Powerful Quake Kills At Least 4 In Northern Italy, One of the strongest earthquakes to shake northern Italy rattled the region around Bologna early Sunday, a magnitude-6.0 temblor that killed at least four people, toppled buildings and sent residents running into the streets, emergency services and news reports said.

The quake struck at 4:04 a.m. Sunday between Modena and Mantova, about 35 kilometers (22 miles) north-northwest of Bologna at a relatively shallow depth of 5 kilometers (3.2 miles), the U.S. Geological Survey said.

It was one of the strongest quakes to shake the region, seismologists said, and initial television footage indicated that older buildings had suffered damage: roofs collapsed, church towers showed c***ks and the bricks of some stone walls tumbled into the street. As dawn broke over the region, residents milled about the streets inspecting the damage.

News reports, citing emergency services, said three people were killed in Sant’Agostino di Ferrara when a ceramics factory collapsed. Another person was killed in Ponte Rodoni do Bondeno, ANSA said.

Italy’s Sky TG24 showed images of the collapsed ceramics factory where the two workers were reportedly killed; the structure, which appeared to be a hangar of sorts, had twisted metal supports jutting out at odd angles amid the mangled collapsed roof.

“This is immense damage but the worst part is we lost two people,” said Stefano Zeni, a worker in the factory.

SKY said two other people died of apparent heart attacks in the wake of the quake.

“It was a strong one, and it lasted quite a long time,” said Emilio Bianco, receptionist at Modena’s Canalgrande hotel, housed in an ornate 18th century palazzo. The hotel suffered no damage and Modena itself was spared, but guests spilled into the streets as soon as the quake hit, he said. (AP)

Escaped China Activist In U.S. Protection: Rights Group, A blind legal activist who fled house arrest in rural China is under the protection of American officials and top-level talks are taking place between the countries about his fate, a human rights group said.

Texas-based ChinaAid said in a statement that Chen Guangcheng was under US protection in Beijing. Some activists say Mr Chen is in the US embassy after escaping from 18 months of house arrest in Shandong province earlier this week.

Blinded by fever in infancy, Mr Chen served four years in prison for exposing forced abortions and sterilisations.

Since his release in September 2010, regional authorities confined him to his home, despite the lack of legal grounds for doing so.

The whereabouts of Mr Chen could be a major political complication for the two countries as secretary of state Hillary Clinton and other top US officials are due in China this coming week for the latest round of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue.

“Chen is under US protection and high-level talks are currently under way between US and Chinese officials regarding Chen’s status,” said ChinaAid, citing a source close to the situation.

ChinaAid and its founder Bob Fu have been active in promoting Mr Chen’s case and confirmed yesterday that he had escaped to Beijing from where he was being held in his village in Shandong province in eastern China.

The US embassy in Beijing declined to comment, as did US officials in Washington. (UKPA)

Activists: Blind Chinese Lawyer Flees House Arrest, A blind legal activist who is a key figure in China’s rights movement escaped the house arrest he has lived under for a year and a half, fleeing to an unknown location and angering his captors, fellow rights campaigners said Friday.

Chen Guangcheng slipped out of his usually well-guarded house in Dongshigu town on Sunday, said the campaigners, who are based in China and overseas. He Peirong, a leading campaigner for Chen’s freedom, said she picked him up and drove him to “a relatively safe place” she would not further describe.

If confirmed, Chen’s freedom would be a boost for a persecuted dissident community that has seen repression increase over the past two years. His plight under house arrest has been closely monitored by Western governments and by local activists, who have seen Chen – a self-taught lawyer who was blinded by a fever in infancy – as an inspiring, determined fighter for justice.

“His mental state is pretty good. He’s alive, but whether he’s safe I don’t know,” He said from her home city of Nanjing. She said she left Chen a few days ago but declined to discuss further details, other than to say he is no longer in his home province of Shandong, southeast of Beijing.

She denied an online report by Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao newspaper that Chen entered the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on Thursday night. The paper did not name a source.

“I can tell you he’s not at the U.S. Embassy, and he’s not in Shandong. I did talk to the U.S. Embassy people, though,” He said.

The embassy would not comment. Security outside the embassy appeared normal Friday. (AP)

Jet With 127 Aboard Crashes In Pakistan, A Pakistani passenger jet with 127 people on board crashed Friday as it was landing in bad weather at an airport near the capital, Islamabad, officials said. A government minister expressed little hope of finding survivors.

The Bhoja Air Boeing 737-200 went down in farmland just a few kilometers (miles) away from the Benazir Bhutto International Airport, Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhar said.

Mukhar said civil aviation officials had reported it was unlikely anybody had survived. It was unclear if any casualties occurred on the ground, but the crash happened in what appeared to be a relatively unpopulated rural area.

