SALISBURY, Maryland (Reuters) – Building a house in a week is always a challenge for the 60 crew members who work on the ABC reality show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," but this week they faced a double whammy: first an earthquake, then a 600-mile wide hurricane named Irene.

The hit television program is building a soup kitchen and home in the Rehoboth Beach area of Delaware for Dale Dunning and her husband Ken, who have been providing food for hundreds of needy residents for a dozen years.

Work at the site began on Monday, then the mid-Atlantic region was hit by a 5.8 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday.

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COPLEY, Ohio – A gunman who killed seven people during a weekend rampage in his Ohio neighborhood cornered one of his victims, his girlfriend’s 11-year-old nephew, in the basement of a house, ordered out the family sheltering the boy and then shot him, police said Monday.

Michael Hance’s cold-blooded killing of such a young victim after stalking seven other people on a tidy suburban Akron street named Goodenough Avenue was, neighbors said, the culmination of a dispute over a home that once belonged to his girlfriend’s parents.

Hance, 51, had no previous criminal record before the outburst late Sunday morning and his death in a shootout with police in Copley, where a flag flew at half-staff Monday outside the home where the carnage began.

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Maria Elena Carvalho, a 65-year-old retiree, lives in the same apartment in which she was born, a sprawling, rundown four-bedroom in the center of Lisbon. “This is where I got married, where my mother died, where my children were born,” she says. Carvalho pays her landlord only €81 ($ 115) per month, but lives in fear that her rent may soon rise sharply – were she forced to leave, she would have little chance of finding another apartment she could afford in the capital. Jose Gago da GraÇa, meanwhile, owns a building across town and rents out most of the 170-sq-m (ft) units for €2,750 ($ 3,900) per month. But until recently one tenant was only paying €75 ($ 105), thanks to the rent-controlled lease he inherited from his father. After a decade in court, Gago da GraÇa has finally won the right to evict the tenant, but only because he managed to prove that the man had not lived with his father for at least a year, a requirement for anyone who inherits a lease. “The apartment is now in very bad shape,” he says. “I’ll have to invest a lot of money into it before I can rent it out again.”

But in Portugal neither landlords nor tenants blame the other for their woes. The problem, they say, is the country’s antiquated tenancy laws – laws that, if the International Monetary Fund and the European Union get their way, could soon get a drastic makeover. In exchange for an $ 11 million bailout, Portugal has agreed to make sweeping structural changes, and among them is modernizing the country’s housing market. Good news for landlords, who have long had their hands tied by centuries-old rent-control agreements and a lengthy eviction process. But for renters, reform could mean a double tragedy. Not only could they be forced from the homes that have been in their families for generations, but many could then also find themselves unable to afford to live anywhere else. (Read: With “Portugal’s New Government, the Promise of Harsh Cuts.”)

Portugal’s rent-control laws, which date back to the beginning of the republic in 1910, mean landlords often find it simply isn’t worth their while to rent out their property, leaving abandoned buildings dotting the country. “The market has been completely warped by rent control,” says Luis Menezes Leitao, who heads Portugal’s Association of Landlords. The most beautiful buildings in Lisbon and Porto often have completely symbolic rents. So it’s impossible to invest in the city centers.” The situation is made even trickier for landlords by the country’s slow-paced judicial system – evicting someone who doesn’t pay their rent can take years. “These two problems – not being able to hike rents and not being able to evict tenants – has really traumatized landlords,” says lawyer Pedro Sarragal-Leal, an expert in housing issues.

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NEW ORLEANS – A Louisiana researcher looking into ways to produce more and bigger crawfish in the same space said she’s had success with lighting the ponds at night and believes her work could pave the way for expanding crawfish farming in cooler areas.

Crawfish is one of the nation’s biggest aquaculture crops, with the number of pounds harvested second only to catfish in most years. While Louisiana produces almost all of the fresh — not frozen — crawfish eaten in this country, there are farms at least as far north as the Carolinas and Virginia. Crawfish also are raised in Europe and Australia.

Julie Delabbio, director of Northwestern State University’s Aquaculture Research Center in Lena, said she has found putting underwater lights in crawfish ponds dramatically improves production. Her work is important as the U.S. looks to increase its domestic aquaculture.

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