remains

At least 128 people died and 200 remain missing after the towers housing 4,600 people were engulfed by flames.

People in Hong Kong are mourning the deaths of at least 128 people who died in the region’s largest blaze in decades in an eight-apartment residential complex.

The flags outside the central government offices were lowered to half-mast on Saturday as Hong Kong leader John Lee, other officials and civil servants, all dressed in black, gathered to pay their respects to those lost at the Wang Fuk Court estate since the fire on Wednesday.

Condolence books have been set up at 18 points around the former British colony for the public to pay their respects, officials said.

At the site of the residential complex, families and mourners gathered to lay flowers.

By Friday, only 39 of the victims had been identified, leaving families with the morbid task of looking at the photographs of the deceased taken by rescue workers.

The number of victims could still dramatically rise as some 200 people remain missing, with authorities declaring the end of the search for survivors on Friday.

But identification work and search for remains continues, as Lee said the government is setting up a fund with 300 million Hong Kong dollars ($39m) in capital to help the residents.

The local community is also pitching in, with hundreds of volunteers mobilising to help the victims, including by distributing food and other essential items. Some of China’s biggest companies have pledged donations as well.

The Wang Fuk Court fire marks Hong Kong’s deadliest since 1948, when 176 people died in a warehouse blaze.

At least 11 people have been arrested in connection with the tragedy, according to local authorities.

They include two directors and an engineering consultant of the firm identified by the government as doing maintenance on the towers for more than a year, who are accused of manslaughter for using unsafe materials.

The towers, located in the northern district of Tai Po, were undergoing renovations, with the highly flammable bamboo scaffolding and green mesh used to cover the building believed to be a major facilitator of the quick spread of the blaze.

Most of the victims were found in two towers in the complex, with seven of the eight towers suffering extensive damage, including from flammable foam boards used by the maintenance company to seal and protect windows.

The deadly incident has prompted comparisons with the blaze at the Grenfell Tower in London that killed 72 people in 2017, with the fire blamed on flammable cladding on the tower’s exterior, as well as on failings by the government and the construction industry.

“Our hearts go out to all those affected by the horrific fire in Hong Kong,” the Grenfell United survivors’ group said in a short statement on social media.

“To the families, friends and communities, we stand with you. You are not alone.”

Nov. 24 (UPI) — A federal agency wants to exhume unknown servicemembers who died in the Pearl Harbor attack in Honolulu, Hawai, including on the battleship Arizona, 84 years ago.

The Defense Department’s Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency announced it “will seek exhumation of dozens of unknowns from the Pearl Harbor attack once an advocacy group is confirmed to have reached the required mark in its genealogy work,” Stars & Stripes reported last week. The agency has a searchable list of missing military personnel dating to World War II.

They want to remove 86 sets of commingled remains buried as unknowns from the Arizona in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and 55 sets of remains with no known ship affiliation, DPAA director Kelly McKeague told Stars & Stripes.

Since the surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941, the Arizona has been underwater as a gravesite for more than 900 entombed.

The Pearl Harbor National Memorial straddles the sunken battleship with an oil sheen. The names of all 1,177 casualties are engraved on a marble wall in the Shrine Room of the memorial.

The U.S. Navy considers the site a final resting place.

In all, 2,403 were killed at Pearl Harbor, including on the USS Oklahoma with 429 fatalities.

Of the ship’s dead, 277 of the sailors and marines are buried in Honolulu’s National Memorial of the Pacific with the 86 unknown remains.

The Pentagon requires a general threshold of family reference samples from 60% of the “potentially associated service members” before removal.

With the Arizona, that means 643 families. Once the threshold had been reached, final approval from the Defense Department can be sought.

The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory had DNA from 613 families and is awaiting additional test kits, DPAA director Kelly McKeague said.

Rear Adm. Darius Banaji, the agency’s deputy director, said in 2021 the Navy had no plans to exhume the remains and try to identify them because there is insufficient documentation, the Military Times reported.

It would cost approximately $2.7 million and take 10 years to track down enough families.

In 2023, Virginia-based real estate agent Kevin Kline formed Operation 85 with a “mission to identify 85 or more crew members removed from the ship in 1942, or found near the U.S.S. Arizona after the attack, never identified, and left buried in commingled graves ten miles away from Pearl Harbor, marked only as “UNKNOWN USS ARIZONA.”

His great-uncle, Robert Edwin Kline, a gunner’s mate second class petty officer, was among those killed on the Arizona, and his remains were never recovered or identified.

Kline brought in research analysts and a forensic genealogist to track down the appropriate family member DNA donors and worked with the Navy and Marine Corps casualty offices to send DNA kits to the families.

They have tracked down 1,415 family members from 672 families

“What DPAA is preparing to do now is exactly the mission we built the foundation for,” Kline said. “When the system said ‘no,’ families stepped forward and made ‘yes’ possible.”

James Silverstein is a California attorney and maternal grandnephew of Pearl Harbor casualty Petty Officer 2nd Class Harry Smith.

“So much hard work and dedication has gone into something that should have been so uncontroversial, yet has been so difficult to receive approval for,” he told Stars & Stripes. “It will be such a glorious homecoming and well-deserved sendoff when they are identified.”

Officials have recovered the remains of all 20 people who were killed when a Turkish C-130 cargo plane crashed near the Georgia-Azerbaijan border Tuesday.

Body identified as Israeli soldier Hadar Goldin with the remains of four other deceased captives still in Gaza.

Israel has received the body of a soldier held in Gaza for more than a decade after he was killed in an ambush by Hamas fighters in 2014 during the last major ground assault on the Palestinian enclave.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said on Sunday the remains were handed over to Israeli forces in Gaza by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) after Hamas transferred the body to the aid organisation.

