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AP, 12/31/07: Thousands of stranded travelers contemplated the prospect of ringing in the new year at motels and shelters after blowing snow and the risk of avalanches closed the main highway through the Colorado Rockies.A 60-mile stretch of I-70 was shut down west of Denver, and officials said it would be at least mid-afternoon Monday before it opened. They were waiting for 70 mph gusts to die down so they could use low-yield explosives to break the snow loose and avert avalanches.
In the meantime, the champagne had to wait.
“I’ve got some in the car, but it’s probably frozen by now,” said Ken Simons of Grand Junction. He and his wife were trying to get to Denver for New Year’s when the closing of the highway forced them and more than 2,000 others to spend Sunday night in shelters.
With no definite word on when they could hit the road again, some faced the prospect of welcoming 2008 on a cot in a school gymnasium.
Liquor stores did a brisk business.
“We’ve definitely seen a rush,” said John Will of Antler’s Discount Liquor in Frisco. “People are coming in complaining that they are stuck” or caught in slow-moving traffic.
Leaha Widrowicz was trying to get back to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with her boyfriend and his mother after a skiing trip but had to spend the night in Frisco, missing their midnight flight from Denver International Airport.
“We’re not even thinking of New Year’s right now,” Widrowicz said. “We are just trying to get home to family.”
High winds piled deep snow into more than two dozen narrow ravines in the mountainsides — known as avalanche chutes — raising the danger of deadly avalanches cascading onto I-70. Blowing snow reduced visibility to nearly zero.
At the Eisenhower Tunnel, where the interstate passes under the Continental Divide at 11,000 feet above sea level, wind gusts reached 70 mph, keeping crews from clearing the avalanche chutes.
“That is basically the problem we are having right now,” Colorado Department of Transportation spokesman John Nelson said. “It’s not snowing — it’s blowing snow.”
While many people took advantage of seven Red Cross shelters in schools and recreation centers, others relied on the kindness of strangers.
Brian Jerry of Colorado Springs said people he had never met before let him stay in their Silverthorne home because motels were full. “We called the local Quality Inn, and they basically laughed at us,” Jerry said.
I-70 is the main route between Denver and many of the state’s major ski resorts. The closing of the road could hurt ski business during the lucrative holiday season.
Blowing snow and low visibility also kept three other mountain passes closed Monday: U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass, U.S. 6 over Loveland Pass and U.S. 550 over Red Mountain Pass.
Daily Times of Pakistan, 12/31/07: LAHORE: The year 2007 saw many prominent lawyers, human rights activists and students taken to court after being arrested for protesting against the suspension of human rights and the top judiciary, after the imposition of the emergency rule. Almost all of them were charged under the Anti-Terrorism Act.
More than 500 lawyers, 54 human rights activists – 24 of them being women – and seven students were arrested in various incidents. They were granted bail after spending some time in prison.
This year, a court sentenced a person to death, who had killed his children after facing financial problems. Kashif Salim, who worked as a car-battery changer in Mozang, had killed his two daughters, Mantaiha (5) and Alisha (1), and son, Rafay (3), with poisoned sweets in 2005.
A court also sentenced a former schoolteacher, Mohammad Mukhtar, to death on two counts: for stabbing to death his two daughters while they were asleep. He too had been facing financial strains.
The ATC sent to prison Jamia Naeemia principal Dr Sarfaraz Naeemi, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz leader Zaeem Qadri, along with 104 people, for disturbing the peace in the city during the protest against blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him).
Another court gave capital punishment to Ashraf, a resident of Masti Gate, for killing three women, who were relatives of his fourth wife, Aasia, and for injuring three others, including his wife by throwing acid on them.
This year, a court had cases registered against doctors and paramedics of various hospitals involved in illegal kidney trade. The accused men were: Dr Humayun Rashid, Dr Sarfaraz, Dr Masood and Dr Rafiq Zaki of Masood Hospital; Dr Shafiq and Dr Omer of Al Shafi Hospital; Dr Rehmat Ali, Dr Rana Amjad and telephone operator Sabir Hussain of Al Rasheed Hospital and Rana Amjad. However, they were bailed out after a few days.
A court gave capital punishment to two robbers, Rashid Aziz Rana and Abdul Rasheed. They had murdered Dr Taufiq Ahmad, son of chief justice (r) Mian Mehboob Ahmad, for resisting the robbers.
An Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) sentenced a private security guard, Muhammad Rizwan, to death for killing businessman Seth Abid’s son, Hafiz Ayaz Ahmad and four others.
Another ATC sentenced a kidnapper, Imran, to life imprisonment with a fine of Rs 100,000 for kidnapping for ransom former chief minister Mumtaz Daultana’s son, Zahid Daultana.
An ATC sentenced Amir, alias Ghora, to death for the firing at Aiwan-e-Adal, killing five people and injuring many more.
In 2007, an ATC also granted bail to 33 people, including members of the Provincial Assembly (MPAs), Rana Mashhood, and former Jamaat-e-Islami information secretary Amirul Azeem, who were arrested on March 17 for protesting against the presidential reference against former chief justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.
