"We have created and are expanding a system of space monitoring of emergency situations which provides real-time data on the conditions of potentially dangerous facilities or areas in high-risk zones," the ministry said in a report to the Cabinet.

The system currently comprises 10 satellites with monitoring systems of various visual and spectral resolutions allowing surveillance of Russian territory (except the northern part of Yakutia and Chukotka) and border regions of neighboring countries, the ministry said.

The ground-based segment of the system includes four data receiving and processing centers in Moscow, Vologda, Krasnoyarsk and Vladivostok.

Russia is planning to expand the system with the addition by 2015 of three data receiving and processing centers in the Arctic region, where the country has nuclear power stations, naval bases and ports hosting nuclear submarines and nuclear icebreakers, and important transport hubs.

The system will also help ensure the safety of the Northern Sea Route, a vital shipping lane from the Atlantic to the Pacific running along Russia's Arctic coast from Murmansk on the Barents Sea, across Siberia, to the Bering Strait and Far East.

Easier access to the untapped natural resources of the Arctic, caused by the melting pack ice, will lead to the construction of dozens of new pipelines and require well-coordinated monitoring of oil and gas exploration in the region, the ministry said.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST Washington DC (SPX) May 17, 2013 - Earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters often showcase the worst in human suffering - especially when those disasters strike populations who live in rapidly growing communities in the developing world with poorly enforced or non-existent building codes.

This week in Cancun, a researcher from Yale-National University of Singapore (NUS) College in Singapore is presenting a comparison between large-scale earthquakes and tsunamis in different parts of the world, illustrating how nearly identical natural disasters can play out very differently depending on where they strike.

The aim of the talk at the 2013 Meeting of the Americas, which is sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), is to focus on the specific role geoscientists can play in disaster risk reduction and how their work should fit in with the roles played by other experts for any given community.

"To reduce the losses from these disasters, a diverse group of researchers, engineers, and policy makers need to come together to benefit from each other's expertise," said Brian McAdoo, professor of science at Yale-NUS College.

"Geophysicists play a crucial role in natural hazard identification and determining the key questions of, how often does a geophysical hazard affect a given area and how big will it be when it hits?" McAdoo said. "We need to be aware of how this information is incorporated into the disaster planning architecture."

San Francisco, Haiti, and New Zealand
In his talk, McAdoo will present case studies that he and his colleague Vivienne Bryner compiled comparing death counts and economic fallout following geophysical events of similar magnitude in areas with different levels of economic development.

What their analysis shows is that deaths tend to be higher in poor countries exposed to severe natural disasters because of existing socioeconomic, environmental, and structural vulnerabilities. At the same time, economic losses tend to be higher in developed nations, but developing countries may be less able to absorb those economic losses that do occur.

As an example, he points to the earthquakes that hit Haiti, San Francisco, and Christchurch and Canterbury, New Zealand, in 2010, 1989 and 2010-2011. While the quakes were nearly identical in magnitude, the consequences of these natural disasters were remarkably different.

Some 185 people died in the 2011 Canterbury earthquake, which was preceded by the larger Christchurch quake in 2010 in which nobody died. Both quakes and their aftershocks cost New Zealand about $6.5 billion, which was approximately 10-20 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).

The 1989 San Francisco earthquake killed 63 people, and it cost $5.6 billion (the equivalent of about $10 billion in 2010 dollars).

The U.S. economy is so large, however, that it only caused a one-tenth of one percent drop in U.S. GDP. The 2011 earthquake in Haiti, on the other hand, killed some 200,000 people and resulted in economic losses approaching an estimated $8 billion, which is more than 80 percent of Haiti's GDP.

To address such disparities, McAdoo advocates what is known as Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) decision making - a framework for finding solutions to best prepare for natural disasters, lessen their impact, and sensibly engage in post-disaster reconstruction. For such planning to work, he said, it must be broad-based.

