Up to 1,000 feared dead in Turkey quake

Up to 1,000 feared dead in Turkey quake

By Fulya Ozerkan (AFP) – 2 hours ago 

ANKARA — An earthquake of 7.3 magnitude rocked eastern Turkey on Sunday, with a seimological institute saying up to 1,000 people could lie dead under the rubble of dozens of collapsed buildings.
Turkey's strongest earthquake in years struck Van, a large eastern city populated mainly by Kurds.
"Five hundred to 1,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the quake," Mustafa Erdik, director of the Kandilli seismological institute in Istanbul, told a news conference.
Earlier reports did not mention casualties, but many were feared trapped in collapsed buildings and officials warned they were struggling to assess the extent of the damage.
At least 50 people were taken to hospital in Van, Anatolia news agency said.
"There is serious human and material loss," said a brief statement from the national disaster body, which is based in the prime minister's office.
Around 50 buildings have collapsed including a dormitory, officials said.
The most serious damage occurred in Ercis, a district of around 100,000 people, they added.
Television footage showed panicked residents using shovels and other digging tools trying to rescue people trapped under a collapsed eight-storey building in the city centre as nightfall approached.
Most people are expected to spend the night outdoors, with the temperature expected to dip to three degrees Celsius (37 Fahrenheit).
"People are panicked. The telecommunication services have collapsed. We cannot reach anybody," Van Mayor Bekir Kaya told the NTV television in an initial assessment.
The government is due to send satellite phones to the region, according to media reports. The army will also send search and rescue teams to the area.
Six helicopters, including four ambulance helicopters, as well as C-130 military cargo planes were sent to the area carrying tents, food and medicine.
The US Geological Survey measured the quake at 7.3 magnitude and said an aftershock of 5.6 magnitude had also been registered. The epicentre of the aftershock, which occurred at 1056 GMT, was 19 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Van.
The depth of the initial quake was 7.2 kilometers (4.5 miles), according to the US seismologists. The depth of the aftershock was 20 kilometers, they added.
The epicentre of the quake, which struck around 1041 GMT, was at Tabanli in Van province, the Kandilli institute said.
The Turkish institute said there were two aftershocks which affected the villages of Ilikaynak and Gedikbulak in particular.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cancelled his official programme and will visit the quake region on Sunday, NTV said.
The quake damaged Van's airport, the Anatolia news agency reported, adding however that it did not disrupt the air traffic, quoting civilian aviation authorities.
Van, a city of 380,000 mainly Kurdish inhabitants, is more than 1,200 kilometres from the capital Ankara.
The quake was also felt across the border in northwestern Iran, causing some panic in major cities, Iranian media reported, but without any mention of casualties or damage.
The tremors were strong enough to cause "scenes of panic among the population of the cities," according to several Iranian media.
Earthquake-prone Turkey lies atop several fault lines.
In 1999, two strong quakes in the heavily populated and industrialised regions of northwest Turkey left some 20,000 dead.
And a powerful earthquake in the town of Caldiran in Van province killed 3,840 people in 1976.

