Aleppo’s oldest residents fear they’ll die alone —  BEIRUT — Before the war convulsed his native Syria, Marea Marea relished retirement. He enjoyed leisurely morning walks, played with his grandchildren and took afternoon catnaps. Then the fighting began in rebel-held eastern Aleppo. Airstrikes have pulverized his neighborhood, and a brutal siege has forced him to skimp on food so other members of his family have enough to eat. ADVERTISING Now the 70-year-old feels weak, frightened and helpless. “My entire life has been spent trying to build something for my family,” he said, speaking by Skype from his home in the war-divided city. “I built this home. My body aches from the decades of work that I did to make them a better life. But now this? There’s little dignity in this kind of life.” The war has taken an immense toll on the more than 200,000 people still in eastern Aleppo. Marea and other older residents face especially difficult circumstances, according to aid workers and doctors there. Some choose — or are asked — to make sacrifices for younger family members or are left to cope on their own after their children and grandchildren flee to safety in other countries. “People are being forced to make sacrifices, and this often involves the older people getting neglected,” said Bacry al-Ebeid, who distributes food to residents in rebel areas of Aleppo for Mercy-USA, a Michigan-based charity. [Darkness and fear in Aleppo as the bombs rain down] Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war, has become perhaps the most important battleground in the conflict, which began in 2011 and has left more than 400,000 dead and millions displaced. Rebels seized the city’s eastern districts in 2012, and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have intensified efforts to take them back. If they do, it would mark a significant victory for the embattled leader. In recent months, warplanes operated by Assad’s government and its ally, Russia, have increasingly bombed hospitals and homes in the city’s opposition-held areas. Food and fuel shortages have worsened because of the siege imposed by pro-government forces, who control the city’s west end. As a result, residents and aid workers in eastern Aleppo say, it has become nearly impossible to find medicine to treat heart disease, diabetes, rheumatism and other conditions most commonly experienced by older people. Overstretched medical facilities must turn away people suffering from such conditions because of the overwhelming number of more-urgent cases, such as people with shrapnel wounds and other war-related injuries. Pablo Marco, Middle East operations manager for the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, said the situation is so bad that fewer than three dozen doctors are still working in eastern Aleppo. The area has only one functioning dialysis unit left, he said. “If that unit stopped working, then that would mean more deaths,” he said. “The doctors just don’t have the time and facilities to take care of chronic diseases that, if not properly treated, will kill you in a matter of weeks and months.” As some become frail, they might see themselves as a burden on their family, which can fuel anxiety, Ebeid said. Some families have had to take extreme measures and have abandoned older family members, he said. In Arab societies, older people generally live with their children until death. [Syrian regime and Russia may have killed more children in latest bombing] There are no reliable age breakdowns of people living in the city’s besieged eastern areas, but before the war, Aleppo had a population approaching 3 million. Hundreds of thousands of residents have fled since the conflict erupted. “In a lot of cases, though, what we see are elderly people who refuse to leave their homes,” Ebeid said. “So that means their families, when they flee to other countries, are forced to leave them behind.” In another neighborhood of eastern Aleppo, 83-year-old Reema Salama lives alone in the home where she raised her children. Most of her family escaped to Turkey last year, but Salama chose to stay put, she said during a recent interview over Skype. Because of the siege, she cannot leave, and her family cannot visit. She receives food from Ebeid’s organization but struggles to cook it, relying on neighbors for help. “I’m all alone! I’m going to die alone here!” she said before abruptly ending the conversation. Marea said he would never leave his home. To pay for it, he worked for years as a freelance farmhand and day laborer. But even if he tried to leave, the government’s siege would prevent him. So he spends most of his time at home feeling isolated and hoping airstrikes do not obliterate him and his family. “I’m afraid our house will get bombed but that we won’t die in the attack,” he said, describing the fate of many people in his area of town. “We’ll just be stuck in the rubble for days and slowly die.” He also thinks constantly about trying to balance what he and his 70-year-old wife, Ajoun, need to survive with the demands of the 10 children and grandchildren living with them. Already, the family struggles to care for one son, 45-year-old Ahmed, whose leg was amputated last year after shrapnel struck it during an attack. “We eat twice — once in the morning and once in the evening — because we are trying to reduce the amount we eat so the kids still have enough,” he said. He fears the effect this could have on his wife, who suffers from high blood pressure and rheumatism. Marea has received unexpected help from another son, Hameed, who was visiting from Turkey and became trapped in the city when the government imposed its siege several weeks ago. Asked whether Hameed intends to return to Turkey, Marea choked up. “No, he can’t go back. The siege. He can’t leave us here,” Marea said. Then, he said, “I’m an old man. I shouldn’t have to think about these kind of things.” Heba Habib in Stockholm and Zakaria Zakaria in Istanbul contributed to this report.

