First the good news: bird flu is becoming less deadly. Now the bad: scientists fear that this is the very thing that could make the virus more able to cause a pandemic that would kill hundreds of millions of people.
This paradox – emerging from Egypt, the most recent epicentre of the disease – threatens to increase the disease's ability to spread from person to person by helping it achieve the crucial mutation in the virus which could turn it into the greatest plague to hit Britain since the Black Death. Last year the Government identified the bird-flu virus, codenamed H5N1, as the biggest threat facing the country – with the potential to kill up to 750,000 Britons.
The World Health Organisation is to back an investigation into a change in the pattern of the disease in Egypt, the most seriously affected country outside Asia. Although infections have been on the rise this year, with three more reported last week, they have almost all been in children under the age of three, while 12 months ago it was mainly adults and older children who were affected. And the infections have been much milder than usual; the disease normally kills more than half of those affected; all of the 11 Egyptians so far infected this year are still alive.
The Mount Redoubt volcano had another large eruption Saturday after being relatively quiet for nearly a week.
Radar indicated a plume of volcanic ash rose 50,000 feet into the sky, making it one of the largest eruptions since the volcano became active on March 22, said the National Weather Service.
The ash cloud was drifting toward the southeast and there were reports of the fine, gritty ash falling in towns on the Kenai Peninsula.
Scientists sailed Thursday to inspect an undersea volcano that has been erupting for days near Tonga -- shooting smoke, steam and ash thousands of feet into the sky above the South Pacific ocean.
Authorities said Thursday the eruption does not pose any danger to islanders at this stage, and there have been no reports of fish or other animals being affected. Spectacular columns are spewing out of the sea about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the southwest coast off the main island of Tongatapu -- an area where up to 36 undersea volcanoes are clustered, geologists said.
Almost 90,000 food crop seed samples have arrived at the "doomsday vault" in the Arctic Circle, as part of its first anniversary celebrations.
The four-tonne shipment takes the number of seeds stored in the frozen repository to more than 20 million. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built 130m (426ft) inside a mountain, aims to protect the world's food crop species against natural and human disasters.
The £5m ($7m) facility took 12 months to build and opened in February 2008.
"The vault was opened last year to ensure that, one day, all of humanity's existing food crop varieties would be safely protected," explained Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT).
China faces a "grim" situation in preventing and controlling human cases of bird flu, the health minister said, after announcing four human infections in the last two weeks and three deaths. Health Minister Chen Zhu called for hospitals to spare more resources in diagnosing and treating bird flu and more cooperation between agriculture authorities and his ministry, Xinhua news agency said.
A Chinese newspaper reported that the mother of a toddler diagnosed with bird flu had died of severe pneumonia earlier this month, but no samples had been taken to see if she had bird flu. She had been in contact with poultry before her death.
Just when you thought you could scratch bird flu off your list of things to worry about in 2009, the deadly H5N1 virus has resurfaced in poultry in Hong Kong for the first time in six years, reinforcing warnings that the threat of a human pandemic isn't over.
India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and mainland China also experienced new outbreaks in December. During the same period, four new human cases -- in Egypt, Cambodia and Indonesia -- were reported to the World Health Organization. A 16-year-old girl in Egypt and a 2-year-old girl in Indonesia have died.
The new cases come after a two-year decline in the number of confirmed human deaths from H5N1 bird flu and as fewer countries are reporting outbreaks among poultry. A United Nations report released in October credits improved surveillance and the rapid culling of potentially infected poultry for helping to contain and even prevent outbreaks in many countries.
Authorities and witnesses say a strong earthquake in eastern Indonesia has sent panicked residents running outside.
The country's meteorology and seismology agency warned that with a preliminary magnitude of 7.2 it was strong enough to cause a tsunami. There were no immediate reports of giant waves. It struck at 2:43 p.m. EST, around 85 miles off of Manokwari, Irian Jaya, at a depth of about 6 miles.