The Water Hegemon

NEW DELHI – International discussion about China’s rise has focused on its increasing trade muscle, growing maritime ambitions, and expanding capacity to project military power. One critical issue, however, usually escapes attention: China’s rise as a hydro-hegemon with no modern historical parallel.
No other country has ever managed to assume such unchallenged riparian preeminence on a continent by controlling the headwaters of multiple international rivers and manipulating their cross-border flows. China, the world’s biggest dam builder – with slightly more than half of the approximately 50,000 large dams on the planet – is rapidly accumulating leverage against its neighbors by undertaking massive hydro-engineering projects on transnational rivers.
Asia’s water map fundamentally changed after the 1949 Communist victory in China. Most of Asia’s important international rivers originate in territories that were forcibly annexed to the People’s Republic of China. The Tibetan Plateau, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood for mainland China and South and Southeast Asia. Other such Chinese territories contain the headwaters of rivers like the Irtysh, Illy, and Amur, which flow to Russia and Central Asia.
This makes China the source of cross-border water flows to the largest number of countries in the world. Yet China rejects the very notion of water sharing or institutionalized cooperation with downriver countries.
Whereas riparian neighbors in Southeast and South Asia are bound by water pacts that they have negotiated between themselves, China does not have a single water treaty with any co-riparian country. Indeed, having its cake and eating it, China is a dialogue partner but not a member of the Mekong River Commission, underscoring its intent not to abide by the Mekong basin community’s rules or take on any legal obligations.
Worse, while promoting multilateralism on the world stage, China has given the cold shoulder to multilateral cooperation among river-basin states. The lower-Mekong countries, for example, view China’s strategy as an attempt to “divide and conquer.”
Although China publicly favors bilateral initiatives over multilateral institutions in addressing water issues, it has not shown any real enthusiasm for meaningful bilateral action. As a result, water has increasingly become a new political divide in the country’s relations with neighbors like India, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Nepal.
China deflects attention from its refusal to share water, or to enter into institutionalized cooperation to manage common rivers sustainably, by flaunting the accords that it has signed on sharing flow statistics with riparian neighbors. These are not agreements to cooperate on shared resources, but rather commercial accords to sell hydrological data that other upstream countries provide free to downriver states.
In fact, by shifting its frenzied dam building from internal rivers to international rivers, China is now locked in water disputes with almost all co-riparian states. Those disputes are bound to worsen, given China’s new focus on erecting mega-dams, best symbolized by its latest addition on the Mekong – the 4,200-megawatt Xiaowan Dam, which dwarfs Paris’s Eiffel Tower in height – and a 38,000-megawatt dam planned on the Brahmaputra at Metog, close to the disputed border with India. The Metog Dam will be twice as large as the 18,300-megawatt Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, construction of which uprooted at least 1.7 million Chinese.
In addition, China has identified another mega-dam site on the Brahmaputra at Daduqia, which, like Metog, is to harness the force of a nearly 3,000-meter drop in the river’s height as it takes a sharp southerly turn from the Himalayan range into India, forming the world’s longest and steepest canyon. The Brahmaputra Canyon – twice as deep as the Grand Canyon in the United States – holds Asia’s greatest untapped water reserves.
The countries likely to bear the brunt of such massive diversion of waters are those located farthest downstream on rivers like the Brahmaputra and Mekong – Bangladesh, whose very future is threatened by climate and environmental change, and Vietnam, a rice bowl of Asia. China’s water appropriations from the Illy River threaten to turn Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash into another Aral Sea, which has shrunk to less than half its original size.
In addition, China has planned the “Great Western Route,” the proposed third leg of the Great South-North Water Diversion Project – the most ambitious inter-river and inter-basin transfer program ever conceived – whose first two legs, involving internal rivers in China’s ethnic Han heartland, are scheduled to be completed within three years. The Great Western Route, centered on the Tibetan Plateau, is designed to divert waters, including from international rivers, to the Yellow River, the main river of water-stressed northern China, which also originates in Tibet.
With its industry now dominating the global hydropower-equipment market, China has also emerged as the largest dam builder overseas. From Pakistani-held Kashmir to Burma’s troubled Kachin and Shan states, China has widened its dam building to disputed or insurgency-torn areas, despite local backlashes.
For example, units of the People’s Liberation Army are engaged in dam and other strategic projects in the restive, Shia-majority region of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan-held Kashmir. And China’s dam building inside Burma to generate power for export to Chinese provinces has contributed to renewed bloody fighting recently, ending a 17-year ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and the government.
As with its territorial and maritime disputes with India, Vietnam, Japan, and others, China is seeking to disrupt the status quo on international-river flows. Persuading it to halt further unilateral appropriation of shared waters has thus become pivotal to Asian peace and stability. Otherwise, China is likely to emerge as the master of Asia’s water taps, thereby acquiring tremendous leverage over its neighbors’ behavior.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research, is the author of Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Black Death mapping reforms disease study

