This is horrible… from AP.org:
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) - Women fainted with grief and wailed in sorrow Monday outside a morgue in Abidjan where the bodies of 19 soccer fans killed in a weekend stadium stampede were being held.
Mothers and sisters of the dead sobbed as they held each other, while fathers and brothers stood, their eyes red with sorrow.
World soccer body FIFA demanded an investigation into Sunday’s tragedy and the prime minister of Ivory Coast convened an emergency Cabinet meeting Monday to look into the stampede that left 19 dead and at least 132 injured at a World Cup qualifying match.
Thousands of fans at the capital’s main Felix Houphouet-Boigny arena pushed against each other before Sunday’s game between Ivory Coast and Malawi, setting off a panic that led to the stampede, Interior Minister Desire Tagro said on state television.
The melee prompted security forces to fire tear gas, which witnesses say forced fans to hurl themselves toward the field, causing a wall to come down and setting off a stampede.
Tagro gave the death toll Sunday, but there was no immediate update Monday on the condition of the injured. The game took place despite the deaths and Ivory Coast won 5-0.
Sunday’ game drew tens of thousands because of the presence of Chelsea striker Didier Drogba, a native of Ivory Coast who is seen as superstar in his home country. Drogba scored twice in the victory.
At the downtown morgue, family members were told to come and identify the dead. The morgue showed reporters a list of 19 names - including two children, the youngest of whom was age 10.
Momodou Kamara, who waited outside the morgue, blamed police for his brother’s death. “My brother left to go to the stadium with his friends. At the entrance, they were attacked by security forces. That’s what set off the stampede,” he said.
Diarassouba Adama, who was inside the stadium at the time, also blamed police for the deadly tragedy.
“We saw people falling from the top bleachers. The stampede was provoked by the security forces who threw tear gas canisters at us. I don’t know why they fired on us,” he said as stood vigil outside the morgue.
State TV announced that Prime Minister Guillaume Soro was holding an emergency cabinet meeting later Monday to deal with the national tragedy. In Zurich, FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter offered his condolences and also demanded a full investigation into the stampede.
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WatchMojo NewsletterI guess Topps is really throwing everything at the wall at this point? Read more from Fortune.com:
NEW YORK (Fortune) — “I’ll trade you two Bernie Madoffs for a Derek Jeter and David Wright.”
Baseball card collectors could soon be saying something along those lines as the Topps Company will be issuing a trading card of confessed swindler Bernard Madoff as part of a product due out early this summer.
The Topps 2009 Allen & Ginter release will include cards of some 260 baseball players along with cards of historic figures and “world champions” from realms outside baseball. This year’s product, though, will also nod to Madoff’s financial chicanery as part of a group of cards featuring the “world’s biggest hoaxes, hoodwinks and bamboozles.” Among the other do-badders in the subset are Charles Ponzi, The Runaway Bride, and Enron.
“These cards feature 20 perpetrators of some of the most notorious pranks, dubious claims, and outright frauds of the last 2 centuries,” boasts a Topps sell-sheet for the collection.
That means collectors who open a pack of the cards at their local hobby shop could find Madoff right alongside notable sluggers like Alex Rodriguez or Albert Pujols. Packs of the cards will sell for $3 apiece at retailers including Target (TGT, Fortune 500) and Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500). The odds of finding a Madoff will be one in 12 packs on average.
The hoaxes subset, originally inspired by the case of 1970’s skyjacker D.B. Cooper, was in the works even before the Madoff scandal hit the headlines, according to Topps spokesman Clay Luraschi. Madoff, in fact, was a late addition to the checklist, Luraschi says. “Ironically, the economy takes a dive and all these characters start washing out, like Bernie Madoff. We thought, hey, if anyone should be in this set it should be him.”
The Madoff card is not the only gimmick included in the set. Topps will again be issuing so-called DNA relics, cards featuring actual hairs of historical subjects including Napoleon, King George III, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Edgar Allen Poe, George Washington, Jefferson Davis, Geronimo, Abraham Lincoln and Beethoven. But the Madoff card is the one most directly linked to current headlines.
“I think it will add some interest to the hobby in terms of non-collectors, more mainstream people getting into it just because of those cards,” says Chris Olds, editor of Beckett Baseball, a publication for collectors. “They try to touch on unusual things that people would latch onto — stuff that’s out of the ordinary, especially stuff you wouldn’t expect to find in a pack of baseball cards.”
Some collectors on one popular trading-card blog seemed less than eager to see Madoff captured on cardboard.
“I think if I pull a Bernie Madoff card it will be getting burned or shredded,” one poster noted.
Another collector noted that Madoff isn’t the first infamous criminal to be featured on a trading card.
“I was pretty appalled when I found out about the Bernie Madoff card too,” that blogger wrote, “but they’ve had Jesse James and Jack the Ripper in previous sets so I guess Bernie is the designated scumbag criminal for this year’s set.”
