News Info - A team of US experts has been sent to Nigeria to help find more than 200 schoolgirls abducted last month by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.
US President Barack Obama said the team comprised personnel from military, law enforcement and other agencies.
human body facts - He said he hoped the kidnapping might galvanise the international community to take action against Boko Haram.
Earlier, it emerged that eight more girls had been abducted in north-eastern Nigeria by suspected militants.
The latest kidnapping happened on Sunday night in the village of Warabe in Borno state. The girls taken were aged between 12 and 15.
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US Secretary of State John Kerry. 6 May 2014
President Goodluck Jonathan was very happy to receive this offer and ready to move on it immediately”
US Secretary of State John Kerry
On Monday, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau threatened to "sell" more than 230 girls seized from their school, also in Borno, on 14 April.
Growing international outrage led the US to offer the Nigerian government help and, on Tuesday, Mr Obama confirmed that the offer had been accepted.
"We have already sent in a team to Nigeria... a combination of military, law enforcement, and other agencies who are going in, trying to identify where in fact these girls might be," he said.
Mr Obama described the abduction as "heartbreaking" and "outrageous" and denounced Boko Haram as "one of the worst regional... terrorist organisations".
But he added: "This may be the event that helps to mobilise the entire international community to finally do something against this horrendous organisation that's perpetrated such a terrible crime."
'Devasting'
Boko Haram - whose name means "Western education is forbidden" - is seeking to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state in the north of Nigeria.
Its insurgency has left thousands dead since 2009.
US officials have said the first group of abducted girls, aged between 16 and 18, may have already been smuggled over Nigeria's porous borders into countries such as Chad and Cameroon.
However, officials in Chad and Cameroon say they do not believe the girls are in their countries.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday that Washington will set up a co-ordination cell at its embassy in Abuja with US military personnel, law enforcement officials and experts in hostage situations.
"[Nigerian] President Goodluck Jonathan was very happy to receive this offer and ready to move on it immediately," he told reporters, after talks with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
Baroness Ashton said the girls' kidnapping was "devastating for all of us".
"These are the future of the country," she said.
"They are teachers, dancers, politicians. They are scientists, they are mothers, they are women in the making who have a right to play their full part in their society."
Criticism
President Jonathan, speaking in Abuja, said his country's security agencies "would appreciate" the deployment of US counter-insurgency expertise.
The Nigerian government has been criticised at home and abroad for what some say is a slow response to the abductions.
President Jonathan has said they are doing everything they can.
In the latest kidnapping, gunmen arrived in two trucks and also seized animals and food from the village of Warabe.
Residents of a nearby town said they feared Boko Haram would target them next.
Warabe is also close to the Sambisa forest, where the first group of schoolgirls is thought to have been taken.
Tuesday, 6 May 2014
South Africa election: Polls open
News Info - Polls have opened in South Africa's fifth general election since the end of apartheid 20 years ago.
The governing African National Congress (ANC) is tipped to win, returning President Jacob Zuma for a second five-year term.
Human Body and Mind - However, it is expected to lose ground amid concern over high unemployment and a number of corruption scandals.
The run-up to the vote has been marked by protests and troops have been deployed to boost security.
Wednesday's election is the first time that those born after the end of apartheid are able to take part and commentators say much will depend on how they cast their ballots.
Polls show many are disaffected with the country's leadership and are willing to support the opposition Democratic Alliance, led by anti-apartheid activist Helen Zille, or the Economic Freedom Fighters, headed by former ANC youth leader Julius Malema.
The ANC's campaign has drawn heavily on past glories and on the outpouring of grief over the death of its former leader, Nelson Mandela.
"Do it for Madiba, Vote ANC!" campaign posters read, referring to Mr Mandela by his clan name.
But many commentators say this election could be the last to be dominated by South Africa's post-apartheid legacy.
About a quarter of South Africa's workforce is jobless and a BBC poll suggests unemployment is the major issue among young voters, followed by education.
Some 22,000 polling stations will open at schools, places of worship, tribal authority sites and hospitals, while dozens of vehicles serving as mobile voting centres will operate in remote areas.
About 25 million people have registered to vote - roughly half the population.
