Eideard

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Four people were pulled out alive Monday from the rubble of the Turkey earthquake after one managed to call for help with his mobile phone…

Dozens of people were trapped in mounds of concrete, twisted steel and construction debris after hundreds of buildings in two cities and mud-brick homes in nearby villages pancaked or partially collapsed in Sunday’s earthquake.

Worst-hit was Ercis – an eastern city of 75,000 close to the Iranian border that lies in one of Turkey’s most earthquake-prone zones – where about 80 multistory buildings collapsed.

Yalcin Akay was dug out from a collapsed six-story building with a leg injury after he called a police emergency line on his phone and described his location, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. Three others, including two children, were also rescued from the same building in Ercis 20 hours after the quake struck, officials said…

As over 200 aftershocks rocked the area, rescuers searched mounds of debris for the missing and tearful families members waited anxiously nearby. Cranes and other heavy equipment lifted slabs of concrete, allowing residents to dig for the missing with shovels. Generator-powered floodlights ran all night so the rescues could continue.

Aid groups scrambled to set up tents, field hospitals and kitchens to help the thousands left homeless or too afraid to re-enter their homes. Many exhausted residents spent the night outside, lighting fires to keep warm…

The bustling, larger city of Van, about 55 miles (90 kilometres) south of Ercis, also sustained substantial damage, but Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin said search efforts there were winding down. Mr Sahin expected the death toll in Ercis to rise, but not as much as initially feared. He told reporters rescue teams were searching for survivors in the ruins of 47 buildings where dozens could be trapped, including a cafe…

More than 2,000 teams with a dozen sniffer dogs were involved in search-and-rescue and aid efforts.

Several countries offered assistance but Mr Erdogan said Turkey was able to cope for the time being. Azerbaijan, Iran and Bulgaria still sent aid, he said.

I decided a long time ago that life was tough enough without adding earthquakes to the potential of forces completely out of your control that could affect your life.

To get to Brandon, you have to drive across the Pearl River, a boundary that seems to separate black Mississippi from white.

In the town’s center, a monument stands honoring the confederate soldiers who fought in the Civil War.

This mostly white town in mostly white Rankin County is about a 30-minute drive from Jackson, Mississippi. It’s here in Brandon that some residents say a gang of teenagers expressed their strong racial prejudice — sometimes through violence.

These residents say the teens were friends with and often led by Deryl Dedmon, now 19 and facing capital murder and hate crime charges for the killing of James Anderson, a black man, who died after he was beaten and run over by a truck in Jackson, according to police. Dedmon has pleaded not guilty and his attorney has refused to answer CNN’s repeated requests for comment…

Parents and students who knew Dedmon tell CNN it was widely known that he expressed a hatred for blacks, white people who had black friends, and anyone he thought was gay. And they say he had a history of harassing teens at his high school.

CNN has learned that Department of Justice investigators have uncovered two other possible incidents where groups of white Rankin County teens, including Dedmon, have sought out and attacked a black person.

But police and school officials told CNN that there were no warning signs, no concerns about Dedmon or his friends before James Anderson’s death this summer. Brandon’s Assistant Police Chief Chris Butts described Anderson’s killing as “an isolated incident” that has been blown out of proportion by the media.

RTFA. It’s long. It’s just as I remember a lot of white Mississippi, White Louisiana.

It wasn’t the same in Black or integrated communities. The balance may have changed by now. The results of official racism obviously haven’t.

When I was an IT admin, I had the pleasure of dealing often with people who would submit urgent service requests and then leave for the day, leaving their office empty and computer locked by the time I could get there to help. Fortunately, I was often able to fix their problem while they weren’t there. Why? Their password was somewhere on their desk in one of these easy-to-find locations.

Under the Keyboard. This is a pretty common one, and one of the first places to look if you need to find someone’s password (or one of the first places to avoid if you need to jot down an often-used but difficult to remember password.) The worst offenders leave them on a post-it on their keyboard tray, or under the spot where their keyboard lives. Others attach the post-it to the underside of the keyboard, thinking it’s better hidden there. In both cases, it’s a sure bet that anything under the keyboard will have a password on it…

Under the Mouse Pad. This is another common hiding place for people who don’t want to put their passwords under their keyboard. They’ll usually slide a couple of sheets of paper under the mousepad with their usernames and passwords on it and refer to them when they forget, or update them when their password expires…

Under the Desk. One of the most disturbingly common spots many officer workers hide their passwords is one of the easiest to find: right under their desk surface. Just sit down at their desk and put your hand directly under the desktop, and you’ll often find yet another post-it note attached there. Most people who do this operate under the assumption that no one’s ever under their desk to see or notice such a thing—except the IT admin or help desk tech they call when they’ve jostled the Ethernet cable loose from the back of their desktop…

I haven’t even posted half of the silly places people think are secure in the world of prairie-dog cubicles. If you’re guilty of any of these, go apologize in advance to your network administrator. You may have compromised everything that should be secure. And if your password is “1-2-3-4-5″ – quit your job and go back to flipping burgers for a living.

