Nepal quake death toll tops 4,000; villages plead for aid

KATHMANDU, Nepal As the death toll from Nepal’s devastating earthquake climbed past 4,000, aid workers and officials in remote, shattered villages near the epicenter pleaded Monday for food, shelter and medicine.

Help poured in after Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 quake, with countries large and small sending medical and rescue teams, aircraft and basic supplies. The small airport in the capital of Kathmandu was congested and chaotic, with some flights forced to turn back early in the day.

Buildings in parts of the city were reduced to rubble, and there were shortages of food, fuel, electricity and shelter. As bodies were recovered, relatives cremated the dead along the Bagmati River, and at least a dozen pyres burned late into the night.

Conditions were far worse in the countryside, with rescue workers still struggling to reach mountain villages two days after the earthquake.

Some roads and trails to the Gorkha district, where the quake was centered, were blocked by landslides – but also by traffic jams that regularly clog the route north of Kathmandu.

“There are people who are not getting food and shelter. I’ve had reports of villages where 70 percent of the houses have been destroyed,” said Udav Prashad Timalsina, the top official for the Gorkha region.

World Vision aid worker Matt Darvas arrived in the district in the afternoon and said almost no assistance had reached there ahead of him.

Newer concrete buildings were intact, Darvas said, but some villages were reported to be devastated. He cited a “disturbing” report from the village of Singla, where up to 75 percent of the buildings may have collapsed and there has been no contact since Saturday night.

In the villages that have been reached, World Vision said the greatest needs were for search-and-rescue teams, food, blankets, tarps and medical treatment.

Timalsina said 223 people had been confirmed dead in Gorkha district but he presumed “the number would go up because there are thousands who are injured.”

He said his district had not received enough help from the central government, but Jagdish Pokhrel, a clearly exhausted army spokesman, said nearly the entire 100,000-soldier army was involved in rescue operations.

“We have 90 percent of the army out there working on search and rescue,” he said. “We are focusing our efforts on that, on saving lives.”

Nepal’s Home Ministry said the country’s death toll had risen to 4,010. Another 61 were killed in neighboring India, and China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported 25 dead in Tibet. At least 18 of the dead were killed at Mount Everest as the quake unleashed an avalanche that buried part of the base camp packed with foreign climbers preparing to make their summit attempts.

At least 7,180 people were injured in the quake, police said. Tens of thousands are estimated to be left homeless.

Rescue workers and medical teams from at least a dozen countries were helping police and army troops in Kathmandu and surrounding areas, said Maj. Gen. Binod Basnyat, a Nepal army spokesman. Contributions came from large countries like India and China – but also from Nepal’s tiny Himalayan neighbor of Bhutan, which dispatched a medical team.

Read more: Nepal quake death toll tops 4,000; villages plead for aid

See how this dad helped his son with Down syndrome 'fly' in stunning photos

A Utah dad hopes the adorable photos of his young son "flying" through beautiful scenery can help send a positive message about Down syndrome.

The photos of the young boy soaring through the air have gone viral, and dad Alan Lawrence said the project is a way for him to prove to the world that even kids with Down syndrome, like his son William, can live magical lives.

"When Will was born, I didn't take the news as well as my wife did, and my family," Lawrence told TODAY.com. "I was dwelling on things that were out of my control. I was being selfish."

Lawrence, from Paradise, Utah, said he's ashamed to admit that he once thought his new son would be a burden because of his disability. But he had it all wrong, he said.

"This project is a way for us to show how much our son has blessed our family," Lawrence said. "He's not a burden, he hasn't limited us. He's opened the door to so many new things, to new experiences."

Lawrence and his wife have four other children and another son the way. William is the youngest and was born in October 2013 — and he's wanted to fly ever since.

"He arches his back and puts his hands out. I never pose him, that's the funny part — he just naturally wants to fly," Lawrence said.It makes for great photos. Lawrence, an art director who does photography on the side, started taking pictures of his son assuming the "flying" pose and then edited him into gorgeous backdrops or funny situations — like one in which he looks like he's soaring above a field of cows.

