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Greenland cold snap linked to Viking disappearance
The report, reconstructing temperatures by examining lake sediment cores in west Greenland dating back 5,600 years, also indicated that earlier, pre-historic settlers also had to contend with vicious swings in climate on icy Greenland.
"Climate played (a) big role in Vikings' disappearance from Greenland," Brown University in the United States said in a statement of a finding that average temperatures plunged 4 degrees Celsius (7F) in 80 years from about 1100.
Such a shift is roughly the equivalent of the current average temperatures in Edinburgh, Scotland, tumbling to match those in Reykjavik, Iceland. It would be a huge setback to crop and livestock production.
"There is a definite cooling trend in the region right before the Norse disappear," said William D'Andrea of Brown University, the lead author of the study in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers have scant written or archaeological records to figure out why Viking settlers abandoned colonies on the western side of the island in the mid-1300s and the eastern side in the early 1400s.
Conflicts with indigenous Inuit, a search for better hunting grounds, economic stresses and natural swings in climate, perhaps caused by shifts in the sun's output or volcanic eruptions, could all be factors.
LITTLE ICE AGE
Scientists have previously suspected that a cooling toward a "Little Ice Age" from the 1400s gradually shortened growing seasons and added to sea ice that hampered sailing links with Iceland or the Nordic nations.
The study, by scientists in the United States and Britain, added the previously unknown 12th century temperature plunge as a possible trigger for the colonies' demise. Vikings arrived in Greenland in the 980s, during a warm period like the present.
"You have an interval when the summers are long and balmy and you build up the size of your farm, and then suddenly year after year, you go into this cooling trend, and the summers are getting shorter and colder and you can't make as much hay," D'Andrea said.
The study also traced even earlier swings in the climate to the rise and fall of pre-historic peoples on Greenland starting with the Saqqaq culture, which thrived from about 4,500 years ago to 2,800 years ago.
Scientists fear that the 21st century warming is caused by climate change, stoked by a build-up of greenhouse gases from human activities. An acceleration of warming could cause a meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, raising world sea levels.
Signs of recovery in Japan, debt remains a worry
Factory output rose 1.0 percent in April, data showed, against a record drop of 15.5 percent a month earlier as the March 11 disaster shattered supply chains and crippled power stations, including the Fukushima atomic plant.
The gain was lower than the 2.9 percent predicted in a poll of economists by Dow Jones Newswires and by the Nikkei financial daily, but analysts welcomed the news as a signal of a brighter outlook.
The effect of the earthquake was grave, said Japan Research Institute chief economist Hidehiko Fujii, but "the recovery trend as shown in forecasts is extremely strong. It is possible for production to be restored to pre-quake levels before summer."
The economy slipped back into recession in January-March, contracting sharply after the disasters left around 25,000 dead or missing and devastated infrastructure and manufacturing facilities, plunging the nation into its worst crisis since World War II.
Many key component manufacturers are based in the worst-hit regions and suffered damage to their facilities from the 9.0 magnitude earthquake or were inundated by the giant wave that followed.
Industrial behemoths such as Sony and Toyota were forced to halt some production.
But while fears of a major electricity shortfall going into the summer have eased slightly, the situation remains volatile, analysts warn.
Total domestic production of cars, trucks and buses plunged a record 60.1 percent year-on-year in April, according to the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, while exports fell 67.8 percent, another record.
"In April, the production of the auto sector did not recover as much as the market had expected. But there are many positive signals in the economic report," said Hiroshi Watanabe, economist at Daiwa Institute of Research.
The government forecast overall industrial output would rise 8.0 percent in May and 7.7 percent in June, with production in transport equipment expanding 35.7 percent in May and 36.7 percent in June.
"It was widely thought that the disruption in the supply chain would last until the July-September quarter, but if this trend of recovery continues, the supply chain may return to the pre-disaster state as early as June. I would say the prospect is pretty bright," Watanabe said.
Dampening the domestic outlook somewhat was data showing household spending fell 3.0 percent on year for the second straight month with consumers holding off on areas such as entertainment and travel.
Keiji Kanda, economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research, said: "The figures show that the levels of household earnings are lowering as a result of the stagnant economy and declining exports."
The government also said unemployment stood at 4.7 percent in April, up from 4.6 percent in March and matching expectations, although the figures exclude data from regions most hit by the twin disaster.
Ratings agency Moody's said Tuesday it could lower Japan's sovereign debt rating in three months over fears it will fail to contain a debt mountain that is twice GDP, the industrialised world's largest.
"The review has been prompted by heightened concern that faltering economic growth prospects and a weak policy response would make more challenging the government's ability to fashion and achieve a credible deficit reduction target," Moody's said in a statement.
"Without an effective strategy, government debt will rise inexorably from a level which already is well above that of other advanced economies."
Moody's assigned a "negative" outlook in February on Japan's "Aa2" rating, which analysts said would probably lead to a downgrade.
"Although a (Japan government bond) funding crisis is unlikely in the near- to medium-term, pressures could build up over the longer term, and which should be taken into account in the rating, even at this high end of the scale," Moody's said.
The move will put further pressure on centre-left Prime Minister Naoto Kan, under fire for his handling of the response to the disaster and facing the threat of a no-confidence motion this week.
Iran oil output 'may drop drastically by 2015'
"The national oil company plans to invest 150 billion dollars during the fifth development plan," which ends in 2015, said the deputy oil minister for planning, Mohsen Khojasteh-Mehr, quoted by IRNA state news agency.
"If the investments are not realised..., the country's oil output will drop to 2.7 million barrels per day" from the current production of 3.7 million, he said.
The proposed investment would raise Iran's oil production capacity to 4.7 million pbd by 2015, from the current 4.0 million, while gas production would increase to 1,470 million cubic metres from 600 million, he said.
According to Khojasteh-Mehr, 75 billion dollars would be used to develop gas projects, 34 billion to develop oil fields, and 32 billion to maintain production capacity.
Sixty billion dollars would be financed by foreign investors despite tight economic and financial sanctions which world powers have imposed on Iran over its disputed nuclear programme, he said.
Another 50 billion dollars would come from the oil ministry, and 40 billion dollars would be invested by Iranian banks.
Iran is the second largest crude producer in the oil cartel OPEC and also has the world's second-largest natural gas reserves after Russia.
But the development of its oil and gas projects have been affected by the departure of major Western companies, as well as those from Japan and South Korea, due to international sanctions against the Iranian nuclear programme.
The companies however have been partially replaced by Chinese ones.
14 dead in Germany as food poisoning crisis grows
Belgium and Russia banned the import of vegetables from Spain, believed to be the source of at least some of the contaminated cucumbers. Madrid shot back saying it would seek financial compensation from the European Union for lost sales.
More than two weeks after the food poisoning outbreak was first reported in northern Germany, the number of confirmed and suspected cases has reached 1,200, according to media reports.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany's national disease institute, said three deaths have been officially linked to the bacteria, but "in total about a dozen people have died according to regional authorities".
These authorities later Monday announced two more deaths: a woman of 50 and a man of 75 -- bringing the toll to at least 14.
The Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has described the outbreak of the strain of E. coli as "one of the largest worldwide and the largest ever reported in Germany".
Authorities in Germany warned against eating raw vegetables after traces of the bacteria were found on organic cucumbers from Spain last week.
