Experts probe deadly Mexico flu

Public buildings have closed across Mexico City because of the outbreak

World health experts are investigating a new strain of flu that may have killed as many as 60 people in Mexico.

The US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) said tests so far seem to link Mexico's outbreak with a swine flu virus that had sickened eight in the southern US.

Eight swine flu cases identified in U.S.

...None of the American victims has had any contact with pigs and only one of them has traveled to Mexico recently, he said....


Boy, 7, Is San Diego's 4th Case of Swine Flu
By RORY DEVINE, ERIC S. PAGE and MICHELLE WAYLAND
Updated 3:10 PM PDT, Fri, Apr 24, 2009


I wondered where it might have come from, since there is very little agriculture left in San Diego due to drought conditions and most of the county is not zoned for animals other than household pets, or small caged animals. If you can afford enough land for a horse corral around here, chances are your snooty neighbors don't want pigs in the neighborhood.


Venture capital firm set to reap rewards on swine flu
Fri Apr 24, 2009 11:11pm BST


(snopes.com) Does Donald Rumsfeld own stock in the company that makes Tamiflu?

Real World Facts, Real World Understanding Needed on Torture Issue

Blogged by Coleen Rowley on 4/24/2009 11:09AM
The harsh realities of torture and following orders are quite different from the fictional world of Hollywood's anti-terror warriors, says a noted former FBI Special Agent and 9/11 whistleblower...



When Michelle Bachelet was elected President of Chile I found out that she had been tortured, and it didn't work.

I want the bastards who said it was OK to torture tried at the Hague.

Andbody who knows the military knows the "bad apple" story was bullshit

update 7:00 PM 4/26/2009
Straight to the Top By Scott Horton
April 25, 2009 "Harpers" -- The torture trail starts and ends in the White House.

Arrrrgggggh, No Shit Sherlock!

Seems like everybody has been blogging about the torture thing, so I've avoided it. Last night Rachel Maddow covered it splendidly. I was happy to see Ron Suskind there with Rachel, as I've read a couple of his books.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Religion sucks #18

Paraguay's president caught in triple paternity row
Former Roman Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo has admitted fathering one child and hasn't denied the other claims

* Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 April 2009 17.54 BST
* Article history

Bonus: Muslim stupidity in the UK

I want to know why "religious" Muslims in Western countries only raise a stink about civil rights and scream racism and religious discrimination when it's convenient for them? If observing their religious traditions is that important maybe they should quit trying to make business harder to conduct in the Western country that they're living in and go live in a Muslim countries? Oh yeah, that's right, there are no jobs in Muslim countries .

I wore some really ugly uniforms that I didn't like wearing, but I needed a job. Helloooooo?

Ummmm, yeah. I have questions. Why isn't the Vatican irrelevant by now? Why isn't Mecca irrelevant? I could go on, but I think you got my point, and obviously there are some wealthy people who still find some use in the structure of these silly organizations and their middle class enforcers.

Earth Day

You want happy talk about how fabulous the human race is on Earth Day? Wrong fucking blog, go on now there are literally millions of blogs out there.

What, you still here? OK then, steel yourself, big breath now.



Usually the PBS NOW show is 26 minutes, but last week it was a special 56 minute presentation on glaciers, that can be watched online.

On Thin Ice
Seventy-five percent of the world's fresh water is stored in glaciers, but scientists predict climate change will cause some of the world's largest glaciers to completely melt by 2030. What effect will this have on our daily lives? With global warming falling low on a national list of American concerns, it's time to take a deeper look at what could be a global calamity in the making.

(I love to listen to Vandan Shiva, she's a brilliant woman who uses her vast, well-rounded knowledge as an activist.)

PBS Frontline -- Poisoned Waters (click here to watch 52 minute show online)



James Caress: Gases fast destroying oceans' pH
By JAMES CARESS
Guest commentary
Updated: 04/20/2009 08:36:02 AM PDT


As Earth Day Arrives, Population Still the Uneasy Issue

Carrying Capacity, Exponential Growth, and Resource Wars
By John Cairns Volume 14, Number 1 (Fall 2003) Issue theme: "Mass immigration: the public health dimension"
...Nature levies brutal penalties for exceeding carrying capacity, such as famine, disease, and war...

