Gym Turned Into Morgue for Nightclub Fire Victims

Coffins lined a gymnasium in Santa Maria, Brazil, today as family members tried to identify their loved ones after a fast-moving fire tore through a crowded nightclub Sunday morning, killing more than 230 people and injuring hundreds more.

A community gym near the popular Kiss nightclub has been converted to a temporary morgue were family members were led in one by one Sunday night and early this morning to identify the dead. Outside the gym police held up personal objects, including a black purse and blue high-heeled shoe, as people seeking information on loved ones crowded around, hoping not to recognize anything they were being shown.

"Doctors from other parts of Brazil were flown in to assist the medical side of this," BBC reporter Julia Carneiro told ABC News this morning. "One hundred people are injured and in hospital. Some have been flown to other cities that have better hospital capacity."

PHOTOS: Santa Maria, Brazil Nightclub Fire

Flames and smoke outraced a terrified crowd at the Kiss nightclub, located in the southern city of Santa Maria, shortly after 2 a.m. Sunday morning. Panicked partygoers tried to outrun flames and black, thick smoke, but the club appeared to have only one open exit, police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello told The Associated Press.

Police confirmed that the toll had risen to 231 with the death of a hospitalized victim.

Hours after the fire, cellphones on the victims were ringing inside the still-smoldering nightclub as family members tried to contact their loved ones, Brazilian radio reporter Sara Bodowsky told "World News" anchor David Muir.

JEFFERSON BERNARDES/AFP/Getty Images

Brazil Nightclub Fire: Nearly 200 People Killed Watch Video

"It's really like a war zone in here. We have [over 230] bodies laid down, side by side, so the families go inside one by one. They look at the bodies," Bodowsky said.

The first funerals for the victims were scheduled to begin later today for those families who have identified their loved ones.

"It was terrible inside. It was like one of those films of the Holocaust, bodies piled atop one another," police inspector Sandro Meinerz said Sunday. "We had to use trucks to remove them. It took about six hours to take the bodies away."

Investigators believe the blaze began when a band's small pyrotechnics show ignited foam sound insulating material on the ceiling, releasing a putrid haze that caused scores of people to choke to death.

Survivors and police inspector Marcelo Arigony said security guards briefly tried to block people from exiting the club in the mass confusion and chaos moments after the fire began.

But Arigony said the guards didn't appear to block fleeing patrons for long. "It was chaotic and it doesn't seem to have been done in bad faith because several security guards also died," he told the AP.

Police Maj. Bastianello told the AP by telephone the death toll was likely made worse because the nightclub appeared to have just one exit through which patrons could exit.

A security guard told the newspaper Diaro de Santa Maria that the club was filled to capacity, with 1,000 to 2,000 people inside.

Meanwhile, people outside tried to break through walls to get in to save those trapped inside.

Michele Pereira told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that she was near the stage when members of the band lit some sort of flare.

"The band that was onstage began to use flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward," she said. "At that point, the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak, but in a matter of seconds it spread."

Guitarist Rodrigo Martins told Radio Gaucha that the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, started playing at 2:15 a.m. "and we had played around five songs when I looked up and noticed the roof was burning."

"It might have happened because of the Sputnik, the machine we use to create a luminous effect with sparks. It's harmless, we never had any trouble with it," he said. "When the fire started, a guard passed us a fire extinguisher, the singer tried to use it but it wasn't working."

He confirmed that accordion player Danilo Jacques, 28, died, while the five other members made it out safely.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was attending a summit with European Union leaders and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States in Chile, cut her trip short and returned home to Brazil Sunday.

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Violent protests greet Egypt emergency decree

CAIRO (Reuters) - A man was shot dead on Monday in a fifth day of violence in Egypt that has killed 50 people and prompted the Islamist president to declare a state of emergency in an attempt to end a wave of unrest sweeping the Arab world's biggest nation.

