Infinite Unknown

* At least 500 buildings destroyed after quake
* Water and supplies starting to return to city
* Earthquake rips open new faultline

A man walks over a damaged road in Paiapoi, 20 kilometres south of Christchurch following the weekend’s devastating earthquake / AP

The powerful 7.1-magnitude earthquake smashed buildings, cracked roads and twisted rail lines around the city / AP

THE powerful earthquake that smashed buildings, cracked roads and twisted rail lines in Christchurch also ripped a new 3.5m-wide fault line in the Earth’s surface.

At least 500 buildings were destroyed in the 7.1-magnitude quake that struck New Zealand at 4.35am on Saturday near the South Island city of about 400,000 people.

The earthquake cut power across the region, roads were blocked by debris, and gas and water supplies were disrupted.

Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker yesterday said power had been restored to 90 per cent of the city and water supply had resumed for all but 15 to 20 per cent of residents.

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Tags: Earthquake, Environment, Global News, New Zealand, Politics

Added: 4. September 2010

Related article: Heavy rains devastate Guatemala (BBC News)

Guatemala floods leave 20 dead, emergency declared

A bus was caught in a landslide killing at least ten people near central Chimaltenango city

GUATEMALA CITY — At least 20 people were killed in Guatemala in landslides triggered by weeks of driving rains, according to figures released by national emergency and rescue services.

President Alvaro Colom has declared a national emergency in the wake of the disaster.

“Top priority at present is dealing with this emergency. There are no funds left to deal with earlier disasters like the one caused by tropical storm Agatha,” in late May, Colom told reporters after a surveying tour of the country Saturday

He said damage estimates across Guatemala after weeks of rain stood at 350-500 million dollars, or 40 percent of the damage wrought by Agatha, which killed 183 people in Central America, including 165 in Guatemala earlier this year, and left thousands homeless.

The latest rains have triggered several dozen landslides around the country.

One swept away a bus on a road near central Chimaltenango city killing at least 10 people and injuring 20.

The other killed four people inside a house in western Quetzaltenango.

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Tags: Alvaro Colom, Environment, Flood, Global News, Government, Guatemala, Politics

Added: 4. September 2010

Heavy rains have caused chaos in Australia’s southern states on Saturday, with major flooding in Victoria state, Australian media reported. (Sept. 4)

Tags: Australia, Environment, Flood, Global News

Pakistanis displaced by the floods return to their homes in Shikapur, in Sindh province

A senior Pakistan diplomat has accused “powerful” figures of diverting floodwaters into unprotected areas to save their own land.

Abdullah Hussain Haroon, Pakistan’s representative to the UN, has called for an inquiry into a “handful” of cases where influential people took “advantage of these floods and saved themselves” in a disaster that has left more than 1,600 people dead.

Mr Haroon, one of a number of senior officials including a former prime minister who have made the allegations, called for a full judicial inquiry amid claims that unprotected villages had been swamped, forcing the inhabitants to abandon their homes.

However, he said the incidents of embankments being breached by a few influential figures should not hamper the international effort to help the millions affected by the flooding.

The International Monetary Fund said yesterday that it will give Pakistan £290m in emergency aid over the coming weeks. The IMF’s managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, said yesterday that discussions on repayment of a £7.1bn loan would continue.

The announcement came amid continuing pressure on Pakistan over its handling of the unprecedented floods that have affected more than 18 million people and caused nearly £28bn of damage to infrastructure and agriculture, the mainstay of the economy.

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Tags: Environment, Flood, Government, IMF, Pakistan, Politics, Society, U.N.

Amazon shipyards have been left high and dry

The Amazon river has dropped to its lowest level in 40 years in north-eastern Peru, causing severe economic disruption in a region where it is the main transport route.

At least six large boats have been stranded near the port city of Iquitos.

The low water level is the result of a prolonged spell of dry weather, Peru’s national meteorological office said.

The river is expected to fall further before the rainy season begins next month.

Cut off

Iquitos and other towns in Peru’s rainforest region have no road links to the rest of the country, and depend on the Amazon and its tributaries for transport.

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Tags: Environment, Global News, Peru

Smoking it does destroy the brain, BUT …

(Watch the video “Hemp For Victory below.”)

