Malian refugee children sit on December 7, 2012 under a tent that serves as a classroom in the Goudebou refugee camp, some 20 kilometers from the northwestern Bukinabe city of Dori.
Mon Feb 25, 2013 1:33AM GMT
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says the French-led war in Mali has worsened the educational situation of children in the West African country.
On January 11, France launched a war on Mali under the pretext of halting the advance of fighters who had taken control of the north of the African nation. The United States, Canada, Britain, Belgium, Germany, and Denmark have voiced support for the move.
“Many teachers have failed to return to the north and already overcrowded schools in the south cannot cope with the influx of displaced students from the north,” UNICEF said in a statement on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Francoise Ackermans, UNICEF Representative in Mali added that “When a teacher is afraid to teach and when a student is afraid to go to school, the whole education is at risk.”
This comes as Malian Education Minister Bocar Moussa Diarra said only one on three schools in northern Mali is working.
Multiple areas, [Jutland, the Zealand area and Greater Copenhagen]
….
Snow Storm in Denmark on Saturday, 08 December, 2012 at 17:52 (05:52 PM) UTC.
Description
National weather service DMI has issued a winter weather advisory starting this evening and continuing into tomorrow. A cold front moving in from the west will bring with it snowfalls of between 10 and 25cm accompanied by gusting winds. DMI warns that drifting snow can cause whiteout conditions and make roads impassable. Snow accumulations are predicted to be highest in northern Jutland and the Zealand area. Greater Copenhagen will see around 17cm. Although temperatures will fall to -12 C tonight, daytime highs tomorrow will rise to around 0 C. Temperatures will fall again fall below zero during the day tomorrow. Temperatures are forecast to remain freezing through Friday. Keep your eyes on cphpost.dk and our Facebook page for the most important updates about the storm.
National Earthquake Information Center
U.S. Geological Survey http://neic.usgs.gov/
Tectonic Summary
Seismotectonics of the Aleutian Arc
The Aleutian arc extends approximately 3,000 km from the Gulf of Alaska in the east to the Kamchatka Peninsula in the west. It marks the region where the Pacific plate subducts into the mantle beneath the North America plate. This subduction is responsible for the generation of the Aleutian Islands and the deep offshore Aleutian Trench.
The curvature of the arc results in a westward transition of relative plate motion from trench-normal (i.e., compressional) in the east to trench-parallel (i.e., translational) in the west, accompanied by westward variations in seismic activity, volcanism, and overriding plate composition. The Aleutian arc is generally divided into three regions: the western, central, and eastern Aleutians. Relative to a fixed North America plate, the Pacific plate is moving northwest at a rate that increases from roughly 60 mm/yr at the arc’s eastern edge to 76 mm/yr near its western terminus. The eastern Aleutian arc extends from the Alaskan Peninsula in the east to the Fox Islands in the west. Motion along this section of the arc is characterized by arc-perpendicular convergence and Pacific plate subduction beneath thick continental lithosphere. This region exhibits intense volcanic activity and has a history of megathrust earthquakes.
The central Aleutian arc extends from the Andreanof Islands in the east to the Rat Islands in the west. Here, motion is characterized by westward-increasing oblique convergence and Pacific plate subduction beneath thin oceanic lithosphere. Along this portion of the arc, the Wadati-Benioff zone is well defined to depths of approximately 200 km. Despite the obliquity of convergence, active volcanism and megathrust earthquakes are also present along this margin.
The western Aleutians, stretching from the western end of the Rat Islands in the east to the Commander Islands, Russia, in the west, is tectonically different from the central and eastern portions of the arc. The increasing component of transform motion between the Pacific and North America plates is evidenced by diminishing active volcanism; the last active volcano is located on Buldir Island, in the far western portion of the Rat Island chain. Additionally, this portion of the subduction zone has not hosted large earthquakes or megathrust events in recorded history. Instead, the largest earthquakes in this region are generally shallow, predominantly strike-slip events with magnitudes between M5-6. Deeper earthquakes do occur, albeit rather scarcely and with small magnitudes (M<4), down to approximately 50 km.
Most of the seismicity along the Aleutian arc results from thrust faulting that occurs along the interface between the Pacific and North America plates, extending from near the base of the trench to depths of 40 to 60 km. Slip along this interface is responsible for generating devastating earthquakes. Deformation also occurs within the subducting slab in the form of intermediate-depth earthquakes that can reach depths of 250 km. Normal faulting events occur in the outer rise region of the Aleutian arc resulting from the bending of the oceanic Pacific plate as it enters the Aleutian trench. Additionally, deformation of the overriding North America plate generates shallow crustal earthquakes.
The Aleutian arc is a seismically active region, evidenced by the many moderate to large earthquakes occurring each year. Since 1900, this region has hosted twelve large earthquakes (M>7.5) including the May 7, 1986 M8.0 Andreanof Islands, the June 10, 1996 M7.9 Andreanof Islands, and the November 17, 2003 M7.8 Rat Islands earthquakes. Six of these great earthquakes (M8.3 or larger) have occurred along the Aleutian arc that together have ruptured almost the entire shallow megathrust contact. The first of these major earthquakes occurred on August 17, 1906 near the island of Amchitka (M8.3) in the western Aleutian arc. However, unlike the other megathrust earthquakes along the arc, this event is thought to have been an intraplate event occurring in the shallow slab beneath the subduction zone interface.
000
WEPA42 PHEB 262347
TIBPAC
TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 001
PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 2347Z 26 SEP 2012
THIS BULLETIN APPLIES TO AREAS WITHIN AND BORDERING THE PACIFIC
OCEAN AND ADJACENT SEAS...EXCEPT ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...
WASHINGTON...OREGON AND CALIFORNIA.
... TSUNAMI INFORMATION BULLETIN ...
THIS BULLETIN IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY.
THIS BULLETIN IS ISSUED AS ADVICE TO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. ONLY
NATIONAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO MAKE
DECISIONS REGARDING THE OFFICIAL STATE OF ALERT IN THEIR AREA AND
ANY ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN IN RESPONSE.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 2340Z 26 SEP 2012
COORDINATES - 51.2 NORTH 178.2 WEST
DEPTH - 35 KM
LOCATION - ANDREANOF ISLANDS ALEUTIAN IS.
MAGNITUDE - 6.9
EVALUATION
A WIDESPREAD DESTRUCTIVE TSUNAMI THREAT DOES NOT EXIST BASED ON
HISTORICAL EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI DATA.
THE WEST COAST AND ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER WILL ISSUE
INFORMATION REGARDING ANY LOCAL TSUNAMI THREAT TO COASTS NEAR
THE EARTHQUAKE EPICENTER.
THIS WILL BE THE ONLY BULLETIN ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
THE WEST COAST/ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER WILL ISSUE PRODUCTS
FOR ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...WASHINGTON...OREGON...CALIFORNIA.
A volcano has erupted on Indonesia’s Sumatra island, spewing thick grey smoke up to 1.5 kilometres into the sky. Monitoring official Suparno says Mount Marapi’s eruption on Wednesday is its strongest since August last year, when its status was raised to level three out of four. Suparno, who uses one name, says there is no plan for an evacuation because the nearest villages are far beyond the danger zone of three kilometres from the crater.
At least 26 eruptions accompanied by steam and gas, as well as a volcano tectonic quake were registered as a consequence of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl activity during the last hours, it was reported Tuesday. The National Center of Disaster Prevention (Cenapred) said eruptions were of low and medium intensity with no ash expulsion in any of them. According to the institution, the volcano tectonic quake was registered at 11.54 local time (16:54 GMT). At this moment, the alert light of volcano activity remains yellow phase 2 and the surrounding population to keep informed as to alerts on the activity of the volcano also known as Don Goyo. Traffic between Santiago Xalitzintla and San Pedro Nexapa, via the Cortes passage, is under control. The Popo is located at the center of the country, in the territorial limits of the Morelos, Puebla and Mexico states. Located 55 kilometers Southeast of the Federal District, the Popocatépetl is the second highest volcano in Mexico, with a maximum height of five thousand 458 meters above sea level, only second to the Pico de Orizaba (Veracruz) with five thousand 610 meters.
A woman died after being hit by a falling tree branch at the Royal Botanical Gardens in London. She was a victim of the storm that has swept across the UK, causing power black-outs and flood evacuations. Heavy rain and winds of up to 70mph disrupted rail services in the South West, the Midlands, northern England and Wales. East Coast trains said there was no service on the East Coast Main Line between York and Darlington because of flooding, preventing the running of East Coast services between London and Scotland. About 70 areas in England and Wales were being warned to expect flooding, with northern England the worst affected. In Tyne and Wear, Northumberland and County Durham 200 homes were evacuated. In Scotland, there were eight flood warnings, mostly for the Borders. The Scottish Governmentâs Resilience Room (SGoRR) and Transport Scotlandâs Multi Agency Response Team (MART) were both activated in light of Met Office Amber Alerts. Transport Minister Keith Brown, who chaired a meeting earlier today, said: âYet again, we have seen a wide range of agencies and organisations react quickly to weather alerts and to put in place their response plans for the potential impact of heavy rain and high winds. âThis activity, including a significant level of multi-agency co-operation, has played its part in keeping disruption to a minimum in difficult conditions. âThe travelling public also deserve praise for the way they have reacted to the various travel updates.â And around 2,000 households across a number of areas were without power.
More than 300 homes have been flooded in the north of England in two days, as almost twice the average rainfall for September drenched the Pennine and Cheviot catchments and streamed off both sides. Boats ferried residents to safety from St Helen’s in Lancashire and Morpeth in Northumberland, where defences installed after disastrous flooding in 2008 failed to contain the river Wansbeck. Transport was devastated as parts of the M6 and the East Coast main line became temporary rivers, and swirling underground water left a block of town houses in Newburn, Newcastle, seemingly on stilts as earth round the foundations was swept away. Police cordoned off the building amid fears it could collapse and last night the area around it was said to be like a “ghost town” after a power failure. An old fishing village in the Footdee or “Fittie” area of Aberdeen was covered in a white foam as wind and rain drove a thick froth of plankton and sea-spume inland. The city council said the coating was “unusual but harmless” and it would be swept up by environmental teams if any was left after the rain. An easing of the downpour in the central Pennines, turning to a fine mist by mid-afternoon on Tuesday, saved the centre of Leeds and the much-flooded Calder valley town of Hebden Bridge from serious damage. Sandbags were everywhere in Hebden Bridge and pumps on standby, while emergency teams from the Environment Agency in Leeds ran a round-the-clock clearing of drains and watercourses. The agency warned, however, that further flooding was likely in Yorkshire, the north-west and north Wales overnight before the obstinate centre of low pressure finally crept off the fells and turned its attention to the Midlands and south. The Meteorological Office warned that their turn would be on Wednesday as the weather backtracked down the course it took over the weekend. There are 219 flood warnings in place.
The wet and windy start to week has persisted into Wednesday with more than a month’s worth of rain falling in some places across the UK.
Britain has been hit with the most extreme September weather for decades, with hundreds evacuated from their homes and fire and rescue teams battling against the floods to help residents of some of the worst-hit areas.
The RSPCA had to step in to rescue donkeys (one of whom was called none other than Noah!) from their field in Cattal near YorkCars sailed down streets after being abandoned by motorists, and a block of flats in Newburn, Newcastle were left with their foundations exposed as the town struggled with another day of heavy rain.
There were fears that the modern housing blocks could crumple as torrents of water washed away their foundationsMick Murphy, technical director of Newcastle City Council, told the BBC that the Spencer Court flats were “extremely unstable”, adding that he had “never seen anything like this in 33 years of civil engineering experience”
The floods washed away material around the foundations as a waterfall surged through the backgardenIt was evacuated close to a bicycle shop which had thousands of pounds worth of cycles stolen while the roads were blocked by water and silt.
“We have increased patrols in Newburn” said Acting Chief Superintendent Dave Byrne, of Newcastle Area Command.
He added: “It is despicable if people are thinking of taking advantage of the bad weather and using it as an opportunity to break in to properties.”
The river Tweed bursts its banks in the centre of Peebles, Scottish Borders as rain causes misery for many across the UK.There are 57 flood warnings and 100 flood alerts currently in force across the UK, with the North of England worst affected.
Although the worst of the rain has now passed, river levels in some places were still rising as the water comes down through the systems.
The Environment Agency said rivers such as the Ouse, which flows through York, and the Dane, which flows through Crewe, Nantwich and Northwich, had yet to peak this afternoon and posed a real risk of flooding.
Elevated walkways carry pedestrians to walk above floodwater in York as the River Ouse continues to rise today following the torrential rainfalls of the past few days.Some towns have been “cut in half” by the floods, as bridges were swamped by the swollen river conditions. Tadcaster was split in two by the closure of the bridge which carries the A659 over the River Wharfe as a precaution after firefighters noticed water seeping through the structure.
Beautiful but dangerous: flood waters in the fields around Tewkesbury AbbeyShut roads and flooded railways have caused travel chaos, with diversions in place across the affected counties. The A1 near Catterick will remain closed all day, police have said.
An aerial view showing flood water from the River Ouse in York, North Yorkshire as communities are being warned of the possibility of more flooding.
Workers evacuated from their offices in York city centre on Wednesday
However for some, coping with the flooding is just the first obstacle to overcome.
After the floods subside residents and business owners will have to cope with the huge amounts of mud and debris left by the floods. Some of these deposits have already rendered areas unrecognisable.
A car is submerged in mud after the waters subsided in an area of Newcastle on WednesdayResident have had to use ladders to bridge their way across the islands of mud that have been left by the floods.
Councils have called on the government to set up an emergency fund to help pay for millions of pounds of repairs to roads damaged by the persistent rain and flooding in the past few months.
A flooded back garden in Morpeth, where hundreds have been evacuated after stormsIt said funds might have to be diverted from elsewhere to plug the gap, causing cuts to services or planned infrastructure projects that aim to boost growth being put on the back-burner.
NEW YORK, Sept. 27 (UPI) — Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda told the United Nations Japan will share the lessons from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster to promote nuclear safety.
Addressing the General Assembly, the Japanese leader urged U.N. members to act in the interest of future generations about nuclear safety.
He said the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, caused by a massive earthquake and tsunami, led his government to take steps that would allow Japan to end its dependence on nuclear power by 2030s.
In this regard, Noda said, his government, along with the International Atomic Energy Agency, will co-sponsor the Fukushima Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Safety at the end of this year and the U.N. World Conference on Disaster Reduction in 2015.
Noda also urged his counterparts to do more to combat threats such as environmental degradation, terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and to build a sustainable future for future generations.
“Political leaders must take charge of their responsibilities now for tomorrow,” he said.
Five persons showing symptoms of infection from a SARS-like virus have been admitted to Odense University Hospital (OUH), central Denmark, the hospital said in a press statement Tuesday. The five patients are currently being examined for symptoms of infection from a new corona virus, which can lead to severe respiratory disease. Corona viruses are a large family of viruses including those which cause the common cold, as well as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an outbreak of which killed some 800 people in 2003. The new corona virus is thought to have an incubation period lasting seven to 10 days, and has previously been found among patients who had traveled from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. OUH Director Jens Peter Steensen said to Danish media late Tuesday that the five patients, who are all Danish residents, will be tested for the new corona virus and for a range of more common triggers of respiratory infection. The results of these tests will be released Wednesday afternoon, Steensen said, adding the patients will be kept in isolation until then. On Monday, the Danish Health and Medicines Authority advised persons who had traveled to Qatar or Saudi Arabia to seek medical advice if they experienced fever, cough or difficulty breathing within ten days of their return from these countries. It followed a warning from British health officials who alerted the World Health Organization on Saturday of the new virus found in a man transferred from Qatar to the UK on Sept. 11.
Biohazard name:
SARS (susp, human)
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
MessageToEagle.com – This strange object was discovered by an American astronomer, H.L. Giclas in 1947.
It was lost and later recovered again in 1979.
Its name is 2201 Oljato. It is in a highly elliptical Earth-crossing orbit and has a unique spectrum that does not resemble that of any other known asteroid or comet.
Its nature is unknown. For some time, it was believed it could be the “dead” nucleus of a comet that has ceased to be active, but this possibility was later ruled out.
Click on image to enlargeHubble Space Telescope observation of an asteroid trailing debris following a suspected collision. Photo Credits: NASA, ESA, & D. Jewitt/UCLA
In recent years, there has been much focus on the possible relation between comets and asteroids. It has been observed that many asteroids have orbits, which are reminiscent of cometary orbits.
Earth-crossing asteroid 2201 Oljato, for example, seems to have more links to comets than just its orbital parameters.
The orbit of Oljato appears to be coincident with perturbations in the magnetic field of Venus as it was detected by the Pioneer Venus spacecraft.
Are these perturbations caused by particles trailing behind Oljato or a “tail”?
The study of the near-Earth object 2201 Oljato has resulted in many surprises. The asteroid 2201 Oljato appears to be exhibiting some strange behavior.
Its orbital properties have been associated with meteor showers, and its modeled orbital evolution is chaotic, a property which might indicate a history related to comets.
All available observational data gathered during the object’s two apparitions – in 1979 and 1983, shows that this asteroid has a high radiometric albedo, a property not associated with comet nuclei. In certain wavelength regimes it is classified as an S-type asteroid, in others, an E-type, but its overall spectral reflectance is not typical of either taxonomic type, and neither type is thought of as cometlike.
Click on image to enlargeArtist’s conception of Pioneer Venus orbiter entering Venus’ atmosphere.
Surprisingly, high ultraviolet reflectance at the 1979 apparition was suggested to be the result of residual outgassing as in a comet. The UV photometric data are modeled as fluorescent emission from neutral species found in comets.
Oljato orbits the Sun once every 3.2 years. During its lifetime, NASA’s Pioneer Venus Orbiter and its magnetometers observed three passages of Oljato between Venus and the Sun.
Each time, there was a marked increase in the region of unusual magnetic peaks known as Interplanetary Field Enhancements (IFEs), both ahead and behind the asteroid.
The European Space Agency’s craft Venus Express follows an orbit around Venus that brings it to within 250 km (155 miles) at its closest and 66,000 km (41,000 miles) when furthest away. Its seven instruments are mounted on the central body, which is about 1.5m (5 ft) across. Credit: ESA
Now, new data from Venus Express spacecraft suggest the asteroid has lost its magnetism. Dr. Christopher Russell presented an explanation for Oljato’s strange behavior at the European Planetary Science Congress in Madrid on Tuesday 25th September.
“This is not typical asteroidal behavior! These magnetic increases are rare, occurring in Venus orbit about 10 times per year. Pioneer observed that when Oljato was just in front or just behind Venus, the rate of IFEs approximately trebled. And yet, in more recent observations with Venus Express, the occurrence of IFEs is now lower than the average we find outside this region,” Russell said.
Russell and his team believe that the answer to this discrepancy lies with collisions between Oljato and debris in its orbit. When objects collide in interplanetary space, they become electrically charged and dust particles are accelerated by the solar wind.
“At one point in time Oljato shed boulders – mostly a few tens of meters in diameter – into its orbit and they formed a debris trail in front and behind Oljato. These impactors then hit other targets as they passed between Venus and the Sun. The large amount of fine dust released by these collisions was picked up by the solar wind, producing the IFEs observed by Pioneer, and was accelerated out of the solar system,” Russell explained.
The reduced rate of IFEs observed during the Venus Express epoch suggests that the collisions with Oljato’s co-orbiting material have reduced the general debris in the region as well as the co-orbiting material shed by Oljato.
“The IFEs observed by Pioneer suggest that more than 3 tons of dust was being lost from the region each day. Effects associated with solar heating and gravitational perturbations have gradually nudged larger chunks of debris away from Oljato’s orbit. From once being unusually crowded, the region has become unusually clear and free of IFEs,” said Russell.
A chemical leak on the premises of the Auto-Klima company on Kopcianska Street in Bratislava’s Petrzalka district has injured sixteen people, one seriously. The fire brigade in Bratislava reported that the leak was of styrene, an organic chemical, and sulphur dioxide. The site was evacuated, a de-contamination process begun and the building’s power supply disconnected. Police spokesperson Petra Hrášková said that officers were investigating the cause of the accident.
Sixteen people were hospitalised for exposure to poisonous gasses in a leak Wednesday at a former chemical plant in Slovakia’s capital Bratislava, the police said.
“Fifteen people suffered light injuries and one was injured more seriously. All of them were taken to hospital,” Boris Chmel, spokesman for the emergency services, told AFP.
The styrene and sulphur dioxide leak occurred at a firm making car air-conditioning systems, which operated on the premises of the former chemicals plant, local media reported.
Sulphur dioxide is a toxic gas, a key contributor to so-called acid rain.
Both chemicals in question may cause breathing problems and possibly, cancer.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
(Reuters) – A magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck off the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, on Tuesday and caused panic, but local officials said there were no reports of damage or injuries.
The quake’s epicenter was located 46 miles north of La Paz, Mexico, and was centered in the Gulf of California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
“It felt pretty strong,” said Ivan Calderon, a Baja California Sur state civil protection official, adding there were no reports of damages or injuries.
“So far there have just been some reports of people panicking, but nothing serious,” Calderon said.
He said school was suspended across the state on Wednesday while officials examined sites for damages. Some other public buildings would also be closed Wednesday for checks, he said.
A magnitude 6 earthquake is capable of causing severe damage. Four more tremors, magnitude 4.8 or less, followed the bigger quake, all clustered north of La Paz, the USGS said.
The southern part of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula is sparsely populated outside of La Paz, the capital of Baja California Sur, and the tourist resort of Los Cabos, located about 98 miles to the south.
(Reporting By Michael O’Boyle; Editing by Bill Trott and Stacey Joyce)
National Earthquake Information Center
U.S. Geological Survey http://neic.usgs.gov/
Tectonic Summary
Seismotectonics of Mexico
Located atop three of the large tectonic plates, Mexico is one of the world’s most seismologically active regions. The relative motion of these crustal plates causes frequent earthquakes and occasional volcanic eruptions. Most of the Mexican landmass is on the westward moving North American plate. The Pacific Ocean floor south of Mexico is being carried northeastward by the underlying Cocos plate. Because oceanic crust is relatively dense, when the Pacific Ocean floor encounters the lighter continental crust of the Mexican landmass, the ocean floor is subducted beneath the North American plate creating the deep Middle American trench along Mexico’s southern coast. Also as a result of this convergence, the westward moving Mexico landmass is slowed and crumpled creating the mountain ranges of southern Mexico and earthquakes near Mexico’s southern coast. As the oceanic crust is pulled downward, it melts; the molten material is then forced upward through weaknesses in the overlying continental crust. This process has created a region of volcanoes across south-central Mexico known as the Cordillera Neovolcánica.
The area west of the Gulf of California, including Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula, is moving northwestward with the Pacific plate at about 95 mm per year. Here, the Pacific and North American plates grind past each other creating strike-slip faulting, the southern extension of California’s San Andreas fault. In the past, this relative plate motion pulled Baja California away from the coast forming the Gulf of California and is the cause of earthquakes in the Gulf of California region today.
Mexico has a long history of destructive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In September 1985, a magnitude 8.1 earthquake killed more than 9,500 people in Mexico City. In southern Mexico, Volcán de Colima and El Chichón erupted in 2005 and 1982, respectively. Paricutín volcano, west of Mexico City, began venting smoke in a cornfield in 1943; a decade later this new volcano had grown to a height of 424 meters. Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl volcanos (“smoking mountain” and “white lady”, respectively), southeast of Mexico City, occasionally vent gas that can be clearly seen from the City, a reminder that volcanic activity is ongoing. In 1994 and 2000 Popocatépetl renewed its activity forcing the evacuation of nearby towns, causing seismologists and government officials to be concerned about the effect a large-scale eruption might have on the heavily populated region. Popocatépetl volcano last erupted in 2010.
