NEPAL RESCUERS FIND 3 BODIES NEAR CRASHED US MARINE CHOPPER
Source: AP
BY BINAJ GURUBACHARYA AND NIRMALA GEORGE
KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) -- Nepalese rescuers on Friday found three bodies near the wreckage of a U.S. Marine helicopter that disappeared earlier this week while on a relief mission in the earthquake-hit Himalayan nation, and officials said it was unlikely there were any survivors from the crash.
"The wreckage of the helicopter was found in pieces and there are no chances of any survivors," Nepal's Defense Secretary Iswori Poudyal said. He gave no details about the nationalities of the three victims, only saying their remains were charred.
The helicopter was carrying six Marines and two Nepalese army soldiers.
A separate team sent by the U.S. Marines also said they identified the wreckage as the missing helicopter, the UH-1 "Huey."
FULL story at link.
Also see: Wilcox, Nebraska, native piloted Marine Corps helicopter missing in Nepal: http://www.omaha.com/news/military/wilcox-nebraska-native-piloted-marine-corps-helicopter-missing-in-nepal/article_e42e877a-fa6e-11e4-86d8-c3e5ce8cbdd8.html
POSTED: THURSDAY, MAY 14, 2015 2:24 PM
By Steve Liewer / World-Herald staff writer
Family members of a Marine Corps helicopter pilot from central Nebraska who is missing with his crew in Nepal are holding out hope that he’ll come home safely.
Nothing has been heard from Capt. Dustin Lukasiewicz, 28, of Wilcox, since his UH-1Y Huey disappeared Tuesday about 45 miles east of the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu.
The helicopter vanished that evening while on a disaster relief mission in rugged, mountainous country, near the epicenter of a 7.3 earthquake that occurred earlier that day. Lukasiewicz’s relatives said they have learned that he was one of six Marines aboard the aircraft, along with two Nepalese soldiers.
“The family is staying positive, and praying,” said Mike McCann of Kearney, whose wife is Lukasiewicz’s cousin. “It’s in God’s hands.”
DEFENSE VIDEO & IMAGERY DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM
Dustin Lukasiewicz is a 2003 graduate of Wilcox-Hildreth High School and a 2007 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
FULL story at link. Video: http://studio.omaha.com/?ndn.trackingGroup=91341&ndn.siteSection=omahalanding&ndn.videoId=29076480&freewheel=91341&sitesection=omahalanding&vid=29076480
Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_NEPAL_EARTHQUAKE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
= new reply since forum marked as read
Have you been to US military "combat zone", particularly in Southwest Asia? The US department of defense human traffics many poor Nepalese in-fact.
A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad:
Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World's Largest Embassy
John Owens didn’t realize how different his job would be from his last 27 years in construction until he signed on with First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting in November 2005. Working as general foreman, he would be overseeing an army of workers building the largest, most expensive and heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Scheduled to open in 2007, the sprawling complex near the Tigris River will equal Vatican City in size.
Then seven months into the job, he quit.
Not one of the five different US embassy sites he had worked on around the world compared to the mess he describes. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption, but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional, he says. The Kuwait-based company building the $592-million Baghdad project is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken.”
<snip>
No Questions Asked
By March 2006, First Kuwaiti’s operation began looking even sketchier to Owens as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Baghdad following some R&R in Kuwait city. He remembers being surrounded by about 50 First Kuwaiti laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai – not to Baghdad.
“I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane,” says the 48-year-old Floridian who once worked as a fisherman with his father before moving into the construction business.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173
BTW -- that was nothing new -- business as usual (from 2005
Blood, Sweat & Tears:
Asia’s Poor Build U.S. Bases in Iraq
Invisible and Indispensable Army of Low-Paid Workers
This mostly invisible, but indispensable army of low-paid workers has helped set new records for the largest civilian workforce ever hired in support of a U.S. war. They may be the most significant factor to the Pentagon’s argument that privatizing military support services is far more cost-efficient for the U.S. taxpayer than using its own troops to maintain camps and feed its ranks.
But American contractors returning home frequently share horrible tales of the working and living conditions that these TCNs endure on a daily basis.
TCNs frequently sleep in crowded trailers, wait outside in line in 100 degree heat to eat “slop,” lack adequate medical care and work almost every waking hour seven days a week for little or no overtime pay. Frequently, the workers lack proper safety equipment for hard labor
And when insurgents fire incoming mortars and rockets at the sprawling military camps, American contractors slip on helmets and bulletproof vests, but TCNs are frequently shielded by only the shirts on their backs and the flimsy trailers they sleep in.
Adding to these hardships, some TCNs complain publicly about not being paid according to their contracts and they also accuse their employers of “bait-and-switch” recruitment tactics where they are falsely recruited for jobs in the Middle East and then pressured to work in Iraq. Once in Iraq, their passports are held to prevent them from escaping. All of these problems have resulted in labor disputes, including labor strikes and work stoppages at US military camps.
“They do all the grunt jobs,” said Steve Powell, 54, of the rural town of Azle, Texas, a former KBR supervisor from the United States. “But a lot of them are top notch.”
