Over 30,000 California prisoners started refusing meals on Monday morning in what might become the biggest hunger strike in California prison history, according to California's corrections department.

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So far, corrections officials have acknowledged that prisoners in two-thirds of the 33 prisons across the state, along with all of the out-of-state private prisons in the system, have missed at least breakfast and lunch on Monday. Corrections officials don't start calling such a protest a hunger strike until prisoners have missed nine consecutive meals. 2,300 prisoners also refused to go to work or to their classes, they added.

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While the California prison system has a less than stellar reputation on a handful of issues — many of which trace back to its astonishing overcrowding — the striking prisoners are focusing their message on improving conditions for those locked in solitary confinement. Last October, Mother Jonespublished a must-read on solitary in California, written by Shane Bauer, one of the three hikers kept in an Iranian solitary confinement cell for 26 months. Spoiler: Bauer thought California's conditions were worse.

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Here's the message from the organizers of the protest, comprised of a group of inmates at the Pelican Bay State Prison:

California holds nearly 12,000 people in extreme isolation - over 3,000 for life - at a cost of over $60 million per year. The cells have no windows, no access to fresh air or sunlight. The United Nations condemns the use of solitary confinement for more than 15 days as torture.

They've outlined five main demands, which organizers claim would bring the California system up to par with the standards at American Supermax prisons in other states:

1) End group punishment & administrative abuse. 2) Abolish the debriefing policy, and modify active/inactive gang status criteria. [California inmates who are connected to a prison gang can be held in isolation indefinitely]. 3) Comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement. 4) Provide adequate and nutritious food 5) Create and expand constructive programming.

The unofficial tally of this week's protest is already larger than the last hunger strike in the California corrections system. In 2011, over 11,600 inmates refused meals some meals, according to the LA Times. The department officially counted about 6,000 prisoners maximum who refused 9 consecutive meals. That 2011 protest make very similar demands to the current one. The length of time some California prisoners spend in solitary is also the subject of a current lawsuit.

BEIJING (AP) — Flooding in western China, the worst in 50 years for some areas, has triggered a landslide that buried up to 40 people and destroyed a high-profile memorial to a devastating 2008 earthquake.

There was no immediate word on the chances of survival for the 30 to 40 people buried in the city of Dujiangyan, but rescue workers with search dogs had rushed to the area, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Mudslides and flooding are common in China's mountainous areas, killing hundreds of people every year. Deforestation has led to soil erosion and made some parts of China prone to mudslides after strong rains.

In nearby Beichuan county, flooding destroyed buildings and destroyed exhibits at a memorial for the earthquake five years ago in Sichuan province that left 90,000 people dead or missing. The quake left the Beichuan county seat unliveable. The town was abandoned and 27 square kilometers (10 square miles) of ruins was turned into a memorial and museum.

The flooding also caused the collapse of an almost 50-year-old bridge in a neighboring county, sending six vehicles into the raging waters and leaving 12 people missing.

Since Sunday, flooding in Sichuan has affected 360,000 people, damaging or destroying 300 homes, and forcing at least 6,100 emergency evacuations, state media reported.

ZURICH (Reuters) - Roche will stop development of a drug for treating diabetes partly due to its undesired side effects, marking a high-profile setback for the Swiss company outside its cancer drug comfort zone.

The diabetes treatment - aleglitazar - belongs to a class of drugs that rival pharmaceutical firms had already pulled back from, raising the question of why Roche had pressed on with what analysts had seen as a risky bet.

Patients in a late-stage trial of the drug suffered side effects affecting organs such as their kidneys and hearts, a spokesman for the Basel-based drugmaker said, adding Roche could not yet quantify the financial impact of the move.

Roche said in a statement on Wednesday it was working to support patients on the drug to move to other therapies.

AstraZeneca had scrapped development of a similar class of drug in 2006, the same year as Bristol-Myers Squibb ended development of another after regulatory setbacks.

Analysts at Kepler Chevreux said the consensus view for peak sales of the drug had only been 200 million francs.

"In hindsight it seemed odd how Roche put so many resources into a compound whose mechanism - given experience with at least 3 other drugs in the class - was at best questionable," they wrote in a note.

Roche shares were down 0.3 percent at 0749 GMT (3.49 a.m. EDT) , compared to a 0.2 percent rise in the European healthcare index.