Mexico, Sep 25 (Prensa Latina) At least 26 eruptions accompanied by steam and gas, as well as a volcano tectonic quake were registered as a consequence of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl activity during the last hours, it was reported Tuesday.
The National Center of Disaster Prevention (Cenapred) said eruptions were of low and medium intensity with no ash expulsion in any of them.According to the institution, the volcano tectonic quake was registered at 11.54 local time (16:54 GMT).At this moment, the alert light of volcano activity remains yellow phase 2 and the surrounding population to keep informed as to alerts on the activity of the volcano also known as Don Goyo.Traffic between Santiago Xalitzintla and San Pedro Nexapa, via the Cortes passage, is under control.The Popo is located at the center of the country, in the territorial limits of the Morelos, Puebla and Mexico states.
Located 55 kilometers Southeast of the Federal District, the Popocatépetl is the second highest volcano in Mexico, with a maximum height of five thousand 458 meters above sea level, only second to the Pico de Orizaba (Veracruz) with five thousand 610 meters.
sgl/ef/lac/dfm
Modificado el ( martes, 25 de septiembre de 2012 )
Ferries have also been cancelled and commuiters suffered severe delays to rail services. A number of trees came down overnight in Aberdeen, causing roads in the city centre to close, including Union Terrace and Willowbank Road. The city council said it received dozens of calls about fallen trees and crews are working to remove them. Drivers were also warned to take extra care on the Esplanade after sand and water was blown on to the road. In Dundee a driver suffered minor injuries after a tree came down and hit a car on Arbroath Road near Baxter Park at about 9am. Fife Constabulary also reported trees down in the area, with “Standing Stane road” between Kirkcaldy and Leven shut as well as the road from Cupar to Melville Lodges roundabout. High winds also led to restrictions on bridges, with the Forth Road bridge opened to cars only this morning. There was widespread disruption on the main East Coast rail line between Edinburgh and Newcastle, although ScotRail reported only “minor disruption” to its West Highland line. For those hoping to travel by ferry, many Caledonian MacBrayne services were facing disruption and some routes were cancelled.Flood warnings are in place for Haddington in East Lothian and many parts of the Borders. A further nine flood alerts were issued across Scotland, including in Aberdeenshire, Dumfries and Galloway and Fife. The Met Office put out yellow “be aware” warnings of severe weather for much of the country and forecasters predicted the most persistent rain would be in the south and east throughout the day. Transport minister Keith Brown is leading the Scottish Government’s resilience committee meeting this morning to receive updates on the transport network, utilities and flooding. The resilience committee meeting was told that about 2,000 households across a number of areas were without power, but electricity providers had staff trying to reconnect customers as quickly as possible. It also heard the heavy rain had seen some areas record about 40mm of water in the past 36 hours. Mr Brown said: “Yet again, we have seen a wide range of agencies and organisations react quickly to weather alerts and to put in place their response plans for the potential impact of heavy rain and high winds. “This activity, including a significant level of multi-agency co-operation, has played its part in keeping disruption to a minimum in difficult conditions. “The travelling public also deserve praise for the way they have reacted to the various travel updates this morning. “But no-one is being complacent and whilst the weather alerts remain in place, the focused response will continue.”
26.09.2012
Extreme Weather
United Kingdom
Multiple region, [South west, northern England and Scotland]
Hundreds of homes have been evacuated and dozens of cars abandoned by drivers after widespread flooding across the UK. Flood warnings are in place across Britain as rivers burst their banks and forecasters say there is more bad weather to come. The North East has been worst affected, with towns such as Morpeth, Chester-le-Street, Stockton on Tees and parts of Newcastle badly hit. Other areas in England, Wales and Scotland have also been flooded, with over 200 official warnings and alerts still in place. More than 300 properties have flooded since Sunday. Over a month’s worth of rain fell in just one day in some parts of the country. There has been widespread disruption to travel after roads were closed and long delays to rail services. The A1 and the East Coast Main Line were among the routes hit by the conditions. The Met Office said many places have had between 50mm and 70mm (2in to 2.8in) rain in the past 48 hours. Heavy rain and strong winds are forecast to return to some southern areas with 20mm to 40mm (0.8in to 1.6in) likely in places into Wednesday. There is also no sign of the downpours easing in the Midlands. Among the properties evacuated was a council care home at Gilling West, in North Yorkshire.The Oswin Grove Unit’s 19 pensioners had to be carried to safety by firefighters after it became swamped by 3ft of water. Parts of the UK are also experiencing strong winds, with gusts over 60mph across parts of Scotland and Ireland at times. The Environment Agency is urging people to sign up to its flood alerts and has issued guidance to residents who may be affected by flooding. Kath Evans, from the Environment Agency, told Sky News that the situation had been made worse by the wet summer. “With the rainfall over the summer and more falling over the last 24 to 36 hours, it has caused this widespread flooding,” she said. She said they were watching areas around the River Ouse in Yorkshire and the River Severn as the water moved downstream and would “urge people to keep an eye out and listen out for flood warnings”. Communities in Yorkshire, the North West and North Wales were urged to remain on guard for further floods. In Morpeth, parts of the town were evacuated as a precaution before the river burst its banks and some 40 stranded residents were rescued using lifeboats, although water levels later appeared to have peaked. Heavy rain sent cars careering down the River Coquet and homes were flooded in Rothbury, Northumberland, with at least two more flooded in Thropton and Netherton.Hebden Bridge, which suffered severe flooding twice this summer, appeared to have escaped further damage as river levels seemed to level off just below bank tops. About 50 properties in and around Wearside were evacuated, Sunderland City Council said. A number of roads and two primary schools were closed and residents were warned refuse collections could be disrupted. Emergency services evacuated around 30 properties in Hartburn, Stockton, Teesside, as water levels rose, and a crew of refuse collectors had to be rescued by firefighters at Eryholme, North Yorkshire, when a river burst its banks and swamped their truck. The A1 was closed near Catterick in both directions and is not expected to reopen until Wednesday morning. The A66 was closed in both directions near Darlington as a result of flooding. In Durham, police threatened to prosecute impatient drivers who tried to use closed roads. There was no service on the East Coast Main Line between York and Newcastle for much of the day because of flooding at Eryholme, near Northallerton, preventing the running of services between London and Scotland. East Coast Trains advised people not to travel and said tickets for Tuesday would be valid on trains on Wednesday. The West Coast line remained open.
A group of 16 Russian and Norwegian researchers who sailed to take measurements surrounding a Russian nuclear submarine that was scuttled for nuclear waste off the coast of the former Soviet nuclear test archipelago Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea have found no radioactive leaks, Norwegian radiation authorities said today. Per Strand, a director at the Norwegian Radiation Protection agency told Bellona, however, that the primary purpose of the expedition, which returned today, was to inspect the possibility of an uncontrolled chain reaction aboard the K-27 Russian nuclear submarine, which was sunk in 50 meters of water in Novaya Zemlya’s Stepovogo Bay in the Kara Sea as nuclear waste in 1981. “The Russian side indicated there might be a hypothetical possibility that spent nuclear fuel in the reactor in extreme situations could cause an uncontrolled chain reaction, which can lead to heat and radioactivity releases,” Strand said in a telephone interview from Kirkeness. The K-27, was dumped by the Soviet Navy in 1981, with spent nuclear fuel packed in its reactors, after a 1968 reactor leak aboard the killed nine sailors.The navy tried to repair it before deciding to seal the nuclear units and sinking the sub. The researchers also examined some 2000 containers of various kinds of radioactive waste that were dumped in Stepovogo Bay, but found no increase in radiation since the site was last inspected in 1994. Authorities in Russia and their counterparts in Norway, which lies about 965 kilometers to the west of the sunken sub, need to make a decision about a safe disposal of the K-27, which was the top priority of the expedition, Strand said. Strand said that the joint research team aboard the Ivan Petrov research vessel took sediment, plant and sea life samples. They also used a mini submarine to take photos of the K-27’s condition. Though emphasizing that all data collected is preliminary, Strand said it would “contribute to making decisions about whether the submarine needs to be lifted out of the water” for safer storage. “For now, the first priority will be the development of environmental impact studies based on the information we have collected to judge the feasibility of lifting the submarine,” he said. Norway’s number one focus for the moment, said Strand, will be developing an effective system of countermeasures should a chain reaction occur aboard the K-27.
Today
Nuclear Event
USA
State of Minnesota, Monticello [Monticello Nuclear Power Plant]
Xcel Energy says its Monticello nuclear power plant automatically shut down Tuesday, Sept. 25, for unknown reasons. The shutdown occurred at 11:07 a.m. and all plant safety systems were functioning, the Minneapolis-based utility said Tuesday. The shutdown posed no danger to the public or the plant’s workers, Xcel officials said. The cause of the shutdown is under investigation. Xcel said it has notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state. Monticello is located about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis. The 600-megawatt boiling water reactor plant was last shut down in August for seven days due to a leaking gasket on a pipe flange. Monticello also had a three-week shutdown last year that started on Nov. 19 when safety systems detected low oil pressure in the plant’s turbines, Xcel said at the time of the incident. In both previous shutdowns, Xcel said there was no danger to the public or workers. Monticello generates enough electricity to supply almost 500,000 homes. Xcel officials said the current shutdown is not expected to be lengthy.
Five persons showing symptoms of infection from a SARS-like virus have been admitted to Odense University Hospital (OUH), central Denmark, the hospital said in a press statement Tuesday. The five patients are currently being examined for symptoms of infection from a new corona virus, which can lead to severe respiratory disease. Corona viruses are a large family of viruses including those which cause the common cold, as well as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an outbreak of which killed some 800 people in 2003. The new corona virus is thought to have an incubation period lasting seven to 10 days, and has previously been found among patients who had traveled from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. OUH Director Jens Peter Steensen said to Danish media late Tuesday that the five patients, who are all Danish residents, will be tested for the new corona virus and for a range of more common triggers of respiratory infection. The results of these tests will be released Wednesday afternoon, Steensen said, adding the patients will be kept in isolation until then. On Monday, the Danish Health and Medicines Authority advised persons who had traveled to Qatar or Saudi Arabia to seek medical advice if they experienced fever, cough or difficulty breathing within ten days of their return from these countries. It followed a warning from British health officials who alerted the World Health Organization on Saturday of the new virus found in a man transferred from Qatar to the UK on Sept. 11.
Biohazard name:
SARS (susp, human)
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a global alert on Monday for a new SARS-like respiratory virus which left a man from Qatar critically ill in a London hospital and killed at least one more in Saudi Arabia. The 49-year-old Qatari was admitted to an intensive care unit in Doha on September 7 suffering from acute respiratory infection and kidney failure before being transferred to Britain by air ambulance on September 11, the WHO said. A Saudi Arabian national died earlier this year from a virtually identical virus, the WHO said, while Saudi medical authorities said they were investigating other possible cases of the disease. The WHO confirmed the illness was in the coronavirus family but was not SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which swept out of China in 2003, killing more than 800 people worldwide. “This is a new virus,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told AFP. “We haven’t heard of any more new cases. We don’t have an appreciation of how widespread the virus is,” Hartl said. “This is one reason why we’re trying to get more information. We don’t know how it’s transmitted.”The WHO said the Qatari first fell ill on September 3 after visiting Saudi Arabia. Britain’s Health Protection Agency confirmed the presence of the new coronavirus and then found that it was a 99.5 percent match with a virus obtained from the lung tissue of a 60-year-old Saudi man who died earlier this year. Coronaviruses are causes of the common cold but can also include more severe illnesses including SARS. In Riyadh, the health ministry revealed that a total of three people, including the Qatari man, had been diagnosed with the virus after spending time in Saudi Arabia, according to state media. The other two later died. The ministry said it would continue to “follow developments” linked to the disease “in coordination with international health organisations,” adding that “these are rare cases and the situation is reassuring”. The announcement comes ahead of next month’s annual Muslim hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia’s holy city of Mecca which will attract nearly three million believers, although the WHO said it did not recommend any travel restrictions. In Britain, the HPA, an organisation set up by the government to manage infectious diseases, meanwhile, stressed no-one else in Britain, including those who had come into contact with the man, were reporting symptoms. The HPA said the new virus was “different from any that have previously been identified in humans.” It said there were encouraging signs that it was not as infectious as SARS as there had been no evidence of illness in people who had been in contact with the Qatari or the Saudi, including in health workers.”Based on what we know about other coronaviruses, many of these contacts will already have passed the period when they could have caught the virus from the infected person,” it said. John Watson, head of the respiratory diseases at the HPA, said: “Immediate steps have been taken to ensure that people who have been in contact with the UK case have not been infected, and there is no evidence to suggest they have.” Peter Openshaw, director of the Centre for Respiratory Infection at Imperial College London, urged caution, saying any evidence of human-to-human transmission causing severe disease “would be very worrying”. But fellow expert John Oxford, professor at the University of London, said he was “somewhat relaxed” because he believed the illness was more likely to behave “like a nasty infection rather than join the ‘exception’ group like SARS.”
A previously unknown virus has appeared in both Saudi Arabia and in a traveler who recently returned from the country. The virus killed one and has left the other in intensive care in London. Officially, the World Health Organization called the disease a ânovel coronavirus.â Coronaviruses include multiple viruses including the common cold and SARS, according to the WHO. SARS killed hundreds of people in Asia during a 2003 epidemic. British officials informed the World Health Organization over the weekend of the new virus in a man that had recently been sent to London for treatment from Qatar. The patient has since suffered renal failure. Health officials donât know much about the new virus and the WHO said itâs âin the process of obtaining further information to determine the public health implications of the two confirmed cases.â However, the WHO is not recommending any travel restrictions at this time.
Ontario has found a case of an infection with a new swine flu virus, in a man who had close contact with pigs. The infection was caused by an H1N1-variant virus, which is not the swine flu virus that has been jumping from pigs to people in the United States this summer. That virus was an H3N2-variant, and has caused 305 infections this year in the U.S. but has not been spotted in Canada to date. Most infections with the H3N2-variant flu have been in people who visited pig barns at state and county fairs. The Ontario case was announced by the province’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Arlene King on Tuesday morning. Ms. King said the man is being treated in hospital in southwestern Ontario. She did not indicate whether that is as a precaution or because he is seriously ill. Health Minister Deb Matthews said the fact that the case was detected in Ontario demonstrates that the province has a strong surveillance system for infectious diseases.“It’s one case, the first we’ve seen in Ontario, but not really unexpected because there have been cases in the States,” Ms. Matthews told reporters on Tuesday. Ms. Matthews said health care providers in Ontario learned a lot about infectious diseases from the earlier outbreaks of SARS and H1N1. “Our hospitals know exactly what to do when they get a case,” she said. Ms. King said this new virus is one that rarely spreads from animals to people, and human-to-human spread is also rare. She stressed the discovery of the infection does not trigger food safety concerns. “Proper cooking of meats, including pork, kills all bacteria and viruses.” She also urged people to remember that hand washing and getting a flu shot are the best way to protect against contracting the flu. The term variant is added to flu virus names when viruses that normally circulate in animals cause infections in humans. In written form it is often shortened to a “v” at the end of the virus’s name. This H1N1v virus would be a distant cousin of the H1N1 viruses that have been circulating in people for most of the last century. That family includes the virus that cause the 2009 pandemic. But viruses within a large family group such as H1N1 can be sufficiently different from one another that antibodies to one won’t fully protect a person from becoming infected with another. U.S. authorities have also seen one case of infection with an H1N1v virus there this summer, in Missouri. Ms. King did not say whether the genetic blueprints of the Ontario and Missouri viruses were closely related.
Biohazard name:
H3N2
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
Astronomy forums are buzzing with speculation about newly-discovered Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON). Currently located beyond the orbit of Jupiter, Comet ISON is heading for a very close encounter with the sun next year. In Nov. 2013, it will pass less than 0.012 AU (1.8 million km) from the solar surface. The fierce heating it experiences then could turn the comet into a bright naked-eye object. (continued below)
Comet ISON photographed by E. Guido, G. Sostero & N. Howes on Sept. 24. [more]
Much about this comet–and its ultimate fate–remains unknown. “At this stage we’re just throwing darts at the board,” says Karl Battams of the NASA-supported Sungrazer Comet Project, who lays out two possibilities:
“In the best case, the comet is big, bright, and skirts the sun next November. It would be extremely bright — negative magnitudes maybe — and naked-eye visible for observers in the Northern Hemisphere for at least a couple of months.”
“Alternately, comets can and often do fizzle out! Comet Elenin springs to mind as a recent example, but there are more famous examples of comets that got the astronomy community seriously worked up, only to fizzle. This is quite possibly a ‘new’ comet coming in from the Oort cloud, meaning this could be its first-ever encounter with the Sun. If so, with all those icyvolatiles intact and never having been truly stressed (thermally and gravitationally), the comet could well disrupt and dissipate weeks or months before reaching the sun.”
“Either of the above scenarios is possible, as is anything in between,” Battams says. “There’s no doubt that Comet ISON will be closely watched. Because the comet is so far away, however, our knowledge probably won’t develop much for at least a few more months.”
Meanwhile, noted comet researcher John Bortle has pointed out a curious similarity between the orbit of Comet ISON and that of the Great Comet of 1680. “Purely as speculation,” he says, “perhaps the two bodies could have been one a few revolutions ago.”
The onset of northern autumn means it’s aurora season. For reasons researchers don’t fully understand, equinoxes are the best times to see Northern Lights. And, right on cue, the Arctic Circle is glowing. Marianne Bergli sends this picture of auroras shimmering directly above Storfjord, Norway:
“Last night it was difficult to select [which part of the sky to photograph]. The auroras were dancing everywhere,” says Bergli. “Eventually I was just lying on my back looking up. It was absolutely, unbelievable wonderful.”
As the week begins, the solar wind velocity is low (~350 km/s), but at this time of year it only takes a gentle gust to ignite bright auroras around the Arctic Circle. High-latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras
Experts and citizen scientists are tracking the “zombie bee” infection across the country. The insects have a parasite that causes them to fly at night and lurch around erratically until they die. The infection is another threat to bees that are needed to pollinate crops, in addition to the mysterious ailment “colony collapse disorder.” The infection is as grim as it sounds: “Zombie bees” have a parasite that causes them to fly at night and lurch around erratically until they die. And experts say the condition has crept into Washington state. “I joke with my kids that the zombie apocalypse is starting at my house,” said Mark Hohn, a novice beekeeper who spotted the infected insects at his suburban Seattle home. Hohn returned from vacation a few weeks ago to find many of his bees either dead or flying in jerky patterns and then flopping on the floor. He remembered hearing about zombie bees, so he collected several of the corpses and popped them into a plastic bag. About a week later, the Kent man had evidence his bees were infected: the pupae of parasitic flies. “Curiosity got the better of me,” Hohn said. The zombie bees were the first to be confirmed in Washington state, The Seattle Times reported. San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik first discovered zombie bees in California in 2008.Hafernik now uses a website to recruit citizen scientists like Hohn to track the infection across the country. Observers also have found zombie bees in Oregon and South Dakota. The infection is another threat to bees that are needed to pollinate crops. Hives have been failing in recent years due to a mysterious ailment called colony collapse disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly die. The life cycle of the fly that infects zombie bees is reminiscent of the movie “Alien,” the newspaper reported. A small adult female lands on the back of a honeybee and injects eggs into the bee’s abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots. “They basically eat the insides out of the bee,” Hafernik said. After consuming their host Relevant Products/Services, the maggots pupate, forming a hard outer shell that looks like a fat, brown grain of rice. That’s what Hohn found in the plastic bag with the dead bees. Adult flies emerge in three to four weeks. There’s no evidence yet that the parasitic fly is a major player in the bees’ decline, but it does seem the pest is targeting new hosts, said Steve Sheppard, chairman of the entomology department at Washington State University. “It may occur a lot more widely than we think,” he said. That’s what Hafernik hopes to find out with his website, zombeewatch.org. The site offers simple instructions for collecting suspect bees, watching for signs of parasites and reporting the results. Once more people start looking, the number of sightings will probably climb, Hohn said.
Biohazard name:
Colony collapse disorder (bees)
Biohazard level:
3/4 Hight
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans, but for which vaccines or other treatments exist, such as anthrax, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, SARS virus, variola virus (smallpox), tuberculosis, typhus, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, yellow fever, and malaria. Among parasites Plasmodium falciparum, which causes Malaria, and Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes trypanosomiasis, also come under this level.
Symptoms:
Status:
confirmed
……………….
Today
HAZMAT
USA
State of , Charlotte [Emerald Performance Materials plant]
Mecklenburg County and Charlotte fire fighters responded to the Emerald Performance Materials plant Tuesday to help contain an acid spill. The West Mecklenburg Fire Department was the first on scene at about 9 p.m. Soon after, they called for the hazmat team from the Charlotte Fire Department. Hazmat teams determined the spill was triflic acid. A pipe that was malfunctioning caused the leak. One employee was treated on the scene for chemical burns. He was not taken to the hospital, firefighters said. Triflic acid is extremely strong acid, often called a “super acid,” according to manufacturers. It is used to make a variety of products. Investigators told WBTV News an improper mixture of chemicals caused a chemical cloud, that plant operators feared was caustic, caused the incident. Hazmat crews were able to control the spill and contain it to the plant. The scene was cleared in about an hour, and hazmat crews said there was no environmental impact.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
Danish geologists say a 4.4-magnitude quake has rattled the seabed between Denmark and Sweden, causing no damage or casualties.
Trine Dahl-Jensen of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) said Monday’s quake was “pretty strong” by Danish standards.
Dahl-Jensen says such quakes happen once or twice a decade.
The epicenter was 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) southeast of the Danish island of Anholt in the Kattegat Sea.
Media in Denmark and Sweden reported that residents in the two Scandinavian countries woke up when they felt the earth shake at 0257 GMT (10:57 p.m. EDT Sunday).
COALINGA, Calif. — A magnitude-4.5 earthquake has shaken a rural area of Central California.
A U.S. Geological Survey computer-generated report says Monday’s 12:36 a.m. quake was centered 16 miles south-southwest of Coalinga in the San Joaquin Valley and 123 miles southeast of San Jose.
A Coalinga police officer says several people have reported feeling the quake but there are no reports of damage.
STEAMING: GNS confirms that ‘volcanic eruption is underway’, although there is little or no ash being emitted.
White Island volcano has erupted, prompting GNS Science to advise visitors to take extra care.
The island, located about 50 kilometres off the coast of Whakatane, is an active volcano and a popular tourist spot.
Its web camera captured the small eruption from Crater Lake, GNS Science volcanologist Michael Ronsenberg said.
“These phenomena are not unknown for While Island, but this is the first substantial confirmation that small scale eruptions are now occurring on the island and confirms the risk to visitors has increased,” he said.
“Eruptions can occur at any time with little or no warning. We advise extra caution should be taken, if visiting the island.”
GNS has changed the volcano’s code from “experiencing signs of elevated unrest above known background levels” to “volcanic eruption is underway with no or minor ash emissions”.
The alert level has also changed from one to two due to “minor eruptive activity”.
It follows a code change last week when scientists discovered water levels in Crater Lake rose by about 3m to 5m overnight and the number of tremors had increased.
