The Baja earthquake centered 22 miles from the border town of Mexicali, Mexico, knocked buildings off their foundations and closed a busy US-Mexico port of entry Sunday.
The 7.2-magnitude Mexicali earthquake, centered in Mexico near the border city, rattled LA for nearly a minute. One researcher says she hopes it is a wakeup call for southern Californians.
A stepped-up campaign of American drone strikes have reportedly cast a pall of fear over an area that was once a free zone for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The United States reversed course on its account of a botched Special Operations raid after an investigative report said there were signs of evidence tampering.
AP - A powerful earthquake swayed buildings from Los Angeles to Tijuana, killing two people in Mexico, blacking out cities, forcing the evacuation of hospitals and nursing homes, and prompting an Arizona border town to shut down its downtown area.
AP - It was the Catholic calendar's holiest moment -- the Mass celebrating the resurrection of Christ. But with Pope Benedict XVI accused of failing to protect children from abusive priests, Easter Sunday also was a high-profile opportunity to play defense.
AP - More than 100 Chinese miners were pulled out alive Monday after being trapped for more than a week in a flooded coal mine, sparking cheers among the hundreds of rescue workers who had raced to save them and almost given up hope.
When the massive magnitude-8.8 quake that rocked Chile on Feb. 27 reduced dozens of the country's oldest historical sites to rubble, Oscar Acuña wasted no time before dispatching teams of architects and archaeologists to assess the damage. In the capital, Santiago, the quake damaged a handful of churches and buildings in the historic districts. But in the traditional towns nearest the epicenter none was spared.
Initial assessments of 241 damaged sites include the San Salvador Basilica in Santiago and the World Heritage sites of La Matriz Church and the Port marketplace, both in the coastal city of Valparaiso.
The most extensive damage, however, occurred in the south-central regions of Maule, O'Higgins, and Biobio, where many adobe homes were destroyed.
Mr. Acuña, executive secretary of Chile's National Monuments Council (NMC), now finds himself in a race against the clock to prevent demolition crews from erasing what remains of these culturally important sites.
"This is not the time to be hasty," Acuña says. "We're asking communities to pause before they demolish these buildings because once they're gone, the loss is total."
The Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti also destroyed many well-known symbols of the island nation's cultural heritage, such as the National Palace and the Holy Trinity Cathedral. The United Nations and other international groups are evaluating the damage to develop a strategy for preserving such sites, while in Chile the government itself is taking the lead role.
The NMC and the National Center of Conservation and Restoration are overseeing the damage assessment in collaboration with religious and historical organizations, architects, and architectural students. Where the NMC's focus is primarily on the edifice, the conservation and restoration center is concerned with the altars and other objects often as significant as the buildings themselves.
The slow but steady U.S. economic recovery appears set to continue, with underlying indicators signaling a growing strength, some senior economists say.
Dancing on the head of a pin, two of the president's top advisers were out Sunday touting March job gains as signs that the president's economic policy is working while paying due diligence to a brutal 9.7 percent unemployment rate.
![[logo]](http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/bbc_news_120x60.gif "BBC News")
![[logo]](http://graphics.nytimes.com/images/section/NytSectionHeader.gif "NYT > Home Page")
![[logo]](http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/nws/th/main_142c.gif "Yahoo! News")
![[logo]](http://a.abcnews.com/images/site/abcnews_google_rss_logo.png "ABC News: International"){kind=logo}
![[logo]](http://image.guardian.co.uk/sitecrumbs/Guardian.gif "Guardian Unlimited")
![[logo]](http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/img/1.0/logo/cnn.logo.rss.gif "CNN.com"){kind=logo}