Canadian researchers have genetically mapped the bacterium known as the Black Death, one of the deadliest pathogens in history that wiped out onethird of Europe's population in only four years during the Middle Ages.
Mapping Black Death marks the first time an ancient pathogen has been reconstructed in its entirety and will allow researchers to track changes in its evolution and virulence over time.
The study, published in the science journal Nature, sheds light on how epidemics develop and suggests a killer pandemic will not be caused by a deadly pathogen alone, but by a "perfect storm" of circumstances, said Hendrik Poinar, one of the lead researchers, from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.
He said the findings mark a new era of research into infectious diseases.
"For so many years, people focused on the pathogen," said Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research. "It's one thing to talk about the pathogen, but it's another thing to talk about the disease."
The research team found there were few genetic changes between the ancient and modern version of the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes the bubonic plague today and whose relative is a harmless soil-based bacterium.
"The Black Death was the first plague pandemic in human history," said Johannes Krause, a professor at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and another of the lead researchers on the international project. "Humans were [immunologically] naive and not adapted to this disease."
Another likely factor that worsened the Black Death's toll was social conditions: Poverty and malnutrition were rampant and the concept of hygiene was non-existent.
The onset of the so-called "Little Ice Age" could also have favoured the spread of the disease which, as with many pathogens, travels more quickly in cold climes.
No bug or virus has wiped out a greater proportion of humankind in a single epidemic than the Black Death.
The first outbreak of plague occurred in China more than 2,600 years ago before reaching Europe via Central Asia's "Silk Road" trade route.
It scythed through Europe from 1347 to 1351, killing about one in three of Europe's and nearly one in 12 of the world's population at the time.
"Plague was among the strongest sources of selection on the human population in the last few thousand years," Krause said. "People who were less susceptible due to mutations might have survived, and these [beneficial] mutations may have spread."
When put up against modern medicine, the Black Death is not very dangerous.
"Based on what we know from this [genetic] sequence, would modern antibiotics work on this? Yes," Poinar said.
The researchers studied DNA from the remains of 109 skeletons, now more than 650 years old, that were buried beneath the Royal Mint in London, England, just outside the walls of the Tower of London.
Poinar and his team took bone and teeth samples to gather whatever small bits of DNA they could find.
They then used what can be described as a magnetic fishing line to hook Yersinia pestis from the morass of viruses, bacteria and human genes.
That unique piece of technology - to fish for DNA- can now be used to study and reconstruct other ancient pathogens that turned into deadly killers, Poinar said.
"This technology will allow us to time travel and capture pathogens in the past, which was really [once] a pipe dream. We never thought this was possible," Poinar said.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Black+Death+mapping+reforms+disease+study/5543155/story.html#ixzz1ai1W59yB

A Significant Ozone Hole Is Reported Over the Arctic

Intense cold in the upper atmosphere of the Arctic last winter activated ozone-depleting chemicals and produced the first significant ozone hole ever recorded over the high northern regions, scientists reported on Monday in the journal Nature.

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While the extent of the ozone depletion is considered temporary, and well below the depletion that occurs seasonally over the Antarctic, atmospheric scientists described it as a striking example of how sudden anomalies can occur as a result of human activity that occurred years ago. At its maximum extent in February, the northern ozone hole reached southward into Russia and Mongolia.
Emissions of chlorinated fluorocarbons, or CFCs, once found in aerosol sprays, and other ozone-depleting substances like the soil fumigant methyl bromide produced the first ozone hole over the Antarctic, which was identified in 1985. Emissions of those compounds were banned under the Montreal Protocol, which has been signed by 191 countries.
Since 2000, concentrations in the atmosphere have been declining, but remain about 25 percent higher than when the ozone hole was identified, said Michelle L. Santee, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the paper’s authors.
“The root cause is the residual products from the CFCs that were released throughout the 20th century,” she said. “But they are very long-lived, and it will take a few decades for them to be cleansed from the atmosphere.”
The appearance of a second ozone hole at the other end of the earth “is a reminder that human activities can have a very significant impact and often unintended consequences on the atmosphere,” she added.
In a telephone interview, Dr. Santee and a NASA laboratory colleague and co-author, Nathaniel J. Livesey, were nonetheless cautious about linking the cold temperatures in the upper atmosphere far north to the warmer weather that has been unfolding closer to the earth’s surface. That warming trend led to one of the greatest-ever reductions in the extent of Arctic sea ice this year.
Whether the cold snap in the stratosphere “is related to it being warmer than it typically is lower down is intriguing,” Dr. Livesey said, “but the connection has yet to be made.”
David Fahey, a physicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and the author of a well-known pamphlet on the ozone layer, said the appearance of a second hole in the ozone layer underlined the unpredictability of atmospheric reactions, particularly in the far North.
“The Antarctic ozone hole is the drumbeat,” Dr. Fahey said. “We see it every year and it tells us that the stuff we did in the last two decades still matters” in terms of reducing the levels of ozone-depleting chemicals. Yet the ozone depletion recorded this year at the opposite end of the planet this year points to “the lack of predictability of what will happen in the Arctic,” he said.

