Friday, February 25, 2011

China widened its Internet policing after online calls for protests like those that swept the Middle East, with social networking site LinkedIn and searches for the U.S. ambassador's name both blocked on Friday.

Searches for Ambassador Jon Huntsman's name in Chinese on popular microblogging site Sina Weibo were met with a message saying results were not available due to unspecified "laws, regulations and policies."

A video circulating online shows Huntsman, who has been mentioned as a potential Republican presidential candidate, scanning the crowd at the site of a tiny protest in Beijing last weekend. An unidentified Chinese man asked Huntsman what he was doing there and whether he wanted to see chaos in China. Huntsman walked away from the scene after that comment.

The U.S. Embassy was aware that Huntsman's name was being "restricted on some searches" on China's domestic Internet, spokesman Richard Buangan said, but declined further comment on the issue.

He said the ambassador and some family members were passing through the bustling Wangfujing shopping street on Sunday and it was a coincidence that they were there at the same time as the planned protest.

A Pakistani court adjourned on Friday the trial of a CIA contractor charged with killing two Pakistanis until March 3, dismissing U.S. demands for his release.

The contractor, Raymond Davis, shot dead two men in the eastern city of Lahore last month. He said he acted in self-defense and the United States says he has diplomatic immunity and should be repatriated.

The case has inflamed anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and is straining relations between the allies. Pakistani efforts against Islamist militants on its border with Afghanistan are seen as crucial to ending the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

"He (Davis) said that he should be given immunity ... a discussion will be held on this at the next hearing," said Asad Manzoor Butt, a lawyer for the families of the two men Davis killed.

Davis, a former U.S. special forces officer, has been charged with double-murder and faces possible execution.

There have been conflicting accounts about the identity of the two victims with Davis and a police report indicating they were armed robbers while Pakistani media and some officials have portrayed them as innocent victims.

With public anger and anti-American feeling running high, President Ali Asif Zardari's unpopular government had little choice but to let the case go through the courts.

"He should be treated the same way he treated Pakistanis," said Muzammil Mukhtar, a laborer in a factory near Kot Lakhpat jail, where Davis has been detained since February 11 and where his trial began on Friday.


We drove through the streets of the earthquake affected suburb of Brighton, on the outskirts of Christchurch, and came across a collapsed two-story building where Adele Stokes, covered in dust, was picking though the wreckage, looking for anything she could salvage.
Her relatives had just arrived with their two young sons when the 6.3 magnitude quake struck Christchurch on Tuesday at 12.51 p.m.

Still visibly shaken up days after the quake, Adele looks at the tonnes of rubble that could have so easily have crushed her, her family and friend to death. And if the pub had been opened, as it was due to later that afternoon, Adele says there would definitely have been fatalities.

"It was terrible, it started shaking -- moving from side to side and the walls were caving in. Then the floor dropped. We somehow managed to escape and get the kids out. I don't know how we did it. I really don't."

It was Adele's neighbor Dale Lynn who helped pull them to safety. His house was still standing after the quake violently shook the city, but then he heard the yelling and screams coming from next door.

The air was filled with dust and he couldn't see anything. All he could hear were cries for help. He and his son followed the noise and quickly found them - pulling them all to safety. And other than a few cuts, bumps and bruises, everyone else got out unscathed.

Adele is aware she's lost everything but continues to smile. She knows how fortunate she is just to be alive. Her friend Melissa arrives and gives her a huge hug, repeating over and over again: "Thank god you are safe."

Melissa is a policewoman who lives down the road. She drove past Adele's house after the quake and feared the worst. Melissa says she tried desperately to reach Adele on the phone but got no answer. The two women can now laugh. Adele explains she'd lost her mobile phone in the debris until a friend found it -- banged up but remarkably still working.

Adele has decided to leave Christchurch for a while. With no home, she's taking off in a camper van and heading north. It's been a tough few days but as she walks off carrying just a handful of retrieved possessions, Adele reminds me, she's one of the lucky ones.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Hopes faded of finding more survivors Thursday in the collapsed downtown towers of New Zealand's quake-shattered Christchurch, as officials said the death toll rose to 98 with grave fears for many of the 226 missing.

Police said up to 120 bodies may still lie trapped in the tangled concrete and steel that was the Canterbury Television or CTV building, where dozens of students from Japan, Thailand, China and other Asian countries were believed buried when an English-language school collapsed along with other offices. Twenty-three bodies were pulled from the building Thursday, but not immediately identified.

"The longer I don't know what happened, the longer my agony becomes," said Rolando Cabunilas, 34, a steel worker from the Philippines whose wife, Ivy Jane, 33, was on her second day of class at the school when the quake struck. She hasn't been heard from since.

"I can't describe it - it's pain, anger, all emotions," he said.

Officials appealed to families of the missing to be patient, saying the agony could be worse if they rushed the identifications and came to wrong conclusions.

