According to the report of Indian Meteorological Department, "The earthquake was of moderate intensity, measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale. The epicenter of the earthquake was Rapar in the Kutch area of Gujarat."

Rapar is around 250 miles from Gujarat's main city of Ahmedabad. The quake struck just before midnight at 1825 (GMT) on Tuesday.

Residents in Ahmedabad said they were woken up by the tremors, with those living in high-rise buildings rushing out onto the streets in panic. "I thought there was a dog shaking under my bed. When I woke up finally, everyone was screaming and fleeing," said resident Palak Zaveri.

The earthquake was also felt in nearby La Hoya, and in Totana and Aledo. The epicentre was to the north east of Lorca and to the south west of Aledo.

An earthquake registering 4.7 on the Richter scale damaged almost a thousand houses in the Lorca area just over a year ago. It happened on 29th January 2005, and affected the small villages of La Paca and Zarcila de Ramos. There were 500 aftershocks on that occasion.

Tenet Healthcare, based in Dallas, Texas, sent a letter to CNN on Wednesday stating that it understands from the Louisiana Attorney General's Office that it is not a target of the investigation and insists that all of its Gulf Coast hospitals, including Memorial, were prepared in advance for Hurricane Katrina. But those familiar with the company's checkered history say they aren't surprised it is a Tenet hospital that is under scrutiny.

Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and who studies health policies and ethics, said Tenet has a history of promoting profits over patient care.

"I think at the end of the day, if you look at over the past 15 to 20 years of the company, you'd have to say the management has been pushing the bottom line, telling doctors to cut corners, basically saying we are going to evaluate you and promote you based on how well you make money, not on how well you take care of the patients," Caplan said.

Tenet itself was born in 1995 after a scandal over medical insurance fraud by its predecessor, National Medical Enterprises. Recently Tenet Healthcare facilities around the country have come under investigation and faced lawsuits.

In just the past four years, Tenet has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits while denying any wrongdoing. That amount includes $7 million just last month to the state of Florida to settle a billing dispute.

Many of the lawsuits alleged the company overbilled Medicare, cheating taxpayers. But there have also been allegations that some Tenet hospitals practiced bad medicine, harming patients in the process.

The company has denied all those allegations. And according to the letter it sent to CNN, Tenet says it brought in new management in 2003 and developed a new strategy to resolve all of its legal problems from the past, to resolve all pending federal investigations, and to put transparency, honesty and integrity at the forefront of everything it does.

Tenet also wrote that since new management came on board, the quality of care at its hospitals has greatly improved.

The company again denied our request for any on-camera interview by CNN.

Last year Tenet paid out $31 million in settlements to people who sued when cardiac patients at a Florida hospital claimed they suffered from post-surgical infections because of unclean conditions. Twenty cardiac patients died at this hospital.

In 2002, the FBI raided a Tenet hospital in Redding, California, in connection with its investigation into whether doctors were performing unnecessary open-heart surgery. Tenet admitted no wrongdoing but paid $60 million to settle federal and state claims and another $395 million to the 750 patients who claimed they were victims of the heart-surgery center.

Attorney Gary Cripe said things got so bad that locals joked "you didn't dare drive by Redding Hospital with a complaint of chest pains because they would pull you in and you would get surgery."

Five years ago, Cripe was hired by a doctor and minority shareholder to try to change the company's direction. Cripe even wrote a book, "Greed, Scandal and Wrongful Deaths at Tenet Healthcare Corporation," detailing the various investigations and accusing Tenet of cutting costs, cutting care and breaking rules to increase profits.

"The evidence suggests that the corporate culture is so pervasive that they may well be incapable until there is a total housecleaning of those in management that are a part that corporate culture," Cripe said.

Cripe's book came out five months before Katrina hit New Orleans. Nurses, doctors, families of patients and others have told CNN that Tenet's Memorial Medical Center was ill-equipped to handle the hurricane and its aftermath, especially when it came to evacuating patients.