Population growth and resource depletion
Essential Concepts
There are 5 main concepts that our students struggle with when learning about population growth and the relationship of population to geological resource use:

1. overpopulation is a leading environmental problem,
2. exponential population growth and development leads to faster depletion of resources,
3. population grows exponentially,
4. why population prediction is difficult,
5. population is not evenly distributed throughout the world.

When my mother was born there were 2.3 billion people on the planet. When I was born there were 3.2 billon people on the planet. My child is now of childbearing age and there are almost 7 billion people on the planet. That's called exponential growth. I'm not a big fan of religions because they all seem to be mired in the past when their holy texts were written and population growth. was not linked to deadly environmental degradation.

Oh Jeez, I don't know where to start with this article, it just cracks me up:

President Obama to head to Iowa for Earth Day
By PHILIP ELLIOTT – 58 minutes ago
...Obama aides note: Last year, the U.S. wind industry gained 13,000 direct jobs, and about half of wind turbines' components are made domestically...

...5.1 million jobs have been lost since December 2007 -- pushing the (nationwide) unemployment rate to 8.5 percent in March."...

(I'm not even going into the fact that the IMF and the World Bank are useless as teats on a boar to most of the world population)

Meet the Press and the Media’s Distortions of the Bush Prosecutions Debate

the Bush Prosecutions Debate
By Salon.
– By Glenn Greenwald
Whatever else one thinks about the debate over investigations and prosecutions for Bush crimes, there is no question that huge numbers of Americans — likely majorities — favor them. And that was true even before the release of the most graphic and stomach-turning evidence yet: the 4 DOJ memos released this past week which describe the torture in detail. The assertion that “most Americans” don’t want investigations — whether made by media stars to argue against investigations or Obama supporters to justify the immunity the President wants to extend to everyone involved — is factually false....(title link)


I'm loving Gomer this week.

Crimes suspected in 20 bailout cases -- for starters

The special inspector general says TARP is 'inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse.' The risk grows as the plan becomes more complex, he says.
By Ralph Vartabedian and Tom Hamburger
April 21, 2009 LA Times

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles -- In the first major disclosure of corruption in the $750-billion financial bailout program, federal investigators said Monday they have opened 20 criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax violations, insider trading and other crimes...(title link)

We Shall Remain

I missed the first one. I just happened to catch part of Tecumseh's Vision. Ironically I happened to walk through the room when the tribe that my ancestor is from was mentioned, and the Treaty of Greenville which really did the tribe in. There wasn't a treaty that the US Govt or settlers respected. They were all broken.

Rolled tacos/enchiladas, friends and beer

It don't get any better than that.

I am wiped out. Yesterday I spent all day drinking Pacifico and making enchiladas/rolled tacos, & last week I was in LA. If there are major brain farts in this post, let me know and I'll fix it when my brain recovers :)

My friend came over and helped me with them. We had a blast. We haven't spent the whole day together in I don't know how long. At one time she teased me about my "filing cabinet" in the freezer until she came over one day and I had a great Mexican meal on the table in a half hour. I took out 2 8x8 pyrex dishes, stripped the ziploc bags off of Enchilada sauce, laid it frozen on top of the frozen enchilada rolls, microwaved the enchiladas, microwaved the frozen beans, cooked a (cheater) Rice-a-Roni Spanish rice package and fed 4 people all inside a half hour.

Everybody loves them so here's the recipe. It's a lot of work, but with all the extra you make, you don't have to do it very often. The red basket pictured is my "filing cabinet" for the freezer.

