How to help Midwest tornado victims

Tornadoes tore through the Midwest on Sunday, killing at least six people and injuring dozens more while causing tremendous devastation in several cities and towns in Illinois and Indiana.

Images posted on Twitter and Facebook showed entire neighborhoods flattened, homes with roofs torn off and cars crushed.

Alexandra Sutter, a reporter for central Illinois' WMBD-TV, called the damage "horrific."
Washington, Ill., 145 miles southwest of Chicago, was hit particularly hard.
"I went over there immediately after the tornado, walking through the neighborhoods," Washington Alderman Tyler Gee said, "and I couldn't even tell what street I was on."

Officials in the devastated communities say it could take days to fully assess the scope of the damage.
Several groups are already pledging to offer aid to the tornado-battered region. Here are two to start:

Suicide bombings kill 23 near Iran embassy in Beirut

Two suicide bombings rocked Iran's embassy compound in Lebanon on Tuesday, killing at least 23 people including an Iranian cultural attache and hurling bodies and burning wreckage across a debris-strewn street.

A Lebanon-based al Qaeda-linked group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, claimed responsibility and threatened further attacks unless Iran withdraws forces from Syria, where they have backed President Bashar al-Assad's 2-1/2-year-old war against rebels.

Security camera footage showed a man in an explosives belt rushing towards the outer wall of the embassy in Beirut before blowing himself up, Lebanese officials said. They said a car bomb parked two buildings away from the compound had caused the second, deadlier explosion. The Lebanese army described both blasts as suicide attacks.

Apple to launch 13-inch iPad in March

Rumors of an upcoming ‘maxi' iPad are gathering pace with reports that a larger version of the sector-defining tablet is already in production.

In fact, if the Korea Times' sources are accurate, the 12.9-inch iPad could be unveiled in March 2014.
The report is the latest in a growing line of stories claiming that Apple is looking to extend its existing tablet range, which currently consists of the 9.8-inch iPad Air, 9.8-inch low-resolution iPad 2 and two 7.9-inch iPad Mini tablets, one with and one without a Retina display.

NASA satellite launched to find clues about Mars' lost water

An unmanned Atlas 5 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Monday, sending a Mars orbiter on its way to study how the planet most like Earth in the solar system lost its water.

Unlike previous Mars probes, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, will not be looking at or landing on the planet's dry, dusty surface. Instead, MAVEN will scan and sample what remains of the thin Martian atmosphere and watch in real-time how it is peeled away, molecule by molecule, by killer solar radiation.

The first step of the planned year-long, $671 million mission was getting MAVEN into space. The satellite, tucked inside a protective nosecone, lifted off aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket at 1:28 p.m. EST/1838 GMT to begin a 10-month flight to Mars.
United Launch Alliance is a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

After JFK, a Secret Service transformed

The date most closely associated with the Secret Service probably isn’t its founding in 1865. It’s not 1902, when it took over full-time protection of the president following William McKinley’s assassination. It’s probably Nov. 22, 1963 — when John F. Kennedy was killed, shot dead as he rode in a convertible with the top down, his government bodyguards powerless to help.

But 50 years later, there’s no mistaking that JFK’s death — and the June 1968 killing of Robert Kennedy, and the March 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan — utterly transformed the small agency with one of the government’s biggest jobs.

 

Obama administration knew millions wouldn't be able to keep insurance

Monday, former Obama adviser David Axelrod said on MSNBC's Morning Joe that "most people are going to keep their own plan." When asked about Axelrod's admission of "most" as opposed to all, White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledge that some individual's plans will be cancelled, but countered that the plans they switch to will be better and affordable.

"What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage," Carney said. "… So it's true that there are existing health-care plans on the individual market that don't meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act."

You can now buy your friend a Starbucks coffee on Twitter

The Seattle-based coffee behemoth recently launched a program called "Tweet-a-coffee." Here's how it works: Interested users link their Twitter and Starbucks accounts and set up a payment method. Then, it's as (supposedly) simple as tweeting "@tweetacoffee" with the recipient's Twitter handle. The lucky person gets a $5 Starbucks gift card, which can be redeemed on a smartphone

Astronomers discover most distant galaxy yet

Astronomers have found the most distant galaxy yet, a discovery that pushes back scientists' view of the universe to about 700 million years after it is thought to have come into existence.

"It could be that this one galaxy lives in an over-dense region of (ionized hydrogen) so we can see it ... but that's a little bit of conjecture. For all we know these other galaxies have just a lot more hydrogen gas within the galaxies themselves and that's why we can't see them," Finkelstein said

What Makes You Fat?

 

Why do so many of us get so fat? the answer appears obvious. “The fundamental cause of obesity and overweight,” the World Health Organization says, “is an energy imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended.”

 

 

Put simply, we either eat too much or are too sedentary, or both.

 

 



Russian Space Program

Russian Space program is for the journey outside Moscow to Star City, the formerly secret training facility for Soviet cosmonauts.

You can enjoy VIP viewing at the launch site to seethe Soyuz spacecraft break free of the earth’s atmosphere on its way to the International Space Station.

I have been staying in the US since 2011 Mar as a ESL Student. I came to the US to improve my English  to be fluent level by living and studying here with native speaker. I have lived in Naperville and commuted to Chicago downtown to go to school. My first 2years were in the BIR trainging center in Chicago. Now, I am taking a class at CSI for the Advanced Intensive English course. I hope that I can obtain a lot of vocabulary so that I can communicate with fluent English in the future.

Hi, How are you?