Under emergency powers announced by President Mohamed Mursi for the cities of Port Said, Ismailia and Suez on Sunday, the army will have the right to arrest civilians and to help police restore order.

A cabinet source told Reuters any trials would be before civilian courts, but the step is likely to anger protesters who accuse Mursi of using high-handed security tactics of the kind they fought against to oust president Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt's politics have become deeply polarized since those heady days two years ago, when protesters were making most of the running in the Arab Spring revolutions that sent shockwaves through the region.

Although Islamists have won parliamentary and presidential elections, the disparate opposition has since united against Mursi. Late last year he moved to expand his powers and push a constitution with Islamist leanings through a referendum punctuated by violent street protests.

Mursi's opponents accuse him of hijacking the revolution, listening only to his Islamist allies and breaking a promise to be a president for all Egyptians. They say too many hold-outs from the Mubarak era remain in their posts.

Islamists say their rivals want to overthrow by undemocratic means Egypt's first freely elected leader.

Some opposition groups have called for more protests in Cairo and elsewhere on Monday to mark the second anniversary of one of the bloodiest days in the revolution that erupted on January 25, 2011, and ended Mubarak's iron rule 18 days later.

Hundreds of demonstrators in Port Said, Ismailia and Suez, cities which all lie on the economically vital Suez Canal, turned out against Mursi's decision on Sunday within moments of him speaking. Activists there pledged to defy a curfew that starts at 9 p.m. (1700 GMT).

Instability in Egypt has raised concerns in Western capitals, where officials worry about the direction of a key regional player that has signed a peace deal with Israel.

The political unrest has been exacerbated by street violence linked to death penalties imposed on soccer supporters convicted of involvement in stadium rioting a year ago.

In Cairo on Monday, police fired volleys of teargas at stone-throwing protesters in and around Tahrir Square, cauldron of the anti-Mubarak uprising.

KILLED BY A GUNSHOT

A 46-year-old bystander was killed by a gunshot, a security source at the Interior Ministry said. It was not clear who fired the shot.

"We want to bring down the regime and end the state that is run by the Muslim Brotherhood," said Ibrahim Eissa, a 26-year-old cook, protecting his face from teargas wafting towards him.

Mursi also called for a national dialogue with his rivals for later on Monday, but the early response from members of the main opposition coalition suggested they saw little point.

Propelled to the presidency in a June election by the Muslim Brotherhood, Mursi has lurched through a series of political crises and violent demonstrations, complicating his task of shoring up the economy and preparing for a parliamentary election to cement the new democracy in a few months.

"The protection of the nation is the responsibility of everyone. We will confront any threat to its security with force and firmness within the remit of the law," Mursi said, offering condolences to families of victims in the canal zone cities.

Appealing to his opponents, the president called for a dialogue on Monday at 6 p.m. (1600 GMT), inviting a range of Islamist allies as well as liberal, leftist and other opposition groups and individuals to discuss the crisis.

The main opposition National Salvation Front coalition said it would not attend.

Mursi's call to hold talks was "cosmetic and not substantive", a leading member of the coalition, Mohamed ElBaradei, told a news conference.

SECURITY MEASURES

The opposition Front has distanced itself from the latest flare-ups but said Mursi should have acted far sooner to impose security measures that would have ended the violence.

"Of course we feel the president is missing the real problem on the ground, which is his own policies," Front spokesman Khaled Dawoud said. "His call to implement emergency law was an expected move, given what is going on, namely thuggery and criminal activity."

But other activists said Mursi's measures to try to impose control on the turbulent streets could backfire.

"Martial law, state of emergency and army arrests of civilians are not a solution to the crisis," Ahmed Maher of the April 6 movement that helped galvanize the 2011 uprising said. "All this will do is further provoke the youth. The solution has to be a political one that addresses the roots of the problem."

