Quake jolts China's Sichuan, killing 70

In this photo provided by China's official Xinhua News Agency, a giant rock blocks the road, about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the county seat of Lushan in Ya'an city, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Saturday, April 20, 2013. A powerful earthquake jolted China's Sichuan province Saturday near where a devastating quake struck five years ago. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Hai Mingwei) NO SALES

In this photo provided by China's official Xinhua News Agency, a giant rock blocks the road, about 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the county seat of Lushan in Ya'an city, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Saturday, April 20, 2013. A powerful earthquake jolted China's Sichuan province Saturday near where a devastating quake struck five years ago. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Hai Mingwei) NO SALES

In this photo provided by China's official Xinhua News Agency, people gather on a street to avoid aftershocks of an earthquake, in Shifang, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Saturday, April 20, 2013. At least two people were killed Saturday when a powerful earthquake jolted China's Sichuan province near the same area where a devastating quake struck five years ago, with state media warning the casualty toll could climb sharply. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Zhang Xiaoli) NO SALES

In this photo provided by China's official Xinhua News Agency, students gather outside their school buildings to avoid aftershocks of an earhtquake, in Dazhou, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Saturday, April 20, 2013. People were killed Saturday when a powerful earthquake jolted China's Sichuan province near the same area where a devastating quake struck five years ago, with state media warning the casualty toll could climb sharply. (AP Photo/Xinhua, Deng Liangkui) NO SALES

BEIJING (AP) ? A powerful earthquake jolted China's Sichuan province Saturday near where a devastating quake struck five years ago, killing at least 70 people and leaving more than 2,000 hurt, prompting worries the death toll will climb.

The quake ? measured by China's seismological bureau at magnitude-7 and the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6 ? struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8 a.m. toppling buildings, many of them older brick structures. Tiles fell from roofs and walls collapsed, sending people into the streets in their underwear and wrapped in blankets.

Rescue workers turned a square outside the Lushan's county hospital into a triage center with medical personnel treating the wounded, according to footage on China Central Television.

The emergency response office for the city of Ya'an, which administers Lushan, said the death toll had climbed to 70, including 56 from Lushan, as of 2 p.m., with more than 2,000 injured.

It said in a written statement that nearly all of the structures in Longmen village collapsed and that nearly 10,000 houses were damaged throughout the county.

Hard-hit parts of the county remained unreachable by road, with several highways cut off, the statement said.

The county's power grid has been disrupted and phone services were only partially available, the authorities said. State media said some text and Internet services were working.

A person whose posts to a micro-blogging account "Qingyi Riverside" on Sina Corp.'s Twitter-like Weibo service carried a Lushan geotag said that many buildings collapsed and that people could spot helicopters hovering above.

Aerial photos released by China's military and shown on state television showed individual houses in ruins and some stretches of the county seat and villages flattened into rubble. The roofs of some taller buildings appeared to have slipped off exposing the floors beneath them.

The quake's shallow depth, less than 13 kilometers (8 miles), likely magnified the impact and CCTV showed footage from local security cameras shaking. Xinhua said that the quake rattled buildings in the provincial capital of Chengdu 115 kilometers (70 miles), to the east. It caused the shutdown of the city's airport for about an hour before reopening, state media said.

Lushan, where the quake struck, is home to 124,000 people where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that eventually rise to the Tibetan plateau. The area is near a well-known preserve for pandas, Bifengxia, which Xinhua said was not affected by the quake. Dozens of pandas were moved to Bifengxia from another preserve, Wolong, after its habitat was wrecked by the 2008 quake.

Ya'an authorities said more than 2,000 rescuers were dispatched to the disaster area, along with excavators, loaders, 200 tents and 1,400 quilts.

Premier Li Keqiang flew to Ya'an to direct rescue efforts, and he and President Xi Jinping ordered officials and rescuers to make saving people the top priority, Xinhua said.

Social media users who said they were in Lushan county posted photos of collapsed buildings and reported that water and electricity had been cut off. At least 35 aftershocks ? at least two of them at magnitude-5 or higher ? shook the area.

"It's too dangerous," said a person with the Weibo account Chengduxinglin and with a Lushan geotag. "Even the aftershocks are scary."

The area lies near the same Longmenshan fault where the devastating 7.9-magnitude quake struck May 12, 2008, leaving more than 90,000 people dead or missing and presumed dead.

