Hasta La Gadget!

SPANISH TOWN, Jamaica (AP) — Corpses, the suspected victims of violent deaths, are wrapped in plastic bags or covered loosely in stained sheets. There is no air conditioning and the room quickly becomes sweltering as the tropical sun beats down on the metal roof. A black fly buzzes around the room amid the smell of decay.

A Jamaican forensic pathologist and his sweating assistants can merely shrug at the primitive conditions. “What can I say? The lack of resources is definitely a challenge,” Dr. S.N. Prasad Kadiyala said as he waited for police officers to show up so he could start autopsies on a recent morning inside a hospital complex in gritty Spanish Town, on the edge the Jamaican capital.

Jamaica has had one of the highest homicide rates in the world for years, but its capacity to deal with the wave of killings has not kept pace. While the Caribbean country has made some gains in the gathering and processing of evidence, one of its biggest challenges is simply finding a place to store and study the dead.

The island has not had a national morgue since the 1970s despite widespread agreement that autopsies are often performed in facilities so inadequate that investigations are placed in jeopardy, said Hayden Baldwin, who has worked as forensic consultant to Jamaica’s police force.

“I have never seen such deplorable conditions and lack of support from a government to resolve these issues,” said Baldwin, a retired Illinois state police officer and director of Forensic Enterprises, Inc. of Orland Park, Illinois.In a report on global homicides released earlier this year, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime listed Jamaica as having the world’s sixth highest homicide rate. About a decade ago, it had the highest. The island of 2.7 million people has seen 1,000-plus killings every year since 2004, mostly in slums far from the beach resorts.

Relatively few murders are solved. The conviction rate for homicides is 5 percent, according to a 2013 U.S. State Department report.

Political leaders have vowed over the years to construct a modern public morgue, especially after the botched 2007 death investigation of Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, who died unexpectedly while the island hosted the sport’s World Cup. That year, Peter Phillips, then national security minister, said the Woolmer case “brought into focus the need for the most up-to-date forensic capabilities possible, including most importantly the construction of a new public morgue.”

Seven years later, Jamaica has steadily improved some aspects of its forensic investigations, including securing more specialized microscopes to evaluate ballistics. But officials say the cost of building a morgue must be considered against competing budget demands.

Under a system revamped several years ago, just over a dozen private funeral homes around the island have government contracts to collect and store corpses awaiting autopsies. Several mortuaries also provide space and equipment several times a week for the country’s three forensic pathologists.

Pathologists and some morticians say the funeral homes are paid so little — just $6 to $10 per body per day for storage — that they have little interest in keeping the corpses at the correct temperature because of the high cost of energy, about five times the cost in much of the United States.

“The remuneration from the government is not commensurate with what the private funeral homes put into it,” said Joseph Cornwall, director of the House of Tranquility, an established Kingston funeral home that stores bodies for the government. He said his business keeps the corpses to be autopsied at the right temperature, but Kadiyala believes funeral homes often don’t do so.

Activists and some politicians say officials could resolve the protracted problem if they wanted.

“Whatever the government really wants to do, they usually find the money. What we lack is the political will to get this done because it mostly impacts on poor, disenfranchised people,” said Yvonne McCalla Sobers, a prominent human rights activist.

The country’s health ministry declined comment.

But Angela Patterson, special services director for Jamaica’s police force, said the situation has steadily improved since 2010, when there was a big backlog of bodies awaiting autopsies. She said contracting with established funeral homes helps the government get autopsies done quickly, generally within two to three days of being requested.

“That is a significant achievement,” Patterson said.

Desmond McKenzie, a former Kingston mayor who has led calls to build a morgue for years, said that’s not enough. The opposition lawmaker believes the lack of urgency displayed by successive administrations is illogical for a nation with such high levels of gun crime.

“The simple fact is the government has failed miserably,” he said.

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David McFadden on Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmcfadd

THREE FORKS, Mont. (AP) — A fire engine and a pickup truck collided on a Montana highway, causing an explosion and fire that killed a family of five and a volunteer fire chief, authorities said. There were no survivors.

The fire engine driven by Three Forks Volunteer Fire Department Chief Todd Rummel was heading east on U.S. Highway 12 when it collided with the westbound pickup about 10 miles east of Helena, forcing both vehicles into a ditch in a fiery blaze, authorities said. Killed in the pickup were a Helena couple and their three young children, Montana Highway Patrol Capt. Gary Becker said. Their names and ages were not immediately released.

