19 October 2015 (AFP) – Residents of flooded farming villages in the Philippines were trapped on their rooftops on Monday and animals floated down fast-rising rivers, as the death toll from Typhoon Koppu climbed to 16. Koppu, the second strongest storm to hit the disaster-plagued Southeast Asian archipelago this year, had also forced more than […]
By Andrew Freedman17 October 2015 (Mashable) – Super Typhoon Koppu, known as Typhoon Lando in the Philippines, made landfall close to 1 a.m. local time on Sunday morning near the town of Casiguran in Luzon’s Aurora Province, as a powerful Category 4 or 5 storm. The storm was on the cusp of being declared a […]
By Aimee Picchi15 October 2015 (CBS News) – The likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould — the robber barons of the late 19th century — might feel right at home in today’s economy. The coffers of the uber-rich have exploded since the Great Recession, reaching a level “possibly not seen for almost a century,” […]
31 January 1988 7 February 2014 By Adam Voiland14 October 2015 (NASA) – White-flowered mangroves—nila in Tagalog—once crowded the shores of the Pasig River, a tidal waterway in the Philippines that connects Laguna de Bay with the South China Sea. The flowers were so numerous that the settlement at the western end of the […]
By Olga Gertcyk5 October 2015 (The Siberian Times) – The old stereotype of bears walking the streets in these regions was largely fictitious: in the past, bears and man coexisted, their paths seldom crossing, or so many experts say. This is changing as a spate of incidents highlight this year. And the attacks from hungry […]
By Kate Baklitskaya10 October 2015 (The Siberian Times) – Is it a freak heat wave or an indisputable sign of global warming? The experts will argue about this but a range of balmy temperatures in October in Siberia certainly begs a few questions: 27C in Altai, 24C in Barnaul, 21C in Novosibirsk, 21C in Tomsk, […]
By Tim Gaynor9 October 2015 GENEVA, 9 October 2015 (UNHCR) – UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres today appealed to the European Union to provide “massive support” to Greece to meet the needs of up to 6,000 refugees arriving each day as winter looms across Europe. He stressed that Greek authorities alone were not […]
By Debasish Ghosh1 October 2015 (The Guardian) – IT professional Debasish Ghosh has been documenting toxic foam in the Indian city’s polluted lake system. The snowy froth, a cocktail of chemicals and sewage, has a pungent odour and causes irritation on contact with the skin. Bangalore was once known for its interconnected lake systems which […]
5 October 2015 (BBC News) – The number of people seeking asylum in Germany this year will be as high as 1.5 million – almost double the previous estimate, German media report. The German government has not confirmed the new estimate, which comes from an internal official report cited by popular daily Bild. The report […]
By Nick Robins-Early22 September 2015 (The Huffington Post) – The doomsday seed vault on Norway’s remote Svalbard archipelago houses the world’s back up supply of seeds to ensure crop diversity. It contains deposits of nearly 865,000 varieties of seeds buried within a mountain in case of catastrophe. Due to Syria’s civil war, it will now […]
