Troops dug burial pits in this quake-shattered town and black smoke poured from crematorium chimneys elsewhere in central China as priorities began shifting Thursday from the hunt for survivors to dealing with the dead. Officials said the final toll could more than double to 50,000.
As the massive military-led recovery operation inched farther into regions cut off by Monday's quake, the government sought to enlist the public's help with an appeal for everything from hammers to cranes and, in a turnabout, began accepting foreign aid missions, the first from regional rival Japan.
Millions of survivors left homeless or too terrified to go indoors faced their fourth night under tarpaulins, tents or nothing at all as workers patched roads and cleared debris to reach more outlying towns in the disaster zone.
On Friday, Chinese President Hu Jintao flew to Sichuan to support victims and express "appreciation to the public and cadres in the disaster zone," the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The official death toll for Burma's cyclone disaster has jumped to almost 78,000 people, with nearly 56,000 missing, according to state TV.
The numbers are nearly double those released on Thursday, raising fears the final human toll may be enormous.
The Red Cross is seeking more than $50m (£26m) in aid to help survivors of the storm which struck on 2-3 May.
Foreign aid agencies are frustrated at the slow progress of aid to areas worst hit, especially in the Irrawaddy Delta.
A BBC reporter in the delta this week saw little sign of official help and foreign aid workers have been barred from the area. Heavy rain has been lashing the region, compounding the misery of survivors of Cyclone Nargis.
Thousands of people have been killed by Monday's powerful earthquake in just one affected region of central China, its government said, with the toll expected to keep rising as bodies are retrieved from schools, homes and factories.
he death toll quickly rose throughout the day. State-run news agency Xinhua said it had reached 8,533 in Sichuan Province by Monday night, and another 10,000 were believed to be injured.
It reported that authorities were yet to reach Wenchuan County -- which sits at the epicenter of the 7.9-magnitude earthquake with a population of about 112,000 -- because of damage to roads.
In Beichuan County, close to Wenchuan, the number of deaths was estimated at more than 3,000, with 80 percent of the buildings destroyed. In addition, at least 48 people were killed in the northwest Gansu Province, Xinhua said. Several hundred students were also feared to be buried in collapsed school buildings, the agency said.
Three children were recently removed from a remote church compound called Strong City in New Mexico. There had been allegations that children at the cult may have been sexually abused, though the matter remains under investigation and charges have yet to be filed. The leader of the group, Wayne Bent, claims to be the son of God.
In early 2007, Bent said that the world would end on Halloween of that year. That apparently fell through, however Bent was undeterred and has updated his prophecy to say that the Apocalypse will happen at any moment: "The seven last plagues are all falling now and the end of all things is at hand," Bent wrote on his church's Web site.
Failed doomsday predictions are nothing new, of course. There have been thousands of people predicting the imminent end of the world, dating back to at least 2800 B.C . They have all been wrong for thousands of years (or however how long since they spoke), but that doesn't keep people from trying. End-times claims are often rooted in Bible passages, but also based on everything from schizophrenia to misunderstood astronomy. Most doomsday promoters are quite sincere, genuinely believing that they have discovered a (literally) Earth-shaking secret that must be shared with others.
Relief deliveries into cyclone-hit Burma increased today but aid groups said supplies fell far short of the enormous need and that foreign experts were still barred from the country.
A cargo plane chartered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) carrying 35 tonnes of aid was one of the latest to arrive. The ICRC said the medical supplies on board were sufficient to treat some 250 trauma patients and provide three months of basic health care for 10,000 people. The plane was also carrying sanitation equipment, including a mobile water-treatment plant to provide drinking water for 10,000 people, it said.
But other aid groups warned of a growing catastrophe. “It’s really crucial that people get access to clean water sources and sanitation to avoid unnecessary deaths and suffering,” Sarah Ireland, Oxfam regional chief, said. She said the death toll from the May 3 cyclone could go up to 100,000, a figure also suggested by other aid groups.
The Myanmar cyclone . The earthquake off the coast of Japan. The Chilean volcano. Has Earth gone bonkers?
Not at all. This level of natural activity is normal for Earth, scientists say.