The official death toll from Tuesday's 6.3-magnitude temblor stood at 98, Police Superintendent Dave Cliff said. An additional 226 people were listed as missing, and Prime Minister John Key said there were "grave fears" that many of them did not survive. Among the dead were two infant boys, one 9 months old, the other 5 months, Cliff said. He did not give details of their deaths.

"We are very fearful tonight that the death toll could be much greater than any of us have ever feared," Key said, adding words of concern for the dozens of "international people that are caught up in this tremendous tragedy."

Rescue efforts so far had focused on the CTV building and a handful of other major office complexes that crumbled downtown, but work at those sites was shifting to the recovery of bodies while the remaining rescue efforts fanned out further afield. No new survivors were found since Wednesday.

The damaged buildings in and around Christchurch numbered in the thousands, including many of the older structures in Lyttelton, a port town just southeast of the city and closer to the quake's epicenter. Residents there wandered through the dusty, brick and glass-covered streets, pausing to offer each other hugs and ask the ubiquitous question: "How's your house?"

"It was just horrific," 63-year-old teacher's assistant Kevin Fitzgerald said of Tuesday's quake, which sent him scurrying under a desk along with a student at a school as the building undulated menacingly.

"I thought the devil was coming up out of the earth," he said.

In Christchurch, hundreds of foreign specialists - from the U.S., Britain, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan - arrived to bolster local police and soldiers and allow teams to broaden their search to smaller buildings not yet checked.

"Now we've got the capability of going out and doing searches in areas where there may still be people trapped that hitherto we haven't been able to address," Civil Defense Minister John Carters said.

Teams dressed in blue coveralls and orange helmets and with sniffer dogs moved along city streets lined with one- and two-story office buildings, small stores, restaurants and cafes. The brick facades of some had fallen onto sidewalks, and car after car parked at the curb lay crushed under heavy steel awnings.

At times, a dog would bark and rush excitedly into the rubble, the rescuers following gingerly after them. At one place, they uncovered a body pinned under a huge chunk of concrete.

Mayor Bob Parker said searchers divided downtown into a grid of 114 squares, and did preliminary checks on 60 percent of them, marked some areas as too dangerous to enter and others as needing more detailed checks later.

Video shot Tuesday showed rescuers lining a mine-like shaft through the rubble of the Pyne Gould Guinness building, pulling a man, then a woman from between collapsed floors.

"When I saw his face, right there in front of me I just burst into tears, I was just so, so happy," trapped woman Roslyn Chapman said of her rescuer. "I just felt so lucky and to get down on the street and see my fiance ... and to turn around and look at that building I just can't believe we made it out of there alive," she told TV New Zealand, which broadcast the footage, shot by a rescuer.

There was more misery for the family of Donna Manning, a morning show presenter whose teen-aged children Kent and Lizzy held a vigil outside the CTV building until being told by police Tuesday their mother could not have survived. As they were waiting, their home was robbed, Manning's brother Maurice Gardner told TVNZ.

Key has declared the quake a national disaster, and analysts estimate insurance losses could be as much as $12 billion.

The water system for Christchurch and surrounding areas was in disarray.

Parker said water was still out for half of the city and that it might be contaminated for the other half. All residents were urged to assume that tap water is unsafe, and to boil it before using it to drink, wash or cook because of the risk of disease.

Fourteen water tankers have been dispatched around the city for people to fill buckets or other containers, and residents were urged not to flush toilets or use showers.

Power was restored to 75 percent of the city, but it could take weeks to repair supplies to the rest, including the hardest-hit regions, said Roger Sutton, the chief executive of supplier Orion.

School classes in the city were suspended, and residents advised to stay home as rescue and recovery efforts continued.

Officials tightened control over a cordoned-off zone downtown where the damage is worst, gathering news crews at central point and putting them in buses to take them to sites of interest. Cliff said restrictions on the movement of journalists were to protect them from potential building collapses.

Tuesday's quake was the second major temblor to strike the city in the past five months.

It was less powerful than the 7.1 temblor that struck before dawn on Sept. 4, damaging buildings but killing no one. Experts said Tuesday's quake was deadlier because it was closer to the city and because more people were about.

---

Associated Press writers Steve McMorran in Christchurch, and Ray Lilley in Wellington, New Zealand, and Kelly Doherty in Sydney contributed to this report.
Britain's government is convening its crisis committee to decide whether the military will need to evacuate almost 200 U.K. oil workers and their colleagues from other countries stranded in Libya.

Foreign Secretary William Hague told BBC radio on Thursday the COBRA emergency panel was scheduled to meet and would discuss evacuation options with Defense Secretary Liam Fox.

Hague said he did not rule out the use of British special forces to rescue the 170 British workers marooned in desert camps away from Libya's major cities.

The defense ministry said that ministers were considering "a full range of options" to mount a rescue mission.

Hague has canceled planned talks in Washington with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to handle the issue