Magnitude-6.9 earthquake hits off Calif. coast

William Cummings, USA TODAY6:02 a.m. EDT March 10, 2014

A powerful magnitude-6.9 earthquake struck in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast early Monday, the United States Geological Survey reported.

The quake hit about 50 miles west of Eureka and occurred at 10:18 a.m. PDT, 4.3 miles beneath the seabed, according to the USGS.

It was followed by about a half-dozen aftershocks, including one of magnitude-4.6.

There is not believed to be any threat of a tsunami, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

The Humboldt County Sheriff's Department, which oversees most of the populated areas near the quake, says there have been no calls about damage or injuries.

Jana Pursley, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center, said that based on the area's tectonics and past temblors, damages or casualties were unlikely.

Contributing: Associated Press                                                   Weather for Tirana, Republic of Albania

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Taliban Warns Afghans Not to Vote

VOA News

March 10, 2014\

The Taliban has warned Afghans not to participate in the upcoming presidential election and has ordered its fighters to disrupt the vote.

In an emailed statement sent to the media on Monday, the Taliban warned Afghans they should "reject completely" the April 5 election to select a successor to President Hamid Karzai. The statement said Afghans should not put themselves in danger by going to the polls.

The Taliban said it has urged clerics across the country to spread the word that the election is an "American conspiracy."

The statement is the Taliban's first formal threat of violence against the presidential vote.

The Afghan government did not immediately respond to the Taliban threat.

The presidential vote will be a crucial test of whether Afghanistan can ensure a stable political transition as NATO combat forces ready their withdrawal after nearly 13 years of war.

Karzai had been expected to sign a bilateral security agreement late last year, which would allow about 10,000 U.S. troops to be deployed in the country after NATO withdraws by December. However, the Afghan president refused to sign the deal, and has said his successor might now complete negotiations. The delay in signing the deal has strained relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan.

Billions of dollars have been spent on military operations and development in Afghanistan, but the country remains wracked by poverty and violence with weak government structures and a fragile economy dependent on aid money.

• Texas News

Edward Snowden to speak at SXSW conference

| March 10, 2014

NSA leaker Edward Snowden is getting ready to speak at this year's South By Southwest Interactive Festival.

But the former NSA contractor won't appear in person at the conference in Austin on Monday.

He'll participate remotely via video as Snowden remains in Moscow where he's living in temporary asylum.

Snowden faces felony charges in the U.S. after revealing the agency's mass surveillance program by leaking thousands of classified documents to media outlets.

Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, will be speaking to Snowden along with Snowden's legal adviser, the ACLU's Ben Wizner.

Fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke at the conference in a similar manner on Saturday. Assange is living in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Forbes

WATCH HERE HQ Watch 300 Rise Of An Empire Online Full Movie Free 2014 ... The Cincinnati Herald  - ‎20 minutes ago‎ Watch 300 Rise Of An Empire Online.Watch 300 Rise Of An Empire Online Full Movie Free Streaming HQ.Watch 300 Rise Of An Empire Movie Video Link. Investigators chase 'every angle,' but signs of missing Malaysia Airlines plane elusive Published March 10, 2014 Malaysian authorities: No sign of wreckage from... Officials working to identify passengers on missing... Vietnam air force spot 2 oil slicks in ocean More than 48 hours after a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 plane with 239 people on board disappeared from radar screens, a multinational search team consisting of dozens of ships and aircraft had failed to find any sign of the aircraft's ultimate fate.  Malaysia's civil aviation chief, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, said that investigators were pursuing "every angle," including the possibility of an attempted hijacking, in an effort to understand what happened that caused the plane to vanish early Saturday morning, local time.  "We accept God's will. Whether he is found alive or dead, we surrender to Allah," said Selamat Omar, a Malaysian whose 29-year-old son Mohamad Khairul Amri Selamat was heading to Beijing for a business trip. He said he was expecting a call from his son after the flight's scheduled arrival time at 6:30 a.m. Saturday. Instead he got a call from the airline to say the plane was missing. The plane was flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, and apparently fell from the sky at cruising altitude in fine weather, and the pilots were either unable or had no time to send a distress signal. There are also questions over how two passengers managed to board the ill-fated aircraft using stolen passports. Interpol confirmed it knew about the stolen passports but said no authorities checked its vast databases on stolen documents before the Boeing jetliner departed Saturday. Warning "only a handful of countries" routinely make such checks, Interpol secretary general Ronald Noble chided authorities for "waiting for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates." "I can confirm that we have the visuals of these two people on CCTV," Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said at a news conference late Sunday, adding that the footage was being examined. "We have intelligence agencies, both local and international, on board." The thefts of the two passports -- one belonging to Austrian Christian Kozel and the other to Luigi Maraldi of Italy -- were entered into Interpol's database after they were stolen in Thailand in 2012 and last year, the police body said. Electronic booking records show that one-way tickets with those names were issued Thursday from a travel agency in the beach resort of Pattaya in eastern Thailand. A person who answered the phone at the agency said she could not comment. But no authorities in Malaysia or elsewhere checked the passports against the database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents before the Malaysian Airlines plane took off. Possible causes of the crash included some sort of explosion, a catastrophic failure of the plane's engines, extreme turbulence, or pilot error or even suicide. Establishing what happened with any certainty will need data from flight recorders and a detailed examination of any debris, something that will take months if not years. Malaysia's air force chief, Rodzali Daud, said radar indicated that before it disappeared, the plane may have turned back, but there were no further details on which direction it went or how far it veered off course. "We are trying to make sense of this," Daud said at a news conference. "The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back, and in some parts this was corroborated by civilian radar." Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Ahmad Jauhari Yahya said pilots are supposed to inform the airline and traffic control authorities if the plane does a U-turn. "From what we have, there was no such distress signal or distress call per se, so we are equally puzzled," he said. A total of 34 aircraft and 40 ships from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and the United States were deployed to the area where ground controllers lost contact with the plane on the maritime border between Malaysia and Vietnam. Family members of Philip Wood, a 50-year-old IBM executive who was on board the plane, said they saw him a week ago when he visited them in Texas after relocating to Kuala Lumpur from Beijing, where he had worked for two years. The other two Americans were identified on the passenger manifest as 4-year-old Nicole Meng and 2-year-old Yan Zhang. It was not known with whom they were traveling. Aought them. Interpol said it and national investigators were working to determine the true identities of those who used the stolen passports to board the flight. White House Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken said the U.S. was looking into the stolen passports, but that investigators had reached no conclusions. Interpol has long sounded the alarm that growing international travel has underpinned a new market for identity theft: Bogus passports are mostly used by illegal immigrants, but also pretty much anyone looking to travel unnoticed such as drug runners or terrorists. More than 1 billion times last year, travelers boarded planes without their passports being checked against Interpol's database of 40 million stolen or lost travel documents, the police agency said. The Associated Press contributed to this report.