Cripe and Caplan say it has been Tenet's practice over the years to deny knowledge by management of allegations of wrongdoing by hospital doctors and staff. That, they say, appears to be the case in New Orleans.

Allegations of euthanasia at Memorial first surfaced a week after the hurricane. A week later, on September 13, Memorial CEO Rene Goux sat down with CNN and denied any knowledge of the allegations even though he was inside the hospital and coordinating the evacuation.

"I was not in the health care or nursing side of it,'' Goux said. "I was in the evacuation side of it. "I'm trying to answer as honestly as I can," Goux said. "I'm not in health care. I wasn't up in those areas. If there is something that needs to be investigated I'm sure it will get done."

Since then Tenet has repeatedly refused requests for interviews. They have only issued statements saying they are cooperating with the attorney general's investigation.

An attorney for one doctor, Anna Pou, who worked inside Memorial during the hurricane, has said in court records his client is under investigation for allegations of euthanasia. But attorney Rick Simmons has told CNN Pou was not involved in any criminal misconduct.

Caplan said while he doesn't know what happened at Memorial he believes doctors can be driven to kill but only under the extreme stress of a hopeless situation.

The staff at Memorial Hospital have said that after the storm they felt abandoned, that they worried about the sporadic evacuations and that they feared looters, some of whom they watched break into a nearby credit union.

"If you get in a situation where doctors are saying under oath that I felt I couldn't save myself unless somehow I had been able to take care of my patients one way or another, then that's poor management," Caplan said. "That's culpable management. That's not responsible management."

"And so in order to help fulfill our promise on the levees, Congress needs to restore the $1.5 billion to make this a real commitment to inspire the good folks down here that they'll have a levee system that will encourage development and reconstruction," Bush added.

The White House in December announced it was seeking $3.1 billion to bolster flood defenses, but Congress only approved about half that amount for New Orleans with the rest going to other hurricane-related projects.

The White House's $1.5 billion levee request for Louisiana is now part of a $19.8 billion hurricane relief supplemental bill the administration has sent to Congress.

Jenny Manley, a spokeswoman for the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that although the White House had announced in a news conference it wanted the full $3.1 billion to go to New Orleans, the official request was never sent to Congress.

"I don't think the blame can be put on Congress," she said.

Bush, who was heavily criticized for the administration's sluggish initial response to the disaster, strode with his wife, Laura, through the water-damaged streets of the city's Lower Ninth ward, seeing boarded-up and abandoned houses and mounds of debris. He also toured a levee restoration project in a part of the system that suffered one of the worst breaches during the August 29 hurricane.

"EQUAL OR BETTER"

Standing at the levee site amid the clatter of construction work, Bush renewed his pledge to make the levees "equal or better" to their pre-Katrina condition ahead of the June 1 start of the new hurricane season. Some engineering experts have questioned whether the pledge is realistic and warned federal engineers that weak soil in some areas could leave the levees unsafe.

Bush's comments came as House of Representatives Republicans are in open rebellion over plans by a state-owned Arab company to manage six U.S. ports.

So says a new report published by the International Journal of Pediatric Obesity.

"We have truly a global epidemic which appears to be affecting most countries in the world," states Dr. Philip James, chairman of the International Obesity Task Force, warning of the trend in an editorial in the journal.

Heart disease, stroke and other illnesses are a likely result in adulthood.

But another study, by Britain's Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, found that during their lifetime obese children are also at risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Till now, type 2 has generally been found in middle-aged overweight people. But the numbers are increasing in children and still may not be fully recognized, because many parents miss early signs of diabetes in their seriously overweight children.

Another 60,000 children are believed to be suffering from the combination of high blood pressure, raised cholesterol and increased fats in the blood that contribute to the weight-related metabolic syndrome believed to be the precursor of type 2 diabetes.

We have now created globally the first generation of children who could die before their parents.

