Finally India gets its raw star ritu raj has won. I liked all his shows .surely he deserves its . congratulations Rituraj.Ghar chod kar bhaga , bhagya saath lekar ghar lotega apne maaa baap ke paas. Once again congratulations from our team www.fortunedial.com . Sukhman Property Advisor . Bachher Property Linkers .
30/11/2014
05/10/2014
14/08/2014
04/08/2014
26/07/2014
24/06/2014
23/06/2014
Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
'Right-to-try'
for the terminally ill
WASHINGTON — Fifteen-year old Austin Leclaire and his brother Max, 12, of
Pembroke, Mass., share the deadly degenerative diseaseBut over the course of the past 144 weeks, the boys' physical
conditions have progressed in opposite directions.Max has regained functions — he has abandoned his wheelchair and can now run, tote his own backpack to school and even ride a bike. Austin's capabilities are diminishing. He cannot walk at all, and he's lost the ability to brush his teeth or hold a water bottle. He expects that soon he won't be able to play drums anymore, one of his few remaining physical pleasures.
The difference in their trajectories is that Max has been in a clinical trial for nearly three years, during which he has been given weekly infusions of the experimental drug eteplirsen, manufactured by Sarepta Therapeutics Inc. Austin was deemed unqualified to get the drug because of his more advanced condition.
Withholding experimental drugs from the most gravely ill has fueled several states to pass so-called "right-to-try" legislation that would make these drugs available without Food and Drug Administration approval to terminally ill patients with no other options.
Some critics of the yearslong FDA drug approval process, with its requirement for multiple clinical trials, contend that it is much longer than it should be, thereby keeping some promising drugs from those who might benefit, particularly those, like Austin, with time running out. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development says it normally takes 5 1/2 to 10 1/2 years for a drug to receive FDA approval.
Because of that, Colorado, Missouri and Louisiana all passed right-to-try legislation this year that would enable those with terminal illnesses and no other treatment options to secure investigational drugs after their first phase of clinical trials (there usually are at least three) before final FDA approval if the drug manufacturer is willing to provide them. Arizona voters will decide a similar measure in a referendum in November.
The legislation passed overwhelmingly and with bipartisan support, often after lawmakers heard anguished testimony from terminally ill patients or their families.
The laws would cut the FDA out of the process, at least in terms of an individual terminally ill patient. The decision would be left entirely in the hands of the patient, the doctor and the drug company.
Whether these laws would withstand a court challenge is an open question. Typically, state laws cannot supersede federal statutes. Even if the laws don't withstand a challenge, advocates say, they may serve a valuable service in spotlighting the issue.
"(A lawsuit) wouldn't be all bad news because it would further elevate this issue in the public arena and put pressure on Congress and the FDA to make this change and literally save thousands of lives every year," said Frank Burroughs, head of the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs, which he founded 13 years ago after his 21-year-old daughter died of cancer.
So far, only Colorado's law has taken effect, a little over a month ago. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative nonprofit that defends states' rights, created the model legislation for the new laws. While it has received word of interest, no patients have yet formally tried to receive an experimental drug under the new law, the institute said.
Under FDA rules for drug testing, Phase One, the first studies to use human subjects, is quite limited in the number of patient participants (typically 20 to 80, according to the FDA website on the drug approval process). This first step is intended to determine the drug's most frequent side effects and how the drug is metabolized and excreted.
If Phase One doesn't reveal unacceptable toxicity, the drug can be approved for Phase Two trials, where the emphasis is on testing the effectiveness of the drug. This stage can involve a few dozen to 300 patients. If the drug passes muster, it goes onto Phase Three, which gathers additional evidence on safety and effectiveness and involves from several hundred to 3,000 subjects.
In the Leclaire brothers' case, those selected for the trial had to still be ambulatory most of the time, but with the expectation that their walking days would end within a year, said Jenn McNary, the boys' mother. Max fell down occasionally, but he still didn't need the wheelchair most of the time. Austin no longer qualified.
So even as Austin has watched Max get stronger from the drug treatments, he wonders what motor skill he will lose next. And while he hopes s one day to earn degrees in mechanical engineering and zoology, he is aware that those with his condition rarely survive their 20s.
"I'm glad that Max has (the treatments), and he's proving that it does work, and I should have it, too," Austin said by phone from home. "But it's also unfair. ... I'm just really upset that the FDA won't approve the drug, and it's their fault that someone might die."
The FDA has taken no official position on the new laws. "While the agency is supportive of patients' access to experimental new treatments, the FDA believes that the drug approval process represents the best way to assure the development of safe and effective new medicines for patients," an FDA statement said.
Although there are already provisions in place that allow for expedited approval of drugs and to make certain experimental drugs available to individuals prior to final approval, the Goldwater Institute insists that even those procedures take too long for a person whose time is running out. "A lot of patients don't have five or six months" that those procedures take, said Victor Riches, a Goldwater spokesman.
The FDA said it receives about 550 applications a year from drug companies to supply drugs to individuals before final approval and agrees to nearly all of them.
But that doesn't account for patients who have been turned down by manufacturers, such as Holly Singh, a Texas second-grade teacher whose 14-month-old daughter, Harper, has spinal muscular dystrophy, which leaves her incapable of picking her head up, crawling or rolling over. Without help, her life expectancy is quite limited.
Singh applied to Isis Pharmaceuticals, developer of the promising drug, ISIS-SMN-rx, which is soon to enter Phase Three clinical testing, for early access to the drug. In turning down her request, Isis chairman Stan Crooke raised the possibility that granting it could have prolonged the overall testing program and delayed the drug's approval for other patients. He also said that all the safety concerns had not been fully addressed.
Singh's correspondence with Crooke demonstrates her desperation. She wrote, "What kind of mother would I be if I just told my child, 'I'm sorry that there's a drug, but unfortunately you can't have it. You just need to suffer a little while longer.' "
While sympathetic to the situation of individual patients, the pharmaceutical industry has been far from enthusiastic about the right-to-try laws.
"We have serious concerns with any approach to make investigational medicines available that seeks to bypass the oversight of the Food and Drug Administration and clinical trial process, which is not in the best interest of patients and public health," said Sascha Haverfield, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. He suggested that medical providers, the pharmaceutical industry and FDA should seek ways to improve access to clinical trials.
Critics of the new laws contend that Phase One trials are too limited to assure that a drug can be safely used. "Safety (in Phase One) is tested in only the crudest way you can imagine, making sure it doesn't kill people," said David Gorski, an associate professor of surgery at Wayne State University and the editor of the Science-Based Medicine blog, which has been critical of right-to-try laws. Even for terminally ill patients, Gorski argues, the risks are too great based solely on Phase One trials.
"They say it couldn't get any worse." Gorski said. "Well, yes, it can get worse. If there's anything worse than dying of a terminal disease, it's added suffering and potentially cutting the time you have left."