Hasim Rumatiga, a local health official, said electricity went off and residents ran to higher ground. Indonesia straddles a chain of faultlines and volcanoes known as the Pacific "Ring of Fire" and is prone to seismic activity. A huge quake off western Indonesia caused the 2005 Asian tsunami that killed around 230,000 people.
More earthquakes are rattling Yellowstone National Park.
The small quakes include three more Friday that measured stronger than magnitude 3.0. The University of Utah Seismic Stations say the strongest was 3.5. Several hundred quakes centered under the northern end of Yellowstone Lake have now occurred since Dec. 26. No damage has been reported.
Earthquake swarms happen fairly often in Yellowstone. But scientists say it's unusual for so many earthquakes to happen over several days. Yellowstone lies mostly in northwestern Wyoming and is the caldera of a volcano that last erupted 70,000 years ago. Scientists have not concluded what is causing the earthquakes.
Medical workers were going door-to-door to look for people with symptoms of avian influenza in northeast India Friday as the infection in birds spread further, officials said.
So far, no human cases of infection of the deadly H5N1 virus have been reported in the affected Assam state, but authorities stepped up a health drive after 150 people developed some symptoms of the infection.
"About 150 people were treated for fever and upper respiratory tract infections in bird flu-hit areas. We have put the patients in isolation," senior health official Parthajyoti Gogoi told AFP.
Bird flu was ruled out in all cases, the official said.
The virus has spread in the past two weeks across six Assam districts, where an estimated 300,000 people live in the affected areas.
Things are going to be tight for some time to come but it'll be too tight for some people. Faced with large redundencies, people losing houses and costs of travelling to work rising, I can see how some people may get angry.
Tropical Storm Fay made an unexpected shift to the north early this morning, putting emergency officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties on alert for possible flooding and high winds. Early today, a tropical storm warning was issued for Florida's east coast from Jupiter Inlet southward and along Florida's west coast from Bonita Beach southward, including Lake Okeechobee.
A tropical storm warning remained in effect for the Florida Keys from Ocean Reef to Key West. A hurricane watch was in effect for most of the Keys and along Florida's west coast to Tarpon Springs. A tropical storm watch was in effect for from north of Jupiter Inlet to Sebastian Inlet.
While some Key West businesses began putting up hurricane shutters in preparation for Fay, tourists and residents still strolled lazily through town. Some even seemed jaded as they talked about the impending storm, which threatened to strengthen to a hurricane.
Thousands of panicked pilgrims stampeded Sunday at a remote mountaintop temple in northern India during celebrations to honor a Hindu goddess, sending dozens of people plummeting to their deaths and trampling scores more. Police said 145 people were killed.
Rumors of a landslide apparently started the panic at the shrine in the foothills of the Himalayas, said C.P. Verma, a senior government official in the Bilaspur district.
Pilgrims already at the Naina Devi Temple began running down the narrow path leading from the peak. There, they collided with devotees winding their way up.
With a concrete wall on one side and a precipice on the other, there was nowhere to escape and they were crushed. At one point a guard rail broke and dozens of people fell to their deaths.
Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday, a spokesman said. He was 71.
Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.
Known for his edgy, provocative material, Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television." A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse? According to many of the world's top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now.
This September, in Earth 2100, a dramatic ABC News 2-hour broadcast, the greatest minds across the globe will join together in a countdown to the year 2100 to tell us what we must do to survive the next century … And what may happen if we don't. The time to act is now, says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute.
"The 21st century is going to be the century which determine[s] whether we live or die as a sustainable species," Gleick said. "As populations grow, as our use of resources grows, I think we get closer and closer to that edge." Experts say that extreme changes in climate, combined with dwindling resources, famine, war and disease have the potential to create a post-apocalyptic world in less than a hundred years.
Nuclear war will begin next Thursday, June 12, or sooner, according to the latest prediction of self-proclaimed prophet Yisrayl "Buffalo Bill" Hawkins, the founder of a religious sect in Abilene, Texas.