"Mother Nature is just reminding us that she is in charge," Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told LiveScience.
That also means the recent Midwestern quake (centered in Illinois) and temblors near Reno, though unnerving and frightening to locals, were just another day for Planet Earth.
Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster on a scale comparable with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
The official death count after Cyclone Nargis stood at just under half that by 1300 GMT today, at around 22,500 people dead plus a further 41,000 missing.
But due to the incompleteness of the information from the stricken delta of the Irrawaddy river, UN and charity workers in the city of Rangoon privately believe that the number will eventually be double that.
"We are looking at 50,000 dead and millions homeless," Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children, told The Times.
More than 10,000 people were killed in a devastating cyclone that hit western Burma on Saturday, Foreign Minister Nyan Win has said on state TV.
He said his government was ready to accept international assistance. Aid shipments are now being prepared. Thousands of survivors of Cyclone Nargis are lacking shelter, drinking water, power and communications. The United States offered to increase aid offered if Burma agreed to allow a US team access to assess the situation.
First Lady Laura Bush, who takes a special interest in Burma, urged Burma to accept $250,000 (£126,000) already allocated for emergency aid, and said more would be available if the team was allowed into the country. She also accused the Burmese authorities of failing to give a "timely warning" about the approaching storm, after which five regions - home to 24 million people - have been declared disaster zones.
Oil futures blasted to a new record over $122 a barrel Tuesday, gaining momentum as investors bought on a forecast of much higher prices and on any news hinting at supply shortages. Retail gas prices edged lower, but appear poised to rise to new records of their own in coming weeks.
A new Goldman Sachs prediction that oil prices could rise to $150 to $200 within two years seemed to motivate much of Tuesday's buying, although a falling dollar and increasing concerns about declining crude production in Mexico and Russia contributed, analysts say. Light, sweet crude for June delivery jumped to a new record of $122.47 a barrel before retreating slightly to trade up $1.29 at $122.26 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Oil prices have nearly doubled from about $62 a barrel a year ago, which Goldman sees as a sign that the world is in the midst of a "super spike" in oil prices. Analyst Arjun Murti said in a research note released Monday that prices would ultimately force demand to fall sharply.
Myanmar's military junta believes at least 10,000 people died in a cyclone that ripped through the Irrawaddy delta, triggering a massive international aid response for the pariah state in southeast Asia.
"The basic message was that they believe the provisional death toll was about 10,000 with 3,000 missing," a Yangon-based diplomat told Reuters in Bangkok, summarizing a briefing from Foreign Minister Nyan Win. "It's a very serious toll."
The scale of the disaster from Saturday's devastating cyclone drew a rare acceptance of outside help from the diplomatically isolated generals, who spurned such approaches in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
To misquote the opening credits of Star Wars, these spectacular images show interstellar car-crashes happening a long time ago, in a place that's far, far away. Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, they capture various points in the collision process between two galaxies, which can take hundreds of millions of years to go from start to finish.
Galaxy mergers were more common in the early universe than they are now, and are thought to have been one of the principal driving forces for cosmic evolution, from the frenetic births of stars to their explosive deaths. Indeed, our own Milky Way galaxy is currently absorbing the smaller Sagittarius dwarf elliptical galaxy, and will in turn be merged with our bigger neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy.
The interaction of two galaxies is driven by the tidal pull of gravity, which draws the massive objects together (though actual collisions between stars are rare, as most of a galaxy is empty space). The billions of stars in each galaxy move individually, so that the interweaving tidal forces produce intricate and varied effects as the galaxies gradually coalesce.
A face recognition system will scan faces and match them to biometric chips on passports. Photograph: Image Source/Getty
Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.
From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.
Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.
But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.
Scientists say they know far too little about Midwestern seismic zones like the one that rumbled to life under southern Illinois Friday morning, but some of what they do know is unnerving.
The fault zones beneath the Mississippi River Valley have produced some of the largest modern U.S. quakes east of the Rockies, a region covered with old buildings not built to withstand seismic activity.
And, when quakes happen, they're felt far and wide, their vibrations propagated over hundreds of miles of bedrock.