"We won't ever be able to prevent disasters," he said. "The only way we will effectively minimize the effects of hazards is to collaborate across academic disciplines, businesses, governments, NGOs, and perhaps most critically the exposed community."

"Planning for any sort of natural disaster takes insight into what may be expected, which necessarily includes the important perspective of scientists," added Philip ("Bo") Hammer, Associate Vice President for Physics Resources at the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and co-organizer of the session in which McAdoo is speaking.

"One reason why we organized this session in the first place was to encourage the sharing of such perspectives within the context of how geophysicists can build local capacity, not only for dealing with acute issues such as disasters, but also longer term challenges like building capacity for economic growth."

The talk, "Building Capacity for Disaster Risk Reduction," will be presented by Brian G. McAdoo and Vivienne Bryner on Friday, May 17, 2013, at the 2013 Meeting of the Americas in Cancun, Mexico. McAdoo is affiliated with Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and Bryner is at University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST Seaside Heights, New Jersey (AFP) May 14, 2013 - Prince Harry inspected hurricane-damaged areas of the New Jersey shore Tuesday at the tail end of a US tour that has done much to bury his royal PR disaster last year in being photographed during a strip billiards session in Las Vegas.

The third-in-line to Britain's throne strolled with New Jersey's popular and pugnacious governor, Chris Christie, in Seaside Heights, a resort battered by Superstorm Sandy on October 29 last year.

Wearing sunglasses and an open-necked white shirt, Harry witnessed the still visible scars of the storm, which forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes and caused $80 billion in regional damage.

He then chatted with emergency services workers and local residents, and took in some of the arcade games on the newly rebuilt boardwalk, famous as a setting for the drunken excesses of characters on the "Jersey Shore" reality TV series.

Christie, seen by many as a possible Republican contender in the 2016 presidential election, remained by the prince's side throughout the visit -- much as he'd promised to do back in March, joking he'd make sure the party-loving royal guest did not repeat his Las Vegas antics.

Harry was engulfed in a tabloid frenzy in August last year when nude photographs of him playing billiards with an unidentified woman were published.

His current US tour has been far more sober and has been widely deemed a public relations coup for Britain's royal family at a time when Harry, his elder brother Prince William and their father Prince Charles are increasingly taking over the spotlight from the monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

After New Jersey, Harry traveled to a British business promotion event in nearby Manhattan, where he accompanied Prime Minister David Cameron on a new model of the famous London red bus. On Wednesday, he was due to play in a charity polo match in posh Greenwich, Connecticut.

Over the weekend, the serving British army captain attended a Paralympic-style competition for wounded servicemen and women called the Warrior Games and last week he paid tribute at the Arlington National Cemetery to US soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There has been little sign of Harry's playboy tendencies, although the bachelor's presence did prompt unusual levels of excitement among young Senate staffers during a visit to Capitol Hill to promote land mine clearance.

His final event at the Greenwich Polo Club will benefit his Sentebale charity, which helps vulnerable children in Lesotho.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST Philadelphia PA (SPX) May 09, 2013 - Uncertainty issues are paramount in the assessment of risks posed by natural hazards and in developing strategies to alleviate their consequences.

In a paper published last month in the SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification, the father-son team of Jerome and Seth Stein describe a model that estimates the balance between costs and benefits of mitigation-efforts to reduce losses by taking action now to reduce consequences later- following natural disasters, as well as rebuilding defenses in their aftermath.

Using the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan as an example, the authors help answer questions regarding the kinds of strategies to employ against such rare events.

"Science tells us a lot about the natural processes that cause hazards, but not everything," says Seth Stein. "Meteorologists are steadily improving forecasts of the tracks of hurricanes, but forecasting their strength is harder. We know a reasonable amount about why and where earthquakes will happen, some about how big they will be, but much less about when they will happen.

This situation is like playing the card game '21', in which players see only some of the dealer's cards. It is actually even harder, because we do not fully understand the rules of the game, and are trying to figure them out while playing it."