Police say at least one officer will be on duty at every polling station and troops have also been deployed to keep order at various hotspots.
There was rioting in Bekkersdal township, south west of Johannesburg, on Tuesday and reports that some temporary polling stations had been burned down.
Bekkersdal has suffered intermittent unrest since last year as residents protested over a lack of public services. Many have vowed to boycott the election.
Polls opened at 07:00 (05:00 GMT) and are due to close 14 hours later.
President Zuma is expected to vote at his Nkandala homestead in rural KwaZulu-Natal while opposition leader Helen Zille will vote in Cape Town.
The full result is not expected before Friday.
The governing African National Congress (ANC) is tipped to win, returning President Jacob Zuma for a second five-year term.
Human Body and Mind - However, it is expected to lose ground amid concern over high unemployment and a number of corruption scandals.
The run-up to the vote has been marked by protests and troops have been deployed to boost security.
Wednesday's election is the first time that those born after the end of apartheid are able to take part and commentators say much will depend on how they cast their ballots.
Polls show many are disaffected with the country's leadership and are willing to support the opposition Democratic Alliance, led by anti-apartheid activist Helen Zille, or the Economic Freedom Fighters, headed by former ANC youth leader Julius Malema.
The ANC's campaign has drawn heavily on past glories and on the outpouring of grief over the death of its former leader, Nelson Mandela.
"Do it for Madiba, Vote ANC!" campaign posters read, referring to Mr Mandela by his clan name.
But many commentators say this election could be the last to be dominated by South Africa's post-apartheid legacy.
About a quarter of South Africa's workforce is jobless and a BBC poll suggests unemployment is the major issue among young voters, followed by education.
Some 22,000 polling stations will open at schools, places of worship, tribal authority sites and hospitals, while dozens of vehicles serving as mobile voting centres will operate in remote areas.
About 25 million people have registered to vote - roughly half the population.
Police say at least one officer will be on duty at every polling station and troops have also been deployed to keep order at various hotspots.
There was rioting in Bekkersdal township, south west of Johannesburg, on Tuesday and reports that some temporary polling stations had been burned down.
Bekkersdal has suffered intermittent unrest since last year as residents protested over a lack of public services. Many have vowed to boycott the election.
Polls opened at 07:00 (05:00 GMT) and are due to close 14 hours later.
President Zuma is expected to vote at his Nkandala homestead in rural KwaZulu-Natal while opposition leader Helen Zille will vote in Cape Town.
The full result is not expected before Friday.
Stars boycott Beverly Hills Hotel
News Info - Stars of Hollywood are boycotting one of the area's most famous hotels because of a harsh Islamic penal code introduced by Brunei's government.
Comedians Jay Leno and Ellen DeGeneres are among the celebrities supporting the boycott against the Beverly Hills Hotel and other hotels owned by Brunei.
hiccups treatment - Beverly Hills city council is to vote on a resolution condemning the laws.
Brunei's leader, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, announced the first phase of the new penalties last week.
They will eventually include death by stoning for homosexuality and adultery.
The mayor of Beverly Hills, Lili Bosse, has also urged the city to adopt a resolution condemning Brunei's new laws and divesting the country from the hotel and others it owns through the Dorchester Collection chain.
The city is set to vote on the measure on Tuesday.
And Virgin group founder Richard Branson tweeted on Saturday his employees and family would not stay at the luxury hotel chain "until the Sultan abides by basic human rights".
Several organisations have cancelled events at the hotel, long a gathering place for Hollywood celebrities, including the Motion Picture & Television Fund's annual Night Before the Oscars charity event and the Feminist Majority Foundation's annual Global Women's Rights Awards.
During a small protest in front of the hotel on Monday, Mr Leno said: "I'd like to think that all people are basically good and when they realise this is going on, hopefully they'll do something about it."
But Christopher Cowdray, the chief executive of the Dorchester Collection chain, said those protesting have ignored local hotels owned by countries with poor human rights records.
"There are other hotel companies in this city that are owned by Saudi Arabia... you know, your shirt probably comes from a country which has human rights issues," Mr Cowdray said, adding a boycott would hurt local employees the most.