There was a particularly stronger seismic episode recorded Sunday morning, ending in a volcanic earthquake at 4.54am that day.
Rosenberg said: “[The earthquake] had a sound signal, which meant something happened on the surface. So we went back and looked at the camera images.”
“Obviously being at night time, there was no visual observations and initially we weren’t able to determine what that small event was.
“But we’ve narrowed it down and recognise that there has been full hydrothermal eruption.”
Rosenberg said there had not been any further eruptions, and the number of tremors had decreased.
“It’s now at similar levels to before the weekend.”
GNS Science was “paying close attention” to the volcano as the last “gentle eruption” had been in early 2001.
White Island also experienced a “moderate-sized explosion” in July 2000, when fresh lava was pushed out.
“In the past this kind of activity has increased to small eruptions that produce ash, and that ash could drift as far as the mainland,” Rosenberg said.
“We can’t predict what the volcano is going to do and we are not making any forecasts, but yes, it’s certainly possible that the activity could ramp up again.”
A mountain which the Icelandic Marine Research Institute (Hafró) discovered on the ocean floor west off the Snæfellsnes peninsula in West Iceland during an expedition earlier this summer may turn out to be a previously unknown volcano.
A fishing ship with Snæfellsjökull, the glacier-covered volcano on the tip of Snæfellsnes in the background. Copyright: Icelandic Photo Agency.
“Multi-laser measurements […] revealed a large underwater mountain deep off the foot of the continental shelf approximately 120 nautical miles west of Snæfellsnes,” a statement from Hafró reads, according to Fréttablaðið.
The mountain, which is at a depth of 950 to 1,400 meters is around 450 meters high, similar to Ingólfsfjall in south Iceland. However, it extends over 300 square kilometers, which is ten times the square measure of Ingólfsfjall.
The shape of the mountain is very similar to that of table mountains and it appears to be geologically young.
“The analysis of a rock sample from the mountain will determine whether this is the case or whether it is a volcano connected with an old drift belt, which might mean that it is 20 million years old,” the statement continues.
During the expedition multi-laser measurements were made between West Iceland and Greenland to map the shape of the ocean floor in these commonly-used fishing grounds and explore the environment of powerful ocean currents.
A total of 9,000 square kilometers were covered during the 11-day expedition.
Can you help? If you have tips, photos or video of the eruption, please email us.
Expand
An aerial from a Mountain Air flight over the Tongariro National Park. Photo / Greg Bowker
A thick ash cloud is covering much of the central North Island after Mt Tongariro erupted for the first time in more than a century late last night.
The volcanic alert level for Mt Tongariro has risen from 1 to 2, while the aviation colour code has been raised to red.
Roads are closed, flights are likely to be disrupted and nearby residents are advised to stay indoors as ash and rock spews from the mountain.
Turoa Ski Area manager Chris Thrupp told Firstline the ski field remains open and has not been advised to close. He said the ash has not drifted to Ruapehu, south of Tongariro.
“The ash is the concern – if the wind changes, which we don’t believe it will.”
GNS science is reporting that about 11.50pm on Monday night ash fall began to be reported in the volcano’s vicinity – it has since been reported as far east as SH5 near Te Haroto and in Napier.
It is the first time the mountain has erupted since 1897.
GNS duty volcanologist Michael Rosenberg told Radio New Zealand that some people are reported to have left their houses on the southern shores of Lake Rotoaira, though no formal notices of evacuation have been issued so far by Civil Defence.
He said residents in the area have told GNS of hearing several loud explosions, lightning and plumes of smoke and police have been told by an onlooker that “a new hole in the side of the mountain” had formed.
They have also reported bright red rocks flying out of the mountain.
The eruption reportedly happened at the Te Mari Craters, which are close to the Ketetahi Hot Springs on the northern side of the mountain.
There have been no further eruptions since midnight, according to GNS seismic records.
Mr Rosenberg said while volcanologists have been monitoring small earthquakes under the mountain in the past few weeks, the eruption was “quite unexpected”.
Activity at the mountain is expected continue for some time, bit it was “anyone’s guess” whether there would be larger eruptions.
AREAS AFFECTED
Civil defence spokesman Vince Cholewa told Newstalk ZB ash could reach those living in Waikato, Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Manawatu-Wanganui, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki.
“The advice to people is to stay indoors, because volcanic ash can obviously be a health hazard, if they’re indoors please close windows and doors to try and limit the entry of ash.”
Mr Cholewa says at this stage not all areas alerted are affected by ash, but that situation could change.
“We’re working actively with GNS Science who operate the monitoring equipment on the mountains, and with police so all the information from the ground is being gathered, and decisions will be based on that information.
“Evacuations have not been ordered, please listen to the radio for advice from local authorities and police, any evacuations would be issued at that level, and based on the evidence from GNS Science.”
Police are sending search and rescue teams up Mt Tongariro at first light to check no one is stranded in huts. However, they say there have been no reports of injuries or damage.
ROADS
The police have closed State Highway 1 between Rangipo and Waiouru (Desert Road) and SH46 west of Rangipo. SH47 and 4 remain open at this stage as does SH5.
Motorists are being advised to avoid travel in the area and these closures will be re-assessed once daylight reveals the extent of the ash cloud.
Truck driver Bryn Rodda told Radio New Zealand thick dust meant there was poor visibility on the Desert Road when he passed through last night.
“I could see this big cloud – it looked like a fist, basically, at an angle across the sky – and about the wrist section of the fist there was an orange ball of flash that I saw.”
Clayton Bolt, a passing motorist told RadioLive that he saw a massive white cloud coming from the side of Mt Tongariro.
“I put my foot down. I said, I’m going.”
AVIATION
Civil Aviation Authority manager of meteorology Peter Lechner said the plume is leading off to the east and south east. affecting a zone of airspace stretching as far as from Tongariro to north of Gisborne then south to Hawkes Bay and possibly northern Wairarapa.
The CAA alerted all aircraft using a volcanic ash advisory system, working with MetService.
Mr Lechner said that ash can build up in the turbines of aeroplanes and helicopters, causing engines to stall.
“It can result in significant flight risk.”
WEATHER
WeatherWatch chief analyst Philip Duncan said westerlies will continue to blow the ash east to south east of the mountain.
“The winds don’t look especially strong over the next few days as the centre of a low crosses the North Island – the lighter the winds are the more ash will fall locally around the mountain and less likely to cause widespread disruptions further afield.”
The Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management (MCDEM) is currently assessing information with the assistance of GNS scientific advisors.
It has not yet activated the National Crisis Management Centre which is called upon in times of emergency like the Christchurch earthquake.
The volcanic alert level for Mt Tongariro has risen from 1 to 2 after the central North Island volcano erupted for the first time in more than a century late last night. GNS science is reporting that at approximately 11:50pm on Monday night ash fall began to be reported in the volcano’s vicinity – it has since been reported as far east as SH5 near Te Haroto and in Napier. GNS duty volcanologist Michael Rosenberg told Radio New Zealand that some people are reported to have left their houses on the southern shores of Lake Rotoaira, though no formal notices of evacuation have been issued so far by Civil Defense. He said residents in the area have told GNS of hearing several loud explosions, lightning and plumes of smoke and police have been told by an onlooker that “a new hole in the side of the mountain” had formed. They have also reported bright red rocks flying out of the mountain. The eruption reportedly happened at the Te Mari Craters, which are close to the Ketetahi Hot Springs on the northern side of the mountain. Civil defence spokesman Vince Cholewa told NewstalkZb ash could reach those living in Waikato, Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne, Manawatu-Wanganui, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki. “The advice to people is to stay indoors, because volcanic ash can obviously be a health hazard, if they’re indoors please close windows and doors to try and limit the entry of ash.” Mr Cholewa says at this stage not all areas alerted are affected by ash, but that situation could change. “We’re working actively with GNS Science who operate the monitoring equipment on the mountains, and with police so all the information from the ground is being gathered, and decisions will be based on that information. “Evacuations have not been ordered, please listen to the radio for advice from local authorities and police, any evacuations would be issued at that level, and based on the evidence from GNS Science.”
Due to possible danger to the public the police have closed SH1 between Rangipo and Waiouru (Desert Road) and SH46 west of Rangipo. SH47 and 4 remain open at this stage as does SH5. Motorists are being advised to avoid travel in the area and these closures will be re-assessed once daylight reveals the extent of the ash cloud. A truck driver has told Radio New Zealand that the ash cloud has caused thick dust and reduced visibility on the Desert Road. Bryn Rodda said he saw a large cloud rising from the mountain with orange flashes. Civil Aviation Authority manager of meteorology Peter Lechner told NewstalkZb the plume is leading off to the east and south east. “Flight operations to the west of the plume should remain unaffected, however operations to the eastern half of the North Island will have some difficulty at this stage.” Mr Lechner says a frontal system is on its way which should disperse the cloud, but that depends on whether there are further eruptions. Police are sending search and rescue teams up Mt Tongariro at first light to check no one is stranded in huts. However, they say there have been no reports of injuries or damage. The Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management (MCDEM) is currently assessing information with the assistance of GNS scientific advisors. It has not yet activated the National Crisis Management Centre which is called upon in times of emergency like the Christchurch earthquake. New Zealand’s other high profile active volcano, White Island, also had its alert level raised from 1 to 2 on Monday after a small eruption was recorded in its crater lake.
Historically high temperatures were recorded in 28 locations throughout Bulgaria on Monday, the country’s National Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology (NIMH) said. At 3 p.m. local time (0200 GMT), the temperature in Ruse by the Danube River was 41 degrees Celsius. Pleven in northern Bulgaria recorded 40 degrees Celsius, followed by Sandanski in the southwest of the country at 39.6 degrees Celsius. Meanwhile, temperatures in the capital Sofia also hit 34.6 degrees Celsius. Temperatures were unusually high even in the mountains, NIMH said. At Botev peak, temperatures reached 17.5 degrees Celsius, 25.2 degrees Celsius at Murgash peak, and 26.5 degrees Celsius at Rozhen peak. Record-high temperatures were reported also on the Black Sea coast in the towns of Ahtopol and Varna at 35 degree Celsius, and cape of Kaliakra at 32.8 degree Celsius. Temperatures will remain high on Tuesday, after which they should return to what is considered normal for the season, NIMH said.
06.08.2012
Extreme Weather
USA
State of Pennsylvania, Tunkhannock Township [Pocono Raceway]
NASCAR fans at Pocono Raceway were advised over public address systems and through social media to take cover when lightning and heavy rain hit the track near the end of the race. The warnings weren’t enough to avoid tragedy at the track on Sunday. Lightning strikes at Pocono after a rain-shortened NASCAR race killed one fan and injured nine others, one critically, racetrack officials said. Multiple lightning strikes occurred behind the racetrack’s grandstands and outside one of the gates as fans were leaving, Pocono spokesman Bob Pleban said. It wasn’t immediately clear how many of the fans were actually struck by the lightning itself or were injured by related jolts. “Unfortunately, a member of our raceway family here, a fan, has passed away,” Pocono President Brandon Igdalsky said in announcing the death. He provided no details about the victim but expressed condolences to his family. Igdalsky later posted on Twitter, “My family and I are praying for all those that were involved in the lightning strikes. … Difficult evening for all.” The victim was in or near his car in a parking lot after the race had ended when lightning struck the car, Monroe County Coroner Bob Allen said. Bystanders performed CPR on the man, who had gone into cardiac arrest, until paramedics arrived, Allen said. They took him to the track’s medical facility, where efforts to revive him failed. He was pronounced dead at a hospital.
The Pennsylvania 400 was called because of storms, with 98 of the 160 scheduled laps completed. As the storm approached, the track posted messages on its Twitter page to more than 22,000 followers near the end of the race encouraging fans to “seek shelter as severe lightning and heavy winds are in our area.” The attendance was estimated by the track at 85,000. Public address announcements were made before the storm and the end of the race for fans to take shelter and evacuate the grandstands, Pleban said. Racetrack officials were reviewing the logs of when the announcements were made, he said. There was no order to evacuate the track premises. Jeff Gordon, who won the race, said at a post-race news conference that he could hear a huge crack as he walked down the pit road during the storm. “You could tell it was very close,” he said. “I mean, that’s the thing that’s going to take away from the victory, is the fact that somebody was affected by that.” Kyle Manger, a spectator from New Jersey, told The Sporting News that he saw people hit by lightning near the Turn 3 grandstands. He said when the severe weather began, he and some friends ran to their truck. “The visibility was very poor and all of a sudden (I) saw a bolt of lightning right in front of our windshield,” he said. “When it became a little more visible, we saw two bodies next to a destroyed tent with people scrambling.” One person remained hospitalized in critical condition at Lehigh Valley Hospital Center, Pleban said. Three people were taken to hospitals with minor to moderate injuries, and five others were treated on the scene, he said. “We are deeply saddened that a fan has died and others were injured by lightning strikes following today’s race at Pocono,” NASCAR spokesman David Higdon said. “Our thoughts are with them as well as those affected by this unfortunate accident.” Gordon’s team, Hendrick Motorsports, also offered sympathies on Twitter, writing, “Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected by the lightning” at Pocono Raceway.
Around 900 holidaymakers from Italy and abroad were moved from hotels and camping areas as the fire hit the Zingaro National Park on the island’s northwest tip overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. “The Zingaro reserve went up in flames,” said Matteo Rizzo, Mayor of San Vito Lo Capo, just north of the park. Firefighters, forest patrols and volunteers worked for 12 hours to bring the fire under control and a school was opened in San Vito Lo Capo to house evacuees while others slept outdoors in the stifling heat. Mr Rizzo said the damage from the Zingaro blaze could have been reduced if firefighters had received air support. “I realise that there were a number of fires in Sicily and the situation was rather serious, but it is inconceivable that one of the most beautiful and oldest reserves in Sicily went up in smoke because no one lifted a finger.” Park officials said on Monday the reserve would remain closed to the public while they assessed the full extent of the park’s vegetation and wildlife which includes 40 different birds, rabbits, snakes and weasels. The reserve covers 4,000 acres and beneath its dramatic cliffs there are coves and grottoes stretching for four miles of the coast. One hotel owner said electricity and water supplies had been cut off and telephone lines were down while emergency workers continued to secure the area as temperatures soared close to 95F (35C).
A wildfire that has burned about 1,000 acres of grass and brush near Chelan also threatens 14 homes or outbuildings. Chelan County sheriff’s Cpl. Jason Reinfeld told The Wenatchee World the owners were advised of the danger. The fire broke out about noon Sunday off Highway 97. State, federal and Chelan County crews are attacking the fire from the ground and air using two air tankers and three helicopters, which are dipping from the Columbia River.
Manila, Aug 6 (Prensa Latina) More than 45 people died and six others missing due to Typhoon Saola in the northern region of Philippines, reported on Monday the National Center for Disaster Prevention.
The rains and flooding caused further serious damage to 74 roads, 7, 000 homes and the evacuation of about 200, 000 people still housed in improvised centers, according to the press.
Landslides and overflowing dam flooded much of Manila, the capital, especially in the areas near the sea, other media reported as Rappler website.
Between May and November, during rainy season in the Philippines, the archipelago is hit by an average of 15 to 20 typhoons that affect the entire region of Southeast Asia.
Hundreds of people residing near Beas river have been evacuated to safe places after flash flood caused by torrential rain over Dhundi peaks at south portal of Rohtang tunnel flooded the Seri rivulet, a tributary to Beas river, on Friday at 8pm. People living close to river between Palchan and Kullu are being evacuated and traffic on national highway has been stopped. Till last report received from Palchan (near Dhundi) at 10.30pm, level of the river was rising continuously and police were evacuating the people from Bahang village, 6km from Manali. According to police, there is no report of any casualty. Sandeep Kumar, a resident of Bahang village, said people are trying to save the household accessories amid chaotic atmosphere and conditions have become even worse after power failure. “Everything was normal till late evening but the situation changed suddenly after 8pm when river water, mixed with sludge, started engulfing its banks. People are risking their lives to remove the household stuffs,” he said. An engineer working with a hydel project near Palchan said over phone that roaring sound of river is shaking the foundation of the houses. “Nobody is going to sleep tonight. Villagers have gathered at many places and are guarding the river banks with floodlights,” he said. According to villagers it is a cloudburst which might have caused devastation at its source on mountains. Kullu deputy commissioner Amitabh Awasthi said , police are patrolling the river banks and have directed people to move to safe places. “We have closed the traffic on national highway. We shall keep an eye on the situation throughout the night,” he said.
Torrential rains pounding the Philippine capital on Tuesday paralyzed traffic as waist-deep floods triggered evacuations of tens of thousands of residents and the government suspended work in offices and schools. Incessant downpours set off by the seasonal monsoon overflowed major dams and rivers in Manila and nine surrounding provinces and put authorities on alert. The death toll from last week’s Typhoon Saola, which battered Manila and the northern Philippines for several days, has climbed steadily to 51. The head of the government’s rescue agency, Benito Ramos, said there were no immediate reports of new casualties early Tuesday after the rains pounded already saturated Manila for more than 24 hours. Vehicles and even heavy trucks struggled to navigate water-clogged roads, where hundreds of thousands of commuters were stranded overnight. Many cars were stuck in the muddy waters. The La Mesa dam, which supplies water to the capital of 12 million people, spilled excess water for a second time early Tuesday into the rivers flowing into Quezon city, a middle-class Manila suburb, as well as the neighborhoods of Malabon, Valenzuela and Caloocan, where several villages were submerged. Along the swollen Marikina River, police were deployed to move more than 5,000 residents away from the riverbanks in what Vice Mayor Jose Cadiz said was an enforced evacuation. The operation started after the City Hall sounded the alarm bell. The Philippine Stock Exchange in the financial district of Makati, which was also flooded, was closed Tuesday. Also closed was the U.S. Embassy along Manila Bay in the historic old city, which was drenched out last week when a storm surge pushed the water over the seawall. “The embassy is closed today due to excessive flooding in the streets and concern for the safety of our employees and consular applicants,” Ambassador Harry Thomas Jr. said in an announcement.
Heavy rains pounded northeast Tennessee Sunday, including downtown Johnson City, where emergency crews in inflatable boats rescued people trapped in their homes and in their cars on flooded streets. Johnson City Schools announced their start on Monday is postponed because of the storm damage. The city’s garage complex flooded and several were buses under water, leading the city to cancel transit service for Monday. WTFM radio reported shelters were still open at schools in Unicoi and Jonesborough early Monday. Streams throughout the region overflowed across roads and into homes. Houses and apartments in several areas are surrounded by water at the Mall at Johnson City’s parking lot was covered by high water, stranding numerous vehicles. Sections of Washington, Carter and Unicoi counties also were flooded. The National Weather Service said three to four inches of rain fell within an hour’s time across upper northeast Tennessee during the height of the storm. And more rain was expected through the night. At least 10 people were rescued from their homes in Washington County, and in Unicoi County, officers and volunteer firefighters were evacuating other areas as well. In down downtown Johnson City, a portion of one street washed away into a creek, officials said. “Occasionally, we’ve been up to our gun belt in water, but it’s starting to subside,” said city police Lt. Gerald Harrell. “We are actively answering every call for service that we have. It may be taking us just a tad bit longer, but we’re getting to each and every one and we will get to each and every one,” Harrell said.Police urged people to stay home and avoid any local travel if possible and emergency shelters were open. Elizabethton also was hit hard, officials there said. “We’ve got flooding all over,” Carter County Sheriff Chris Mathes said. Unicoi County Sheriff Mike Hensley said when he first was called at 7 p.m. or so, it was just drizzling. “When I came in, it was just unreal. The water was coming up and I saw we were going to have serious, serious problems,” he said. About 4,000 customers, most in Johnson City, had no power but officials expected it to be restored quickly.
A team of medical experts from Dar es Salaam was yesterday dispatched to Kagera region to further examine the two patients believed to be suffering from the Ebola hemorrhagic fever. But as the team of medical experts was sent to Kagera region, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare subsequently confirmed the outbreak of the deadly fever in the western part of the country. Confirming the reports, the Deputy Minister for Health and Social Welfare, Dr Seif Seleman Rashid, also said that a team of medical experts was still diagnosing a patient in efforts to establish the symptoms. In the meantime, reports from Nyakahanga designated hospital in Karagwe district, Kagera region indicate that there were two patients including a child, suspected to be suffering from the deadly fever that has rocked neighbouring Uganda. According to one of the doctors who diagnosed the patient at Karagwe’s Nyakahanga hospital, preliminary findings show that the victim might have contacted the Ebola virus. However, the doctor who requested anonymity told the Guardian on Sunday that ‘further medical examination’ would be conducted to gather more evidence about the possible outbreak of Ebola, adding that the patient had since been quarantined pending final results. According to the doctor, the ‘Ebola patient’ was brought to the hospital on Friday morning and, upon diagnosis, it was established that the patient had suffered from Ebola. The patient who is a six-year-old child was brought to the Mulongo hospital by his mother from a village close to the Uganda-Tanzania boarder after the child developed severe symptoms.
“We are doing further medical examination on a patient … we will tell the general public once it is confirmed that we are dealing with Ebola virus infections,” the doctor said, adding that currently the patient alleged to have been infected was admitted in a separate room and now lives in isolation from other patients at the hospital. He said preliminary check-ups found out that the diagnosis had all signs showed clear symptoms of Ebola – after which he ordered the patient to be admitted for closer monitoring locally, and further medical examination by medical experts from the ministry headquarters. He added that the patient had since been placed in a special intensive care room which is out of bounds for all other people — apart from his mother who is taking care of the patient. However, he said, this was a medical rule aimed at avoiding quick spread of the deadly disease Another patient also believed to have crossed the boarder from Uganda was admitted at the hospital as well, but medical investigations of his deteriorating health conditions were still not completed by Saturday evening. As a precaution, the doctor said his hospital team and the district health workers had since started warning people in surrounding villages to take immediate measures whenever they come across such patients. He has also warned the people living closer to the border with Uganda to be careful not to come into contact with any person whom they see vomiting or bleeding – clear signs of someone suffering from Ebola.
On Wednesday this week, Dr. Mwinyi told visibly alarmed legislators in Dodoma that a team of medical experts had been dispatched to the border with Uganda, fully equipped with protective gear and medical supplies. The minister advised the general public especially those living in the northern regions of Kagera, Mara, Mwanza and Kigoma — some of which share the border crossings with Uganda — to take precautions because the disease was highly contagious. Earlier, the World Health Organization (WHO) had alerted Tanzania on the Ebola threat, prompting the ministry to issue a press statement elaborating that Ebola (Ebola HF) was a severe, often-fatal disease in humans and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees) that has appeared sporadically since its initial recognition in 1976. The disease is caused by infection with Ebola virus, named after a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), where it was first recognized. The virus is one of two members of a family of RNA viruses called the Filoviridae; there are five identified subtypes of the Ebola virus — four of which have been known to cause disease in humans: Ebola-Zaire, Ebola-Sudan, Ebola-Ivory Coast and Ebola-Bundibugyo. The fifth, Ebola-Reston, has caused disease in nonhuman primates, but not in humans.
Biohazard name:
Ebola (susp.)
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
At least 10 people admitted to the Sukraraj Tropical and Disease Control Hospital in Nepali capital Kathmandu have tested positive for cholera. The hospital laboratory said Vibrio Cholera belonging to 01 Ogawa stereotype was detected in all the patients. Doctors at hospital attributed the spread of cholera and diarrhea infection in Kathmandu to contaminated water, according to Saturday’s Republica daily. “Most of the patients who came to the hospital said that they had drunk water supplied by Kathmandu Upatyaka Kahanepani Limited without boiling or treatment,” Tulsha Adhikari, a nursing staff said. She said whole families had been infected and some were brought to the hospital by their neighbors as all family members were sick.
