Chicago

Study: CDC overstated danger of obesity

Being overweight is nowhere near as big a killer as the government thought, ranking No. 7 instead of No. 2 among the nation’s leading preventable causes of death, according to a startling new calculation from the CDC.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated Tuesday that packing on too many pounds accounts for 25,814 deaths a year in the United States. As recently as January, the CDC came up with an estimate 14 times higher: 365,000 deaths.

The new analysis found that obesity — being extremely overweight — is indisputably lethal. But like several recent smaller studies, it found that people who are modestly overweight actually have a lower risk of death than those of normal weight.

The study — an analysis of mortality rates and body-mass index, or BMI — was published in today’s Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Houston

Engineers who saved Apollo 13 honored

A group of engineers was honored Tuesday for concocting a plan using plastic bags, cardboard and duct tape to save Apollo 13’s astronauts after their spacecraft was crippled by an explosion 35 years ago.

Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert would have died without the engineers’ quick thinking, said John Schneiter, president of GlobalSpec, the New York company that presented the award.

Sunday marked the 35th anniversary of the spacecraft’s return to Earth after their aborted moon mission. It was crippled by an oxygen tank that overheated and exploded, raising concerns the carbon dioxide the astronauts expelled from their lungs as they breathed would eventually kill them. Two of Apollo’s three fuel cells, a primary source of power, also were lost.

Engineers advising them from the ground figured out a way to provide them oxygen for the trip home.

West Virginia

Vandals drain lake at summer camp

Vandals drained a lake at a Salvation Army camp where hundreds of underprivileged children go canoeing and fishing every summer.

Camp Happy Valley’s caretaker, David Stover, returned from vacation Saturday to find only about 2 feet of water in Lake Mary Beth, which normally is 12 to 14 feet deep.

“It was pretty sad,” Stover said Tuesday, next to the muddy remains in the wooded mountains about 20 miles west of Charleston. “It’s very uncalled for, very heartbreaking.”

State police are investigating. Whoever drained the lake used a temporary pipeline recently installed over an earthen dam between the lake and a creek. The pipeline had been set up in case the lake needed to be drained and the dam fixed.

Stover said that the self-siphoning pipeline was used to pump an estimated 250,000 gallons of water into the creek over about 10 hours.

Camp officials hope to get enough rain to fill the 25- by 60-yard lake by June 13, the start of camp.

Taiwan

Opposition to meet with Chinese leader

The leader of Taiwan’s opposition Nationalists will have talks with China’s top leader in Beijing, the first such meeting since China was split by civil war a half-century ago, party officials said early today.

The trip by party leader Lien Chan has drawn protest from Taiwan’s ruling party, which has charged the Nationalists are playing into the hands of the communist mainland in its efforts to divide the Taiwanese people.

The party announced Lien’s schedule for the trip but didn’t disclose topics for his April 29 session with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

“(The meeting) will produce a large and significant influence on Taiwan and on peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” party official Lin Feng-cheng told reporters.

Tokyo

Strong earthquake hits southern Japan

A strong earthquake struck southern Japan early today, injuring at least 21 people, shattering windows and knocking down houses already damaged by a powerful tremor that hit the same area last month. There was no threat of tsunami.

The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 5.8, hit at 6:11 a.m. and was centered in the ocean just west of the city of Fukuoka on Kyushu island, the Central Meteorological Agency reported.

The 21 people hurt — four of them seriously — suffered broken bones and other injuries, but none of them were life-threatening, said Naruo Kitamoto, a spokesman for Fukuoka Prefecture.

The quake damaged some 30 buildings and triggered several landslides in the damage zone, including on the island of Genkai, where several homes already damaged in a powerful March 20 quake were knocked down in today’s temblor.

Ecuador

Embattled president says he won’t quit

Thousands of protesters marched on President Lucio Gutierrez’s offices late Tuesday, hours after Ecuador’s embattled leader defiantly stated he wouldn’t resign in the face of mounting demonstrations.

“There is not the least possibility. I was elected for four years. My government ends in January 2007,” Gutierrez told The Associated Press in an interview at the Government Palace.

As he spoke, army troops carrying assault rifles guarded positions behind barbed wire to keep protesters from approaching the palace, located in Quito’s Spanish-era colonial downtown.

Hours later at least 30,000 people, the largest demonstration so far against Gutierrez in Quito, tried to march to the palace to demand that he resign. But hundreds of police firing tear gas drove them back at a point 15 blocks from the palace.