But officials said they are unsure what caused the sudden outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) which can result in full-blown haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), a disease that causes bloody diarrhoea and serious liver damage and possible death.
The outbreak has hit countries including Britain, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, but most these cases appear to involve people who had recently travelled to or from Germany.
"Normally we see about 1,000 cases per year, but we've now had some 1,200 cases in just 10 days," Jan Galle, director of the Luedenscheid clinic in western Germany, told ZDF public television.
"And we know that this time the EHEC strain is especially virulent and resistant, and has led to a very high number of HUS" cases, he added.
RKI has reported 329 confirmed HUS cases nationwide.
"Rapid identification of potential cases linked to this outbreak, within Germany or among persons who have travelled to Germany since the beginning of May, is essential to prevent the development of severe disease," the European disease control centre said in a statement Monday.
German Consumer Affairs Minister Ilse Aigner held emergency talks with Health Minister Daniel Bahr and regional state representatives, telling reporters the crisis has "taken a European dimension".
Burger said the source of the contamination had not been definitively identified.
Last week his organisation said a study had shown that all those affected had eaten significantly above-average amounts of tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers.
European health officials said there was currently no indication that raw milk or meat is associated with the outbreak.
Many German supermarkets and shops removed all Spanish-grown vegetables from their shelves.
Spain in turn has hotly denied that its cucumbers were the cause of the outbreak and said it would seek compensation from the European Union for the "enormous damage" to its agriculture industry.
Belgium said it was blocking cucumber imports from Spain, while Russia said it was banning vegetable imports from both Spain and Germany.
The Netherlands, which usually exports vast amounts of vegetables to Germany, said sales had collapsed. German farmers also said consumers were boycotting their vegetables.
Doctors remained unsure how to treat the disease which can result in total kidney failure.
"We have 61 adults hospitalised, 21 in intensive care," a spokeswoman for the Eppendorf University Clinic in Hamburg, where most cases are being treated clinic, said Monday evening.
The clinic has appealed for blood donations.
"We are using between 500 and 700 bags of plasma per day, compared to 60 normally. We're running out of supplies," the spokeswoman said.
Rolf Stahl, a neurologist at the clinic, said nearly a third of patients there had lost all kidney functions and were on dialysis.
Doctors were experimenting with a new type of monoclonal antibodies drug, Eculizumab, which, while not officially approved, has been administered to 11 patients in a bid to save their lives.
"The infection source remains active and we have to reckon with a growing number of cases," Bahr said.
Bangladesh woman cuts off 'attacker's' penis
The woman, a married mother of three, was attacked while she was sleeping in her shanty in Jhalakathi district, some 200 kilometres (120 miles) south of Dhaka, on Saturday night, officers said.
"As he tried to rape her, the lady cut his penis off with a knife. She then wrapped up the penis in a piece of polythene and brought it to the Jhalakathi police station as evidence of the crime," police chief Abul Khaer told AFP.
The woman has filed a case accusing the man -- who is also 40 and a married father of five -- of attempted rape, saying that he had been harassing her for six months.
The severed penis has been kept at the police station and the rape suspect was undergoing treatment in hospital.
"We shall arrest him once his condition gets better," Khaer added.
Beneath Jerusalem, an underground city takes shape
At street level, the walled Old City is an energetic and fractious enclave with a physical landscape that is predominantly Islamic and a population that is mainly Arab.
Underground Jerusalem is different: Here the noise recedes, the fierce Middle Eastern sun disappears, and light comes from fluorescent bulbs. There is a smell of earth and mildew, and the geography recalls a Jewish city that existed 2,000 years ago.
Archaeological digs under the disputed Old City are a matter of immense sensitivity. For Israel, the tunnels are proof of the depth of Jewish roots here, and this has made the tunnels one of Jerusalem's main tourist draws: The number of visitors, mostly Jews and Christians, has risen dramatically in recent years to more than a million visitors in 2010.
But many Palestinians, who reject Israel's sovereignty in the city, see them as a threat to their own claims to Jerusalem. And some critics say they put an exaggerated focus on Jewish history.
A new underground link is opening within two months, and when it does, there will be more than a mile (two kilometers) of pathways beneath the city. Officials say at least one other major project is in the works. Soon, anyone so inclined will be able to spend much of their time in Jerusalem without seeing the sky.
On a recent morning, a man carrying surveying equipment walked across a two-millennia-old stone road, paused at the edge of a hole and disappeared underground.
AP Photo/Bernat Armangue
In a multilevel maze of rooms and corridors beneath the Muslim Quarter, workers cleared rubble and installed steel safety braces to shore up crumbling 700-year-old Mamluk-era arches.
Above ground, a group of French tourists emerged from a dark passage they had entered an hour earlier in the Jewish Quarter and found themselves among Arab shops on the Via Dolorosa, the traditional route Jesus took to his crucifixion.
South of the Old City, visitors to Jerusalem can enter a tunnel chipped from the bedrock by a Judean king 2,500 years ago and walk through knee-deep water under the Arab neighborhood of Silwan. Beginning this summer, a new passage will be open nearby: a sewer Jewish rebels are thought to have used to flee the Roman legions who destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.D.
The sewer leads uphill, passing beneath the Old City walls before expelling visitors into sunlight next to the rectangular enclosure where the temple once stood, now home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the gold-capped Dome of the Rock.
From there, it's a short walk to a third passage, the Western Wall tunnel, which continues north from the Jewish holy site past stones cut by masons working for King Herod and an ancient water system. Visitors emerge near the entrance to an ancient quarry called Zedekiah's Cave that descends under the Muslim Quarter.
The next major project, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority, will follow the course of one of the city's main Roman-era streets underneath the prayer plaza at the Western Wall. This route, scheduled for completion in three years, will link up with the Western Wall tunnel.
The excavations and flood of visitors exist against a backdrop of acute distrust between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims, who are suspicious of any government moves in the Old City and particularly around the Al-Aqsa compound, Islam's third-holiest shrine. Jews know the compound as the Temple Mount, site of two destroyed temples and the center of the Jewish faith for three millennia.
Muslim fears have led to violence in the past: The 1996 opening of a new exit to the Western Wall tunnel sparked rumors among Palestinians that Israel meant to damage the mosques, and dozens were killed in the ensuing riots. In recent years, however, work has gone ahead without incident.
Mindful that the compound has the potential to trigger devastating conflict, Israel's policy is to allow no excavations there. Digging under Temple Mount, the Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg has written, "would be like trying to figure out how a hand grenade works by pulling the pin and peering inside."
Despite the Israeli assurances, however, rumors persist that the excavations are undermining the physical stability of the Islamic holy sites.
"I believe the Israelis are tunneling under the mosques," said Najeh Bkerat, an official of the Waqf, the Muslim religious body that runs the compound under Israel's overall security control.
Samir Abu Leil, another Waqf official, said he had heard hammering that very morning underneath the Waqf's offices, in a Mamluk-era building that sits just outside the holy compound and directly over the route of the Western Wall tunnel, and had filed a complaint with police.
The closest thing to an excavation on the mount, Israeli archaeologists point out, was done by the Waqf itself: In the 1990s, the Waqf opened a new entrance to a subterranean prayer space and dumped truckloads of rubble outside the Old City, drawing outrage from scholars who said priceless artifacts were being destroyed.