The US government has been largely quiet on the change to Brunei's penal code, but the state department said on Tuesday it had privately relayed concerns to the Brunei government.
The initial phase of the new penal code introduces fines or prison terms for offences including indecent behaviour, failure to attend Friday prayers and pregnancies out-of-wedlock.
The second phase due to start later this year will cover crimes such as theft and robbery and will involve more stringent penalties such as amputations and flogging.
The most severe punishments, such as death by stoning for offences including sodomy and adultery, will be introduced late next year
Brunei officials have previously said that judges would be given discretion in sentencing. It is not clear to what extent the code will apply to non-Muslims.
The tiny state, on the island of Borneo has grown rich on oil and gas exports.
Almost three-quarters of those who live there are Malay Muslims, but there are sizeable Buddhist and Christian communities.
Comedians Jay Leno and Ellen DeGeneres are among the celebrities supporting the boycott against the Beverly Hills Hotel and other hotels owned by Brunei.
hiccups treatment - Beverly Hills city council is to vote on a resolution condemning the laws.
Brunei's leader, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, announced the first phase of the new penalties last week.
They will eventually include death by stoning for homosexuality and adultery.
The mayor of Beverly Hills, Lili Bosse, has also urged the city to adopt a resolution condemning Brunei's new laws and divesting the country from the hotel and others it owns through the Dorchester Collection chain.
The city is set to vote on the measure on Tuesday.
And Virgin group founder Richard Branson tweeted on Saturday his employees and family would not stay at the luxury hotel chain "until the Sultan abides by basic human rights".
Several organisations have cancelled events at the hotel, long a gathering place for Hollywood celebrities, including the Motion Picture & Television Fund's annual Night Before the Oscars charity event and the Feminist Majority Foundation's annual Global Women's Rights Awards.
During a small protest in front of the hotel on Monday, Mr Leno said: "I'd like to think that all people are basically good and when they realise this is going on, hopefully they'll do something about it."
But Christopher Cowdray, the chief executive of the Dorchester Collection chain, said those protesting have ignored local hotels owned by countries with poor human rights records.
"There are other hotel companies in this city that are owned by Saudi Arabia... you know, your shirt probably comes from a country which has human rights issues," Mr Cowdray said, adding a boycott would hurt local employees the most.
The US government has been largely quiet on the change to Brunei's penal code, but the state department said on Tuesday it had privately relayed concerns to the Brunei government.
The initial phase of the new penal code introduces fines or prison terms for offences including indecent behaviour, failure to attend Friday prayers and pregnancies out-of-wedlock.
The second phase due to start later this year will cover crimes such as theft and robbery and will involve more stringent penalties such as amputations and flogging.
The most severe punishments, such as death by stoning for offences including sodomy and adultery, will be introduced late next year
Brunei officials have previously said that judges would be given discretion in sentencing. It is not clear to what extent the code will apply to non-Muslims.
The tiny state, on the island of Borneo has grown rich on oil and gas exports.
Almost three-quarters of those who live there are Malay Muslims, but there are sizeable Buddhist and Christian communities.
Obama and Boehner
News Info - The latest snowfall was a bigger story in Washington this week than Tuesday’s private meeting between the estranged president and House speaker - their first in more than a year. Since Barack Obama recently signaled that he has all but given up on legislating with Republicans, and since John Boehner has flat out said thathe can’t trust the president, the assumption in Washington is that the chances for big legislation anytime soon are basically zero, whether the White House breaks out the good china or not.
chronic hiccups - A clever Washington Post headline summed up the reaction this way: "Obama and Boehner Meet. No Big Deal."
It probably invites mockery to raise the tattered flag of optimism here, especially among the unbending partisans on either side who would reject any form of compromise that isn't a total capitulation of the other, and whose attention has already shifted to 2016, when they plan to win the White House and every one of the 535 seats in Congress, thus obviating any need for negotiation.
And yet I’ll offer the dissenting view that this week's resumption of face-to-face talks could ultimately lead to a lot. In fact, there are several reasons to think that Obama and Boehner could still salvage their relationship enough to reach accord on some major issues, during the next Congress if not before.
