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People

Flood victims in Bangladesh suffering from waterborne diseases

Dhaka - Waterborne diseases coupled with poor relief efforts, lack of jobs and price hike of essentials, are putting the lives of poor flood-hit people in Bangladesh in misery, leading newspaper The Daily Star reported Tuesday.

The flood situation is worsening in the central parts while the situation is improving in the northern districts, the newspaper said.

Waterborne diseases like dysentery and diarrhea have broken out in the central Faridpur district, as flood situation worsened in the last 24 hours. Medicine and oral saline are being distributed among the victims.

In northwestern Sirajganj district, about 200 people were infected with diseases like diarrhea, pneumonia and skin infections.

Target

Strong earthquake off Solomon Islands

A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 6.1 has struck off the Solomon Islands.

Bizarro Earth

Over 50 people killed in Chinese landslide

More than 50 people have been killed and hundreds may be missing in northern China after a reservoir of mining waste collapsed, burying cars and homes under a wall of sludge.

Laptop

Hurricane Ike Tracking: Computer Model Projected Path - Gulf Coast

Tracking the projected path of Hurricane Ike - Hurricane Ike moved toward western Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico oil fields early on Tuesday.

Ike weakened on Monday as it bore down on Cuba, where it blew off roofs, toppled trees and flattened sugar cane fields like a giant lawn mower on a path toward the U.S. oil hub in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ike
©Unknown

Better Earth

Parrots wreak havoc at New Zealand bird sanctuary

Wellington, New Zealand -- A gang of unruly teenage bush parrots have wrought havoc at a bird sanctuary in New Zealand by using their powerful beaks to destroy nesting boxes.

Image
©AP/Kakori Sanctuary
Teenage native Kaka parrot

The native Kaka parrots - juvenile birds that haven't reached sexual maturity - have torn off nesting box doors and vandalized the bird homes, sanctuary conservation officer Matt Robertson said Friday.

Twenty-four of 44 new Kaka nest boxes built over the winter have been ripped apart, he said, adding that the birds then gouged out chunks of wood with their strong beaks.

"It may be that the challenge of taking doors off nest boxes is the Kaka equivalent to the Rubik's Cube," said Robertson. "As far as I'm aware, this extent of destruction has never been observed."

Kaka are acutely threatened by loss of habitat, competition from introduced species, and predators like stoats, ferrets and wild cats. They disappeared from the capital Wellington in the late 19th century when forests were cleared for settlement.

After an absence of more than a century, Kaka parrots were reintroduced to the Karori Sanctuary in Wellington in 2002 with six captive-raised birds. Since then, sanctuary staff have counted more than 100 juvenile parrots.

The birds are highly intelligent and extremely resourceful, Robertson said.

Ambulance

One dead, 60 injured in Indonesian quake

One person died and dozens were injured after a moderate 5.6-magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia's Sumatra island, a health ministry official says.

"One elderly person, 70 years old, died and 60 people were injured," Rustam Pakaya, chief of the health ministry's crisis centre, told AFP.

Target

M6.1 earthquake hits sea near Taiwan

Beijing - A 6.1 magnitude earthquake shook the sea near Taiwan at 3:43 p.m. on Tuesday, said the Taiwanese weather bureau.

The quake's epicenter was 24.57 degrees north latitude and 122.71 degrees east longitude, the bureau said.

Magnify

Chlorine fails to kill Australian far north E. coli

Council water authorities say chlorine treatment on a contaminated reservoir in the Port Douglas and Mossman region of far north Queensland has failed to kill the bacteria E. coli.

Bulb

Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate

This is a review of "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate" edited by Dr. S. Fred Singer.

This is an excellent summary for policy makers on many of the technical issues surrounding "global warming".

Those quotation marks are a reminder that the proponents of global warming have recently changed the term to "climate change". This change is largely driven by the fact that while CO2 is been increasing a few percent since 1998, global temperatures have not been increasing, and even declining since 2002.

This undermines their hypothesis that man-made CO2 "causes" global warming. It obviously doesn't. Such a vague term has the added advantage of being invoked during periods of warming, cooling, floods, droughts, hurricanes, calms, heat waves, blizzards, etc. For the users of the term it conveniently explains all of our climate tragedies in terms of abuses from capitalist nations.

Snowman

Global Warming's Kaput; 2008 Coolest in 5 Years

The global warming theory is going into the freezer, some climate experts say.

The first half of this year was the coolest in at least five years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). And the global warming that has taken place during the past 30 years is over, says geologist Don J. Easterbrook, a professor emeritus at Western Washington University.

Easterbrook, who has written eight books and 150 journal publications, predicts that temperatures will cool between 2065 and 2100 and that global temperatures at the end of the century will be less than 1 degree cooler than now. This is in contrast to other theories saying that temperatures will warm by as much as 10 degrees by 2100.