Earthquake cycles-triggered by movement of the Earth's tectonic plates and the resulting stress and strain at plate boundaries -are irregular in time and space, making it hard to predict the timing and magnitude of earthquakes and tsunamis.

Hence, forecasting the probabilities of future rare events presents "deep uncertainty," Stein says. "Deep uncertainties arise when the probabilities of outcomes are poorly known, unknown, or unknowable. In such situations, past events may give little insight into future ones."

Another conundrum for authorities in such crisis situations is the appropriate amount of resources to direct toward a disaster zone.

"Much of the problem comes from the fact that formulating effective natural hazard policy involves using a complicated combination of geoscience, mathematics, and economics to analyze the problem and explore the costs and benefits of different options. In general, mitigation policies are chosen without this kind of analysis," says Stein.

"The challenge is deciding how much mitigation is enough. Although our first instinct might be to protect ourselves as well as possible, resources used for hazard mitigation are not available for other needs. For example, does it make sense to spend billions of dollars building buildings in the central U.S. to the same level of earthquake resistance as in California, or would these funds do more good if used otherwise?"

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011 toppled seawalls 5-10 meters high. The seawalls being rebuilt are about 12 meters high, and would be expected to protect against large tsunamis expected every few hundred years. But critics argue that it would be more cost effective and efficient to focus on relocation and evacuation strategies for populations that may be affected by such tsunamis rather than building higher seawalls, especially in areas where the population is small and dwindling.

In this paper, Stein says, the authors set out to "find the amount of mitigation-which could be the height of a seawall or the earthquake resistance of buildings-that is best for society." The objective is to provide methods for authorities to use their limited resources in the best possible way in the face of uncertainty.

Selecting an optimum strategy, however, depends on estimating the expected value of damage. This, in turn, requires prediction of the probability of disasters.

It is still unknown whether to assume that the probability of a large earthquake on a fault line is constant with time (as routinely assumed in hazard planning) or whether the probability gets smaller after the last incidence and increases with time. Hence, the authors incorporate both these scenarios using the general probability model of drawing balls from an urn. If an urn contains balls that are labeled "E" for event and "N" for no event, each year is like drawing a ball.

"If after drawing a ball, we replace it, the probability of an event stays constant. Thus an event is never 'overdue' because one has not happened recently, and the fact that one happened recently does not make another less likely," explains Stein.

"In contrast, we can add E-balls after a draw when an event does not occur, and remove E-balls when an event occurs. This makes the probability of an event increase with time until one happens, after which it decreases and then grows again."

Since the likelihood of future earthquakes depends on strain accumulation at plate boundaries, the model incorporates parameters for how fast strain accumulates between quake incidences, and strain release that happens during earthquakes.

The authors select the optimal mitigation strategy by using a general stochastic model, which is a method used to estimate the probability of outcomes in different situations under constrained data. They minimize the expected present value of damage, the costs of mitigation, and the risk premium, which reflects the variance, or inconsistency, of the hazard. The optimal mitigation is the bottom of a U-shaped curve summing up the cost of mitigation and expected losses, a sensible balance.

To determine the advantages and pitfalls of rebuilding after such disasters, the authors present a deterministic model. Here, outcomes are precisely determined by taking into account relationships between states and events.

The authors use this model to determine if Japan should invest in nuclear power plant construction given the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown during the 2011 tsunami. Taking into account the financial and societal benefits of reactors, and balancing them against risks-both financial and natural-the model determines the preferred outcome.

Such models can also be applied toward other disaster situations, such as hurricanes and floods, and toward policies to diminish the effects of climate change.

Stein gives an example: "Given the damage to New York City by the storm surge from Hurricane Sandy, options under consideration range from doing nothing, using intermediate strategies like providing doors to keep water out of vulnerable tunnels, to building up coastlines or installing barriers to keep the storm surge out of rivers.

"In this case, a major uncertainty is the effect of climate change, which is expected to make flooding worse because of the rise of sea levels and higher ferocity and frequency of major storms. Although the magnitude of these effects is uncertain, this formulation can be used to develop strategies by exploring the range of possible effects."

