Villagers examine the wreckage of their collasped houses in Ben Tre province, Vietnam on Tuesday Dec. 5, 2006. Tropical storm Durian slammed into Vietnam's southern coast, killing at least 47 people, injuring more than 300 and destroying thousands of houses (AP Photo/Tuoi Tre Newspaper, Lu The Nha)


Residents view the remains of fishing boats washed ashore after Tropical Storm Durian tore through the area, on Phu Quy island off the coast of Binh Thuan province, Vietnam, on Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2006. The typhoon that ravaged the Philippines with landslides and torrential rain slammed into Vietnam's southern coast Tuesday as a tropical storm, killing at least 47 people and destroying thousands of homes. (AP Photos/Tuoi Tre, Tran Tien Dung)

Vietnam searches for missing after killer typhoon

HANOI, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Rescuers searched for scores of missing people after a typhoon swept southern Vietnam with strong winds and rain, killing at least 48 and damaging or destroying thousands of homes, officials said on Wednesday.

Flood control authorities warned south-central provinces that rivers were rising and they should prepare for flooding in the aftermath of Typhoon Durian, which struck the coast on Monday night and Tuesday with 120 kph (70 mph) winds.

"Localities should expand their efforts to continue to rescue and find missing people," Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Sinh Hung, coordinator of storm preparation and relief, said on state-run television.

Hung said they should work to "restore normal life, especially rebuild houses and mobilise military police and the youth union to help".

The storm was downgraded to a tropical depression and was heading west across the Gulf of Thailand on Wednesday.

Vietnam's national flood and storm control centre said in a report on Wednesday that Typhoon Durian killed at least 48 people in four south-central provinces of Binh Thuan, Ba Ria Vung Tau, Ben Tre and Vinh Long. It said 49 people were missing and that 433 were injured.

There was no immediate estimate of the cost of the damage from the storm, the ninth of the year in Vietnam, but it damaged or destroyed 120,899 houses and sank 696 fishing vessels, the government report said.

Durian, named after a strong-smelling spiky Asian fruit, slammed into the Philippines one notch below a category 5 super-typhoon on Thursday. Disaster officials on Wednesday raised the death toll to 543 and 740 missing.

Philippine officials decided to extend rescue efforts by 10 days in the villages devastated by mudslides at the foot of Mayon volcano when typhoon Durian hit. Nearly 250,000 houses were damaged while agriculture and infrastructure damage was estimated at 608 million pesos ($12.25 million).

In the Philippines and Vietnam hundreds or even thousands of people are killed each year in tropical storms and typhoons that batter flimsy dwellings and fishing boats, and also cause flooding and mudslides.

In May, hundreds of Vietnamese fishermen were lost in a typhoon named Chanchu. In October, another typhoon, Xangsane, killed at least 70 and destroyed or submerged hundreds of thousands of homes when it struck the central coastal city of Danang, despite early warnings and preparations.

Australia drought has impact on farmers

CANBERRA, Australia - Grain farmer Eddie Valks hosted his daughter's wedding on his 2,000 acre spread northwest of Sydney, complete with bride and groom sailing off on a small lake. Four years later the lake is gone, dried out by Australia's worst drought on record.

"If the wedding guests from the cities saw the place now, they'd be shocked," said the 61-year-old Valks.

Drought and flood have been a familiar feature of Australia's vast cattle and sheep ranches and shimmering grain fields ever since the first Europeans settled here more than 200 years ago. But this "big dry" is the worst and widest, officials say, and poses a massive economic challenge.

It could bring lasting changes to the Earth's driest inhabited continent and sharpen a debate about whether drought-hit farmers should simply leave the Outback for rainier parts of the country.

It is also putting pressure on Prime Minister John Howard from those who link the drought to global warming. These critics condemn his center-right coalition for joining the United States in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Thailand buries last of its unknown tsunami dead

BANGKOK (AFP) - Thailand began burying the last of its unknown victims from the devastating December 2004 tsunami, in a quiet ceremony attended by a handful of officials and Buddhist monks.

Few people were there to see the last group of the 410 unidentified bodies go into the ground at Bang Maruan cemetery in the hardest-hit province of Phang Nga, just north of the resort island of Phuket.