"It was just like May 12," said Liu Xi, a writer in Ya'an city, who was jolted awake by Saturday's quake. "All the home decorations fell at once, and the old house cracked."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-04-20-AS-China-Earthquake/id-001fd65f842440d7ab9cf986b2cabeee

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Pressure cooker bombs used in past by militants

CAIRO (AP) ? Homemade bombs built from pressure cookers, a version of which was used in the Boston Marathon bombings, have been a frequent weapon of militants in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. Al-Qaida's branch in Yemen once published an online manual on how to make one, urging "lone jihadis" to act on their own to carry out attacks.

President Barack Obama underlined Tuesday that investigators do not know if the twin bombing the day before that killed three people and wounded more than 170 was carried out by an international organization, a domestic group or a "malevolent individual." There has been no claim of responsibility.

A person briefed on the investigation told The Associated Press that the explosives were fashioned out of pressure cookers and packed with shards of metal, nails and ball bearings to inflict maximum carnage.

The relative ease of constructing such bombs and the powerful punch they deliver has made them attractive to insurgents and Islamic extremists, particularly in South Asia. They have turned up in past bombing plots by Islamic extremists in the West, including a plan by a U.S. soldier to blow up a restaurant frequented by fellow soldiers outside Fort Hood, in Texas. One of the three devices used in the May 2010 Times Square attempted bombing was a pressure cooker, according to a joint FBI and Homeland Security intelligence report issued in July 2010.

Al-Qaida's branch in Yemen gave a detailed description on how to make a pressure cooker bomb in the 2010 first issue of "Inspire," its magazine that only appears online, in a chapter titled "Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom."

"The pressurized cooker is the most effective method" for making a simple bomb, the article said, describing how to fill the cooker with shrapnel and gunpowder and to create a detonator using the filament of a light bulb and a clock timer.

"Inspire" magazine has a running series of such training articles called "Open Source Jihad," which the group calls a resource manual for individual extremists to carry out attacks against the enemies of jihad, including the U.S. and its allies. The magazine is targeted heavily at encouraging "lone wolf" jihadis.

An issue last year reprinted an older article by a veteran Syrian jihadi Abu Musab al-Souri addressing would-be jihadis proposing a long list of possible targets for attacks, among them "crowded sports arenas" and "annual social events."

Notably, Army Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison last year for the Fort Hood restaurant bombing plot, was discovered to have a copy of the "How to build a bomb in the kitchen of your mom" article, according to the FBI. Investigators found bombmaking materials in his hotel that included a pressure cooker and gunpowder, according to testimony at his trial.

The SITE Monitoring Service, a U.S. independent group tracking militant messaging online, noted that Islamic extremists are not the only ones paying attention to the al-Qaida magazine: White supremacists have also circulated copies on their web forums. They found "Inspire" and "other al-Qaida manuals beneficial for their strategies," it said.

Over the course of 10 issues the past three years, "Inspire" has given detailed instructions with diagrams and photos on how to use automatic weapons, produce remote control detonators, set fire to a building or create forest fires. In the most recent issue, put out in March, it described how to set fire to a parked vehicle and how to cause road accidents with oil slicks on a road or tire-bursting spikes.

The chapters, including the one on pressure cooker bombs, were compiled into a booklet titled "The Lone Mujahed Pocketbook," released on Islamic militant web sites in March, according to SITE.

Al-Qaida's Yemeni branch, known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, has repeatedly tried to carry out direct attacks on U.S. soil, once by dispatching the would-be 2009 Christmas bomber of a U.S. jet ? whose attack failed when the explosives hidden in his underwear failed to go off ? and then the following year by trying to mail explosives to the U.S. in packages that were intercepted.

The pressure cooker bomb's most frequent use seems to be in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and India in attacks against police or the public. This year, local press reports in Pakistan have reported several such bombs found planted on streets, including in the city of Karachi, where multiple militant groups operate.

In 2010, suspected militants attacked the U.S.-based Christian aid group World Vision in northwestern Pakistan, killing six Pakistani employees with a remotely detonated pressure cooker bomb.

That same year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security put out a warning about such explosives, noting their frequent use in South Asia.

"The presence of a pressure cooker in an unusual location such as a building lobby or busy street corner should be treated as suspicious," it said.

__

AP correspondents Cassandra Vinograd and Paisley Dodds in London and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pressure-cooker-bombs-used-past-militants-204616173.html

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89% A Place at the Table

All Critics (53) | Top Critics (22) | Fresh (47) | Rotten (6)

Hunger in America is not about a shortage of food but an abundance of poverty. This is where the spiral spins downward.

A shocking indictment of how people are starving in the land of plenty ...

You don't have to be a fan of info-graphics in social-justice docs to be troubled by one showing that the price of processed food has decreased in almost exact proportion to the rise in cost of fresh fruits and vegetables.

