Sign or punishment

Dear Mouse, I am sorry mouse, if I write about depressing news--must be a hangover of my flu. If you are stuck in the house on a Christmas day, sneezing, coughing and your muscles ached all over with nothing to read but disasters, you can't expect me to sing joy to the world. Disasters galore. In an old movie of John Wayne where he starred as an American consul, a governor of Japan told him that disasters are brought by progress. According to him, gods punish the mortals for destroying what they have provided them. For doomsayers, calamities of these nature are signs of the coming end of the world. St. Paul had prophesied this end, cults have warned their members to prepare for rupture and the Chinese guy in the downtown area is paid to carry that board that has bold letterings, The End of the world is near, REPENT. A sign or a punishment? More Than 5,000 Killed in Iranian Earthquake Ancient City Devastated; Death Toll Expected to Climb AP TEHRAN (Dec. 26) -- A devastating earthquake struck the ancient Silk Road city of Bam in southeastern Iran on Friday, killing more than 5,000 people and injuring thousands of others, Iranian news agency IRNA said. Soldiers search for bodies in Bam, Iran, after Friday's earthquake. Initial estimates suggested 5,000-6,000 people died in the earthquake which measured 6.3 on the Richter scale, the official IRNA news agency quoted a senior official as saying.Mohammad Ali Karimi, governor of Kerman province, where Bam is located, was said to have given the figure in a telephone conversation with President Mohammad Khatami.Iranian television said about 70 per cent of the buildings in the historic city, a popular tourist destination some 600 miles southeast of the capital, Tehran, had collapsed and many people were feared trapped under the rubble. 200 feared dead in landslidesPosted: 10:49 AM (Manila Time) | Dec. 21, 2003 Agence France-Presse AT least 200 people were killed or feared dead in the series of landslides that hit the central and southern Philippines over the weekend, civil defense officials said Sunday. They said 77 people were confirmed to have died while another 123 were still missing and feared dead after heavy rains triggered flooding and landslides in the central island of Leyte and the southern island of Mindanao since late Friday. Chinese describe escape from toxic gasBy AUDRA ANGASSOCIATED PRESS WRITERCHONGQING, China -- Villagers were preparing for sleep when the gas well burst with a bang. Then came choking fumes. Families dashed out of their homes in terror, struggling to breathe in the searing cloud.Survivors and state media gave harrowing accounts Friday of the disaster that killed at least 191 people in China's southwest, forced 41,000 to flee and left a 10-square-mile "death zone" strewn with bodies lying in fields, by the sides of roads and in homes. 4 dead in California mudslides; rescuers search for at least 12 others believed missing ALEX VEIGA, Associated Press Writer Friday, December 26, 2003 (12-26) 14:57 PST SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) -- Searchers slogging through waist-high muck found four people dead Friday and looked for at least 12 others missing after mudslides engulfed two camps in the San Bernardino Mountains in a terrifying torrent of soil, boulders and tree trunks. The missing included nine children, ages 6 months to 16, who had been at a Greek Orthodox youth camp. The mudslides were set off on Christmas Day after as much as 31/2 inches of rain fell on hillsides that had been stripped of vegetation by wildfires in October and November. With nothing to hold the soil in place, trees and rocks went roaring down the hillsides, along with the dark-brown mud. I can not even greet you happy new year. The Ca t