Multi-faith ceremonies were held for victims, most of whom are believed to be migrant workers from neighbouring Myanmar.

"Wednesday started with Buddhist, Christian and Islamic religious ceremonies and the actual burial started shortly afterwards," said police Colonel Khemmarin Hassiri, the head of the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification unit.

About 20 people, mostly police officers and representatives from the faiths, attended the burial.

Three hundred of the unidentified bodies were buried in October and November. Fifty people will be buried Wednesday. The remaining 60 will go into the ground before Friday.

After the low-key ceremony, the bodies were transferred to stainless steel coffins and lowered into a mass grave, with just plain concrete slabs separating the resting place of each victim.

The bodies of 103 victims who have been identified but whose families have yet to collect them will remain in storage, Khemmarin said.

"We will keep them in temperature-controlled containers waiting for their relatives to collect them," he told AFP.

They include 72 Myanmar nationals, 28 Thais, one Filipino, one Turk and one Nepalese.

Most of the 410 unidentified bodies are believed to be migrants from Myanmar, whose families are either unable to leave Myanmar or are in Thailand illegally and afraid to come forward for fear or deportation.

"Australia, the US, they have ambassadors to claim the body and relatives to come," said Uraiwan Kanjan, a field coordinator in Phang Nga for the International Organisation for Migration.

"(Migrants) have no relatives here, and no officials papers," she told AFP last week.

Experts have collected DNA samples from all the victims, so if any new evidence arises, the bodies can be exhumed to complete the identification process.

The bodies have until now been kept in a morgue awaiting identification, but the decision was made to bury them because of concerns that the containers were not designed for prolonged use and could begin to deteriorate.

Some 5,400 people were killed in Thailand on December 26, 2004, when the tsunami tore across the Indian Ocean and killed 220,000 people in a dozen countries.

Roughly half of the victims in Thailand were foreign holidaymakers. Tourism was badly hit by the disaster, but it is now almost back to pre-tsunami levels.

Thai and US officials on Friday sent off a ship carrying a tsunami warning device designed to protect millions of people around the Indian Ocean. It is hoped this will also reassure tourists.

Few events are planned for the second anniversary of the tragedy. A Thai tourism ministry spokesman told AFP that they did not have the budget for any memorial service.

However, a number of private ceremonies will be held, with Phuket's Japanese Association planning to hold a memorial attended by Japan's ambassador to Thailand and about 200 guests.

Relief in sight for St. Louis area

ST. LOUIS — The thaw is finally underway.
As temperatures crept above freezing Tuesday, metropolitan St. Louis' electric utility, Ameren Corp., said it expects 95% of those who lost power in last week's intense ice storm to have lights and heat again by the end of today.

Beleaguered residents from here to Decatur, Ill., say they are relieved but wary. For many, this is a frozen encore to an equally disruptive blackout less than five months ago when violent thunderstorms ripped through St. Louis, cutting electricity to hundreds of thousands for a sweltering week or longer.

Families who abandoned their homes last summer for city-run "cooling centers" returned to some of the same locations last weekend and this week to get warm and, if necessary, spend the night.

Ameren serves 2.4 million homes and businesses in Missouri and Illinois, many of them in the path of the storm that encased in ice a more than 200-mile-long corridor from southeast Missouri to central Illinois last Thursday night and Friday. An estimated 510,000 customers lost power.

Lisa Hunt, a marketing manager for cancer centers, fled her home in the southern suburbs of St. Louis County on Friday. Both summer and winter blackouts, she says, "were just absolutely unacceptable."

"We're in 2006, and we can't figure out how to get the power back on?" asks Hunt, whose electricity and heat were restored Tuesday afternoon. "We were out of power for five days in July. We thought that was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing."

'On the downhill side'

Ron Zdellar, vice president of energy supply for Ameren, previously had said the July thunderstorms, which snapped power poles and downed thousands of wires, were the worst in the company's history. But he says the icy onslaught has exceeded that. New outages even occurred as late as Monday, he added, "from trees that were still breaking" as thick encasements of ice finally began to melt.

An estimated 7,000 electrical workers and hundreds of repair trucks from as far as Canada and Florida have labored in 16-hour shifts to restore service.