According to a January article in the journal Nature Biotechnology, only 16 percent of investigational drugs that complete Phase One clinical trials ultimately gain FDA approval.
Still, patients and families say they feel that they should be free to take the chance given that the alternative is death. "I should be able to take the risk of whether or not it would help," said Austin Leclaire. "It's my life."
22/06/2014
Tallest tree (morphanki ) in amritsar
11 years old Tree
Person claiming it the tallest tree of its kind ( morpankhi )
in amrtsar .Height 20.5 ft from ground .N.G.Avenue , Amritsar
Person claiming it the tallest tree of its kind ( morpankhi )
in amrtsar .Height 20.5 ft from ground .N.G.Avenue , Amritsar
healthy diet
Fun fun food
Water melon with no loss of vitamins ,
You use this water melon skull for display of salads .
Try Pickles on Dinnig table preserved in the skull covered for at least 1 hour .
Try boiled Pulses and cereals like Grams (black.white ) , Dals , eat Indian Chat in it
Graze thin layers of white part of the water melon skull ,pour vinegar in the skull to dip the pieces only wait for 15 mins and eat it with breakfast , lunch , dinner . You will like it
 |
| Try this at home and Restaurant owners for biz |
21/06/2014
15/06/2014
12/06/2014
10/06/2014
09/06/2014
This Domain Is for sale
www.quicr.in
For sale $ 15000
Quality visitors
Contact : Amritpal singh
Cell No.: 9256049541
For sale $ 15000
Quality visitors
Contact : Amritpal singh
Cell No.: 9256049541
06/06/2014
Trace of another world on moon
Trace of another world found on Moon
Researchers have found evidence of
the world that crashed into the Earth billions of years ago to form the Moon.
Analysis of lunar rock brought back
by Apollo astronauts shows traces of the "planet" called Theia.
The researchers claim that their
discovery confirms the theory that the Moon was created by just such a
cataclysmic collision.
The study has been published in the
journal Science.
The accepted theory since the 1980s
is that the Moon arose as a result of a collision between the Earth and Theia
4.5bn years ago.
Theia was named after a goddess in
Greek mythology who was said to be the mother Selene the goddess of the Moon.
It is thought to have disintegrated on impact with the resulting debris
mingling with that from the Earth and coalescing into the Moon.
It is the simplest explanation, and
fits in well with computer simulations. The main drawback with the theory is
that no one had found any evidence of Theia in lunar rock samples.
Earlier analyses had shown Moon rock
to have originated entirely from the Earth whereas computer simulations had
shown that the Moon ought to have been mostly derived from Theia
Alien
origin
Now a more refined analysis of Moon
rock has found evidence of material thought to have an alien origin.
According to the lead researcher, Dr
Daniel Herwartz, from the University of Goettingen, no one has found definitive
evidence for the collision theory, until now.
"It was getting to the stage where some people were suggesting that the
collision had not taken place," he told BBC News. "But we have now discovered small differences between the Earth and the Moon. This confirms the giant impact hypothesis."
But the difference, some say, could be explained by material absorbed by the Earth after the Moon formed.
And Prof Alex Halliday of Oxford University, is among many scientists who are surprised at the difference between the Theian material found in the Moon rock and the Earth is so small.
"What you are looking for is a much bigger difference, because that is what the rest of the Solar System looks like based on meteorite measurements," he said.
Dr Herwartz measured the difference in what is called the isotopic composition of the oxygen contained in rocks on Earth and Moon rock. This is the ratio of different forms of oxygen.
Studies of meteorites from Mars and the outer solar system show that these ratios are markedly different - rather like a fingerprint. So Prof Halliday and others are puzzled by the fact that the fingerprints of Earth and Theia seem almost identical.
Similar composition
One possibility is that Theia was formed very close the Earth and so had a similar composition. If that was the case it raises the possibility that the assumption that each planet in the current Solar System has a markedly different fingerprint that needs to be revisited, according to Prof Halliday."It raises the question of how well the meteorites from Mars and the asteroid belt in the outer Solar System is representative of the inner Solar System? We do not have samples from Mercury or Venus.
"They may well be similar to the Earth. If that is the case then all the arguments over the similarities of the Earth and the Moon fall away," he told BBC News.
Dr Mahesh Anand from The Open University described the research as "exciting" but noted that the data was from just three lunar rock samples.
"We have to be cautious about representativeness of these rocks of the entire Moon, and so further analysis of a variety of lunar rocks is required for further confirmation," he said.
Other theories have been proposed to explain why the composition of the Earth and Moon are so similar: one is that the Earth spun much faster before impact, another is that Theia was much larger than current models suggest.
An alternative, controversial, theory proposed by Prof Rob de Meijer of Groningen University in the Netherlands was that the Earth's crust and mantle was blown into space by an accumulation of nuclear material 2,900km (1,800 miles) below the surface. It was this debris that clumped together to form the Moon.
He told BBC News that the new finding - demonstrating that there was a difference in
the composition of the Earth and the Moon - did not change his view.
"The difference is too small," he said. "We don't know how the Moon was formed. What we need are manned missions to the Moon and a search for rocks deeper under the lunar surface, that have not been polluted by meteorite impacts and the solar wind."
02/06/2014
26/05/2014
You are invited to join the group
Discussions group for the need of help to others from ou views .
Only if you really are are good hearted on e you would join , Because discussions is meant for helping each other from our views
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1393597637529478/
Only if you really are are good hearted on e you would join , Because discussions is meant for helping each other from our views
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1393597637529478/
22/05/2014
Hooray the hacker has lost
I with the help of my friend has got hold of my quicr.in controls from the clutches of the hacker.
Hooray.
Cheers cheers
Hooray.
Cheers cheers
18/05/2014
17/05/2014
Guess the dish i am enjoying .
See for yourself search what taste it can be
Sour
Sweet
Chiilli
Veg or non veg
with cup of sugar free coffee and news
See for yourself search what taste it can be
Sour
Sweet
Chiilli
Veg or non veg
with cup of sugar free coffee and news
Tiring evening for me , what should i do ?
Thinking of playing Chess with a cup of sugar free hard coffee , with AAJ TAK news .
Watch for yourself the right channel
Thinking of playing Chess with a cup of sugar free hard coffee , with AAJ TAK news .
Watch for yourself the right channel
16/05/2014
12/05/2014
10/05/2014
Quote of the Day
What do you think of when you leave home for office or work?
I leave it to god and believe me he does the best
Quote of the Day
Leave your worries to God and do the best you can
09/05/2014
07/05/2014
I am opening a free computer training institute for all classes people young or old who are interested .
I have a suitable place also . The students will have to pay 0 fees and i will provide a certificate also after completion of the course .I have seen that today jobs are related with Computers . I have no moral support from my family . I have finance but i need the support of my friends because with the good wishes of friends i will be successfull.