Thousands of mourners joined funerals in Port Said for the latest victims in the Mediterranean port city. Seven people were killed there on Sunday when residents joined marches to bury 33 others who had been killed a day earlier, most by gunshot wounds in a city where arms are rife.

Protests erupted there on Saturday after a court sentenced to death several people from the city for their role in deadly soccer violence last year, a verdict residents saw as unfair. The anger swiftly turned against Mursi and his government.

Rights activists said Mursi's declaration was a backward step for Egypt, which was under emergency law for Mubarak's entire 30-year rule. His police used the sweeping arrest provisions to muzzle dissent and round up opponents, including members of the Brotherhood and even Mursi himself.

Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch in Cairo said the police, still hated by many Egyptians for their heavy-handed tactics under Mubarak, would once again have the right to arrest people "purely because they look suspicious", undermining efforts to create a more efficient and respected police force.

"It is a classic knee-jerk reaction to think the emergency law will help bring security," she said. "It gives so much discretion to the Ministry of Interior that it ends up causing more abuse, which in turn causes more anger."

(Additional reporting by Yasmine Saleh in Cairo and Yusri Mohamed in Ismailia; Editing by Will Waterman and Giles Elgood)

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Syria pledges to end opposition prosecutions

DAMASCUS: Syria's high judicial council has announced a suspension of prosecutions of opposition members so they can join a national dialogue, state media reported on Sunday, without detailing the nature of crimes affected by the ruling.

The report comes after Interior Minister Mohammed al-Shaar had earlier vowed to ease the return of Syrian opposition members living in exile so that they too can take part in the dialogue proposed by President Bashar al-Assad on January 6.

"The high judicial council has decided to discontinue all prosecutions against opposition forces and individuals so they may participate in the national dialogue" the official news agency SANA said, without elaborating.

The council stressed that those "opposition forces will be designated by the government or first ministerial action group charged with implementing the preparatory phase of the programme to resolve the Syrian crisis."

In his January 6 speech, Assad proposed a dialogue with opposition figures who were not "slaves of the West" and on condition that "terrorist attacks" came to a halt before any political transition.

The regime has branded activists and armed insurgents alike as terrorists.

Shaar, in comments reported by state media on Saturday, said the directive allowing Syrians living abroad to return was not a blanket amnesty.

"Executive orders will be issued to border crossings to facilitate and guarantee that all political opposition forces may enter the country, maintain residency and leave at will," Shaar was quoted as saying.

"There is a big difference between those who safeguard their nation and those who are complicit in foreign agendas."

The United Nations says that more than 60,000 people have been killed in Syria's uprising, which broke out in March 2011 with peaceful protests and morphed into an armed insurgency after a harsh regime crackdown.

- AFP/xq

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The ultimate gall of a heartless iPhone thief

An object of desire?

(Credit:
CNET)

One should never expect justice in life.

The best one can hope for is poetry.

And yet, just once or twice, both manage to collide with a deliciousness that moves the soul.

Here is the tale of a teenage girl who had her iPhone stolen.

As The New York Times composes it, the girl had her
iPhone 4S ripped from her by a teenage boy in Brooklyn's notoriously difficult Prospect Park.

iPhone theft is rather popular in New York. Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg recently suggested that it's responsible for an increase in crime in the city.

Anyway, the iPhone-less girl collared a couple of policemen, but the miscreant was not to be found.

However, the thief then decided that he'd try to get some money for the phone. So he met a man on a Flatbush street -- as you do.

The man asked to take a look at the phone. Perhaps he wanted to see whether Siri was still inside.

Then, he ran off with it.

Yes, this is slightly poetic. But we've only just begun.

You see, the boy thief was not very happy. After all, he'd had his recently acquired property stolen. So he went off in search of a policeman to report the crime.

I pause for your sound effects.

Thank you.

More Technically Incorrect

The police reacted with unusual efficiency. They corralled both the boy and the man who had taken Siri from him. But they still assumed the boy was the victim.

Are you ready for verse three?