Family and friends loved the photos so much that Lawrence is now trying to produce a series of calendars. The family also launched a Kickstarter campaign called "Bringing Light" to raise money for a road trip so they can take more photos at scenic spots, and meet other families with children who have Down syndrome along the way. So far, they've raised more than $2,000.

Read more: See how this dad helped his son with Down syndrome 'fly' in stunning photos

Senators Introduce ‘Fast Track’ Trade Bill

WASHINGTON—Lawmakers introduced fast-track trade legislation into the House and Senate Thursday that could pave the way for President Barack Obama to conclude a major agreement with 11 nations around the Pacific.

The bill, the result of a compromise between Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, is expected to escalate an already-bitter fight with some Democrats and labor unions over what could become a key part of Mr. Obama’s legacy. The committee is expected to vote on the plan next week.

Along with Japanese and other officials from Canada to Vietnam, Mr. Obama is seeking to open up the barriers that businesses face at the borders around the Pacific to spur economic growth and blunt China’s influence in the region, part of a strategic rebalancing toward Asia.

“If we want to maintain our nation’s economic leadership and promote American values around the world, we must reach beyond our borders, and this bill is a strong first step,” Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) said.

Mr. Hatch introduced the legislation, commonly known as fast track, along with Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.). The Senate committee was set to reconvene Thursday afternoon for a hearing on the bill.

Labor leaders and top Democrats protested the measure Wednesday on Capitol Hill, and its fate is unclear in Congress. Most Democrats oppose it while most Republicans back the legislation, along with Mr. Obama. Trade bills often clear Congress by a narrow margin with support from both political parties.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), likely the next Senate Democratic leader, on Thursday came out strongly against the Pacific trade deal, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the fast-track legislation.

If enacted, the legislation would allow a completed TPP deal and other trade agreements to pass Congress without amendments or procedural delays, a process said to lend more certainty to the U.S. following through on trade terms negotiated between countries.

Opponents ranging from union leaders to some conservative Republicans and most Democratic lawmakers have rejected renewing the legislation, saying it would cede congressional authority to Mr. Obama or pave the way for a trade agreement they oppose.

The bill comes after months of contentious negotiations among Mr. Hatch, Mr. Wyden and Rep. Paul Ryan (R, Wis.). The public clashes between Messrs. Hatch and Wyden delayed a bill that backers of free trade had hoped would clear the new Republican-led Congress earlier this year.

Mr. Wyden had sought changes in the bill that would appeal to more Democrats, and in the end Mr. Hatch agreed to let legislation known as trade adjustment assistance, popular among Democrats, move in parallel with the fast-track bill. The measure helps those whose jobs may have been displaced by international trade.

The bill contains other changes meant to appeal to Democrats and others cautious about opening up trade, without turning off broad Republican support.

Read more: Senators Introduce ‘Fast Track’ Trade Bill

One year later: Nigeria and the world remember missing schoolgirls

(CNN)One year after it was perpetrated, the kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls by a jihadist group in Nigeria remains a crime almost too horrifying to comprehend: Hundreds of teenaged girls, just finishing school, destined perhaps for significant achievement -- kidnapped, never to be seen again.

"This crime has rightly caused outrage both in Nigeria and across the world," the country's President-elect, Muhammadu Buhari, said Tuesday in marking the anniversary. "Today is a time to reflect on the pain and suffering of the victims, their friends and families. Our thoughts and prayers, and that of the whole Nigerian nation, are with you today."

Abducted night of April 14-15

The girls were abducted on the night of April 14-15, 2014, in the town of Chibok, in northeastern Nigeria, about a two-hour drive from the border with Cameroon.

The Government Girls Secondary School had been closed for a month because of the danger posed by Boko Haram militants, who are opposed to Western education, particularly for girls. But students from several schools had been called in to take a final exam in physics.

The militants stormed the school, arriving in a convoy of trucks and buses and engaging in a gun battle with school security guards. Then they forced the girls from their dormitories, loaded them into trucks and drove them into the forest. Most have never been seen since, except in a photograph in which they sat on the ground in a semi-circle, clad in Islamic dress.