Biohazard name:
Cholera
Biohazard level:
2/4 Medium
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that cause only mild disease to humans, or are difficult to contract via aerosol in a lab setting, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, influenza A, Lyme disease, salmonella, mumps, measles, scrapie, dengue fever, and HIV. “Routine diagnostic work with clinical specimens can be done safely at Biosafety Level 2, using Biosafety Level 2 practices and procedures. Research work (including co-cultivation, virus replication studies, or manipulations involving concentrated virus) can be done in a BSL-2 (P2) facility, using BSL-3 practices and procedures. Virus production activities, including virus concentrations, require a BSL-3 (P3) facility and use of BSL-3 practices and procedures”, see Recommended Biosafety Levels for Infectious Agents.
Low levels of a deadly nerve agent have been detected in a chemical weapons igloo containing M55 GB, or sarin, rockets at Blue Grass Army Depot in central Kentucky. The Army Chemical Materials Agency says there’s no danger to people in Madison or surrounding counties and that state and local emergency officials have been notified of the leak. Toxic chemical workers have connected a 1,000 cubic feet-per-minute filter to the igloo’s rear vent. The agency says the leak was discovered during weekly monitoring.
South Korea’s state power company issued a shortage warning on Monday, meaning that reserves are dangerously low, as electricity consumption rose sharply due to an unusual heatwave. The warning from the Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO) was aimed at averting power cuts, the knowledge economy ministry said, urging households, factories and other users to cut consumption voluntarily. Temperatures have stayed above 35 degrees Celsius (95 F) for 10 consecutive days across the country, driving up air-conditioning use. It was the first such warning since last September, when more than 2.1 million households and other premises were hit with rolling power cuts lasting up to one hour. The ministry also resumed operations of the country’s oldest nuclear power plant at Gori. It had been closed for months due to scrutiny over its safety and protests by civic groups. “We are relieved to resume operations of the Gori reactor at a time when power consumption is expected to reach its peak,” Knowledge Economy Minister Hong Suk-Woo said in a statement. In February the Gori plant, built in 1978 near the southern city of Busan, briefly lost mains power and the emergency generator failed to kick in. The incident did not result in any radioactive leaks but it sparked an extensive probe amid concerns over nuclear safety following last year’s atomic crisis in Japan. South Korea operates 23 nuclear power plants which meet more than 35 percent of its electricity needs. Analysts say successive governments have failed to authorise major increases in the relatively low cost of electricity, encouraging wasteful consumption. KEPCO last Friday decided to raise rates by 4.9 percent, yielding to government pressure to limit the increase to less than five percent.
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MultiStates, [States of Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Missouri, Indiana, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia, South Dakota and Kentucky]
The Cook County medical examiner’s today determined eight more people died from heat-related causes following the heat wave that ended Saturday. That brings the total number of confirmed heat-related deaths to 18 in Cook County. Lucille Griffith, 100, of the 7300 block of South Peoria, Street, died from heart disease, with heat stress as a secondary cause. Griffith was declared dead a little before 10 a.m. at St. Bernard Hospital, after being found and home with a body temperature of more than 107 degrees, according to the medical examiner’s office. Irene Moriarty, 89, of West 60th Place in Summit died from heart disease, with heat stress as a secondardy cause. Moriary was found Saturday in her apartment, where investigators measured the temperature at 100 degrees. Mary Williams, 56, of East 122nd Place, was declared dead at 1:07 p.m. Saturday at Roseland Community Hospital. Williams died from heart disease, with secondary causes of obesity and heat stress. Sherry Garrett, 53, of the 1400 block of South Hamlin Avenue, was declared dead at 4:28 p.m. Saturday at her home. She also died from heart disease, with secondary causes of diabets, obesity and heat stress. Investigators measured the temperature in her apartment at 110 degrees when she was found. Ann Narcisse, 78, of the 9200 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue, was found dead Saturday. She died of heart disease, with heat stress a secondary cause.John Stacey, 81, of the 1800 block of South Cuyler, was declared dead on the scene at 5:45 p.m. Saturday. He died from heart disease, with heat stress and obesity secondary causes. Levon Calhoun, 54, of the 8100 block of South Saginaw Avenue, was found dead at home Saturday. He died from heart disease, with obesity and heat stress as secondary causes. Anthony Thomas, 48, also died from heart disease, with heat stress as a secondary cause. Details about where and when he was declared dead were not immediately available. Those confirmed to have died from heat-related causes were among at least seven people whose deaths the medical examiner’s office was investigating as possibly heat-related. In one case, that of a 43-year-old man found dead Saturday at his home in the 2800 block of North Maplewood Avenue, the medical examiner’s office did not determine a cause of death, pending further studies. In another case, that of a 67-year-old woman who lvied in the 6200 block of South St. Louis Avenue, the medical examiner’s office determined the woman died solely from heart disease and not from any heat-related causes.
The heat that blanketed much of the U.S. will begin easing up this week as temperatures approach normal from the Midwest to the East Coast.
Andrew Orrison, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Camp Springs, Md., said Sunday night that a cold front through the South and the mid-Atlantic will bring thunderstorms and showers.
It ‘will break the heat wave we’ve had,’ he said, dropping temperatures there to a more normal range of mid- to upper-80s. The Southeast and Tennessee Valley will be in the low 90s, ‘still fairly warm,’ Orrison said, but not as hot as it has been.
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Melting hot: 100 degree temperatures in Washington caused this plane to sink into the runway at the Reagan National Airport on Friday evening; the flight was delayed by three hours after getting stuck in the ground
The Midwest can expect cooler weather, as well, with temperatures in the 80s.
The cooler air began sweeping southward Sunday in the eastern half of the country, bringing down some temperatures by 15 or more degrees from Saturday’s highs, which topped 100 in cities including Philadelphia, Washington, St. Louis, Indianapolis and Louisville, Ky.
The heat of the past several days has been blamed for at least 46 deaths across the country.
The welcome relief from the blistering heat comes after a weekend during which an airliner in Washington sank onto a melted runway on Friday evening.
Sweet Relief: Felix John Fowler, age 5, plays at a fountain outside Public School 20 in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York
The scorching 100 degree temperature caused the tarmac runway at the Reagan National Airport to melt – delaying the flight to Charleston for three hours after the plane became stuck in the ground.
Thankfully the record-breaking hot weather across the central and eastern states is cooling off slightly today, after already claiming the lives of 36 people.
Yet for many, Sunday’s cooler temperatures won’t exactly be comfortable, falling only into the 90s.
Cooler air is sweeping southward in the eastern half of the country, bringing down some temperatures by 15 or more degrees from Saturday’s record-breaking highs.
Cooling down: The relief from the triple-digit heatwave continues on Monday with cooler temperatures in the 80s and 90s; the recent record-breaking heat has claimed the lives of more than 30 people
Maryland and Virginia each reported 10 deaths so far, there have been six deaths in Chicago, three in Wisconsin, two in Tennessee and three in Pennsylvania. In St. Louis three people have died and six other deaths were still under investigation.
A 3-month-old girl died and a 16-month-old girl was hospitalized Saturday in separate incidents in suburban Indianapolis when both were found trapped in cars during near-record 105-degree heat.
In St. Louis, the 13-degree drop from Saturday’s high still will leave residents baking in 93-degree weather — the high Saturday was a record 106.
Temperatures in Philadelphia, Washington, and Indianapolis will fall to the low 90s or upper 80s on Sunday after crossing the 100 mark on Saturday.
The top temperature in Manhattan’s Central Park was expected to be 91, according to the National Weather Service. That’s down several degrees from Saturday, when it came close to hitting 100 degrees, capping several days of heat hovering around triple digits that drew warnings from the weather service.
Catching some rays: The top temperature in Manhattan’s Central Park was expected to be 91 on Sunday; the weather in New York is forecast to drop to the 80s this week
Sunday was likely to be the last day in the 90s for now in New York. Relief was on the way, with the weather service forecasting a week of daytime temperatures in the low 80s.
Weather service meteorologist John Cristantello said the extreme heat was due to what was happening thousands of feet up in the atmosphere. He said high pressure building up there ‘translates to the surface, warming it up.’
The quick shift to a week of temperatures plummeting by almost 20 degrees is nothing unusual, he said.
Residents in Louisville, Ky., can expect a high of 95 today, one day after 105-degree temperatures.
For many areas, the cooler temperatures were ushered in by thunderstorms that knocked out power to thousands.
In New Jersey, a line of strong, fast-moving storms knocked out power to nearly 70,000 in Ocean and Monmouth counties on Saturday night. By Sunday morning, Jersey Central Power & Light’s website reports that more than 23,000 customers were still without electricity.
Record highs: A clock shows a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington yesterday
Staying cool: A boy plays in a fountain at the Yards Park in Washington on Saturday to beat the heat
Cooling off: Children play in a fountain in Silver Spring, Maryland as temperatures soar above 100 F
He can’t bear this heat: Hudson, a polar bear at Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield, Illinois, enjoys a swim
Residents from Iowa to New Jersey spent the trying to stay cool. They dipped into the water, went to the movies and rode the subway just to be in air conditioning.
If people ventured outside to do anything, they did it early. But even then, the heat was stifling.
‘It was baking on the 18th green,’ said golfer Zeb Rogerson, who teed off at 6 a.m. at an Alexandria, Va., golf course but was sweltering by the end of his round.
Officials said the heat caused highways to buckle in Illinois and Wisconsin. In Maryland, investigators said heat likely caused rails to kink and led a Metro train to partially derail in Prince George’s County on Friday afternoon. No one was injured, and 55 passengers were safely evacuated.
Micah Straight, 36, brought his three daughters to dance in jets of water spurting from a ‘sprayground’ near Philadelphia’s Logan Square fountain to cool off.
‘We got here early, because I don’t think we’ll be out this afternoon — we’ll be in the air conditioning,’ he said. ‘So I wanted to get them out, get some sunshine, get tired.’
In South Bend, Ind., serious kayakers took to the East Race Waterway, a 1,900-foot long manmade whitewater course near downtown.
‘A lot of times I’ll roll over just to cool off,’ said Robert Henry of Carmel, just north of Indianapolis. ‘The biggest challenge is walking coming back up carrying a kayak three-eighths of a mile in this heat.’
In Manhattan, customers who stepped in to see ‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi’ at an IFC movie theater were there for more than entertainment.
‘Of course we came to cool off!’ said John Villanova, a writer who was on his second sweaty T-shirt of the day — expecting to change again by evening.
He said that earlier, he rode a Manhattan subway back and forth for a half an hour, with no destination in mind, ‘because it really keeps you cool.
Struggle: Women wipe their brows by the crowded swimming pool in lower Manhattan, New York City
Making a splash: More than 4,500 temperature records have been broken this week in the heat
Bearly making it: A bear reacts to triple-digit temperatures at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha today; temperatures rose to 103F Friday
Water for horses: A horse gets a cooling shower from a rancher following competition in the Ranch Sorting Championship at a State Fair in Oklahoma City
One man figured out a way to beat the heat: stay in the car.
That was the plan for 60-year-old Roger Sinclair of Batavia, Ill., who was headed home Saturday from Detroit, where he’d spent a few days visiting an old friend and catching Friday night’s Tigers game.
While he enjoyed the game, a 4-2 Tigers win, the conditions were less than ideal.
‘It was 97 at the first pitch and still in the 80s at the time of the last out,’ he said. ‘It was tough. There was no breeze.’
Before heading home, though, Sinclair wanted to see a Great Lakes ore carrier make its way through the city’s waterways. So, he tracked one down the Detroit River, driving ahead of it and parking on Belle Isle, which sits in the middle of the river between the city and Windsor, Ontario.
Feeling the heat: Wyatt Young, 5, cools off in a fountain set up outside Busch Stadium in St. Louis,
Sweltering: A boy cools off under a sprinkler at the National Zoo in Washington, left, and World War II veteran James Wakefield, 89, sips water in the shade during his first visit to the National World War II Memorial
Safe: Ryan Abbott, 6, left, and his brother Hayden Abbott, 7, try on their newly purchased umbrella shade hats from Lee Shinn, right, who sells the hats at the intersection of Jackson and Springdale in Memphis, Tenn. Friday, July 6, 2012
Sinclair, standing along the riverbank and shielding his eyes from the sun, watched the Algomarine slowly head west.
‘You just don’t see this in Chicago,’ said Sinclair, a dispatcher at a plumbing company’s call center.
As the vessel traveled out of sight, he walked to his car.
‘This is how I’ve dealt with it the last couple of days,’ he said. ‘A lot of time in the car.’
The expected rain should help dry spells in many places. Much of Arkansas is enduring brown grass and seeing trees lose their green, and farmers in Ohio are growing concerned about the dry conditions, considered among the worst of the past decade.
In Chicago, perspiration beaded on the face of street magician Jeremy Pitt-Payne, whose black top hat and Union Jack leather vest weighed heavily as he waited to board a Chicago River water taxi that would take him to his sidewalk stage downtown.
Keeping New York hydrated: A man pushes a cart of bottled water down Broadway during a blistering heat wave
‘This is part of the character. I’m a magician from Britain,’ Pitt-Payne said in a British accent. ‘I may lose the vest by the end of the day.’
Pitt-Payne worked throughout Chicago’s three-day stretch of triple-digit temperatures. His shows have been shorter and crowds have dwindled from his usual of 50 to about 20 people.
His trick for beating the heat? He starts his shows at about 2 p.m. ‘when the Trump Tower is gracious enough to block out the sun’ along his stretch of sidewalk. ‘That’s when I start.’
According to the national Drought Monitor, a staggering 56 per cent of the entire country matches the qualifying factors and is considered to be in a drought.
This is the highest percentage in the 12 years that the data have been compiled, topping the previous record of 55 per cent from August 26, 2003.
It also smashed data from the previous week by a massive five percentage points.
Dried up: The national Drought Monitor, 56 per cent of the entire country matches the qualifying factors and is considered to be in a drought, including this area in Noblesville, Indiana
Contributing factors: Long periods of record-high temperatures have lead to such drastic conditionsBrad Rippey, a meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told msnbc.com that unique conditions have allowed 2012 to nearly level the extremely dry 1988.
‘This year the high temperatures have certainly played into this drought,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot more evaporation and crop demands for water.’
The Drought Monitor added that the weather is starting to ‘take a significant toll’ on food supplies as the area of abnormally dry and drought conditions expands across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Missouri.
‘In the primary growing states for corn and soybeans, 22 per cent of the crop is in poor or very poor condition, as are 43 per cent of the nation’s pastures and rangelands and 24 percent of the sorghum crop,’ it noted.
As the heat scorched crops across the country, corn and soybean prices jumped to new highs in the week.
Struggle: Firefighter Michael Mullins tries to cool off after battling a house fire in Huntsville, Alabama
Dried out: In Indiana where the drought has scorched thousands of acres of cropland, dead corn stalks lay in fields (left) and fish bones lie in the dried lake bed south of Dewey Point (right)
Burnt out: Firefighter Ken Bachelder drags charred remains of a tree away from apartments in Evansville, Indiana. The drought and the high temperatures have left the area with numerous field fires
‘It’s not only abnormally dry, but now you have 100 degree heat combined with the ongoing drought and it’s too much for the crop,’ Accuweather.com senior meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said.
In Tennessee, county farm agents have reported the extreme conditions to the National Agricultural Statistics Service office in Nashville.
‘Crops have really begun to suffer and go backwards this week. Rain is needed yesterday,’ wrote agent Richard Buntin in Crockett County.
Crops and pastureland are ‘burnt to a crispy crunch,’ wrote Kim Frady of Bradley County.
‘Need rain,’ in Loudon County, added John Goddard. ‘Saw a farmer digging a waterline about 4-5′ deep. Nothing but powder!’
The weather service added that although some areas can expect cooler temperatures in mid-July, ‘drought is likely to develop, persist or intensify’ across the Ohio and Tennessee valleys, the Corn Belt region, the Mississippi Valley and much of the Great Plains.
In Alabama, abnormally dry conditions and droughts are parching 91 per cent of the state, with many city areas more than a foot below normal rainfall totals for the year.
‘It’s a long-term drought, in that they never came out of it from last year. It’s going to take not just one hurricane but three months of above-average rainfall to end that,’ said John Christy, from the University of Alabama.
Forestry officials in the state said there’s an increased threat of wildfires because of the dry conditions, and farmers are relying on irrigation to sustain crops in some areas.
‘We’re really needing water right now,’ Brandon Dillard, an agronomist with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, told the AP.
A wildfire in the Mendocino National Forest has led to the closure of campgrounds and the evacuation of a handful of homes. The fire was estimated at around 2,500 acres on Monday morning, two days after it began. It was 10 percent contained. Fire information officer Adrienne Freeman says it is burning in steep terrain and has been aided by high temperatures and dry conditions. More than 300 firefighters are working on the blaze. The cause has not been determined. Crews are also battling a separate blaze several miles to the east in Colusa County.
10.07.2012
Drought
USA
State of Wisconsin, [Wisconsin-wide (42 counties)]
With raindrops in southern Wisconsin as rare and precious as diamonds, Gov. Scott Walker on Monday declared a state of emergency in 42 bone-dry counties. The state of emergency will streamline farmers’ efforts to temporarily use stream or lake water to irrigate arid fields. Most farmers with crops in the ground, whether it’s corn, soybeans or alfalfa, are looking glumly at the weather forecast, which shows unrelenting sunshine and warm weather for at least a week and a slim chance for precipitation next week in Wisconsin’s breadbasket. That’s great for sunbathers, Little League teams and picnickers. But it could be devastating to much of Wisconsin’s corn crop, which is now in its make-or-break stage. Plants need moisture in the next seven to 10 days to pollinate. “Rain would be priceless for us right now,” said George Koepp, University of Wisconsin Extension agriculture agent in Columbia County. Weeks of way-below average rainfall plus recent triple-digit temperatures that baked much of the state have stressed farmers, their crops and animals. The U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook shows the drought in southern Wisconsin is expected to persist or intensify throughout the rest of the summer. Madison has received only 0.31 of an inch of rain since June 1, almost 5.5 inches below normal, while a scant 0.97 of an inch has fallen in Milwaukee during the same time period, almost 4 inches below average, according to the National Weather Service.Officially, the southern third of Wisconsin is in a moderate drought while a broad swath across the central part of the state is considered abnormally dry. The affected area is roughly south of a line from Jackson County in western Wisconsin to Oshkosh. But no rain has fallen since the U.S. Drought Monitor issued that report July 3, and conditions are expected to worsen when the next drought report is issued Thursday. But farmers don’t need meteorologists to tell them that. “We’re at a critical juncture with tasseling and pollination. If the silks of the ear are not pollinated, the corn kernels won’t develop,” said Matt Hanson, UW-Extension southern regional director. “If we don’t have rain within two weeks, it’s about over.” Koepp’s phone has been ringing off the hook at his UW Extension office in Portage. It’s the same for other agriculture agents in counties in southern Wisconsin. Farmers are worried and nervous because their corn looks like tiny pineapples. “What they want to know is what do they do with this corn if they don’t get any ears,” Koepp said. “Some talk about chopping it up and feeding it to their cattle right away or putting it in a silo. But it has to dry down before it can be put in a silo.” Columbia County has 1,500 farmers plus 125,000 acres of corn, 46,000 acres of soybeans, 26,000 acres of alfalfa and 17,000 acres of corn silage.
“I just got off the phone with a dairy farmer who is looking for an idea on what to do to salvage some feed value out of his corn crop. That’s all he’s looking for – salvage value,” said David Laatsch, UW Extension agriculture agent in Dodge County. Parched conditions also have affected hay crops. Farmers will get fewer cuttings of alfalfa, and that will mean either buying hay or selling some animals to avoid feeding them, or both. “It might put livestock farmers in the southern part of the state in a bind if they can’t get adequate amounts of hay this year,” said Casey Langan, Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation spokesman. A Dodge County dairy farmer told Laatsch that he recently harvested his hay fields where he expected to get 600 big bales, weighing 800 to 900 pounds each. He got only 60 large bales. “So now he’s looking at his corn crop, seeing it’s only 3 to 4 feet tall, and asking where can I maximize my feed value? He’s got 300 dairy cows,” said Laatsch, adding that some farmers in Dodge County – where more than 220,000 acres are farmed – have contracted to buy hay from out-of-state. Soybeans are stunted from the lack of rain, but the outlook isn’t as bleak compared with corn because soybeans flower longer, Hanson said.
The problem, meteorologically speaking, is that the weather has been too stable. A high pressure system locked above Wisconsin is acting as a stabling influence, preventing rain from forming. “It suppresses vertical motion in the atmosphere, which you need for rainfall. It doesn’t lend itself to a lot of good chances for rain,” said Paul Collar, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Sullivan. The forecast for southeastern Wisconsin calls for sunny skies this week with gradually increasing high temperatures from 82 on Tuesday, 86 on Wednesday and 89 on Thursday before highs expected in the low to mid-90s Friday through Monday. The governor’s state of emergency declaration means the state Department of Natural Resources can expedite requests from farmers to divert water from streams and lakes for irrigation. The DNR must inspect the water bodies within 72 hours of the request, instead of the normal 30 days, to ensure fish and aquatic wildlife would not be harmed. But relatively few farmers have the irrigation equipment to divert water from lakes and streams. The last time the state allowed that – in August 2009 – only five applications were received, said Donna Gilson, spokeswoman for the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. Walker encouraged farmers to report crop conditions to their local U.S. Farm Service Agency office, which compiles information that could be used by the governor to request a federal disaster declaration. That could pave the way for Wisconsin farmers to get low-cost emergency loans and other assistance.
The worst U.S. drought since Ronald Reagan was president is withering the world’s largest corn crop, and the speed of the damage may spur the government to make a record cut in its July estimate for domestic inventories.Tumbling yields will combine with the greatest-ever global demand to leave U.S. stockpiles on Sept. 1, 2013, at 1.216 billion bushels (30.89 million metric tons), according to the average of 31 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. That’s 35 percent below the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s June 12 forecast, implying the biggest reduction since at least 1973. The USDA updates its harvest and inventory estimates July 11.
Crops on July 1 were in the worst condition since 1988, and a Midwest heat wave last week set or tied 1,067 temperature records, government data show. Prices surged 37 percent in three weeks, and Rabobank International said June 28 that corn may rise 9.9 percent more by December to near a record $8 a bushel. The gain is threatening to boost food costs the United Nations says fell 15 percent from a record in February 2011 and feed prices for meat producers including Smithfield Foods Inc. (SFD)
“The drought is much worse than last year and approaching the 1988 disaster,” said John Cory, the chief executive officer of Rochester, Indiana-based grain processor Prairie Mills Products LLC. “There are crops that won’t make it. The dairy and livestock industries are going to get hit very hard. People are just beginning to realize the depth of the problem.”
Top Commodities
Corn rallied 18 percent in the month through July 6 on the Chicago Board of Trade to $6.93, trailing only wheat among 24 commodities tracked by the Standard & Poor’s GSCI Spot Index, which rose 2 percent. The MSCI All-Country World Index of equities advanced 4 percent, and the dollar gained 1.3 percent against a basket of six currencies in the period. Treasuries returned 0.5 percent, a Bank of America Corp. index shows. Corn for December delivery in Chicago extended the rally today, jumping 5.3 percent to settle at $7.30.