Source Article: Formulating Natural Hazard Policies under Uncertainty by Jerome L. Stein and Seth Stein

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST Los Angeles (AFP) May 6, 2013 - Rock music royalty including the Rolling Stones joined last year's charity show for victims of superstorm Sandy -- but even Bill Clinton couldn't convince Led Zeppelin to play.

Organizers said they tried to get the iconic band to play the so-called "12-12-12" concert at New York's Madison Square Garden in December, alongside the likes of Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, The Who and Eric Clapton.

The Robin Hood Foundation were brainstorming to put the show together in only a few weeks, ultimately raising $50 million to help victims of the October 29 hurricane-strength storm which killed about 120 people.

"There were two bands that we were trying desperately to recruit, one was Rolling Stones, the other was Led Zeppelin," the group's executive director David Saltzman explained on CBS news show "60 Minutes."

Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein "had this great idea that we could enlist Bill Clinton to convince Led Zeppelin to reunite to perform at the 12-12-12 concert.

"So, Harvey and I got on a plane to fly down to Washington to meet with President Clinton who was going to be seeing the members of Led Zeppelin, who were being honored at the Kennedy Center.

"And, you know, the president was terrific. He goes, 'I really want to do this. This would be a fantastic thing. I love Led Zeppelin.' And Bill Clinton himself asked Led Zeppelin to reunite. And they wouldn't do it."

Musicians who played the December 12, 2012 show also included Jon Bon Jovi, Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Billy Joel, Alicia Keys, Chris Martin, and rapper Kanye West.

Movie and TV stars including Leonardo DiCaprio, Chris Rock, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, and political humorist Jon Stewart fronted a telethon drive or appeared in the arena to appeal for funds.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST Zurich, Switzerland (SPX) May 03, 2013 - Our global networks have generated many benefits and new opportunities. However, they have also established highways for failure propagation, which can ultimately result in man-made disasters. For example, today's quick spreading of emerging epidemics is largely a result of global air traffic, with serious impacts on global health, social welfare, and economic systems.

Helbing's publication illustrates how cascade effects and complex dynamics amplify the vulnerability of networked systems. For example, just a few long-distance connections can largely decrease our ability to mitigate the threats posed by global pandemics.

Initially beneficial trends, such as globalization, increasing network densities, higher complexity, and an acceleration of institutional decision processes may ultimately push man-made or human-influenced systems towards systemic instability, Helbing finds.

Systemic instability refers to a system, which will get out of control sooner or later, even if everybody involved is well skilled, highly motivated and behaving properly. Crowd disasters are shocking examples illustrating that many deaths may occur even when everybody tries hard not to hurt anyone.

Our Intuition of Systemic Risks Is Misleading
Networking system components that are well-behaved in separation may create counter-intuitive emergent system behaviors, which are not well-behaved at all. For example, cooperative behavior might unexpectedly break down as the connectivity of interaction partners grows. "Applying this to the global network of banks, this might actually have caused the financial meltdown in 2008," believes Helbing.

Globally networked risks are difficult to identify, map and understand, since there are often no evident, unique cause-effect relationships. Failure rates may change depending on the random path taken by the system, with the consequence of increasing risks as cascade failures progress, thereby decreasing the capacity of the system to recover.

"In certain cases, cascade effects might reach any size, and the damage might be practically unbounded," says Helbing. "This is quite disturbing and hard to imagine." All of these features make strongly coupled, complex systems difficult to predict and control, such that our attempts to manage them go astray.

"Take the financial system," says Helbing. "The financial crisis hit regulators by surprise." But back in 2003, the legendary investor Warren Buffet warned of mega-catastrophic risks created by large-scale investments into financial derivatives. It took 5 years until the "investment time bomb" exploded, causing losses of trillions of dollars to our economy.