First, although this isn’t a new development, both men (probably more than anyone else in their respective parties) badly want some bipartisan deals, or at least one significant breakthrough. Obama has less than three years left in office, and that could well be the limit for Boehner, as well, who has told friends there are other things in life he’d like to do.
As it stands now, Obama’s “paragraph in history,” as he recently put it to the journalist David Remnick, will reflect mostly futility after the first quarter of his tenure. And Boehner’s signature achievement as speaker will be not getting himself deposed. It’s safe to say that neither man sees this as his ideal legacy.
Also, while the breakdown of earlier negotiations over a so-called grand bargain, most notably in 2011, led to recrimination at the staff level in both the West Wing and the speaker’s crypt-like Capitol office, enough time has passed now that aides to Obama and Boehner may have a chance to reset the relationship and the negotiating parameters.
Most of the senior aides who took the lead in earlier rounds (including Boehner’s top two negotiators, his former chief of staff Barry Jackson and policy chief Brett Loper, and their counterparts in the White House, the former chief of staff Bill Daley and legislative director Rob Nabors) have moved on to other jobs. In their place, Obama’s new legislative director, Katie Beirne Fallon, and Boehner’s current chief of staff, Mike Sommers, have opened their own direct line of communication.
And despite all the talk about the vast ideological struggle raging in Washington, the simple truth is that on the three issues these aides and their bosses are most likely to find themselves negotiating—immigration, some restructuring of the tax code and maybe even entitlement reform again—the policy differences really aren’t very hard to bridge, if both sides are willing to move even a little from where they’ve been in the past. The real chasm has to do with trust.
More specifically, neither Obama nor Boehner—nor their aides—trust the other side to follow through with any concession that might infuriate their most ideological allies. Boehner sees Obama as unwilling to confront his party’s congressional leaders and interest groups, and he suspects that the president won’t follow through on enforcing key provisions of any deal. Obama doubts that Boehner will risk his speakership to make any deal for which the tea partiers in his caucus will excoriate him, and even if he will, the White House has been given ample reason to doubt that he can deliver the votes needed to pass it.
This trust gap represents a serious impasse to any bipartisan legislation. But when Boehner boldly pushed through a bill earlier this month that raised the nation’s debt limit, he used an intriguing strategy—and one that might signal another path ahead.
In this instance, Boehner found himself in a familiar conundrum; most of his members wanted to raise the debt limit, except for the contingent of several dozen antigovernment conservatives backed by outside agitators like the Club for Growth. The problem, as always, was that a lot of mainline Republicans who wanted the bill were deathly afraid of being challenged in primaries, and so they weren’t willing to vote for anything that the nihilist caucus opposed.
Faced with this problem in the past, Boehner has usually tried to get a bill that would satisfy his hardliners, so that he could keep his majority together. That’s how he ended up shutting down the government last year.
But this time, fearing that Republicans might self-immolate before the midterm elections, Boehner finally did what Obama has wanted him to do for years; he told his tea party contingent to take a walk. The speaker proposed an unconditional lifting of the debt ceiling, but he also told his other members that they could vote against the bill if they needed to.
As a result, the bill passed the House with mainly Democratic support; only 28 of 232 Republicans voted for it. But most of Boehner’s members were fine with that outcome, because they privately supported the bill and considered it good politics for the party nationally, if not in their specific districts. Boehner’s already strained relationship with the tea party crowd, meanwhile, probably suffered lasting damage.
This might suggest a new reality in the House. Obama’s team is skeptical, and perhaps reasonably so, that the strategy Boehner employed to pass the debt-ceiling increase will have larger implications. The feeling at the White House is that it was a desperate gambit to avoid political catastrophe, rather than a new way of doing business.
But if Boehner has now lost the most radical members of his party for good, as seems likely, then he has little impetus to negotiate other deals with their support in mind. And there’s no good reason, then, not to pass the legislation he wants with largely or even mostly Democratic votes, while at the same time retaining as much of a Republican bloc as he can.
When I asked Boehner’s spokesman, Michael Steel, if the same strategy might work on an issue like immigration, where a centrist solution is likely to attract the support of a lot of the Republican caucus but not necessarily all their votes, he chose his words carefully. “We could get to a place on immigration where members want that to happen but won’t vote for it,” he said. “But we’re not there yet.”
