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.