I was not connected to anyone after reading the article on Aleppo and the horrible circumstances that the elderly face after the destruction wrought on the city. I was told by the System to enter the code after the survey so I completed the survey and answered with all neutral answers. The instructions said that I would get paid if I somehow was not connected with anyone (i.e. if they disconnected). I guess in this situation they did in fact disconnect. I hope that your research goes well, and if there is anyway that I can chat with someone else regarding this incident I would be more than happy to do so. War tears cities apart, and it is hard for me to understand how so many innocent people suffer due to the whims of those in power. I hope to get paid for my efforts. Good luck.


The person is female. Racially, the person is white. The person is 45 years old. The person has a went to college but did not get a degree. The person earns 52000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 4.0 in openness, 6.0 in conscientiousness, 3.0 in extraversion, 6.0 in agreeableness, and 4.0 in stability.

Airline worker gunned down at Oklahoma City airport, suspect found dead —  A gunman murdered a Southwest Airlines employee, then killed himself Tuesday at Oklahoma City's Will Rogers World Airport in what police described as a premeditated attack.   Michael Winchester, 52, was shot while walking between a crowded terminal and the airport employee parking area. The unidentified suspect was later found dead in a pickup truck in public parking garage overlooking the scene. Police said the suspect appeared to die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Oklahoma City Police Capt. Paco Balderrama said the shooter apparently knew the victim's schedule and routine.   "This individual went there and waited for the employee to either be coming or going to take this opportunity," Balderrama said. He wouldn't say conclusively that it was a "sniper-type" attack. A LinkedIn page with Winchester's name described him as a ramp supervisor for Southwest and said he was from Washington, Okla., about 35 miles south of the airport.   Southwest spokeswoman Brandy King said in a statement that the airline would cancel all flights scheduled to depart Oklahoma City for the remainder of the day Tuesday.   The 1 p.m. shooting set off a scramble at the airport, with police immediately closing the sprawling complex and asking passengers inside to seek cover. They diverted incoming flights and refused to give already-loaded aircraft permission to leave. There were concerns the gunman might have entered the terminal and mingled among passengers or employees. "We have a heightened level of security all the time. These people have access to aircraft so we're very concerned about that," airport spokeswoman Karen Carney said. Hundreds of people were stranded inside the terminal for more than three hours before officers began letting them leave slowly. Carney said about 300 people were held on aircraft away from the terminal after their planes landed ahead of a ground stop. Once police determined that a suspect found in a red pickup truck on the second floor of a public parking garage was dead, officers gave an all-clear. The airport handles between 7,000 and 8,000 passengers daily for Alaska, Delta, Southwest and United airlines and has a separate terminal that serves as a transfer center for federal inmates. A jet carrying inmates to the transfer site was allowed to land while the rest of the airport was shuttered. Video from a television station helicopter showed what appeared to be a pool of blood about 100 feet from the airport's employee parking area -- and about 100 yards from the airport's ticket counters and departure area. While airports have high security, it wasn't immediately known whether surveillance cameras might show the shooting, Balderrama said. Balderrama initially said police had received reports of a possible second victim, but no one was found. Police found the suspect's truck in the garage about three hours after the shooting and determined that someone was inside. They were not sure whether he was dead or alive. After about 75 minutes, using a robot, officers determined the suspect was dead. A number of inbound flights were diverted to other airports after Will Rogers suspended operations. Southwest redirected one flight back to Dallas while a Las Vegas to Houston flight that stops in Oklahoma City went to Amarillo, Texas, instead. Two commercial flights from Chicago's O'Hare Airport were directed to Tulsa, about 100 miles away. Michael Winchester was a punter on the University of Oklahoma's 1985 national championship team. His son, James, also played for the school and currently plays for the Kansas City Chiefs. "Our hearts are truly heavy for the entire Winchester Family. Mike was a former Sooner student athlete as was his son James/daughter Carolyn," the school's athletic director, Joe Castiglione, tweeted Tuesday afternoon. He added "daughter Becca was also a student athlete. Please keep this beautiful family in your prayers" in a later tweet.

