The downtown of Fagatoga was flooded when a tsunami hit American Samoa early on Tuesday.
The earthquake struck around dawn, as many residents were preparing for work and getting their children ready for school. Officials said they expected heavy damage in the southern parts of Samoa and American Samoa, a United States territory with about 60,000 residents.
Damaged telephone lines on both islands hampered efforts to count the casualties and assess the destruction from the earthquake, with a magnitude of 8.0. It struck below the ocean about 120 miles southwest of American Samoa and 125 miles south of Samoa, and it was centered only 11 miles below the seabed, according to the United States Geological Survey.
At least 14 people were killed in American Samoa, the territory’s governor, Togiola T. A. Tulafono, said at a news conference in Hawaii. The toll could rise as emergency workers gain access to damaged areas, he and other officials said.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at Ewa Beach, Hawaii, raised a regionwide alert that extended from American Samoa to New Zealand, though minimal damage was reported elsewhere.
Tsunami awareness is relatively high in this earthquake-prone part of the world, particularly after the devastating earthquake and tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, that killed 227,898 people around the Indian Ocean, according to the United States Geological Survey. Even so, Filipo Ilaoa, deputy director of the American Samoan office in Honolulu, said that the tsunami struck the coast of American Samoa in “a matter of minutes” after the quake, and that many residents would not have had much time to run for higher ground.
“American Samoa is a small island, and most of the residents are around the coastline,” he said. “There was no warning or anything at all. By the time the alert was out of the PacificTsunamiWarningCenter, it had already hit.”
Both islands are just east of the international date line, which is why it was early Tuesday morning when the quake occurred, but it was already early Wednesday in Japan, China and Australia.
On Samoa, there were reports of at least a dozen casualties. Russell Hunter, the managing editor of The Samoa Observer newspaper in Vaitele, outside the capital, Apia, said his reporters had received word that at least 17 people on the island had been killed. Samoa’s police office did not respond to telephone calls, and phone lines on much of the island were cut or jammed.
“There is extensive damage in the southeast part of the island,” Mr. Hunter said. “It seems to be mostly in the rural villages,” which he said were mostly clustered along the coast and whose houses were generally made of light materials, including wood.
Many residents told local reporters of flattened houses and cars that were swept into neighboring towns. Graeme Ansell, a New Zealand tourist who was at Faofao Beach Fales on the southeast coast of UpoluIsland, told Radio New Zealand that the village had been decimated. He said he and others had clambered up a nearby hill to safety.
AMD/ATI’s next-gen Radeon HD 5870 graphics card is here, and it’s a blockbuster. Its architecture is a refinement of the 4xxx series, and is manufactured using the 40nm process that AMD demonstrated it had mastered with the 4700
First some numbers: The 5870 GPU has 1600 shader units (or stream processors) and 80 texture units for over 2 TeraFLOPS of rendering power—exactly twice as many as the 4870. All that power goes into making lots of new tricks work, the foremost being DirectX 11. Yes, this is the first and only DX11-capable card available.
DX11’s new features included multi-threaded rendering, better tessellation and shadows, better physics and AI calculations, new types of transparency, and real-time post processing. All this means we should expect vast improvements in textures, shading, antialiasing, and effects such as HDR lighting, depth of field, lens effects, realistic shadows in DX11 games, which will start trickling in from October onwards. DX11 also brings in DirectCompute 11, which will tie into Windows 7’s GPU optimizations to enable desktop acceleration.
Stream technology is another buzzword. This is what AMD pitches as its open-standards-compliant approach to GPU processing. Stream is implemented in both hardware and software, and enables better load sharing between CPUs and GPUs so that each does the task it is best suited for. The last cool new trick is Eyefinity, which lets you drive up to 6 HD displays with a single card for up to a crazy 8192x8192 pixel theoretical maximum desktop area! Gamers will love it, while designers and analysts can benefit too, especially now that LCD prices are so low.
The HD 5870 card itself is huge and heavy, and comes in black with firetruck-red accents. It’s nice to see two DVI ports as well as HDMI and DisplayPort on the back. It runs cooler and quieter than expected, but still blocks a lot of room in a big PC cabinet. We used Windows 7 and DX11 with the latest pre-release Catalyst drivers, to get the most out of this card. In our tests, the new Radeon easily took the top spot for single-GPU cards, beating its own predecessor, the HD 4890 as well as Nvidia’s GTX285. The overall 3DMark score was 14,724, while Crysis gave us 51.52 fps at 1680x1050, Gamer settings, and 2xAA. Sadly, no DX11 games or tests are available yet, but we can’t wait to see the new muscle in action.
Nvidia’s going to have a hard time keeping up; only its dual-GPU GTX295 and a few SLI solutions will match it even if prices are cut. With all intelligence suggesting that their own DX11 generation is still months away, AMD can enjoy this victory for a while.
