At least four people have been killed and 17 are missing after a building under construction collapsed in the Philippines, authorities say as search and rescue efforts are under way.

Rescuers retrieved at least three people on Monday from the rubble of the nine-storey building in the city of Angeles, north of the capital, Manila.

One of the victims had a pulse when he was retrieved but later died while another suffered cardiac arrest while still trapped, Maria Leah Sajili, an information officer at the Bureau of Fire Protection, said in a phone interview with the Reuters news agency.

Crews pulled the body of another person from the rubble, but it was not immediately clear if the unidentified body belonged to a person listed among the missing, rescuers said in an updated toll.

Due to that uncertainty, authorities said about 17 people were still considered missing, mostly construction workers who were sleeping at the building site when the disaster struck on Sunday.

The fourth person killed was a Malaysian tourist trapped in a budget inn, part of which was hit by an avalanche of debris from the collapsed building. Another guest at the inn was injured but managed to dash out, officials said.

At least 26 people have been rescued from the site.

Reporting from Angeles, Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Lo said hopes of finding more survivors were beginning to fade.

“Authorities are still saying the operation is a search and rescue. They will be using thermal detectors to try and find more signs of life, but if they don’t, they’re saying they will start using heavy equipment to clear the debris and retrieve people they believe are trapped under the rubble,” he said.

Officials said up to 70 people were employed at the construction site although most had gone home for the weekend.

[Aljazeera]

The execution of a Tennessee death row inmate has been postponed after staff were unable to find a vein to administer a lethal drug.

Tony Carruthers, convicted of kidnapping and murdering three people in 1994, was set to be executed on Thursday.

But the state’s Department of Corrections said that while its medical team did find a primary IV line to carry out the lethal injection, they could not find a suitable second vein to establish a backup line, which is required under lethal injection execution protocol.

In response, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said he would grant Carruthers a temporary reprieve from execution for one year.

After finding the primary injection line, “the team continued to follow the protocol, but could not find another suitable vein”, the corrections department said in a statement.

“The team attempted to insert a central line pursuant to the protocol, but the procedure was unsuccessful,” the statement continued. “The execution was then called off.”

Carruthers was convicted in 1996 for the kid­nap­ping and mur­ders of Marcellos Anderson, his mother Delois Anderson, and Frederick Tucker.

The men were beaten and shot and the three were buried alive in a Memphis cemetery.

Carruthers’ case has drawn national attention as advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have argued there were significant problems with his trial, including that he was forced to represent himself.

Carruthers himself has consistently maintained his innocence.

“His trial was riddled with errors. He was denied legal counsel. There was no physical evidence linked to him,” the ACLU said in a press release demanding the “wrongful execution” of Carruthers be called off.

“The evidence against him that was presented at trial came from informants who have since recanted their statements or been discredited,” the ACLU continued.

The nonprofit group also collected more than 130,000 signatures calling for the execution to be halted to allow for “necessary fingerprint and DNA testing”.

Advocates and community groups delivered that petition to the governor’s office at the Tennessee capitol on Monday, but Gov Lee announced the following day that Carruthers’ execution would go forward as planned.

Last week, Kim Kardashian took up Carruthers’ cause, urging her fans in a social media post to call the governor’s office and demand the DNA evidence be tested “before it’s too late”, according to US media.

In a petition for clemency filed on Wednesday, attorneys for Carruthers argued that his current mental state – resulting from Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Type, and brain damage – is too impaired for him to be executed.

“These disorders manifest in current symptoms of unending, synergistic, and complex delusions that thwart a rational understanding of his imminent execution,” his lawyers argued.

In response to the news of the temporary reprieve, Maria DeLiberato, senior counsel at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said the ACLU will continue fighting on Carruthers’ behalf.

“Tennessee cannot continue torturing a man while refusing to answer serious questions about his innocence,” DeLiberato said.

[BBC]

A French appeals court has found Airbus and Air France guilty of manslaughter in 2009 Rio de Janeiro – Paris crash that killed 228 people – the worst aviation disaster in the country’s history.

The Paris Court of Appeal ruled on Thursday that both companies were “solely and entirely responsible for the crash of flight AF447”, and ordered a payment of 225,000 euros ($261,720) for each passenger, the maximum fine possible for corporate manslaughter.

Although the penalties are largely symbolic, they capped an eight-week trial that victims’ families saw as a last chance to find justice two years after a lower court acquited Airbus and Air France.

Both companies have repeatedly denied all charges.

Following the ruling, Airbus said it would appeal to France’s highest court, saying the latest finding contradicted submissions from prosecutors and the 2023 acquittal.

Prosecutors previously warned that an appeal was likely and denounced the companies’ behaviour throughout the decade-plus legal process.

“Nothing has come of it – not a single word of sincere comfort,” said prosecutor Rodolphe Juy-Birmann as the trial was under way last November. “One word sums up this whole circus: indecency.”

The crash unfolded on June 1, 2009, when flight AF447 disappeared from radar screens as it headed from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to the French capital Paris with 216 passengers and 12 crew.

Two years passed before a deep-sea search uncovered the plane’s black boxes, which record flight data.

Investigators found the pilots had pushed the jet into a climb as it struggled with sensors blocked with ice during a mid-Atlantic storm. The plane stalled and crashed into the ocean.

While Airbus and Air France have blamed pilot error, the lawyers for passengers’ families argued that both companies knew that there was a problem with the plane’s pitot tubes, which measure flight speed.

Pilots were not trained to deal with such an emergency as the tubes malfunctioned, prosecutors said, triggering alarms in the cockpit and turning off the plane’s autopilot function.

Air France lawyer Pascal Weil said in October that the company “had the means to conduct high-altitude training, but we did not do so because we sincerely believed it was unnecessary”.

[Aljazeera]