This month, an Israeli government watchdog released a report saying Waqf construction work in the compound in recent years had been done without supervision and had damaged antiquities. The issue is deemed so sensitive that the details of the report were kept classified.
Some Israeli critics of the tunnels point to what they call an exaggerated emphasis on a Jewish narrative.
"The tunnels all say: We were here 2,000 years ago, and now we're back, and here's proof," said Yonathan Mizrachi, an Israeli archaeologist. "Living here means recognizing that other stories exist alongside ours."
Yuval Baruch, the Antiquities Authority archaeologist in charge of Jerusalem, said his diggers are careful to preserve worthy finds from all of the city's historical periods. "This city is of interest to at least half the people on Earth, and we will continue uncovering the past in the most professional way we can," he said.
Greenpeace climbers occupy Arctic oil rig
The activists, who arrived by rubber dinghy, climbed the 53,000-tonne "Leif Eiriksson", a rig due to begin drilling for oil for Scottish company Cairn Energy.
They placed themselves in a survival pod that now hangs from the platform 30 metres above icy water below, Greenpeace said.
"The two men are in this capsule with enough supplies for 10 days," said Birgitte Lesanner, Greenpeace spokeswoman in Denmark.
The event took place early Sunday morning, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) off the coast of Greenland's capital, Nuuk.
The platform was on its way to its field of operations where two seperate drilling explorations are to take place before December, when Arctic water begins icing over.
One of the militants, calling himself Luke, said he was "proud to have managed to attach my pod above water" and to "help stop this folly".
"Cairn Energy plays dangerously with Greenland's nature," said Greenpeace in a statement, deploring that the Scottish oil company stayed "deaf to calls by environmental organisations, fishermen and warnings by Canada and the United Kingdom against drilling in the Arctic."
Greenland authorities condemned the action "vigorously", calling it illegal and a "flagrant violation of international law".
"Greenpeace is acting cynically, at the expense of the legitimate rights for those less advanced to develop economically," industry minister Ove Karl Berthelsen in a statement, labelling Sunday's action a stunt to "attract media attention".
Greenland, an overseas territory of Denmark, is looking to oil prospecting as a way to ensure its economic independence.
Cairn Energy has told Greenland authorities that it will continue moving its platform towards the agreed drilling point and it has not excluded asking police to evict the two activists.
Yemen warplanes bomb Islamists who seized town
The new attempts to suppress the uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh with overwhelming force, following a weekend when high-level military defectors formed a united front in support of the protesters, all pointed to the longtime leader's increasingly tenuous grip on power.
Early Tuesday, residents said multiple explosions were heard in several parts of Sanaa, apparently from heavy weapons and shells. They said clashes were in progress in the capital. There were no immediate details of who was fighting or whether there were casualties.
More than three months of mass street protests have posed an unprecedented threat to Saleh's 33-year rule, splintering his security forces and battering the country's already frail economy. The U.S. has moved away from it former ally despite fears that his fall could leave room in this rugged corner of the Arabian Peninsula for an active al-Qaida franchise or other militant Islamist groups to take power.
Saleh has responded to protesters who say they seek democratic reforms with a mix of promised concessions and bloody crackdowns, such as Monday's attack in the city of Taiz that left at least 20 protesters dead. He has also long raised the specter of an Islamist takeover of Yemen to solicit international funds and rebuff calls that he stand down.
Yemen's weakly governed provinces are known as a haven for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, one of the group's most active branches, and other Islamic militant groups like the one that overran the southern town of Zinjibar last week.
Government jets bombed the town's outskirts Monday, the loud booms sending up columns of smoke, resident Ali Dahmis said by phone. He said the army was targeting residential areas.
The airstrikes were the government's hardest hit yet against the Islamists since hundreds of them streamed in Friday, seizing banks and government buildings. Military units battled them overnight and into Monday.
"The sound of explosions and bullets are rattling the city," resident Waleed Mokbal said. "The exchange of gunfire is nonstop."
The death toll since Saturday rose to 34, a medic at al-Razi hospital said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to talk to journalists. He said the dead included militants, civilians and soldiers. Militants shot dead four soldiers Monday after stopping them at a checkpoint outside the city, the medic said.
It remains unclear whether the Islamists who seized Zinjibar are connected to al-Qaida. Other armed Islamist groups have sought refuge in the area, some whom fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, others who fought with Saleh's government in a 1994 civil war with the south. Those militiamen demanded payback for their help and received positions in the security forces and civil service.
Residents said the men looted banks, making them look more like criminal gangs than ideological fighters.
"Not all armed Islamist groups in that area are al-Qaida," said Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert at Princeton University. "Whether they are working together in that area, it's such a murky situation that we just don't know."
The militants appeared to be the same group that seized the nearby town of Jaar in early April.
A group of high-level military officers who defected to the opposition accused Saleh Sunday of allowing the takeover, saying he sought to spread fears that Yemen without him would become "another Somalia."
The group of nine, which include high-ranking military commanders and former interior and defense ministers, issued a joint communique calling on all army units to help topple the president.
Johnsen, the Yemen expert, said it is unclear what portion of Yemen's armed forces the group commands. Elite units such as the Republican Guard, which Saleh's son Ahmed commands, have largely stood by the president. And to date, army units that have abandoned the president have kept their guns out of the effort to push Saleh from power.
Still, the statement is a slap, Johnsen said.
"If these guys are coming together to form some sort a unified command, particularly since these are many of the people Saleh has relied on in the past, that is very worrying for the president," he said.
Yemen's unrest has veered dramatically in the past week.
A U.S.-backed mediation effort by Yemen's powerful Gulf neighbors for Saleh to leave power in exchange for immunity from prosecution failed. Then five days of street battles in the capital between Saleh's security forces and fighters from the country's most powerful tribal confederation left 124 people dead before the sides reached a tenuous cease-fire.
In Monday's attack on the square in Taiz where protesters have camped out for weeks, security forces tried overnight to clear the area with water cannons, tear gas and stun grenades, sending thousands fleeing.
Forces from the Republican Guard then moved in before dawn with tanks, said Sadek al-Shugaa, head of the protest camp's field hospital. Soldiers and men in civilian clothes attacked the remaining protesters, setting fire to some tents and bulldozing others without checking whether anyone was still inside, two witnesses said.
One of the witnesses, Mohammed al-Zarafi, said government forces set tents alight with injured protesters inside.
The other witness, Boushra al-Maqtali, said the army took over the area.
"The artillery units are occupying the whole space to make it impossible for the youth to return to the square," she said.
Troops also attacked the Majeedi Hotel, which overlooks the square, detaining journalists and posting snipers on the roof to fire on protesters, al-Shugaa said.
Most of those injured had critical gunshot wounds to the head, chest and neck, he said. Security forces dragged away several dozen of the injured.
The U.S. Embassy in Sanaa condemned the attack as an "unprovoked and unjustified attack on peaceful demonstrators."
Late Monday, security forces shot dead another protester during a march through the city, Al-Shagaa said.
Afghan president seeks to limit NATO airstrikes
The president's remarks follow a recent strike that mistakenly killed a group of children and women in southern Helmand province. He said it would be the last.
"From this moment, airstrikes on the houses of people are not allowed," Karzai told reporters in Kabul.
NATO says it never conducts such strikes without Afghan government coordination and approval. A spokesman for NATO forces in Afghanistan said they will review their procedures for airstrikes given Karzai's statement but did not say that it would force any immediate change in tactics.