1 1/2 split chickens barbecued over mesquite and then cooled in the fridge and de-skinned, de-boned and diced no larger than 1/4 inch squares
4 lbs Jack Cheese, grated
2 large or 3 medium onions softened in olive oil
3 7 oz cans diced (mild) green chiles
3 X 36 count corn tortillas softened (very quickly fried) in oil

quart size ziploc type freezer bags, labeled and dated with a permanent marker

Mix all ingredients together and roll the taquitos/enchiladas and place in bags and lay flat in the freezer the ones you won't be using for dinner (pizza boxes are a great flat surface). Each bag should hold 6 to 8. These can be taken out of the freezer bags one or two at a time and fried (taquitos) and dipped in guacamole or salsa

Guacamole

1-2 fresh garlic cloves minced finely
1/2 onion minced finely
3 key limes
salt
2 avocados

Salsa (everything is fresh, and hand diced from an 1/8 inch for the peppers to 1/4 inch for the onion and tomato, I tried to cheat and throw everything in the blender once and it sucked)

3 Yellow chiles
3 jalapeños
1 Anaheim chile (mild green)
1 red bell pepper
2 medium sized onions
1/2 bunch cilantro
juice from a dozen or so key limes
4 medium tomatoes (ripe, preferably sent to the market still on the vine!)
salt to taste

Enchiladas
the rolled enchiladas can be taken out of the bags and put into whatever pan you want to bake them in and doused with your favorite enchilada sauce or you can make your own. I've gotten lazy so I don't make my own any more. I like El Pato, but I just paid $1.5o for this can, not $4.00. It's not hard to make, just tomato sauce, fresh garlic, fresh onion, oregano (Mexican, not Mediterranean) and a bit of dried ground cayenne pepper. After rolling over a hundred taquito/enchilada thingys and making sure they lay flat on a pizza box in the freezer, I generally don't feel like screwing around with making the Enchilada sauce too. Especially since it's hot outside the last couple of days and hotter inside softening the tortillas.

Best served with your choice of beans and Spanish or Mexican rice (there is a difference)

My favorites are frjoles negritos (refried black beans) and (my) "Mexican rice"

my "Mexican rice"

2 cups Brown rice (20 minutes in the rice cooker, eh?)

7.5 oz can of El Pato hot tomato sauce or jalapeño sauce
1 medium onion diced
2-3 cloves garlic
3/4 cup frozen mixed vegetables
Mexican ground oregano (no more than 1/8 tsp)
chili powder (? to taste)
cayenne

Saute onion, garlic and veggies in olive oil till onions are translucent
add everything else and cook on low till the veggies are done

Former Prosecutor Talks about Crossing the Political Line

Oh. My. God. I just listened to David Iglesias hand a local caller's ass to him. I laughed out loud, very loudly. The blowhard caller told Iglesias that he was "very partisan," and implied that Iglesias was a rabid "liberal" Democrat.

David Iglesias is a registered Repubulican

Giving a free lecture a SDSU Price center 7 pm

Iran sentences U.S. journalist to 8 years

Nice. Understandable once you have read the book I'm reading. Iranians are weird. Paranoid and weird.

California to get $260 million in U.S. funds for water

Wed Apr 15, 2009 4:32pm EDT
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California will receive $260 million of $1 billion in U.S. economic stimulus funds slated for water infrastructure, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Wednesday.

Environmental groups sue to halt water transfers
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 15, 2009 at 9:18 am
From the Contra Costa Times:
Environmental activists, including the Butte Environmental Council, filed a lawsuit Monday stating the state Department of Water Resources, the state Natural Resources Agency and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are not following environmental laws for planned water transfers. After filing the lawsuit, representatives from the groups said they will likely seek an injunction to halt the proposed water transfers.

The Drought Water Bank, established by the state, is in the works to transfer water this year. While far fewer sellers have signed up than initially proposed, sellers from the Sacramento Valley are poised to move some water.

The bank was used in the 1990s to broker water sales from north to south. It was revived this year to deal with California’s third year of drought. The program would pay growers $275 for an acre-foot of water — about the amount of water used annually by two average households.


Whoa boy, let the games begin.