"The fact is, Roche isn't particularly good in metabolic and cardiovascular drugs and should exit its research in these areas," Zuercher Kantonalbank analyst Michael Nawrath said.

Bank Vontobel, which had forecast 2 billion Swiss francs ($2.05 billion) in peak sales from aleglitazar, pruned its price target for Roche to 263 francs from 270 francs after the setback, but confirmed its "buy" rating.

As it went into the 7,000-patient late-stage study of aleglitazar, Roche took steps to reduce the possibility that its product might have the same problems as other medicines in the class. It particular, it conducted a renal safety study to ensure its product was free of the kidney problems that undermined AstraZeneca's.

Drugs like aleglitazar are designed to turn on two protein receptors known as PPARs, one that regulates glucose and another lipids. These dual PPAR drugs have long fascinated researchers as a potential way to help diabetics address multiple targets linked to heart disease.

The news is also a new blow for Roche's Basel research operations, known as pRED, which have languished in the shadow of the work done at Genentech acquired in 2009, whose labs cooked up Roche's four top-selling medicines in 2011.

"The news just raises more fundamental questions about the productivity of pRED," Kepler Chevreux analysts wrote.

Last year, Roche scrapped development of pRED's dalcetrapib - a medicine aimed at boosting levels of "good" high-density cholesterol - which some industry analysts had estimated could have achieved $10 billion in annual sales.

($1 = 0.9735 Swiss francs)

(Reporting By Katharina Bart, Paul Arnold and Ben Hirschler; additional reporting by Caroline Copley; editing by Jane Merriman and Emma Thomasson)

CAIRO (AP) — With a mob of Muslim extremists on their tail, the Christian businessman and his nephew climbed up on the roof and ran for their lives, jumping from building to building in their southern Egyptian village. Finally they ran out of rooftops.

Forced back onto the street, they were overwhelmed by several dozen men. The attackers hacked them with axes and beat them with clubs and tree limbs, killing Emile Naseem, 41. The nephew survived with wounds to his shoulders and head and recounted the chase to The Associated Press.

The mob's rampage through the village of Nagaa Hassan, burning dozens of Christian houses and stabbing to death three other Christians as well, came two days after the military ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi from power. It was no coincidence the attackers focused on Naseem and his family: He was the village's most prominent campaigner calling for Morsi's removal.

Some Christians are paying the price for their activism against Morsi and his Islamist allies in a backlash over his ouster last week.

Since then, there has been a string of attacks on Christians in provinces that are strongholds of hard-liners. In the Sinai Peninsula, where militant groups run rampant, militants gunned down a priest in a drive-by shooting as he walked in a public market.

Egypt's Christian minority, about 10 percent of the population, long shunned politics for fear of reprisals, relying on their church to make their case to those in power. That changed in the revolutionary fervor when autocrat Hosni Mubarak was toppled in 2011, as Christians started to demand a say in the country's direction.

But they took it to a new level during Morsi's year in office and the empowerment of his Islamist allies. The new Coptic Christian pope, Tawadros II, enthroned in November, openly criticized the president. He told Christians they were free to actively participate in politics and that the church will not discourage them.

"The Christians have emerged from under the robes of the clergy and will never go back," said Ezzat Ibrahim, an activist from Minya, a southern province with a large Christian community.

It was a risky gamble for a minority that has long felt vulnerable, with its most concentrated communities often living in the same rural areas where the most vehement and vocal Islamists hold sway.

During Morsi's year in office, some of his hard-line allies increasingly spoke of Christians as enemies of Islam and warned them to remember they are a minority. When the wave of protests against Morsi began on June 30, Brotherhood media depicted it as dominated by Christians — and to hard-liners, it smacked of Christians rising up against a Muslim ruler.

The worst anti-Christian backlash since Morsi's July 3 ouster was the attack in Nagaa Hassan, a dusty village on the west bank of the Nile River, not far from the most majestic ancient Egyptian archaeological sites in the city of Luxor.

The body of a Muslim villager was discovered at dawn on July 5. The cry went out around the village that Christians killed him. A mob of several hundred, led by men wearing the hallmark long beards of ultraconservative Salafis as well as more extreme movements, went on a rampage, according to witnesses and security officials speaking to the AP.

