff says. “We are slowly coming to embrace the fact that you cannot eradicate ticks.” What human ingenuity might do, however, is manage the risks and — dream big! — make ticks irrelevant.

That’s an urgent hope. Data from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., have for two years suggested 2017 will be a high risk one for Lyme disease in the Northeastern United States. Of the various illnesses that North America’s ticks pass along, Lyme is the most common, caused by a squiggle of a parasite called Borrelia burgdorferi. The disease can bring on an eerie red bull’s-eye rash, flulike misery and risks of long-term neurological and joint troubles if not treated early. In 2015, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tallied about 30,000 confirmed cases. Considering gaps in case reporting, some estimates put the number closer to several hundred thousand.

So bring on the robots and other science revenge fantasies. It’s time to rethink humankind’s defenses against ticks. Pesticides and tick checks just aren’t doing the trick.

There may be ways to attack ticks without touching a single molecule of their die-hard little bodies. Ecologists have made progress in tracing what ticks need from the woods and lawns where they lurk. For instance, researchers believe that it was a bumper crop of acorns in 2015 that, through a Rube Goldberg series of consequences, created conditions for a perfect tick storm two years later. Breaking key ecological connections could knock back the tick menace in the future.

Molecular biologists are focusing on tick survival tricks. Researchers are looking for weak spots inside tick guts and trying to take advantage of ticks’ reckless abandon in mating. Biology is proving as important as electronics in the robot line of defense.

Ticks attack

First, a quick intro to ticks.

Unlike mosquitoes, ticks are pure vampires, consuming nothing but blood. Mosquitoes get colloquially called vampires, but blood is just their version of a pregnancy craving, a female-only nutrient gorge to aid reproduction in an adult life of sipping flower nectar.

For most of the troublesome tick species in North America, including the black-legged ticks that spread Lyme, blood is the elixir that lets them transition to the next life stage — from larva to nymph to adult. And after a single meal, an adult female can lay 1,000 or even 15,000 eggs without anything else to eat for the rest of her life. Hard ticks, the Ixodidae family, which includes the black-legged variety, typically have only two or three meals of any kind during the entire two or three years they live.

Soft ticks are gluttons, relatively speaking. Many move into mammal dens for a bedbug lifestyle. These ticks hide and, whenever they get hungry, just crawl over to the resident dinner.

For ticks without live-in prey, many “quest,” as the ambush is called. Ticks climb to some promising spot like the top of a grass blade, raise their front legs and just wait until something brushes by. But there are also ticks that hunt vigorously, even pursuing human prey.

A visit to Dennis Bente at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston is unforgettable, in part because of a video of a Hyalomma tick chasing down one of Bente’s collaborators. The tiny brown creature scurries like a frantic ant in an almost-straight line over bare dirt, onto a boot and finally into a hand reaching down to grab it. This hunter doesn’t live in North America.

Ticks can spread a wide variety of diseases. Despite its name, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which brings a higher risk of fatality than Lyme, is more common in the central United States and the South than in the Rockies. Other tickborne diseases are lately getting attention: A tick-bitten baby in Connecticut in April became the state’s first reported victim of the rare, but potentially fatal Powassan virus, thought to enter the bloodstream in just 15 minutes after a tick starts feeding. And medical journals are publishing discussions of whether a tick bite might lead to a sudden, deadly allergy to red meat. With a possible threat even to our beloved hamburger, new approaches to fending off ticks can’t come soon enough.

What can we learn about Mercury’s surface during the eclipse?

On the morning of August 21, a pair of jets will take off from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to chase the shadow of the moon. They will climb to 15 kilometers in the stratosphere and fly in the path of the total solar eclipse over Missouri, Illinois and Tennessee at 750 kilometers per hour.

But some of the instruments the jets carry won’t be looking at the sun, or even at Earth. They’ll be focused on a different celestial body: Mercury. In the handful of minutes that the planes zip along in darkness, the instruments could collect enough data to answer this Mercury mystery: What is the innermost planet’s surface made of?

Because it’s so close to the sun, Mercury is tough to study from Earth. It’s difficult to observe close up, too. Extreme heat and radiation threaten to fry any spacecraft that gets too close. And the sun’s brightness can swamp a hardy spacecraft’s efforts to send signals back to Earth.

But Messenger only scratched the surface, so to speak. It analyzed the planet’s composition with an instrument called a reflectance spectrometer, which collects light and then splits that light into its component wavelengths to figure out which elements the light was reflected from.

Some Important Health Tips You Need To Know

Here are some very important tips you need to know for maintaining a healthy life