Pirates Fail in Attack on U.S. Ship

By MARK McDONALD
Published: April 15, 2009
HONG KONG – An

HONG KONG – An American cargo ship was attacked by pirates armed with grenade launchers and automatic weapons in the Gulf of Aden on Tuesday, but the attackers failed to take over the ship, which was able to continue with its delivery of humanitarian food aid to the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

Yeesh, sometimes it's hard to feel sorry for these morons. Yeah, yeah, I know that the evil Western infidels have made their lives harder, but for Christsakes, some of their problems THEY CREATED. They've known for generations that Somalia is prone to drought, yet they breed like rats, and
engage in tribal warfare etc. etc.

Does this area look green to you?

Yeah, pastoral society whose animals wrecked the land, and they scorned European education.

Maybe their savior Osama bin Fucked-in-the-Head will save them. I say we just quit feeding them unless they agree to educate their girls and allow their women to choose how many brats they squirt out.

Frontline -- Black Money

Heh, we'll see how it goes. I wrote a report in a business class ten years ago. Since there are people here from all over the world, I had to interview as many people as I could about "black money." I learned a new Spanish word- Mordida. Let's see if they cover bribery inside the US?...

(Update 12:17 AM 4/15/2009 It's viewable online, and it's all about the US discontinuing official bribery and then other countries following suit. And then all of the mulitnational corporations going underground and continuing to find a way to bribe, which is way the world does business.

Who the fuck is working the PBS station this month as SDSU? The brat ought to be flunked. This is what's actually ON right now, instead of Black Money, which was advertised.

Pakistan: Children of the Taliban

Great. Just what I want to see, a bunch of morons determined to move people back into the 7th century. Hey, first priority, destroy girls schools, and make women wear fucking pup tents.

Minnesota Judges: Franken Received Highest Number of Votes

posted by John Nichols on 04/13/2009 @ 9:40pm

Heh!

Chomsky 'splains it

What the Paulites Have Right
posted by Zephyr Teachout on 04/13/2009 @ 08:25am

Of course, we citizens have to compete with these fuckers for some attention from our Congressional "Representatives."

The Power of Lobbying
— By Kevin Drum | Mon April 13, 2009 10:19 AM PST

Mother fuckers, wouldja look at that! Half of the top ten companies gaining tax breaks through lobbying are drug companies. Maybe they should be paying for the "War on (illegal) Drugs" since some of the people without Rx insurance to pay for anti-depressants, or chronic pain medication turn to the evil marijuana for some relief.

Unrelated, but following up on the Obama continues the government spying on us

Predictably, the MSM ignores it and it looks like more wait and see if Pelosi gets pushed enough by those of us who are pissed off about it.

¿Qué onda güero?

Because I just love this song. I have no idea why, except it's so LA, plus, depending on the circumstances, I have been called güera, AND gringa.

From the Urban dictionary:

A term used for Latinas who have a fairer complexion and lighter hair/eyes than their more darker Latina counterparts. It is not the same as a "gringa." It is important to note that in the spelling there is an umlaut above the letter "u" giving it a "w" sound, pronounced like "weda". Can be either derogatory or complimentary given the circumstances. The masculine form would be guero.

h1. que onda guero Spanish for "What's up, whitey?!"

1. Guero
a spanish slang term for a fair skinned or light haired person. once again it is not derogatory but can be used that way

So, now you know why it says ¿Qué onda güera? right under politickybitch.

I'm almost finished reading Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" (C)1990. Thank God because it is one depressing book. The black and Latino gang problem hasn't gotten any better since he wrote the book 20 years ago. This documentary, La Vida Loca (my crazy life) that I spotted in the LA Times today highlights it, and the US' part in the proliferation of Latino gangs.

I'll bet it doesn't go into how the little fuckers kill people who are not Latino, just because they can and they want them out of the neighborhoods they take over. I know what of I speak. My friend had to send her kid out of the state so he wouldn't get killed by the nasty little fuckers who killed his friend.

Pirates

Update 1:55 PM 4/12/2009 Heh, fuckers shouln't have messed with a US ship, 3 out of 4 of them are dead now.