About 53 percent of the Midwest, where farmers harvested 60 percent of last year’s U.S. crop, had moderate to extreme drought conditions as of July 3, the highest since the government-funded U.S. Drought Monitor in Lincoln, Nebraska, began tracking the data in 2000. In the seven days ended July 6, temperatures in the region averaged as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Soil moisture in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri and Kentucky is so low that it ranks in the 10th percentile among all other years since 1895.
Fields are parched just as corn plants began to pollinate, a critical period for determining kernel development and final yields. About 48 percent of the crop in the U.S., the world’s largest grower and exporter, was in good or excellent condition as of July 1, the lowest for that date since 1988 and down from 77 percent on May 18, government data show.
Yield Losses
The USDA may cut its production forecast by 8.5 percent, the biggest July reduction since a drought in 1988 led the government to cut its estimate by 29 percent, a separate Bloomberg survey of 14 analysts showed. Farmers probably will collect 13.534 billion bushels, compared with the USDA’s June forecast for a record 14.79 billion, based on the average of estimates in the survey.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said July 2 that yields will reach 153.5 bushels an acre, below the USDA estimate for an all-time high of 166.
“Corn yields were falling five bushels a day during the past week” in the driest parts of the Midwest, said Fred Below, a plant biologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana. “You couldn’t choreograph worse weather conditions for pollination. It’s like farming in hell.”
Record Crop
Even with the drought, U.S. production in 2012 is expected to rise 9.5 percent from last year to a record after farmers sowed the most acres since 1937, the survey showed. Higher output would help boost inventories before next year’s harvest, up from what analysts said will be a 16-year low on Sept. 1 of 837 million bushels.
Futures fell 2.2 percent on July 6, the most in two weeks, after the USDA reported a 90 percent drop in export sales in the week ended June 28. U.S. refiners curbed output of corn-based ethanol last week to the lowest since September as gasoline demand weakened, government data show.
Corn’s rally also may stall if Europe’s widening debt crisis and a faltering global economy erode record demand for the grain. The International Monetary Fund will reduce its estimate for growth this year because of weakness in investment, employment and manufacturing in Europe, the U.S., Brazil, India and China, Managing Director Christine Lagarde said July 6.
World food prices are likely to rise in the coming months in the wake of record-breaking temperatures and drought in the major maize and soybean producing regions of the United States, economists say.
It would be the third spike in food prices in the past five years.
Previous hikes – during 2007 and 2008, and again in 2010 and 2011 – triggered riots and social instability in dozens of countries around the world.
Whether rising food prices will again trigger unrest is unclear, especially since different crops are affected.
Crops shrinking
Despite early predictions of a record maize crop, estimates have plummeted after a string of record-high temperature days and dry conditions stretching across the farm states of the U.S. Midwest.
“We need rain, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to get it,” says Iowa State University economist Dermot Hayes.
As the world’s leading exporter of maize and a top soybean exporter, what happens in the U.S. affects global prices, according to Hayes.Mexico and Central America, where maize is a key staple, will be affected directly, but Hayes expects others to be affected indirectly as well.
“Bread prices in North Africa will go up, and chicken prices in China, pork prices in China, et cetera,” he says. “And there are going to be some very unhappy people.”
Bread will go up in North Africa because wheat prices follow maize prices.
Meat prices to rise
Pork and chicken prices will go up, as well as beef, milk and eggs, because maize and soybeans are key ingredients in animal feed.
Countries that import substantial amounts of animal feed will feel the impacts the most, according to economist Maximo Torero with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
“That’s China, India, and most of the Latin American countries, which are growing a lot and are starting to consume a lot more meat,” Torero says. “So it could affect them substantially.”
However, Torero expects the world’s poor to be hit less severely than in the previous two price spikes.
“I don’t see the issue of meat and milk as a huge problem for the poorest countries,” where consumption of animal products is much lower than in industrialized nations, he says.
“A different kind of maize”
Cornell University economist Chris Barrett agrees. “The poor who consume maize in large quantities are disproportionately in areas where they consume either a different kind of maize, or they’re in relatively remote regions where they are likewise buffered from the global markets.”
In much of sub-Saharan Africa, Barrett notes, consumers prefer white maize over the yellow varieties grown in the United States.
Also, the fact that the most-affected crops are primarily used as animal feed and not crops such as rice or wheat, which are consumed directly, mitigates the impact on the poor, says IFPRI’s Maximo Torero.
“If the case was rice, like what we had in 2007-2008, then the situation would be different because those commodities are really imported in most of sub-Saharan Africa. And also in the case of wheat that happened in 2010, it affected Northern Africa – Cairo and so on – because they are net importers.”
Lower standard of living
But while rising prices may threaten food security for the poor, experts note they can create unrest among consumers whose standard of living had been rising.
Iowa State University’s Dermot Hayes says it could be an irritant in China, a country with a growing middle class but significant social inequality.
“It’s a tinderbox over there,” he says. “It’s not a real homogenous or pleasant society the way it’s structured right now. So there could be some issues.”
But Cornell University’s Chris Barrett says Beijing would keep a lid on prices for the sake of stability.
“The Chinese government isn’t going to be the least bit shy about buffering its own domestic markets,” he says. And with $3 trillion in foreign currency reserves, he adds, “they have the wherewithal to do that.”
But other countries without China’s fiscal wherewithal may feel the impacts more strongly.
Demand outstripping supply
The fundamental problem is that world production has not been keeping up with growing demand for food corps, says IFPRI’s Maximo Torero.
“There is a lot of talk about what to do and how to improve, but nothing is happening and we have not been able to change the scenario.”
Torero cautions the world will continue under the same scenario until serious efforts are made to meet the growing demands.
HOUSTON—The extreme heat and drought conditions in the Midwest is going to affect the price of food here in Houston.
From corn flakes to corn syrup—even corn-fed chicken, pork and beef—grocery prices are expected to rise.
J.D. Denton has raised cattle in southeast Oklahoma since the 1960s. Now, his part of the state is in the middle of a drought.
Normally, 16 inches of rain falls in the spring. This year, there have been four inches.
Denton’s ranch in Corrine shows the fallout—a brown pasture would typically be a lush green, trees are slowly dying and ponds hold barely six inches of water.
“Well, I’m glad they have that much,” said Denton.
Denton says the drought has forced him to use feeding troughs in the summer, something he’s hardly had to do in the past and that’s just the beginning.
“It means that have had to sell part of my capital assets to stay in business. I don’t like to do that. It’s either that or watch the animals die,” said Denton.
“It hurts everybody in this area. With less beef, beef prices are going to be higher,” said Tom Smith with the OSU extension office in Pushmataha County.
He says the drought is taking its toll on farmers and ranchers.
“That means less forage production, thinner cows, less grass for them to eat, lower reproduction from those cows, less hay produced in this area,” said Smith.
This is the driest southeast Oklahoma has been since they started keeping records in 1921 and Smith says the closer you get to Texas and Arkansas the worse it gets.
Smith says ranchers like Denton have tried everything and all that’s left to do now is hope for rain.
“They’re predicting rain for early next week. We’re praying it comes. Just as simple as that, hoping and hanging on and praying for rain,” said Smith.
Emilia has strengthened to a Category Two hurricane in the Pacific far off the coast of Mexico but is not posing a threat to land.
The hurricane’s maximum sustained winds Monday were near 100 mph (160 kph) with additional strengthening expected.
Emilia is centered about 710 miles (1,145 kilometers) south of the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California and is moving west-northwest at 12 mph (19 kph).
Meanwhile, farther west over the Pacific, Hurricane Daniel had maximum sustained winds near 85 mph (140 kph). The hurricane is expected to weaken slowly during the next 48 hours and was moving west at 15 mph (24 kph).
Torrential rains since last Saturday have lashed east and northwest China, drenching towns, causing landslides and halting traffics. Another round of heavy rainfall following the previous one ended last Friday has struck most regions of east China’s Shandong Province. Rainfall caused severe flood in Cangshan County of the province, drenching residences and halting local traffics. Flood has immersed many streets of the county, including one of the major roads, which has been inundated completely. A nearby residential quarter has also been flooded. A resident said usually he spent three to five minutes to get home. But now it takes him 20 minutes to stumble in water. Waterlogging is a long-time issue that troubling the residential quarter due to its obsolete sewage system. Local authority dispatched workers to drain the floodwater of the waterlogged area on Sunday. So far they are making progresses gradually, but it still needs time to dry the streets completely. The flood also caused severe losses to the mink farmers in rural areas. In Jinling Township of the Canshan County, rainfall has accumulated to 282 millimeters, immersing dozens of local mink farms. At one of the biggest farms, which raises 1,100 minks and sables, piles of drowned animals can be seen lying on ground. “At that time the water was about this high. When my fellow-townsmen learned my situation, they came to help me lifting the cages up above the water. But it was too late. The water rose too fast and many minks were drowned,” said Guo Defeng, owner of the farm. Although lots of villagers came to help Guo to hang up the cages, which was the only way to save the animal, floodwater still inundated the cages and half of Guo’s 700 minks were dead. Compared with the loss in mink, Guo’s loss in sable is even more worse, only 60 out of 400 sables survived. Guo said the flood has caused him 200,000 yuan (31,000 U.S. dollars) of losses.
Strong storms have brought heavy rains and flash flooding to the Triad and Charlotte regions while knocking out power to thousands of homes and businesses. The News & Record of Greensboro reported Monday night ( http://bit.ly/OrD2cl) that the National Weather Service said 2.7 inches of rain had fallen in less than two hours at Piedmont Triad International Airport. The newspaper reported that Greensboro police had closed off some streets. The weather service said flash flooding had closed Interstate 40 westbound at Highway 68 in Greensboro. Forecasters warned motorists not to drive into flooded roadways. Some flights were also diverted from Piedmont Triad airport. As temperatures plunged to around 70 degrees Monday night, Greensboro and Guilford County were under a flash-flood warning until 1:45 a.m. EDT, the weather service said. At 10:45 p.m., Duke Energy was reporting 9,400 outages in the Carolinas, mostly in Guilford County, N.C., but also in Mecklenburg County, N.C. and Lancaster, S.C.. The Charlotte Observer was reporting downed trees in Mecklenburg and Union counties. The storms follow five days of record-setting heat in North Carolina. On Sunday, the Raleigh-Durham area set a record when temperatures reached 100 degrees or more for the sixth straight day. That marked the first such streak since the weather service began keeping records in 1944 and broke the record set in July of last year. The high of 105 tied the all-time record just set June 29 and tied again June 30 of this year Forecasters said a cold front will ease temperatures, with highs of mid-80s expected the rest of the week. The tradeoff is a forecast for severe storms, which could include strong lightning and damaging winds.
Floods that hit Russia’s Black Sea coast have wrought chaos on major road and rail links to its main grain export outlet, but stocks at the port of Novorossiisk are high and may delay any impact on exports, traders and analysts said on Monday.The effects were likely to be short-lived but laid bare the infrastructure risks faced by Russia as it attempts to secure and strengthen its status as a dominant global wheat exporter by exploiting its vast reserves of farmland.
Russian Railways said it had halted rail traffic to the port of Novorossiisk to repair a bridge southwest of Krymsk, the town hardest hit when floodwaters came crashing down suddenly in the early hours of Saturday, killing at least 171 people.
The state rail operator said the rail bed also was washed out in places. Later in the day it said traffic had resumed between Krymsk and Novorossiisk, but only southbound trains were moving and passenger trains had priority.
The Russian government has an ambitious target for grain exports to rise to 40 million tonnes a year. Russia emerged from a catastrophic drought in the 2010/11 crop year to export a record 28 million tonnes in the year to June 2012, IKAR analysts said on Monday.
The biggest obstacle to export growth is infrastructure. Novorossiisk, the main grain export port, has two terminals that are linked to the wheat fields north of the Caucasus mountain foothills by a single rail link and by mountain roads.
Even in good weather, rail backlogs outside the port are chronic.
On Monday, freight traffic up and down the coast was limited largely to food and petroleum products designated for the domestic market.
A trader with a Russian grain exporter said lorry traffic was held up at a mountain crossing north of Novorossiisk and cited estimates from grain forwarders that washed-out roads could take around seven days to repair.
Full elevators
An immediate reduction in the loading of grain for export is unlikely, however. Novorossiisk resumed full operation on Sunday after the weather had forced a temporary halt to loadings.
Elevators at Novorossiisk’s two grain terminals were full and stopped intake of grain last week, so they can run down their stocks to sustain current loadings, trade and port sources said.
“They just won’t be replenished quickly,” the trader said, adding that the impact on exports would emerge once port stocks are exhausted.
Transport may be functioning by then.
“As per shipments, looks like everything is going to be back to normal within the current week,” Andrei Sizov, Jr., managing director of the SovEcon agricultural consultancy, said by email.
The Novorossiisk Grain Terminal, controlled by port operator Novorossiisk Commercial Sea Port has elevator capacity of 120,000 tonnes.
It was not immediately clear how much current capacity was at the nearby terminal controlled by state-owned United Grain Co, which features a seven-storey brick elevator built in 1893.
UGC, which recently agreed to sell a stake to Russia’s largest port investor, Summa Capital, has an ambitions investment programme to facilitate an increase in exports and plans to build new elevators that can hold 100,000 tonnes.
No damage to Russia’s grain and oilseed harvest was expected, because the flooding passed by key arable regions.
“The Krymsk area has never been distinguished by grain or oilseed production,” said Dmitry Rylko, managing director of the Institute for Agricultural Market Studies. “They grow vegetables there.”
Sizov, citing trader estimates, said around 10,000-20,000 hectares sown with wheat, sunseeds and other crops were likely to be damaged.
“It looks like the flood hasn’t affected any significant acreage,” Sizov said.
Rylko added that he was considering a downgrade to his harvest forecast because of protracted rain in Russia’s south, which began in late May and could result in decreased yields.
Farmers in Russia’s south have faced a long spell of extreme weather, starting with an unusually warm start to the winter, during which some of the winter crop failed to go dormant, only to be hit by a fierce cold snap that caught them with no snow cover.
Spring brought a drought, which was relieved in late May by the onset of rains, which have been falling for much of the past six weeks.
Late last month, the Agriculture Ministry cut its forecast for wheat production and exports in the forthcoming 2012/13 crop season as a result of winterkill and spring drought.
For the new season, the ministry cut its wheat crop forecast to 46 million to 49 million tonnes from 57 million expected earlier, with the export forecast cut to 16 million to 18 million tonnes from 20 million. A Reuters poll in late June showed Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan’s combined wheat crop would fall 22 percent to 78.9 million tonnes this year from 2011, with the biggest impact on yields from winterkill and spring drought in Russia and Ukraine.
Updates:
* Russian Railways halts traffic on Novorossiisk line
* Rail bed, roads to grain export terminals washed away
* Port elevators full, immediate impact on loadings unlikely
* No crop damage seen but prolonged rain could hit yields (Recasts, adds estimate on damaged acreage, capacity of port elevators)
The number of cholera cases confirmed in eastern Cuba jumped from 30 to 85 over the weekend but the death toll remained at three, one government official said, although independent reports put the deaths at anywhere from five to 15. Up to five other cases of cholera also were unofficially reported in Havana and dissidents in Guantánamo near the eastern tip of the island reported a handful of cholera-like cases in Caimanera, a village on the edge of the U.S. navy base. The state-owned TV station in Granma province, where the outbreak hit hardest, suggested residents avoid travelling outside the area while trucks with loudspeakers urged them to boil water and wash their hands often, two residents said. Public Health officials in the British-run Cayman Islands, just south of Granma, issued a caution against travel to Cuba and U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen warned potential travelers that visiting the island “may put them at risk of becoming ill with cholera.” The U.S. Center for Disease Control in Atlanta had not issued any special travel notices on Cuba as of Monday evening. Its Web page recommends only general vaccinations, like those for Hepatitis A and B, typhoid fever and rabies.Government epidemiologist Ana Maria Batista González told Granma’s Telecentro TV station Saturday that 30 cholera cases had been confirmed in the province, then upped the number to 85 when she appeared again on the station Sunday, said Santiago Marquez, a doctor in the Granma town of Manzanillo. A Cuban government statement July 3 – the only other official word on the outbreak – said 53 cholera cases had been confirmed and that the outbreak was “under control.” There was no explanation for the conflicting numbers, although it’s possible the 53 may have referred to cases in the southeastern region, not just Granma. Batista also noted the number of suspected cases in Granma rose from 332 to 346 and more general cases of diarrhea and vomiting rose from 3,422 to 3,998 and that 110 persons have been hospitalized, Marquez added by phone to El Nuevo Herald. Most of the cases have been recorded in Manzanillo and the provincial capital, Bayamo, as well as nearby municipalities of Niquero, Yara and Bartolome Masó, Batista added. All are along Cuba’s southern coast, about 415 miles east of Havana.
Batista said the death toll remained at three – the same number the government reported on July 3. Bayamo dissident Yoandris Montoya said he had heard reports of five deaths and Marquez put it at about 10. Havana dissident Calixto Martínez has reported about 15. Batista’s TV appearances seemed to mark the start of a government effort to step up its public information on the outbreak, and she was expected to appear on Telecentro again late Monday. But police kept up a heavy security presence at area hospitals and relatives were not allowed to visit patients with cholera, said Marquez. He was fired from his public health job after his wife, Tania de la Torre, became a human rights activist. Cholera was declared to have been eradicated in Cuba no later than the early 1900s, but an ongoing outbreak in neighboring Haiti has killed more than 7,400 people and scores of Cuban doctors have worked there. A Florida woman and others in the Dominican Republic who visited Haiti came down with cholera in 2010 but survived. Cholera is generally not fatal but can kill in a matter of hours when the diarrhea and vomiting cause dehydration, especially among the elderly. The three dead confirmed by the Cuban government were 60 or older.
Cuba once boasted one of the best and broadest public health systems in the Western Hemisphere. It remains capable, but it has been going downhill since the end of the Soviet Union’s massive subsidies in the early 1990s. The government announcement last week said the cholera was spreading through contaminated water wells, but gave no explanation of how the bacteria entered the wells or the water pipes. A Cuban television report last month noted that up to 58 percent of the water pumped nationally is wasted because of breaks in the pipes. Cuban authorities also have not commented on unofficial reports that dengue fever, which is carried by mosquitoes, is spreading rapidly through a dozen Cuban cities and has killed at least five people in Havana.
State rushes closure of its only TB hospital in Lantana
Stacey Singer
Lilla Charline Burkhalter, 60, comes to the Clara White center for breakfast most mornings. It was here, in the soup kitchen, that a man with active, coughing TB was recently identified, leading to the discovery that Jacksonville was in the midst of the largest TB outbreak in the country. Burkhalter is coughing, but she says it’s her emphysema acting up. (Photo by Stacey Singer)
The CDC officer had a serious warning for Florida health officials in April: A tuberculosis outbreak in Jacksonville was one of the worst his group had investigated in 20 years. Linked to 13 deaths and 99 illnesses, including six children, it would require concerted action to stop.
That report had been penned on April 5, exactly nine days after Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill that shrank the Department of Health and required the closure of the A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana, where tough tuberculosis cases have been treated for more than 60 years.
As health officials in Tallahassee turned their focus to restructuring, Dr. Robert Luo’s 25-page report describing Jacksonville’s outbreak — and the measures needed to contain it – went unseen by key decision makers around the state. At the health agency, an order went out that the TB hospital must be closed six months ahead of schedule.
Had they seen the letter, decision makers would have learned that 3,000 people in the past two years may have had close contact with contagious people at Jacksonville’s homeless shelters, an outpatient mental health clinic and area jails. Yet only 253 people had been found and evaluated for TB infection, meaning Florida’s outbreak was, and is, far from contained.
The public was not to learn anything until early June, even though the same strain was appearing in other parts of the state, including Miami.
Tuberculosis is a lung disease more associated with the 18th century than the 21st, referred to as “consumption” in Dickensian times because its victims would grow gaunt and wan as their lungs disintigrated and they slowly died. The CDC investigator described a similar fate for 10 of the 13 people who died in Jacksonville.
They wasted away before ever getting treatment, or were too far gone by the time it began. Most of the sick were poor black men.
“The high number of deaths in this outbreak emphasizes the need for vigilant active case finding, improved education about TB, and ongoing screening at all sites with outbreak cases,” Luo’s report states.
Today, three months after it was sent to Tallahassee, the CDC report still has not been widely circulated.
Backer of closing hospital didn’t know
Meanwhile the champion of the health agency consolidation, Rep. Matt Hudson, R-Naples, said he had not been informed of the Jacksonville outbreak and the CDC’s role as of Friday.
Told the details, the chairman of the House Health Care Appropriations Committee vowed that there would be money for TB treatment.
“There is every bit of understanding that we cannot not take care of people who have a difficult case of TB,” Hudson said.
The governor’s office asked a reporter to foward a copy of the CDC letter on Saturday, but did not comment by press time.
Treatment for TB can be an ordeal. A person with an uncomplicated, active case of TB must take a cocktail of three to four antibiotics — dozens of pills a day — for six months or more. The drugs can cause serious side effects — stomach and liver problems chief among them. But failure to stay on the drugs for the entire treatment period can and often does cause drug resistance.
At that point, a disease that can cost $500 to overcome grows exponentially more costly. The average cost to treat a drug-resistant strain is more than $275,000, requiring up to two years on medications. For this reason, the state pays for public health nurses to go to the home of a person with TB every day to observe them taking their medications.
However, the itinerant homeless, drug-addicted, mentally ill people at the core of the Jacksonville TB cluster are almost impossible to keep on their medications. Last year, Duval County sent 11 patients to A.G. Holley under court order. Last week, with A.G. Holley now closed, one was sent to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. The ones who will stay put in Jacksonville are being put up in motels, to make it easier for public health nurses to find them, Duval County health officials said.
They spoke about CDC’s report Friday, only after weeks of records requests from The Palm Beach Post. The report was released late last week only after a reporter traveled to Tallahassee to demand records in person. The records should be open to inspection to anyone upon request under Florida Statute 119, known as the Government in the Sunshine law.
TB strain spreads beyond homeless
In his report, the CDC’s Luo makes it clear that other health officials throughout the state and nation have reason to be concerned: Of the fraction of the sick people’s contacts reached, one-third tested positive for TB exposure in areas like the homeless shelter.
Furthermore, only two-thirds of the active cases could be traced to people and places in Jacksonville where the homeless and mentally ill had congregated. That suggested the TB strain had spread beyond the city’s underclass and into the general population. The Palm Beach Post requested a database showing where every related case has appeared. That database has not been released.
It was early February when Duval County Health Department officials felt so overwhelmed by the sudden spike in tuberculosis that they asked the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to become involved. Believing the outbreak affected only their underclass, the health officials made a conscious decision not to not tell the public, repeating a decision they had made in 2008, when the same strain had appeared in an assisted living home for people with schizophrenia.
“What you don’t want is for anyone to have another reason why people should turn their backs on the homeless,” said Charles Griggs, the public information officer for the Duval County Health Department.
Even the CDC was not forthcoming about the outbreak. An agency spokesperson declined requests from The Post when asked to make an expert available to discuss a CDC-authored scholarly paper on the possible origins of the Jacksonville outbreak, offering only general fact sheets on TB.
“After checking in with the Division of TB Elimination about your specific questions, they have suggested that you reach out to your health department,” wrote Salina Cranor of the CDC’s TB prevention office. . “They are really the best source for your questions.”