I think it is very sad. I think many people are turning to suicide because they are desperate. They are depressed and can't take it anymore. It is an awful place to be in. The family was well known but that does not keep them safe from the depression or despair that can hit anyone at any time. You should look out for one another. It is a very tough world out there. It is very easy to slip into a depression. This did not have to happen to him.


The person is female. Racially, the person is other. The person is 55 years old. The person has a college or university degree. The person earns 70000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 5.0 in openness, 4.5 in conscientiousness, 4.5 in extraversion, 5.0 in agreeableness, and 5.0 in stability.

3,800 dead ... and more on the way —  (CNN)Rickety boats that should never have sailed. Unscrupulous smugglers with no regard for life. And desperate people risking everything. That mix of fear, hope and greed has now produced a horrifying record. More people have drowned in the Mediterranean this year than ever before: at least 3,800. That's about 90 a week. It's nearly 13 every day. Here's a look at how we got to this point. Why are they doing it? They have no choice. They are Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, escaping war. They are Nigerians and Eritreans in search of a better life. More than 65 million people have fled their homes; 1 in 3 of them are refugees. We're in the midst of the largest migration of refugees since World War II. The sheer number dwarfs the population of many countries. Would you risk these odds? Even though fewer people are crossing this year than in 2015, more people are dying as they try to make the journey. One person out of every 88 has been lost at sea trying to reach the shores of Greece, Italy or Spain. That means they're 90 times more likely to die on the journey than an American is likely to die of gunshot wounds. Where are they heading? There are three main routes across the Mediterranean. Eastern Route: Last year, the route from Turkey to Greece was the busiest by far, but a deal between the European Union and Ankara has brought the numbers down. Still, it remains a heavily trafficked route. Central Route: Libya has no government, which gives people smugglers plenty of freedom to operate out of north Africa. Traffic has been busy this year between Libya and Italy. Central Route: Libya has no government, which gives people smugglers plenty of freedom to operate out of north Africa. Traffic has been busy this year between Libya and Italy. Western Route: West Africa is far from the Middle Eastern hotspots and poor sub-Saharan African countries that produce most migrants to Europe. And relatively small numbers of people try to reach the continent from there. But even so, a steady trickle crosses the sea at the narrow point south of Spain.  Where are they fleeing from? More than a million people have fled Somalia. Nearly three million have escaped Afghanistan. But it is Syria, wracked by civil war for more than five years, that produces the most refugees: nearly five million. Just how bad is it in Syria? The Syrian refugees may outnumber any other country's refugees, but they make up less than half the number of Syrians driven from their homes by the war. Far more are internally displaced -- still in Syria, but living like refugees in the country. And then, of course, an unknown number of people have been killed in the war. International agencies stopped trying to count the dead years ago. The latest estimates by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number somewhere around 430,000. If that's right, it means about one out of every 50 people in the country has been killed. Where do they go? President Obama vowed that the United States would resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees this year, and by August, the administration was saying it would surpass the target. Justin Trudeau vowed Canada would take 25,000 when he became prime minister last year. But far more are claiming asylum in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country would take one million refugees. And all across Europe, refugees from Syria are claiming asylum. But far more stay in the Middle East. Syria's own neighbors host the vast majority of people trying to escape the war. And there's little hope the war will end any time soon -- so the refugees will keep fleeing. And they will keep dying.