"The financial architecture is not properly designed," concludes Helbing. "The system lacks breaking points, as we have them in our electrical system." This allows local problems to spread globally, thereby reaching catastrophic dimensions.

A Global Ticking Time Bomb?
Have we unintentionally created a global time bomb? If so, what kinds of global catastrophic scenarios might humans face in complex societies? A collapse of the world economy or of our information and communication systems? Global pandemics? Unsustainable growth or environmental change? A global food or energy crisis? A cultural clash or global-scale conflict? Or will we face a combination of these contagious phenomena - a scenario that the World Economic Forum calls the "perfect storm"?

"While analyzing such global risks," says Helbing, "one must bear in mind that the propagation speed of destructive cascade effects might be slow, but nevertheless hard to stop. It is time to recognize that crowd disasters, conflicts, revolutions, wars, and financial crises are the undesired result of operating socio-economic systems in the wrong parameter range, where systems are unstable."

In the past, these social problems seemed to be puzzling, unrelated, and almost "God-given" phenomena one had to live with. Nowadays, thanks to new complexity science models and large-scale data sets ("Big Data"), one can analyze and understand the underlying mechanisms, which let complex systems get out of control.

Disasters should not be considered "bad luck". They are a result of inappropriate interactions and institutional settings, caused by humans. Even worse, they are often the consequence of a flawed understanding of counter-intuitive system behaviors. "For example, it is surprising that we didn't have sufficient precautions against a financial crisis and well-elaborated contingency plans," states Helbing.

"Perhaps, this is because there should not be any bubbles and crashes according to the predominant theoretical paradigm of efficient markets." Conventional thinking can cause fateful decisions and the repetition of previous mistakes. "In other words: While we want to do the right thing, we often do wrong things," concludes Helbing. This obviously calls for a paradigm shift in our thinking.

"For example, we may try to promote innovation, but suffer economic decline, because innovation requires diversity more than homogenization."

Global Networks Must Be Re-Designed
Helbing's publication explores why today's risk analysis falls short. "Predictability and controllability are design issues," stresses Helbing. "And uncertainty, which means the impossibility to determine the likelihood and expected size of damage, is often man-made." Many systems could be better managed with real-time data.

These would allow one to avoid delayed response and to enhance the transparency, understanding, and adaptive control of systems. However, even all the data in the world cannot compensate for ill-designed systems such as the current financial system. Such systems will sooner or later get out of control, causing catastrophic man-made failure. Therefore, a re-design of such systems is urgently needed.

Helbing's Nature paper on "Globally Networked Risks" also calls attention to strategies that make systems more resilient, i.e. able to recover from shocks. For example, setting up backup systems (e.g. a parallel financial system), limiting the system size and connectivity, building in breaking points to stop cascade effects, or reducing complexity may be used to improve resilience. In the case of financial systems, there is still much work to be done to fully incorporate these principles.

Contemporary information and communication technologies (ICT) are also far from being failure-proof. They are based on principles that are 30 or more years old and not designed for today's use.

The explosion of cyber risks is a logical consequence. This includes threats to individuals (such as privacy intrusion, identity theft, or manipulation through personalized information), to companies (such as cybercrime), and to societies (such as cyberwar or totalitarian control). To counter this, Helbing recommends an entirely new ICT architecture inspired by principles of decentralized self-organization as observed in immune systems, ecology, and social systems.

Coming Era of Social Innovation
A better understanding of the success principles of societies is urgently needed. "For example, when systems become too complex, they cannot be effectively managed top-down" explains Helbing. "Guided self-organization is a promising alternative to manage complex dynamical systems bottom-up, in a decentralized way." The underlying idea is to exploit, rather than fight, the inherent tendency of complex systems to self-organize and thereby create a robust, ordered state.

For this, it is important to have the right kinds of interactions, adaptive feedback mechanisms, and institutional settings, i.e. to establish proper "rules of the game".

The paper offers the example of an intriguing "self-control" principle, where traffic lights are controlled bottom-up by the vehicle flows rather than top-down by a traffic center.