“With TB it’s a judgment call,” said Duval County Health Director Dr. Bob Harmon in a telephone interview Friday, after the state’s new surgeon general referred questions back to him.
“There have been TB outbreaks where we do alert the public, such as a school or a college,” Harmon added.
For weeks, there had been a dissonant message coming from the Department of Health press office in Tallahassee. It released overall numbers of Florida tuberculosis cases showing a marked decline statewide, supporting the argument that A.G. Holley had become irrelevant. Asked whether she had been aware of the severity of Jacksonville’s outbreak while delivering that message, she did not answer.
“Florida experienced a 10 percent decrease in cases for 2011 compared to 2010. For the period 2007—2011, there was a 24 percent decrease in cases,” wrote agency spokeswoman Jessica Hammonds in an emailed response to written questions on May 18. She declined, at the time, to make agency experts available for interview.
In an article published in June’s American Journal of Psychiatry, CDC experts Dr. Joseph Cavanaugh, Dr. Kiren Mitruka and colleagues described the apparent origins of the current outbreak, when a TB strain called FL 046 came to claim two lives and sicken at least 15 mentally ill residents of one assisted living facility in 2008.
A single schizophrenic patient had circulated from hospital to jail to homeless shelter to assisted living facility, living in dorm housing in many locations. Over and over, the patient’s cough was documented in his chart, but not treated. It continued for eight months, until he finally was sent under court order to A.G. Holley. That year, 2008-2009, a total of 18 people in that community developed active tuberculosis from the strain called FL 046 and two died. The CDC sent a $275,000 grant to help pay for the staff needed to contain it.
After the money ran out, Harmon said, staff were redeployed to other needs. But in 2011, suddenly, the number of active cases of FL 046 spiked, rising 16 percent to 30 cases of a specific genotype, the one seen in 2008.
“We thought after 2008 that we had it contained,” Harmon said. “It was not contained. In retrospect, it would have been better to inform the general population then.”
Harmon said the Duval County Health Department will need more resources if it is to contain the current TB outbreak. In 2008, when the TB outbreak hit, his department employed 946 staff with revenues of $61 million. “Now we’re down to 700 staff and revenue is down to $46 million,” Harmon said. “It has affected most areas of the organization.”
If he can raise at least $300,000, he will use the money to hire teams of experts — epidemiologists, nurses, outreach workers, to look under bridges, in fields — in all the places where Jacksonville’s estimated 4,000 homeless congregate, to track down the people who may still be infected unknowingly. Fortunately, only a few of the cases have developed drug resistance so far. The vast majority respond to the first-line antibiotics.
In downtown Jacksonville, in the homeless shelters and soup kitchens, the TB strain called FL 046 continues to spread.
On a recent June morning, 60-year-old Lilla Charline Burkhalter joined about 100 other poor and homeless guests being served a free hot meal of scrambled eggs, grapes, potatoes and butterless bread by a local church youth group.
The youth group was volunteering at the Clara White Mission, where a man with active tuberculosis had been identified just three weeks earlier.
Looking weary but friendly, Burkhalter described her life of late, sleeping in grassy fields and in shelter dormitories. She lived on a small Social Security disability check, she said. It had enabled her to pay for a room in an apartment, for a while. But her roommate had kicked her out for making his girlfriend jealous, she said, and she hadn’t been able to find any other accommodations. It had been a rough few months, she acknowledged. But she had been through tough times before.
As she spoke, she coughed often. It was her emphysema acting up, she explained.
Asked if she was fearful about the TB in the community, she shrugged.
“The health department tests me for TB once a year, so I know I don’t have it,” she said. “I’m not worried.”
The Clara White Mission is now playing a key role in helping Jacksonville fight TB. Its housing case manager, Ken Covington, had spent most of his career helping bank branches assimilate after mergers. Two months ago, he joined Clara White, charged with placing homeless veterans and recently released jail inmates into homes. But the job has became much larger.
Today, Covington is the new chairman of the Duval County TB Coalition. In his hands he holds a massive binder with the intimidating title, “Core Curriculum in Tuberculosis: What the Clinician Should Know.” It was given to him by Vernard Green, the CDC’s visiting TB liaison.
Covington said he was a banker, not a clinician. But he had learned what to watch for with TB – coughing up blood, night sweats, sudden weight loss. The coalition members were looking at buying air filtration equipment, drafting intake protocols, getting to know the TB experts in the community, and educating shelter staff on what to watch for and what to do if a client appeared ill.
“We’re trying to do what we can to rein it in, and stay in front of it, and not let it get any worse,” Covington said. “I take it as a very important role for the community.”
WHAT THE POST UNCOVERED
In 2008, a schizophrenic patient contracted TB but went untreated for eight months, wandering among many places where the homeless congregate, infecting at least 17 others.
In 2012, the CDC was invited to help with a sudden spike in cases of the same rare strain the schizophrenic patient had. What they found is the worst outbreak they have investigated in 20 years, and it is not contained.
ON THE TRAIL OF TB
Hard to track: Homeless and mentally ill people and those they have come in contact with are especially hard to treat.
Long, tough treatment: Several pills a day of several virulent antibiotics for a minimum of six months, often up to two years.
What’s at stake: If treatment regimen isn’t strictly followed, antibiotic resistent strains emerge.
TB Basics
Tuberculosis (TB) is caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The bacteria usually attack the lungs, but TB bacteria can attack any part of the body such as the kidney, spine, and brain. If not treated properly, TB disease can be fatal.
How TB Spreads
TB is spread through the air from one person to another. The TB bacteria are put into the air when a person with TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. People nearby may breathe in these bacteria and become infected. TB is NOT spread by
shaking someone’s hand
sharing food or drink
touching bed linens or toilet seats
sharing toothbrushes
kissing
TB Symptoms
Symptoms of TB disease include:
a bad cough that lasts 3 weeks or longer
pain in the chest
coughing up blood or sputum
weakness or fatigue
weight loss
no appetite
chills
fever
sweating at night
TB Risk Factors
Once a person is infected with TB bacteria, the chance of developing TB disease is higher if the person:
Has HIV infection;
Has been recently infected with TB bacteria (in the last 2 years);
Has other health problems, like diabetes, that make it hard for the body to fight bacteria;
Abuses alcohol or uses illegal drugs; or
Was not treated correctly for TB infection in the past
Rogue waves sweep teen kayakers into Pacific Ocean
By Greg Morrison, CNN
(CNN) — A day of kayaking and backpacking on Hawaii’s Big Island changed in an instant as the might of the Pacific Ocean swept six teenagers into the surf.
One remains missing.
The group of 12 students and their guides, who were on their way to a waterfall, were taking a break at a tide pool 15 feet above the swirling ocean and 50 feet inland when rogue waves hit.
“(T)he waves were totally unexpected,” Abbott Wallis, founder and executive director of tour operator Bold Earth Teen Adventures, said Sunday.
Parents: We’ll carry you in our hearts
The surf sucked two of the teenagers into the sea Wednesday and left four others clinging for their lives along the cliff and rocky shoals.
Kayak guides “immediately dived into the water at risk to their own lives” and rescued five of the teens, said Bari Sims of Hawaii Pack and Paddle. The sixth, 15-year-old Tyler Madoff of White Plains, New York, has not been found. Authorities suspended search operations for his rescue Thursday evening.
The other student swept out to sea remains hospitalized after his rescue, but is expected to recover. One of the kayak guides resuscitated him at the scene.
“I can’t convey my shock and sorrow,” Wallis said. “We’re doing all we can to support the families and students. As a parent myself, I can only imagine what the families are feeling right now.”
Tyler’s father, Michael Madoff, strongly criticized Bold Earth, but said the family would not seek legal action against the tour operator.
“People of Bold Earth Expeditions have shown poor judgment and extremely poor character,” Madoff said Sunday. “None of the Bold Earth people stayed on site to continue the search for our son Tyler.”
“We’re devastated by this,” Wallis said in response. “There’s nothing Mr. Madoff can say that we disagree with.”
A statement from the company says Bold Earth has served nearly 12,000 students on six continents since it was founded in 1976. Wallis said last week’s accident was the first significant incident in the company’s history.
Manchester, N.H. – Manchester police said a sinkhole has shut down a section of Langdon Street between Elm Street and Canal Street.Police said the sinkhole opened up late Sunday night, nearly swallowing a car that was parked nearby. They said the sinkhole was caused by a water leak.
Crews were able to fix the leak early Monday morning, but they are still working to repair the road. Officials said Langdon Street will be shut down all day Monday.
A 45-foot hole under the highway between Red Cliff and Leadville will keep road closed indefinitely
Leadville – A 20-by-30-foot round sinkhole that is at least 45 feet deep is keeping U.S. Highway 24 north of Leadville closed indefinitely.
Forty-five feet is as deep as Colorado Department of Transportation crews could measure Monday afternoon before engineers and geologists arrived, said Ashley Mohr, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation.
After about 45 feet deep, the hole starts to curl back under the highway, sort of like an asphalt-eating serpent. They’re not entirely certain how far it curls under the highway, Mohr said, they’re just certain that it does.
The hole puts the highway, and motorists, in danger. CDOT closed the highway Monday afternoon to traffic in both directions.
It’ll stay closed until they can figure out what happened and how they might fix it.
“Safety is our first concern. We know this is an inconvenience for people,” Mohr said.
Motorists should use state Highway 91 as an alternative route, she said.
“Our engineers determined it would be unsafe to allow motor vehicles on the road,” Mohr said.
That means Leadville commuters – many of whom drive from Leadville to work places in Eagle County – get a yellow flag for the foreseeable future because the road is wrecked.
The sinkhole is almost exactly halfway between Red Cliff and Leadville, on the north side of Tennessee Pass. It’s south of Homestake Lake and Blodgett campground.
Geologists rolled in Monday afternoon from Denver to take a look, Mohr said.
“Our engineering crews are having a look at it,” Mohr said.
Sinkholes are caused by fragile land. That land moves around and hollows out at a faster pace in some places than in others, Mohr said.
Heavy rains over the past few days, after months of dry weather, could have triggered the land, Mohr said.
“It could be caused by running water, and we’ve had some of that. It could be a mine under there. It could be just about anything,” Mohr said.
For those curious about this sort of thing, it’s our second swing at a sinkhole in recent years.
In June 2003, a huge sinkhole collapsed the westbound lane of Interstate 70 above East Vail. Hundreds were evacuated from their homes overnight.
That one was caused by pretty much the same thing this one was: lots of water rushing into a small space. Heavy runoff washed out a culvert and opened a 20-foot-wide sinkhole.
It shut down a 24-mile stretch of I-70 between Copper Mountain and Vail.
A fleeting meteor streaks across the night sky over a New Jersey beach in serene view captured by a local photographer.Night sky photographer Jack Fusco captured the meteor as it flared up over Cape May, N.J., beach in the wee hours of June 28, just after the peak of the annual Bootid meteor shower.
“The shower peaked about an hour after the moon had set, at about 2 a.m. EDT,” Fusco told SPACE.com in an email. “Overall, it was a beautiful night for stargazing.”
June’s Bootid meteor shower is created by the remains of the Comet 7P/Pons Winnecke, according to the International Meteor Organisation.
The Bootid shower is classified as a variable meteor shower by the American Meteor Society because its annual displays are often dim, but can sometimes be impressive to lucky stargazers. Variable meteor showers typically only “produce strong activity on rare occasions,” the society explains in an overview. “Most of the time, only a few scattered remnants of these showers are observered with rates of one shower member per night.”
The Bootid meteor shower is one of several meteor showers to light up the night skies in the next few months.
The annual Delta Aquarid meteor shower is expected to hit its peak on July 29, but will likely be washed out by the nearly full moon, according to a NASA alert.
Next up is the annual Perseid meteor shower, which will peak on Aug. 12 and is typically one of the year’s dependable shooting star displays. At its peak, the 2012 Perseid meteor shower could produce up to 100 meteors per hour for stargazers observing the night sky from a dark location, well away from city lights, between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. local time, NASA officials said.
July 9th began with a brief but beautiful display of auroras over North America. “I had gone out to search for noctilucent clouds, but instead I found these Northern Lights,” says Robert Snache of Rama First Nation, Ontario:
The source of the display was not an explosion on the sun, but rather a fluctuation in the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). The IMF near Earth tipped south, briefly opening a crack in our planet’s magnetosphere. Solar wind poured in and ignited the lights.
More auroras could be in the offing. A CME that left the sun on July 6th might deliver a glancing blow to Earth’s magnetic field on July 9-10. NOAA forecasters estimate a 25% to 30% chance of polar geomagnetic storms if and when the cloud arrives.
E. Guido, N. Howes, M. Jenkins, J. Hodge & G. Sostero
Remanzacco Observatory
Cbet 3166, issued on 2012 July 07, reports the discovery by Koichi Nishiyama and Fujio Kabashima (Japan) of a possible nova (mag 7.8) on two 40-s unfiltered CCD frames (limiting magnitude 13.7) taken around July 7.4986 UT using a 105-mm f/4 camera lens (+ SBIG STL6303E camera). The variable was designated PNV J18202726-2744263 when it was posted at the Central Bureau’s TOCP webpage.
The nova has been designated NOVA SAGITTARII 2012 No. 4.
We performed some follow-up of this object remotely through the 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD of “Faulkes Telescope South” (MPC Code – E10). On our images taken on July 09.4, 2012 we can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with R-filtered CCD magnitude 8.7 at coordinates:
Hundreds of jellyfish have hauled up the red flag at Gibraltar’s beaches and provided Tara Bossano-Anes a bit of shoreline fishing activity. Hundreds of jellyfish have accumulated in Catalan Bay and nearby areas, over the weekend. Red flags flew at both Eastern Beach and Catalan Bay on Saturday, however, only Catalan Bay had the red flag flying yesterday. Unable to swim in amongst the jellyfish, children collected the jellyfish into their nets and proceeded to pile them on the beach, where they will dry out and break down quickly as they are mostly water. Caution needs to still be taken around jellyfish on the beach, in or out of water, any jellyfish you see has the potential to sting if touched. The species of jellyfish that have arrived have the Latin name Pelagia Noctiluca, commonly called luminous jellyfish or mauve stinger. Known for their colour, they can change from pale red to mauve-brown, they may grow up to 10cm in diameter and the exumbrella surface (the outer, convex surface of the umbrella of jellyfishes), is covered in pink or mauve nematocyst bearing warts.Shaped like a mushroom, it has 16 marginal lobes, eight marginal sense organs and eight, hair-like marginal tentacles. Jellyfish are widely known for their sting, and very much like a bee, it leaves its stinger embedded in the person. Treatment of a sting is done in two stages, the first step is to deactivate any stingers, remove stingers by applying shaving foam to the sting area and scraping the skin closely with a razor, knife blade, or credit card, or rub sand over it to dislodge the stingers. The second step is to remove the stingers from the person’s skin, you can do this by blotting or pouring 3-10% percent acetic acid solution (white vinegar) on the sting with a clean cloth. Protective clothing needs to be worn by the person removing the stings. If the sting occurred in salt water, using fresh water can cause the stingers to inject more venom, and therefore become more painful. Urinating on it does not help, that is an urban legend. Arriving into Gibraltar via the tides it is uncertain at present as to when they will leave. The annual Argus endurance swim that was due to take place on Sunday, July 8, was postponed due to the presence of the jellyfish in the reclamation area. The swim is now provisionally due to take place this Sunday, July 15, weather and jellyfish permitting. Registration for the event takes place at the far end of eastern beach next to the lifeguard post and starts at 2.15pm till 2.45pm.
Biohazard name:
Jellyfish invasion
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Danish authorities say an intravenous drug user who injected heroin and died has tested positive for anthrax. The Health Ministry suspects the drug was contaminated with the bacillus anthracis strain of anthrax. The 55-year-old addict died Sunday. Terrorism is not suspected, and the health ministry says there is no risk of contagion because the bacteria cannot be passed from person to person. Anthrax is a deadly disease that can be treated with antibiotics if caught early. Officials said Monday they will compare the case to two similar deaths in Germany in June. Last week, German officials said there may be a link between contaminated heroin found in Germany and an anthrax outbreak in Scotland in 2009 and 2010, which left 10 people dead.
Biohazard name:
Anthrax contained heroin
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Fire crews investigating the cause of a suspected chemical leak at a council office that left nine people needing medical treatment have found no trace of any chemicals that could have caused the problem. The Essex County Council building in The Crescent, Colchester, was evacuated this morning after reports of around a dozen people feeling ill. It is the second time in less than a fortnight that the building has had a suspected chemical leak – it was first cleared by authorities on June 29 after reports of people falling unwell and reporting a strange smell. Essex County Fire and Rescue Service said that shortly after the incident this morning nine people were given oxygen therapy and all other persons were accounted for. Crews entered the building this afternoon to try and find the reason for the problem but have said there is no definitive cause. A statement from the Fire Service said: “Crews have now conducted their final tests inside the building with the air-conditioning system running and found no sign of any chemical which could have caused the problem. “The building remains empty and staff will not return for at least 48 hours. “Fire officers are now leaving the scene in the hands of the Health Protection Agency.”A spokeswoman for Essex County Council said the building would now be closed until it was found to be safe and a review would be carried out. She said: “Essex County Fire & Rescue Service has confirmed there is no indication of what the cause of today’s incident might have been. “Despite the building being handed back to us we see the health and safety of our staff as paramount and have taken the decision to close the building until we can reassure our staff that it is a safe place to work. “A complete and independent review will now be undertaken. “To minimise disruption to our customer’s telephone calls, and as part of our business continuity plans, an alternative contact centre will be in place tomorrow from 9am to 5pm. “Residents should check our website for up to date information about the contact centre opening times.” A specialist Detection Identification and Monitoring (Dim) vehicle from Epping – on its first emergency incident – was sent to the scene to assist in identifying the chemical involved. Ambulance crews, specialist officers and the trusts hazardous area response team (Hart) were sent to the council office to deal with the incident after being alerted to a report of several people taken unwell at 10.40am, the East of England Ambulance Service said.
Assistant Divisional Officer Steve Foster said earlier: “Our crews treated nine people, all of whom were complaining of a bad smell, a feeling of nausea and metallic taste in their mouth. We gave all of them oxygen therapy.” A spokeswoman for Essex County Council said the cause of the incident last month was unknown and the building was declared safe 48 hours after it happened. She said: “We can confirm that Essex House has been evacuated today following reports of employees feeling unwell. “Emergency services are on the scene and responsible for leading initial investigations into this incident. We are aware of 11 members of staff currently being assessed. “We are committed to making sure that our staff work in a safe and healthy environment and when emergency services dealt with the last incident, along with a specialist detection team, there was no indication of what the cause might have been – the building was handed back to Essex County Council by the emergency services 48 hours later, and was declared safe for employees to enter. “We recognise this is the second incident that has occurred at Essex House in the last month and would like to reiterate that the health and safety of our staff is paramount at all times. “We are taking necessary measures to ensure minimal disruption to our customers’ telephone calls, with business continuity procedures currently in place. “We would ask that emergency services as well as our own ECC teams are allowed to assess the situation and we will, of course update with further information and advice as soon as it is available.”
Nearly 17,000 Dominion Virginia Power customers lost electricity after an afternoon thunderstorm swept through the region. The largest outage was in South Norfolk, where more than 3,800 customers were in the dark, according to the Dominion website. About 2,000 customers north of Norfolk State University also lost power. Shortly after 10 p.m. there were still about 1,000 customers without electricity. The company said on its website restoration should be completed overnight. Calls to the media representative and a media line were not returned. The storm moved into the region shortly before 3 p.m. with winds of about 40 mph and lightning strikes throughout the area, said John Billet, a National Weather Service meteorologist. As much as 2.5 inches of rain reportedly fell in the Deep Creek area of Chesapeake. More storms moved through northeastern North Carolina, prompting severe thunderstorm warnings in Chowan, Gates, Perquimans, Tyrrell and Washington counties. Those warnings expired, but a new batch of short-lived warnings came shortly before 9 p.m. Suffolk, Franklin and Isle of Wight in Virginia, as well as Gates County in North Carolina had severe thunderstorm warnings in effect until 9:15 p.m. A severe thunderstorm watch in effect for most of South Hampton Roads and northeastern North Carolina until 10 p.m., also expired. A watch means conditions are favorable for severe thunderstorms. Thunderstorms that do develop are capable of producing wind gusts as high as 70 mph, hail as large as 1.5 inches in diameter and brief, heavy rainfalls, according to the National Weather Service. A weak, slow-moving cold front was moving into the area today before stalling over the border with North Carolina. The cold front was bringing some relief from last week’s record-setting high temperatures. Temperatures should stay in the mid-80s the rest of this week.
For the first time, researchers at Aalto University in Finland have located where the sounds associated with the northern lights are created. The auroral sounds that have been described in folktales and by wilderness wanderers are formed about 70 meters above the ground level in the measured case.
Researchers located the sound sources by installing three separate microphones in an observation site where the auroral sounds were recorded. They then compared sounds captured by the microphones and determined the location of the sound source. The aurora borealis was seen at the observation site. The simultaneous measurements of the geomagnetic disturbances, made by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, showed a typical pattern of the northern lights episodes.
“Our research proved that, during the occurrence of the northern lights, people can hear natural auroral sounds related to what they see. In the past, researchers thought that the aurora borealis was too far away for people to hear the sounds it made. This is true. However, our research proves that the source of the sounds that are associated with the aurora borealis we see is likely caused by the same energetic particles from the sun that create the northern lights far away in the sky. These particles or the geomagnetic disturbance produced by them seem to create sound much closer to the ground,” said Professor Unto K. Laine from Aalto University.
Details about how the auroral sounds are created are still a mystery. The sounds do not occur regularly when the northern lights are seen. The recorded, unamplified sounds can be similar to crackles or muffled bangs which last for only a short period of time. Other people who have heard the auroral sounds have described them as distant noise and sputter.
Because of these different descriptions, researchers suspect that there are several mechanisms behind the formation of these auroral sounds. These sounds are so soft that one has to listen very carefully to hear them and to distinguish them from the ambient noise.
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“While Citizens United enjoys strong support among Republican officials (and among the five Republican justices responsible for it), few Americans share this view.”
Twenty-two states joined an amicus brief that will be filed today in the Supreme Court by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) calling for the Supreme Court to back off its election-buying decision in Citizens United. The brief, which supports the state of Montana’s effort to preserve its ban on corporate money in elections, argues that state elections present an even greater risk than federal elections of being corrupted by corporate money — and thus states should be allowed to restrict such money even if the justice cling to their idiosyncratic belief that federal bans on corporate election spending are unconstitutional.
Sadly, the states’ brief only highlights the partisan impact of Citizens United. Of the 22 states that joined the brief, only three — Idaho, Washington and Utah — have Republican attorneys general. Additionally, top Republican elected officials and lobbying organizations, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, previously filed briefs calling for the justices to redouble their commitment to corporate influence on elections.
“In the past four years, two and a half million people have left the Democratic and Republican parties,” explains Linda Killian, author of the new book The Swing Vote: The Untapped Power of Independents. Not only are these voters sick of the two dominant parties, Killian believes they are increasingly determining electoral outcomes. “They voted for Barack Obama, they voted for the Democrats in 2006, [but] they swung 19 points in voting for the Republicans in 2010.”
Killian sat down with Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie to examine what makes a swing voter, their growing importance, and if their socially tolerant and fiscally responsible viewpoints should buoy libertarians.
Runs about 6.40 minutes
Produced by Meredith Bragg. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Josh Swain.
