Earth Changes
The massive quake plunged much of the Chilean capital, Santiago, into darkness as it snapped power lines and severed communications, and AFP journalists spoke of walls and masonry collapsing. People in pyjamas fled onto the streets.
Residents in the south of the city, which appeared to have borne the brunt of the quake, said roads had crumpled and a bridge had been damaged, as an AFP correspondent said buildings "shook like jelly."
Japan's meteorological agency also warned of a tsunami risk across large areas of the Pacific including as far away as the Antarctic as the Philippines warned low lying coastal areas to prepare for a possible evacuation. Related article: 'Widespread' tsunami warning for Pacific nations
Update#7. Almost all countries in the Pacific have been issued a warning, including New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Hawaii and as far as Russia and Japan.
There has been no contact with the Chilean city of Concepcion, a coastal area home to more than 600,000 people which is under 100 kilometres from the quake epicentre.
The quake struck the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, 84 km east of Naha, and about 1,600 km south of Tokyo, at 5:31 a.m. local time Saturday (2031 GMT Friday), at a depth of 29 km below the seabed.
A tsunami warning for waves of up to two meters in some areas was issued, the agency said.
Fifteen more birds have been collected from the lake and taken to the Veterinary Department for testing but the results are still pending. The results of water samples taken are also pending.
The flamingo deaths were briefly discussed during the Parliament's Environmental Committee meeting yesterday but no new information emerged, said Martin Hellicar, Campaign Manager for Bird Life Cyprus.

A quake reading on a seismograph. A 7.0 magnitude quake struck southern Japan early Saturday the USGS …
The quake occurred off the coast of the island of Okinawa at a depth of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) at 5:31 a.m. Saturday (2031 GMT Friday), the agency said.
There have been no reports of major damage or casualties so far, except for reports of ruptured water pipes in two locations, Okinawa police official Noritomi Kikuzato said.
The Meteorological Agency had initially predicted a tsunami up to 6 feet (2 meters) near the Okinawan coast, warning nearby residents to stay away from the coastline. The agency later lifted the warning within two hours after observing only a small swelling of tide.
The bitter cold, with more intense winter weather forecast for March in parts of the United States, have led some to question if global warming has stalled.
Understanding the overall trend is crucial for estimating consumption of energy supplies, such as demand for winter heating oil in the U.S. northeast, and impacts on agricultural production.
"It's not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven't warmed in the past 50 years," veteran Australian climate scientist Neville Nicholls told an online climate science media briefing.
Davi said, 'The arrival of miners is increasing, and the Yanomami are very worried... Soon there will be conflicts between the miners and the Yanomami... I know how the miners treat the Yanomami and I am also very sad because some Yanomami are working at the mining sites in return for food. They will fall ill; they'll catch malaria and sexually transmitted infections, because the miners will use the Indian women as they have done in the past'.
He added, 'I am very angry with FUNAI (the Brazilian government's indigenous affairs department) and the police; they have not controlled the entrance of miners. The Yanomami territory is being invaded'.
Davi Yanomami's warning comes just months after he met with President Lula to ask him to remove all the gold-miners working illegally in the Yanomami territory.
Mr. Gore's financial gains were based on the contradictory and error-plagued assertion that man's release of the trace gas CO2 will fry the planet.
The re-analysis, which was approved at a conference in Turkey this week, comes after the climate change email scandal which dealt a severe blow to the credibility of environmental science.
The Met Office says that the review is 'timely' and insists it does not expect to come to a different conclusion about the progress of climate change.
But the reassessment, which will take an international group of experts three years to complete, will be seen as a tacit admission that previous reports have been tainted by the association with the University of East Anglia's controversial Climatic Research Unit.
Since the leak of more than 1,000 emails and documents from the unit in November, belief in global warming has fallen from 41 per cent to 26 per cent.

A Kwegu boy outside his hut. The Omo Valley tribes are finding it hard to feed their children in these times of drought.
The Kwegu, a small hunter-gatherer tribe, have been badly hit. Survival has received reports that two Kwegu children and four adults died from hunger in November.
A Kwegu man sent this message: 'Go and give this news to your elders, we Kwegu people are hungry. Other tribes have cattle, they can drink milk and blood. We don't have cattle; we eat from the Omo River. We depend on the fish, they are like our cattle. If the Omo floods are gone we will die.'