It’s true — we’re not at anything close to a pivotal moment and probably won’t be until after this fall’s elections. But that moment is coming, and as Obama and Boehner eye their respective legacies, no one should assume that this week’s meeting is going nowhere. My guess is that the president and the speaker, for all their mutual disdain and disillusionment, will find themselves locked in a room again before long, facing another series of critical choices.
In Washington, things often seem like no big deal, until suddenly they are.
chronic hiccups - A clever Washington Post headline summed up the reaction this way: "Obama and Boehner Meet. No Big Deal."
It probably invites mockery to raise the tattered flag of optimism here, especially among the unbending partisans on either side who would reject any form of compromise that isn't a total capitulation of the other, and whose attention has already shifted to 2016, when they plan to win the White House and every one of the 535 seats in Congress, thus obviating any need for negotiation.
And yet I’ll offer the dissenting view that this week's resumption of face-to-face talks could ultimately lead to a lot. In fact, there are several reasons to think that Obama and Boehner could still salvage their relationship enough to reach accord on some major issues, during the next Congress if not before.
First, although this isn’t a new development, both men (probably more than anyone else in their respective parties) badly want some bipartisan deals, or at least one significant breakthrough. Obama has less than three years left in office, and that could well be the limit for Boehner, as well, who has told friends there are other things in life he’d like to do.
As it stands now, Obama’s “paragraph in history,” as he recently put it to the journalist David Remnick, will reflect mostly futility after the first quarter of his tenure. And Boehner’s signature achievement as speaker will be not getting himself deposed. It’s safe to say that neither man sees this as his ideal legacy.
Also, while the breakdown of earlier negotiations over a so-called grand bargain, most notably in 2011, led to recrimination at the staff level in both the West Wing and the speaker’s crypt-like Capitol office, enough time has passed now that aides to Obama and Boehner may have a chance to reset the relationship and the negotiating parameters.
Most of the senior aides who took the lead in earlier rounds (including Boehner’s top two negotiators, his former chief of staff Barry Jackson and policy chief Brett Loper, and their counterparts in the White House, the former chief of staff Bill Daley and legislative director Rob Nabors) have moved on to other jobs. In their place, Obama’s new legislative director, Katie Beirne Fallon, and Boehner’s current chief of staff, Mike Sommers, have opened their own direct line of communication.
And despite all the talk about the vast ideological struggle raging in Washington, the simple truth is that on the three issues these aides and their bosses are most likely to find themselves negotiating—immigration, some restructuring of the tax code and maybe even entitlement reform again—the policy differences really aren’t very hard to bridge, if both sides are willing to move even a little from where they’ve been in the past. The real chasm has to do with trust.
More specifically, neither Obama nor Boehner—nor their aides—trust the other side to follow through with any concession that might infuriate their most ideological allies. Boehner sees Obama as unwilling to confront his party’s congressional leaders and interest groups, and he suspects that the president won’t follow through on enforcing key provisions of any deal. Obama doubts that Boehner will risk his speakership to make any deal for which the tea partiers in his caucus will excoriate him, and even if he will, the White House has been given ample reason to doubt that he can deliver the votes needed to pass it.
This trust gap represents a serious impasse to any bipartisan legislation. But when Boehner boldly pushed through a bill earlier this month that raised the nation’s debt limit, he used an intriguing strategy—and one that might signal another path ahead.
In this instance, Boehner found himself in a familiar conundrum; most of his members wanted to raise the debt limit, except for the contingent of several dozen antigovernment conservatives backed by outside agitators like the Club for Growth. The problem, as always, was that a lot of mainline Republicans who wanted the bill were deathly afraid of being challenged in primaries, and so they weren’t willing to vote for anything that the nihilist caucus opposed.
Faced with this problem in the past, Boehner has usually tried to get a bill that would satisfy his hardliners, so that he could keep his majority together. That’s how he ended up shutting down the government last year.