So where should you store your passwords? RTFA for a couple of suggestions.

Nearly 11 years after the 2000 presidential election brought the corruption idiosyncrasies of the United States’ Electoral College into full view, 62% of Americans say they would amend the U.S. Constitution to replace that system for electing presidents with a popular vote system. Barely a third, 35%, say they would keep the Electoral College.

Gallup’s initial measure of support for the Electoral College with this wording was conducted in the first few days after the 2000 presidential election in which the winner remained undeclared pending a recount in Florida. At that time, it was already clear that Democratic candidate Al Gore had won the national popular vote over Republican George W. Bush, but that the winner of the election would be the one who received Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes…

Republicans have grown somewhat more amenable to adopting a popular vote system over the past decade. Now, for the first time since 2000, the majority of Republicans favor it. Independents are not quite as supportive as Democrats of the popular vote system, but the majority of them have consistently favored it.

Additionally, Gallup finds little difference in the views of Americans of various age groups on changing how the country elects presidents. Support for amending the Constitution on this matter is 58% among 18- to 34-year-olds, 64% among 35-to 54-year-olds, and 62% among those 55 and older.

From 1967 through 1980, Gallup periodically asked Americans about replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote system using different question wording, and each time, the majority favored it. The issue was particularly relevant during this period because the popular vote in the 1968 and 1976 presidential elections was so closely divided…

Next question? What do you think Congress will do about responding to the will of the people?

I thought so, too. They are truly useless.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

India has “never been closer” to wiping out polio, India’s health minister has declared as he marked World Polio Day.

There have been no new cases for more than nine months, making it the longest polio-free period since the global eradication campaign was launched. The only case reported this year was in the state of West Bengal in January. There were 39 cases reported over a similar period in 2010.

India is one of only four countries in the world where polio is still endemic. The virus is also prevalent in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

The overall trend in India is so positive that its vaccination programme is being discussed as one other countries might learn from.

Pakistan is a particular concern. It has seen 118 new cases so far this year concentrated in poor, insecure areas: Karachi, Baluchistan and the tribal areas close to the border with Afghanistan.

The two countries routinely re-infect each other. Afghanistan has seen 40 new cases this year. The continuing violence there also makes it hard to reach vulnerable children. Nigeria too has seen a surge in cases this year which have undermined recent gains…

Some communities simply do not trust the people who administer the vaccine and fear it could hurt their children… But they trust their priests.

The health ministry reported that no cases were reported from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh for 18 months…

Uttar Pradesh has been one of the worst-affected regions in the world’s fight against polio with hundreds of cases reported until a few years ago. Of the 549 polio cases in India in 2008, 297 were in Uttar Pradesh.

It is especially heartwarming for a grayhead like me to witness this victory. I grew up in a time when polio threatened all societies. Beaches and pools were often closed in summer because of the threat of contagion. All of us knew someone in every neighborhood who died or was left paralyzed by the disease.

I experienced each stage of vaccine development from early days of the first vaccinations, needle sticks and terrified children as kids always are over needles – on through to oral vaccines. The relief experienced by my parents, all parents in the factory town I grew up in. The minority of superstitious nutballs who kept their kids from safety were looked at as fools who fortunately only constituted a danger to themselves – and unfortunately to their own children.

It was bad enough for the University of Illinois when The Chicago Tribune’s 2009 series “Clout Goes to College” exposed the existence of a “clout list” that over five years gave hundreds of well-connected students an edge in admissions, and led to the resignations of the university president, the chancellor of the flagship Urbana-Champaign campus and most of the trustees.

But two years later, the university is still mired in litigation before the federal appeals court in Chicago, fighting the release of more documents the newspaper has asked for, including the names and addresses of the parents on the clout list. The university has turned over about 5,200 pages of documents to the newspaper. But in a separate state court proceeding, The Tribune is seeking the grade point averages and ACT scores of the students accepted from the clout list.

Those requests set off a shootout between the state’s freedom of information law and the federal privacy law for educational records…

Mr. Skinner said the university’s position is that anything anyone sends in about any applicant is a student record protected by the law.

But The Tribune, backed by media groups including The New York Times, argues that the documents are not education records under the federal law, but rather records of questionable conduct, so the public’s right to know should prevail.

“When Governor Blagojevich calls the chancellor and says, ‘Admit this favored person,’ that’s not an admission record kept in someone’s file,” said James Klenk, a lawyer for The Tribune. “That’s something that should be disclosed to the public. We’re investigating public officials in their decision making. Some people were admitted not on their merits, while other people, on the merits, didn’t get those spots, and that’s wrong…”

Parents and university officials who used the clout list to bypass the merit-based application process, the brief said, “cannot now claim any reasonable right to privacy to cover their actions, as it is far outweighed by the newsworthiness of the scandal and the right of the public to hold accountable those responsible for perpetrating a fraud.”

