April Sumatra quakes signal Indian ocean plate break-up

The sequence of huge earthquakes that struck off the coast of Sumatra in April may signal the creation of a new tectonic plate boundary.

Scientists give the assessment in this week's Nature journal.
They say their analysis of the tremors - the biggest was a magnitude 8.7 - suggests major changes are taking place on the ocean floor that will eventually split the Indo-Australian plate in two.
It is not something that will happen soon; it could take millions of years.
"This is a process that probably started eight to 10 million years ago, so you can imagine how much longer it will take until we get a classic boundary," said Matthias Delescluse from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.

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Superstar who turned romance, and even death, into high art

Rajesh Khanna, actor, died in Mumbai on 18 July 2012, aged 69. He was born in Amritsar on 29 December 1942. He is survived by two daughters, Twinkle and Rinke.

A rose, a candle, a couplet. Rajesh Khanna, Hindi cinema’s first real superstar who passed away in Mumbai following a prolonged illness on Wednesday, used these props freely and easily to capture for the first time in Indian cinema a romance that was both adult and modern.

He was made less by the characters he played or the lines penned by dialogue writers than his idiosyncratic mannerisms — the drawls, the pauses, the sudden sparkle in his eyes, the fresh and easy smile, and the playful tilt of the head. Even when stricken with cancer, or ‘lymphosarcoma of the intestine — as Anand, a character he played in the film of the same name, was — that tilt and smile barely faltered.

To understand what Rajesh Khanna was or how he altered the persona of the film hero, it is important to stress what he was not. He was not a loveable tramp like Raj Kapoor, nor a tragedy king like Dilip Kumar. He did not trade on his masculinity like Dharmendra and rarely, if ever, played the hero with shades of grey as Dev Anand liked to do. He was the stuff of soft romance, his characters often earnest and virtuous, his performances enhanced by a face that was a fortune and a style of acting that used eyes, lips, hands, and vocal chords to great effect.

He got his break in cinema in Chetan Anand’s Aakhri Khat in 1966 as a result of winning a talent competition.

Syrian children used as human shields, says UN report

Children in Syria have accused troops of using them as human shields, a UN report has revealed.

Some children said they had been forced to ride on tanks to stop attacks by opposition fighters, the report said.
The UN's Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict said children were being tortured in detention and slaughtered in massacres.
Radhika Coomaraswamy told the BBC that her team had returned from Syria with "horrific" reports.
She said she had never seen a similar situation where children were not spared - and even targeted - in a conflict.

"Many former soldiers spoke about shooting into civilian areas, seeing children, young children being killed, and maimed," she said.
"We also had testimonies and saw children who had been tortured, and who carried the torture marks with them. We also heard of children being used - this was recounted to us by some children - of being put on tanks and being used as human shields so that the tanks would not be fired upon."
However, she also criticised the opposition Free Syrian Army for endangering children.
"For the first time we heard of children being recruited by the Free Syrian Army mainly in medical and service orientated jobs but still on the front line," she said.

'Shocked'

Ms Coomaraswamy said the suffering inflicted on children in Syria was unusual even for combat situations.

"We are really quite shocked. Killing and maiming of children in cross-fire is something we come across in many conflicts but this torture of children in detention, children as young as 10, is something quite extraordinary, which we don't really see in other places."

She said that in recent massacres children under the age of 10 had been summarily killed, adding: "Those kinds of things we don't see elsewhere."

The UN's annual report on children and armed conflict cited one attack on the village of Ayn l'Arouz in Idlib province on 9 March 2012.

It quoted a witness saying how several young children were forcibly taken from their homes and "used by soldiers and militia members as human shields, placing them in front of the windows of buses carrying military personnel into the raid on the village".

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US drone attack 'targeted al-Qaeda deputy'

A US drone strike on Monday in Pakistan targeted al-Qaeda's second-in-command Abu Yahya al-Libi, US officials say.

They say it is still unclear whether he was among those killed in the strike on a suspected militant compound in North Waziristan, near the Afghan border.
Two missiles by the unmanned aircraft killed 15 people, Pakistani officials say.
Pakistan's foreign ministry strongly condemned the strike, calling it "illegal", Reuters news agency reports.
'Major blow' A senior US official told the BBC that Libi was the target of Monday's morning strike in Hesokhel, to the east of Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan.
The first missile struck the compound, killing three militants, Pakistani security officials said. 

A second missile then killed 12 more militants who had arrived at the scene, they added.
If Libi's death is confirmed, it would be a "major blow to core of al-Qaeda", the US official told the BBC.

Washington believes that following Osama Bin Laden's death last year, Libi, an Islamic scholar from Libya, became al-Qaeda's second-in-command after Egyptian born Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Libi is reportedly in charge of day-to-day operations in Pakistan's tribal areas.
Libi was reported killed in a drone strike in Pakistan in 2009, but it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.
Pakistan's frontier tribal region is considered a hub of activity by al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.
There have been eight US drone strikes in the past two weeks despite Pakistani demands for them to be stopped.

Kazakhstan court jails 13 over Zhanaozen riots

A court in Kazakhstan has jailed 13 people for their role in deadly riots last December in the remote desert oil town of Zhanaozen.