Smugglers are causing so many deaths! You must read this article about their disregard for life and how its causing so many deaths around the globe! So many are trying to escape war, and the governments of these country are giving these smugglers so much freedom -- Its so sad! You have to read this article to belive it!


The person is male. Racially, the person is white. The person is 35 years old. The person has a college or university degree. The person earns 120000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 4.5 in openness, 4.5 in conscientiousness, 3.0 in extraversion, 5.5 in agreeableness, and 4.5 in stability.

A Palm Oil Company Threatens The Third Largest Population Of Orangutan In Indonesia —  The Sungai Putri, meaning River of the Princess, is an exquisite natural forest located in West Kalimantan, providence of Indonesia. It is about 141,000 acres of forest land, has extensive peat areas of up to 14.5 meters deep at some points, and can provide a home to about 750 to 1750 orangutan. Because of these numbers, it is the third largest population of critically Endangered orangutan Species in the province. Due to the fact that the Indonesia government has committed to protecting peat, forests and orangutans, it is alarming that there is no protection to this forest.   The forest is at critical risk of being cut down by a company named PT Mohairson Pawan Khatulistiwa who have plans to clear more than half of their liscence area to covert into an industrial tree plantation. The company is also planning on building a drainage canal from the north to the south side of the area for which some work has already reportedly began.   The Indonesian government has stated its international and national commitments to reducing carbon emissions and deforestation, protecting and restoring peat swamp forests through the Peatland Restoration Agency established by the president and stabilizing all remaining wild orangutan populations. At the same time, they allowed the company to obtain a lisence permissing the destruction of this forest land, peat and the orangutans who live in that habitat.   A satellite image taken of the land in 2016 confirms that about 58 percent of the 48,440 lisence area still remains covered in tall tree peat swamp forest and the rest is covered in medium height swamp forest, heath forest and hill forest.   At the deepest part of the dome, the peat is 14.5 meters deep, with large areas deeper than 3 meters. Indonesian laws such as the Government Regulation no. 71 of 2014 do not allow peat development in areas with more than 3 meters peat.   Threatened orangutans living in the area also raises much concern. The most recent orangutan survey for the 57,000 Sungai Putri block estimated up to 1,750 orangutans. These orangutans will not survive in areas where all forest is cleared. If conversion plans go ahead, some 500 to 1,000 orangutans will likely die or will be in need of rescue. The Indonesian Orangutan Forum FORINA recently recognized this as the largest population of orangutan located in the region and if they lose their habitat they will have  no other place to go. Indonesia’s current national action plan for orangutans aims to stabilize all wild populations by 2017, and destroying the habitat of one of the largest remaining populations is incompatible with that.   A well known developer Norweigian professor who specializes in tropical forests says, “These developments seem to violate Indonesia’s own legal processes not to mention its international commitments. Claims about absence of forest, peat and endangered species – here and elsewhere – clearly need to be assessed and verified in a transparent manner. Those who dispute the conditions can provide their data”.   Improved management is desperately needed in Sungai Putri. There are lots of illegal logging happening in the area, as are fires. According to the Global Fire Watch data, in 2015 alone, there were about 250 fires that occurred on the margins of Sungai Putri. The risk of more fires would only increase if Sungai Putri was drained and deforested as planned.   There are opposing conflicts regarding the deforestation.  Some people welcome the development of the peatland area because of the potential employment opportunities it can bring as well as the possibility to get compensated by the company for their lost traditional land uses. Others see it differently. However, according to the latest science studies, the development of coastal peatlands will never be sustainable.   Instead of going through with this development, there are other solutions available that would allow Indonesia to fulfill its development and poverty alleviations objectives but they require careful planning and close collaboration efforts between the private sector, governments, non-governmental groups, and local communities. The time to initiate those collaborations and find sustainable solutions for Indonesia is now!