Look at the whole array in the litigation: bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians – and the well-connected parents and students. Decide for yourself what’s really at stake. Privacy or public access to information about people who committed a crime?

He is a prolific artiste who has appeared in more than 350 films. But Shigeo Tokuda gets little in the way of recognition on the streets of Tokyo. Perhaps that’s because at 77 he couldn’t look less like a star. Or perhaps it’s because admirers tend to keep their appreciation of his work to themselves.

Tokuda has shot to prominence as Japan’s oldest porn actor, the unlikely face of a brand of Japanese blue movie that taps into the country’s fast changing demographics. And yet he didn’t even get started until he was almost 60.

Tokuda, who is married with two adult children and a grandchild, made his debut in 1994 after a meeting with a porn director in Tokyo.

“I was a fan of adult films and went directly to his office to ask if they’d got specific films in stock,” he says. “He asked me there and then if I wanted to appear in a film. I immediately said no.”

He soon changed his mind and at 59 in a hotel in western Tokyo he launched his acting career, playing the part of a company president with a roving eye…

Other than changing his name – Shigeo Tokuda is his professional alias – his attempts to conceal his acting career from his family are surprisingly half-hearted. He had to confess to his daughter after she intercepted a fax offering him a scene that left little to the imagination. “She was speechless for a while,” he says…

According to industry executives, the market for “silver porn” has doubled over the last decade and now comprises about a fifth of the 3,000 adult films…that Japan produces every year.

That growth reflects wider social changes in Japan, where more than a fifth of the population is 65 or over. That figure is expected to rise to about 40% by 2055.

The impressive life expectancy of the Japanese – 86.4 years for women and 79.6 years for men – has spawned a range of services for the elderly, from tailor-made exercise parks in playgrounds once meant for children to bigger, easier-to-read fonts in national newspapers…

Tokuda usually appears with much younger women – the youngest was 54 years his junior – in films with such titles as Forbidden Elderly Care.

Go for it, dude. Physical fitness for grayheads is an important category of lifestyle management.

Tokuda intends to stay in the craft until he’s 80.

The most violent panda we have ever posted

Game developer Blizzard has revealed the fourth expansion pack for “World of Warcraft” — an expansion that will let people play the massively popular online game as a race of giant humanoid pandas known as the Pandaren.

Blizzard unveiled the forthcoming “Mists of Pandaria” expansion Friday at its annual BlizzCon convention in California. And no, this is not a joke…

“Mists of Pandaria” will introduce the continent of Pandaria to “WoW” — a place inspired by real-world Asia, home of the real-world pandas — as well as a new martial-arts-focused Monk class.

Uh, OK.

Standing in line at a polling station in Tunis
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Nine months after a people’s revolution ousted the despot Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and inspired uprisings across the region, Tunisia on Sunday was holding the first vote of the Arab spring. The small country of 10 million is being watched by the Arab world as an experiment in moving from dictatorship to democracy.

If the elections usher in a credible new political class after 50 years of a one-party state, they could boost the democratic hopes for neighbouring post-Gaddafi Libya and Egypt, where there is profound uncertainty…

“There’s an overwhelming sense of joy and relief,” says Mehdi Lassoued, a tyre company worker, wrapped in the Tunisian flag. “I feel we are finally moving on, that we can finish this revolution, vote for a legitimate government.”

Tunis university professor Ghofrane Ben Miled says: “There’s so much expectation and excitement on the street. I didn’t sleep, I was wired. It felt like the nights during the revolution, but calmer. I’m 42 and I’ve never voted before.”

Flag-festooned cars with horns blaring are everywhere and hundreds queue in the sun, wearing homemade paper hats. Asked who the election winner will be, most say: “We all will…”

There are now 110 political parties and scores of independents. Tunisians will appoint a 217-seat assembly with the specific role of rewriting the constitution to prepare for parliamentary elections next year.

A complex proportional representation system means that no one party will dominate the assembly…

A high turnout is expected – as high as 80% in some precincts. Full results will be released on Monday…

Amid the optimism there is a sense of vigilance. Many say that the people staged the revolution and they will take to the streets again if they feel they are being cheated or let down.

RTFA. Lots of accurate anecdotal description of people coming out to vote for the first time in their lives.

Enjoy it. Help the revolution if you’re in a position to do so. They are leading the Arab Spring.

Containers on the stern deck of the 47,230 ton Liberian-flagged Rena hang precariously, about 12 nautical miles from Tauranga, on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island October 20, 2011. The recovery of fuel oil from a stricken container ship grounded off New Zealand resumed on Thursday as salvage teams worked to minimize the damage in the country’s worst environmental disaster in decades. Two days of strong winds and high seas had prevented the pumping of oil from the Rena, which has been stuck for more than two weeks on the Astrolabe Reef.