Filipinos still trapped on roofs; typhoons kill 55

Rescuers scrambled Sunday to deliver food and water to hundreds of villagers stuck on rooftops for days because of flooding in the northern Philippines, where back-to-back typhoons have left at least 55 people dead.

Typhoon Nalgae slammed ashore in northeastern Isabela province Saturday, then barreled across the main island of Luzon's mountainous north and agricultural plains, which were still sodden from fierce rain and winds unleashed by a howler just days earlier. Nalgae left at least three people dead Saturday. Typhoon Nesat killed 52 others and left 30 missing in the same region before blowing out Friday.

Nalgae was whirling over the South China Sea and heading toward southern China late Sunday afternoon, 230 miles (370 kilometers) from the Philippines' northeast coast, with sustained winds of 75 miles (120 kilometers) per hour and gusts of 93 mph (150 kph), according to the Philippine government weather agency.

China's National Meteorological Center urged people in areas expected to be lashed by rainstorms in the next three days, including on southernmost Hainan island and in eastern Taiwan, to stay indoors and cancel large assemblies, China's official Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday.

Nalgae's ferocious winds set off a rockslide in the northern mountain province of Bontoc in the Philippines on Saturday, causing boulders to roll down a mountainside and smash a passing van, where a passenger was pinned to death and another was injured, police said.

In northern Tarlac province's Camiling town, a man sought safety with his two young nephews as flooding rose in their village Saturday. But one of the children was swept away by rampaging waters and drowned, while his uncle and his brother remained missing. A drunken man drowned in flooding in a nearby village, provincial disaster officer Marvin Guiang said.

Nalgae roared through parts of Luzon that had been saturated by Typhoon Nesat, which trapped thousands on rooftops and sent huge waves that breached a seawall in Manila Bay. Nesat then pummeled southern China and was downgraded to a tropical storm just before churning into northern Vietnam on Friday, where 20,000 people were evacuated.

Seven towns north of Manila were still flooded Sunday, including Calumpit in rice-growing Bulacan province, where hundreds of residents remained trapped on rooftops in four villages for the fourth day, many desperately waving for help. Rescuers aboard rubber boats could not reach them because of narrow alleys. Two air force helicopters were ordered deployed to drop water and food packs to the marooned villagers, officials said.

Calumpit Mayor James de Jesus pleaded for more help from the national government and the air force.

"The ones waving for help are the ones who need to be rescued first because they have elderly people and children with them," de Jesus told ABS-CBN TV network. "We can't rescue everybody because there are so many of them. It's impossible."

Benito Ramos, who heads the Office of Civil Defense, said that floodwater was receding in many areas. But she cautioned that freshly dumped rains by Nalgae may flow down from the mountainous north to the central Luzon provinces of Bulacan and Pampanga, which act like a catch basin, especially during high tide in nearby Manila Bay. Some officials said water released from nearby dams had exacerbated the floods.

Ramos criticized those villagers who refused to leave their flooded homes despite orders to evacuate.

During a nationally televised meeting with disaster response agencies, President Benigno Aquino III ordered authorities to study how villagers and fishermen can be forced to follow storm warnings to prevent casualties in the future.More...

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Long road from farm to fork worsens food outbreaks

Outbreaks of listeria and other serious illnesses linked to tainted food are becoming more common, partly because much of what we eat takes a long and winding road from farm to fork.

A cantaloupe grown on a Colorado field may make four or five stops before it reaches the dinner table. There's the packing house where it's cleaned and packaged, then the distributor. A processor may cut or bag the fruit. The retail distribution center is where the melons are sent out to various stores. Finally it's stacked on display at the grocery store.

Imported fruits and vegetables have an even longer journey.

The Colorado cantaloupe crop that's linked to 84 illnesses and as many as 17 deaths in 19 states has traveled so far and wide that producer Jensen Farms doesn't even know exactly where their fruit ended up.

The company said last week that it can't provide a list of retailers that sold the tainted fruit because the melons were sold and resold. It named the 28 states where the fruit was shipped, but people in other states have reported getting sick.

"The food chain is very complex," says Sherri McGarry, a senior adviser in the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Foods. "There are many steps, and the more steps there are the harder it can be to link up each step to identify what the common source" of an outbreak is.