Thirty-seven defendants, mostly oil workers, were tried after seven months of industrial action ended in rioting.
At least 15 people were killed in the unrest and more than 100 injured.
The violence in Zhanaozen was the worst unrest seen in Kazakhstan since its independence from the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago.
The 13 defendants were given sentences of up to seven years; 16 others received conditional sentences and the remaining defendants were either given amnesties or acquitted.
The hearings were conducted at a youth centre that had been turned into a makeshift courtroom in the Caspian port city of Aktau, about 150km (96 miles) west of Zhanaozen.

'Bottles thrown'

The BBC's Central Asia correspondent Rayhan Demytrie says the scenes in the courtroom where chaotic.
Relatives of the defendants reportedly threw plastic bottles at the judge, amid claims those accused were tortured during the investigation.
Five policemen tried separately for their role in the violence were jailed last week for up to seven years for abuse of power.
Witnesses say that police fired on and beat unarmed protesters, leading to the deaths of at least 15 people.
Security officials maintain they were acting in self defence.
The workers had been striking to demanding better pay and conditions, but the oil company responded by sacking them.
Correspondents say the violence has tarnished the country's image of stability, which has been carefully cultivated by President Nursultan Nazarbayev over the past two decades.
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Some G.O.P. Foreign Policy Experts Are Tepid on Romney

The next election barely five months away and Mitt Romney gearing up for a tough battle with President Obama, Mr. Kissinger, a former Republican secretary of state, remains on the sidelines. The reason, according to several Republicans familiar with the matter: concerns about Mr. Romney’s aggressive statements on trade policy toward China, a keen issue for Mr. Kissinger, who helped reopen relations with China and who later, as a consultant, has had clients with significant interests there.

As Republican leaders fell in behind Mr. Romney this spring, many members of the party’s foreign policy establishment have been more muted. Reluctance by this group to come forward for Mr. Romney more quickly reflects an unease over some of his positions, including his hard line on Russia and opposition to a new missile treaty.

Mr. Romney will soon get a boost, however: Condoleezza Rice is expected to endorse him formally on Wednesday night when she headlines a fund-raiser for him near San Francisco, according to one of her aides and a Romney aide.

She would join Frank C. Carlucci, a defense secretary under President Ronald Reagan, and Stephen J. Hadley, a national security adviser under President George W. Bush, in officially backing Mr. Romney. Other Republican foreign policy stalwarts are likely to endorse him once they get a chance to discuss their differences with him directly.

But some nevertheless believe that Mr. Romney has taken approaches too confrontational or too hawkish, or worry that harsh campaign-trail statements could hurt later diplomatic efforts and may signal a drift toward neoconservative passions as the party seeks to take back the White House, say Republicans familiar with the discussions.

Some longtime deans of the Republican establishment, like Brent Scowcroft, the two-time national security adviser, believe the party as a whole has drifted rightward. Mr. Scowcroftdeclined a request for an interview, but he has recently voiced opinions at odds with Mr. Romney’s.

For example, a seeming eagerness to follow the cues of Israeli leaders has at times left Mr. Romney with what appears to be a dim view of the need to press Israelis and Palestinians toward a settlement, which many old-line Republican experts see as crucial to stability in the Middle East and cultivating ties with the Arab world. “I don’t think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process; instead we should stand by our ally,” he told an Israeli newspaper last year, referring to Israel. 

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Tornadoes kill five in US Midwest

Tornadoes have hit a large swathe of the US Midwest, killing at least five people in Oklahoma, officials say.Twisters were also reported in Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska as the storm front swept east.The deaths occurred before dawn in the town of Woodward, Oklahoma, after warning sirens failed to sound, officials said. A tornado there caused extensive damage, mainly in the west of the town. At least 29 people were injured.The National Weather Service had forecast further tornadoes early Sunday morning, with concern they could strike as people slept.

Officials feared people would not hear warnings as they slept and said that it was more difficult for weather spotters to track the funnel clouds overnight.

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Rescue teams searched rubble for people trapped or wounded in Woodward, where high winds damaged homes, uprooted trees and brought down electricity lines, the Associated Press reported.

A block of flats was also damaged by the twister, after residents were caught by surprise as the storm sirens had failed to sound, Reuters news agency quoted the local mayor as saying.

This thing took us by surprise," Keli Cain, spokeswoman for Oklahoma Emergency Management, told the agency. "It's kind of overwhelming."

"They're still going door to door and in some cases there are piles of rubble and they are having to sift through the rubble," one of Ms Cain's deputies, Michelann Ooten, told AP.In Iowa, a tornado destroyed large parts of the town of Thurman, on Saturday, but there were no major injuries, the NWS said.

"It lasted three to four minutes probably - what seemed like an eternity," one man from Thurman told the broadcaster ABC."The next thing I know, the house was shaking and I could feel it lifting and it was over that quick," another man said.
Another twister caused widespread power outages and other damage in the city of Wichita, Kansas, according to Associated Press. The roof of a hospital in Creston, southwest of Des Moines, was damaged, but patients and staff were not hurt, AP reported.
Tornado experts had said that storms on Saturday could be a "life-threatening event".

US tornadoes have already killed at least 39 people in 2012.

An outbreak of deadly twisters hit the states of Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Georgia and Alabama in early March. At the start of April the Dallas-Fort Worth area was badly hit, with hundreds of flights being disrupted but no-one injured or killed.

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