Earth ChangesS

Light Sabers

US: Giant pythons invade southeastern Florida


Agence France-Presse
Fri, 16 May 2008 15:11 UTC
Giant pythons capable of swallowing a dog and even an alligator are rapidly making south Florida their home, potentially threatening other southeastern states, a study said.

"Pythons are likely to colonize anywhere alligators live, including north Florida, Georgia and Louisiana," said Frank Mazzotti, University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences professor, in his two-year study.

The pythons thriving in Florida are mostly Burmese pythons from Myanmar that were brought over as pets and then turned loose in the wild.

From 2002-2005, 201 of the beasts were caught by state authorities, but in the last two years the number has more than doubled to 418, Mazzotti said in his study published on the university website.

Image
©Unknown
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Bizarro Earth

China buries quake dead as new aftershock hits

John Ruwitch, Emma Graham-Harrison in Yingxiu, Jason Li in Houzhuang, Lucy Hornby, Benjamin Kang Lim and Guo Shipeng in Beijing and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva
News Daily
Fri, 16 May 2008 14:38 UTC
BEICHUAN - China struggled to bury its dead and help tens of thousands of injured and homeless on Friday when a powerful aftershock brought new havoc four days after an earthquake thought to have killed more than 50,000.

President Hu Jintao flew to the battered province of Sichuan and Premier Wen Jiabao said the quake damage could exceed the devastating 1976 tremor in the northeastern city of Tangshan that killed up to 300,000 people.

Image
©REUTERS/Stringer
An elderly woman mourns as her grandson is buried under the debris of a collapsed building behind at Yingxiu primary school at the earthquake-hit Yingxiu town of Wenchuan, the epicenter, Sichuan province, May 16, 2008.

Wen called on officials to ensure social stability as frustration and exhaustion grew among survivors, many of whom lost everything and were living in tents or in the open air.

China put the death toll at just over 22,000 on Friday but has said it expects it to exceed 50,000. About 4.8 million people have lost their homes.
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Cloud Lightning

Rain deepens Myanmar misery; death toll spikes

Aung Hla Tun, Ed Cropley and Darren Schuettler in Bangkok
News Daily
Fri, 16 May 2008 14:29 UTC
YANGON - Torrential rain lashed victims of Cyclone Nargis on Friday as Myanmar's junta admitted more than 130,000 people were dead or missing, putting the disaster on a par with a 1991 cyclone that killed 143,000 in neighboring Bangladesh.

In a shock update to a death toll that had consistently lagged behind international aid agency estimates, state television in the army-ruled former Burma said 77,738 people were dead and another 55,917 missing.

village hit by Cyclone Nargis
©REUTERS/Stringer
A boy watches as a man builds a shelter in a village hit by Cyclone Nargis, near the Myanmar capital Yangon, May 16, 2008.

The May 2 storm has left another 2.5 million people clinging to survival in the delta, where thousands of destitute victims are lining roadsides, begging for help in the absence of large-scale government or foreign relief operations.

In the storm-struck town of Kunyangon, around 100 km (60 miles) southwest of Yangon, men, women and children stood in the mud and rain, their hands clasped together in supplication to the occasional passing aid vehicle.
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Bizarro Earth

New rumbling from Chilean volcano worries experts

Monica Vargas
News Daily
Fri, 16 May 2008 12:46 UTC
Santiago - Chile's Chaiten volcano groaned, rumbled and shuddered on Thursday, raising new concerns among authorities, as lightning bolts pierced the huge clouds of hot ash hovering ominously above its crater.

Chile's National Emergency Office, ONEMI, said heavy ash kept shooting from the volcano in southern Chile as it generated small tremors.

On the ground, heavy flooding hit the area around Chaiten as falling ash swelled rivers, overflowing their banks.

"There's been additional volcanic activity that we're really worried about," regional governor Sergio Galilea told reporters.

The Chaiten volcano, 760 miles south of the capital Santiago, started erupting on May 2 for the first time in thousands of years, spewing ash, gas and molten rock into the air.
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Attention

Post-quake Beichuan: a vision of hell

Clifford Coonan
The Independent
Fri, 16 May 2008 05:33 UTC
Beichuan was a town of 160,000 nestling in one of the world's most beautiful valleys. When rescuers arrived yesterday, they found a scene of unimaginable devastation and despair

Reaching Beichuan is a long march into hell. When you finally emerge scrabbling through the dirt into the town, what lies before you is a breathtaking vision of horror. Official estimates say China's worst natural disaster in 30 years has claimed 50,000 lives so far, but looking at the devastation here, it is hard not to imagine the final toll will be much, much higher.

Beichuan county in Sichuan province used to be home to 160,000 people, and most of them lived in the now-forsaken town of the same name, nestling in one of the world's most beautiful valleys. But everyone is gone, either dead or having abandoned their flattened home.
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Health

Recovery effort turned disaster for desert tortoises

Alice Short
Los Angeles Times
Sun, 11 May 2008 05:21 UTC


tortoise
©Unknown

In an $8.7-million relocation effort, 760 California desert tortoises were moved out of an Army training center and onto safer ground. But even the best-laid plans sometimes go awry. What federal biologists did not foresee was an unexpected predator: hungry coyotes. Times staff writer Louis Sahagun reports:
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Ladybug

German Beehives Hit by Mass Die-Off

Andrew Curry
Business Week
Mon, 12 May 2008 01:25 UTC
Beekeepers are pointing the finger at a Bayer CropScience pesticide marketed under the name Poncho, but government tests aren't conclusive

In Germany's bucolic Baden-Wรผrttemburg region, there is a curious silence this week. All up and down the Rhine river, farm fields usually buzzing with bees are quiet. Beginning late last week, helpless beekeepers could only watch as their hives were hit by an unprecedented die-off. Many say one of Germany's biggest chemical companies is to blame.
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Life Preserver

Why China's buildings crumbled

Geoffrey York
globeandmail.com
Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00 UTC
Survivors blame corruption, shoddy construction and cost cutting for the collapse of so many 'tofu buildings' - and even state media outlets are asking questions

The bodies of the children were lined up in a long row in the mud of a basketball court, just outside the flattened school. Every few minutes, another corpse was brought out of the rubble, carried on a wooden door, covered in rags.

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Wolf

Scientists Investigate Recent Coyote Attacks on Children in California


Associated Press
Mon, 12 May 2008 19:43 UTC
Los Angeles - The coyote was limping as it approached a girl in a sand box at a public park - but it was still dangerous. It snapped its jaws on the girl's buttocks and her nanny had to pry the toddler from the wild animal.
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Cloud Lightning

India: Toll in Uttar Pradesh storm rises

Ram Dutt Tripathi
BBC News
Thu, 15 May 2008 17:38 UTC
The number of people killed in a storm in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday has risen to 94, the state's relief commissioner says.

GK Tandan told the BBC that most deaths were caused by the uprooting of trees, phone and electricity wires as well as fires and collapsing houses.
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