Creating and Protecting Social Capital
"One man's disaster is another man's opportunity. Therefore, many problems can only be successfully addressed with transparency, accountability, awareness, and collective responsibility," underlines Helbing.

Moreover, social capital such as cooperativeness or trust is important for economic value generation, social well-being and societal resilience, but it may be damaged or exploited. "Humans must learn how to quantify and protect social capital. A warning example is the loss of trillions of dollars in the stock markets during the financial crisis." This crisis was largely caused by a loss of trust.

"It is important to stress that risk insurances today do not consider damage to social capital," Helbing continues. However, it is known that large-scale disasters have a disproportionate public impact, in part because they destroy social capital. As we neglect social capital in risk assessments, we are taking excessive risks.

Paper Source: D.Helbing: Globally networked risks and how to respond. Nature (May 2, 2013).

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST New York (AFP) May 3, 2013 - New York needs everything from bigger evacuations to better boats if it is to weather another event like last year's Hurricane Sandy, a wide-ranging review showed Friday.

The 59 recommendations in a report by deputy mayors Linda Gibbs and Cas Holloway seek to improve on the response to Sandy, which left 43 New Yorkers dead and forced tens of thousands of people out of their homes last October.

The proposed measures focus on evacuating low-lying coastal areas, getting better information to New Yorkers during phone and electricity blackouts, dealing with flooded houses, relief distribution, and getting emergency services the right equipment.

The city says that during Sandy and its aftermath, it sent 2,000 Tweets and received 16 million page views on its nyc.gov website.

When it came to ordering mandatory evacuations from at-risk neighborhoods, the authorities say they made 33,000 calls and knocked on more than 10,000 doors of the most fragile residents.

However, the message didn't entirely get through, the report concedes.

"Despite extensive communications before the storm, many residents of Zone A chose not to leave their homes," the report said, noting that a survey showed that most of those who ignored the mayoral order believed "the storm would not be strong enough to pose a danger."

In the future, the city will have to "ensure that communications clearly explain the importance of following an evacuation order," the report said, suggesting the city also work with advertising companies to make use of digital billboards.

And if there is another hurricane, more people will be asked to leave their homes.

The deputy mayors noted that floods from the storm surge "significantly exceeded" the primary Zone A.

So from now, the three existing zones will be replaced with six, including much of southern Manhattan, encompassing an additional 640,000 New Yorkers.

After the storm passed over, the biggest and longest lasting problem for New Yorkers were power outages, something the new report says must be addressed before the next incident.

"Significant steps can be taken to strengthen the city's capacity to more quickly respond to the massive power outages that residents and businesses faced following the storm," the deputy mayors wrote.

Many of the recommendations call for complex plans, but one of the most specific items is the call for getting police the right kind of small boat to navigate flooded streets.

"NYPD patrol commands used flat-bottomed jon boats to conduct many rescues; because these boats do not have motors and require manual rowing or towing, they limit mobility and maneuverability in swift currents," the report noted.

"Because these boats are metal, officers had to use extreme caution to avoid downed power lines."

Instead, patrol police should have been issued the same inflatable craft used by specialized police and fire department units.

These "have outboard motors that can operate with only 18 inches of draft and are made of... galvanized rubber that is easily decontaminated and patched. Inflatable boats are generally more maneuverable than jon boats, fold up for storage on a vehicle, and can be easily deployed," the report said.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST Dhaka (AFP) May 3, 2013 - After trudging to every hospital and mortuary in Bangladesh's vast capital following last week's factory disaster, an exhausted Mohammed Jashim finally conceded defeat in his search for his beloved sister.

"For the last seven days, I think I must have walked literally hundreds of miles but it all seems to have been in vain as I've not been able to find her body," said the 25-year-old rickshaw driver.

"When you don't have money, all you can do is walk. But my tendons can't take it anymore."

