Traditionally, analysts have cautioned that Chinese growth figures should be greeted with skepticism, but according to one school of economic thought, there may be something to the idea that the quake served as a brutal stimulus. In fact, some economists argue that despite the widespread destruction they leave behind, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions and [...]

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Infectious diseases are emerging as a major threat in China’s quake zone, with injured and traumatised victims most at risk, the health minister was quoted as saying Wednesday.
As summer approaches, the warmer weather creates optimal conditions for epidemics, with survivors of the massive May 12 quake particularly vulnerable to disease, the China Daily reported, citing [...]

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WHAT IF Troy was destroyed by an earthquake? What really brought down the walls of Jericho or the Colossus of Rhodes? These are some of the questions Stanford University geophysicist Amos Nur raises in “Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God” (Princeton University Press: 324 pp., $26.95), a book that posits seismicity — rather [...]

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The massive earthquake that shook Japan this week nearly killed millions in a nuclear apocalypse.
It also produced one of the most terrifying sentences ever buried in a newspaper. As reported deep in the New York Times, the Tokyo Electric Company has admitted that, “the force of the shaking caused by the earthquake had exceeded the [...]

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Japan’s turbulent history of war and natural catastrophe has already given the world a terrifying vocabulary of death: tsunami, kamikaze, Hiroshima.
But the country now stands on the brink of unleashing its most chilling phrase yet: genpatsu-shinsai – the combination of an earthquake and nuclear meltdown capable of destroying millions of lives and bringing a nation [...]

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WASHINGTON, July 20 (UPI) — What do Japan and Iran have in common? Japan has nuclear power plants and Iran is on its way to acquiring nuclear technology. Japan is prone to powerful earthquakes, and so is Iran. This is where the similarities end.
If a similar earthquake was to hit one of Iran’s nuclear [...]

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