"In the days and weeks ahead we will coordinate very closely with President Karzai to ensure that his intent is met," spokeswoman Maj. Sunset Belinsky said. Karzai has previously made strong statements against certain military tactics — such as night raids — only to back off from them later.
But if Karzai holds to what sounds like an order to international troops to abandon strikes, it could bring the Afghan government in direct conflict with its international allies.
"Coalition forces constantly strive to reduce the chance of civilian casualties and damage to structures, but when the insurgents use civilians as a shield and put our forces in a position where their only option is to use airstrikes, then they will take that option," Belinsky said.
It is unclear if Karzai has the power to order an end to such strikes. NATO and American forces are in Afghanistan under a United Nations mandate that expires in October. The United States is negotiating an agreement with the Afghan government on the presence of its forces in the country going forward, but this has already become contentious, with Karzai declaring that he will put strict controls on how U.S. troops conduct themselves in his country.
"The Afghan people can no longer tolerate these attacks," Karzai told reporters at the presidential palace.
He issued a veiled threat: "The Afghan people will be forced to take action." He did not, however, say what this action would be.
Karzai said that NATO forces risk being seen as an "occupying force" if they continue with their current approach, using the same phrase that Taliban insurgents use to describe the international coalition.
"We want it to be clear that they are working in a sovereign nation," Karzai said.
At least nine civilians were killed in the air strike in Helmand province on Saturday, according to NATO figures. Afghan officials have said 14 were killed, including at least 10 children and two women.
NATO officials have apologized for the strike on two houses in Nawzad district, saying their troops thought there were only insurgents inside the targeted compound when they ordered the strike.
Southwest regional commander U.S. Marine Maj. Gen. John Toolan said that the airstrike was launched after an insurgent attack on a coalition patrol in the district killed a Marine. Five insurgents occupied a compound and continued to attack coalition troops, who called in an airstrike "to neutralize the threat," Toolan said.
The troops later discovered there were civilians inside the house.
Karzai has vacillated between calling for an end to airstrikes and night raids and softer rebukes of NATO forces, telling them they have to exercise more caution. NATO has managed to significantly reduce civilian casualties from its operations in recent years.
Meanwhile, civilians deaths from insurgent attacks have spiked.
At least 2,777 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2010, a 15 percent increase over the prior year, according to a United Nations report. The insurgency was blamed for most of those deaths, and while civilian deaths attributed to NATO troops declined 21 percent in 2010, Afghan leaders say the number remains too high.
Blast at Japan nuclear plant 'likely gas cylinder'
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which has struggled to control the crippled Fukushima plant, said the explosion was heard as unmanned heavy machines worked near the unit four reactor building.
"The machines were remotely controlled to remove rubble when the blast was heard," a TEPCO spokeswoman told AFP.
"Local workers believe a gas cylinder might have been damaged and caused the blast noise," she said. "No one was injured as it was a remotely controlled operation. No changes in radiation levels were detected in the area."
Officers disown Gaddafi as peace bid stalls
The mediator, South African President Jacob Zuma, said after a whistlestop visit on Monday that Gaddafi wanted a ceasefire including an end to NATO bombing -- terms already rejected last month after an earlier mediation mission by Zuma.
Zuma added, without elaborating: "We discussed the necessity of giving the Libyan people the opportunity to solve their problem on their own."
Within hours of his departure, Libyan television reported that NATO aircraft had resumed attacks, striking what it called civilian and military sites in the desert settlement of Al Jufrah, 460 km (285 miles) southeast of Tripoli.
Coalition aircraft also struck a number of civilian and military sites in the capital's Tajura district, the television reported.
There was no immediate confirmation of the reports.
Western leaders in charge of the two-month old NATO-led air campaign against his forces say they will not stop bombing until Gaddafi steps down.
In Rome, the eight officers, including five generals, appeared at an Italian government-arranged news conference, saying they were part of a group of up to 120 military officials and soldiers who defected from Gaddafi in recent days.
The defections come two months after that of Libyan foreign minister and former espionage chief Moussa Koussa and the resignation of senior diplomat Ali Abdussalm Treki.
In Rome, one of the defecting officers, who identified himself as General Oun Ali Oun, told reporters: "What is happening to our people has frightened us.
"There is a lot of killing, genocide ... violence against women. No wise, rational person with the minimum of dignity can do what we saw with our eyes and what he asked us to do."
Libyan U.N. ambassador Abdurrahman Shalgam, who has also defected from Gaddafi, said all 120 of the military personnel were outside Libya now but he did not say where they were.
The television broadcast footage of Gaddafi welcoming Zuma, giving the outside world the first view of the Libyan leader since May 11, when he was shown by the country's television meeting what it said were tribal leaders.
Zuma's visit was his second since the conflict began in February. His previous trip made little progress because Gaddafi has refused to end his 41-year-old rule, while rebel leaders say that is a precondition for any truce.
AIR STRIKE TEMPO RAISED
NATO warplanes have been raising the pace of their air strikes on Tripoli, with Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziyah compound in the center of the city being hit repeatedly.
A video posted online showed hundreds of angry funeral mourners chanting slogans against Gaddafi, in what activists called proof that demonstrations were growing in the capital.
Gaddafi has retained control of the capital and the west of the country while the east is in the hand of rebels.
Foreign journalists in Tripoli have limited freedom of movement and have had difficulty verifying the extent of hostility or support for the leader in a capital with a fearsome security apparatus.
The video showed hundreds of demonstrators at a funeral, filling a street and chanting "Muammar is the enemy of God!" and "God loves martyrs!"
Activists said it was filmed on Monday at the burial for two slain protesters in the Souq al-Juma district of the capital, an area that has seen some clashes between demonstrators and government security forces in the past.
It was not immediately possible to independently verify the location and time of filming.
Britain said on Sunday it was to add "bunker-busting" bombs to the arsenal its warplanes are using over Libya, a weapon it said would send a message to Gaddafi that it was time to quit.
"Our operation in Libya is achieving its objectives ... We have seriously degraded Gaddafi's ability to kill his own people," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a NATO forum in Varna, Bulgaria.
"Gaddafi's reign of terror is coming to an end," he said.
Gaddafi denies attacking civilians, saying his forces were obliged to act to contain armed criminal gangs and al Qaeda militants. He says the NATO intervention is an act of colonial aggression aimed at grabbing Libya's plentiful oil reserves.
Britain and other NATO powers are ratcheting up the military pressure to break a deadlock that has seen Gaddafi hold on to power despite a rebellion and weeks of air strikes.
U.S. Admiral Samuel Locklear, commander of the Joint Operations Command at Naples, declined to comment on whether NATO would put forces on the ground but suggested a small force may be needed to help the rebels once Gaddafi's rule collapses.
COALITION MAY FRAY
Britain said the Enhanced Paveway III bombs, each weighing nearly a tonne and capable of penetrating the roof or wall of a reinforced building, had arrived at the Italian air base from where British warplanes fly missions over Libya.
The military alliance says it is acting under a mandate from the United Nations to protect civilians from attack by security forces trying to put down the rebellion against Gaddafi.
But the more aggressive tactics risk causing divisions within the alliance backing the intervention, and could also lead to NATO being dragged closer toward putting its troops on Libyan soil, something it is anxious to avoid.