"A Place at the Table" presents a shameful truth that should leave viewers dismayed and angry: This nation has more than enough food for all its people, yet millions of them are hungry.

One thing is clear from "A Place at the Table": You cannot answer the question "Why are people hungry?," without also asking "Why are people poor?"

It specifically addresses our country's hunger crisis. But it also speaks to larger hungers. Hungers for independence, a dignified life, a better chance for ones children-in short, the American dream. See it and weep.

Filmmakers Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush chip away at the topic until their message becomes unassailable.

It doesn't offer much in terms of optimism, but provides an eye-opening glimpse into a frequently overlooked social issue.

Jacboson and Silverbush know how to make this potentially unpleasant news palatable and inspiring.

A documentary about the shocking extent of hunger in America, affecting 1 in 4 children.

Provides plenty of moving case studies...[but] it's most useful for its prismatic look at the problem of American hunger, examining the problem's recent history, its root causes...and its inextricability from other national crises...

Hunger in America, seen through the eyes of its victims, with an emphasis on children. Sobering documentary addresses a shameful problem.

As moving as the real lives are, for a film clearly intending to be a call for action, hunger cries out for more journalism and not just depressing stories and statistics.

A Place at the Table makes a strong case that hunger for one is a problem for all.

Directors Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush explore the surprisingly difficult obstacles to ending a situation where about 1 child out of 4 faces insecurity over where to get a meal.

A Place at the Table may bring to light a hunger epidemic the entire United States faces, but it also casts an even darker shadow on an already tainted world.

Powerful docu explores the problem of hunger in America.

An explosive investigative documentary about the injustices emanating from agricultural capitalism, how it's more about who gets to define what food is, and exactly who hugely profits from it.

...joined by an eclectic array of advocates and advisors to hit home the fact that, daily, millions of Americans go hungry.

Fine but conventional documentary on the problem of hunger in contemporary America.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a_place_at_the_table_2013/

supreme court

Venezuela's PDVSA to keep funding socialist programs under Maduro

By Daniel Wallis

CARACAS (Reuters) - Nicolas Maduro's win in Venezuela's presidential election means state oil company PDVSA will continue funding the government's socialist policies while increasingly relying on deals with China and Russia.

The late Hugo Chavez picked Maduro, a 50-year-old former bus driver, to continue his self-declared revolution in the OPEC country where he nationalized most of the oil industry during his polarizing 14-year rule.

That put Venezuela's crude reserves, the world's biggest, at the service of Chavez's power base among the poor majority. Maduro, who narrowly won the presidential election on Sunday with 50.7 percent of votes, now takes office on a pledge to push forward his late boss's plan.

His opposition rival, Henrique Capriles, refused to recognize the result and demanded a recount, although the National Electoral Council said Maduro's victory was "irreversible".

Maduro can be expected to increase oil sales to political allies, especially China, at the expense of the United States, the traditional top buyer of Venezuelan crude, while taking on more debt from those partners.

Chavez turned PDVSA into the financial motor of his self-styled revolution, funding everything from sports and cultural events to free health clinics and home-building programs.

Critics say that stopped the company from focusing on its main priorities, leading to the neglect of older oil fields and new projects alike, and fomenting a culture in which technocrats were replaced by political appointees.

Chavez sharply increased fuel sales to China amid years of ideological tensions with the United States, turning Beijing into his government's biggest single source of foreign funding.

Venezuela now sends China about 430,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude and products, up from just a few thousand bpd in 2005, in repayment for loans totaling $36 billion.

And the biggest Chinese energy company, China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), is a key part of Venezuela's ambitious efforts to tap its vast Orinoco extra heavy crude belt, one of the planet's largest mostly-untapped hydrocarbon reserves.

Maduro's victory ensures the continuity of a string of projects in the Orinoco region with foreign partners that include U.S. major Chevron and Spain's Repsol - all drawn to the South American country in spite of Chavez's record of nationalizing oilfield operations in the past.

Early production began last month at one joint venture in the Orinoco between PDVSA and Italy's ENI, and the Venezuelan government expects output to begin within weeks at other projects with Chevron and CNPC.

Another key Orinoco project began pumping last September, Petromiranda, where PDVSA is partnered with a consortium of Russian companies led by state energy giant Rosneft.

FOCUS ON ORINOCO PROJECTS

Russia has given high-level support to its energy companies' efforts in Venezuela. During a visit in 2010, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin handed Chavez a $600 million check as part of a signing fee for their participation in the Orinoco.

And Igor Sechin, powerful deputy prime minister and chief executive at Rosneft, Russia's top crude producer, has been a regular visitor to discuss oil deals and arms sales.