But this time, fearing that Republicans might self-immolate before the midterm elections, Boehner finally did what Obama has wanted him to do for years; he told his tea party contingent to take a walk. The speaker proposed an unconditional lifting of the debt ceiling, but he also told his other members that they could vote against the bill if they needed to.
As a result, the bill passed the House with mainly Democratic support; only 28 of 232 Republicans voted for it. But most of Boehner’s members were fine with that outcome, because they privately supported the bill and considered it good politics for the party nationally, if not in their specific districts. Boehner’s already strained relationship with the tea party crowd, meanwhile, probably suffered lasting damage.
This might suggest a new reality in the House. Obama’s team is skeptical, and perhaps reasonably so, that the strategy Boehner employed to pass the debt-ceiling increase will have larger implications. The feeling at the White House is that it was a desperate gambit to avoid political catastrophe, rather than a new way of doing business.
But if Boehner has now lost the most radical members of his party for good, as seems likely, then he has little impetus to negotiate other deals with their support in mind. And there’s no good reason, then, not to pass the legislation he wants with largely or even mostly Democratic votes, while at the same time retaining as much of a Republican bloc as he can.
When I asked Boehner’s spokesman, Michael Steel, if the same strategy might work on an issue like immigration, where a centrist solution is likely to attract the support of a lot of the Republican caucus but not necessarily all their votes, he chose his words carefully. “We could get to a place on immigration where members want that to happen but won’t vote for it,” he said. “But we’re not there yet.”
It’s true — we’re not at anything close to a pivotal moment and probably won’t be until after this fall’s elections. But that moment is coming, and as Obama and Boehner eye their respective legacies, no one should assume that this week’s meeting is going nowhere. My guess is that the president and the speaker, for all their mutual disdain and disillusionment, will find themselves locked in a room again before long, facing another series of critical choices.
In Washington, things often seem like no big deal, until suddenly they are.
Monday, 5 May 2014
Knife attack at south China station
News Info - At least six people have been injured in a knife attack at a station in Guangzhou, Chinese officials say.
Police shot one of the attackers, a statement from the city's public security bureau said.
There is no information yet on the motivation for this attack, but it comes a week after an attack on a station in Urumqi, in the western region in Xinjiang.
genghis khan biography - It also follows an attack at Kunming station in March that killed 29 people.
Chinese authorities have blamed both these attacks on separatists from the Muslim Uighur minority group, which lives in Xinjiang.
An image posted by the People's Daily showed crowds evacuated from the station and an ambulance at the scene.
In a statement on the public security bureau's official microblog, police said they arrived at the station at 11:30 on Tuesday.
They shot a male suspect armed with a knife after he failed to heed warnings, they said.
The six injured people had been taken to hospital for further treatment, they said, and further investigations were underway.
Police shot one of the attackers, a statement from the city's public security bureau said.
There is no information yet on the motivation for this attack, but it comes a week after an attack on a station in Urumqi, in the western region in Xinjiang.
genghis khan biography - It also follows an attack at Kunming station in March that killed 29 people.
Chinese authorities have blamed both these attacks on separatists from the Muslim Uighur minority group, which lives in Xinjiang.
An image posted by the People's Daily showed crowds evacuated from the station and an ambulance at the scene.
In a statement on the public security bureau's official microblog, police said they arrived at the station at 11:30 on Tuesday.
They shot a male suspect armed with a knife after he failed to heed warnings, they said.
The six injured people had been taken to hospital for further treatment, they said, and further investigations were underway.
Civilian diver dies in South Korea ferry search
News Info - A civilian diver searching for bodies in the South Korean ferry that sank last month has died, authorities say.
Officials said the 53-year-old, known only by his surname Lee, became unconscious and later died in hospital.
He is the first fatality among divers searching the Sewol ferry, which sank on 16 April with 476 people on board.
abyssal plain facts - Only 174 people survived, with many trapped inside the vessel. So far the disaster has claimed 262 lives, with 40 others missing.
State news agency Yonhap reported that Mr Lee was a veteran crew member of Undine Marine Industries, which specialises in maritime engineering and rescue work.
He had lost consciousness shortly after diving into waters 25m deep in the early hours of Tuesday.