An ATC sentenced to death Babar Ashraf, Nadeem Ahmad Chohan and Farooq for killing police inspector Naveed Saeed and his two companions Waheed Butt and Maqsood Pathan.
An ATC also acquitted former police inspector Ali Imran Niazi, former bank manager Humayun Nabeel and Adnan Bashir, who were accused of murdering former federal minister Derek Cyprian.
Ten boys were bailed out after remaining in prison for 14 days; they had been arrested on the charges of one wheeling.
A court gave capital punishment on four counts each to Amir and Asif for murdering an excise inspector and a head constable and for dissolving the victims’ bodies in chemical.
The court of a civil judge turned down a suit seeking a ban on motorcycle and bicycle riding during basant because the Supreme Court had already decided the issue. The Supreme Court had banned kite flying in cities.
A court issued notices to Amjad Ali Khan, son of former federal minister Dr Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, after his daughter-in-law, Shahida, filed a suit demanding maintenance from her husband. Later, she also moved a petition for registration of an attempt to murder case against Amjad Khan.
An Anti-Corruption Court dismissed the bail of one Major Wasim Gill, who was accused in a fraud case and was not appearing in court.
Three actresses – Atiya Bano alias Saima Khan, Sonia Idrees alias Dedar and Nida Chaudhry – were granted bail in a case on the charge of obscenity.
Two film producers, Arshad Chaudhry and Ahmad Chaudhry, faced litigation when actress Nida Chaudhry wanted to lodge a fraud case against them. The producers filed a civil suit against the actress and some other actors, accusing them of breaching a contract.
Pending: Another year has passed, but the trial of Asif Ali Zardari in a drug case, registered in 1998, remains undecided. The court also issued non-bailable arrest warrants at the start of the year, but the proceedings had not been held since then.
The year also left undecided the trial of the murder of former Punjab additional advocate general, Arif Bhinder. Bhinder was shot dead along with his brother, nephew and guards on January 12. The civil suit for recovery of Rs 242 million in damages for victims of a PIA Fokker crash has also been left pending. Two judges of the Lahore High Court also died in the crash. Dr Rafiq Javed, the father of the victim (Samina Hassnain), her mother, Naseem Rafiq, and husband, Capt Hassnain, initiated the suit.
Narrative: Flight 1750 departed Perth (PER) at 08:29 for a flight to Port Hedland (PHE). The flight climbed to FL190, encountering light to moderate turbulence. Last radiocontact was at 11:34 when the crew reported 30DME south of Port Hedland, descending from 7000 feet. The aircraft was seen to descend rapidly and steeply a little later. The wreckage was found at 28 miles from Port Hedland.
CAUSE: “The cause of the accident was that the fatigue endurance of the starboard inner main spar lower boom was substantially reduced by the insertion of a flared bush at station 143 when the margin of safety associated with the retirement life specified for such booms did not ensure that this boom would achieve its retirement life in the presence of such a defect.”Sources:
» ICAO Circular 107-AN/81 (71-95)
…1986, San Juan, Puerto Rico: The Dupont Plaza Hotel is the scene of a fire that kills 97 and injures 146. Many were saved by risky roof-top rescues by helicopters. The hotel had no fire evacuation plans or fire detectors.
San Juan, Puerto Rico: Dupont Plaza Hotel
In San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Dupont Plaza Hotel, once located in Condado where the Marriott currently stands, experienced a devastating fire on December 31, 1986. The fire, set by three employees, originated on corrugated cardboard cartons of furniture, containing mainly dressers composed of particleboard and wood, located in the south ballroom. The fire rapidly broke out of this space and swept through the lobby and casino areas. As a result of this fire, 97 people died in less than 12 minutes.
It is believed that the occupants of the lobby and the casino first became aware of the serious threat to their lives with the crash involved in the breakage of the windows located between the south ballroom and the foyer. This window breakage occurred at the time of flashover, allowing a flow of dense smoke into the lobby. Source: iklim.com
Intro: You think it’s bad for Iraqi EMS and hospital personnel having to deal with all the trauma they see on a regualr basis and with inadequate resources? Consider the common streetsweeper:
IHT, 12/30/07: It must be a candidate for the worst job in Iraq. It falls to Baghdad’s street sweepers, who use their bare hands, to pick up the fingertips and scraps of flesh spattered around every bomb site in the Iraqi capital. They do it without gloves, in all but the coldest weeks of winter.
The past year was one that delivered several $8 bonuses to Baghdad’s municipal cleaners, albeit not as many as in previous years.
It is a welcome sum when your salary is only $6 a day. Less so when you earn it by picking up parts of your fellow Iraqis who were unfortunate enough to be blown apart on your street-sweeping route. Anything within your six-hour shift counts as part of the job.
For two of Baghdad’s municipal street-cleaners, Imad al-Hashemi and Laith Mahdi Latif, the bonuses are something they can live without in 2008.