Friday's quake shook things up from Nebraska to Atlanta, rattling nerves but doing little damage and seriously hurting no one. It was a magnitude 5.2 temblor centered just outside West Salem in southeastern Illinois, a largely rural region of small towns that sit over the Wabash fault zone. The area has produced moderately strong quakes as recently as 2002.
But it hasn't been studied to nearly the degree of quake-prone areas west of the Rockies, particularly along the heavily scrutinized Pacific coast.
The magnitude 5.2 earthquake that rocked the Midwest on Friday was felt from Kansas to Georgia, and aftershocks could continue for months at this strange seismic zone at the nation's center and even trigger another big quake, a geophysicist said.
The quake occurred on a northern extension of the New Madrid fault, about 6 miles north of Mt. Carmel, Ill. The New Madrid fault was responsible for devastating quakes in the Mississippi Valley in 1811 and 1812. So the Friday quake and its aftershocks likely are raising the blood pressure of some residents and scientists. For decades, scientists have debated whether and when the underlying fault could generate another temblor of similar and deadly strength.
"I think we saw a window to this possibility today in the Wabash Valley," said geophysicist Allessandro Forte of the Université du Québec à Montréal, who has studied the region's seismicity. "It's to the north of the New Madrid seismic zone, but given the strength of crust, the stress can be distributed great distances. It's not clear if we could see something in the next few years or even next few months, I would say." The last earthquake in the region to approach the severity of Friday's temblor was a 5.0 magnitude quake that shook a nearby area in 2002, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Earth's jet streams, the high-altitude bands of fast winds that strongly influence the paths of storms and other weather systems, are shifting--possibly in response to global warming. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution determined that over a 23-year span from 1979 to 2001 the jet streams in both hemispheres have risen in altitude and shifted toward the poles. The jet stream in the northern hemisphere has also weakened. These changes fit the predictions of global warming models and have implications for the frequency and intensity of future storms, including hurricanes.
Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology tracked changes in the average position and strength of jet streams using records compiled by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the National Centers for Environmental Protection, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The data included outputs from weather prediction models, conventional observations from weather balloons and surface instruments, and remote observations from satellites.
A nuclear device detonated near the White House would kill roughly 100,000 people and flatten downtown federal buildings, while the radioactive plume from the explosion would likely spread toward the Capitol and into Southeast D.C., contaminating thousands more
The blast from the 10-kiloton bomb — similar to the bomb dropped over Hiroshima during World War II — would kill up to one in 10 tourists visiting the Washington Monument and send shards of glass flying the length of the National Mall, in a scenario that has become increasingly likely to occur in a major U.S. city in recent years, panel members told a Senate committee yesterday.
"It's inevitable," said Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia, who has charted the potential explosion's effect in the District and testified before a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "I think it's wistful to think that it won't happen by 20 years."
The Senate committee has convened a series of hearings to examine the threat and effects of a terrorist nuclear attack on a U.S. city , as well as the needed response.
Their work shows that the size of the meteorite that likely plummeted to Earth at the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary 65 million years ago was four to six kilometers in diameter. The meteorite was the trigger, scientists believe, for the mass extinction of dinosaurs and other life forms.
François Paquay, a geologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), used variations (isotopes) of the rare element osmium in sediments at the ocean bottom to estimate the size of these meteorites. The results are published in this week's issue of the journal Science. When meteorites collide with Earth, they carry a different osmium isotope ratio than the levels normally seen throughout the oceans.
"The vaporization of meteorites carries a pulse of this rare element into the area where they landed," says Rodey Batiza of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research along with NSF's Division of Earth Sciences. "The osmium mixes throughout the ocean quickly. Records of these impact-induced changes in ocean chemistry are then preserved in deep-sea sediments."
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.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may not have been the whopper scientists thought.
Analysis of chemical remains of the asteroid that can still be found in sediments under the sea shows the rock was about 2.5 miles wide, according to Francois Paquay, a geology graduate student at the University of Hawaii.
That is significantly less than the up-to-12-mile-wide space boulder that past researchers have suggested was the dinosaur-killer, according to research published Friday in the journal Science.