Fellow divers lost communication with him five minutes into his dive and later pulled him to the surface. It was his first search attempt in the Sewol, according to the authorities.
Prime Minister Chung Hong-won has since ordered government officials overseeing the rescue operation to thoroughly check divers' health conditions.
Divers have been battling bad weather and fast currents to retrieve bodies over the past three weeks. Inside the ferry, they must also navigate floating debris and the maze of corridors, reports say.
Yonhap said another civilian diver, aged 31, fell unconscious last week after diving four times before daybreak.
Several others have also been treated at hyperbaric oxygen therapy centres.
Authorities said divers were now working their way to the last three unopened rooms next to a snack bar on the ferry's third floor.
But they did not expect to find many bodies there as they were not occupied by the high school students who were the majority of the passengers, a spokesman said. Divers would also recheck areas previously searched.
Earlier this week, workers put out more nets around the site to prevent bodies floating away.
Officials said the 53-year-old, known only by his surname Lee, became unconscious and later died in hospital.
He is the first fatality among divers searching the Sewol ferry, which sank on 16 April with 476 people on board.
abyssal plain facts - Only 174 people survived, with many trapped inside the vessel. So far the disaster has claimed 262 lives, with 40 others missing.
State news agency Yonhap reported that Mr Lee was a veteran crew member of Undine Marine Industries, which specialises in maritime engineering and rescue work.
He had lost consciousness shortly after diving into waters 25m deep in the early hours of Tuesday.
Fellow divers lost communication with him five minutes into his dive and later pulled him to the surface. It was his first search attempt in the Sewol, according to the authorities.
Prime Minister Chung Hong-won has since ordered government officials overseeing the rescue operation to thoroughly check divers' health conditions.
Divers have been battling bad weather and fast currents to retrieve bodies over the past three weeks. Inside the ferry, they must also navigate floating debris and the maze of corridors, reports say.
Yonhap said another civilian diver, aged 31, fell unconscious last week after diving four times before daybreak.
Several others have also been treated at hyperbaric oxygen therapy centres.
Authorities said divers were now working their way to the last three unopened rooms next to a snack bar on the ferry's third floor.
But they did not expect to find many bodies there as they were not occupied by the high school students who were the majority of the passengers, a spokesman said. Divers would also recheck areas previously searched.
Earlier this week, workers put out more nets around the site to prevent bodies floating away.
Friday, 2 May 2014
Policing 'dark side' behind Adams' arrest
News Info - The North's Deputy First Minister has blamed the “dark side” of policing conspiring with enemies of the peace process for the arrest of Gerry Adams.
Martin McGuinness acknowledged that Jean McConville was the victim of a terrible wrong done by the IRA but said yesterday’s detention was a deliberate attempt to influence the outcome of European elections du in three weeks’ time.
human body organs - The head of Sinn Féin’s team at the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly has strongly condemned the shooting dead of police officers by dissident republicans opposed to the peace process.
But the arrest of Mr Adams in the midst of an election campaign has angered republicans who hope to make major vote gains south of the border.
Mr McGuinness said: “I think we have seen that dark side flex its muscles in the last couple of days.”
His partner at the head of the Stormont coalition, First Minister Peter Robinson, said it would have been political policing had the PSNI decided not to investigate Mr Adams.
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader said: “It strengthens our political process in Northern Ireland for people to know that no one is above the law, everyone is equal under the law and everyone is equally subject to the law.”
Mr McGuinness said serious questions had to be asked of the agenda of those behind the arrest.
“In the mouth of an election the leader of a political party experiencing huge growth all around the island finds himself under arrest.”
He claimed Sinn Féin had been told by “senior” and “reforming” figures within the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) that there was still a dark side within policing.
He said some former republicans who were “maliciously and vehemently” hostile to the peace process had been targeting Mr Adams.
“It is quite disappointing to see the efforts of those people now in consort with the dark side within policing.”
Mr McGuinness said his colleague played a pivotal role in bringing peace to the North.
“For over 20 years we have worked very, very closely in developing the peace process, bringing about the political and security transformation that the public enjoy today and, in my opinion, in the course of supporting the peace process, he has been the single most influential figure in the process,” he said.
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