Cannondale has come a long way since its birth in a crowded loft above a pickle factory in 1971, when it introduced the cycling industry's first bicycle trailer. The company grew quickly during its early years, adding cycling apparel and accessory lines along the way while also earning a strong reputation for innovation and quality. That reputation proved invaluable when Cannondale introduced its first bicycle, a touring model, in 1983, followed by a road racing model and a mountain bike model in 1984. Cannondale raised the cycling world's eyebrows by equipping their bicycles with handcrafted aluminum frames that were both lighter and more flex-resistant than the steel models that dominated the industry at the time. Cannondale's reputation encouraged both bike dealers and customers to give the bicycles a try, and widespread industry skepticism quickly gave way to a host of imitators.
Today Cannondale is the leading manufacturer of high-end bicycles, and is widely regarded as the bike industry's leading innovator. Many of the ideas that keep Cannondale products on the cutting edge come from the sponsored athletes on the company's professional racing teams. The mountain bike teams have captured a dozen or more World Championships, World Cup Series overall titles, National Championships and two Olympic medals. The company's road racing bikes have won multiple stages at the Tour de France, more than two dozen stages at the Giro d'Italia, two Giro d'Italia overall victories, a Professional World Championship title, and two Italian National Championships.
After my diagnosis with breast cancer at 31, I can tell you firsthand that breast cancer doesn’t just happen to older women – it can happen to anyone, even young women.
My message to you is to become 'Breast Aware' by regularly checking your breasts for any changes or lumps. The sooner you find a change and go to see your GP, the better.
Please download this information as a gift from the McGrath Foundation and keep it as a guide on how you can become 'Breast Aware'. It could save your life.
Because breast cancer affects women of all ages, it is important that all women, including young women, examine their breasts regularly to pick up any changes. Self-examination is important because if you’re aware of how your breasts normally look and feel, you’re more likely to notice a change if it develops.
In addition to seeing your doctor each year for a breast examination, you should check your breasts regularly. A good time to do this is after the last day of your menstrual cycle or if you do not have periods, the same date each month. Most women find that their breasts are easier to examine just after their period when any premenstrual pain and lumpiness have settled.
You may check your breasts standing up, for example in the shower, or lying down, for example before going to sleep. Your partner should also be alert and look for changes in your breasts.
Most changes in the breast are not related to breast cancer. However, if you do find a change in your breast or a lump, it is important to visit your GP immediately.
Unfortunately, many of us will know someone who has been touched by breast cancer, which affects one in eight Australian women1 – but you can help protect yourself against the disease.
More women are surviving breast cancer than ever before due to better testing and treatment. Breast cancer survival is now up to 85 percent1. The smaller a breast cancer is, the simpler the treatment and the better the outcome.
Early detection has been proven to save lives. Be 'Breast Aware' and check your breasts regularly
Iceland (Kronurs) "Now, that's a hat! It even seems to require a neck brace to hold it up. The model for this striking fashion statement is Ragnheiour Jonsdottir. She lived 1646-1715 and was most noted for being the wife of not one but two successive Icelandic bishops, though she was also a celebrated seamstress as well. That's Ragnheiour teaching a couple of students on the back."
Hong Kong (Hong Kong Dollars) "In Hong Kong, they seem to have gone just about as far as you can go, money-design wise. But then Hong Kong often seems to be cheerfully humming along in the 23rd century. It makes New York City feel kind of sleepy and slow. So the futuristic money fits perfectly. And as a practical matter, it's an example of a trend in paper currency toward major-league complexity, the better to thwart would-be counterfeiters."
The French Pacific Territories (Franc) "Hard to get much lovelier than the one-two of the face and back of this note from French Polynesia. But then the islands encompassed by the territory pretty much define paradise: Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, Hiva Oa, Nuku Hiva, made part of our imaginative landscape by artists and writers such as Paul Gauguin, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Somerset Maugham, Herman Melville, and even Jimmy Buffett."
Faroe Islands (Kronurs) "Okay, maybe it's not that beautiful, although the asymmetrical design and the somehow come-hither claws are pretty fetching. But the Faroe Islands, in the far North Atlantic about halfway between Iceland and Norway, have a bleak windswept beauty, and the people have great character. You gotta love a place that puts a crab on its money
Cook Islands (Cook Island Dollars) "Hard to say why this woman seems so tranquil and happy, since she is riding a giant ferocious shark, but it's probably just the vibes from living in the Cook Islands, which are still in the middle of nowhere. The islands are about halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii, with no high-rise hotels or resorts, and mercifully few tourists to junk things up. Come to think of it, that shark looks sort of blissed-out, too."