The crash devastated Rummel’s colleagues and the community of Three Forks, a town of about 2,000 people at the headwaters of the Missouri River.

Rummel, 44, was driving the fire engine alone to Three Forks from Helena, where its water pump had been repaired.

Jason Shrauger, fire chief in nearby Bozeman, said he knew Rummel through regular contact over the past several years during training and planning sessions for Gallatin County firefighters.

“He was a go-getter. He loved the fire service and every waking moment was thinking about how he could improve the department he was a member of,” Shrauger said.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office sent the deceased to the state crime lab for identification and to determine the cause of death, Becker said.

It will take some time to reconstruct what happened, he said.

“We’re going to take all the evidence and digest it all and see what we can come up with,” he said. “We can’t say anything until we make a positive determination of what happened.”

Firefighters learned of the crash overnight. They gathered at the firehouse Friday to talk through their shock and to welcome residents who stopped by to share a few words about Rummel, who was just promoted to chief about a month ago.

“He didn’t really get a chance to meet his full potential as chief,” firefighter Dave Whitesitt said. “We’re trying to stick together as a team. We’re going to work through this.”

At 14, Todd Rummel joined a junior fire company at his father’s firehouse in Haycock Township, Pennsylvania, helping to clean hoses and odd jobs around the firehouse, father Allen Rummel said.

“When he was a baby, I used to take him down to the firehouse and one of the old timers used to sit around and babysit him while I went” on fire calls, Allen Rummel said.

At 18, he began fighting fires. He worked as an auto mechanic while serving as volunteer fire chief in Milford Township, Pennsylvania, said Jim Young, a firefighter there.

“That was his life. He was very dedicated,” Young said. “But talking to him years ago, his dream was to move out there” to Montana.

Rummel made the move in 2006, ending up in Three Forks, the site where the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers meet to form the Missouri. It was a stopping point in 1806 for the expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

Rummel joined the fire department and built a house for himself just outside town. He was battalion chief until May, when the firefighters unanimously selected him to replace the retiring chief.

“This fire department was more than a business. It was a family. Todd was like a bother. To some folks in the fire department, he was like a father,” said firefighter Brad Eastty.

Wreckage from the collision was towed away and all that remained was charred earth, spray paint markings and 18 small flags where investigators noted debris. Somebody placed a small flower memorial on the blackened dirt in the afternoon.

A memorial service for Rummel was set for June 25 at Three Forks High School.

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Associated Press writer Amy Beth Hanson in Helena contributed to this report.

Seth Rogen and James Franco’s new movie, “The Interview,” is already stirring up controversy. The forthcoming comedy follows a celebrity tabloid TV show host (Franco) and his producer (Rogen) as they try to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un after landing an interview with him. Needless to say, North Korea isn’t pleased.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Kim Myong-chol, executive director of The Centre for North Korea-US Peace and an “unofficial spokesman” for Kim Jong-un’s regime, was “dismissive” of the film and criticized its plot.

“There is a special irony in this storyline as it shows the desperation of the US government and American society,” he said. “A film about the assassination of a foreign leader mirrors what the US has done in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. And let us not forget who killed [President John F.] Kennedy –- Americans. In fact, President [Barack] Obama should be careful in case the US military wants to kill him as well.”

Despite all that talk about murder, Myong-chol said that Kim Jong-un would probably watch the movie anyway. Rogen hopes he likes it.

“The Interview” also stars Lizzy Caplan and Randall Park (as Kim Jong-un), and Rogen co-directs alongside Evan Goldberg. It hits theaters Oct. 10. Check out the trailer below.

Most of us go to great lengths to get amazing hair: We’ll take supplements to boost thickness, try any and all products to amp up shine, and spend hours in the salon chair getting fitted with extensions to enjoy new levels of volume and length. This latest craze coming out of Brazil, however, takes the cake for inventiveness, with women going above and beyond in the pursuit of longer hair.

There is nothing worse than a paper cut. It just comes out of the blue from a seemingly innocuous source and cuts you in the most insidious way. What if this power could be harnessed for good instead of evil? How, you say? Well, designer Nadeem Haidary has taken on this very challenge and has come up with — wait for it — The Paper Cut Razor!