Earthquakes

Iran Earthquake: 7.8 Quake Rocks Middle East Region
The Inquisitr

Authorities say at least 40 people were killed Tuesday after a powerful earthquake struck Iran near its border with Pakistan.

According to the United State Geological Survey, the 7.8 magnitude quake struck around 3:44 pm local time (6:44 am EST) in southeastern Iran, about 50 miles east of the city of Khash.

There were reports of tremors lasting as long as 30 seconds felt in Qatar, Bahrain, and Abu Dhabi in the Gulf, in Multan in Pakistan, and elsewhere. BBC reports in Delhi, more than 1,500 miles from the quake’s suspected epicenter, office workers evacuated buildings as fittings shook and windows rattled.

The USGS said that the temblor had a depth of 9.7 miles. Such deep quakes are rare and typically have greater destructive capability.

“It was the biggest earthquake in Iran in 40 years and we are expecting hundreds of dead,” said an Iranian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Following the quake, Iranian television reports suggested that at least 40 people had been killed and possibly as many as 200, but no official figures were given, and the reports could not be confirmed.

Tuesday’s earthquake came less than a week after a 6.1 magnitude temblor about 60 miles southeast of Bushehr, the site of Iran’s main nuclear reactor, devastating two villages, leaving 37 people dead and more than 800 injured.

Due to Iran’s proximity to geological faultlines, the middle eastern country is prone to earthquakes.

A 6.6 quake in 2003 flattened the southern city of Bam and killed about 40,000 people, and, in 1990, at least 30,000 people also died in a quake along the Caspian Sea.

PressTV has more on Tuesday’s 7.8 magnitude quake in Iran in the video below:

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Earthquakes

Strong earthquake rocks Papua New Guinea
AAP

A 6.6-MAGNITUDE earthquake has hit Papua New Guinea's north, where a huge tsunami killed more than 2000 people in 1998.

However, reports suggest the area escaped serious damage this time.

The earthquake, at a depth of just 13km, hit 23km east of the small town of Aitape on the Pacific nation's north coast, the US Geological Survey said.

"We are aware of the earthquake off Aitape in Papua New Guinea. There have been no reports of serious damage or injury," a spokeswoman from Australia's foreign office told AFP.

No destructive tsunami warning was issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center but it cautioned that earthquakes of this size could sometimes generate local tsunami waves.

A giant tsunami in 1998 smashed into the coastline around Aitape following an offshore earthquake that triggered waves measuring up to 10 metres, which swept away churches, schools and other buildings.

Phone lines to Aitape, which has a population of about 8000, appeared to be down.

However, the PNG National Disaster Centre said it had been in touch with officials in the town of Vanimo about 150 kilometres away and no tsunami waves had been seen.

"If there was going to be a tsunami it would have been there by now," Chris McKee from the disaster office said.

Geoscience Australia said about 60,000 people would be in the exposure zone.

"There is the possibility of considerable damage. It certainly could bring buildings down," seismologist Steve Tatham told AFP.

The PNG National Broadcasting Corporation said it had spoken to Aitape community leader Paul Reptario.

"He says his whole house was shaking while his vehicle almost overturned," the broadcaster said.

"He ran down to the beach to check for signs of tsunami like receding waves but there was none. Reptario says houses and other infrastructure in his village were not damaged," it added.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation also cited an Aitape local as saying there had been no unusual waves and no significant damage but people had been panicking.

"They were all running around the street. They were frightened maybe the sea will come up," said Max Kamave from the Aitape Resort Hotel.

Personnel at Wewak Hospital, about 150 kilometres from the coastal epicentre, said they too felt the tremor but there was no immediate reports of damage from their town.

"It was a strong one. This is a solid building... and it was shaking," hospital spokesman Morris Iuandu told AFP.

He estimated that the swaying had lasted at least three minutes.

Wewak resident Gregory Moses described it as a "huge earthquake".

"Everything literally was shaking and I thought the roof was going to cave in any minute but thank God its now over," he said on Facebook.

Quakes of this magnitude are common in impoverished PNG, which sits on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire", a hotspot for seismic activity due to friction between tectonic plates.

A 6.6-magnitude quake struck the country's Bougainville Island on Sunday but there were no reports of damage or injuries.