Pirates Seize Tug With Crew of 16 as U.S. Captain Is Still Hostage
Published: April 11, 2009

Look, here's the deal people. Until multinational corporate interests invest in the people of Africa instead of extracting raw materials and cheap labor, the violence spilling out of there will only get worse. Being that piracy is interfering with global trade, now might be a good time to do that.

The top nine out of ten birth rates are in Africa. A couple of those high birth rates are negated by the high death rates. It's all very complicated, this counting of people, even my eyes glaze over at times. What it boils down to, though, and correct me if I'm wrong, are total fertility rates. Africa's, overall, are high.

This is something that happens in "undeveloped" countries.

Declining total fertility rates in the Middle Eastern countries can be linked to female education, female empowerment, a shift to urban, rather than rural environments, and increasing availability of medical care.

Somalia

is

a


fucking


train


wreck.

And they had some help getting there. It's no wonder they are
listening to Osama bin Laden, but he's a damn hypocrite also. How many of his 51 siblings would have lived if westerners had never had anything to do with Saudi Arabia, and how would his father gotten out of Yemen and then rich in construction in SA?

These American jihadi morons aren't helping anyone.

Somehow I missed Jersey Cynic's post over at Blondesense . Yeesh, as if I needed another reason to hate Lawrence Summers.

Way to icrease the digital divide even more ya fucktards

Time Warner Tests $150-Per-Month Unlimited Internet

A pay-what-you-use model is the fairest option for customers while generating the revenue needed, Time Warner Cable COO Landel Hobbs says.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
April 10, 2009 06:05 PM

Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) Cable has released new pricing for consumption-based Internet billing the company is testing in some areas of the United States. The tiered pricing, which the company plans to roll out in other regions this year, includes unlimited service for $150 a month...

...Time Warner Cable plans to being trials in Rochester, N.Y., and Greensboro, N.C., in August, expanding to San Antonio and Austin, Texas, in October...

yeah, yeah, keep those brown people offa the net

Tonight on PBS NOW

Can Coal be Earth-Friendly?

Can America's cheapest and most plentiful energy resource be produced without burning the environment?

Americans are addicted to coal—it powers half of all our electricity, and is both plentiful and cheap. In fact, some call America the "Saudi Arabia of Coal." But are we paying too high an environmental price for all this cheap energy?

With carbon emissions caps high on the Obama Administration's agenda, coal is in the crosshairs of the energy debate. This week, NOW Senior Correspondent Maria Hinojosa travels to Wyoming to take a hard look at the coal industry there and its case that it can produce "clean coal"—coal that can be burned without releasing carbon into the atmosphere. President Obama has been outspoken in his support for "clean coal" technology, but some say the whole concept is more of a public relations campaign....

Exactly. One Third of greenhouse gases are from coal fired power plants. There are 600 of them nationwide

Fiber Optic Cable Cut intentionally

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Obama continues the government spying on us

Keith Olbermann's scathing criticism of Obama's secrecy/immunity claims
Glenn Greenwald at Salon
Wednesday April 8, 2009 10:26 EDT

...Last night, Keith Olbermann -- who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) -- devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder's DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration's use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and -- worse still -- a brand new claim of "sovereign immunity" to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans...

Great. So I guess I'll never know if the NSA enjoys my friends and I jokingly telling them "Hi and fuck you, you fucking fucks!" when we are discussing current events. D'ya think they'll report me to Mossad if I'm critical of the rabid right Israeli warhawks running US foreign policy in the Middle East? Hope they like PMS and period discussions because we talk about that too, bwaaaa haha ha ha ha ha!

Mark Klein - AT&T WhistleBlower

Sickness bubbling up

from PBS's Sick Around America.

I'm still digging around, but I tend to believe the CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER when they say that

PBS Lashes Back
23 Corporate Crime Reporter 15, April 7, 2009

Last week, I wrote an article – “Something is Rotten at PBS” – about a slanted PBS Frontline documentary – “Sick Around America.”

Frontline hired former Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid to put together the documentary.

Reid did the reporting.

He turned over his interviews to the Frontline producers.

And they came back with a documentary Reid couldn’t agree with.