Canadian scientist - Nobel Prize

MONTREAL — Dr. Ralph Steinman, the Montreal-born immunologist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine along with two other scientists on Monday, died on Friday of pancreatic cancer — never having learned that he would be awarded science's top honour. He was 68.
Steinman earned the prize for his 1973 discovery of what he called the dendritic cell — a finding that scientists say has greatly enhanced our understanding of how the body's adaptive immune system works, and that has paved the way for treatments for cancer and other diseases.
In fact, Steinman probably prolonged his own life with a therapy that was based on his original research, his sister-in-law said. Steinman had been battling pancreatic cancer for the past 4 1/2 years, and had been doing well until his health deteriorated suddenly in the last few weeks, Linda Steinman said.
"He was using his own immune therapy on his illness," she said. "I can't tell you how he was doing it. It's much too complex, I imagine. He worked with colleagues at Harvard (University) and Johns Hopkins (in Baltimore) on this type of therapy. We firmly believe that the therapy that he developed helped him — that it extended his life, since pancreatic cancer is such a lethal form."
Steinman was born at the Royal Victoria Hospital on Jan. 14, 1943. He grew up in Sherbrooke, Que., with his brothers Seymour and Mark as well as sister Joni, working in the family clothing store on weekends.
He returned to Montreal to study science at McGill University on a scholarship, living with his maternal grandparents, Nathan and Eva Takefman.
After earning an undegraduate degree at McGill, he studied medicine at Harvard, also on a scholarship.
Reached by phone at her Montreal-area home, Steinman's mother, 92-year-old Nettie Steinman, said she was proud of her son.
"But I have other children, so they're all equal in my estimation," she said.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper released a statement Monday afternoon praising Steinman's achievements in immunology, along with those of the other recipients, Jules Hoffman and Bruce Beutler.
"Sadly, Dr. Steinman passed away on Sept. 30, 2011, prior to receiving his prize," Harper said. "The Nobel Prize is a fitting final tribute to his life's work."
Seymour Steinman described his brother as a "terrific man and a great guy."
"He worked seven days a week on his research," he said.
In May 2010, Seymour and his wife Linda visited Steinman at his lab at Rockefeller University in New York, where he had made his discovery. Steinman was excited to be giving his brother and sister-in-law a tour of his newly renovated facilities.
"He was amazed by the wonder of science," Linda said. "But he was spiritual, too."
Despite working in New York, Steinman visited Montreal regularly, tending to his mother after she broke a hip.
He advised Dr. Jean-Pierre Routy, a hematologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital, when he was developing an HIV vaccine in 2009. That vaccine is now undergoing Phase II clinical trials
"He was a very kind person," Routy recalled.
The Nobel committee observed that Steinman's discovery was "initially met with skepticism" but later proved to be highly influential.
"He was able to find something from a lab mouse — the dendritic cell — to understand the mechanism of the immune system," Routy explained. "He was able to show that these cells are the big conductors of the immune system. Then he pushed for research into these cells as a therapeutic vehicle."
Steinman had been asked to advise the McGill University Health Centre in its plans to build a new hospital and research facilities, Linda said. And he sat on a committee sponsored by the Canadian government that discussed how research grants are awarded.
In 2003, Steinman was awarded the Gairdner Prize in Toronto for his pioneering work into dendritic cells. In 2009, he was named a co-recipient of the $500,000 Albany Medical Centre Prize, the largest award in medicine in the United States.
But Steinman wasn't all science and research. He enjoyed gardening and jogging. For a while, he and his wife, Claudia, took dancing lessons, practising the salsa at a number of New York clubs.
A private funeral was held over the weekend in New York. In addition to his mother and siblings, Steinman is survived by his son Adam, twin daughters Alexis and Lesley, as well as three grandchildren.

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/health/Canadian+scientist+wins+Nobel+prize+days+after+death/5492973/story.html#ixzz1ZmcBmdyD

IDEO: Our Approach: Design Thinking

Our Approach: Design Thinking

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” —Tim Brown, president and CEO
Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which IDEO calls design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to solve a vast range of challenges.
Design thinking is a deeply human process that taps into abilities that we all have but are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional, and to express ourselves through means beyond words or symbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking provides an integrated third way.
The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions. Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas. Implementation as the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.
Operating from this perspective, IDEO uses a mix of analytical tools and generative techniques to help clients see how their new or existing operations can look in the future — and build road maps for getting there. Our methods include business model prototyping, data visualization, innovation strategy, organizational design, qualitative and quantitative research, and IP liberation.
All of IDEO’s work is done in consideration of the capabilities of our clients and the needs of their customers. As we iterate toward a final solution, we assess and reassess our designs. Our goal is to deliver appropriate, actionable, and tangible strategies. The result: new, innovative avenues for growth that are grounded in business viability and market desirability.