Visit http://www.reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV’s YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.
Talk to Al Jazeera – Ali Salim el-Beidh: Separating South Yemen
Is it possible for a united Yemen to move towards a new future or will the forces that are advocating a division of the country win in the end?
Ali Salim el Beidh, the leader of the separatist movement in South Yemen, is the man now considered one of the most important figures in this respect.
Obama, NATO leaders chart path out of Afghanistan
President Obama and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai met Sunday at the NATO summit in Chicago to discuss the transition of power in Afghanistan.
By NBC News and news services
Updated 6:22 p.m. ET: CHICAGO — President Barack Obama on Sunday pressed world leaders to help implement a strategy for post-2014 Afghanistan after U.S. troops leave, a transition that Afghan President Hamid Karzai said will mark the day that his war-torn country is “no longer a burden” on the rest of the world.
Obama and Karzai met on the sidelines of the NATO summit on Sunday to discuss Afghanistan’s post-conflict future. After the meeting, Obama told reporters that the two-day summit would focus on Afghanistan’s move to peace and stability after a decade of war.
“We still have a lot of work to do and there will be great challenges ahead,” Obama said. “The loss of life continues in Afghanistan and there will be hard days ahead.”
Standing next to Obama, Karzai reaffirmed his commitment to the transition timetable process, which he said will lead to a time when Afghanistan “is no longer a burden on the shoulder of our friends in the international community, on the shoulders of the United States and other allies.”
Karzai also thanked Americans for the help that their “taxpayer money” has done in Afghanistan.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP
President Barack Obama, right, shakes hands with with Afghan President Hamid Karzai during their meeting at the NATO summit in Chicago on Sunday.
Propaganda that was supposed to target foreigners could now be aimed at Americans, reversing a longstanding policy. “Disconcerting and dangerous,” says Shank.
An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.
The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee’s official website.
The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.
The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mac Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State.
In a little noticed press release earlier in the week — buried beneath the other high-profile issues in the $642 billion defense bill, including indefinite detention and a prohibition on gay marriage at military installations — Thornberry
‘Election silence’ prevails in Egypt as final countdown to landmark voting starts
Monday, 21 May 2012
Egypt’s 13 presidential candidates are prohibited from any public activities that can influence the voters’ decisions during the two days of ‘election silence’. (File photo)
By Al Arabiya with Agencies
Egypt started a ban on all activities of presidential campaigning dubbed “election silence” on Monday that will last for two days before the landmark voting kicks off on May 23-24.
According to the rules laid by the Supreme Presidential Election Commission, candidates are prohibited from any public activities that can influence the voters’ decisions before casting their ballots in the first presidential poll that follows the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak.
Media platforms are also subject to the ban. They are prohibited from airing any publicity advertisements for presidential candidates or conducting any interviews with them.
A runoff for the landmark polls will be held on June 16-17 if no single candidate wins an absolute majority. The country’s next president will be formally named on June 21.
The main contenders in the elections are former Arab League chief Amr Moussa; Islamist Abdul Muniem Abul Fotouh; Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi; last prime minister of Mubarak’s era Ahmed Shafiq and leftist leader Hamdeen Sabbahi.
Sketchy polls taken by a government-funded think tank and the cabinet’s research division show Mursi trailing behind moderate Islamist Abul Fotouh, Mussa, Shafiq and Sabbahi.
Denmark to start labeling goods made in illegal Israeli settlements
Israel says it is being singled out since special labels are not applied to products made in dozens of other places where territorial conflicts exist. (Reuters)
By Sara Ghasemilee
Al Arabiya
It should be crystal clear to Danish consumers if a product they are about to purchase was made in an Israeli settlement, the foreign ministry announced earlier this week.
Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal wants to introduce a labeling system for all goods imported from West Bank settlements “which are illegal according to international law.”
“This is a step that will clearly demonstrate to consumers that these products are produced under conditions that, not only a Danish government, but European governments in general do not approve of. And so it is up to consumers whether they want to purchase the goods or not,” Soevndal said to Danish newspaper Politiken.
The labeling system will be offered to Danish supermarkets and they will be free to decide if they want to implement it or not. But Soevndal said he was confident that businesses will want to partake in the system and referred to Great Britain which implemented a similar arrangement “with great success.” Soevndal also has a firm belief that the settlement issue causes so much resentment that consumers will change their behavior.
“I am convinced that the labeling will have a very significant and direct impact on imports, but exactly how much is impossible to guess,” he said.
The Danish labeling initiative comes at a time when the European Union has agreed to tighten the monitoring of the trade agreement with Israel, which exempts goods produced in the Jewish state from customs duty.
With a better identification of the origin of the goods and improved documentation at customs, the EU is attempting to make sure that manufacturers producing the goods in illegal settlements do not profit from the duty-free agreement.
“Our intention is to ensure that the trade agreement with Israel is not being used to smuggle settlement products,” said Soevndal.
Soevdal added that the new Danish labeling system should be viewed in relation to the EU aim of a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians “that is being made increasingly difficult to obtain due to settlements.”
“Therefore, we hope to show the Palestinians a world that is actually concerned that these illegal settlements should not be allowed to continue,” said Soevndal.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps have been accused of tampering with recent parliamentary election results. (Reuters)
By Najah Mohamed Ali
Al Arabiya
Iranian veteran conservative MP Ali Motahari accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) of interfering in the results of the latest parliamentary elections amid retaliation threats by IRGC senior officials.
IRGC General Ramadan Sharif, was quoted in a statement posted on the IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency as saying the military body is, and will always be, committed to the teachings of the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khomeini and will therefore never interfere in legislative elections.
The IRGC, the statement added, did not influence in any way the results of the March 2 elections, which witnessed a major victory for the supporters of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, some of whom are IRGC members.
IRGC members were infuriated by the accusations Motahari, one of Iran’s most daring and independent MPs, hurled at them in the parliament session held Sunday and threatened to take the MP to court if he does not withdraw his “allegations.”
Motahari, who called for the questioning and possible impeachment of the president, also accused Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his brother-in-law and chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei of spreading vice among the youth and creating the suitable environment for indecent behavior.
“I suggest that you open nightclubs to satisfy the sexual desires of the youth,” he once said, addressing Ahmadinejad.
Al Arabiya News Channel and AlArabiya.net ran on March 3 reports stressing that the ninth parliamentary elections since the 1979 revolution have witnessed a wide range of violations such as rigging and vote buying in the capital Tehran and other Iranian cities.
Those violations, reports explained, were committed by various political powers but especially by the IRGC and the IRGC-affiliated volunteer militia the Basij.
According to an Al Arabiya report, IRGC and Basij members toured the streets on their bikes, paid money to pedestrians, and told them to vote for the IRGC list.
Large numbers of villagers were also transferred to big cities to give the impression that the turnout was high in the elections described by several opposition figures inside and outside Iran as a “farce.”
Several of those involved in paying money were arrested in several cities only to be released later after IRGC interfered.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), H.R. 4310, authorizes a total of $642.7 billion.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today released the following statement detailing why he voted against the National Defense Authorization Act.
“The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), H.R. 4310, authorizes a total of $642.7 billion. According to Congressional Quarterly, defense spending is expected to constitute nearly 60% of all federal discretionary spending this year. This expensive piece of legislation is a bad investment. It doubles down on war as an economic engine at a time when our domestic economy desperately needs attention.
“H.R. 4310 includes language that paves the way for war with Iran. It specifically calls for aggressive deployment of our armed services to begin ‘credible, visible preparations for a military option.’ It directs the Secretary of Defense to pre-position the U.S. Armed Forces in key locations in the Middle East in order to threaten Iran. It specifically authorizes actions ‘including military action if required.’ I strongly supported an amendment by Representative John Conyers, Jr. that clarified that nothing in the underlying bill authorizes war with Iran. The acceptance of that amendment was a critical victory, but the bill still prepares for war, making war more likely.
The Indian rupee, losing its value since last year, has now hit an all-time low against the US dollar.
The currency has lost more than 20 per cent since 2011, contributing to a slow down of India’s GDP growth and a widening of its fiscal deficit.
Critics blame the government’s indecision in introducing financial reforms as the main cause for the rupee’s current crisis.
A greatly devalued rupee means a ballooning import bill, as India buys about 80 per cent of its oil from abroad.
India’s vulnerability to the eurozone crisis is also pushing the rupee downward.
Al Jazeera’s Prerna Suri reports from New Delhi.
Ireland ‘may need’ second bailout
Deutsche Bank said today Ireland’s bailed-out banks may need as much as ?4 billion more to deal with loan losses.
Ireland’s bailed-out banks may need as much as €4 billion more loan loss provisions than assumed in stress tests last year, which could “tip the balance in favor” of the country requiring a second aid program, Deutsche Bank said in a report today.
“A new, even modest, increase in capital requirements could deter sovereign investor participation and tip the balance in favor of the sovereign requiring a second loan program,” said Deutsche Bank analysts David Lock and Jason Napier.
In Argentina, the government is using dogs to sniff out US dollars.
As part of a crack down on tax evasion, money laundering and cash being sent overseas, restrictions are being imposed on foreign currency.
Those restrictions have made the dollar, seen as a refuge from double-digit inflation, increasing difficult to find on the streets of the Argentine capital.
In an effort to curb the smuggling of millions in US dollars to neighbouring Uruguay, the government of Cristina Kirchner, the Argentinian president, has employed dogs to snif out the currency.
Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman reports from Buenos Aires.
Will The European Union Destroy Itself Just To Save The Euro?
Submitted by Tyler Durden
David McWilliams (of Punk Economics) begins his latest excellent discussion by conjuring Clint Eastwood and noting that when it comes to the Fiscal Compact in Europe “they are pissing down our backs and telling us that it is raining”. The Fiscal Compact will NOT strengthen the Euro but in fact by cementing the austerity agenda into law it will make the political environment even more unstable. The Irishman goes on to discuss why Europe is imploding as he insightfully notes that “financial panics do not cause the destruction of wealth, financial panics merely tell you the extent to which wealth has been destroyed by reckless speculation“. The realization that current account deficits and not budget deficits were always the problem in Europe which leaves the fiscal compact akin to a doctor prescribing chemotherapy for heart disease.
The scene of the deadly blast outside the so-called Palestinian branch intelligence headquarters on 10 May. Photograph: Youssef Badawi/EPA
Military defectors in northern Syria have denounced claims that al-Qaida was behind a series of deadly bombings in Damascus, contradicting the UN secretary general’s assessment that the terror group is taking a lead in the insurgency.
The defectors were speaking before Ban Ki-moon’s claim on Thursday that al-Qaida was responsible for a deadly blast outside one of Syria’s top intelligence services on 10 May, which reportedly killed 55 people and wounded 372.
“A few days ago there was a huge, serious, massive terrorist attack. I believe that there must be al-Qaida behind it,” Ban said at the UN headquarters in New York. “This has created again very serious problems.”
The defectors, interviewed by the Guardian in villages in the Jisr al-Shughour and Jabal al-Zawiya areas this week, alleged that Syrian security forces had caused many of the blasts.
Nine defectors, some of them officers who had fled recently, relayed first-hand accounts of plots they had witnessed being planned or executed that were later blamed on “armed gangs” or al-Qaida.
All have provided details of the plots they say took place and are willing to provide testimonies to international investigators. They say they are reluctant to put their names to their allegations, fearing reprisals against their families.
Arrested Protester Charges Mistreatment After Police Raid Apartment
Lawyers Deny Group Was Plotting To Make Molotov Cocktails, Only Beer
Darrin Annussek, who was detained by police, talks with the media Friday. (CBS)
CHICAGO (CBS) — As dignitaries arrive for the NATO Summit in Chicago, protesters and police are making news for an arrest controversy earlier this week in Bridgeport.
For the first time, as CBS 2’s Pam Zekman reports, one of the nine protesters scooped up by police in a controversial raid says he was mistreated and his civil rights violated.
Darrin Annussek says he walked to Chicago from Philadelphia to participate in Occupy protests, only to be seized by police in a raid on an apartment at 32nd and Morgan.
“For 18 hours, we were handcuffed to a bench and our legs were shackled together,” he said. “Some of our cries for the bathroom were either ignored or met with silence.”
Annusek was released Friday morning along with four others reportedly suspected of preparing molotov cocktails. At least one other detainee was released several hours later Friday.
Kris Hermes, of the National Lawyers Guild said: “There is absolutely no evidence of molotov cocktails or any other criminal activity going on at this building.”
A tenant who agreed to host the out-of-town protesters says the police did seize his home-brew making equipment, including buckets, beer bottles and caps.
“If anybody would like some, I would like to offer them a sip of my beer,” said William Vassilakis.
The National Lawyers Guild says the warrantless raid violated their clients’ civil rights.
“It is outrageous behavior on the part of the City of Chicago,” said Sarah Gelsomino.
NATO chief says no ‘rush for the exits’ in Afghan war
Sunday, 20 May 2012
President Barack Obama once called the Afghan conflict a “war of necessity” and is now looking for an orderly way out as hosts the NATO summit in his home town, Chicago. (Reuters)
By Missy Ryan and Phil Stewart
REUTERS / CHICAGO
NATO leaders sought on Sunday to dispel fears of a rush for the exits in Afghanistan even as the Western alliance met to chart a path out of an unpopular war that has dragged on for more than a decade.
President Barack Obama, who once called the Afghan conflict a “war of necessity” but is now looking for an orderly way out, hosted the NATO summit in his home town, Chicago, a day after major industrialized nations tackled a European debt crisis that threatens the global economy.
The shadow cast by fiscal pressures in Europe and elsewhere followed leaders from Obama’s presidential retreat in Maryland to the talks on Afghanistan, an unwelcome weight on countries mindful of growing public opposition to a costly war that has not defeated the Taliban in nearly 11 years.
Obama, hoping an Afghan exit strategy will help shore up his chances for re-election in November, said the summit would ratify a “broad consensus” for gradually turning over security responsibility to Afghan forces and pulling out most of the 130,000 NATO troops by the end of 2014.
But the Chicago talks faced undercurrents of division, especially with France’s new President Francois Hollande now planning to remove its troops by the end of 2012, two years before the alliance’s timetable.
Seeking to paper over differences, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen expressed confidence the alliance would “maintain solidarity within our coalition,” despite France’s decision.
“There will be no rush for the exits,” Rasmussen told reporters. “We will stay committed to our operation in Afghanistan and see it through to a successful end.”
But signaling tensions over the issue, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters: “We went into Afghanistan together, we want to leave Afghhanistan together.”
Obama, meeting Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the sidelines of the summit, said the meeting would agree on a “vision post-2014 in which we have ended our combat role, the Afghan war as we understand it is over, but our commitment to friendship and partnership with Afghanistan continues.”
Standing next to Obama, Karzai thanked Americans for “your taxpayer money” and said his country looked forward to the day it is “no longer a burden” on the international community. Karzai’s government has been widely criticized for rampant corruption.
Karzai’s comments underscored the political bind that Obama and other Western leaders face in underwriting a unpopular war effort and the build-up of Afghan forces during a time of budget austerity at home.
Syrian troops clash with rebels in Damascus; militant group claims blasts, vows more
Heavy fighting was reported during the night between regime soldiers and rebels in other parts of Damascus province, the Observatory said. (File photo)
By Al Arabiya with Agencies
Syrian forces ambushed and killed nine army deserters near a north Damascus suburb as fighting between armed rebels and troops raged around the capital during the night, a monitoring group said Monday, as a militant group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in eastern Syria last week vowed to continue launching attacks.
The deserters were killed as they were retreating under cover of darkness from the village of Jisr al-Ab near Damascus’s Duma suburb, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, according to AFP.
On Sunday, at least 60 people were killed across Syria, including 40 in an assault by regime forces on a village in central Hama province, Al Arabiya reported.
The watchdog had on Sunday reported fighting between rebels and regime troops near Duma, during which a rocket-propelled grenade exploded near a team of U.N. observers.
No one was hurt in the blast, which came as U.N. truce mission head Major General Robert Mood and peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous were leading observers around the north Damascus suburb.
Syrian soldiers who were on the spot have attributed the blast to an RPG rocket but U.N. observers have not commented on the nature of the explosion.
Clashes between settlers from the hardline Yitzhar settlement and Palestinian villagers from Asira al-Qibliya near Nablus took place on Saturday afternoon. (File photo)
By AFP
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM
The Israeli army on Monday said it was investigating an incident that was exposed by two video clips in which troops appeared to stand by without intervening as settlers shot at Palestinians.
The shooting incident took place on Saturday afternoon during stone-throwing clashes between settlers from the hardline Yitzhar settlement and Palestinian villagers from Asira al-Qibliya near Nablus.
The footage, which shows a Palestinian being shot by two settlers in the presence of at least three soldiers, was captured by a volunteer for the Israeli rights group B’Tselem.
The apparent indifference of the soldiers was widely covered by the Israeli press.
In response, the army said troops had arrived at the scene to break up a violent confrontation in which both sides were throwing stones at each other.
“During the confrontation live fire was used; the incident is currently being investigated by the division commander,” a military statement said.
“That said, it appears that the video in question does not reflect the incident in its entirety,” it added, without elaborating.
In one of the clips, two settlers with M-16 assault rifles can be seen opening fire at a stone-thrower in a green shirt who collapses onto the ground after being hit in the head.
In the second clip from a slightly different angle, a third settler can be seen firing with a pistol towards the stone-throwers as three soldiers stand close by doing nothing.
B’Tselem filed a complaint with the police, urging them to prosecute the gunmen, and also with the military police calling for an investigation into suspicions the soldiers “did not adhere to their obligation to protect Palestinians from settler violence.”
“The video footage raises grave suspicions that the soldiers present did not act to prevent the settlers from throwing stones and firing live ammunition at the Palestinians,” the NGO said in a statement late on Sunday.
“The soldiers did not try to remove the settlers and in fact are seen standing by settlers while they are shooting and stone throwing.”
(Newser) – Don’t look now, but the Syrian conflict might not be confined to Syria anymore. Gun battles broke out in Beirut today between factions supporting and opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the New York Times reports, in Lebanon’s most intense outbreak of violence since the Syrian uprising began. The fighting was eventually quelled by military intervention, but not before a pro-Syrian group had been driven out of its predominantly Sunni neighborhood, and the streets had been lined with burning cars.
The outbreak was sparked by the killing of an anti-Assad Sunni cleric at a Lebanese checkpoint, but tensions have long been simmering. Syria’s army was deployed in Lebanon for 30 years, up until 2005, and Syria still exerts a strong influence on Lebanese politics; Hezbollah, and most Shiite groups support Assad, while most Sunnis oppose him. An al-Jazeera reporter says he saw streets lined with Syrian opposition flags, and others dotted with posters of Assad.
Common grief is uniting Israelis and Palestinians who’ve lost loved ones to the long-lasting conflict between them. It’s a unique gathering of suffering parents, who want to increase understanding and bring peace closer. But their goal is all but out of reach, as RT’s Paula Slier reports.
Police gear up in Chicago as thousands join anti-NATO rallies
Thousands of protesters have flooded Chicago ahead of a NATO summit on Sunday. A huge showdown is expected later, with police already on high alert. Around a dozen activists were arrested on the eve of the gathering – three were charged with conspiracy to cause terror. RT’s Anastasia Churkina is in Chicago.
Muslims revive old pilgrimage route via Jerusalem, angering top clerics
Monday, 21 May 2012
For centuries, Muslim pilgrims visited Jerusalem while on their way to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia. (File photo)
By DIAA HADID
The Associated Press Occupied Jerusalem
After decades of shying away from an ancient pilgrimage route, Muslims are visiting Jerusalem to pray at Islam’s third-holiest site, the revered al-Aqsa mosque.
In doing so, they find themselves caught in a disagreement between some leading Muslim clerics, who oppose such pilgrimages, and Palestinian leaders who encourage them as evidence of the city’s Muslim credentials.
Palestinians say the only Arab visitors have been officials from Arab countries that have peace treaties with Israel. Recent trips here by a top Egyptian cleric and a Jordanian prince sparked angry backlashes in their home countries.
The vast majority of the pilgrims are from non-Arab countries like South Africa, Malaysia and India, where the stigma of visiting Israeli-controlled areas isn’t as powerful.
“Jerusalem is a beautiful place,” said Ali Akbar, 51, a Shiite Muslim who was visiting recently with a group of 40 pilgrims from Mumbai, India. “All Muslims should try to come to Jerusalem and pray and seek the blessings of Allah, the almighty,” Akbar said.
Muslim pilgrims began trickling back beginning around 2008 as violence between Israel and the Palestinians petered out. Palestinian tour guides, hotel operators and religious officials also attribute the increasing numbers to easier travel and rising Muslim middle classes in Asia and Western countries that can afford tickets to the Holy Land.
While Islam’s birthplace is in the Arabian peninsula, Jerusalem is intimately tied with Islam’s beginnings. Mohammed’s first followers prayed toward al-Aqsa and only later turned their prayers east to Mecca.
For centuries, Muslim pilgrims visited Jerusalem while on their way to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, now in Saudi Arabia. Many Muslims believe visiting Jerusalem deepens the sanctity of their pilgrimage.
But that pilgrimage route was abruptly halted after Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war. East Jerusalem is home to the hilltop compound housing both al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site.
As a result, many Muslims believe visiting the mosque would amount to recognition of Israel’s claim to the area and be inappropriate when Israel prevents many Palestinians from entering.
Those sentiments have recently softened somewhat, and an estimated 2,000 people have come over the past year. That’s a tiny percentage of the roughly 3 million visitors to Jerusalem annually, mostly Jews and Christian pilgrims — but still a sharp contrast to the almost total absence of Muslim pilgrims here for many decades.
A screen shot created by Syrian activists pokes fun at Syria becoming the latest country asking citizens not to travel to Lebanon. (Image taken from users on Twitter)
By Al Arabiya
Soon after Kuwait issued a warning against its citizens traveling to Lebanon, due to the conflict unraveling in light of the Syrian crisis, Syrian activists followed suit by issuing their own warning.
An image of a broadcast on state TV Al Souriya showing a ticker that urges Syrians not to travel to Lebanon was widely circulated on the internet and social media forums.
The “statement” soon became the butt of jokes online, with people on Twitter calling it ironic, with some saying “look who’s talking?” while others just poked fun at the “breaking news.”
Kuwait on Monday joined other Gulf states like the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain, by calling on its citizens to avoid traveling to Lebanon and asking those already in Beirut to leave after deadly clashes linked to the Syrian conflict left two people dead.
In Lebanon, gunbattles between pro- and anti-Syrian groups rocked Beirut overnight Monday, killing at least two people. The fighting came hours after Lebanese soldiers fatally shot an anti-Syrian regime cleric and his bodyguard when they failed to stop at a checkpoint.
Syrian activists often lampoon Syrian officials in videos, caricatures and now fake broadcasts.
Lebanese firemen extinguish a fire set by Lebanese Sunni men at Camille Chamoun Sports City in Beirut, after overnight clashes between Sunni Muslim Future movement supporters and a pro-Syrian group in the Tariq al-Jadideh district. (Reuters)
By AFP
Kuwait City
The Gulf state of Kuwait on Monday urged its citizens to avoid travel to Lebanon and also asked those already present there to leave after deadly clashes linked to the Syrian conflict left two people killed in Beirut.
The foreign ministry called on Kuwaitis to cancel travel plans to Lebanon “due to developments in the tense security situation.”
The ministry’s statement, carried by the official KUNA news agency, also urged Kuwaitis currently in Lebanon to leave the Arab country “for their safety.”
