Earthquake hits Caribbean coast

A strong earthquake has hit Honduras and Belize, leaving at least five dead and 40 injured and destroying many homes on the Caribbean coast. The 7.1 magnitude quake struck at 2.20am (0820GMT) on Thursday, 64km from Roatan, the biggest of Honduras' Bay Islands. "We have confirmed four dead," Randolfo Funes, an official at Honduras' civil protection agency, said. "They were all asleep. Most of them died crushed ... There will be many more dead." A six-year-old girl in the Honduran beach town of Morazan was killed when one of the walls of her house fell on her. Another man in the nearby town of Tela suffered a heart attack when the quake struck and was taken for treatment. Scenes of fear Local residents told of scenes of fear as people struggled to find safety and some were trapped under buildings. "I felt the car rock and I started to hear little bits of debris from the building next door hitting the roof," Pedro Ramirez, a security guard who was in his lorry outside an office building in Tegucigalpa when the tremor hit, said. "It was frightening because it was shaking a lot. I've never felt anything like it." Alfredo Cedeno, at the Gran Hotel Paris in the beach town of La Ceiba, said: "People were running for the door. "You could really feel it and you could see the water come out of the pool." Democracy Bridge, which crosses the Ulua, the country's largest river, collapsed in the town of El Progreso. "It was an earthquake of great proportions,'' Ana Maria Rivera, a spokeswoman for the Honduran emergency commission, said.

June 6, 1944: UK's last day as a superpower

The scale of the D-Day landings, 65 years ago this week, will never be repeated. But this last hurrah for British military might also became the model for armed intervention from Bosnia to Afghanistan, says Peter Caddick-Adams. Sixty-five years after the event, the 1944 campaign in Normandy remains a battle of awe-inspiring proportions. The simple facts of D-Day itself still conjure visions of wonder in an era used to telephone-number salaries, international travel and lightning-speed communication, and represented an unprecedented feat of military planning. Two-hundred thousand seamen manned 6,939 ships, including 1,213 warships. One astonished German described the off-shore scene as "a city on the water". Putting troops ashore involved 4,126 landing vessels of all types, including 1,073 tank landing craft, as well as 864 merchant ship. American troops muster on Utah beach By the day's end had deposited 132,715 troops and 20,000 vehicles directly on to the beaches, with another 23,490 parachutists and glider-borne troops dropped by the allied air forces. The aerial armada supported the landings with 11,590 aircraft, which flew 14,674 sorties. In the previous nine weeks 197,000 sorties had been flown (at a cost of 1,251 aircraft and 12,000 aircrew) and 195,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on German military and communications targets. The cover of Time Magazine called the 1994 Normandy celebrations The Last Crusade, implying that in the future no single invasion fleet or military force would be so concentrated - the subsequent invention and deployment of atomic weapons with their awesome destructive capabilities would make such a fleet too vulnerable a target. It was Britain's last day as a superpower. No army in the world today could project such force and much of the effort on 6 June 1944 was British - about 60% of the troops landed were UK or Commonwealth (Canadians); the warships were predominantly from the Royal Navy - even the landing craft taking the Americans to Omaha Beach were manned by British seamen - and much of the air power came from the RAF.  The allied co-operation for the campaign was the military forerunner of modern coalition warfare, Nato and the political antecedent of the EU  The senior commanders under Eisenhower (an American) were all British, led by Montgomery. So the clock started ticking as more US troops gradually arrived (and therefore started taking a higher percentage of the casualties) and eventually the Americans had enough men ashore to warrant their own Army Group and their own direct command under Eisenhower. So, while the Normandy campaign ended with more of an American flavour, it was prefaced by our last hurrah on D-Day itself. We have never competed with the Americans on anything like equal terms since. One of the myths of Operation Overlord (the codename for the invasion of France) is it was the biggest seaborne invasion in history. It was not. Nor was it the biggest maritime invasion of World War II. That accolade goes to the 1943 invasion of Sicily - a far greater undertaking than Normandy and one from which many valuable lessons were learned. Worse than Somme Ironically, because of the casualties, the Normandy campaign ended up as more attritional than the worst battles of the 1914-18 war, something its commanders - haunted by the shadow of the Somme - desperately tried to avoid. The scene on Utah beach Enlarge Image The campaign lasted 77 days (as against the 90 days predicted by allied planners), and resulted in the destruction of the German Seventh Army and Fifth Panzer Army in the Falaise Pocket by 21 August. Some 209,672 allied soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing, 16,714 allied aircrew lost their lives. German losses were estimated at 250,000. Additionally, 2,483 Normans connected with the French Resistance were executed before or during the campaign, while as many as 35,000 civilians died (the lowest estimate is 15,000) and 60,000 were wounded in the liberation. This averages out at 6,600 casualties per day for the entire campaign. This daily average exceeds the Great War daily casualty rates of Verdun 1916 (2,300 per day over 299 days), the Somme 1916 (6,400/day over 142 days) or Passchendaele 1917 (4,600/day over 113 days). By mid-July 1944, the region was as heavily populated with troops as the Western Front of World War I: there were 2,052,299 allied troops and nearly half-a-million German soldiers in Normandy that summer of 1944. Rainbow coalition From a purely European spectacle, it can be argued that the allied co-operation for the campaign was the military forerunner of modern coalition warfare, Nato and the political antecedent of the European Union. More than 200,000 allied soldiers died British, Free French, Belgian, Dutch, Luxembourgois, Czechs, Poles, Greek, Danish and Norwegian naval and military forces all took part, or flew overhead with the vast air armada. Many soldiers from the Irish Republic fought with British units, whilst some anti-Nazi Austrians and German Jews were involved in the allied deception and intelligence war. You'll find a rainbow of nationalities in Normandy this summer - Swedish and Chinese, Pakistani, Nigerian and Columbian military folk all trek to the region, for the campaign is widely studied today by military leaders from around the world. They walk the terrain looking not at the tactics, but at the example of a multinational military operation, encompassing air, land and sea forces, which ended in victory but saw costly mistakes and unwelcome surprises along the way. In many ways, the way military business done in Bosnia, Iraq or Afghanistan and on UN peacekeeping missions owe much to the seeds sown on 6 June 1944.

