Xeni Jardin:
Via Ned Sublette, snapshots of Hurricane Wilma’s impact on Havana, Cuba. Sorry I don’t have better metadata, but some of the filenames describe location coordinates. Most appear to be from the city’s malecón area.
Xeni Jardin:
More evidence of H5N1’s swift westward flight. Snip:
Greece has become the latest country to report a case of bird flu as the virus appears to spread across Europe. Twelve swans have also tested positive for bird flu in a second cluster in Romania. And the European Commission has ordered urgent tests on dead birds found in Croatia. Meanwhile in Asia, the deadly H5N1 strain has been detected in sparrows in Thailand.
Link to BBC News item (via Warren Ellis)
i hope the treviso swans and ducks gangs stay safe!
The New York Times takes a look at some of the questions we raised last month in “Recycling the City,” about the enormous amounts of waste left over in New Orleans after the storms. The Times article gives a good sense of the scale of the problem, which amounts to 22 million tons of garbage:
It is more trash than any American city produces in a year. It is enough to fill the Empire State Building 40 times over. It will take at least 3.5 million truckloads to haul it away. [...] This is not even counting the cars that have been abandoned on sidewalks, or the boats stranded on the streets. It is not counting the more than 1 million refrigerators, stoves and washing machines on curbs all over the area. This is not counting any of the hundreds of homes that will inevitably be demolished.
Unfortunately, while raising many useful questions about just how this clean-up will be accomplished, the article focuses a bit too much on how awful the rotting food smells, and gives scant attention to the question of handling the tons of potentially dangerous materials that should not go into landfills. Worse, it leaves out any suggestion that potentially a large portion of the waste could be recycled. This will not be the last major urban clean-up effort we undertake this century, and possibly not even this decade; we need to get better at not making the situation worse in the long-term.
(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 11:36 AM)
yikes!
To protect Buddhist monks in predominantly Muslim southern Thailand from increased violence, new products are being developed, from bulletproof vests in the traditional safron hue to motorcycle sidecars—dubbed “monkmobiles“— encased in protective glass and outfitted with a small window for receiving alms.
Many of the products are devised by “Thailand’s Q” (reference to James Bond’s gadget guru), Major Songphon Eiamboonyarith who has also invented bulletproof tuk-tuks, net-shooter to entangle would-be agressors, “umbrellas that shoot rubber bullets, bullet-proof baseball caps and a hand-held device to fire a man-sized net 30 feet (10 m) to stop a villain in his tracks.”
Via Eyeteeth.
it’s almost like the Popemobile, but not as efficient (ahh asian knock-offs, just like the bags)… what i’m wondering is.. what happens to the dude who rides the motorcycle in case of a real attack??? — ann
Would you know an environmental refugee if you saw one?
As a recent spate of natural disasters ably demonstrates, thousands of people can be driven from their homes with no place to go other than away from the devastation, and global climate disruption promises to make evacuation for environmental reasons a more frequent occurrence. The United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security is now looking at the issue of environmental refugees, and how best to recognize and support them (PDF). One of the big questions is precisely how to define “environmental refugee.”
The UNU says that, by 2010, the world will have as many as 50 million people driven from their homes by environmental crises…
(click the header link to read more)
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