I have a suitable place also . The students will have to pay 0 fees and i will provide a certificate also after completion of the course .I have seen that today jobs are related with Computers . I have no moral support from my family . I have finance but i need the support of my friends because with the good wishes of friends i will be successfull.
06/05/2014
Online scams
Previously since the start of internet use and upto now mostly people all over the world are got trapped with online income generators or earn online or work from home ,earned $4 lk etc.,
But to my distress i have come to notice mostly people are going on clicking to the sights provided by these fraudy ad placers about online income and so on.
Some sites which are shut down without paying payouts to their users,.
Like gigamails.com , cherrymails.com, firemails.com,superpaymails.com , emailpaysu.comand many other sites which have put people to distress as they have paid to some online ad about earn from home and so on and as to yet not recieved pay outs for clicking ads and emails.
Beware from such fraudy ads on line or you will get depressed from such deals
Have a nice day
But to my distress i have come to notice mostly people are going on clicking to the sights provided by these fraudy ad placers about online income and so on.
Some sites which are shut down without paying payouts to their users,.
Like gigamails.com , cherrymails.com, firemails.com,superpaymails.com , emailpaysu.comand many other sites which have put people to distress as they have paid to some online ad about earn from home and so on and as to yet not recieved pay outs for clicking ads and emails.
Beware from such fraudy ads on line or you will get depressed from such deals
Have a nice day
04/05/2014
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Free advisor available
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Free advisor available
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03/05/2014
get readynforCrorepati registartion
Crorepati a leading quiz and entertainment host Amitabh Bachhan
win name and fame
win name and fame
02/05/2014
crorepati registration starts on 5th may
Crorepati a indian star plus channel programe , whenever emerges on the star plus screen , people sit tight lipped . Ssssssshhhhhh even i enjoy it . Major general knowledge gainer for childrens to oldest . do see .
25/04/2014
Teen blogger Dying of cancer
LIKE
A Like is a mark of goodness at this stage
Teen blogger dying of cancer writes 'final thumbs up'
Please like this as i think it deserves a sentimental tribute to the lively man.
hope for a miracle because everything is possible on earth
20/04/2014
Boston Marathon
Boston Marathon looks to shake shadow of 2013 bombing
BOSTON - Runners, from the world's elite racers to first-timers, will step to the Boston Marathon starting line on Monday for the first running of the world-renowned race since last year's deadly bombing attack.
Some 36,000 people, the second-largest field in the race's 118-year history, will set out from Hopkinton, a town west of Boston, for the 26.2-mile race that finishes on Boston's Boylston Street, where two homemade pressure-cooker bombs last year killed three people and injured 264.
For the top men and women runners, including 2013 winners Ethiopia's Lelisa Desisa and Kenya's Rita Jeptoo, the focus will be entirely on the competition.
The fans, hundreds of thousands of whom are expected to line the course, will also be rooting for top U.S. entrants including Ryan Hall of California and Desiree Linden of Michigan. Either could be the first American to stand atop the podium in three decades, breaking a long domination of the event by African athletes.
A heavy police presence is planned and racers and supporters will face new restrictions including a ban on backpacks, which the ethnic Chechen brothers accused in the April 15, 2013, attack were believed to have used to carry the bombs.
While the memory of the attacks has hung heavy over Boston through the week of events leading up to the race, Linden said it wouldn't affect her thinking come race day.
"That's a backward thought process," said Linden, who in 2011 finished in second place, missing victory by two seconds. "I don't need a terrorist event to be motivated. I'm inspired by the city and the people and I'll honor that ... Boston is such a big event in itself that you don't need extra motivation, especially not that kind."
Race organizers, the Boston Athletic Association, admitted an additional 9,000 runners this year, in part to ensure that the roughly 5,000 people on the course when the blasts occurred get a chance to cross this finish line.
Many runners train for years to post the fast, age-graded qualifying times needed to earn a spot, while others commit to raising thousands of dollars for charity.
SENSE OF CLOSURE
This year's race could bring a sense of closure for some concerning the attack, experts said. Memories of the horrific incident were stirred after a memorial service on Tuesday, when a shoeless man in a black veil, shouting "Boston Strong" dropped a backpack on the street near the finish line.Police said the backpack contained a rice cooker. The man was arrested and charged with possession of a hoax device.
"Loose ends are a nagging source of stress," said Joseph Tecce, an associate professor of psychology at Boston College, who added that seeing a race go off smoothly could help people overcome their memories of the attack. "There will be fears, nagging doubts and insecurities, but there will also be an anticipation that it's all going to go away if we just wait until April 21, when people start hitting the street again."
One runner who may know more than most about helping a society overcome lingering fears of an attack is Lukman Faily, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States.
Faily will run to show solidarity with the people of Boston and the United States. It will not be his first marathon, as he also ran after the 2011 Fukushima tsunami while stationed in Japan.
"We will stand with each other in defying terrorism and making a pure sporting event, a sporting statement that terrorism will never prevail," Faily said. "If the marathon was stopped because of last year's event, then they would have won."
Some 36,000 people, the second-largest field in the race's 118-year history, will set out from Hopkinton, a town west of Boston, for the 26.2-mile race that finishes on Boston's Boylston Street, where two homemade pressure-cooker bombs last year killed three people and injured 264.
For the top men and women runners, including 2013 winners Ethiopia's Lelisa Desisa and Kenya's Rita Jeptoo, the focus will be entirely on the competition.
The fans, hundreds of thousands of whom are expected to line the course, will also be rooting for top U.S. entrants including Ryan Hall of California and Desiree Linden of Michigan. Either could be the first American to stand atop the podium in three decades, breaking a long domination of the event by African athletes.
A heavy police presence is planned and racers and supporters will face new restrictions including a ban on backpacks, which the ethnic Chechen brothers accused in the April 15, 2013, attack were believed to have used to carry the bombs.
While the memory of the attacks has hung heavy over Boston through the week of events leading up to the race, Linden said it wouldn't affect her thinking come race day.
"That's a backward thought process," said Linden, who in 2011 finished in second place, missing victory by two seconds. "I don't need a terrorist event to be motivated. I'm inspired by the city and the people and I'll honor that ... Boston is such a big event in itself that you don't need extra motivation, especially not that kind."
Race organizers, the Boston Athletic Association, admitted an additional 9,000 runners this year, in part to ensure that the roughly 5,000 people on the course when the blasts occurred get a chance to cross this finish line.
Many runners train for years to post the fast, age-graded qualifying times needed to earn a spot, while others commit to raising thousands of dollars for charity.
SENSE OF CLOSURE
This year's race could bring a sense of closure for some concerning the attack, experts said. Memories of the horrific incident were stirred after a memorial service on Tuesday, when a shoeless man in a black veil, shouting "Boston Strong" dropped a backpack on the street near the finish line.Police said the backpack contained a rice cooker. The man was arrested and charged with possession of a hoax device.