They say marijuana is dangerous. Pot is not harmful to the human body or mind. Marijuana does not pose a threat to the general public. Marijuana is very much a danger to the oil companies, alcohol, tobacco industries and a large number of chemical corporations. Big businesses, with plenty of dollars and influence, have suppressed the truth from the people. The truth is, if marijuana was utilized for its vast array of commercial products, it would create an industrial atomic bomb! The super rich have conspired to spread misinformation about the plant that, if used properly, would ruin their companies.

Where did the word ‘marijuana’ come from? In the mid 1930s, the M-word was created to tarnish the good image and phenomenal history of the hemp plant - as you will read. The facts cited here, with references, are generally verifiable in the Encyclopedia Britannica which was printed on hemp paper for 150 years :

1) All schoolbooks were made from hemp or flax paper until the 1880s. (Jack Frazier. Hemp Paper Reconsidered. 1974.)

2) It was legal to pay taxes with hemp in America from 1631 until the early 1800s. (LA Times. Aug. 12, 1981.)

3) Refusing to grow hemp in America during the 17th and 18th centuries was against the law! You could be jailed in Virginia for refusing to grow hemp from 1763 to 1769 (G. M. Herdon. Hemp in Colonial Virginia).

4) George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers grew hemp. (Washington and Jefferson Diaries. Jefferson smuggled hemp seeds from China to France then to America.)

5) Benjamin Franklin owned one of the first paper mills in America, and it processed hemp. Also, the War of 1812 was fought over hemp. Napoleon wanted to cut off Moscow’s export to England. (Jack Herer. Emperor Wears No Clothes.)

6) For thousands of years, 90% of all ships’ sails and rope were made from hemp. The word ‘canvas’ is Dutch for cannabis. (Webster’s New World Dictionary.)

7) 80% of all textiles, fabrics, clothes, linen, drapes, bed sheets, etc., were made from hemp until the 1820s, with the introduction of the cotton gin.

The first Bibles, maps, charts, Betsy Ross’s flag, the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were made from hemp. (U.S. Government Archives.)

9) The first crop grown in many states was hemp. 1850 was a peak year for Kentucky producing 40,000 tons. Hemp was the largest cash crop until the 20th century. (State Archives.)

10) Oldest known records of hemp farming go back 5000 years in China, although hemp industrialization probably goes back to ancient Egypt.

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Tags: Benjamin Franklin, Conspiracy, Corporations, Economy, Environment, George Washington, Global News, Health, Hemp, Marijuana, Politics, Science, Society, Technology, Thomas Jefferson, U.S.

Antarctic cold snap kills millions of aquatic animals in the Amazon.

The San Julián fish farm in the Santa Cruz department of Bolivia lost 15 tonnes of pacú fish in the extreme cold.Never Tejerina

With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.

Scientists who have visited the affected rivers say the event is the biggest ecological disaster Bolivia has known, and, as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife, it is unprecedented in recorded history.

“There’s just a huge number of dead fish,” says Michel Jégu, a researcher from the Institute for Developmental Research in Marseilles, France, who is currently working at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. “In the rivers near Santa Cruz there’s about 1,000 dead fish for every 100 metres of river.”

With such extreme climatic events potentially becoming more common due to climate change, scientists are hurrying to coordinate research into the impact, and how quickly the ecosystem is likely to recover.

The extraordinary quantity of decomposing fish flesh has polluted the waters of the Grande, Pirai and Ichilo rivers to the extent that local authorities have had to provide alternative sources of drinking water for towns along the rivers’ banks. Many fishermen have lost their main source of income, having been banned from removing any more fish from populations that will probably struggle to recover.

The blame lies, at least indirectly, with a mass of Antarctic air that settled over the Southern Cone of South America for most of July. The prolonged cold snap has also been linked to the deaths of at least 550 penguins along the coasts of Brazil and thousands of cattle in Paraguay and Brazil, as well as hundreds of people in the region.

Water temperatures in Bolivian rivers that normally register about 15 ˚C during the day fell to as low as 4 ˚C.

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Tags: Bolivia, Climate Change, Dolphins, Environment, Fish, Global News, South America

After years of drought, flash floods have destroyed harvests in Niger

Nineteen-month old Amina at Save the Children’s clinic for severely manlnourished children in Aguie, Niger, yesterday. Two of her siblings have already died within the past year HARRIET LOGAN/SAVE THE CHILDREN

Hundreds of thousands of children across central Africa are at risk of death from starvation and disease after flash flooding worsened an already chronic humanitarian crisis caused by drought.

