Free Republic

DURRES, Albania — Still bleeding, the gash on his hand covered in dirty gauze, Xhafer Ahmetaj surveyed the mountain of rubble where his friends had been buried after an earthquake struck. Only one teenage boy was pulled out alive. Eight other members of the Lala family, including two toddlers, were killed in November’s 6.4-magnitude quake. Mr. Ahmetaj, 79, a former military officer, took in the devastation and shook his head. Nature, at its most violent, was to blame. But so, too, were people at their most greedy. “If you would have seen this place when it was a marsh, a...

'Burying the mummy will stop the earthquakes' April 01 2004 at 06:33AM Moscow - Residents of Russia's Altai region say that a 25-century-old mummy that was dug up 11 years ago is causing earthquakes in their corner of Siberia and have demanded that it be reburied. "We must calm people down and bury the Altai Princess," which is being studied by researchers at an institute 600km away, said Aulkhan Jatkambayev, the administration chief in the area where the mummy was discovered. "We are having tremors two or three times a week, sometimes measuring up to four (on the Richter scale)....