They smashed the windows and doors of Christian homes, ransacked Christian-owned stores and set them ablaze — damaging about 30 homes and stores in all. Muslim residents who tried to stop them were brushed aside, sometimes threatened with violence as well. At least a dozen Christian families took refuge in the local Church of St. John The Baptist, the church's priest, Father Vassilios, told the AP.

The crowd targeted in particular Naseem, besieging the apartment building of his cousins where he and his wife hid. Their three children had been taken earlier to a relative's home for their safety. The mob set fires in the building, while the families with women and children fled to the upper floors.

Security forces pulled up to the building, backing an armored personnel carrier up to the entrance to evacuate those inside, according to witnesses and activists briefed on the day's events. But the mob, outnumbering police, refused to let the men inside leave — so the police told the families they would only take the women and children, she said.

Naseem and several other men initially put on women's clothes to escape detection by the mob waiting close by for the police to leave so it could set upon the men, said el-Ameer, the nephew,

The police still refused to take the men, fearing the mob outside would see through the ruse and attack the armored police car that came to evacuate the Christians, said el-Ameer and activists. Martha Zekry, Naseem's wife, begged the police to take her husband, pleading with them that he would not survive if left behind. The officer in charge said he would come back for Naseem. He never did.

Once the police pulled away with the women and children, the attackers stormed the building. Naseem tore off the women's clothes and fled to the rooftops with his nephew, al-Ameer said. Naseem's cousins, Romani and Muhareb Nosehi, and a neighbor Rasem Tadros, never made it out of the building, stabbed and beaten to death on the spot.

Naseem's friends and family say he was targeted because of his activism against Morsi. In the months before Morsi's ouster, he was energetically collecting signatures in the village for Tamarod, or "Rebel," the youth-led activist campaign that collected signatures nationwide on a petition demanding Morsi's removal. It organized the June 30 protests that brought out millions.

"Emile was the de facto Tamarod leader in the village and that did not escape the notice of the militants," said Naseem's best friend and fellow activist Emile Nazeer. "He, like other activists, received threatening text messages for weeks before he was killed."

"Almost everyone in Nagaa Hassan loved my uncle. He spoke a lot about politics and people listened to what he had to say," said el-Ameer, Naseem's nephew. "He paid the price."

Shenouda el-Ameer, a close relative, said local Islamists took advantage of the Muslim's murder to blame it on Christians and target Naseem for his political activity.

Luxor's security chief Khaled Mamdouh said 17 villagers, including eight Christians, were being questioned about the murder and the violence that followed. They said some of them were referred to prosecutors to be charged. Security forces, meanwhile, were deployed in the village, whose estimated 7,000 residents are about 20 percent Christian.

Father Vassilios said he did not know of incidents of sectarian violence in Nagaa Hassan, suggesting that the increased anti-Christian rhetoric by hard-liners and the polarization during Morsi's rule had an effect.

"Relations between Muslims and Christians were so good I always thought it was special," he told the AP. "Emile (Naseem) was a political revolutionary who served his community as best as he could."

In the week after Morsi's ouster, extremists carried out attacks on Christians in at least six of the country's 27 provinces. The shooting of the priest in Sinai was the only other fatality.

In one of the most serious incidents, a mob of Morsi supporters attacked Christian homes and shops in Dalaga, a village in southern Minya province where Christians make up about 35 percent of the population, more than three times the national average. During its rampage, the crowd shouted, "There is no god but Allah and the Christians are God's enemies," according to police and villager Bushrah Iskharon, who recounted the events in a telephone interview with the AP.

Churches across much of the country have cancelled evening Mass and social activities as a precaution against attacks.

But activists vow they will continue with their political activities.

"My parents always mention immigration as a solution. I don't," said Marina Zakaria, a 21-year-old in Cairo, who began participating in street politics after Mubarak's ouster

"Christians are mostly isolated in their churches because they are afraid from people who are not like them. With that attitude, we deepened the discrimination we face and ended up without a place in political life," she said.

Christian activist Nirvana Mamdouh, 22, said that for far too long Christians remained silent in the face of injustices and it was time for them to speak up for their rights.

"We cannot have our freedom without blood. It is the price, what can we do?"