All Posts (15429)
Sort by
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7878403/BP-aims-to-fix-oil-spill-by-end-of-July.html
CNN) -- Cattle carcasses dot the desert. More beggars show up at street corners in the capital, Niamey. These are indications that Niger is on the brink of catastrophe, say aid workers.
But few outside the country have noticed these signs in one of the world's least developed nations. And now an encroaching emergency caused by months of severe drought is threatening to leave 8 million people, or half the nation's population, hungry.
The United Nations' World Food Programme announced Tuesday that it is "massively scaling up" food distribution to people who have lost crops and livestock. In this nomadic, pastoral nation, they are people who have lost everything.
"The drought in Niger is an unfolding catastrophe for millions of people and we are struggling against time to scale up quickly enough to reach the escalating number of hungry," said Josette Sheeran, executive director for the U.N. agency.
Sheeran traveled to Niger to see the crisis for herself and saw a landlocked, drought-prone nation where hunger has been growing steadily since the last harvest in September 2009.
"We are massively scaling up special nutritional help for children under two years of age, whose brains and bodies face permanent damage from acute malnutrition," said Sheeran in a statement released Tuesday after her visit.
The agency said it aims to feed about 8 million people through the end of the year by distributing food rations that include a corn and soy supplement, a peanut paste and vitamin-fortified sugar and milk for children.
Earlier this month, 10 leading international aid agencies had called for a surge in the humanitarian response to the hunger crisis across the Sahel region of west and central Africa -- 2 million more people are threatened in Chad and thousands others in Mali, Mauritania, parts of Burkina Faso and northern Nigeria.
But Niger is at the heart. And despite months of warnings, the money for emergency aid has been what aid agencies described as paltry. The United Nations needs another $229 million to reach its recently revised target aid amount of $371 million.
The World Food Programme's appeal follows a similar call by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which earlier this month increased the aid requirement for Niger to $253 million from $191 million. The food agency said it only has half the $213 million it needs to expand its feeding operation.
"I think it has been a really slow onset emergency," said Johannes Schoors, chief of missions in Niger for the aid agency CARE International. "We got very little response from donors."
That's partly because Niger's has been an invisible problem so far.
There are not yet thousands of people starving. Nor are there images of distended bellies and bones piercing out of flesh, as there were in the Sudan famine in the 1990s. The markets still carry fresh fruit for those who can travel far and have deep pockets.
But, Schoors said, if things are allowed to go on this way, human suffering will become unbearable.
Schoors' colleague Stephane Petitprez, CARE's emergency director who just returned from 10 days in eastern Niger, said the people of Niger have no way to survive without their livestock. Their future is dying with the animals.
"They have to start a new life," she said.
But without rain, it will be difficult.
as you can see above there has been 187 earthquakes posted. with a heavy concertration in california and the pacific areas.there are more but usgs chose not to post them. they do not want people to know, not only tell the truth, so people won't panic that they were also more intensive. also that there have been an increase from last year. take care and bewear my friends. j&j.
It makes its point very well. Nothing is sacred in this article. And Planet X is mentioned in a satirical way.
these are the earthquakes from 8-30 days. this does not include today's. jeanette now calls me the earthquake kid. she never went through the three that i did when i lived in ca. j&j.
When I was 12 years old, I was in the realm of half sleep as I refer to it, the point where you know you are falling asleep but you are still cognitive of the real world around you. I was laying on the couch in our living room falling asleep if you will. I felt a strange sensation run over my body but I had little to no control over my body as if I were paralyzed. In moments, I felt myself lifting off the couch as a whole, there was no sensation of weight nor was there any sensation of movement, it was more of an inner knowing that I was over the couch I was falling asleep on. Gradually my form began to rotate so that my facing was directed downward. To my amazement I was looking down upon myself in slumber. I hovered there above myself for a long time but I am unable to say for exactly how long. Then suddenly there was a flash of light in my peripheral vision coming from down the hallway that ran the course of my home. I would say the hallway was roughly 50 feet long and connected directly into our kitchen.