Aid agencies warned yesterday that 10 million people are already facing severe food shortages, particularly in the landlocked countries of Chad and Niger, after a drought led to the failure of last year’s crops. As many as 400,000 children are at risk of dying from starvation in Niger alone, according to Save the Children.

Now unusually heavy rains have washed away this year’s crops and killed cattle in a region dependent on subsistence agriculture. Organisations including Oxfam and Save the Children say that the slow international response to the emergency means that only 40 per cent of those affected are receiving food aid. As many as four out of five children require treatment for malnutrition in clinics.

Such is the shortage of international aid that the United Nations World Food Programme has had to scale back its £57m operation to feed eight million people in Niger and instead concentrate its efforts on the most vulnerable – children under two – according to Oxfam.

Save the Children says the increased malnutrition rate could swiftly be followed by an increase in the number of children dying from disease because of floods in Niger caused by heavy rain over the past few weeks. “Stagnant pools of water have been contaminated by animal carcasses and are a breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This has increased the threat of malaria, respiratory disease and diarrhoea – the biggest killers of young children,” the organisation said.

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Tags: Africa, Environment, Flood, Food, Food shortages, Global News, Hunger, Niger, World Food Programme

Volcano erupts in Indonesia forcing thousands from homes

Villagers watch as a plume of smoke emerges from Mount Sinabung. Photograph: Tarmizy Harva/Reyters

(Reuters) — A volcano has erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumatra for the first time in four centuries, sending smoke 1,500 metres into the air and prompting the evacation of thousands of residents.

There are no reports of casualties so far, and aviation in the area is unaffected.

Mount Sinabung, in the north of Sumatra, began erupting around midnight after rumbling for several days. Lava was overflowing from its crater, the head of Indonesia’s vulcanology centre told Reuters news agency. The agency has placed the volcano on red alert, its highest level.

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Tags: Environment, Global News, Indonesia, Sumatra, Volcano

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The FDA is not testing sea food in the Gulf of Mexico:

- FDA admits NOT testing for MERCURY, ARSENIC, or any other TOXIC HEAVY METALS in Sea Food

American lives seem to continuously drop in value:

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Former Prof. at the University of Alaska Rick Steiner

I first spoke to Rick Steiner more than three months ago — about two weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster — after a source recommended I talk to him for a story I was writing about the spill as a teachable moment. Steiner is a marine conservationist and activist in Alaska who started studying oil spills when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, and never stopped.

What Steiner said to me during that first interview was blunt, depressing — and struck me as having the ring of truth. Little did I know how true.

“Government and industry will habitually understate the volume of the spill and the impact, and they will overstate the effectiveness of the cleanup and their response,” he told me at the time. “There’s no such thing as an effective response. There’s never been an effective response — ever — where more than 10 or 20 percent of the oil is ever recovered from the water.

“Most of the oil that goes into the water in a major spill stays there,” he said. “And once the oil is in the water, the damage is done.”

Steiner was also one of the first scientists to warn that much if not most of BP’s oil was remaining underwater, forming giant and potentially deadly toxic plumes.

I thought of Steiner last week, as I sat in a congressional hearing room listening to Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ed Markey question Bill Lehr, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Lehr was one of the authors of an increasingly controversial federal report about the fate of BP’s spilled oil that Obama administration officials misleadingly cited as evidence that the “vast majority” of the oil was essentially gone.

Markey’s persistent questioning eventually got Lehr to acknowledge that, contrary to the administration spin, most of the spill — including the oil that has been dispersed or dissolved into the water, or evaporated into the atmosphere — is still in the Gulf ecosystem. Then Markey got Lehr to recalculate what percentage of the spill BP had actually recovered, through skimming and burning.

That amount: About 10 percent.

In other words, Steiner was right.

The other part of Steiner’s prediction — that the government and BP would low-ball the volume of the spill — had already played out very publicly. BP and NOAA both opened with a 5,000 barrel a day estimate. NOAA officials stuck to that estimate for weeks, despite the fact that they had access to video feeds from the wellhead clearly showing how far off they were. More than two weeks after some of that video was made public, the government finally, grudgingly, upped its estimates to 12,000 to 19,000 barrels daily; then 20,000 to 40,000 barrels, then 35,000 to 60,000 barrels, before finalizing its estimate in early August at 62,000 barrels a day at the beginning of the spill, declining to 53,000 barrels a day toward the end.

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Tags: BP, Environment, Global News, Gulf of Mexico, Health, Science, Scientists, U.S.