Fewer and larger farms and companies dominate food production in the country.

Now, many in the produce industry have come together to try and improve the ability to quickly trace food from field to plate.

This is good business. Large recalls, such as spinach in 2006, peanuts in 2009 and eggs in 2010, tend to depress sales for an entire product industry, even if only one company or grower was responsible for the outbreak.

A food safety law passed by Congress last year gives the FDA new power to improve tracing food through the system. Food safety advocates say the law will help make the food network safer by focusing on making every step in the chain safer and making it easier to find the source of outbreaks.

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Afghanistan urges Pakistan to take steps for peace

The Afghan government needs to see Pakistan making "tangible progress" on pledges to use its influence to help end the Taliban insurgency, a foreign ministry spokesman said Sunday.

The statement came a day after Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he was giving up on trying to talk to the Taliban directly and that the key to ending the war is mediation by Pakistan.

It underscores the Afghan officials' deep frustration over their inability to deal with a major barrier to ending the war in Afghanistan — insurgent havens across the border in Pakistan.

Already tense Afghan-Pakistani relations have been further degraded in recent weeks as U.S. and Afghan officials have publicly blamed the Pakistani government for supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan following a string of high-profile attacks.

"Afghanistan has invested a great amount of goodwill and political capital to create an atmosphere of trust and confidence and to try to improve relations with Pakistan over the past three years," the spokesman, Janan Mosazai, told reporters in Kabul.

"Unfortunately, we have not been witness to the type of concrete progress that we were expecting — that was promised to us by our brothers and sisters in Pakistan," he added.

For his part, Karzai has suspended a series of trilateral meetings between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States because of the fallout.

"When it comes to specific examples of tangible progress that we would like to see, it is facilitation of direct negotiations with the Taliban leadership and with any other insurgent leaders who are prepared to join the Afghan national reconciliation process," Mosazai said.

Mosazai said an Afghan delegation would travel to Pakistan, possibly as early as Sunday night, to discuss the peace process and the allegations that Pakistan had a role in the recent assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, as alleged by some Afghan officials.

Pakistani analysts said the breakdown in relations between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the U.S. has dire implications for any potential peace settlement with the Taliban, which all sides have said is the only sustainable way to end the Afghan war.

"I don't think anyone is in the mood for talks right now," said Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who has written extensively on the region.

Rashid said he thought Karzai was playing to the American gallery because the mood in the Obama administration and Congress was allegedly anti-Pakistani. The only potential for the reconciliation process to move forward would be an improvement in U.S.-Pakistan relations, something that doesn't seem likely in the near future, said Rashid.

"You need a breakthrough between the U.S. and Pakistan so they can convince Karzai to resume" talks, said Rashid.

There is debate over how much influence Pakistan actually has with the Taliban, but most analysts believe that the country is vital to the success of any peace talks.

"My own sense is that Pakistani influence and connections and its clout is largely exaggerated," said Riffat Hussain, a professor of defense studies at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. "But if there is any player who can act as a bridge to bring these guys on board, it has to be Pakistan." Specifically, he said, the powerful Pakistani intelligence service must be involved.

On Sunday, NATO forces said in a statement that an international service member died Saturday in a bomb attack in southern Afghanistan. The military coalition did not provide further details.

At least 43 international service members have died in Afghanistan in September, the majority of them American forces.

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Yemeni jet mistakenly bombs army post, kills 30

A government warplane has mistakenly bombed an army position in southern Yemen, killing at least 30 soldiers and wounding many more, military and medical officials said on Sunday.

The officials said the bombing, which took place on Saturday evening in the southern Abyan province, targeted an abandoned school used as shelter by soldiers of the army's 119th Brigade.

The school is located just east of Abyan's provincial capital Zinjibar, where militants linked to al-Qaida have been in control since May.

Heavy fighting has been raging in the area for days as part of the army's monthslong campaign to seize back Zinjibar from the militants.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information, said there were unconfirmed reports that militants arrived at the school soon after the airstrike and killed an unspecified number of the wounded.