"It could be turned loose before then," Hawkins told 20/20 for a report to be broadcast tonight. "You're going to see this very soon, really soon," he said.
Hundreds of truck trailers have been loaded with food and water on the group's 44-acre compound, in preparation for the coming war.
Unfortunately for Hawkins, it is not the first time he predicted the outbreak of nuclear war. Most recently, Hawkins set Sept. 12, 2006 as the beginning of the end. His followers produced an on-line video with a countdown to doomsday.
In Kenya, hundreds of his followers actually hid in basement bomb shelters and donned gas masks on the date. They went home in humiliation when there was no war.
The world's most powerful finance ministers and central bankers are meeting in Washington tomorrow; but as they preoccupy themselves with the global credit crunch, another crisis, far more grave, is facing the world's poorest people.
A dramatic rise in the worldwide cost of food is provoking riots throughout the Third World where millions more of the world's most vulnerable people are facing starvation as food shortages grow and cereal prices soar. It threatens to become the biggest crisis of the 21st century.
This week crowds of hungry demonstrators in Haiti stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Port-au-Prince, in protests over food prices. And a crisis gripped the Philippines as massive queues formed to buy rice from government stocks.
There have been riots in Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso and protests in Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Egypt and Morocco. Mexico has had "tortilla riots" and, in Yemen, children have marched to draw attention to their hunger.
More than two dozen others remained behind but were expected to come out as early as Saturday, the governor's office said. Seven women who had holed up in a cave for months other members of a Russian cult awaiting the end of the world emerged Friday night and were being treated by emergency workers, regional officials said.
About 35 members of the Christian cult entered the cave near the village of Nikolskoye, 400 miles southeast of Moscow, in early November to await the end of the world, which they expected in May. They threatened to detonate gas canisters if police tried to remove them by force.
The vice governor of the Penza region, Oleg Melnichenko, said in televised comments that the seven women came out voluntarily, carrying satchels with their belongings. He said the cult leader, the self- declared prophet Pyotr Kuznetsov, was brought from a local psychiatric hospital to help persuade the women to leave. He said the women walked on their own nearly a mile to a prayer house, where emergency workers were talking with them, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported.
Food security and the rapid rise in food prices make up the "elephant in the room" that politicians must face up to quickly, according to the government's new chief scientific adviser.
In his first major speech since taking over, Professor John Beddington said the global rush to grow biofuels was compounding the problem, and cutting down rainforest to produce biofuel crops was "profoundly stupid".
He told the Govnet Sustainable Development UK Conference in Westminster: "There is progress on climate change. But out there is another major problem. It is very hard to imagine how we can see a world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous increase in the demand for food which is quite properly going to happen as we alleviate poverty."
He predicted that price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. "The agriculture industry needs to double its food production, using less water than today," he said. The food crisis would bite more quickly than climate change, he added.
A University of Arizona researcher has created a new system to dramatically show American cities their relative level of vulnerability to bioterrorism.
Walter W. Piegorsch, an expert on environmental risk, has placed 132 major cities -- from Albany, N.Y., to Youngstown, Ohio -- on a color-coded map that identifies their level of risk based on factors including critical industries, ports, railroads, population, natural environment and other factors.
Piegorsch is the director of a new UA graduate program in interdisciplinary statistics and a professor of mathematics in the College of Science, as well as a member of the UA's BIO5 Institute.
The map marks high-risk areas as red (for example, Houston and, surprisingly, Boise, ID), midrange risk as yellow (San Francisco) and lower risk as green (Tucson). The map shows a wide swath of highest-risk urban areas running from New York down through the Southeast and into Texas. Boise is the only high-risk urban area that lies outside the swath.
The model employs what risk experts call a benchmark vulnerability metric, which shows risk managers each city's level of risk for urban terrorism.
The world is only ten weeks away from running out of wheat supplies after stocks fell to their lowest levels for 50 years.
The crisis has pushed prices to an all-time high and could lead to further hikes in the price of bread, beer, biscuits and other basic foods.
It could also exacerbate serious food shortages in developing countries especially in Africa.