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Wars and Rumors of Wars
 

Even a midget nuke strike will lead to massive retaliation, India warns Pak
Indrani Bagchi, TNN

NEW DELHI: India will retaliate massively even if Pakistan uses tactical nuclear weapons against it. With Pakistan developing "tactical" nuclear warheads, that is, miniaturizing its weapons to be carried on short-range missiles, India will protect its security interests by retaliating to a "smaller" tactical attack in exactly the same manner as it would respond to a "big" strategic attack.

Articulating Indian nuclear policy in this regard for the first time, Shyam Saran, convener of the National Security Advisory Board, said, "India will not be the first to use nuclear weapons, but if it is attacked with such weapons, it would engage in nuclear retaliation which will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage on its adversary. The label on a nuclear weapon used for attacking India, strategic or tactical, is irrelevant from the Indian perspective." This is significant, because Saran was placing on record India's official nuclear posture with the full concurrence of the highest levels of nuclear policymakers in New Delhi.

Giving a speech on India's nuclear deterrent recently, Saran placed India's nuclear posture in perspective in the context of recent developments, notably the "jihadist edge" that Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability have acquired.

Saran argued that as a result of its tactical weapons, Pakistan believes it has brought down the threshold of nuclear use. "Pakistani motivation is to dissuade India from contemplating conventional punitive retaliation to sub-conventional but highly destructive and disruptive cross-border terrorist strikes such as the horrific 26/11 attack on Mumbai. What Pakistan is signalling to India and to the world is that India should not contemplate retaliation even if there is another Mumbai because Pakistan has lowered the threshold of nuclear use to the theatre level. This is nothing short of nuclear blackmail, no different from the irresponsible behaviour one witnesses in North Korea," he said.

One of the main reasons for Pakistan miniaturizing its nukes is actually to keep its weapons from being confiscated or neutralized by the US, a fear that has grown in the Pakistani establishment in the wake of the operation against Osama bin Laden. "Pakistan has, nevertheless, projected its nuclear deterrent as solely targeted at India and its strategic doctrine mimics the binary nuclear equation between the US and the Soviet Union which prevailed during the Cold War," Saran said.

However, warning Pakistan, he added, "A limited nuclear war is a contradiction in terms. Any nuclear exchange, once initiated, would swiftly and inexorably escalate to the strategic level. Pakistan would be prudent not to assume otherwise as it sometimes appears to do, most recently by developing and perhaps deploying theatre nuclear weapons."

There have been significant shifts in Pakistan's nuclear posture recently. First is the movement from uranium to a newer generation of plutonium weapons, which has enabled Pakistan to increase the number of weapons, outstripping India in weapons and fissile material production. Although they are still to be verified, Pakistan has claimed it has miniaturized nuclear weapons to be used on cruise missiles and other short-range missiles. The newer generation of Pakistan's weapons are also solid-fuelled rather than liquid, making them easier to transport and launch.

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Pestilence
 

China reports latest bird flu death, toll rises to 27
Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - A 55-year-old man in central China has died from a new strain of bird flu, bringing to 27 the number of deaths from the mysterious H7N9 virus, state news agency Xinhua said on Thursday.

The H7N9 virus, which has infected 127 people in China, is a threat to world health and should be taken seriously, scientists said on Wednesday.

The Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) has described it as "one of the most lethal" flu viruses but said there is as yet no evidence of human-to-human transmission of this virus.

The latest victim, a native of southeastern Jiangxi province surnamed Jiao, died in Hunan province, Xinhua said. The man sold braised pork and was diagnosed with the H7N9 virus on April 26, the Hunan Health Bureau said on its website.

A 69-year-old farmer, also from Hunan, was the latest person to be infected with the virus, state media said.

So far, 26 people have recovered after contracting the virus, according to Xinhua.

Chinese scientists have confirmed for the first time that the H7N9 strain has been transmitted to humans from chickens.

Last week a man in Taiwan became the first case of the flu outside mainland China. He caught the flu while traveling in China.

(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee; Editing by Michael Perry)

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Famines

Politics makes people prevaricate, even when famine looms
The Guardian

Donors and developing countries culpable for failing to act on early warnings, claims Chatham House report into food crises.

It is a familiar paradox: the world sees famine coming, yet acts only after the event. The food crisis that engulfed the Horn of Africa in 2011 was predicted almost a year before it happened. Famine was likewise foretold in the Sahel region, which last year experienced extreme hunger for the third time since 2004. Early warning systems are the Cassandras of the modern world, accurate yet unheeded augurs of tragedy.