This is a very serious situation as it affects both the wildlife and forest situation in Indonesia. It affects the population of the endangered Orangutan species. The government must do everything to protect the trees, provide rangers to protect the life of the Orangutans. Provisions should be made to reduce wildfire.


The person is male. Racially, the person is white. The person is 30 years old. The person has a two year associate degree. The person earns 10000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 4.0 in openness, 4.0 in conscientiousness, 4.0 in extraversion, 4.5 in agreeableness, and 4.0 in stability.

Riot police move in on North Dakota pipeline protesters —  Armed police in the US state of North Dakota have arrested 141 Native American protesters and environmental activists during a tense confrontation. They were among several hundred people who occupied private land in the path of a controversial new oil pipeline. Police fired non-lethal rounds and used pepper spray and sound cannon to push protesters back to their main encampment on public land. Skirmishes lasted overnight and continued until early Friday morning. By then, spent bean bag rounds and pepper spray canisters littered the ground as police towed away vehicles that the protesters had burned to create barricades in the road, including several military-grade Humvees. "They used a sonic device and then also they used rubber bullets and we have shots of people who had rubber bullets right to the face. They maced elders right in the face. They dragged people out of sweat lodges. They shot one 15-year-old boy's horse and killed it under him," Jacqueline Keeler from the Sioux tribe told the BBC. She said members of the tribe were protesting because the pipeline threatened the region's water supply went across land never ceded by the tribe. Police said they had fired non-lethal bean bag rounds in response to stone throwing and one woman who fired a pistol three times at police officers without hitting any. Dozens of officers in riot gear, some armed, moved in assisted by trucks and military Humvees. Morton County Sheriff's office said the operation began at 11:15am local time (18:15 GMT) and that protesters had refused to leave voluntarily on Wednesday. Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier said the protesters were a "public safety issue" and their actions had "forced law enforcement to respond". "We cannot have protesters blocking county roads, blocking state highways or trespassing on private property," he said in a statement. But Robert Eder, a 64-year-old Vietnam War veteran from the Standing Rock Reservation, said protesters were not scared. "If they take everybody to jail, there will be twice as many tomorrow, and every day that passes more will come," he said. "If they raze these teepees, tomorrow we will be back." Hundreds of protesters have camped on the federally owned land for months, with more than 260 people arrested before Thursday's police operation. Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the project, has said it will boost the local economy and is safer than transporting oil by rail or road. Members of the Sioux tribe say the Dakota Access pipeline will desecrate sacred land and harm water resources. The pipeline will run almost 1,900km (1,170 miles), carrying oil to Gulf Coast refineries. Native American protesters claim the land as their own, citing a 19th Century treaty with the federal government. The protest has drawn the attention of activists and celebrities, including actress-activist Shailene Woodley and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

I view the content that is sent to me online as my virtualized personalized email inbox. I find it unfortunate that scholars can relate their works cited to the various other work they are completing in ways to document not only their feelings on the article, but also progress on their goals as a person regarding their personalized information they receive. However, we as mTurk workers are afforded the luxury, and in fact the article more relates to the fact that remote workers are sometimes shut off from communication to the outside world by regular means. This does relate to the article in that a pipeline is spewing contamination into a water supply. When I contact my superiors that also work remotely, most projects are mishandled in ways and my personalized communication style.


The person is male. Racially, the person is hispanic / latino. The person is 32 years old. The person has a college or university degree. The person earns 35000 dollar per year. According to the Big Five personality test, on a scale of 10, the person has scored 5.0 in openness, 5.5 in conscientiousness, 2.0 in extraversion, 5.5 in agreeableness, and 4.5 in stability.