The crisis comes after two successive years of disastrous wheat harvests, which saw production fall from 624m to 600m tonnes, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
Experts blame climate change as heatwaves caused a slump in harvests last year in eastern Europe, Canada, Morocco and Australia, all big wheat producers.
Major outbreaks of disease have become more common around the globe in the past 40 years, according to the largest ever investigation into emerging infections.
Diseases such as Ebola and Sars, which originally spread from animals, are an increasing threat to human health, and many infections have now become resistant to antibiotics, researchers said.
The international team of scientists warned that tropical regions are likely to become a future hotspot for new diseases, and called for early warning systems to be set up in countries to spot outbreaks before they become unmanageable.
Researchers from the Zoological Society of London, the Wildlife Trust and Columbia University analysed databases of outbreaks and found 335 cases of emerging diseases between 1940 and 2004. Of these, 60.3% were infections which also affected animals, and 71.8% were known to have triggered disease in humans after spreading from wildlife.
The research, published in Nature, identifies "hotspots" where new diseases are expected to come from wildlife, driven by the proximity of dense human populations and high levels of biodiversity.
Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said today that he will not return to lead the country, retiring as head of state 49 years after he seized power in an armed revolution.
Castro, 81, said in a statement to the country that he would not seek a new presidential term when the National Assembly meets on 24 February.
"To my dear compatriots, who gave me the immense honor in recent days of electing me a member of parliament ... I communicate to you that I will not aspire to or accept - I repeat not aspire to or accept - the positions of President of Council of State and Commander in Chief," Castro said in the statement published on the website of the Communist Party's Granma newspaper.
The National Assembly or legislature is expected to nominate his brother and designated successor Raul Castro, 76, as president in place of Castro, who has not appeared in public for almost 19 months after being stricken by an undisclosed illness.
His retirement drew the curtain on a political career that spanned the Cold War and survived US enmity, CIA assassination attempts and the demise of Soviet Communism.
The U.S. Navy likely will make its first attempt to shoot down a faulty spy satellite Wednesday night.
The U.S. government issued a formal notice warning ships and planes to stay clear of a large area of the Pacific Ocean west of Hawaii. The notice says the two- and-a-half hour window begins 2:30 a.m. Thursday Greenwich Mean Time, which is 9:30 p.m. Wednesday on the East Coast, and 4:30 p.m. Wednesday in Hawaii.
The timing is also after the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to be safely on the ground. Pentagon officials caution that the notice reflects the first opportunity to take a shot at the satellite, but it's possible the attempt could be delayed until later. "We have to make the notification, but it's possible the conditions won't be ideal, or that everything won't be ready," said a Pentagon official who asked not to be identified.
Pentagon officials says if the first attempt to hit the satellite fails, there may be time for a second attempt, but that would only come after an assessment that would be hours or even days after the first attempt. Because the 5,000-pound satellite malfunctioned immediately after launch in December 2006, it has a full tank of fuel. It would likely survive re-entry and disperse potentially deadly fumes over an area the size of two football fields, officials have said.
The Navy plans to fire at the satellite as it enters Earth's atmosphere at an altitude of about 150 miles. Officials want the missile to hit the edge of the atmosphere to ensure debris re-enters and burns up quickly
The U.S. population will soar to 438 million by 2050 and the Hispanic population will triple, according to projections released Monday by the Pew Research Center.
The latest projections by the non-partisan research group are higher than government estimates to date and paint a portrait of an America dramatically different from today's. The projected growth in the U.S. population — 303 million today — will be driven primarily by immigration among all groups except the elderly. "We're assuming that the rate of immigration will stay roughly constant," says Jeffrey Passel, co-author of the report.
Even if immigration is limited, Hispanics' share of the population will increase because they have higher birth rates than the overall population. That's largely because Hispanic immigrants are younger than the nation's aging baby boom population. By 2030, all 79 million boomers will be at least 65 and the elderly will grow faster than any other age group.
Current Events 
