Word: thursday
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...death toll is expected to climb dramatically. Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency announced on Thursday that some 500 buildings had collapsed in the city, with thousands of people still trapped under the rubble. Hospitals, mosques, schools and hotels tumbled to the ground, according to witnesses interviewed on Indonesian television. Outlying areas closer to the earthquake's epicenter have essentially been cut off by landslides. With power down and rain pelting the region, it's impossible to determine yet how badly those districts were affected. But government officials, including the head of Indonesia's Health Ministry, expressed fears that thousands...
...Aftershocks continued to jolt the region a day after the quake, with one measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale striking Thursday morning. With thousands of islands strewn across a volatile fault zone, Indonesia is often shaken by earthquakes. But the past few years have proven particularly deadly. The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and earthquake claimed 130,000 lives in Aceh, the northwestern tip of Sumatra that is not far from Padang on the western side of the island. In 2006, an earthquake hit the metropolis of Yogyakarta on the island of Java, killing more than 5,000 people...
President Barack Obama's strategy of engaging Iran finally got under way in earnest on Thursday with a positive response from Tehran to at least some of the concerns about its nuclear program. At a meeting in Geneva with officials from Western powers, Russia and China, Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect a hitherto secret uranium-enrichment facility under construction near Qum. President Obama and his allies expressed grave concern last week about the site after revelations of its existence, and they made the demand for its inspection...
...talks were a win for Obama, the same could be said for Iran's President Ahmadinejad, who plainly intends to use the process to reinforce his legitimacy in the wake of Iran's June 12 election debacle. Indeed, Iranian Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki said on Thursday that the talks had gone so well that the next round ought to be a summit between the two Presidents - an option that would likely be politically unpalatable to the Administration in light of Iran's domestic political situation...
...Tehran has its own ideas about how to resolve the standoff, and many critics have warned that it will try to string out any negotiating process to buy time and divide the international community without giving significant ground. Certainly, the diplomatic game that got under way in Geneva on Thursday is unlikely to produce quick or even necessarily satisfactory results - and it may force Western powers to accept more limited goals than persuading Iran to forgo enrichment altogether. But Tehran's agreement to inspections at Qum and other signs of cooperation are a positive start. And given the limited potential...