They were between 16 and 18 years old.

Police said the militants kidnapped 276 girls in all. About 50 managed to escape soon after they were abducted. Those who did not, it is feared, may have been raped, brutalized, enslaved and forced to convert to Islam.

World solidarity as hashtag spreads

Their parents were stricken with grief. The world was appalled. On Twitter, a hashtag began trending and spread around the world: #BringBackOurGirls.

On Tuesday, Malala Yousafzai, the 17-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the face for speaking out in favor of girls' education, sent a message to the kidnapped girls.

"I am one of the millions of people around the world who keep you and your families foremost in our thoughts and prayers," she wrote. "We cannot imagine the full extent of the horrors you have endured. But please know this: We will never forget you."

One year later, a few things have changed. Each of the missing girls has had a birthday in captivity. Each is now a year older.

Nigeria's current president, Goodluck Jonathan, was defeated in his campaign for re-election, in part, it is thought, because he failed to effectively combat Boko Haram. Buhari, the incoming president, has pledged an aggressive effort to wipe out the group.

Read more: One year later: Nigeria and the world remember missing schoolgirls

The 'Furious 7' plane that just won't quit

Marietta, Georgia (CNN)The little-known star of this week's No. 1 car chase movie, "Furious 7" isn't a car. It's an airplane.

Film producers hired a Lockheed C-130 Hercules to fly five cars 12,000 feet high, open a cargo door at the rear of the plane and parachute them out in a spectacular free-fall stunt.

Geronimo!

Happy 60th birthday to the Hercules -- the oldest continuously produced family of military planes in history.

Lockheed has been making these airplanes longer than the legendary B-52 bomber and the famous U2 spy jet. Unlike those planes, the C-130 has never become a household name.

The fact that "Furious 7" producers chose a plane that was designed in the 1950s tells you a little something about the success of the Hercules.

The film makes it appear as if another plane -- a C-17 Globemaster III -- drops the cars. But in real life, it took a Hercules to pull it off.

Shooting the scene posed unique logistical challenges, said stunt coordinator Jack Gill in a featurette video about the mission. "You start throwing all those cars out together -- you've got to figure out spacing. And these things drop very fast," Gill said.

Jeremiah Beaudin of International Air Response co-piloted the stunt. "We have to be very precise in our headings and our altitudes," he says in the video.

 The Hercules is big. It's tough. It's versatile. It refuels helicopters in flight. It can fly a small military force and its heavy equipment around the world -- and land on short, unfinished airstrips.

At Lockheed's Marietta, Georgia, factory in 1955, the governor of Georgia christened the first production C-130A by smashing a bottle of Chattahoochee River water across its nose. The plane then proceeded to take off from nearby Dobbins Air Force Base.

 On Tuesday, exactly 60 years later, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal recreated the ceremony -- christening a brand new Super Hercules during a birthday party of sorts for Lockheed executives and military dignitaries.

"I'm told that the 2,500th version of this aircraft is now on the (assembly) line inside this building," Deal said. "It transports, it becomes a war airplane as necessary and it is recognized as the true workhorse."

Inside the plane's cockpit, Lockheed test pilot Steve Knoblock said he's done a lot of air-drop testing while flying C-130s. "We've dropped some crazy things out," Knoblock said. "Air dropping a car out of an airplane is easy. Whatever we can fit inside the (cargo) hold, we can drop."

Several factors come into play for a pilot making a drop, Knoblock said, including payload weight, wind speed and timing.

"We have to give time for the car to clear the airplane, let the parachutes deploy, and then actually open," he said. One tricky decision involves how high the plane drops its cargo.

"There's a trade off -- between dropping it low and being more accurate ... and dropping it high where you have a little more safety in how it will land."

Knoblock also explained how the C-130's robust landing gear helps the plane survive difficult landing conditions.

"The pilot gets to decide how hard the touchdown's going to be," he said. "Sometimes to get his performance, he needs to really let it crunch on the ground. But the airplane can handle it."