Kuwait’s move follows a similar decision on Saturday by its Gulf partners the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain.
The Kuwaiti call comes after gunbattles between pro- and anti-Syrian groups rocked Beirut overnight Monday, killing at least two people.
An office housing a small pro-Syrian party in Tareek el-Jdideh, a mainly Sunni Muslim neighborhood of west Beirut, was torched during the clashes.
The fighting erupted hours after reports that army troops had shot dead Sheikh Ahmad Abdul Wahad, a prominent anti-Syria Sunni cleric, near a checkpoint in north Lebanon on Sunday. Another cleric in the car was also killed.
Their killing followed a week of clashes between Sunnis hostile to the Syrian regime and Alawites who support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that left 10 people dead in Lebanon’s northern port city of Tripoli.
Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage (AFEH) said Israel has planted 3,000 “fake” Jewish graves so far around the al-Aqsa Mosque. (Photo Courtesy of AFEH)
By Al Arabiya
Israel is implanting “thousands of fake” Jewish graves in the land surrounding al-Aqsa Mosque “at the pretext of carrying out repair and maintenance works and new excavations” in a bid to lay hand on Palestinian and Islamic endowment lands, Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage said in a report on Monday.
(Photo Courtesy of AFEH)
“The Israeli occupation of Jerusalem is committing a very ugly crime on Palestinian lands, on Muslim endowment lands, and that is the implanting of thousands of fake Jewish graves in this site,” Abdel Majeed Mohammad, of the Aqsa Foundation was quoted in report as saying.
(Photo Courtesy of AFEH)
“What we learned from the people of Silwan is that there is limited number of Jewish graves (around Aqsa Mosque). The Israeli occupation is trying to impose a fait accomplice to control Palestinian endowment lands through implanting 3,000 graves.”
“This is the greatest paradox; on the one hand Israel bulldozes Muslim graves in Jerusalem, on the other hands it implants thousands of fake Jewish graves,” Mohammad said.
He added that thousands of Jewish tombstones were planted around the mosque to indicate graves, but underneath, there are no bodies, nor skeletons.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
Scientists analysing prehistoric global warming say thawing permafrost released massive amounts of carbon stored in frozen soil of Polar Regions exacerbating climate change through increasing global temperatures and ocean acidification.
Although the amounts of carbon involved in the ancient soil-thaw scenarios was likely much greater than today, the implications of this ground-breaking study are that the long-term future of carbon deposits locked into frozen permafrost of Polar Regions are vulnerable to climate warming caused as humans emit the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels for energy generation.
Researchers in centres across America, Italy and the University of Sheffield, analyzed a series of sudden, and extreme, global warming events – called hyper thermals – that occurred about 55 million years ago, linked to rising greenhouse gas concentrations and changes in Earth’s orbit, which led to a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere, ocean acidification, and a five degrees Celsius rise in global temperature within just a few thousand years.
It was previously thought that the source of carbon was in the ocean, in the form of frozen methane gas in ocean-floor sediments but now the experts believe the carbon released into the atmosphere millions of years ago came from the Polar Regions.
Professor David Beerling, of the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, said: “For the first time, we have linked these past global warming events with a climatically sensitive terrestrial carbon reservoir rather than a marine one. It shows that global warming can be amplified by carbon release from thawing permafrost.”
“The research suggests that carbon stored in permafrost stocks today in the Arctic region is vulnerable to warming. Warming causes permafrost thaw and decomposition of organic matter releasing more greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere.
“This feedback loop could accelerate future warming. It means we must arrest carbon dioxide emissions released by the combustion of fossil fuels if humanity wishes to avoid triggering these sorts of feedbacks in our modern world.”
The breakthrough was made through cross-disciplinary collaborations with climate and vegetation modellers, isotope geochemists and permafrost experts led by Rob DeConto at the University of Massachusetts, in collaboration with the University of Sheffield, Yale, the University of Colorado, Penn State, and the University of Urbino, Italy.
Rob DeConto added: “Similar dynamics are at play today. Global warming is degrading permafrost in the north Polar Regions, unlocking once-frozen carbon and methane and releasing it into the atmosphere. This will only exacerbate future warming in a positive feedback loop.”
The temperature of Earth’s atmosphere is a result of energy input from the sun minus what escapes back into space. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbs and traps heat that would otherwise return to space.
The global warming events were accompanied by a massive input of carbon to the atmosphere plus ocean acidification, and were characterized by a global temperature rise of about five degrees Celsius within a few thousand years.
Until now, scientists have been unable to account for the massive amounts of carbon required to cause such dramatic global warming events and Antarctica, which on today’s Earth is covered by kilometres of ice, has not been appreciated as an important player in such global carbon dynamics.
disclaimer: image is for illustration purposes only
The use of the Internet to promote democracy is most effective in countries already enacting reforms to move in that direction, U.S. researchers say.
The common assumption that the Internet played a major role leading to democratic revolutions in the Arab world and elsewhere is likely an exaggeration, they said.
“Instead of the Internet promoting fundamental political change, it seems to reinforce political change in countries that already have at least some level of democratic freedoms,” researcher Erik Nisbet, a professor of communication at Ohio State University, said.
“Internet use is a less effective means to mobilize citizens for democracy in extremely authoritarian countries,” he said in an OSU release Wednesday.
Demand for democracy is highest in countries where more people are connected to the Internet, the researches said, and in countries where Internet users spend more time on the Web.
“Internet penetration in a country matters in terms of how much people want democratic reforms, but it is even more important that people are spending greater amounts of time on the Internet and that they are connected to other people in their community,” study co-author Elizabeth Stoycheff said.
The researchers analyzed data on 28 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia that evaluated how much the citizens in each country demanded democracy and their frequency of Internet use.
Some countries have the right political and technological mix for the Internet to play a role in social and political change, the researchers said, but countries with highly authoritarian regimes are not likely to see democracy flourishing anytime soon regardless of use of the Internet.
“Our results suggest that the Internet can’t plant the seed of democracy in a country,” Nisbet said. “However, the Internet may help democracy flourish if it has already started to grow.”
(Note: the numbers in certain places are references to the links and info provided at the end.)
Recently, there was a discussion here on the SBlog (as I like to call it) about what knowledge and wisdom our parents and grandparents may have to share with us from their experiences during the depression. I decided to “interview” my father on the subject, using the specific questions that Hunker-Down and Bam-Bam proposed, and expanding from there using my own questions.
It was a very good experience for me. My father is a tough German man, and is seldom open to such things, especially because having to ‘think back’ reveals to him how his memory is failing. But I was gentle and patient and this time he opened up quite a bit. I learned a lot about him, other members of our family, and myself. Discussing my family of origin, and what their lives were like has given me a better understanding of how I am, and what life was like ‘back then’…and what I can do to ‘prep’ for my own future. I’ll share with you here what I found out.
First a little history:
It seems that my father, who was born in 1925, making him 4 years old when the market crashed at the start of the Depression, didn’t have a very hard time of it, really.
His parents were German immigrants, who had been “sponsored” (1) by some other family members to come to the US. In those days, immigrants had to be “sponsored” for a year, which meant someone vouched that you would not become a “burden to society” and they would cover your financial needs until a job was found. There were other requirements, like taking the “umlaut” (those two little dots over some letters) off your name if you had one, which my grandparents had to do. My grandfather came over first (1922), and my grandmother came a year later. They were married here in the US in 1924.
When my father was born and through his childhood, my grandfather worked, and my grandmother was a housewife. They had a small house in Minnesota (one of my most favorite places to go in the summer as a kid). It had a couple of bedrooms, a kitchen, a ‘sitting’ room, and – my favorite – a screened in front porch where I would sleep on a cot sometimes in the Summer, and watch the train go by on the tracks just across the street.
There was electricity in the house and running water and ‘flush’ toilets. They had an apple tree, a good garden, and a ‘cellar’…a space under the house with a hardened dirt floor. I remember there being bushel baskets of root vegetables down there and some jars on shelves. My grandfather had some barrels at the corners of the eaves of the garage which gathered rain water. Their house was 1-2 miles from downtown…..
If you like food as much as I do, it’s hard to imagine that our body can actually go weeks without food. It wouldn’t be fun, of course, but it can be done. But without water, our bodies can get into serious trouble quickly – just a matter of days before dehydration can set in. So why is it that many people keep lots of extra food stored in their houses, but neglect to store any water?
This subject came to mind recently when my cousin told me about having to endure a power outage with no drinkable water. Since power outages often impact water treatment facilities, tap water can be unsafe for drinking. The situation was made worse by the fact that her child had vomiting and diarrhea, which meant that there was an even greater need for drinking water, as well as water for cleaning, sanitation and hand washing.
For instance, a mixture of water and chlorine bleach would have greatly assisted in sanitizing around her child, helping to ensure that others didn’t also get sick. And obviously, you wouldn’t want to clean up after such a mess without being able to thoroughly wash your hands. (As a dad, I know that’s NOT fun!) Finally, water for food preparation is a supply you’ll need over and above what you plan to drink.
Now if you look at the conventional wisdom out on the internet, you’ll find guidelines such as the following:….
The Wonderful, Unpredictable Life of the Occupy Movement
By Arun Gupta, Truthout
Occupy Wall Street demonstration on March 15, 2012. (Photo: Sunset Parkerpix)
I met Nomi on a bus in Baltimore. She was from Wisconsin and had been involved with Occupy Wall Street. She was part of Occupy Judaism and fondly recalled the Yom Kippur services she attended at the Wall Street occupation with hundreds of other people. Nomi said that, for the first time, she and her friends felt like they could combine the religious and radical dimensions of Judaism. The conversation fell silent as the bus rolled along. Suddenly she turned to me and excitedly announced that she met her girlfriend at Liberty Plaza. I smiled and responded, “That’s why Occupy Wall Street matters.”
By enabling people to find fulfillment in all parts of their lives, whether romantic, spiritual, political or cultural, the Occupy movement is more than a movement. It is life-changing. People experience themselves as complete social beings, not just as angry, alienated protesters. Nomi said she was no longer involved in the movement, which I thought was more evidence of why the actual occupations were so important.
The emergence of every mass movement makes sense in hindsight, but no one could have predicted hundreds of occupations and thousands of groups would pop up across the United States just weeks after a ragged encampment secured a tenuous foothold on Wall Street last September. Sure, anger was boiling over prior to the takeover of Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, but the occupation crystallized who is to blame for the economic crisis and who are the legitimate people. Anyone could walk into the public space, share their stories, find people with similar grievances and help build micro-societies. Occupy wasn’t just a rejection of Washington and Wall Street. It revealed the failings of liberals, unions and the left. New activists didn’t first have to master volumes of social and cultural theory, attend grueling anti-oppression workshops and learn how to pepper their comments with academic jargon before joining. Nor did the movement require consultants, focus groups or polling to occupy the center of American politics with a radical left message. And the form was not the same old rallies with canned chants, pre-printed protest signs and preaching to the choir.
It’s worth considering why Occupy Wall Street was such a smashing success last fall, as well as where it is headed. While the media lens has shifted away, Occupy has spawned a menagerie of energized movements and ambitious plans. Veteran organizer David Solnit, who is involved with Bay Area Occupy movements, sums up the current state: “The numbers showing up at GAs have dropped. Any movement has its mass mobilization and its in-between times. The organizing a lot of people are doing around housing and education are less visible but go much deeper. We need a better measuring tape than numbers and public space and whether it’s amplified through media owned by the 1 percent.”
Like plants that lay dormant for the winter conserving energy, many occupations are blossoming anew with ambitious plans now that it’s spring. Solnit says in San Francisco the movement is defending a dozen families in foreclosure, and is working toward a citywide moratorium on bank foreclosures and evictions. In Los Angeles, organizers say May Day plans include large-scale marches by immigrants and unions, rolling street blockades and even an attempt to disrupt the main airport. In New York and around the country, a campaign has been launched called “F the Banks” to force the government to dismantle Bank of America, which is still receiving taxpayer subsidies. In Chicago, after the G8 summit set for May was moved to Camp David because of fear of large-scale protests, activists are moving forward with large-scale demonstrations to coincidence with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting the same month.
Challenging the status quo comes with costs. As the Occupy movement struggles to effect radical social change, it faces persistent police attacks and co-optation by Democratic Party forces from the outside and divisions over identity politics, militancy, localism and diffusion from the inside.
A Chinese dissident who wrote a book critical of the country’s leadership has said he fled into exile after being warned against publishing a biography of a jailed Nobel laureate.
Yu Jie, a writer who in 2010 published “Wen Jiabao: China’s Best Actor” despite threats of jail time, fled to Washington with his family in January after he was “subjected to torture” and faced restrictions on publishing.
In an interview aired Friday on Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK, Yu said that his decision to flee Beijing was also prompted by his urge to pursue a book project on fellow dissident Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
“The secret police told me I will be jailed if the book is published,” he said.
“(I fled)… to make sure the biography can be published overseas,” the 38-year-old told RTHK without saying when the book will be released.
He described the decision to flee as “painful” and said he believed he would not be able to return to Beijing within the next five years.
The writer said he had been warned against criticising the Communist Party or speaking out against China abroad.
Yu has previously said he came under tighter surveillance after Liu won the Nobel Prize.
He has also complained that he was forbidden from publishing or practicing his religion. He is a member of a Protestant church which is not authorised by the Chinese government.
Liu, 56, is the only Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison. He wrote a bold manifesto for democracy called Charter 08 and was jailed for 11 years for subversion on Christmas Day 2009.
Human rights groups frequently voice concern about Chinese dissidents who remain in the country including prominent rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng.
Gao, who has defended some of China’s most vulnerable people including Christians and coal miners, was detained in February 2009 and had been held largely incommunicado by authorities except for a brief release in March 2010.
Gao’s brother said last week that was allowed to meet with him in a remote jail for the first time in nearly two years, allaying fears for his well-being.
China rights couple hear trial verdict on Tuesday Beijing (AFP) April 7, 2012 – The verdict in the trial of rights activists Ni Yulan and her husband will be announced on Tuesday, a year after the couple were detained amid growing unrest in China, their daughter said Saturday.
Ni and Dong Jiqin, who have long helped victims of government-backed land grabs, were detained in April last year as authorities rounded up scores of activists amid online calls for protests similar to those in the Arab world.
In a brief December trial they were charged with “picking quarrels, provoking trouble and willfully destroying private and public property” — charges lawyers and supporters say were trumped up to silence them.
“Our lawyer told me the verdict will be read by the Beijing Western District court on Tuesday morning,” daughter Dong Xuan, 27, told AFP.
“They are not guilty and should be released, but I fear that my mother will be sentenced to at least three years as a repeat offender. I am hoping that my father will be released for time served.”
The couple’s lawyer last visited them in February, she said. Ni, 51, remains ill and is suffering from fever, a swollen neck and has trouble speaking.
Ni spent much of the trial lying on a bed in the courtroom due to her poor health and needed a respirator to breathe.
The couple have provided legal assistance to numerous families around China who have been forcibly evicted from their homes in government-backed land requisitions, a major cause of unrest in China.
Their battle to oppose the land grabs began in 2001 after their courtyard home in central Beijing was requisitioned and marked for demolition.
Trained as a lawyer, Ni was sentenced to a year in jail in 2002 for “obstructing official business,” and for two years in 2008 for “harming public property” — charges brought against her as she tried to protect her home.
She was also disbarred in 2002.
In January, Dong Xuan was barred by police from leaving China to collect a 100,000-euro (131,000) human rights award for her mother in the Netherlands.
She says she remains under police surveillance.
Ni’s case has been championed by numerous Western governments, including the United States and the European Union, which sent representatives to meet with her during her brief period of freedom in 2010.
As we enter Day 207 of the Occupy movements the protests have spread not only across the country but all over the globe. Thousands of activists have descended on Wall Street these past weeks as part of the #OccupyWallStreet protest organized by several action groups. What follows is a live video stream and live Twitter feed of this event….
by Staff Writers
Boyce, Virginia (AFP) April 7, 2012
The bald eagle that came into wildlife rehabilitator Belinda Burwell’s care last month, just as the hunting season was coming to a close in North America, was a shadow of its former self.
The stiff and wobbly bird clung to life but showed distinct signs of lead poisoning, likely from scavenging the remains of big game left by hunters who killed their prey with lead bullets.
“She couldn’t walk, couldn’t fly,” said Burwell. “If she tried to move, she would fall over, she would stumble.”
Environmental groups say 20 million birds die worldwide each year from eating bits of lead in animal carcasses, because many US hunters use lead ammunition which leaves 3,000 tons of toxic fragments in gut piles and unclaimed kills.
The dangers of lead have been well known for decades, and steps have been taken to prevent human consumption by removing it from paint, gasoline, pipes, children’s jewelry and more.
A ban on hunters’ use of lead shot for killing waterfowl was passed in the United States in the early 1990s because birds were being poisoned by ingesting the pieces that fell into waterways and ponds.
But the question of whether to do the same for hunters on land has thrust the eagle, the national symbol of America, into a fresh political battle over gun rights and environmental protection.
On one side is the powerful US gun lobby, which disputes science on lead poisoning and insists that any measures to regulate lead ammunition would spell a ban on hunting in all its forms, infringe on gun rights and raise costs.
On the other is a dogged but weary wildlife protection movement that is pressing the Environmental Protection Agency to take steps to regulate the use of lead ammunition in order to protect birds and humans against lead poisoning.
Both have adopted the bald eagle as a symbol of their efforts, with the bird featuring on the cover of the Center for Biological Diversity’s petition to the EPA as well as on the web page of the National Rifle Association.
“This is the last unregulated, widespread distribution of toxic lead into the environment,” said Jeff Miller of the Center for Biological Diversity, which is seeking US federal rules to require non-toxic bullets in hunting and shooting sports.
– Gun-grabbers disguised as nature lovers –
“We know it is getting into the food chain. We also know that humans are eating it and there is no safe level of lead in the human body so it is most certainly a human health issue too.”
Miller said 150 groups in 40 states now support the petition, including hunters, scientists, American Indians, conservationists and veterinarians.
The EPA turned down a similar request for a ban on lead bullets in 2010, saying it did not have the authority to regulate ammunition. However, environmental advocates say the EPA does have the right to regulate components of ammunition.
More than a dozen countries in Europe have banned lead ammunition for hunting waterfowl and Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden are among a handful of countries that have totally banned lead bullets.
Germany, Japan and Belgium have passed limited restrictions on their use.
The Peregrine Fund, a nonprofit group in Idaho, has posted online a host of peer-reviewed studies on the effects of lead on wildlife, with some figures showing as many as 10-15 percent of young eagles die each year from lead poisoning.
While the bald eagle is no longer a threatened population in the United States, it and other birds that scavenge like the endangered California Condors, vultures, herons and golden eagles, are among the species most at risk.
One study by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources showed how a lead ballistic tip bullet could fragment into an average of 141 pieces per carcass, reaching as far as 14 inches from the wound (35 cm), indicating a danger for humans who eat meat killed with lead bullets, too.
Pro-gun groups like the National Shooting and Sports Foundation say there is no “sound science” to support a ban.
“If wildlife management decisions become about preventing harm to individuals within a species and not about managing a species itself, then you have essentially made the argument to ban hunting,” said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF.
The NRA has urged Congress to “step in and ensure this restriction never happens,” asserting that the effort is being headed by “gun-grabbers… disguised as nature lovers.”
A House subcommittee in late February approved a bill that would prevent the EPA from taking action on the CBD’s petition, and some senators with ties to sportsmen’s groups are considering the same.
Rick Watson of the Peregrine Fund said switching to copper bullets costs the same as buying a box of premium lead ammunition, about $45 a box, while the cheapest lead ammo can be had for $15.
“Hunters historically and traditionally have been some of the best conservationists this country has had. And given accurate facts we believe the vast majority will choose to use lead-free ammunition because it protects the wildlife they so enjoy,” he said.
Matt Miller, an outdoor writer and hunter, said he switched to copper bullets years ago after learning of the dangers of lead, and is pleased with the results.
“It has not increased the cost of my hunting. The bottom line is if you know your rifle and you shoot it well, a big game hunting trip costs you one bullet.”
Burwell, who has been treating her eagle for three weeks and is ready to release her into the wild on Saturday, said she is not optimistic that the EPA will act.
“With the NRA pushing to prevent any type of regulation, the word on the wildlife side is it will never happen,” she said.
“It depends on who has the most money. Doesn’t it seem sometimes that that is who wins these things?”
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
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MessageToEagle.com – This strange object was discovered by an American astronomer, H.L. Giclas in 1947.
The European Space Agency’s craft Venus Express follows an orbit around Venus that brings it to within 250 km (155 miles) at its closest and 66,000 km (41,000 miles) when furthest away. Its seven instruments are mounted on the central body, which is about 1.5m (5 ft) across. Credit: ESA
Mexico, Sep 25 (Prensa Latina) At least 26 eruptions accompanied by steam and gas, as well as a volcano tectonic quake were registered as a consequence of the Mexican volcano Popocatépetl activity during the last hours, it was reported Tuesday.
Melting hot: 100 degree temperatures in Washington caused this plane to sink into the runway at the Reagan National Airport on Friday evening; the flight was delayed by three hours after getting stuck in the ground
Sweet Relief: Felix John Fowler, age 5, plays at a fountain outside Public School 20 in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York
Cooling down: The relief from the triple-digit heatwave continues on Monday with cooler temperatures in the 80s and 90s; the recent record-breaking heat has claimed the lives of more than 30 people
Catching some rays: The top temperature in Manhattan’s Central Park was expected to be 91 on Sunday; the weather in New York is forecast to drop to the 80s this week
Record highs: A clock shows a temperature of 102 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington yesterday
Staying cool: A boy plays in a fountain at the Yards Park in Washington on Saturday to beat the heat
Cooling off: Children play in a fountain in Silver Spring, Maryland as temperatures soar above 100 F
He can’t bear this heat: Hudson, a polar bear at Brookfield Zoo in Brookfield, Illinois, enjoys a swim
Struggle: Women wipe their brows by the crowded swimming pool in lower Manhattan, New York City
Making a splash: More than 4,500 temperature records have been broken this week in the heat
Bearly making it: A bear reacts to triple-digit temperatures at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha today; temperatures rose to 103F Friday
Water for horses: A horse gets a cooling shower from a rancher following competition in the Ranch Sorting Championship at a State Fair in Oklahoma City
Safe: Ryan Abbott, 6, left, and his brother Hayden Abbott, 7, try on their newly purchased umbrella shade hats from Lee Shinn, right, who sells the hats at the intersection of Jackson and Springdale in Memphis, Tenn. Friday, July 6, 2012
Keeping New York hydrated: A man pushes a cart of bottled water down Broadway during a blistering heat wave
Dried up: The national Drought Monitor, 56 per cent of the entire country matches the qualifying factors and is considered to be in a drought, including this area in Noblesville, Indiana
Contributing factors: Long periods of record-high temperatures have lead to such drastic conditionsBrad Rippey, a meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, told 
Struggle: Firefighter Michael Mullins tries to cool off after battling a house fire in Huntsville, Alabama
Burnt out: Firefighter Ken Bachelder drags charred remains of a tree away from apartments in Evansville, Indiana. The drought and the high temperatures have left the area with numerous field fires
Parents: We’ll carry you in our hearts 
Deutsche Bank said today Ireland’s bailed-out banks may need as much as ?4 billion more to deal with loan losses.
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Occupy Wall Street demonstration on March 15, 2012. (Photo: 