Frontline tried to get Reid to narrate the film anyway – whether he agreed with it or not.

Reid refused.

Reid and Frontline parted ways.

After “Something is Rotten at PBS” ran last week, I got a ton of e-mail.

So did Frontline.

“Something is Rotten at PBS” struck a nerve.

This week, Frontline lashed back.... (if you haven't already, please read the whole thing )


And viewers of the PBS show have questions and concerns about the show here .

One of the sponsors was The Colorado Health Foundation
nonprofit, yet:

Our assets total $800 million, including an investment portfolio as well as our ownership interest in Denver's Health ONE hospital system.

Somehow in the midst of following the Google links, starting with the names of the organizations who sponsored the PBS show I ended up with this woman's name
( Comcast and Do Gooder TV put together makes me laugh)

Who? "spent 12 years with the group whose mission is to burnish downtown Denver's image to spur business,..."

Lauer interviews Spitzer

I still wanna know if that ho was double dippin'?

Jean-Michel Cousteau

Sea Ghosts.

I loved watching the Jacques Cousteau specials when I was a kid. I've always loved the water and watching fish and marine mammals' graceful movements. This show was disturbing to me because once again, humans leave a trail of death and destruction in their wake. No irony of course, that the show was brought to us by Dow Chemical. One item that the narrator mentioned stood out in my mind and that was that she said something about the noise from searching for oil and gas might possibly be harming the Belugas.

No, really?

In the reading queue

(click on book cover to purchase, it took so damn long to get the copy from the library I almost forgot why I wanted to read The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd, yeesh)


I'm still only 1/2 way through this, and so far it's only confirming my long-standing suspicions that the land developers and defense contractors have a nasty stranglehold on Southern California politics. Click on the book cover for a very brief blurb on City of Quartz by Mike Davis.
I haven't read about street gangs yet, but according to the blurb its covered.

Krugman on Maddow last night and Chris Hedges

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Resist or Become Serfs

America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs...

Yeesh, this guy Hedges thinks like I do. Aren't you glad you don't live in my head?
And what's this here? The Russians and the Chinese want to mess with our electricity system? WTF?

US electricity grid hit by cyber attacks: report
Agence France-Presse
Published: Wednesday April 8, 2009
Chinese and Russian cyber-spies have hacked into the US electricity grid and inserted programs that could be used to disrupt the system, a report said Wednesday

...In March 2008, Canadian investigators achieved a cyber-security triumph: the exposure of a malicious data-gathering botnet...

I've heard that sucide by cop was growing,

but suicide by fighter plane?

Stolen plane from Canada escorted by US fighters
By ROBERT IMRIE – 36 minutes ago

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) — A man suspected of stealing a plane in Canada and flying erratically across three states was trying to commit suicide, hoping he would be shot down by military fighter planes, a state trooper said Tuesday.

Adam Dylan Leon, 31, was arrested at a convenience store in Ellsinore, Mo., shortly after landing the single-engine, four-seat Cessna on a rural Missouri road Monday night, ending a six-hour flight, police said...

Italy in desperate race to save the buried after the earthquake

From The Times
April 7, 2009

...The 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck shortly after 3.30am local time,..

...L’Aquila, a 13th-century walled city 60km (about 40 miles) from Rome, bore the brunt of the devastation, although tremors awoke Italians as far away as Emilia Romagna, near Bologna, in the north, to Naples in the south. Emergency workers scrambled over the debris of collapsed churches and historic buildings in a desperate effort to pluck survivors from the rubble. The death toll was expected to rise...

Italy earthquake leaves 130 dead and scores more trapped under rubble

• Rescue effort hampered by debris blocking roads
• Up to 15,000 buildings destroyed by quake

...and at least 50,000 people are homeless.

That is a lot of damage and a lot of dead for a 6.3.

Update
Italy quake death toll rises, aftershocks continue
Wed Apr 8, 2009 3:14am EDT
* Italian quake death toll rises to 250, over 1,000 injured

Film Of Police Attack On G20 Climate Camp

(click on title link)

I'm reserving judgment till there is more information.