The office of St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay announced Tuesday afternoon that just 3% of those in the city limits were still in the dark.

Zdellar says the company is now "on the downhill side of this thing."

Skeptical customers, echoing Missouri's "Show Me State" nickname, reply: Prove it.

"I want someone to be responsible for this," says Patrick Cacchione, 47, a lobbyist who lives in Compton Heights, a St. Louis neighborhood of stately, turn-of-the-century houses. "Twice in four months?"

Zdellar says restoring power is complicated. Older neighborhoods are more prone to damage either from the icing on aboveground power lines or from branches and trunks of older, untrimmed trees snapping and falling from the weight of the ice.

By Sunday, an estimated 100,000 customers got power again. Progress slowed after that because crews were working down from bigger supply lines to the house-by-house repair of wires and downed power poles.

Getting the power back on, Zdellar says, is like restarting a human body: "You have to get the heart going first, pumping 'blood' through the big arteries, to restore a process that moves out from the heart to the fingers — the lines that go to the homes."

Hundreds stayed in shelters run by the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Thousands more took refuge with friends and family or in hotels and motels. Uncounted others without power or heat tried to stick it out at home, sometimes with disastrous results.

Death toll climbs

A family in Centerville, Ill., was left homeless early Tuesday by a fire, apparently sparked by a space heater. Another fire Monday hospitalized a St. Louis woman for smoke inhalation. Two St. Louis men died over the weekend from noxious fumes while trying to heat their home with charcoal in a cooking wok, city police spokesman Richard Wilkes said.

Authorities attribute at least 16 deaths to the winter storm and its aftermath, 11 of them in Missouri. Nine more deaths, five in Missouri, are suspected to have links to the storm. Tracy Panus, a police spokeswoman for St. Louis County, said Tuesday that at least 38 people have been hospitalized for carbon monoxide poisoning due to unsafe heating incidents.

"We had good luck and good skill this time with nursing homes and senior living centers and apartments," says Jeff Rainford, Slay's chief of staff. "The problem is finding people who are still shut in and live alone and don't have relatives or friends." He says National Guard troops knocked on nearly 4,000 doors in sweeps looking for those in need.

Those who endured both blackouts had mixed reviews of which was worse.

"Summer was horrible. I was never so hot or miserable," says Debbie Wierzbicki, 47, who found refuge in a suburban St. Louis shelter. "But then, we could just leave the windows open. This time, the house just got colder every night."

Vanita Jimmerson, 28, bedded down Monday at the shelter with her mother, Gloria, and 5-year-old daughter, Aviana. Their home lost power Friday, and they had toughed it out with three to five blankets on each of their beds.

"It was colder inside than it was outside, to the point where you blow your breath and you can see it," Jimmerson says.

For some, sweating through the summer without air conditioning exceeded the inconvenience of indoor temperatures in the 40s.

"Our food's all on the back porch," says Pam Cacchione, wife of Patrick Cacchione. "In the summer, it was all in the trash."

Onions removed at Taco Bell nationwide as 3 states probe E. coli outbreaks

SOUTH PLAINFIELD, N.J. (AP) — Taco Bell on Wednesday ordered the removal of green onions from its 5,800 restaurants nationwide after samples appeared to have a harsh strain of E. coli.
The fast-food chain, whose restaurants were linked to a recent outbreak of E. coli in three states, said preliminary testing by an independent lab found positive results for the strain.

Taco Bell said that the tests are not conclusive, but that it immediately notified health authorities and its restaurants while it awaits a final analysis.

"In an abundance of caution, we've decided to pull all green onions from our restaurants until we know conclusively whether they are the cause of the E.coli outbreak," said Greg Creed, president of Irvine, Calif.-based Taco Bell.

Taco Bell established a telephone number, 1-800-TACO BELL, for those with concerns about the outbreak.

The chain, a subsidiary of Yum Brands (YUM), reopened restaurants linked to the outbreak on New York's Long Island after the eateries were sanitized. But it closed nine outlets in suburban Philadelphia after health officials reported an E. coli outbreak that sickened four people there.

Health officials have not yet been able to pinpoint the source of the bacteria that have sickened more than 35 people in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Nine people remained hospitalized, including an 11-year-old boy in stable condition with kidney damage.

