Earthquake in India kills at least 8, injures more
NEW DELHI - A 6.7 magnitude earthquake left at least eight dead, scores more injured and houses and buildings flattened in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur early Monday morning.
The quake occurred about 18 miles west of Imphal, the state capital, around 4:35 a.m. Monday, according to the United States Geological Survey. Residents fled out of their homes into darkened streets and strong tremors were felt throughout the region, including the Tibetan region of China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma, also known as Myanmar.
Manipur’s chief minister, Okram Ibobi Singh, told reporters Monday that the state was still searching for victims of the disaster and assessing the overall damage. Two teams from India’s National Disaster Response Force had been deployed to the area to help, he said. Another tremor, with magnitude 3.6, was felt about five hours later.
North Carolina pastor stops armed man peacefully
When a man with a semiautomatic assault rifle walked into Larry Wright’s Heal the Land Outreach Ministries in Fayetteville, N.C., on New Year’s Eve, the outcome could have been very different.
As about 60 of Wright’s flock, present for the final prayer service of 2015, watched, the pastor - a 57-year-old city councilor and military veteran, according to the Fayetteville Observer – started with a simple question: “Can I help you?’’
No physical confrontation was necessary, though. The man – not yet named by Fayetteville police – had just one request: Please pray for him.
Wright took the man’s weapon - and returned to the service. As 2015 turned into 2016, he even found a new convert.
“I finished the message, I did the altar call, and he stood right up, came up to the altar and gave his life to Christ,” Wright said of the man, who said he had recently been released from prison and “intended to do something terrible,” as CNN put it. Wright told NBC that the man was a military veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Health effects linger from the Civil War
A map of deaths from heart disease reveals the American South ablaze in red; of the 10 states with the highest rate of death from heart disease among white people in 2010, all but two are below the Mason-Dixon line.
To Richard Steckel, an Ohio State University economist, that striking pattern raises a seemingly outlandish, but utterly serious question: Could the heavy toll of heart disease in the American South today have been triggered, in part, by the region’s rapid rise out poverty since the 1950s? In a new paper, Steckel argues that decades of poverty caused by the Civil War shaped people’s organs and physiology in a way that left them particularly unsuited for a cushy life. The current health disparities in the South, Steckel says, developed as Southerners encountered more prosperous lifestyle than their bodies were prepared for, including more food and less manual labor.
“Several generations of poverty from the Civil War onwards: You had mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, whose offspring -- I won’t say learned -- but received signals, anticipating a lean world,” Steckel said. “The Civil War is not over. Intergenerational ripples of the Civil War are still with us in the South.”
Washington Post