Jashim's sister Jakiya Begum was one of an estimated 3,000 garment workers on shift at the Rana Plaza factory compound in a suburb of Dhaka which suddenly caved in on April 24 in the country's worst industrial disaster.

More than 2,400 people were rescued from the scene and 482 bodies have been pulled from the rubble so far.

But dozens more remain buried in the ruins and with bulldozers now scooping up giant piles of debris there is a very real possibility that some of the victims will never be traced.

Having been brought up by Jakiya after the death of his mother, Jashim feels a special bond towards his sister and a responsibility to find out exactly what happened to her in the April 24 tragedy.

The bodies of dozens of victims have not been identified, with authorities burying 32 of them in unmarked graves at a mass ceremony on Wednesday.

While accepting that his sister most likely died in the collapse in the suburb of Savar, Jashim had wanted to at least accord her a proper burial alongside other family members.

"I wanted her to rest in peace beside our mother," he told AFP while wiping away tears.

"I arrived at Savar last Thursday. Since then, it feels as if I have been doing nothing but crying and walking -- walking from one hospital to another, from the disaster site into the city and then back again."

Jashim began his labour of love after receiving a phone call from his brother-in-law Abu Kalam who told him that Jakiya was missing.

The mother of three children moved to the capital a decade ago after rising tides triggered by global warming submerged their farmland on an island in the southern coastal district of Barguna.

She found work as a seamstress at Rana Plaza where workers typically took home around 40 dollars a month, her meagre wages supplementing Kalam's income from his work as a rickshaw driver.

Bangladesh is the world's second largest garment producer, churning out clothing for Western brand names such as Walmart and Benetton at a fraction of the cost for which they appear on the shelves.

Whether touring the hospital wards or badgering rescue workers for information, Jashim always carries a laminated photo of his sister to help jog memories.

Scores of other relatives of the missing have also been camped out besides the ruins of Rana Plaza in similarly tragic vigils.

"I've visited 15 hospitals three or four times, but she was not among the injured," he said.

When he heard about Wednesday's mass burial of the 32 unidentified bodies, Jashim and his nephew Mohammed Helal dashed to the mortuary on another traumatic but ultimately futile mission.

"The stench of the bodies was so horrible that you felt vomiting. Some were in a decomposed state," he said.

"Even so, Helal and I examined each and every one of them, looking carefully at the bodies as my sister had a burns injury in her stomach and a big cut on her forehead."

None of the bodies resembled his sister.

Helal, 17, said he was similarly shattered -- physically and emotionally -- by the ordeal.

"I can't walk any more and I've cried so much that I don't have any more tears left," he told AFP back at the site of the disaster.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST Hong Kong (AFP) April 30, 2013 - A "litany of errors" contributed to a Hong Kong ferry disaster in which 39 people were killed, an inquiry found Tuesday, slamming the marine department for "systemic failings" in safety standards.

In the city's worst sea disaster in more than 40 years the pleasure boat Lamma IV, carrying more than 120 people, collided with the high-speed Sea Smooth ferry and partially sank within just two minutes near Lamma Island last October.

The inquiry detailed how the bough of the Sea Smooth crashed through the Lamma IV into the main passenger cabin, crushing people as water rushed in.

As the boat tipped up and partially sank some people were trapped by seats that detached and fell on top of them.

The report said government inspectors missed several opportunities to spot the absence of a watertight door within the vessel, which would have stopped the boat sinking so quickly.

"In the process of designing, constructing and surveying the Lamma IV... there was a litany of errors committed at almost every stage by many different people," it said.

"What is required is systemic change, in particular a change in attitude to responsibility and transparency."

The authors criticised the marine department for failing to enforce safety standards, noting that the Lamma IV was carrying no children's life jackets despite being required to do so by law.

Eight children were among those who died in the disaster.

"In respect of general conditions of maritime safety concerning passenger vessels in Hong Kong... there were and are serious systemic failings in the past and present system of control," the report said.

Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying told a press conference the report revealed "serious problems" in the marine department.