"Loose ends are a nagging source of stress," said Joseph Tecce, an associate professor of psychology at Boston College, who added that seeing a race go off smoothly could help people overcome their memories of the attack. "There will be fears, nagging doubts and insecurities, but there will also be an anticipation that it's all going to go away if we just wait until April 21, when people start hitting the street again."
One runner who may know more than most about helping a society overcome lingering fears of an attack is Lukman Faily, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States.
Faily will run to show solidarity with the people of Boston and the United States. It will not be his first marathon, as he also ran after the 2011 Fukushima tsunami while stationed in Japan.
"We will stand with each other in defying terrorism and making a pure sporting event, a sporting statement that terrorism will never prevail," Faily said. "If the marathon was stopped because of last year's event, then they would have won."
19/04/2014
Quest for extraterrestrial life not over: experts
PARIS, April 18, 2014 (AFP) - The discovery of an Earth-sized planet in the "habitable" zone of a distant star, though exciting, is still a long way from pointing to the existence of extraterrestrial life, experts said Friday.
The planet, dubbed Kepler-186f, is the first of this size found orbiting its star at a distance that would allow it to have liquid water -- a prerequisite for the development of life, whether primitive or complex.
But whether it has any, we may never know.
"Unfortunately, the system is too far away and too faint to know more," Heike Rauer of the German Aerospace Centre's Institute for Planetary Research told AFP.
"We don't know for sure whether it is rocky, we don't know for sure that it has an atmosphere, what this atmosphere is made of, or that it has water," she said.
"We know how we want to measure it: by taking a spectrum of the atmosphere, but with current and next foreseen technology, we cannot take this spectrum."
Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at France's CNRS national research centre who was a member of the team that discovered the planet, agreed we won't know how hospitable Kepler-186f is for quite some time. If ever.
"We are not even close to having the means with which to take these measurements," he said. "We will have to wait for the next generation of space telescopes, in 10 or 20 years."
- Are we alone? - The exoplanet, some 500 lightyears from Earth, shows that potentially habitable worlds can exist.
Other exoplanets found within their stars' habitable zones have been gas giants -- this one's size may mean it is a rocky planet, another condition for life to take root.
Science has invested much time and resources into finding so-called exoplanets, which revolve around stars other than our Sun.
The quest is targeted mainly at answering the question: "Are we alone?", but also to find clues as to how and why life on Earth began.
Rauer, who will head the European Space Agency's (ESA) PLATO planet-hunting mission, due for launch in 2024, said the first dedicated searches started in the mid-1990's, with telescopes on the ground measuring the mass of distance planets.
This was followed in the next decade by satellites determining their radius.
NASA's Kepler space observatory, which spotted the new planet, was dedicated exclusively to the task of finding exoplanets -- it has found 3,600 planet candidates of which 961 have been confirmed so far.
Future missions like PLATO will seek to detect Earth-like planets orbiting stars that are brighter than Kepler-186f and closer to our own planet -- which should make it easier to detect life, if there is any.
"In the next decades, we will be able to get answers, but in other systems" than Kepler-186f, said Rauer.
Fabio Favata, coordinator of ESA's science and robotics exploration programme, said that while Kepler-186f is the only planet of its size found in a habitable zone to date, that may soon change.
"We are in a golden era of exoplanet discoveries. So far it is unique, but will it stay so? I am ready to bet you money that it won't."
The search for a planet capable of hosting life remains an academic pursuit -- there is no solar system close enough for mankind to ever reach it, unless we develop time travel. Kepler-186f is so far from Earth that "if you could build a perfect spaceship that can travel close to the speed of light, to go there and back would still take more than 1,000 years," said Favata.
The planet, dubbed Kepler-186f, is the first of this size found orbiting its star at a distance that would allow it to have liquid water -- a prerequisite for the development of life, whether primitive or complex.
But whether it has any, we may never know.
"Unfortunately, the system is too far away and too faint to know more," Heike Rauer of the German Aerospace Centre's Institute for Planetary Research told AFP.
"We don't know for sure whether it is rocky, we don't know for sure that it has an atmosphere, what this atmosphere is made of, or that it has water," she said.
"We know how we want to measure it: by taking a spectrum of the atmosphere, but with current and next foreseen technology, we cannot take this spectrum."
Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at France's CNRS national research centre who was a member of the team that discovered the planet, agreed we won't know how hospitable Kepler-186f is for quite some time. If ever.
"We are not even close to having the means with which to take these measurements," he said. "We will have to wait for the next generation of space telescopes, in 10 or 20 years."
- Are we alone? - The exoplanet, some 500 lightyears from Earth, shows that potentially habitable worlds can exist.
Other exoplanets found within their stars' habitable zones have been gas giants -- this one's size may mean it is a rocky planet, another condition for life to take root.
Science has invested much time and resources into finding so-called exoplanets, which revolve around stars other than our Sun.
The quest is targeted mainly at answering the question: "Are we alone?", but also to find clues as to how and why life on Earth began.
Rauer, who will head the European Space Agency's (ESA) PLATO planet-hunting mission, due for launch in 2024, said the first dedicated searches started in the mid-1990's, with telescopes on the ground measuring the mass of distance planets.
This was followed in the next decade by satellites determining their radius.
NASA's Kepler space observatory, which spotted the new planet, was dedicated exclusively to the task of finding exoplanets -- it has found 3,600 planet candidates of which 961 have been confirmed so far.
Future missions like PLATO will seek to detect Earth-like planets orbiting stars that are brighter than Kepler-186f and closer to our own planet -- which should make it easier to detect life, if there is any.
"In the next decades, we will be able to get answers, but in other systems" than Kepler-186f, said Rauer.
Fabio Favata, coordinator of ESA's science and robotics exploration programme, said that while Kepler-186f is the only planet of its size found in a habitable zone to date, that may soon change.
"We are in a golden era of exoplanet discoveries. So far it is unique, but will it stay so? I am ready to bet you money that it won't."
The search for a planet capable of hosting life remains an academic pursuit -- there is no solar system close enough for mankind to ever reach it, unless we develop time travel. Kepler-186f is so far from Earth that "if you could build a perfect spaceship that can travel close to the speed of light, to go there and back would still take more than 1,000 years," said Favata.
Looming, creeping landslide splits home in Wyoming
JACKSON, Wyo. — A sudden lurch in a creeping landslide in the northwest Wyoming resort town of Jackson split a house in two and forced workers to abandon just-begun efforts to stabilize the hillside.
A huge crack in the ground that had opened up under the house a couple weeks ago shifted several feet downhill in less than a day, breaking off a room or two and leaving a door swinging above the precipice. Rocks and dirt tumbled down in an almost constant stream and a geologist warned much bigger chunks could fall. The ground had been moving at a rate of an inch a day.
"As it starts to get moving, it will start to get faster," George Machan, a landslide specialist consulting for the town, said at a town meeting Friday.