A violent rain and wind storm was lashing parts of the capital around the same time as the crash, which occurred about 6:40 p.m.

The aircraft had been traveling from the country’s largest city of Karachi to the Pakistani capital, officials said.

“We can see the plane’s wreckage is on fire and we are trying to extinguish it,” emergency official Saifur Rehman told Geo TV from the scene. “We are looking for survivors.”

TV footage showed wreckage of the plane, including parts of what looked like its engine and wing, up against the wall of a small building. Rescue officials were working in the dark, with many using flashlights as they combed the area.

The last major plane crash in the country – and Pakistan’s worst ever – occurred in July 2010 when an Airbus A321 aircraft operated by Airblue crashed in the hills overlooking Islamabad, killing all 152 people on board.

A government investigation blamed the pilot for veering off course amid stormy weather. The impact of the crash was devastating, scorching a wide swath of the hillside and scattering wreckage over a kilometer (half-mile) stretch. Most bodies were so badly damaged that identification will require DNA testing. (AP)

Levon Helm Of The Band Dies At 71, With songs like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” ”The Weight” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” The Band fused rock, blues, folk and gospel to create a sound that seemed as authentically American as a Mathew Brady photograph or a Mark Twain short story.

In truth, the group had only one American – Levon Helm.

Helm, the drummer and singer who brought an urgent beat and a genuine Arkansas twang to some of The Band’s best-known songs and helped turn a bunch of musicians known mostly as Bob Dylan’s backup group into one of rock’s most legendary acts, has died. He was 71.

Helm, who was found to have throat cancer in 1998, died Thursday afternoon of complications from cancer at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, said Lucy Sabini of Vanguard Records. On Tuesday, a message on his website said he was in the final stages of cancer.

Helm and his bandmates – Canadians Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel – were musical virtuosos who returned to the roots of American music in the late 1960s as other rockers veered into psychedelia, heavy metal and jams. The group’s 1968 debut, “Music From the Big Pink,” and its follow-up, “The Band,” remain landmark albums of the era, and songs such as “The Weight,” ”Dixie Down” and “Cripple Creek” have become rock standards.

Early on, The Band backed Dylan on his sensational and controversial electric tours of 1965-66 and collaborated with him on the legendary “Basement Tapes,” which produced “I Shall Be Released,” ”Tears of Rage” and many other favorites.

“I am terribly sad. Thank you for 50 years of friendship and music,” Hudson posted on his website Thursday evening. “No more sorrows, no more troubles, no more pain. He went peacefully to that beautiful marvelous wonderful place. … Levon, I’m proud of you.”

The son of an Arkansas cotton farmer, Helm was just out of high school when he joined rocker Ronnie Hawkins for a tour of Canada in 1957 as the drummer for the Hawks. That band eventually recruited a group of Canadian musicians who, along with Helm, spent grueling years touring rough bars in Canada and the South.

They would split from Hawkins, hook up with Dylan and eventually call themselves The Band – because, as they explained many times, that’s what everyone called them anyway. (AP)

Levon Helm The Band, Levon Helm died Thursday at the age of 71, and a piece of the rich roots music now called Americana should be buried with him.

Helm, who was best known as the drummer for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group The Band, had been suffering from a recurrence of the cancer that cost him his singing voice a decade earlier.

Larry Campbell, music director for the Levon Helm Band, said he died peacefully at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, “surrounded by friends and bandmates and family.”

Helm won three solo Grammys over a 65-year career in which he blended all the music he heard as a youth in Turkey Scratch, Ark.: country, blues, bluegrass, gospel, R&B, pop and rock ‘n’ roll.

“He was just a great rock ‘n’ roll drummer,” said his long-time friend and admirer, radio host Don Imus. “He was also a genuinely sweet person – a true angel. There was no one like him.”

Helm and The Band played for 600,000 fans at the 1973 Watkins Glen music festival, but his focus the last decade was the intimate weekly jam sessions he called Midnight Rambles at his studio/ barn in Woodstock, N.Y.

Artists like Emmylou Harris and Elvis Costello often dropped in for the sessions, which were open to the public. Helm said he modeled them after late-night performances by the traveling medicine shows he knew as a child.
He continued the Rambles until several weeks ago, when he fell ill. His Band partner Robbie Robertson, from whom he had been estranged for years, sent “love and prayers” to Helm last Saturday night at the 2012 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.

Robertson also made a personal visit to Helm’s bedside over the weekend and called Helm “one of the most extraordinarily talented people I’ve ever known.”

Helm decided he wanted to be a musician at the age of 6, he said, when he heard bluegrass icon Bill Monroe.