Formal identification of Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, 23, was confirmed by Israeli forensics teams.

At the start of a weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said holding the body for so long has caused “great agony for his family, which will now be able to give him a Jewish burial”.

“Lieutenant Hadar Goldin fell in heroic combat during Operation Protective Edge,” Israel’s leader said.

The Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, said the body was retrieved on Saturday from a tunnel in the Yebna refugee camp in Rafah in southern Gaza.

Goldin was killed on August 1, 2014, two hours after a ceasefire took effect and ended that year’s war between Israel and Hamas. He was part of an Israeli unit tasked with locating and destroying Hamas tunnels.

Another Israeli soldier, Oron Shaul, was also killed in the six-week war, and his body was returned earlier this year.

There are now four deceased abductees remaining in Gaza to be returned under the terms of a ceasefire that began last month. Hamas has so far released 20 living captives and 24 bodies.

For each body returned, Israel has been releasing the remains of 15 Palestinians. Ahmed Dheir, director of forensic medicine at the Nasser Medical Complex in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, said 300 bodies have now been returned and 89 identified.

Israeli attacks continue

Israel has also released nearly 2,000 living Palestinian prisoners since the October 10 truce began. Palestinian authorities said more than 10,000 people still remain in Israeli detention.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health said 241 Palestinians have been killed and 619 wounded since the ceasefire began and 528 bodies have been recovered from under rubble and at attack sites.

Despite the truce, Israel’s military continues to carry out attacks across the Gaza Strip. On Sunday, one man was killed in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, and two died in separate assaults in the north and south, the Health Ministry said.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man in the Far’a refugee camp near Tubas while Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian farmers in several areas, according to local reports.

According to Israeli authorities, Palestinian armed groups captured 251 people during Hamas’s attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and killed at least 1,139 people.

Israel began its war in Gaza on the same day. It has killed at least 68,875 Palestinians and wounded 170,679, according to the Health Ministry.

On her first day in office, Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency on homelessness.

The declaration allowed the city to cut through red tape, including through no-bid contracts, and to start Inside Safe, Bass’ signature program focused on moving homeless people off the streets and into interim housing.

On Tuesday, nearly three years after she took the helm, and with homelessness trending down two years in a row for the first time in recent years, the mayor announced that she will lift the state of emergency on Nov. 18.

“We have begun a real shift in our city’s decades-long trend of rising homelessness,” Bass said in a memorandum to the City Council.

Still, the mayor said, there is much work to do.

“The crisis remains, and so does our urgency,” she said.

The mayor’s announcement followed months of City Council pushback on the lengthy duration of the state of emergency, which the council had initially approved.

Some council members argued that the state of emergency allowed the mayor’s office to operate out of public view and that contracts and leases should once again be presented before them with public testimony and a vote.

Councilmember Tim McOsker has been arguing for months that it was time to return to business as usual.

“Emergency powers are designed to allow the government to suspend rules and respond rapidly when the situation demands it, but at some point those powers must conclude,” he said in a statement Tuesday.

McOsker said the move will allow the council to “formalize” some of the programs started during the emergency, while incorporating more transparency.

Council members had been concerned that the state of emergency would end without first codifying Executive Directive 1, which expedites approvals for homeless shelters as well as for developments that are 100% affordable and was issued by Bass shortly after she took office.

On Oct. 28, the council voted for the city attorney to draft an ordinance that would enshrine the executive directive into law.

The mayor’s announcement follows positive reports about the state of homelessness in the city.

As of September, the mayor’s Inside Safe program had moved more than 5,000 people into interim housing since its inception at the end of 2022. Of those people, more than 1,243 have moved into permanent housing, while another 1,636 remained in interim housing.

This year, the number of homeless people living in shelters or on the streets of the city dropped 3.4%, according to the annual count conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. The number of unsheltered homeless people in the city dropped by an even steeper margin of 7.9%.

The count, however, has its detractors. A study by Rand found that the annual survey missed nearly a third of homeless people in Hollywood, Venice and Skid Row — primarily those sleeping without tents or vehicles.

In June, a federal judge decided not to put Los Angeles’ homelessness programs into receivership, while saying that the city had failed to meet some of the terms of a settlement agreement with the nonprofit LA Alliance for Human Rights.

Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, said the end of the emergency does not mean the crisis is over.

“It only means that we must build fiscally sustainable systems that can respond effectively,” she said. “By transitioning from emergency measures to long-term, institutional frameworks, we’re ensuring consistent, accountable support for people experiencing homelessness.”

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.

French Open champion Gauff reset admirably following her scrappy display against Pegula and reasserted herself as a title challenger with this solid performance.

She produced just three double faults and reduced her total unforced errors by over half (30), with her more consistent serving in particular providing a significant confidence boost before her meeting with Sabalenka.

Displaying calmness and confidence from the back of the court, Gauff appeared largely in control after taking charge of the opening set.

After breaking world number eight Paolini to love at the first opportunity, Gauff withstood three break points to establish a commanding 3-0 lead – and struck back immediately when the Italian offered a response, before serving out the set.

With 29-year-old Paolini’s resistance fading, Gauff converted the first break point of the second set following a superb forehand winner, before sealing victory with a dominant five-game streak.

“I was just trying to play relaxed,” said Gauff. “I played a WTA Finals where I lost all three matches and I was determined to not make a repeat of that.

“I know today was important to keep myself in the tournament.”

Gaza residents say they fear a return to Israel’s full-scale bombing as they struggle to find food, water and medicine.