ROME, May 20, 2012 (AFP) – Panicked people rushed into the streets when a powerful earthquake shook northern Italy early Sunday, killing three people and injuring at least 50, emergency services said.

The 5.9-magnitude quake struck around 0200 GMT and was felt throughout the northeast of the peninsula, from the Emilia-Romagna region to Venice, with its epicentre at Finale Emilia, 36 kilometres (22 miles) north of Bologna.

It took place at a depth of 10 kilometres (six miles) and lasted around 20 seconds, followed by several aftershocks.

Earlier a 4.1-magnitude quake shook the Lombardy region around Milan, Italy’s financial and business capital, and was felt in the historic cities of Modena, Mantua, Ferrara and Rovigo.

Rescue services said the three fatalities were workers on night shifts.

One man was killed when the workshop of a polystyrene factory collapsed at Ponte Rodoni di Bondeno, near Ferrara, and the two others in a ceramics factory at Sant-Agostino.

Another 50 people were lightly injured, none seriously, mostly in the Modena region.

In Bologna and several other cities thousands of people woken in the middle of the night by the tremor rushed out onto the streets in panic. Telephone switchboards of emergency services were inundated with calls.

First television footage showed half-collapsed houses with heaps of rubble on the roads. Several church steeples and towers also partly collapsed.

The region shaken by the quake is Italy’s industrial heartland but also home to priceless architectural and art treasures. The historic centre of Ferrara is classified as a world heritage site.

Hospitals were evacuated as a precautionary measure.

The family was murdered on Friday evening, the officials said, taking to 10 the overall death toll from violence in the Iraqi capital a day ago, and 15 in the past two days, a notable increase from what had been a relative calm.

“Gunmen used silenced pistols to kill Captain Mahmud Abid, his wife and his three children yesterday (Friday) evening in their home in Kadhimiyah,” a predominantly Shiite Muslim neighbourhood in north Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.

A medical official confirmed the deaths, and added that all three children were less than 10 years old. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

The killings came on the day when three near-simultaneous bomb blasts at a pet market in east Baghdad killed five people, and a day after a bomb attack at a restaurant in the capital’s southeast left five others dead.

Violence has diminished in Iraq since its heights in 2006 and 2007, but there are still regular attacks in the country.

In April, 126 Iraqis died in attacks nationwide, compared with 112 in March, the lowest figure since the 2003 US-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein.

A girl, whose age was not given, “did not survive”, Fabiano Amati, said on the television news channel Sky TG24, adding that “two other pupils are in a critical condition.”

The blast went off around 7:45 am (0545 GMT) as the students were arriving at the Francesca Morvillo Falcone vocational school.

First indications from security forces said the bomb had been placed in a container near the school.

According to the Internet site of the daily Repubblica there were two blasts, and the devices had apparently been left in backpacks in front of the school.

Italian media noted that the school is named after the wife of the famous anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.

The judge, his wife and their three bodyguards were killed 20 years ago on May 23 1992 when the Sicilian Mafia planted half a tonne of dynamite on the road between Palermo’s airport and the city centre.

President Mahinda Rajapakse, in an address to the nation, said he could not dismantle military camps in the embattled regions and undermine national security in a country emerging from nearly four decades of ethnic bloodshed.

“The diaspora has not stopped their activities (against Sri Lanka),” Rajapakse said, referring to Tamil separatists abroad. “It is no secret that LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) leaders are freely operating abroad.”

“Some are shouting remove camps, remove camps,” Rajapakse added in his televised speech made at a military parade grounds in the capital.

But “these camps are not in another country. We have troops elsewhere in the country as well.”

His remarks came hours after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris in Washington that Colombo should de-militarise the embattled north and do more to protect human rights.

Last month, a delegation of Indian lawmakers also asked Sri Lanka to de-militarise the northern region where the final battles were fought and the Tamil Tigers defeated in May 2009.

Rajapakse denied that his forces were involved in the civil administration in the Tamil-dominated north, but made it clear that troops would not be removed.

“What the Eelamist terrorists could not do (dislodge the army from the north) through decades of war, they are now trying to achieve through other means,” Rajapakse said. “We will not allow it.”

Rajapakse’s troops ended 37 years of ethnic bloodshed by killing the leadership of the Tamil Tigers in a no-holds-barred final offensive.

The offensive triggered allegations of war crimes with rights groups saying that up to 40,000 civilians perished in the last months of fighting alone.