As I looked down the hallway a form seemed to materialize out of the light. It was a woman, with blond hair, blue eyes, a very slight build. I didn't recognize her but I felt a sense of safety and well being as I looked at her. She smiled and then it all ended nearly as suddenly as it began.
The next morning I immediately went to my mother and told her of my experience during the night. Without saying a world she went off to grab a photo album from my grandmother's home which was next door to ours. She returned in a few minutes and sat down beside me with a smile on her face. She started to leaf through the album slowly glancing at the pages when suddenly she flipped the page and my heart skipped a beat. In the lower left hand corner of the right page was a very old and yellowing picture in black and white of the woman I had seen. In the same exact dress. I pointed at the woman and told my mom that I had no doubts that it was that woman....who is she I asked. My mom said that she is her namesake, sister to her grandmother, my great grandmother's sister. She explained to me that she has been a protector to our family since she was a child and that she should not be feared. My memories fail me here in part because I don't recall everything my mother explained to me. I know she told me that the fact that I was seeing her, meant that I needed to be careful in my choices and in my actions that she was looking after me and that I should know that she is around.
To this day that was the one and only time I had an experience of that nature, my other experiences have been of a spiritual nature and those will be discussed later. I ask each and everyone of you to share your first touch with what society would label paranormal even though it is the norm for about 90% of the population to believe in something. Thanks for taking the time to read this :)
How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. the test lies in being able to see past the contradiction.There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions that our minds can handle in this form. and sometimes we will only find the answer when we are willing to listen.yet regardless of if we are listening we continue to live them out, making our lives a worthy expression of leaning into the light... even if the darkness surrounds us. this society we live in has lost sight of the true meaning of what living really means, and all to often we find ourselves trying to escape the mental trap we find ourselves in. shaking off the veil of ignorance is never a easy feat. but it is not impossible. it will take a lot mentally and spiritually to overcome the lies we all were spoon fed for a lifetime. if you can separate your ego from yourself i believe that you will be able to see the truth in all that you seek. but this is not the only aspect of life that deserves attention...
we have all at one point or another have thought of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. Within the bounds of infinity reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems -- but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.
life is amazing, and continues whether you are ready or not. but on my quest i stop frequently to smell the roses, because i only live this life once. And admist the chaotic times we all face ahead it would be good to remember that life is happening now and we must not waste it. just a little reminder as i know we all get swallowed up with the current events, but remember as well to take a moment to enjoy the sunshine.
peace and love always
LOL! The visitors are here...we see them on NASA images...the awakening is in progress.
2010-07-09
Hawking was extrapolating the possible consequences of my day job: a small but durable exercise known as SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Although we have yet to detect an alien ping, improvements in technology have encouraged us to think that, if transmitting extraterrestrials are but there, we might soon find them. That would be revolutionary. But some people, Hawking included, sense a catastrophe.
Consider what happens if we succeed. Should we respond? Any broadcast could blow Earth's cover, inviting the possibility of attack by a society advanced enough to pick up our signals.
On the face of it, that sounds like a scenario straight out of cheap science fiction. But even if the odds of calamity are small, why gamble?
For three years, this issue has been exercising a group of SETI scientists in the International Academy of Astronautics. The crux of the dispute was an initiative by a few members to proscribe any broadcasts to aliens, whether or not we receive a signal first.
In truth, banning broadcasts would be impractical - and manifestly too late. We have been inadvertently betraying our presence for 60 years with our television, radio and radar transmissions. The earliest episodes of I Love Lucy have washed over 6000 or so star systems, and are reaching new audiences at the rate of one solar system a day. If there are sentient beings out there, the signals will reach them.
Detecting this leakage radiation won't be that difficult. Its intensity decreases with the square of the distance, but even if the nearest aliens were 1000 light years away, they would still be able to detect it as long as their antenna technology was a century or two ahead of ours.
This makes it specious to suggest that we should ban deliberate messages on the grounds that they would be more powerful than our leaked signals. Only a society close to our level of development would be able to pick up an intentional broadcast while failing to notice TV and radar. And a society at our level is no threat.
More at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727676.400-its-too-late-to-worry-that-the-aliens-will-find-us.html.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/07/05/bc-north-vancouver-sinkhole.html