Still, Machan said the ground was unlikely to liquefy and collapse suddenly like the March 22 landslide in Oso, Wash., that killed 39 people. More likely, large blocks of earth would tumble down piece by piece, he said, perpetuating the drawn-out threat to four homes on the hill and to two apartment buildings and four businesses below.
Town officials first noticed significant hill movement April 4. They evacuated 42 homes and apartment units April 9.
Between Thursday night and Friday morning, the shifting earth had bulged a road and a parking lot at the foot of the hill by as much as 10 feet. The groundswell pushed a small Efforts to slow the slide — such as pouring rock and dirt fill behind large, L-shaped concrete barriers arranged in a line at the base of the slide — were on hold to keep workers out of the danger zone.
"It's really not safe to put people out there. You try to do what you can, but at some point you're really restricted from entering the area," Machan said.
On a town webcam, pedestrians could be seen pausing in the rain now and then to gawk at the slide zone that's as big as three or four football fields. Cars and trucks on West Broadway also slowed occasionally, the cause of at least one fender-bender Friday and a police warning for lollygaggers.
"Everybody's looking over there instead of looking where they're driving," Lt. Cole Nethercott said.
On Monday, town officials lifted the evacuation for residents of about 30 homes outside the high-risk zone but said they couldn't drive on the neighborhood street. They've had to walk to and from home by cutting across private property.
On Friday, not even work crews could drive on Budge Drive, which was buckled several feet.
Town officials said they didn't know what was causing the slide but noted the area has seen considerable road-grading over the past few decades. The latest work was last year's construction of the Walgreens drug store, which opened in January.
A huge crack in the ground that had opened up under the house a couple weeks ago shifted several feet downhill in less than a day, breaking off a room or two and leaving a door swinging above the precipice. Rocks and dirt tumbled down in an almost constant stream and a geologist warned much bigger chunks could fall. The ground had been moving at a rate of an inch a day.
"As it starts to get moving, it will start to get faster," George Machan, a landslide specialist consulting for the town, said at a town meeting Friday.
Still, Machan said the ground was unlikely to liquefy and collapse suddenly like the March 22 landslide in Oso, Wash., that killed 39 people. More likely, large blocks of earth would tumble down piece by piece, he said, perpetuating the drawn-out threat to four homes on the hill and to two apartment buildings and four businesses below.
Town officials first noticed significant hill movement April 4. They evacuated 42 homes and apartment units April 9.
Between Thursday night and Friday morning, the shifting earth had bulged a road and a parking lot at the foot of the hill by as much as 10 feet. The groundswell pushed a small Efforts to slow the slide — such as pouring rock and dirt fill behind large, L-shaped concrete barriers arranged in a line at the base of the slide — were on hold to keep workers out of the danger zone.
"It's really not safe to put people out there. You try to do what you can, but at some point you're really restricted from entering the area," Machan said.
On a town webcam, pedestrians could be seen pausing in the rain now and then to gawk at the slide zone that's as big as three or four football fields. Cars and trucks on West Broadway also slowed occasionally, the cause of at least one fender-bender Friday and a police warning for lollygaggers.
"Everybody's looking over there instead of looking where they're driving," Lt. Cole Nethercott said.
On Monday, town officials lifted the evacuation for residents of about 30 homes outside the high-risk zone but said they couldn't drive on the neighborhood street. They've had to walk to and from home by cutting across private property.
On Friday, not even work crews could drive on Budge Drive, which was buckled several feet.
Town officials said they didn't know what was causing the slide but noted the area has seen considerable road-grading over the past few decades. The latest work was last year's construction of the Walgreens drug store, which opened in January.
18/04/2014
Drone risks damage at Record depth in search for malaysian plane
PERTH, Australia (Reuters) - An underwater drone scouring the Indian Ocean floor for a missing Malaysian jetliner has dived to its deepest ever level, putting its equipment at unprecedented risk, as hopes dwindled that it might soon turn up some sign of wreckage.
The U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 and its "side scan" sonar has become the focal point of the search some 2,000 km (1,200 miles) west of the Australian city of Perth, where authorities believe Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 hit the ocean after disappearing from radars on March 8 with 239 people on board.
The search has centered on a city-sized area where a series of "pings" led authorities to believe the plane's black box may be located. But after more than a week without a signal, and almost two weeks past the black box battery's life expectancy, authorities have turned to the Bluefin-21.
But the Bluefin-21's searches of the largely unmapped ocean floor have been frustrated by an automatic safety mechanism which sends it to the surface when it exceeds a depth of 4.5 km (14,763 feet). Its searches have yet to find any sign of the plane.
On Friday, as searchers waited for the remote-control submarine to return from its fifth mission, the U.S. Navy said the Bluefin-21 had gone to a record depth of 4,695 meters (15,403 feet) in its previous mission.
"This is the first time the Bluefin-21 has descended to this depth," U.S. Navy spokesman Lieutenant Junior Grade Daniel S. Marciniak said in a statement. "Diving to such depths does carry with it some residual risk to the equipment and this is being carefully monitored by the U.S. Navy and (Bluefin-21 owner) Phoenix International."
He also confirmed that the Bluefin-21's search area had been reduced based on further analysis of the initial signals believed to have come from the plane's black box. Authorities have said the U.S. Navy's previous estimate, that the Bluefin-21's hunt may take two months, was also wrong and the drone was focusing on a "reduced and more focused underwater search area".
But on Friday, the Perth-based Joint Agency Coordination Centre said that up to 11 military aircraft and 12 ships would join in the search across 52,000 square km (32 square miles) of ocean. Marciniak said U.S. patrol aircraft "continue to support the search effort".
That would suggest searchers, under pressure from the families of those on board the plane that was on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared, still hold some hope of finding floating wreckage.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was quoted by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday as saying that "we believe that (underwater) search will be completed within a week or so. If we don't find wreckage, we stop, we regroup, we reconsider".
Asked by Reuters to clarify Abbott's comments to the newspaper, his office said he was only suggesting that authorities may change the area being searched by the Bluefin-21 drone, not that the search would be called off. Malaysia's defence minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, vowed that the search would continue even if there could be a pause to regroup and reconsider the best area to scour.
"The search will always continue. It's just a matter of approach," he told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
He said Abbott remained in close contact with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and the two had spoken on Thursday to discuss the search.
The U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 and its "side scan" sonar has become the focal point of the search some 2,000 km (1,200 miles) west of the Australian city of Perth, where authorities believe Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 hit the ocean after disappearing from radars on March 8 with 239 people on board.
The search has centered on a city-sized area where a series of "pings" led authorities to believe the plane's black box may be located. But after more than a week without a signal, and almost two weeks past the black box battery's life expectancy, authorities have turned to the Bluefin-21.
But the Bluefin-21's searches of the largely unmapped ocean floor have been frustrated by an automatic safety mechanism which sends it to the surface when it exceeds a depth of 4.5 km (14,763 feet). Its searches have yet to find any sign of the plane.