Further deepening their involvement, Britain and France have said they will deploy attack helicopters over Libya to better pick out pro-Gaddafi forces. Helicopters are more vulnerable to attack from the ground than high-flying warplanes.
Rebels control the east of Libya around the city of Benghazi, Libya's third-biggest city Misrata, and a mountain range stretching from the town of Zintan, 150 km (95 miles) south of Tripoli, toward the border with Tunisia.
Helped by NATO air support, the rebels have been able to repel attacks by pro-Gaddafi forces but in many places they are still under bombardment and cut off from supplies.
Pakistani jets attack Taliban hideouts, kill 17
Orakzai is one of seven ethnic Pashtun tribal areas where the Pakistani army has tried to root out militants with offensives against their strongholds.
The strike came a day after a local newspaper reported that Pakistan will launch an offensive in North Waziristan, a known sanctuary for al Qaeda and Taliban militants also located in Pakistan's tribal belt.
Pakistan's performance in fighting militancy has come under close scrutiny again after it was discovered that al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden had been living in the country.
Army operations in areas like Orakzai have failed to break the back of militant groups such as the Pakistani Taliban, who have stepped up suicide bombings since U.S. special forces killed bin Laden near Islamabad on May 2.
"We had information that militants gathered there and were planning attacks so we launched the attack," a local senior government official told Reuters. He said 17 militants were killed and six wounded in the Orakzai operation.
U.S. PRESSURE
Residents in the town of Mamoozai, where the air strike took place, said several helicopter gunships were hovering overhead hours after the attack.
After the bin Laden raid, the United States told Pakistan it needs to step up the fight against militants, and government officials said Mamoozai has become a hub for militants who fled military operations elsewhere in the tribal belt, a strategy that has enabled them to survive army assaults.
The Pakistani Taliban, which has strong ties to al Qaeda, has attacked army recruits, a naval base, and trucks carrying fuel to U.S.-led NATO troops in Afghanistan to avenge the death of bin Laden.
On Tuesday, gunmen on a motorcycle attacked and torched two NATO trucks in southwestern Baluchistan province, a provincial government official said.
Yemen truce ends, stoking worries of civil war
Global powers have been pressing Saleh to sign a Gulf-led deal to handover power to try to stem the growing chaos in Yemen, home to al Qaeda militants and neighbor to the world's biggest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia.
"The ceasefire agreement has ended," a government official said Tuesday adding that tribal groups have gained control of a government building.
Overnight battles in the capital brought an end to the truce brokered at the weekend. More than 115 people were killed last week in urban battles with machine guns, mortars and rocket propelled grenades in the bloodiest fighting since anti-government protests began months ago.
In the capital Sanaa, several explosions were heard over the staccato of machine guns in the district of Hasaba, the scene of week-long fighting between Saleh's forces and tribesmen.
"Last night's clashes were the fiercest so far, my children and I couldn't sleep all night because of the heavy shooting," Mohammed al-Quraiti, a Hasaba resident, told Reuters.
The fighting last week between members of the powerful Hashed tribe led by Sadeq al-Ahmar and Saleh's security forces widened to areas outside the capital where tribesmen squared off against Saleh's elite Republican Guard.
Opposition forces have called for nationwide protests later Tuesday. Saleh's forces this week broke up similar protests in Taiz, about 200 km (120 miles) south of the capital, by firing on crowds and running over demonstrators with bulldozers, killing at least 15 and wounding hundreds.
In an ominous sign, residents said soldiers had again opened fire on protesters in Taiz Tuesday. Medical sources said at least three people have been killed so far.
FIGHTING WITH AL QAEDA
Further south, government troops and locals have been trying to force al Qaeda and Islamist militants from the coastal city of Zinjibar after they seized the town at the weekend.
Saba news agency reported Tuesday that 21 Yemeni soldiers had been killed a day earlier in the clashes where Yemen's air force dropped bombs on the city of 20,000 near the Gulf of Aden.
Residents said bodies were strewn on the streets, the national bank building was burned and explosions rocked the city from which most people have fled.
"Explosions lit the sky. One shell fell in the street at the back of my house where militants were stationed," one resident said.
The United States and Saudi Arabia, both targets of attacks by Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, are worried that chaos is emboldening the group.
Opposition leaders have accused Saleh of deliberately allowing Zinjibar, near a sea lane where about 3 million barrels of oil pass daily, to fall to al Qaeda to try to show how chaotic Yemen would be without him.
Opposition groups made up of tribal leaders, Islamists and leftists have said they could do a far better job of curtailing the al Qaeda threat.
At least 320 people have been killed in various fighting in Yemen since protests calling for Saleh to end his nearly 33 year rule started about four months ago, inspired by the popular uprisings that ended the reign of the long-standing rulers of Tunisia and Egypt.
Under Saleh, Yemen has moved to the brink of financial collapse, with about 40 percent of the population living on less than $2 a day and a third facing chronic hunger.
Obama pledges to stand by tornado-hit town
"We're not going anywhere," Obama told a memorial service at Missouri Southern State University Sunday. "We will be with you every step of the way."
The massive tornado, which killed 142 people in this town of 50,000, was one of the worst ever in the United States.
Officials said late Sunday that at least 43 people remained missing, down from a list of 232 missing persons that was released on May 26.
The president's motorcade drove through some of the hardest-hit areas, where many homes had been destroyed by the 200 miles per hour (300 kilometer per hour) winds.
After the tour, Obama called the disaster "a national tragedy," and promised there would be "a national response."
At the memorial service, Obama recalled stories of heroism in Joplin, speaking of pizza shop manager Christopher Lucas, a father of two who ushered everyone into the freezer as the tornado approached.
The freezer door wouldn't close from the inside, so Lucas found rope and closed it from the outside.
"Tying a piece of bungee cord to the handle outside, wrapping the other end around his arm, holding the door closed with all his might," Obama said. "And Christopher held it as long as he could. Until he was pulled away by the incredible force of the storm.
"He died saving more than a dozen people in that freezer," he said. "You see, there are heroes all around us all the time."
At the memorial service, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon also pledged to rebuild.
"The people of Missouri were born for this mission," Nixon said. "We are famously stubborn and self-reliant, practical, impatient. No storm, no fire, no flood can turn us from our task.
"We can and we will heal. We've already begun," Nixon continued. "By God's grace, we will restore this community."
Crews continued searching for the missing, seven days after the tornado tore apart everything it touched along a path four miles (six kilometers) long.
The governor said officials are working "24 hours a day" to locate the missing and identify the deceased. He said that the battered condition of some of the bodies means that DNA tests have been needed to identify the remains.
State officials are cross-checking names of the missing with hospitals, and are working with cell phone service providers to determine if anyone has used their phone since being added to the list.
After releasing lower updated figures of the missing, the Missouri Department of Public Safety said there was "steady progress" in the effort, but added that the "objective continues to be reducing that number to zero, to help ease the anxiety of concerned loved ones."
The twister, a massive funnel cloud that struck on May 22, ranked as one of the deadliest tornado to hit the United States since modern record-keeping began in 1950.
More than 8,000 structures in the town, including a major commercial area, were damaged or destroyed when the tornado packing winds over 200 miles (320 kilometers) per hour came roaring through with just a 24-minute warning.
Joplin spokeswoman Lynn Onstot said the city was slowly getting back on its feet, although the traditional Memorial Day weekend opening of Joplin's public pools has been postponed.