The phone rang. It was the girl trying to do a deal to get her phone back. The police realized something might be amiss here. This seemed to be a miss who actually owned the phone.

So they waited for her to arrive in Flatbush. She recognized the boy's sneakers. They were pink.

I pause for your further sound effects.

The police decided it was time to play Solomon. They would slice the phone in two if one party didn't renounce their claim to the phone.

No, wait. They asked both the girl and the pink-sneakered boy to unlock the phone with the PIN code.

You're already there, aren't you? Both the actual thieves were brought to justice -- the actual kind. And the girl got her phone back.

There are several morals to this story.

One, don't steal iPhones if you're wearing pink sneakers.

Two, if someone does unto you as you have done unto someone else, take it onto the chin. It will help you understand the feelings of others.

Three, if you're the kind of New Yorker who thinks they can always get away with it, well, you can't. Not always.

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Dozens of stranded Arizona hikers rescued

TUCSON, Ariz. Teams on the ground and in the air rescued dozens of hikers who were stranded in an Arizona canyon after heavy rains flooded trails, authorities said.

Forty to 50 adults and children were stranded Saturday along various sections of Bear Canyon northeast of Tucson as the waters rushed down mountainsides, the Pima County Sheriff's Department said.

A series of 911 calls from hikers sparked a rescue operation involving teams on the ground and in a helicopter,

The first group of hikers was led out of the canyon in the Catalina Mountains in the late afternoon and the last group well after dark, deputy Tom Peine told the Arizona Daily Star.

Some of the hikers said they were stranded when a river swelled to a raging torrent in a matter of minutes.

"I've never seen anything like this," hiker Jesse Boyd told KGUN-TV. "I've gotten caught in rain out here, but nothing to the point where I had to be rescued."

With some hikers, rescuers used a technique that involved roping them together with flotation devices to help get them through high water. Some of the hikers were flown out by helicopter.

"(A) rescue team member was behind us with a hand on that flotation device," Michael Rolland told KVOA-TV after being aided by rescuers. "They strung a rope across, and so we had to grab the rope and sidestep across the river."

Peine said that the hikers might not have realized that rains at higher elevations could cause canyon flooding long after the down pour ends.

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Authorities: 245 Dead in Brazil Nightclub Fire

A fire swept through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, killing at least 245 people and leaving at least 200 injured, police and firefighters said.

Police Maj. Cleberson Braida told local news media that the 245 bodies were brought for identification to a gymnasium in the city of Santa Maria.

That toll would make it one of the deadliest nightclub fires more than a decade.

The cause of the fire is not yet known, officials said. Officials earlier put the death toll at 180.

Civil Police and regional government spokesman Marcelo Arigoni told Radio Gaucha earlier that the total number of victims is still unclear and there may be hundreds injured,

The newspaper Diario de Santa Maria reported that the fire started at around 2 a.m. at the Kiss club in the city at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.

Rodrigo Moura, whom the paper identified as a security guard at the club, said it was at its maximum capacity of between 1,000 and 2,000, and partygoers were pushing and shoving to escape.

Ezekiel Corte Real, 23, was quoted by the paper as saying that he helped people to escape. "I just got out because I'm very strong," he said.

"Sad Sunday", tweeted Tarso Genro, the governor of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. He said all possible action was being taken and that he would be in the city later in the day.

Santa Maria is a major university city with a population of around a quarter of a million.

A welding accident reportedly set off a Dec. 25, 2000, fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309.

At least 194 people died at an overcrowded working-class nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2004.

A blaze at the Lame Horse nightclub in Perm, Russia, broke out on Dec. 5, 2009, when an indoor fireworks display ignited a plastic ceiling decorated with branches, killing 152

A nightclub fire in the U.S. state of Rhode Island in 2003 killed 100 people after pyrotechnics used as a stage prop by the 1980s rock band Great White set ablaze cheap soundproofing foam on the walls and ceiling.