Guru wounded in Austrian Sikh temple shooting dies: police

A visiting Indian guru died early on Monday after being shot in a clash between rival religious communities at a gurdwara in Vienna in which about 30 people were injured, police announced.

The guru, Sant Rama Nand, 56, one of two visiting the Austrian capital, died of his wounds in hospital after Sikh followers clashed with knives and at least one gun at a gurdwara in Vienna on Sunday,a police spokesman said.
"The surgeon said at first he was satisfied with his patient's condition after an emergency operation," the spokesman said. "But the patient lost consciousness and died shortly after midnight (0330 IST)," he added.
The condition of the second wounded guru, Sant Niranjan Dass, 66, was described as stable, the spokesman said. The two gurus belonged to the Shri Guru Ravidas Sabha movement.
The clash broke out around 1:30 pm (1700 IST)and saw the perpetrators pull out knives and a gun as the gurus visiting from India gave a sermon at the temple, where some 200 people had gathered.
Others in the audience pounced on the attackers, whom a witness said were wearing yellow and blue turbans, and subdued them, according to police.
"Six people did not agree" with the sermon, police spokesman Michael Takacs told Austrian public radio. "One drew a firearm, the others knives. The six people were overpowered by members of the community and seriously injured.

‘More women commit suicide during menstrual period’

A team of forensic experts at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) has correlated complexities in menstrual cycle with the tendency to commit suicide among women.

Women in depression, especially during their menstrual periods, run a greater risk of harming themselves including committing suicide, a team of researchers at the country’s premier institute has found out.
“Complexities in menstrual cycle may be a strong reason for heightened suicide risk,” said Dr TD Dogra, head of department of forensic sciences at AIIMS.
“Women with menstrual problem were more likely to have a major depressive disorder than women with no such problems and we have observed menstrual cycle having a positive association with suicidal behaviour.”
In all, 100 female bodies, between the age group of 15-45 years, were studied for the research. And out of those 56 bodies were found to be suicide cases. The rest had died due to various other reasons.