"Public transportation is back up and running, and trash is running as normal as possible," although not in the disaster areas, she added.
A total of 318 people are living in temporary shelters in Joplin, state officials said Saturday.
Companies look for power way, way up in the sky
Flying, swooping and floating turbines are being developed to turn high-altitude winds into electricity.
The challenges are huge, but the potential is immense. Scientists estimate the energy in the jet streams is 100 times the amount of power used worldwide annually.
Cristina Archer, an atmospheric scientist at the California State University in Chico, said there's "not a doubt anymore" that high-altitude winds will be tapped for power.
"This can be done, it can work," she said.
The question is, when? Some companies project their technology will hit the market by the middle of the decade, but Fort Felker at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says the industry is 10 years away from making a meaningful contribution to the nation's electricity demands.
No company, for instance, has met the basic requirement of demonstrating its turbine can safely fly unsupervised for prolonged periods of time.
High-altitude wind power is similar to ground wind in the 1970s — facing questions but soon to prove its viability, said PJ Shepard of Oroville, Calif.-based Sky WindPower, which is developing a "flying electric generator."
"It's kind of like the adjustment folks had to make when the Wright brothers started flying airplanes," she said.
The lure of high-altitude wind is simple: Wind speed generally increases with its height above the ground as surface friction diminishes. Each time wind speed doubles, the amount of energy it theoretically holds multiplies by eight times.
The world's most powerful winds circulate in the jet streams, which are found four to 10 miles off the ground and carry winds that regularly break 100 miles per hour.
The dream is to eventually tap the jet streams, but high-altitude wind companies are focusing for now below a 2,000-foot ceiling, above which complex federal air-space restrictions kick in. Adam Rein, co-founder of the Boston company Altaeros Energies, said his company calculates winds at the 2,000 foot level are up to 2 1/2 times stronger than winds that can be reached by a typical 350-foot land turbine.
High-altitude wind advocates say their smaller, lightweight turbines will be far cheaper to build and deploy than windmills with huge blades and towers that must be drilled into land or the sea floor.
Those savings would mean inexpensive energy. With wide-scale use, advocates see a range of prices, from something comparable to land wind's current 9 or 10 cents per kilowatt hour down to an astonishingly low 2 cents per kilowatt hour.
"They are projecting crazy numbers," Archer said. "I'm not saying that it's true. ... But it's really the lowest, the cheapest energy source, possibly."
As the turbines eventually aim higher, advocates say there are plenty of remote and offshore no-fly areas where they won't interfere with aircraft and have minimal interaction with people.
Still, any nearby residents must be convinced there's no danger from falling turbines while accepting a view that includes flying objects attached to long tethers that carry the energy to the ground. High-altitude turbines also won't escape the various environmental concerns that face conventional turbines, such as their effect on bird flight.
And each turbine concept awaits extensive testing on its reliability, durability and effectiveness, said Felker, director of NREL's National Wind Technology Center.
Keeping the turbines operating autonomously over long periods in changing weather may be the biggest obstacle, Felker said.
"You have powerful reasons to stay aloft as much as possible," he said. "What do you do when a thunderstorm comes by? Do you recover (the device)? Do you land? ... How do you operate in the real world?"
Different companies have proposed answering that question in different ways.
A "kite" being developed by Makani Power of Alameda, Calif., looks like a glider with four high-speed rotors that launch it into flight, then switch modes to generate electricity that's carried down the tether.
An onboard computer steers the kite in a wide circle, mimicking the path of the tip of a giant wind turbine blade. That allows the device to interact with a larger wind area, increasing the amount of energy it can capture in the same way increasing the size of a sail increases the potential speed of a sailboat, said Damon Vander Lind, Makani's chief engineer.
The kite can also stay up in high winds, and power itself to land in low winds, Vanderlind said.
"It lets us make a very reliable system, something operators can just plug in and use," he said.
Sky WindPower's generator has four rotors, each 35 feet in diameter, that transmit power down the tether. It's built to hover, rather than swoop or circle, Shepard said. While moving turbines can actually fly faster than the wind by flying crosswind, they can't fly as high, she said.
"We can get up a little higher than they can. We can get to higher velocity winds and make up for it," Shepard said.
Altaeros is developing a stationary turbine that sits inside a 60-foot tall, helium-filled shroud that acts like a wind funnel. Similar blimp-like devices, called aerostats, have long been used to keep heavy equipment aloft, such as government surveillance radar tethered up to 15,000 feet above U.S. borders.
"Our view is that our approach is less risky, because we're using a technology that's been out there for decades," Rein said.
Altaeros has big aims — no less than "making an impact on the global energy crisis," Rein said — but it's starting small. Its 10 full and part-time employees share a building with seven other start-up companies in a former wool manufacturing factory in South Boston.
Rein notes that before it tries to bring the untapped power of high-altitude wind to thousands, his company is first developing a system that could bring power to about 40 homes in remote areas.
"You start smaller... and then you scale up over time," Rein said. "We think that approach makes a lot of sense."
Shuttle Endeavour gone forever from space station
Endeavour undocked from the orbiting lab close to midnight Sunday. The shuttle took a victory lap around the station. Then it hung around another few hours, testing navigation equipment intended for a future interplanetary-traveling spacecraft.
The space station astronauts said Endeavour "looks real nice out there." They beamed down video of the departing shuttle Monday morning, the last shot ever of Endeavour in orbit.
NASA's youngest shuttle is due back in Florida early Wednesday. Its next stop after that will be a museum in California for what many consider to be an early retirement.
Germany to close all nuclear plants by 2022
Environment Minister Norbert Roettgen announced the decision early Monday by the centre-right coalition, which was prompted by the crisis at Japan's Fukushima plant, calling it "irreversible".
"After long consultations, there is now an agreement by the coalition to end nuclear energy," he told reporters after seven hours of negotiations into the small hours at Chancellor Angela Merkel's offices.
"This decision is consistent, decisive and clear."
Germany has 17 nuclear reactors on its soil, eight of which are currently off the electricity grid.
Seven of those offline are the country's oldest nuclear reactors, which the federal government shut down for three months pending a safety probe after the emergency at Fukushima that began in March.
The eighth is the Kruemmel plant, in northern Germany, which has been mothballed for years due to repeated technical problems.
Monday's decision made Germany the first major industrial power to announce plans to give up atomic energy entirely.
But it also means that the country will have to find the 22 percent of its electricity needs currently covered by nuclear reactors from another source.
Roettgen insisted there was no danger of blackouts.
"We assure that the electricity supply will be ensured at all times and for all users," he pledged, but did not provide details.
Already Friday, the environment ministers from all 16 German regional states had called for the temporary moratorium on the seven plants to be made permanent.
Roettgen said Monday that none of the eight reactors offline would be reactivated. Six further reactors would be shut down by the end of 2021 and the three most modern would cease operation by the end of 2022.
Monday's decision is effectively a return to the timetable set by a previous Social Democrat-Green coalition government a decade ago.
And it is a humbling U-turn for Merkel, who at the end of 2010 decided to extend the lifetime of Germany's 17 reactors by an average of 12 years, which would have kept them open until the mid-2030s.
That decision was unpopular in Germany even before the earthquake and tsunami in March that severely damaged the Fukushima facility, which sparked mass anti-nuclear protests and prompted Merkel's energy policy review.
Her zig-zagging on what has been a highly emotive issue in the country since the 1970s has cost her since at the ballot box.