Meanwhile, in the back of the plane, Lockheed loadmaster Lucky Madsen showed off the plane's new reversible deck, which makes it easier to switch the floor from a flat surface ... to a floor with rollers embedded in it. The rollers make it easier to move cargo around and launch it out the back of the airplane.

The legacy surrounding the Hercules has been built by 60 years of successful missions, including:


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Changing Skyline: Jewelers' Row: A space for makers at a crossroads

Alexander Danta curled his frame around a cluttered wooden table in his Jewelers' Row workshop to inspect his latest handiwork, a diamond-and-ruby wedding band that nested in his meaty palm like a newborn chick. Raising the delicate ring to the window, he tipped it slightly to catch the light, revealing an acanthus vine he had just etched on the side, perhaps a centimeter wide and sharp as a line of type.

Danta is a master engraver, among the last in Philadelphia to work exclusively with hand tools, and his studio was the custom-made ring's latest stop on its journey through the Jewelry Trades Building at Eighth and Sansom Streets, a six-story beehive filled with designers, casters, polishers, and stone-setters. Once he finished his contribution to the making of the ring, it would be delivered to the next workshop, where a plater would coat the white gold in platinum.

Most of us know Philadelphia's jewelry district for its glittering and sometimes gaudy stores selling everything from chunky gold watches to diamond-encrusted wedding fare. But it's also what people nowadays like to call a "makers space."

Maybe because working factories have virtually vanished from the urban landscape, we rarely think of Philadelphia - never mind Center City - as a place where stuff gets made. Yet, right in the shadow of Washington Square's pricey high-rise condos, dozens of workshops such as Danta's have somehow managed to survive on the upper floors of historic Jewelers' Row.

That doesn't mean they will be there forever.

Packed tightly into the two city blocks between Walnut and Chestnut, from Seventh to Eighth, the jewelry district is a rare survivor from Philadelphia's heyday as the self-proclaimed "workshop of the world."

The city was once full of such niche districts: fabric on Fourth Street, restaurant supply on Second Street, produce on Dock Street, beer in Northern Liberties. Those businesses clustered together because they relied on one another's services. But modern innovations such as websites and overnight delivery have made such physical proximity unnecessary. One by one, businesses dispersed, often to the suburbs.

Jewelers' Row is now among the last intact economic and social ecosystems in the city, where suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers still do business the old-fashioned way: face-to-face. Retailers walk down the block to deliver custom orders to artisans. Artisans buy their tools from suppliers on Sansom Street. Black-hatted Hasidic Jews, big suppliers of cut stones, can be seen davening at a small prayer room on Eighth Street. Everybody gets lunch at the kosher falafel place, Hamifgash, on Sansom Street.

So many businesses are family-owned, mostly by Jews and ethnic Armenians, that even million-dollar deals are sealed "with a handshake," says David Perlman of PRDC Properties, a relative newcomer who bought the Jewelry Trades Building four years ago.

The district remains the closest thing Philadelphia has to a dense, Middle East-style bazaar. Believe it or not, nearly a thousand people earn their living in those two blocks of jewelry stores and workshops, according to Hy Goldberg, head of the Jewelers' Row Business Association, and owner of Safian & Rudolph. Most are employed in skilled jobs that pay well above minimum wage.

The problem is that apartment conversions pay building owners even more.

Jewelers' Row, which has existed in some form since 1852, and which is the nation's oldest surviving diamond district, is at a crossroads. As the Washington Square neighborhood becomes the east-of-Broad rival to Rittenhouse Square, developers are moving in.

At the Seventh Street end of the row, luxury condos are already going in at Walnut Street's Curtis Building, which once housed the printing presses of a national magazine empire. One block east, Tom Scannapieco just broke ground on a 26-story luxury building. Parkway Corp. is even talking about getting rid of its eyesore of a parking lot at Seventh and Chestnut to put up a 32-story tower.