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12675
2012 ACLU - Victims of complacency: The Ongoing Trafficking and Abuse of Third Country Nationals
by U.S. Government Contractors
https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/hrp_traffickingreport_web_0.pdf
I posted the UCLA: Law Review study down-thread. Those were just official sources, I could have used personal stories -- what I saw there - on a large very scale the very opposite of "the US always does" when they have rampant labor abuses for over a decade and have done nothing. Poor Asians & Africans driving fiberglass vehicles, no armor, no weapon for like $300 a month not to mention living on a compound & subject to Kuwaiti law (we always had to wait at the border for the guards to search their vehicles). Pentagon don't even track their death tallies & for the work they've done, if they were US military they'd be given awards & presentation ceremonies but are used & abused then ignored.
Anyways, this is what I could find on Russia
Post-Soviet era
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nepal had extended full diplomatic recognition to the Russian Federation as its legal successor. Since then numerous bilateral meetings have taken place between both sides. Since 1992 numerous Nepalese students have gone to Russia for higher studies on a financial basis. In October 2005 the Foreign ministers of both countries met to discuss cooperation on a variety of issues including political, economic, military, educational, and cultural. Both countries maintain embassies in each other's capitals. Russia has an embassy in Katmandu while Nepal has an embassy in Moscow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepal%E2%80%93Russia_relations
There are many articles where Russia claims they're sending relief workers. Countless articles reported that two Russian diplomats were killed in the mountains but doesn't appear to be a humanitarian relief sort of thing as they were there when the earthquake hit probably why they died.
Report
U.S., China, India Race to Send Aid to Earthquake-Battered Nepal
The United States, China, and India are sending disaster response teams to earthquake-ravaged Nepal, highlighting the role that disaster diplomacy can play in foreign affairs as countries project soft-power influence and aim to win goodwill among their neighbors.
Chinese search-and-rescue teams arrived in Nepal on Sunday, one day after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake devastated the capital city of Kathmandu and killed more than 3,700 people across the Himalayan nation. The U.S. Disaster Response Team is slated to arrive midday on Monday, while a pair of U.S. military special forces teams are providing immediate medical assistance.
The teams from the two countries — as well as India’s contribution of a 300-person disaster response team and a mobile hospital — are racing to keep the death toll from topping the more than 8,000 that died in Nepal’s last mega-quake in 1934. The Nepalese government has been overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, especially in hard-to-access rural areas.
The international response is an attempt to save lives, but all three countries know it can also pay political dividends down the road. Disaster response is especially important in Asia, where dense populations are coupled with oft-weak government capacities and vulnerability to quakes, typhoons, and other natural disasters. China, in particular, has spent the last decade trying to bolster its own disaster-response capabilities in order to burnish its image across Asia and the Pacific.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/26/u-s-china-india-race-to-send-aid-to-earthquake-battered-nepal/
India kinda sorta takes Russia's-China's side on the global side of things, China mainly for economic reasons -- India has really come through naturally because the countries border, regionally, culturally, very similar but Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. What I mean is I'd expect Russia to assist here because of India. This is what I mean.
India and Russia have several major joint military programmes including:
BrahMos cruise missile programme
5th generation fighter jet programme
Sukhoi Su-30MKI programme (230+ to be built by Hindustan Aeronautics)
Ilyushin/HAL Tactical Transport Aircraft
Additionally, India has purchased/leased various military hardware from Russia:
T-90S Bhishma with over 1000 to be built in India
Akula-II nuclear submarine (2 to be leased with an option to buy when the lease expires)
INS Vikramaditya aircraft carrier programme
Tu-22M3 bombers (4 ordered)
US$900 million upgrade of MiG-29
Mil Mi-17 (80 ordered)
Ilyushin Il-76 Candid (6 ordered to fit Israeli Phalcon radar)
The Farkhor Air Base in Tajikistan is currently jointly operated by Indian Air Force and Tajikistan Air Force.
Both countries signed a defence deal worth $2.9 billion during President Putin's visit to India in December 2012. The 42 new Sukhois, to be produced under licence by defence PSU Hindustan Aeronautics, will add to the 230 Sukhois earlier contracted from Russia. Overall, the price tag for the 272 Sukhois - three of the over 170 inducted till now have crashed - stands at over $12 billion.The medium-lift Mi-17 V5 helicopters (59 for IAF and 12 for home ministry/BSF) will add to the 80 such choppers already being inducted under a $1.34 billion deal inked in 2008. The value of India's defence projects with Russia will further zoom north after the imminent inking of the final design contract for the joint development of a futuristic stealth fifth-generation fighter. This R&D contract is itself pegged at US$11 billion, to be shared equally by the two countries. So if India inducts over 200 of these 5th Gen fighters, as it hopes to do from 2022 onwards, the overall cost of this gigantic project for India will come to around US$35 billion since each of the jets will come for upwards of US$100 million at least.[19]
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/26/u-s-china-india-race-to-send-aid-to-earthquake-battered-nepal/