On Friday, as searchers waited for the remote-control submarine to return from its fifth mission, the U.S. Navy said the Bluefin-21 had gone to a record depth of 4,695 meters (15,403 feet) in its previous mission.
"This is the first time the Bluefin-21 has descended to this depth," U.S. Navy spokesman Lieutenant Junior Grade Daniel S. Marciniak said in a statement. "Diving to such depths does carry with it some residual risk to the equipment and this is being carefully monitored by the U.S. Navy and (Bluefin-21 owner) Phoenix International."
He also confirmed that the Bluefin-21's search area had been reduced based on further analysis of the initial signals believed to have come from the plane's black box. Authorities have said the U.S. Navy's previous estimate, that the Bluefin-21's hunt may take two months, was also wrong and the drone was focusing on a "reduced and more focused underwater search area".
NO END IN SIGHT
On Monday, the search coordinator, retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said the air and surface search for debris would likely end in three days as the operation shifted its focus to the ocean floor.But on Friday, the Perth-based Joint Agency Coordination Centre said that up to 11 military aircraft and 12 ships would join in the search across 52,000 square km (32 square miles) of ocean. Marciniak said U.S. patrol aircraft "continue to support the search effort".
That would suggest searchers, under pressure from the families of those on board the plane that was on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it disappeared, still hold some hope of finding floating wreckage.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was quoted by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday as saying that "we believe that (underwater) search will be completed within a week or so. If we don't find wreckage, we stop, we regroup, we reconsider".
Asked by Reuters to clarify Abbott's comments to the newspaper, his office said he was only suggesting that authorities may change the area being searched by the Bluefin-21 drone, not that the search would be called off. Malaysia's defence minister, Hishammuddin Hussein, vowed that the search would continue even if there could be a pause to regroup and reconsider the best area to scour.
"The search will always continue. It's just a matter of approach," he told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur.
He said Abbott remained in close contact with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and the two had spoken on Thursday to discuss the search.
Magnitude 7.5 earthquake shakes mexican capital
ACAPULCO, Mexico — A powerful, magnitude-7.5 earthquake shook central and southern Mexico on Friday. The U.S. Geological Survey said it was centered northwest of the Pacific resort of Acapulco, where many Mexicans are vacationing for the Easter holiday.
The quake was felt strongly in the resort city, as well as in Mexico's capital, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
"There is a crisis of panic," said Alicia Dominguez, who answered the phone at the civil protection office. "It's mainly the tourists who are shaken." Civil protection officials were patrolling the city to check for damage and casualties.
The quake struck 164 miles (265 kilometers) southwest of Mexico City, which shook for at least 30 seconds. Buildings swayed as people fled high rises and took to the streets. Because of the Easter holiday, that city was less crowded than usual.
"This is really strong," said Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez Chavez, 45, an apartment building guard in central Mexico City. "And I'm accustomed to earthquakes." "This is really strong," said Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez Chavez, 45, an apartment building guard in central Mexico City. "And I'm accustomed to earthquakes."
According the USGS, the quake's center was 30 miles (49 kilometers) deep.
Mexico City is vulnerable even to distant earthquakes because much of it sits atop the muddy sediments of drained lake beds that quiver as quake waves hit.
The magnitude-8.1 quake in 1985 that killed at least 6,000 people and destroyed many buildings in Mexico City was centered 250 miles (400 kilometers) away on the Pacific Coast.
The quake was felt strongly in the resort city, as well as in Mexico's capital, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.
"There is a crisis of panic," said Alicia Dominguez, who answered the phone at the civil protection office. "It's mainly the tourists who are shaken." Civil protection officials were patrolling the city to check for damage and casualties.
The quake struck 164 miles (265 kilometers) southwest of Mexico City, which shook for at least 30 seconds. Buildings swayed as people fled high rises and took to the streets. Because of the Easter holiday, that city was less crowded than usual.
"This is really strong," said Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez Chavez, 45, an apartment building guard in central Mexico City. "And I'm accustomed to earthquakes." "This is really strong," said Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez Chavez, 45, an apartment building guard in central Mexico City. "And I'm accustomed to earthquakes."
According the USGS, the quake's center was 30 miles (49 kilometers) deep.
Mexico City is vulnerable even to distant earthquakes because much of it sits atop the muddy sediments of drained lake beds that quiver as quake waves hit.
The magnitude-8.1 quake in 1985 that killed at least 6,000 people and destroyed many buildings in Mexico City was centered 250 miles (400 kilometers) away on the Pacific Coast.
News collected
Garcia Marquez , Nobel Laureate , dies 87 years .
Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez crafted intoxicating fiction from the fatalism, fantasy, cruelty and heroics of the world that set his mind churning as a child growing up on Colombia's Caribbean coast.
One of the most revered and influential writers of his generation, he brought Latin America's charm and maddening contradictions to life in the minds of millions and became the best-known practitioner of "magical realism," a blending of fantastic elements into portrayals of daily life that made the extraordinary seem almost routine.
In his works, clouds of yellow butterflies precede a forbidden lover's arrival. A heroic liberator of nations dies alone, destitute and far from home. "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," as one of his short stories is called, is spotted in a muddy courtyard.
Garcia Marquez's own epic story ended Thursday, at age 87, with his death at his home in southern Mexico City, according to two people close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the family's privacy.
Known to millions simply as "Gabo," Garcia Marquez was widely seen as the Spanish language's most popular writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century. His extraordinary literary celebrity spawned comparisons with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
His flamboyant and melancholy works — among them "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," ''Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Autumn of the Patriarch" — outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.
With writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early
practitioner of the literary nonfiction that would become known as New Journalism. He became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with magisterial works of narrative non-fiction that included the "Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor," the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for 10 days. He was also a scion of the region's left.
Shorter pieces dealt with subjects including Venezuela's larger-than-life president, Hugo Chavez, while the book "News of a Kidnapping" vividly portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the social and moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of its elite. In 1994, Garcia Marquez founded the Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, which offers training and competitions to raise the standard of narrative and investigative journalism across Latin America.
But for so many inside and outside the region, it was his novels that became synonymous with Latin America itself.
When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described the region as a "source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable."
Gerald Martin, Garcia Marquez's semi-official biographer, told The Associated Press that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was "the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure."
The Spanish Royal Academy, the arbiter of the language, celebrated the novel's 40th anniversary with a special edition. It had only done so for just one other book, Cervantes' "Don Quijote."
Like many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended the world of letters. He became a hero to the Latin American left as an early ally of Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of Washington's interventions from Vietnam to Chile. His affable visage, set off by a white mustache and bushy grey eyebrows, was instantly recognizable. Unable to receive a U.S. visa for years due to his politics, he was nonetheless courted by presidents and kings. He counted Bill Clinton and Francois Mitterrand among his presidential friends.
Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the Caribbean coast on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist who fathered at least four children outside of his marriage.