The United Nations estimates some 100,000 people died during Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict between 1972 and 2009.

At least 1,200 officers will be deployed for the 14-hour rally in the retail heart of the city, where the 2010 protests in support of ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra descended into the kingdom’s worst violence in decades.

Police blocked traffic at the Ratchaprasong intersection, one of Bangkok’s busiest junctions, as busloads of Red Shirts from across the country arrived in the city centre a few hours ahead of the rally.

“We expect tens of thousands of them to join the anniversary,” Major General Worasak Nopsitthiporn, deputy commander of Bangkok Metropolitan Police Bureau, said.

“Traffic in front of Central World (a landmark shopping mall) is blocked after they set up the rally stage last night.”

Red Shirt leaders expect between 100,000 and 200,000 people at the rally, which will begin with Buddhist prayers for those killed in the 2010 unrest and see a live video link address from Red Shirt hero Thaksin, who lives overseas to avoid arrest in Thailand.

More than 90 people, mostly civilians, died in the 2010 violence, which marked the culmination of a series of rival protests since a 2006 coup that toppled Thaksin.

The Red Shirts and rights groups have called on the new government, led by Thaksin’s sister Yingluck, to prosecute soldiers and officials responsible for causing the deaths and injuries, many to unarmed demonstrators.

“We have to seek justice otherwise the use of force to crackdown on protesters may happen again,” Red Shirt leader Thida Thavorseth said Friday.

Thailand has seen a string of violent protests since 2005, involving the arch royalist and nationalist Yellow Shirts, the mainly rural working-class Red Shirts and several smaller factions.

Beijing aims to take advantage of “mostly US” defense-related technologies in the private sector in a concerted effort to modernize the country’s armed forces and extend China’s reach in the Asia-Pacific region, the Pentagon wrote in a report to Congress.

The annual assessment of China’s military resembled previous reports but adopted more diplomatic language, possibly to avoid aggravating delicate relations with Beijing, analysts said.

“I am struck by the decidedly mellow tone,” Christopher Johnson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told AFP.

Chinese officials are sure to privately welcome the report’s wording, after having been irritated by a strategy document issued by President Barack Obama in January that portrayed China as a military rival.

“This is much friendlier” than the January strategy paper, Johnson noted.

The report said Beijing had a goal of leveraging “legally and illegally acquired dual-use and military-related technologies to its advantage.”

“Interactions with Western aviation manufacturing firms may also inadvertently benefit China’s defense aviation industry,” the Pentagon warned.

Echoing recent warnings from intelligence officials, the Pentagon also blamed China for “many” of the world’s cyber intrusions over the past year targeting US government and commercial networks, including companies “that directly support US defense programs.”

The report warned that “Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage,” and predicted that those spying efforts would continue.

China’s investments in cyber warfare were cause for “concern,” said David Helvey, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and Asia Pacific security affairs.

Beijing was clearly “looking at ways to use cyber for offensive operations,” Helvey told reporters.

The American military has long worried that China could potentially limit the reach of US naval ships in the western Pacific with new weapons, and the Pentagon report underlined those concerns.

China “is also acquiring and fielding greater numbers of conventional medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) to increase the range at which it can conduct precision strikes against land targets and naval ships, including aircraft carriers, operating far from China’s shores beyond the first island chain,” said the report.

Beijing is pouring money into advanced air defenses, submarines, anti-satellite weapons and anti-ship missiles that could all be used to deny an adversary access to strategic areas, such as the South China Sea, it said.

US strategists — and some defense contractors — often refer to the threat posed by China’s so-called “carrier-killer” missiles, but Helvey said the anti-ship weapons currently have “limited operational capability.”

China’s military budget officially reached $106 billion in 2012, an 11.2 percent increase.

But the US report said China’s defense budget does not include major expenditures such as improvements to nuclear forces or purchases of foreign-made weapons. Real defense spending amounts to $120 to $180 billion, the report said.

US military spending, however, still dwarfs Chinese investments, with the Pentagon’s proposed budget for 2013 at more than $600 billion.

Despite a sustained increase in defense spending over the past decade, China has experienced setbacks with some satellite launches and ambitious projects to produce a fifth-generation fighter jet and modern aircraft carrier still face challenges, according to the report.

