Italy investigates quake buildings, checking for code fraud

Shoddy, price-cutting renovations, in breach of local building regulations, could be partly to blame for the high death toll from last week’s devastating quake in central Italy, according to a prosecutor investigating the disaster.

A quake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale hit at a shallow depth early Wednesday morning in central Italy, bringing down homes on people as they slept.

Speaking to worshippers in St Peter’s Square in Rome, Francis said he wanted to visit those hit by Wednesday’s deadly natural disaster which brought devastation to a string of mountain villages in a remote area straddling the Umbria, Marche and Lazio regions.

As the prosecutor issued his threats, nine more bodies were dug out Saturday by emergency crews from the rubble of Amatrice, which so far has accounted for 230 of those killed midweek.

Charity volunteer Giovanni Salerno hopes to build a new school in time for the start of term next month: “We will like to guarantee this one because they need routine and to look to the future and not to the past”.

Relatives mourn over a coffin of one of the quake victims prior to the start of the funeral service on Saturday in Ascoli Piceno, Italy.

Italy has promised to rebuild the shattered communities and has said it will learn from the mistakes following a similar quake in the nearby city of L’Aquila in 2009, where much of the centre is still out of bounds.

Almost 2,700 quake survivors needing shelter have been staying in 58 tent camps or at other shelters arranged by Italy’s Civil Protection agency.

The Civil Protection Department lowered the official death toll on Sunday to 290 from a previously given 291. Prosecutor Giuseppe Saieva, based in the nearby provincial capital of Rieti, said the high human death toll “cannot only be considered the work of fate”.

Heavy equipment was digging into rubble Sunday as hopes faded that more survivors would be unearthed amid debris from the magnitude-6.2 quake. The culture minister, Dario Franceschini, appealed to Italians to visit a museum as a gesture of solidarity for the victims and their families.

Turkey sent tanks across the border to help Syrian rebels drive the Islamic State group out of the border town of Jarablus last week in an operation that is also aimed at pushing back USA -allied Kurdish forces.

BERLIN (AP): Faced with more than one million migrants flooding across the Mediterranean a year ago, European nations tightened border controls, set up naval patrols to stop smugglers, negotiated an agreement with Turkey to limit the numbers crossing, shut the Balkan route used by hundreds of thousands, and tried to speed up deportations of rejected asylum-seekers.

“Hello little one”, said a handwritten note left on her coffin by one of the rescue team that retrieved her body. One woman consoled her husband by rubbing his back gently as he bowed his head.

Relatives of the dead sat on chairs next to the coffins or knelt on the floor, their arms resting on the caskets, which were covered in flowers.

Nibi’s 31-year-old son Eduardo said the survival of the villages depends on whether Amatrice, the biggest town in the area with more than 2,000 residents, is rebuilt.

“In particular, I am thinking of the towns of Amatrice, Accumoli, Arquata, Pescara del Tronto and Norcia. the church shares your suffering and your worries”.

The quake was followed by a series of aftershocks, the strongest of which measured 4.2, rattling the already hit areas.

Mourner Raphaela Baiocchi told Eleanor that “we are participating, all our pain for our population”.

Since the pre-dawn quake on Wednesday, residents’ nerves have been rattled by more than 1,800 aftershocks.