Walking along Sansom Street, the district's brick-lined main thoroughfare, it's easy to assume Jewelers' Row will be around forever. More than 110 storefronts are occupied, and a dizzying number of protruding signs jockey for customers' attention. In the last year, business has boomed, says Goldberg, and at least a half dozens stores have renovated.

At the urging of the owner's son, Rich Goldberg, who is taking over the business, Safian & Rudolph gutted the store to create a more modern, upscale look. That includes a VIP room and champagne bar where newly engaged couples can toast their purchase.

At the other end of the district, on Eighth Street, Jeffrey Debs did a similar overhaul, installing flattering lighting and curved counters that resemble an elegant bar. The idea was to make the store "more bridal friendly," explains Debs.

Debs didn't stop there. He also converted the workshops on the upper floors into four apartments. "I had to decide, should I move or should I renovate," he says. The deciding factor was the rental income from the apartments. It will provide a cushion when the next recession hits and retail tanks


Read more: Changing Skyline: Jewelers' Row: A space for makers at a crossroads

Is Greece's Debt Odious?

There is a legal concept called "odious debts."   It can be traced back more than a century. The US helped create a precedent for it by denying Cuba's responsibility for the debt incurred under Spanish colonial rule. The concept took on added significance in the post-colonial era more broadly.

The issue here is the continuity of legal obligations from one regime to another especially as it pertains to the debt acquired. The odious debt concept attempts to provide a moral and legal basis for rejecting in whole or part the debt incurred by the previous regime when the funds are sued in ways that are not beneficial, or actually harmful, to the interests of the population. Legal scholars also note that it is usually important to show whether or not the creditor knew or should have know of these circumstances at the time the credit was extended.

The parallel on an individual level is coercion.  An obligation made under duress may not be enforceable. It is not a legitimate debt. Legal scholars cite several types of sovereign debt that can be odious. Two common ones are "hostile debts" which are incurred to suppress a secessionist movement or to conquer peoples, and "war debts" which are contracted by a sovereign to finance a war that it loses and the victor is not obligated to pay the debt.

If Greece's debt is odious, it does not fit into these two categories. Yet the broad principles may still apply though the Syriza government has not explicitly called it such. Both Greece's Prime Minister Tsipras and Finance Minister Varoufakis have argued that the previous governments should not have borrowed the funds that could obviously not be paid back. Other reports have indicated that the IMF violated its own lending rules by extending so much credit to the Greece. DSK reportedly overruled staff and US objections. There have also been reports indicating that the EU was well aware before the crisis had erupted that Greek figures did not add up but closed a blind eye due to narrow political considerations.

The Syriza government can make the case that funds borrowed since the 2010 were odious and against the interests of the people.  The bulk of the new debt has been used to service past debt. Through the SMP program, ECB bought out many private foreign creditors and then claims that the debt is exempt from the debt restructuring (PSI).  A number of European officials have acknowledged that the new debt incurred by Greece was to keep its creditors whole.

The Greek people have not been bailed out. Unemployment has increased three-fold while the economy has contracted by a quarter.  With deflation, nominal growth has collapsed and continues to contract, even though real growth was positive in the middle of 2014.  Minimum wages and pensions have been cut, and living standards have been reduced.

Whether Greece's debt can be considered odious is a thorny legal issue and well beyond the competence of this currency strategist. The Syriza government has not claimed that it is odious. Nevertheless, its arguments are consistent with some of the precedent that has been established. Perhaps, if the official creditors continue to balk at extending Greece credit, this could be a course that it may consider. Tsipras has threatened not to service its debt if the creditors do not release new funds.

There are two drains on the liquidity of Greek banks. First, deposits have plummeted by about 5%  (a month in the December-February period (for a total draw down of almost 24 bln euros) Although the flight appeared to slow earlier this month, an estimated 1.5 bln euro fled last week. Second, interbank funding has dried up. It fell by almost 29 bln euros in the same three month period, which is a 69% decline. The Greek central bank is offsetting this drying up of credit by providing 59.4 bln of liquidity through the ELA facility.

Read more: Is Greece's Debt Odious?