Donors and NGOs know this, but what fewer seem to know is how to change things – and why they aren't already changing.

How can the growing sophistication of early warning systems – which, from humble beginnings in the early 80s, now include long-term weather forecasting, satellite imagery to estimate harvests, population migration monitoring, and detailed household and food availability data – be used for prevention rather than cure, saving lives and money? With effective tools in place, and a clear case for intervention on humanitarian and economic grounds, why isn't risk management improving?

"If we had to boil it down to a single answer – one word – it would be politics," says Rob Bailey, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, a London-based international affairs thinktank.

Bailey says governments are inherently risk averse, causing them to prevaricate rather than commit to strategies that might undermine their foreign policy objectives, tarnish a carefully crafted international image, or – should public funds be used to support a crisis that fails to materialise – provoke a media and voter backlash. Developing country governments can be equally culpable, he says, often failing to act on early warnings because famine is seen as "anathema to the narrative of development".

But although the dynamics of delay vary, the upshot is almost invariably the same: political rather than humanitarian factors determine where aid goes. The situation is exacerbated, argues Bailey, by a "dynamic of buck-passing and free-riding" triggered when there are early warnings of a hunger crisis that is not yet visible.

"The political consequences of sitting on your hands and doing nothing aren't necessarily as apparent as they could be with a rapid onset disaster that's broadcast on the news every night. This makes it easy for donors to wait for somebody else to act and pick up the tab."

Competition holds the key to changing this culture of political inertia, says Bailey, who advocates a carrot-and-stick approach whereby governments would be rewarded for acting on early warnings of famine and penalised for ignoring them.

"I think there's a lot more that can be done by NGOs to try to create that race to the top among donor governments, for instance by producing some kind of index," he says. "NGOs should identify and praise governments that are funding things early and doing their best to mitigate risks. NGOs find it quite difficult to say governments are doing well – it's much easier for them to say a government is doing badly – but there's definitely an opportunity there."

A step in this direction is being taken by the UK's Department for International Development (DfID), where a global risk register is being developed to guide decision-making. The initial model, expected to be operational this summer, will cover a range of humanitarian risk factors, creating a platform for decision-making.

"One of the positive outcomes [will be] that we can use it to frame humanitarian risk as a threat to non-delivery of DfID's development programmes," said DfID's Kate Foster at the launch of a report by Bailey called Managing famine risk: linking early warning to early action. "This research will help us to build the economic case."

Bailey welcomes the DfID initiative while stressing the importance of making such information transparent and accessible so that governments can be held accountable. He echoes Foster's emphasis on making the economic case for early spending. "Governments must do more to justify why early action is important for getting better value for money from aid, making the case publicly that, unless you start to manage these risks to mitigate them, the actual return you get on every pound of foreign aid is greatly reduced."

Donor governments should agree rules on burden sharing, suggests Bailey, with one tier of donors specialising in early action, another in emergency response, a third in recovery, and so on. This approach, he believes, would increase mutual accountability, creating another layer of political incentive.

For governments in developing countries, civil and political freedoms of the kind that underpinned the successful Kenya for Kenyans campaign are central to incentivisation, says Bailey. "The government deprioritised the northern drylands, and it was those civil and political freedoms that created the penalties – the stick, if you like – for the government to respond. They could equally create the carrot in the future, if the campaign continues to put pressure on the government to invest in those communities."

Legislation could play a role in improving early intervention, says Bailey, who suggests "an institutionalised disaster risk reduction policy that identifies the responsibility of certain ministers and government departments to do certain things, with mechanisms of redress if they don't".

Bailey's study, which urges improvements in the capacity and effectiveness of existing systems and greater empowerment at community level, was welcomed by Jane Cocking, Oxfam GB's humanitarian director.

"The report is a refreshing addition to the debate on early warning to early action, and that is inarguably because it is so up front and explicit about the political nature of this discourse, helping us move on from the purely technical approach," said Cocking.

How fast things will move on is another question, however. "If you have a catastrophe like you had in the Horn in 2011, it opens up a window of opportunity where everybody wants to make changes and improve things," says Bailey. "But that window gradually closes as the agenda moves on. Change is piecemeal and long term."

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