Just weeks before the late Venezuelan president won re-election last October, Sechin donned a Chavez T-shirt to pose with workers as Petromiranda produced its first barrels.

Venezuelan officials hope the Orinoco projects will eventually add 2 million bpd of new output via investments of more than $80 billion. But that will take years, with executives at some joint ventures saying work has often been delayed by lack of infrastructure and delays in payments from PDVSA.

Venezuela has consistently taken a "hawkish" stance on global oil prices and Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez, who is also the president of PDVSA, says the government will continue to push for a minimum $100 per barrel at the next OPEC meeting, which is due to be held on May 31 in Vienna.

Venezuela is likely to import more processed fuels because of recurrent problems in its refinery network. They were starkly illustrated by an explosion that killed more than 40 people at the Amuay refinery last August. It was one of the global industry's most deadly accidents in decades.

As he faces a raft of economic challenges from day one, Maduro could be tempted to look at cutting local fuel subsidies that have made Venezuela's gasoline the cheapest in the world.

Venezuelans who see cheap petrol as a birth-right enjoy gasoline prices of around $0.06 per gallon - meaning it costs less than $2 to fill up an average SUV. Chavez was loathe to increase it since it could have revived memories of deadly riots in 1989 that were partly triggered by a fuel price hike.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast last month that whoever won the election would face a "Catch 22" situation.

Current policies of diverting oil revenue to costly social programs could not continue, it warned, without putting the industry and the whole economy at considerable risk.

"But neither can they be reversed without the risk of social unrest and political chaos," it said in a report.

PDVSA contributed almost $44 billion to social welfare programs last year. But despite high global oil prices, its profits slipped 6.1 percent to $4.2 billion - in part because it sold more fuel on the heavily subsidized domestic market.

Ramirez has told Reuters that Venezuela will maintain its oil industry tax and legal framework under Maduro, including an easing of the windfall tax system that was unveiled in January. That alone is unlikely to attract much new funding.

"More far-reaching changes will be needed to increase Venezuela's attractiveness as an investment destination," the IHS Energy consultancy said in a research note.

(Additional reporting by Marianna Parraga; Editing by Kieran Murray and Andrew Heavens)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/venezuelas-pdvsa-keep-funding-socialist-programs-under-maduro-085314998--finance.html

Amy Poehler Australian Open

Key pathway to stop dangerous, out-of-control inflammation discovered

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

A potential new strategy to developing new drugs to control inflammation without serious side effects has been found by Georgia State University researchers and international colleagues.

Jian-Dong Li, director of Georgia State's Center for Inflammation, Immunity and Infection, and his team discovered that blocking a certain pathway involved in the biological process of inflammation will suppress it.

Inhibiting a molecule called phosphodiesterase 4B, or PDE4B, suppresses inflammation by affecting a key gene called CLYD, a gene that serves as a brake on inflammation.

The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Li explained the process of overactive inflammation using a "police" analogy.

When a pathogen ? such as bacteria or viruses -- infects a patient, he said, it triggers an "alarm" to which the "police" of immune system respond. In turn, it triggers neutrophil attractant called cytokines to respond, leading to inflammation that serves to help rid the body of the pathogen. But if inflammation isn't stopped, tissue damage can result.

The pathways during the response are termed "positive," like a gas pedal on a car, and "negative," like a brake, with the process in the positive pathway going down the line from the pathogen to inflammation, and negative going the other direction. PDE4B is involved in controlling the negative pathway.

Many researchers have been focusing on developing anti-inflammatory agents by stopping the positive pathway, but the discovery by Li and his colleagues gives scientists a new route to stop inflammation using safer or even existing drugs proven to be non-toxic as they have found that accelerating the negative pathway will reduce inflammation.

"This is the key negative regulator that we have been searching after for years, " Li said.

There is a need for better drugs to control inflammation, because current treatments come with serious side effects, Li said. Steroids are commonly used, but cannot be used over the long-term. Steroids suppress the immune system.

###

Georgia State University: http://www.gsu.edu

Thanks to Georgia State University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127677/Key_pathway_to_stop_dangerous__out_of_control_inflammation_discovered

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SCOTTEVEST + ThinkGeek = Tropiformer Jacket

Tech clothing mega designer SCOTTEVEST has teamed up with uber geek shop ThinkGeek to create an exclusive jacket. The Tropiformer Jacket is made of super lightweight, soft breathable fabric that will be great for that trip to the tropics or warm summer months in Southern Indiana. It features 22 pockets, 5 colors and the ability [...]

Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2013/04/10/scottevest-thinkgeek-tropiformer-jacket/

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