The 119th Brigade has rebelled against the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh to join the protest movement demanding his ouster. It is thought to have received significant support from the U.S. military to enable it to fight the militants in the south more efficiently.

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700 arrested after protest on NY's Brooklyn Bridge

More than 700 protesters demonstrating against corporate greed, global warming and social inequality, among other grievances, were arrested Saturday after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and shut down a lane of traffic for several hours in a tense confrontation with police.

The group Occupy Wall Street has been camped out in a plaza in Manhattan's Financial District for nearly two weeks staging various marches, and had orchestrated an impromptu trek to Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon. They walked in thick rows on the sidewalk up to the bridge, where some demonstrators spilled onto the roadway after being told to stay on the pedestrian pathway, police said.

The majority of those arrested were given citations for disorderly conduct and were released, police said.

Some protesters sat on the roadway, chanting "Let us go," while others chanted and yelled at police from the pedestrian walkaway above. Police used orange netting to stop the group from going farther down the bridge, which is under construction.

Some of the protesters said they were lured onto the roadway by police, or they didn't hear the calls from authorities to head to the pedestrian walkway. Police said no one was tricked into being arrested, and those in the back of the group who couldn't hear were allowed to leave.

"Multiple warnings by police were given to protesters to stay on the pedestrian walkway and that if they took roadway they would be arrested," said Paul Browne, the chief spokesman of the New York Police Department.

Erin Larkins, a Columbia University graduate student at who says she and her boyfriend have significant student loan debt, was among the thousands of protesters on the bridge. She said a friend persuaded her to join the march and she's glad she did.

"I don't think we're asking for much, just to wake up every morning not worrying whether we can pay the rent, or whether our next meal will be rice and beans again," Larkins wrote in an email to The Associated Press. "No one is expecting immediate change. I think everyone is just hopeful that people will wake up a bit and realize that the more we speak up, the more the people that do have the authority to make changes in this world listen."

Several videos taken of the event show a confusing, chaotic scene. Some show protesters screaming obscenities at police and taking a hat from one of the officers. Others show police struggling with people who refuse to get up. Nearby, a couple posed for wedding pictures on the bridge.

"We were supposed to go up the pedestrian roadway," said Robert Cammiso, a 48-year-old student from Brooklyn told the Daily News. "There was a huge funnel, a bottleneck, and we couldn't fit. People jumped from the walkway onto the roadway. We thought the roadway was open to us."

Earlier Saturday, thousands who joined two other marches crossed the Brooklyn Bridge without problems. One was from Brooklyn to Manhattan by a group opposed to genetically modified food. Another in the opposite direction marched against poverty organized by United Way.
Elsewhere in the U.S. on Saturday, protesters assembled in Albuquerque, N.M., Boston and Los Angeles to express their solidarity with the movement in New York, though their demands remain unclear. Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have been camped in Zuccotti Park and have clashed with police on earlier occasions. Mostly, the protests have been peaceful, and the movement has shown no signs of losing steam. Celebrities including Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon made recent stops to encourage the group.
During the length of the protest, turnout has varied, but the numbers have reached as high as about a few thousand. A core group of about two hundred people remain camped throughout the week. They sleep on air mattresses, use Mac laptops and play drums. They go to the bathroom at the local McDonald's. A few times a day, they march down to Wall Street, yelling, "This is what democracy looks like!"
There has been a growing swell of coverage in mainstream media, but there has been loud complaining the cause hasn't been championed fast enough — or in the way protesters want.

Misinformation has added to the confusion. For instance, a rumor sprang up on Twitter that the New York Police Department wanted to use tear gas on protesters — a crowd-control tactic the department doesn't use. The claim was eventually retracted, one of several such retractions over the past several days. On Friday, a message said Radiohead would be performing in solidarity for the cause, but the band's management said it wasn't playing.

Earlier clashes with police have resulted in about 100 arrests. Most were for disorderly conduct. Many were the subject of homemade videos posted online.

One video surfaced of a group of girls shot with pepper spray by NYPD Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna. The woman claimed they were abused and demanded the officer resign, and the video has been the subject of several news articles and commentary. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said internal affairs would look into whether Bologna acted improperly and has also said the video doesn't show "tumultuous" behavior by the protesters.More...

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