Merkel herself has blamed the Fukushima catastrophe for recent state election debacles.
In the latest, on May 23, the anti-nuclear Greens pushed her Christian Democrats (CDU) into third place in a vote in the northern state of Bremen, the first time they had scored more votes than the conservatives in a regional or federal election.
Environmental pressure group Greenpeace welcomed the plans for a nuclear shutdown but lamented it would take until 2022.
Industrial giant Daimler warned it would undermine Germany's standing as Europe's top economy.
"I see certain risks for Germany as a place to do business," chief executive Dieter Zetschke told the daily Bild, adding that he saw the decision as "strongly coloured by emotions".
"Turning our backs on an affordable energy supply is clearly a risk."
Some coalition members had called for a built-in revision clause which could have seen the decision revisited, but this was thrown out in the final round of negotiations.
Roettgen said the government had largely followed the recommendations of an "ethics panel" appointed by Merkel after the Fukushima disaster, which said it was possible to end nuclear power in Germany within a decade.
The Fukushima accident has sparked a renewed global debate about the safety of nuclear power, with widely differing opinions.
The United States and Britain have announced plans to build new reactors as a means of reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions while ensuring a relatively cheap supply of energy.
Science can't design away tornadoes' deadly threat
Super Outbreak 2011, on April 25-28, killed more than 300 people in the South and Midwest. Less than a month later, a devastating tornado took more than 120 lives around Joplin, Mo. This now could be the deadliest year for tornadoes since 1950, based on an assessment of National Weather Service figures.
This despite warnings of as much as 20 minutes, thanks to improved weather radar installed across the country in the 1990s. Before that, tornado warnings often weren't issued until a twister was sighted on the ground.
Scientists see a variety of factors that helped make this year's twisters deadlier — from La Nina to public complacency, from global warming to urban sprawl.
"We thought for the longest time physical science could get us by ... that we could design out of disaster," said meteorology professor Walker Ashley of Northern Illinois University. Now scientists are finding they need to take human nature into account.
What is clear is that certain factors add to the risk of death. The most vulnerable folks are those living in mobile homes and houses without basements. For a variety of reasons, a lot of homes don't have basements.
Twisters occurring on weekends — like the Joplin tornado — and at night tend to be greater killers because they catch people at home. At night, twisters are harder to see and sleeping people may not hear a warning.
Those less likely to be killed in a storm tend to be more educated and to have a plan in place beforehand.
In Sedalia, Mo., 30-year-old Sean McCabe had the right idea when the tornado struck, heading to the basement. He said the storm shoved him down the final flight of steps. He had scrapes and cuts on his hands, wrists, back and feet. Blood was visible in the house, and much of the roof of the house was gone.
"I saw little debris and then I saw big debris, and I'm like OK, let's go," said McCabe.
Having a plan was a lifesaver for Tuscaloosa's LaRocca Nursing Home in Alabama. As the storm howled, four dozen residents massed in the hallways as trees crashed down and a cloud of dust rained upon them. When the dust settled, the staff realized their drills had paid off. Not one patient was killed, and the worst injury among them was a bruise.
Hundreds have not been so lucky. The death toll reported Saturday by the city of Joplin stands at 139, which if correct puts this year's tornado death toll at 520 — exceeding the previous highest recorded death toll in a single year of 519 in 1953. But Missouri state officials counted 126 dead, a discrepancy that left unclear whether 2011 has yet set the modern record for tornado fatalities.
There were deadlier storms before 1950, but those counts were based on estimates and not on precise figures
The National Weather Service said 58 tornadoes touched down in Alabama on April 27, killing 238 people in that state alone and injuring thousands. Scores died in other states from twisters spawned by the same storm system. Put together, emergency management officials say the twisters left a path of destruction 10 miles wide and 610 miles long, or about as far as a drive from Birmingham to Columbus, Ohio.
Statewide, Alabama officials estimate there was enough debris to stack a football field a mile high with rubble.
Contributing to the massive loss of life is the growth of urban areas, suggested Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Georgia.
"Historically, the central business districts of cities have not been hit that frequently," he explained. But as you increase the land area covered by homes and businesses, he said, "you're increasing the size of the dartboard."
An expanding population does increase exposure to the danger, agreed Ashley, who fears deaths could begin to rise in the future as a result of sprawl and more people living in vulnerable residences such as mobile homes.
If the Tuscaloosa and Joplin tornadoes had each been a few miles to the south, on farmland, little would be heard about them, Ashley said, but when extremely violent tornadoes mingle with urban sprawl "you're going to have a disaster."
"I hope this will be an outlier year, very much like Katrina was to hurricanes," he said in a telephone interview from a field trip to chase tornadoes.
But no one can guarantee that, and weather experts are becoming increasingly concerned about how people respond to tornado warnings.
"A lot of it is complacency," Ashley said. "The population seems to be becoming desensitized to nature. I don't know why."
Studies have shown that 15 to 20 minutes is the most effective amount of warning time, and longer warning times can increase deaths. Weather experts aren't sure why, but worry that people think that if a twister hasn't appeared in a certain amount of time, it must have been a false alarm.
Yet a long-track tornado can be on the ground for 30 miles.
"If you have a basement, you don't need 20 minutes warning, but if you are in a mobile home park you may need more than 20 minutes to find a shelter," commented Alan W. Black, a University of Georgia doctoral student and co-author with Ashley of a recent study of tornado and wind fatalities.
Jerry Brotzge, a research scientist at the Center for Analysis & Prediction of Storms, University of Oklahoma, said many people who hear warnings will look outside to see if they can see the tornado — "they need some kind of confirmation, they want to see it."
But the Joplin tornado was at least partly rain-wrapped, meaning that a powerful rainstorm obscured it from some directions and "they wouldn't have seen it coming."
"Even when people are sheltered in their homes, if they are not underground they can die," Brotzge added.
But asking people to evacuate an area is also a difficult decision, he said, "what if you have a traffic jam and the tornado hits that."
Ashley concluded: "The take-home is, people have to take personal responsibility for their lives."
Why there have been so many tornado threats this year is harder to say.
Viewing pictures of the tornado aftermath it's hard to overestimate the power of such storms, and records bear out how strong they can be.
"You see pictures of World War II, the devastation and all that with the bombing. That's really what it looked like," said Kerry Sachetta, the principal of a flattened Joplin High School. "I couldn't even make out the side of the building. It was total devastation in my view. I just couldn't believe what I saw."
And that movie image a few years ago was no joke: A cow was transported 10 miles by a twister in Iowa in 1878 and a tornado in Minnesota moved a headstone three miles in 1886.
One Joplin resident said a picture that was sucked off his house's wall was found in Springfield, 70 miles away. An insurance policy was found more than 40 miles from its original residence in Oklahoma in 1957 and a 210-mile trip was taken by a canceled check in Nebraska in 1915, according to a study several years ago by researchers at the University of Oklahoma and St. Louis University.
Typically, tornadoes spawn in the clash between warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and cooler, dry air from the north and west — conditions that mark Tornado Alley in the Midwest and South, the most common breeding grounds for twisters.
Factors in this year's excess may include La Nina, a periodic cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean which can affect weather worldwide. In a La Nina year there tend to be more tornadoes than average. If that is a factor, the good news is that La Nina is weakening and is expected to end in a month or so.
