The week in review
Posted on Sunday, October 5, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Perspective/239421/
Around the world Stampede kills 47 A religious festival in northern India turned into a horrific deadly crush on Tuesday as thousands of Hindu pilgrims stampeded at a temple shrine, piling into each other on a treacherous walkway slick with spilled coconut milk. Officials said at least 147 people, mostly men, suffocated. Television footage showed dead pilgrims strewn on the narrow walkway about 150 yards from the Chamunda Devi temple, at the southern edge of the 15 th-century Mehrangarh fort in Jodphur, in the western state of Rajasthan. It was the second deadly religious tragedy in the past few months in India, where pilgrim stampedes are not uncommon. Tuesday was the first day of a nine-day festival called Navratra that celebrates nine incarnations of the Hindu mother goddess Durga. Between 2, 000 and 3, 000 pilgrims were present when the stampede began at about 6 a. m. While the exact cause of the stampede was unclear, officials said the disaster was worsened by devotees who had brought cracked coconuts as religious offerings, which slickened the temple floors and surroundings with coconut milk. Once the stampede started, many victims slipped and fell as they scrambled to escape. “It seems the narrow path became very slippery,” said Kiran Soni Gupta, chief civil servant in the district. “Most of the dead are men and without any visible physical injuries. It seems they died of suffocation.” She said the latest death toll was 147 dead, and 55 injured, with two of the injured in a serious condition. Some unconfirmed Indian news accounts reported the death toll exceeded 168. “The injured do not have any major physical injuries, not even a simple fracture,” said Dr. D. R. Mathur of Mahatma Gandhi hospital in Jodhpur. “None of the dead bodies have any injury marks. They all died of suffocation.”
Around the nation Market falls 780 points Wall Street’s worst fears came to pass Monday, when the government’s financial bailout plan failed in Congress and stocks plunged precipitously — hurtling the Dow Jones industrial average down nearly 7 percent. The almost 780-point decline was the largest one-day point drop ever for the index. The percentage declines for the Standard & Poor’s 500 and Nasdaq composite indexes were even larger. And credit markets, whose turmoil helped feed the stock market’s angst, froze up further amid the growing belief that the country is headed into a spreading credit and economic crisis. The historic selloff spread to Asia Tuesday, with all major stock markets in the region tumbling sharply as they succumbed to heightened fears of a broader global credit crisis. On Monday, the Dow fell 777. 68, or 6. 98 percent, to 10, 365. 45. The blue chip index dropped by hundreds of points in a matter of moments, and by the end of the day had passed by far its previous record for a one-day drop — 684. 81—set in the first trading day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The drop also surpasses the 721. 56 intraday decline record also set during the first trading day after the terror attacks. Car sales decline
September was another difficult month for carmakers. Toyota, the Ford Motor Company and Chrysler each said Wednesday that their sales in the United States fell more than 30 percent in September, as volatility in the financial markets compounded what already had been a miserable year for the auto industry. But sales were better than expected at General Motors, which reported a 16 percent decline and estimated that its market share rose to the highest level in more than three years. “We are looking at a very fragile economy,” Emily Kolinski-Morris, Ford’s chief economist, said on a conference call with analysts and reporters. “I don’t think anyone can say where the bottom might be.” Sales were off 34 percent at Ford, 33 percent at Chrysler and 32 percent at Toyota. Honda, which had fared much better than its rivals in the first half of the year, reported a 24 percent decline. Car dealers have been struggling to draw customers into their showrooms. General: Troops needed
The military needs more troops “as quickly as possible” in Afghanistan, the top American commander in that country said Wednesday, warning that the fighting could worsen before it gets better. Trying to meet Gen. David McKiernan’s urgent need for weapons and equipment, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has asked the military for additional surveillance drones and armored vehicles immediately for Afghanistan, The Associated Press has learned. After an Oval Office briefing from McKiernan, President Bush said Afghanistan is “a situation where there’s been progress and there are difficulties.” The U. S. is in a tough fight in Afghanistan, Bush said. He cited progress in health care, education and transportation, and said McKiernan relayed “what he’s going to need to make sure that we continue helping this young democracy succeed.” McKiernan is in Washington this week meeting with top leaders and laying out his military requirements.
Around the state Crime shows decline Little Rock crime statistics for the first eight months of 2008 show a dramatic drop in violence, down by more than 25 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. Through Aug. 31, all four main categories tracked in the annual FBI Uniform Crime Report — homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — are down by a combined 27. 27 percent, from 2, 237 cases in 2007 to 1, 627 so far this year. And while Little Rock police and anti-crime activists attribute the decreases to new community outreach and education programs and efforts to reduce crime in certain areas, academic experts say it’s more complicated than that. David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention & Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, called the change “quite dramatic. You’re talking about too short a period of time for factors such as a fundamental demographic change or a population change to have an effect,” he said.