Just after their first son was born, his parents left him with his maternal grandparents and moved to Barranquilla, where Garcia Marquez's father opened the first of a series of homeopathic pharmacies that would invariably fail, leaving them barely able to make ends meet.
Garcia Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather, a retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1,000-Day War that hastened Colombia's loss of the Panamanian isthmus.His grandparents' tales would provide grist for Garcia Marquez's fiction and Aracataca became the model for Macondo, the village surrounded by banana plantations at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is set.
"I have often been told by the family that I started recounting things, stories and so on, almost since I was born," Garcia Marquez once told an interviewer. "Ever since I could speak."
Garcia Marquez's parents continued to have children, and barely made ends meet. Their first-born son was sent to a state-run boarding school just outside Bogota where he became a star student and voracious reader, favoring Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.
Garcia Marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947, mailing a short story to the newspaper El Espectador after its literary editor wrote that "Colombia's younger generation has nothing to offer in the way of good literature anymore."
His father insisted he study law but he dropped out, bored, and dedicated himself to journalism. The pay was atrocious and Garcia Marquez recalled his mother visiting him in Bogota and commenting in horror at his
bedraggled appearance that: "I thought you were a beggar."
Garcia Marquez wrote in 1955 about a sailor, washed off the deck of a Colombian warship during a storm, who reappeared weeks later at the village church where his family was offering a Mass for his soul.
"The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" uncovered that the destroyer was carrying cargo, the cargo was contraband, and the vessel was overloaded. The authorities didn't like it," Garcia Marquez recalled.
Several months later, while he was in Europe, dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla's government closed El Espectador.
In exile, he toured the Soviet-controlled east, he moved to Rome in 1955 to study cinema, a lifelong love. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived among intellectuals and artists exiled from the many Latin American dictatorships of the day.
Garcia Marquez returned to Colombia in 1958 to marry Mercedes Barcha, a neighbor from
childhood days. They had two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer.
Garcia Marquez's writing was constantly informed by his leftist political views, themselves forged in large part by a 1928 military massacre near Aracataca of banana workers striking against the United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita. He was also greatly influenced by the assassination two decades later of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a galvanizing leftist presidential candidate.
The killing would set off the "Bogotazo," a weeklong riot that destroyed the center of Colombia's capital and which Castro, a visiting student activist, also lived through.
Garcia Marquez would sign on to the young Cuban revolution as a journalist, working in Bogota and Havana for its news agency Prensa Latina, then later as the agency's correspondent in New York.
Garcia Marquez wrote the epic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in 18 months, living first off loans from friends and then by having his wife pawn their things, starting with the car and furniture.
By the time he finished writing in September 1966, their belongings had dwindled to an electric heater, a blender and a hairdryer. His wife then pawned those remaining items so that he could mail the manuscript to a publisher in Argentina.
"I never made a copy — that was the only one there was," he recalled.
When Garcia Marquez came home from the post office, his wife looked around and said, "We have no furniture left, we have nothing. We owe $5,000."
She need not have worried; all 8,000 copies of the first run sold out in a week.
President Clinton himself recalled in an AP interview in 2007 reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" while in law school and not being able to put it down, not even during classes.
"I realized this man had imagined something that seemed like a fantasy but was profoundly true and profoundly wise," he said. Garcia Marquez remained loyal to Castro even as other intellectuals lost patience with the Cuban leader's intolerance for dissent. The U.S. writer Susan Sontag accused Garcia Marquez in 2005 of complicity by association in Cuban human rights violations. But others defended him, saying Garcia Marquez had persuaded Castro to help secure freedom for political prisoners.
Garcia Marquez's politics caused the United States to deny him entry visas for years. After a 1981 run-in with Colombia's government in which he was accused of sympathizing with M-19 rebels and sending money to a Venezuelan guerrilla group, he moved to Mexico City, where he lived most of the time for the rest of this life.
A bon vivant with an impish personality, Garcia Marquez was a gracious host who would animatedly recount long stories to guests, and occasionally unleash a quick temper when he felt slighted or misrepresented by the press.
Martin, the biographer, said the writer's penchant for embellishment often extended to his recounting of stories from his own life. From childhood on, wrote Martin, "Garcia Marquez would have trouble with other people's questioning of his veracity."
Garcia Marquez turned down offers of diplomatic posts and spurned attempts to draft him to run for Colombia's presidency, though he did get involved in behind-the-scenes peace mediation efforts between Colombia's government and leftist rebels.
In 1998, already in his 70s, Garcia Marquez fulfilled a lifelong dream, buying a majority interest in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio with money from his Nobel award.
"I'm a journalist. I've always been a journalist," he told the AP at the time. "My books couldn't have been written if I weren't a journalist because all the material was taken from reality."
Before falling ill with lymphatic cancer in June 1999, the author contributed prodigiously to the magazine, including one article that denounced what he considered the unfair political persecution of Clinton for sexual adventures.
Garcia Marquez's memory began to fail as he entered his 80s, friends said. His last book, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," was published in 2004. Garcia Marquez's memory began to fail as he entered his 80s, friends said. His last book, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," was published in 2004.
He is survived by his wife, his two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer, seven brothers and sisters and one half-sister.
Associated Press writer Frank Bajak contributed to this report from Lima. Paul Haven and Michael Weissenstein in Mexico City contributed.
Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez crafted intoxicating fiction from the fatalism, fantasy, cruelty and heroics of the world that set his mind churning as a child growing up on Colombia's Caribbean coast.
One of the most revered and influential writers of his generation, he brought Latin America's charm and maddening contradictions to life in the minds of millions and became the best-known practitioner of "magical realism," a blending of fantastic elements into portrayals of daily life that made the extraordinary seem almost routine.
In his works, clouds of yellow butterflies precede a forbidden lover's arrival. A heroic liberator of nations dies alone, destitute and far from home. "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," as one of his short stories is called, is spotted in a muddy courtyard.
Garcia Marquez's own epic story ended Thursday, at age 87, with his death at his home in southern Mexico City, according to two people close to the family who spoke on condition of anonymity out of respect for the family's privacy.
Known to millions simply as "Gabo," Garcia Marquez was widely seen as the Spanish language's most popular writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century. His extraordinary literary celebrity spawned comparisons with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
His flamboyant and melancholy works — among them "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," ''Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Autumn of the Patriarch" — outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. The epic 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.
With writers including Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, Garcia Marquez was also an early
practitioner of the literary nonfiction that would become known as New Journalism. He became an elder statesman of Latin American journalism, with magisterial works of narrative non-fiction that included the "Story of A Shipwrecked Sailor," the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for 10 days. He was also a scion of the region's left.
Shorter pieces dealt with subjects including Venezuela's larger-than-life president, Hugo Chavez, while the book "News of a Kidnapping" vividly portrayed how cocaine traffickers led by Pablo Escobar had shred the social and moral fabric of his native Colombia, kidnapping members of its elite. In 1994, Garcia Marquez founded the Iberoamerican Foundation for New Journalism, which offers training and competitions to raise the standard of narrative and investigative journalism across Latin America.