The meandering jet stream high in the atmosphere that directs the movements of weather also has been in a pattern that encourages warm Gulf air to move in and clash with drier air masses.
While studies of global warming have suggested it could cause more and stronger storms, National Weather Service Director Jack Hayes isn't ready to blame climate change — at least not yet — saying it's too soon to link individual events with the ongoing warming.
Tornado researcher Howard B. Bluestein of the University of Oklahoma says his best guess is this unusual outburst of twisters is due to natural variability of the weather.
"Sometimes you get a weather pattern in which the ingredients for a tornado are there over a wide area and persist for a long time. That's what we're having this year," he said.
"If we see this happen next year and the following year and the following year," then maybe climate change could be to blame, he said.
Whatever the reasons it's an extraordinary year for tornadoes and the worst may not be over. May is usually the peak month, but June traditionally gets lots of twisters, and they can occur in any month.
"You can never completely breathe easy," concluded Russell Schneider, director of the government's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.
Cheetah captured while roaming Abu Dhabi
An animal welfare activist who helped rescue the urban cheetah on Sunday said it might have been kept as a pet and had an injured front left paw — perhaps from leaping off a roof, where some owners of exotic pets keep their animals.
Raghad Auttabashi of the Al Rahma Animal Welfare and Rescue Society said the big cat appeared to be 7 or 8 months old and was found with a broken metal chain around its neck.
It's not clear how the cheetah got free in Abu Dhabi's Karama district, a short drive from the skyscrapers lining the Emirati capital's waterfront.
Animal control authorities rounded up the cheetah, which was later handed over to a wildlife conservation center, Auttabashi said. Photos she took at the scene showed the spotted animal being held in a cage in the back of a van with its injured paw held off the ground.
Cheetahs are the fastest land animals and once lived across wide areas of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. But they are no longer believed to have any native habitats on the Arabian peninsula.
They are listed as a vulnerable species, meaning they are at risk of becoming endangered. International trade in the animals is restricted, though some limited export is allowed from certain African countries.
It's not the first time an exotic animal has been found roaming streets in the United Arab Emirates.
In December, a cheetah was captured near a mosque in Sharjah, the emirate just north of Dubai. Witnesses saw that cat swimming off a port and then prowling past a hotel and offices.
Thai authorities arrested an Emirati citizen at Bangkok's international airport earlier this month after they found drugged baby leopards, panthers, a bear and monkeys in his suitcases. Authorities there believe he is part of a wildlife trafficking network.
And over the weekend, two sick lions that Emirati authorities rescued from a home where they were being kept illegally underwent dental surgery. Local media reported that the lions, which had been declawed, needed the procedure because their teeth had been filed down and had become infected.
Morocco police violently disperse protests
A similar protest organized by the pro-reform February 20 movement in the capital's twin city of Sale on Sunday also was violently disrupted, as was a demonstration in front of parliament a day earlier.
With a hand-picked commission set to recommend amendments to the constitution as part of King Mohammed VI's own reform process, authorities are showing no tolerance for demonstrations by activists.
"What we want is freedom, dignity and democracy, as well as a decent standard of living," said Omar, a civil servant who tried to take part in the Casablanca protests before it was dispersed.
"We want a democratic, popular constitution," he said, as opposed to one designed by appointees of the king, said Omar, who only gave his first name to protect his security as a government worker taking part in a pro-reform movement.
Phalanxes of police motorcycles cruised through the main roads and back streets of Casablanca's lower income Sbata neighborhood, scattering any attempts by the protesters to regroup.
Heavily armored riot police were also deployed throughout the neighborhood blocking streets to cars and discouraging people from congregating in large groups. There were no official reports of the number of injured.
About an hour after the activists had been dispersed, a few dozen teenage residents of the neighborhood organized their own pro-government demonstration. "Mohammed VI is our only king," they chanted, while police looked on.
Villagers say Mladic arrest a surprise
Villagers who admit they know far too much about each other say it just can't be true that they'd have an outsider in their midst without their knowledge. Neighbors have often been at the home of Mladic's relative — a simple man who lived alone in a house with a big gate, some overgrown roses and a cherry tree — but never saw cousin Ratko.
"No one, really I swear, has seen him," said Nedeljko Arsic as he and other locals paused on their bikes to watch the police and the journalists snapping pictures and trying to get a glimpse inside the family compound, complete with tractor and corrugated steel-roofed outbuilding.
Masked police seized Mladic, 69, as he headed out to his garden for a pre-dawn walk on Thursday, Serbian police officials told The Associated Press. Similar raids have been conducted throughout Serbia for years in the hunt for Mladic, who went underground seven years after his 1995 indictment by the U.N. war crimes court on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
But police describe coming across Mladic almost by accident — and say that it was the first time they'd raided the home just off a single lane road. They say he was very pale, suggesting he rarely ventured outside.
But the people of Lazarevo have their doubts about the official version of events. And in a country that loves a conspiracy theory, they are not the only ones who say something is awry in the account of the capture of the infamous fugitive from justice, said Zoran Dragisic, a political analyst.
Serbs also have noted that the man who was captured is a shadow of the vigorous commander who laid siege to Sarajevo and is accused of being the architect of the Srebrenica massacre — the worst such atrocity in Europe since World War II. He's aged. Relatives say he can barely talk.
"What is obvious is that Ratko Mladic is very ill. According to doctors, he had two strokes, and it's clear that a man in that condition cannot live on his own," Dragisic said. "He needed special medical assistance, so I really don't believe this story that he lived alone without help.
"Even if the official version is true, there is a question how Serbian intelligence services were not able to find some old, ill man who is hiding in a village."
The people of Lazarevo, 60 kilometers (35 miles) north of the capital, Belgrade, can't help but wonder, too.
Father Ivan Popov, an Orthodox priest, says that contrary to what authorities have said, police have searched the community before, begging the question of why they didn't find him before. Neighbors also insist that Mladic's cousin, a farmer who lived in this community all his life, was just not capable of the guile needed to hide a war crimes suspect — even if it were only for a little while, as police suggest.
To hide out, a fugitive would have needed help.
"Who helped him all this time, that's the question," Arsic said. Mladic "couldn't have done it by himself."
Authorities have long tried to crack the close circle of military officers, nationalists, and other sympathizers thought to have protected Mladic and given him the funds to keep moving — sometimes only days ahead of the police. Nearly 16 years on the run, Mladic's safehouses have included military bases, apartments owned by former military officers or their relatives in the capital, Belgrade, and reportedly even a hospital.
But as the years dragged on, the undercurrent of Mladic's support began to falter. Serbia's new Western-leaning government gradually isolated the nationalists within the system, slowly dismantled the underlying power structure that kept supporters of former President Slobodan Milosevic in power.
But even if the country hadn't moved on, Mladic could have scarcely found a village more welcoming. People who live in this staunchly nationalist community of 3,000 say they would have sought to protect Mladic, a general seen as a hero who fought to defend the Serbs in the wars that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia — had they known he was here.
Many in the community are descendants of people who once left Bosnia themselves as part of a post-World War II program designed to promote ethnic integration in this corner of northern Serbia. As far as they're concerned, Mladic is one of their own.
"No real Serb would ever think Mladic is a war criminal," Popov said.
He plans a service Sunday at his community church to pray for Mladic's health.
Civic leaders are talking about renaming the village Mladicevo — as a tribute to the general who took refuge there.
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