They were outside the Faqma ice cream shop in early August when at least 15 people were killed, on duty during numerous attempts at the nearby Sayyed Idris shrine and at the market where more than a dozen people were blown up on Dec. 5, before the Id al-Adha holiday, or Feast of the Sacrifice.
Across town their colleagues had to clear up the Ghazil animal market last month and hurl bags of debris into a truck after a car bomber killed eight people at Tayaraan Square last Friday.
“Things have got better over the last few months, maybe 70 percent, and God willing, they will be better again next year,” Hashemi said. “Although we get a 10,000 dinar bonus for each bomb, we do not want to see explosions, we don’t want to see this. They are Iraqis, Sunni, Shia or Christian, they are all Iraqis.”
Hashemi and Latif, whose hands look like those of men twice their 40-odd years, concede that it is not much of a job. But it is, at least, employment in a country where work is scarce.
Both men have lost count of the number of times they have swept up after bombings. At least 10, Hashemi estimated. Maybe six in the last 18 months, Latif guessed, though he conceded that all but the worst details fade for veterans of Saddam Hussein’s military campaigns.
“This is normal for me. I was a soldier for eight years in Basra and Amara during the Iran war,” Hashemi said. “Sometimes it does make you depressed. I was standing 50 meters away from one car when it blew up, and I saw heads cut off from bodies. It was disgusting.”
As residents of the Karrada District of Baghdad, they are on night call when the other cleaners have gone home to Sadr City or elsewhere at the end of the working day. As soon as he hears a bomb, Latif said, he stops everything and waits for the phone call, which inevitably comes.
“The worst one was at Al Faqma,” he said. “There was this woman, she was dying and they couldn’t pull her out because the driver’s seat trapped her against the steering wheel.”
Both reiterated that they hoped, and expected, things to get better. But, Hashemi conceded, he thought the same thing after the Iran-Iraq war. “I thought after we finished that,” he said, “that there would be no more killing, no wars. And after 1991.”
Elsewhere in Iraq, on the first anniversary of Saddam’s execution, fears of violence and protests proved largely unfounded Sunday amid tight security.
Hundreds of supporters, including children who were given the day off school, gathered at the mausoleum erected over the grave in Awja, near Tikrit. Many laid flowers while others recited poetry or chanted slogans beneath large pictures of him.
Saddam was executed on Dec. 30 last year after being convicted of crimes against humanity for the killing of 148 Shiites in Dujail after a failed attempt to kill him in 1982.
His hanging caused widespread outrage among Sunnis, who took it as provocation that his sentence was carried out under a Shiite-led government on the day that Sunnis began their Id al-Adha celebrations. They were further incensed by cellphone camera footage that showed him being taunted on the scaffold.
A year later, the same issues of retribution and reconciliation surround the delayed sentences imposed on three of Saddam’s lieutenants, including his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali for his use of poison gas against Iraqis, and a former defense minister, Sultan Hashem Ahmed al-Jabouri al-Tai.
All have been sentenced to death for war crimes. Sunnis have urged mercy for Hashem, arguing that he was a professional soldier carrying out orders. But Iraqi government officials have demanded that the Americans hand the men over for execution.
I found this word in Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Day.” Never heard of it before coming for the East, but since it’s a metereological term that has a potential environmental and physiological impact on man, it’s worth sharing on this site. pogonip \PAH-guh-nip\ noun
: a dense winter fog containing frozen particles that is formed in deep mountain valleys of the western United States
In the mountains of the western United States, the fog condenses into tiny, biting ice particles in extremely cold weather. The English-speaking settlers who encountered this unpleasant and sometimes scary phenomenon when they went out West in the 1800s needed a word for it. They borrowed “payinappih” (“cloud”) from Shoshone, altering it to “pogonip.”
ProMEDmail, 12/30/07: 25-year-old Egyptian woman died of bird flu on Sunday [30 Dec
2007], the 2nd fatality among humans in Egypt in less than one week,
the Health Ministry said. The woman died in hospital in the Nile
Delta city of Mansoura, 3 days after she was admitted to a smaller
local hospital with a high temperature and difficulty breathing, it
said in a statement carried by the state news agency MENA. Her death
was the 17th in Egypt since the deadly virus arrived in February
2006, and it was the 42nd case of bird flu reported among humans in
the Arab world’s most populous country. The Health Ministry said that
the latest victim was suspected of handling sick domestic birds, the
usual way of contracting the virus in Egypt.
On Wednesday last week [19 Dec 2007], another 25-year-old woman died
of bird flu in Beni Suef province south of Cairo, the 1st case this
winter season. It is the 3rd winter that the virus has struck, after
appearing to remain dormant during the hot summers. The health
ministry said on Thursday [27 Dec 2007] that 2 other Egyptians had
contracted the disease and were receiving treatment. But the latest
death was not one of those, and one health official said those 2 were
still in hospital.
John Jabbour, an official at the World Health Organisation (WHO),
said last week that the new cases were not surprising.
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