The Power to End Poverty

Ban Ki-moon

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2011-10-03

The Power to End Poverty

NEW YORK – Growing up as a child during the Korean War, I knew poverty first hand.  I saw it around me every day; I lived it. One of my earliest memories is walking up a muddy track into the mountains to escape the fighting, my village burning behind me and wondering what would happen to my family and me.
The answer was the United Nations and other international agencies. With the help of many countries and friends, my country was able to get back on its feet and carry on after that terrible and devastating conflict. Thanks to decades of hard work and sacrifice by millions of Koreans, the Republic of Korea rose from desperate poverty to prosperity in less than a half-century.
As Secretary-General of the UN, I am still living that story. Everyday, I work to help end the extreme poverty that traps nearly a billion of the world’s people.
You may imagine, then, the powerful memories that I felt when I visited the Mwandama Millennium Village in the deeply impoverished southern African country of Malawi. As in my youth, I saw once again the challenges and hardship of rural poverty. Yet I also saw, once again, the power of community spirit to overcome it – the same sense of solidarity and determination that launched Korea’s rural modernization five decades ago.

In 2000, the world’s leaders committed to achieve major reductions in poverty, hunger, and disease by 2015. These targets, endorsed by all UN member countries, comprise the eight Millennium Development Goals. The Millennium Village Project, a partnership of academia, business, and UN agencies, aims to show how these goals can be achieved in even the poorest communities in the world.
Like South Korea’s own experience in fighting poverty, Millennium Villages in Africa, and similar projects elsewhere, are now surging ahead in food production, children’s health, and in forging a sustainable pathway out of poverty itself. At the same time, I was impressed with one crucial difference between Korea’s efforts in the 1960’s and what is possible today. Touring the Mwandama Village, I saw the potential of modern technologies – smart phones and mobile broadband, improved seed varieties, the latest in drip irrigation, modern diagnostic tests for malaria, and low-cost solar-energy grids – to advance human well-being in ways that simply were not feasible even a few years ago.
I saw a community health worker using a smart phone to manage malaria treatment within a household. The worker used a low-cost diagnostic kit to confirm the malaria diagnosis, circumventing the need for a microscope and laboratory; a smart phone to key in the test results and receive advice from an “expert system” designed by public-health specialists; and state-of-the-art combination drug therapy to cure the illness. The child was cured within the home; a few years ago, that same child would have faced a high risk of death unless he was somehow brought to a distant clinic in time.
I saw other breakthrough changes in daily life. In a community that once could not feed itself, a giant warehouse was almost bursting with tons of surplus grain. By using high-yield seeds, better soil management, and proper row planting, the community has more than tripled its crop production, and villagers who previously were hungry grain buyers are now food-secure grain sellers.
That surplus, in turn, has contributed directly to improved education, as families donate a portion of their surplus to the school’s mid-day meal program. Now the students get a nutritious bowl of porridge and fruits, giving them the energy to pursue their studies throughout the school day. As so many schools have discovered, mid-day meals lead to an end-of--year jump in performance on national exams.
This month, the Millennium Villages Project launches its second five-year stage on the way to the MDGs target date of 2015. Around Africa, and now around the world, governments are scaling up the lessons from this particular project and others like it: empower communities, help them to invest in their futures using cutting-edge technologies, and thereby end extreme poverty. The MDGs might once have seemed to be merely a set of hopes and aspirations. Now we know that they are actually a practical roadmap out of poverty.
The world leaders who met at the UN in September for the annual General Debate all agreed on a central point: the importance of fighting poverty, hunger, and disease is crucial for our collective survival. They know that extreme poverty threatens the lives of hundreds of millions of people who lack reliable access to adequate nutrition, potable water, health care, and education.
They also know that the dangers don’t stop at the edge of the village or slum; today’s hunger hotspots all too frequently become tomorrow’s violent hotspots. Regardless of whether we are rich, poor, or in between, we share an overwhelming interest in the MDGs’ success, so that every region trapped in extreme poverty can break free, grow, and prosper.

Ban Ki-moon is Secretary-General of the United Nations.