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Fire at nightclub kills more than 200 in Brazil

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (Reuters) - At least 200 people were killed in a nightclub fire in southern Brazil on Sunday after a band's pyrotechnics show set the building ablaze, and fleeing patrons were unable to find the emergency exits, local officials said.

Bodies were still being removed from the Kiss nightclub in the southern city of Santa Maria, Major Gerson da Rosa Ferreira, who was leading rescue efforts at the scene for the military police, told Reuters.

Local officials said 180 people were confirmed dead, and Ferreira said the death toll would rise above 200. He said the victims died of asphyxiation or from being trampled, and that there were possibly as many as 500 people inside the club when the fire broke out at about 2:30 a.m.

Television footage showed people sobbing outside the club, while shirtless firefighters used sledge hammers and axes to knock down an exterior wall to open up an exit.

"It was really fast. There was a lot of smoke, really dark smoke," survivor Aline Santos Silva, 29, told Globonews TV. "We were only able to get out quickly because we were in a VIP area close to the door."

President Dilma Rousseff cut short a visit to Chile and was returning to Brazil following the blaze, her spokesperson said.

Luiza Sousa, a civil police official in Santa Maria, told Reuters the blaze started when a member of the band or its production team ignited a flare, which then set fire to the ceiling. The fire spread "in seconds," Sousa said.

The disaster recalls other incidents including a 2003 fire at a nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, that killed 100, and a Buenos Aires nightclub blaze in 2004 that killed nearly 200. In both incidents, a band or members of the audience ignited fires that set the establishment ablaze.

Brazil's safety standards and emergency response capabilities are under particular scrutiny as the country prepares to host the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament and the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Rio Grande do Sul state Health Secretary Ciro Simoni said emergency medical supplies from all over the state were being sent to the scene.

Santa Maria is some 186 miles west of the state capital of Porto Alegre. "A sad Sunday!" tweeted Rio Grande do Sul Governor Tarso Genro. He said "all possible measures" were being taken in response and that he was on his way to the scene.

(Additional reporting by Guillermo Parra-Bernal, Todd Benson and Brian Winter; Editing by Eric Beech)

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SDA's Lim concedes defeat

SINGAPORE: Singapore Democratic Alliance's Desmond Lim has conceded defeat.

He said he would like to thank his supporters, adding that he ran in the election to keep the SDA flame alive.

In a statement, Mr Lim said: "It has been a fast but hard race to the end. Entering this contest, I was well aware of the risks and challenges. But it was something the SDA had to do to keep its political flame alive.

"The results have not dampened me, nor the SDA. It only means we will have to fight harder and work harder when the next contest comes.

"I thank Punggol East residents for their support nonetheless."

- CNA/al

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Bask in the glow of Zelda: Wind Waker in HD

If you love everything Link, this image should excite your pants off.

(Credit:
Nintendo)

To enhance the appeal of the Wii U, Nintendo plans to re-release several cherished classics, including the epic The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for GameCube, with snazzy high-definition graphics. Below, we present a set of images that show off the HD remastering of the game next to the original version that debuted in 2003.

Prepare yourself for lots of dynamic lighting and bloom when Wind Waker HD hits later this year.

Like the changes or not, the difference 10 years can make may astound you -- nearly everything appears enhanced with the HD remake, including textures, shadows, and the environment overall.

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Hackers take over gov't website to avenge Aaron Swartz

This screenshot shows the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission after it was hijacked by the hacker-activist group Anonymous, early Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013, to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide. The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed." / AP Photo

WASHINGTON The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.

The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago "a line was crossed."

The message read in part:

Citizens of the world,
Anonymous has observed for some time now the trajectory of justice in the United States with growing concern. We have marked the departure of this system from the noble ideals in which it was born and enshrined. We have seen the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the "discretion" or prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain."

The hackers say they've infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.

Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors.

Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.

By mid-morning Saturday the website was offline.

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