1. A strong earthquake rocked a large swathe of northern Italy early on Sunday morning, May 20, causing at least three deaths and collapsing rural factories and ancient bell towers in towns.

2. The epicenter of the quake, which struck at 4:04 a.m. and had a magnitude of 6.0, was in the plains near Modena in the Po River Valley and the tremors were felt in nearby regions.

3. It was the strongest quake to hit Italy in three years.

4. One person working a night shift died in the collapse of a factory and two others were killed in the collapse of another building. Rescue officials were checking reports that other people were buried under rubble.

5. Thousands of people in the area rushed into the streets after the quake, felt in the major towns of Bologna, Modena, Ferrara, Rovigo, Verona and Mantua.

6. "You can see yourself how the situation is. Everything is upside down in my house, but we have not gone back in yet.”

7. A series of strong aftershocks hit the area and local mayors ordered residents to stay out of their homes.

8. The last major earthquake to hit Italy was a 6.3 magnitude quake in the central Italian city of L'Aquila in 2009, killing nearly 300 people.

1. The seven barn owl chicks cuddled together in a wooden nesting box in Israel's Beit She'an valley were hissing with discontent, not knowing that they signal the success of a decade-long project to use the birds of prey as biological pesticides.

2. Jordanian and Israeli farmers decided in 2002 that they wanted to get rid of harmful poisons and toxic means of pest control without leaving their product to the mercy of rats and mice.

3. With the help of Israel's Society for the Protection of Nature and Jordan's General Mansour Abu-Rashid, farmers began to place nesting boxes in their fields for the barn owls to breed in.

4. It took ten years before an Israeli male and a Jordanian female coupled up and bred, said Ornithologist Dr. Motti Charter from Haifa University and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel.

5. "So for them, they don't know that the border is here and they probably met, you know, not like people at a bar or something like that, they met one night and decided to have -- that they fell in love and they started a nest here. The whole concept is that, you know, for them it doesn't matter if it's Jordanian or Israel, they're barn owls. And for us it's a great success story because it shows, because of the Jordanians started thinking differently, started using the barn owls, they succeeded."

6. Beit She'an valley holds the largest population of barn owls in the world, some 25,300 pairs per square kilometre, with each eating between 2,000 to 6,000 rodents a year, Charter added.

7. The joint Israeli-Jordanian project promotes the use of barn owls to replace chemical pesticides, therefore reducing damage to the environment and conserving the natural life in the area.

8. Initiators of the project, Jordanian General Mansour Abu Rashid and Israeli Professor Yossi Leshem of Tel Aviv University, voiced excitement over the love-birds of their enterprise.

9. "I feel it's a very good project, not just for the environment and for the agriculture but also to bring people together from the two countries, to work as a researcher, to work together."

10. Some 2,600 nesting boxes have been placed in fields on the Israeli side of the border, and hundreds are being used by Jordanian farmers.

11. Each box costs the farmer $200 and it's the fact that they buy more and more that proves more than anything else that this is a cost-effective way to keep rodents off farm fields.