But for so many inside and outside the region, it was his novels that became synonymous with Latin America itself.
When he accepted the Nobel prize in 1982, Garcia Marquez described the region as a "source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune. Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable."
Gerald Martin, Garcia Marquez's semi-official biographer, told The Associated Press that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was "the first novel in which Latin Americans recognized themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure."
The Spanish Royal Academy, the arbiter of the language, celebrated the novel's 40th anniversary with a special edition. It had only done so for just one other book, Cervantes' "Don Quijote."
Like many Latin American writers, Garcia Marquez transcended the world of letters. He became a hero to the Latin American left as an early ally of Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and a critic of Washington's interventions from Vietnam to Chile. His affable visage, set off by a white mustache and bushy grey eyebrows, was instantly recognizable. Unable to receive a U.S. visa for years due to his politics, he was nonetheless courted by presidents and kings. He counted Bill Clinton and Francois Mitterrand among his presidential friends.
Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small Colombian town near the Caribbean coast on March 6, 1927. He was the eldest of the 11 children of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Elijio Garcia, a telegraphist and a wandering homeopathic pharmacist who fathered at least four children outside of his marriage.
Just after their first son was born, his parents left him with his maternal grandparents and moved to Barranquilla, where Garcia Marquez's father opened the first of a series of homeopathic pharmacies that would invariably fail, leaving them barely able to make ends meet.
Garcia Marquez was raised for 10 years by his grandmother and his grandfather, a retired colonel who fought in the devastating 1,000-Day War that hastened Colombia's loss of the Panamanian isthmus.His grandparents' tales would provide grist for Garcia Marquez's fiction and Aracataca became the model for Macondo, the village surrounded by banana plantations at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains where "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is set.
"I have often been told by the family that I started recounting things, stories and so on, almost since I was born," Garcia Marquez once told an interviewer. "Ever since I could speak."
Garcia Marquez's parents continued to have children, and barely made ends meet. Their first-born son was sent to a state-run boarding school just outside Bogota where he became a star student and voracious reader, favoring Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky and Kafka.
Garcia Marquez published his first piece of fiction as a student in 1947, mailing a short story to the newspaper El Espectador after its literary editor wrote that "Colombia's younger generation has nothing to offer in the way of good literature anymore."
His father insisted he study law but he dropped out, bored, and dedicated himself to journalism. The pay was atrocious and Garcia Marquez recalled his mother visiting him in Bogota and commenting in horror at his
bedraggled appearance that: "I thought you were a beggar."
Garcia Marquez wrote in 1955 about a sailor, washed off the deck of a Colombian warship during a storm, who reappeared weeks later at the village church where his family was offering a Mass for his soul.
"The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" uncovered that the destroyer was carrying cargo, the cargo was contraband, and the vessel was overloaded. The authorities didn't like it," Garcia Marquez recalled.
Several months later, while he was in Europe, dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla's government closed El Espectador.
In exile, he toured the Soviet-controlled east, he moved to Rome in 1955 to study cinema, a lifelong love. Then he moved to Paris, where he lived among intellectuals and artists exiled from the many Latin American dictatorships of the day.
Garcia Marquez returned to Colombia in 1958 to marry Mercedes Barcha, a neighbor from
childhood days. They had two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer.
Garcia Marquez's writing was constantly informed by his leftist political views, themselves forged in large part by a 1928 military massacre near Aracataca of banana workers striking against the United Fruit Company, which later became Chiquita. He was also greatly influenced by the assassination two decades later of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a galvanizing leftist presidential candidate.
The killing would set off the "Bogotazo," a weeklong riot that destroyed the center of Colombia's capital and which Castro, a visiting student activist, also lived through.
Garcia Marquez would sign on to the young Cuban revolution as a journalist, working in Bogota and Havana for its news agency Prensa Latina, then later as the agency's correspondent in New York.
Garcia Marquez wrote the epic "One Hundred Years of Solitude" in 18 months, living first off loans from friends and then by having his wife pawn their things, starting with the car and furniture.
By the time he finished writing in September 1966, their belongings had dwindled to an electric heater, a blender and a hairdryer. His wife then pawned those remaining items so that he could mail the manuscript to a publisher in Argentina.
"I never made a copy — that was the only one there was," he recalled.
When Garcia Marquez came home from the post office, his wife looked around and said, "We have no furniture left, we have nothing. We owe $5,000."
She need not have worried; all 8,000 copies of the first run sold out in a week.
President Clinton himself recalled in an AP interview in 2007 reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" while in law school and not being able to put it down, not even during classes.
"I realized this man had imagined something that seemed like a fantasy but was profoundly true and profoundly wise," he said. Garcia Marquez remained loyal to Castro even as other intellectuals lost patience with the Cuban leader's intolerance for dissent. The U.S. writer Susan Sontag accused Garcia Marquez in 2005 of complicity by association in Cuban human rights violations. But others defended him, saying Garcia Marquez had persuaded Castro to help secure freedom for political prisoners.
Garcia Marquez's politics caused the United States to deny him entry visas for years. After a 1981 run-in with Colombia's government in which he was accused of sympathizing with M-19 rebels and sending money to a Venezuelan guerrilla group, he moved to Mexico City, where he lived most of the time for the rest of this life.
A bon vivant with an impish personality, Garcia Marquez was a gracious host who would animatedly recount long stories to guests, and occasionally unleash a quick temper when he felt slighted or misrepresented by the press.
Martin, the biographer, said the writer's penchant for embellishment often extended to his recounting of stories from his own life. From childhood on, wrote Martin, "Garcia Marquez would have trouble with other people's questioning of his veracity."
Garcia Marquez turned down offers of diplomatic posts and spurned attempts to draft him to run for Colombia's presidency, though he did get involved in behind-the-scenes peace mediation efforts between Colombia's government and leftist rebels.
In 1998, already in his 70s, Garcia Marquez fulfilled a lifelong dream, buying a majority interest in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio with money from his Nobel award.
"I'm a journalist. I've always been a journalist," he told the AP at the time. "My books couldn't have been written if I weren't a journalist because all the material was taken from reality."
Before falling ill with lymphatic cancer in June 1999, the author contributed prodigiously to the magazine, including one article that denounced what he considered the unfair political persecution of Clinton for sexual adventures.
Garcia Marquez's memory began to fail as he entered his 80s, friends said. His last book, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," was published in 2004. Garcia Marquez's memory began to fail as he entered his 80s, friends said. His last book, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," was published in 2004.
He is survived by his wife, his two sons, Rodrigo, a film director, and Gonzalo, a graphic designer, seven brothers and sisters and one half-sister.
Associated Press writer Frank Bajak contributed to this report from Lima. Paul Haven and Michael Weissenstein in Mexico City contributed.
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