An outbreak of hepatitis A in 2003 in western Pennsylvania was linked to tainted green onions from Mexico served at a Chi-Chi's restaurant. Four people died and more than 600 people were sickened.

Earlier this year, three people died and more than 200 fell ill from an E. coli outbreak that was traced to packaged, fresh spinach grown in California.

On Tuesday, Taco Bell representatives and state and federal health inspectors visited a food distribution center in Burlington, N.J., that supplied the Long Island and New Jersey restaurants patronized by people who were sickened.

"It involves tracking your way back and trying to see if by process of elimination you can determine the root cause," said Bart McKay, a lawyer for the distributor, McLane Co.

E. coli is found in the feces of humans and livestock. Most E. coli infections are associated with undercooked meat. The bacteria also can be found on sprouts or leafy vegetables such as spinach. The germs can be spread by people if they do not thoroughly wash their hands after using the bathroom.

New Jersey's health commissioner has said the most recent case of E. coli was reported Nov. 29, so the danger of infection might have passed.

Two of the New Jersey restaurants implicated were inspected and remained open. The third, in South Plainfield, remained closed Wednesday morning. Health officials in that restaurant's county said Wednesday they were inspecting food that one still-hospitalized victim had saved, but that tests would not be available until later in the week.

Pennsylvania officials were working to determine if the outbreak there was linked to the New York and New Jersey cases. Three of those who fell ill at the end of November had eaten at a Taco Bell, state Health Department spokesman Troy Thompson said. Two were hospitalized and released.

The nine Taco Bell restaurants located in suburban Philadelphia were voluntarily closing as a precaution, the Montgomery County health department said.

In New York, Irene Abbad stopped at a Taco Bell on Long Island on Tuesday, but she was afraid to eat the food and ordered only a soft drink.

After hearing about the outbreak, she called her son, who she said is a frequent Taco Bell customer. "I said, 'Don't eat Taco Bell for a while."'

E. coli, or Escherichia coli, is a common and ordinarily harmless bacteria, but certain strains can cause abdominal cramps, fever, bloody diarrhea, kidney failure, blindness, paralysis, even death.

Earlier this year, three people died and more than 200 fell ill from an E. coli outbreak that was traced to packaged spinach grown in California.

U.N., Red Cross seek aid for Somalia, Kenya floods

GENEVA, Dec 6 (Reuters) - The United Nations and the Red Cross on Wednesday issued appeals totalling some $40 million to help hundreds of thousands of people in Kenya and Somalia where floods have submerged villages and farmlands and cut off roads.

In Somalia, for which the U.N. is seeking $18 million, the worst floods in decades have added to the woes of one of Africa's poorest countries, where there is no effective central government, basic services or infrastructure.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said another $21.9 million was urgently needed to assist some 563,000 people in Kenya over the next four months, especially in hard-hit northeastern and coastal regions.

"The health situation is particularly alarming. There is a high risk of water-borne disease such as cholera," the Geneva-based Federation said, adding that malaria infections were also on the rise.

At least 150 people have been killed and more than 1 million uprooted by the worst floods for years across Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Rwanda.

Forecasts suggest the rains could continue in December and spread into other countries in central and southern Africa, the Federation, the world's largest relief agency, said in a statement.

"We are increasingly worried about more floods affecting more countries over the next few days and weeks," said Peter Rees, head of the Federation's operations support department.

The appeal for Kenya would cover water purification tablets, emergency water supplies, latrines, and the distribution of seeds and farm equipment.

Some 350,000 people in Somalia, mostly in southern and central areas of the country, have been seriously affected by the floods which followed a devastating drought last year, the U.N. said.

It estimated up to 900,000 might become affected in coming weeks if persistent rains continue.

The U.N. appeal is meant to help provide water and sanitation, food, education, health care and other assistance in the country. Another $10 million has already been funded through the U.N.'s Complex Emergency Response Fund.

"The humanitarian crisis of the Somali people, exhausted by years of conflict and disaster, is now deepening," Eric Laroche, the U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator for Somalia said in a statement.

U.N. officials have previously said insecurity in Somalia, where an interim government is pitted against rival Islamists in a conflict some fear will escalate to all-out war, threatened to hamper efforts to help those uprooted by the floods.