"We must learn the lesson and spare no efforts in making fundamental improvements and reform to ensure marine safety and restore public confidence," he said.

The government will carry out a comprehensive examination of existing controls on marine safety, Leung said, adding that it will conduct disciplinary hearings for any human errors or maladministration found.

The Lamma IV had been travelling to the National Day fireworks display when the collision took place, and Leung announced that this year the display will be suspended, to mark the anniversary of the accident.

Earlier this month the captains of the boats involved in the collision were each charged with 39 counts of manslaughter. Parts of the inquiry report have been redacted to ensure their right to a fair trial.

The disaster shocked the Asian financial hub -- one of the world's busiest ports that prides itself on its safety record -- and more than 100 witnesses testified in the inquiry, led by an independent commission set by up Leung.

Since the accident the city's marine department has been re-inspecting all boats to ensure they meet requirements including lifejacket provision and watertight fittings, said marine director Francis Liu.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST Kiev (AFP) April 26, 2013 - Ukrainians on Friday lit candles and laid flowers to remember the victims of the world's worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl 27 years ago, as engineers pressed on with efforts to permanently shield the stricken reactor.

On April 26, 1986, an explosion during testing sent radioactive fallout into the atmosphere that spread across Europe, particularly contaminating Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.

Dozens of people laid flowers and set lit candles in front of portraits at the monument to the Chernobyl victims in the small town of Slavutych, some 50 kilometres from the accident site, where many of the power station's personnel used to live.

At the same time in the capital Kiev, officials and relatives of the victims also held a pre-dawn remembrance ceremony in front of a memorial.

"The memory of the tragedy calls for unity and consolidation of the efforts of the government and society to solve the problems in implementing projects to create an environmentally safe system at Chernobyl," said President Viktor Yanukovych in a statement.

"The countless women, men and children affected by radioactive contamination must never be forgotten," UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said in a statement, urging worldwide "generosity" to the affected regions.

Ukraine last year launched the construction of a permanent shelter to replace the temporary concrete-and-steel edifice that was hastily erected after the disaster and which has since developed cracks.

"A new confinement is our future, this is something that we awaited for many years," Alexander Novikov, deputy technical director for security at the Chernobyl power plant, told reporters on a visit to Chernobyl this week.

The 20,000-tonne arched structure that spans 257 metres, known as the new safe confinement, is designed to last for a century, and will contain hi-tech equipment to carry out safe decontamination work inside the ruined reactor.

The construction of the new structure is expected to cost 990 million euros, while the decontamination work on the site will push the total cost up to 1.5 billion euros ($2 billion).

Completion of the new shelter is expected in October 2015.

The plant's management said it will also soon begin construction of a temporary cover over the section of Chernobyl plant where a part of the roof collapsed this winter under the weight of fallen snow.

Novikov emphasised that the section, which collapsed in February, was not the part of the sarcophagus structure covering the exploded reactor.

"The project work is almost completed and we will start construction of temporary cover to close the hole that appeared," he said.

The general manager of the Chernobyl plant, Igor Gramotkin, added the collapse of the roof section once again underlined the need for the rapid completion of a new arch over the stricken reactor.

Chernobyl is only around 100 kilometres (60 miles) from Kiev and lies close to the borders with Russia and Belarus. The area around the plant is still very contaminated and is designated as a depopulated "exclusion zone".

The Soviet Union ordered thousands of people to take part in the clean-up in Ukraine following the Chernobyl accident, working without adequate protection.

Although only two people were killed in the initial explosions, the UN atomic agency says that 28 rescue workers died of radiation sickness in the first three months after the accident.

According to Ukrainian official figures, more than 25,000 of the cleanup workers, known as "liquidators" from then-Soviet Ukraine, Russia and Belarus have died after the disaster.

However the true scale of the death toll directly attributable to the disaster remains the subject of bitter scientific debate.

]]> Mon, 20 MAY 2013 12:44:18 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D