Although looking to expand its traditional missions to include counter-piracy and humanitarian efforts, the top priority of the People’s Liberation Army remains a possible conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

The report said China is focused on preventing the United States from intervening successfully in support of Taiwan.

The document was released as the House of Representatives voted to force the US government to sell 66 new fighter-jets to Taiwan.

President Barack Obama’s administration, anxious to keep ties with China on track, is only planning to upgrade existing planes. The measure still needs Senate approval.

Marco Antonio Avila Garcia, a police reporter with the newspaper El Regional de Sonora, was snatched at gunpoint on Thursday in Ciudad Obregon by three masked men who forced him to board their vehicle, a spokesman for the Sonora state prosecutor’s office said.

Police found Avila’s tortured body on the side of a highway in northwestern Mexico with a message from one of the drug cartels, the prosecutor’s spokesman Jose Larrinaga told AFP.

Avila was kidnapped while he was cleaning his vehicle at a car wash.

Police had questioned the 34-year-old reporter’s family and friends to try to determine who may have kidnapped him. Ciudad Obregon is located some 1,700 kilometers (1,000 miles) northwest of Mexico City.

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission says 80 journalists have been killed in the country since 2000, five of them in the past month. Fourteen others are missing, it said.

The men, who face a range of charges including directing terrorism, conspiracy to murder and attending a terrorist training camp, were arrested after a joint operation by police and domestic intelligence agency MI5.

“The charges, some of which have been used seldom in the past in Northern Ireland, are the result of an investigation led by police into dissident republican terrorist activity,” the Police Service of Northern Ireland said.

Three of the men were arrested on Monday in Lurgan, in the centre of the British province, the PSNI said.

A 47-year-old suspect was charged with directing terrorism as well as conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to cause an explosion, preparation of terrorist acts and collecting information of use to terrorism.

The other two men arrested in Lurgan, aged 41 and 42, face similar charges but are not accused of directing terrorism.

The trio will appear at Lisburn Magistrates’ Court on Saturday.

Police charged a further two men, aged 33 and 34, with possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life, attendance at a place used for terrorist training and preparation of terrorist acts.

The pair, who were arrested in Carrickmore and Omagh in the west of the province on May 12, are due to appear in court in Omagh on Saturday morning.

A man and a woman also arrested on May 12 as part of the same investigation remain in custody, police added.

Sporadic unrest and bomb threats continue in the province despite the 1998 peace accords that largely ended the Troubles, the three decades of sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics that left more than 3,000 dead.

Ban said President Bashar al-Assad has still not implemented a peace plan agreed with UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.

“Very alarmingly and surprisingly, a few days ago, there was a huge serious massive terrorist attack. I believe that there must be Al-Qaeda behind it. This has created again very serious problems,” Ban said at a youth event at the UN headquarters.

Suicide attackers detonated huge bombs in Damascus on May 10, killing at least 55 people and wounding nearly 400.

Syria has accused Al-Qaeda of orchestrating attacks in the country in recent weeks, adding to the strife caused by the uprising against Assad.

“More than 9,000, at least, maybe 10,000 people have been killed during the last 15 months. It has reached an intolerable situation now,” Ban said.

US and Russian officials have also said they believe Al-Qaeda and other violent militants are now operating in the country.

This month, Syria sent the United Nations the names of 26 mainly Tunisian and Libyan nationals it said had been detained. About 20 had confessed they were members of Al-Qaeda, according to a letter sent with the list.

Ban also highlighted two bomb attacks against convoys of UN ceasefire monitors in Syria.

The UN secretary-general said that apart from the deployment of the monitors, no part of the six-point Annan plan has been implemented.

“We are trying our best efforts to protect the civilian population,” Ban said.

The deployment of the monitors has had a “dampening effect” and reduced the violence, “but not enough, not all the violence has stopped. So we will continue, as much as we can, to protect the civilian population,” he added.

The bus was travelling from Buon Ma Thuot city in the central highlands to southern Ho Chi Minh City, a policeman in Krong Pak district where the accident took place late Thursday said on condition of anonymity.

“We are investigating the cause of the accident and identifying the victims,” he told AFP on Friday.

The wreckage of the bus was raised from the Serepok river bed early Friday, he said.

A total of 54 people, including the driver, were believed to be on the bus.

Road accidents are common in communist Vietnam and kill about 35 people every day. Narrow highways, poorly maintained vehicles and drivers’ disregard for road safety and traffic rules are blamed for most fatalities.