Sam Etherington, deputy chairman of the British Medical Association, has called for action to stop companies advertising junk food to children.

Referring to worldwide childhood obesity, Dr. James told the New York Times that even living in isolated areas no longer safeguarded children against abandoning traditional good eating habits.

"They're being bombarded like they are in the West to eat all the wrong foods. The Western world's food industries without even realizing it have precipitated an epidemic with enormous health consequences."

Like Etherington he says, "There needs to be a ban on all forms of marketing, not just television adverts."

What does it take to wake us up to this new plague? Have we learned nothing from the consequences of ignoring early warnings over HIV/AIDS?

Send your children to school with a salad they may not want to trade for a bag of chips. It goes well with a kebab of grilled chicken pieces that have been marinated 30 minutes in 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and sesame oil. Obviously leave out the peanuts if they are allergic to them.

-- Fresh Ginger Salad

-- 2 ounces of peeled, grated fresh ginger

-- 3/4 cup lime juice

-- 3/4 cup sugar

-- a splash of soy sauce (or more to taste)

-- 1 small head of thinly sliced green cabbage

-- 1 peeled and julienned carrot

-- generous amount of jarred, drained pickled ginger root

-- ½ cup finely crushed roasted peanuts

-- Whisk the first four ingredients together in a bowl.

-- Pour it over the next three and toss thoroughly.

-- Allow the flavors to develop for 30 minutes, then serve with the peanuts scattered over.

Rucker C. Johnson and Steven Raphael of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed census data and a federal database containing detailed information on about 850,000 men and women who contracted AIDS between 1982 and 1996.

They discovered that the surge in black AIDS patients -- particularly women -- since the early 1980s closely tracked the increase in the proportion of black men in America's prisons, which by the 1990s had become vast reservoirs of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The percentage of prisoners who were black increased from 40 percent in 1982 to well over half in 1996, according to government data. At the same time, get-tough sentencing policies more than doubled the prison population, producing even more infected black men who passed the disease on to black women after they were released.

So powerful is the relationship between race, prison and AIDS that it almost completely explains why half of all new AIDS patients in 2002 were African Americans even though only 12 percent of the population is black; in 1982, African Americans made up less than a quarter of new AIDS cases. The link remained strong even after researchers controlled for factors associated with AIDS, including the use of crack cocaine, Raphael said.

Part of the reason for the rapid spread of AIDS among African Americans is that so many black men spend time behind bars, Johnson said. About one out of 12 black men are in jail or prison, compared with one in 100 white men; at current rates, a third of all black males born today will do time.

What explains the black-white prison gap? Raphael said the question is beyond the scope of the study, but other researchers point to poverty, a lack of opportunities, racism in the criminal justice system and the lure of the "thug life."

Whatever the cause, the AIDS gap is not going away. Other studies suggest that half of all prisoners engage in homosexual sex. But safe-sex programs, key to controlling AIDS in the gay community, are unwelcome inside prison walls.

In fact, "it's illegal to distribute condoms in prisons in all but one state" because lawmakers fear it would encourage gay sex, Johnson said.

Yu told AFP the plan had so far met with some support from the public with 460 households registering for the clean power, which went on-line on Tuesday.

It has proved less popular among companies, which had access to the clean power from January, with only 15 enterprises subscribing.

One of the reasons for low market penetration is the price.

The cost of one kilowatt hour is 1.14 yuan, or 0.53 yuan higher than electricity generated through more traditional methods such as coal fired power plants.

To qualify individual households also have to subscribe to a minimum of 120 kilowatts a year, while companies must sign for 6,000 kilowatts.

Although the scheme is in its infancy, Yu said the state-run company remained hopeful.

Shanghai, home to 17 million residents and 3,000 skyscrapers, needs 70 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually, but currently only receives about 2000-3000 kilowatts hours from natural methods.

"It's really a tiny share, but by the end of 2015 (wind) generation capacity will reach three billion kilowatt hours," said Yu.