Blogging the End of the World™
By Katrina MansonKILIMANJARO, TanzaniaTue Dec 8, 2009 8:02am EST KILIMANJARO, Tanzania (Reuters) – At the foot of Africa’s snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro, images of the mountain adorn the sides of rusting zinc shacks and beer bottle labels, but the fate of the real version hangs in the balance. As politicians and lobbyists try to thrash out […]
By Mohamed Ahmed, Reuters Published: Tuesday, December 01, 2009 HARADHEERE, Somalia — In Somalia’s main pirate lair of Haradheere, the sea gangs have set up a cooperative to fund their hijackings offshore, a sort of stock exchange meets criminal syndicate. Heavily armed pirates from the lawless Horn of Africa nation have terrorized shipping lanes in […]
By Holli Riebeek The Ewaso Nyiro River flows down from Mount Kenya to water the dry plains that stretch east from the Great Rift Valley in Kenya. The sparsely populated plains are a haven for wildlife, which rely on the Ewaso Nyiro River as a source of water. Multiple public and private wildlife reserves, including […]
From correspondents in Khun SamutchineDecember 07, 2009 1:35PM AROUND 60 families have already been forced away from the once idyllic fishing community of Khun Samutchine, as the sea that local people rely on for their livelihood advances inland by more than 20m a year. “I live on somebody else’s land, I can’t escape the village […]
By GEORGE SAYAGIE, Posted Monday, December 7 2009 at 22:00 The money raised by ministers and MPs in Nairobi a fortnight ago to help Mau forest evictees will be given out starting this week. This announcement was made as the humanitarian crisis in their makeshift structures escalates. The convener of the fundraising, Kuresoi Member of […]
Posted: Monday, December 07, 2009 1:17 PMFiled Under: On AssignmentBy Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent DHAKA, Bangladesh — When I first met Kohinoor Shelim she was trying to feed rice to her young daughter, but the child just screamed and kept turning her face away. Instead, the girl demanding lentils – wanting anything else except […]
By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-PicayuneDecember 07, 2009, 3:13AM Frequent accidents at 10 of the state’s biggest refineries resulted in the release of millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into the air and millions of gallons of polluted water into state water courses between 2005 and 2008, according to a report to be released this morning […]
From Calculated Risk: Back in September, David Leonhardt wrote on the job churn rate in the NY Times: Try thinking of it this way: All of the unemployed people in the country are gathered in a huge gymnasium that’s been turned into a job search center. The fact that this recession is the worst […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.comDecember 07, 2009 Canada’s tar sands have been internationally criticized as one of the world’s largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases, but the energy-intensive extraction of oil also has a less-noted impact on the local environment. A new study shows that the Alberta’s oil sands are likely releasing more PACs (polycyclic aromatic […]
By Staff WritersKathmandu (AFP) Dec 6, 2009 More than a billion people in Asia depend on Himalayan glaciers for water, but experts say they are melting at an alarming rate, threatening to bring drought to large swathes of the continent. Glaciers in the Himalayas, a 2,400-kilometre (1,500-mile) range that sweeps through Pakistan, India, China, […]