A month after Hurricane Matthew, 800,000 Haitians urgently need food —  FONDTOUTANU, Haiti — There is no food, so along the road through the mountains there are children begging for something to eat. Most of the trucks rumble past with donations for somewhere else. But one stopped here the other day with sacks of rice, beans and dried herring, setting off a stampede. Valleur Noel, a trim, short man with a checkered shirt and a shiny crucifix, climbed to the top of the tailgate and told everyone to calm down. It was futile. His organization, Pwoje Men Kontre, had 412 bags of food, a gift from the German ambassador and U.S. donors. Within minutes there were people pouring through a notch between the mountains, hollering and stumbling down the rocky hillside toward the truck. “No pushing, no pushing!” Noel yelled. “There is enough for everyone!” It wasn’t true. The latecomers got nothing. But many others did, and Figaro Phito, 29, hugged his sack with both arms, like a pillow. “This will keep us alive until another donation arrives,” he said. “Because that is our only way to survive right now.” A month after Hurricane Matthew blasted through southwestern Haiti, the region is a blighted, apocalyptic landscape of wrecked homes and growling hunger. At least 800,000 people need food urgently, according to the United Nations, including more than two-thirds of families in the worst-hit departments of Grand’Anse and Sud. Emergency help is arriving, but there is not enough of it, and it will take several more weeks to reach remote mountain communities where officials say the destruction was total. The desperation is so explosive that truckloads of food and medical supplies have been looted by crowds gathered along the roadways. A teenage boy was killed Tuesday by police in the city of Les Cayes, where hungry crowds burned tires and blocked roads. Haitian police shot four people, one fatally, on Oct. 26 in the coastal village of Dame Marie, where the arrival of an aid shipment sent crowds surging onto the docks. The Oct. 4 hurricane hit some of the poorest places in the Western hemisphere. It smashed fishing villages and shredded mountain hamlets with the force of a bomb blast, obliterating crops, killing livestock and leaving fruit trees as bare as matchsticks. Haiti, a country still digging out from its devastating 2010 earthquake, will need months of emergency aid to stave off famine, according to relief groups and government officials. More than 141,000 storm victims are in shelters, and those are just the ones with someplace to go. “We are sleeping under the trees,” said Jeudina Alexis, 63, who hadn’t eaten in two days but now had a sack of food from Noel to carry home up the mountain. In some towns, 80 to 90 percent of homes were destroyed by Matthew’s 140-mile-per-hour winds. The Category 4 storm converted tin roofing panels into flying razors and broken tree branches into spears. The death toll stands at 546, according to the government, but local officials have reported more than twice that many killed. Some remote mountain villages are so inaccessible that government emergency workers say they will not be able to reach them until the end of November. One man who walked out of the mountains recently after hiking two days told authorities that too many people had died in his town to bury the bodies, so villagers burned them and put the ashes in the river. The United Nations has raised just one-third of the $120 million in emergency funding it says it needs to help 750,000 people, including 315,000 children, get through the next three months. Noel has told his donors he will need to feed people for even longer. “If they plant sweet potatoes and corn, it will be three or four months before they can harvest, but they don’t have seeds,” he said. ‘We are starving, too’ The storm-hit areas have reported at least 3,500 suspected cholera cases in recent weeks, but some of the outbreaks are happening in far-off settlements where help has yet to arrive. The aid organization Doctors Without Borders recently sent staff by helicopter to one village, Pourcine, to investigate reports of a patient with cholera, only to find 20 stricken from it. The disease spreads rampantly once the bacteria enters the water supply. “We are sending materials to contain the epidemic, but there are people dying from cholera every day,” said Emmanuel Massart, the group’s field coordinator in Grand’Anse. It is largely a challenge of distribution. Tim Callahan, the U.S. official in charge of the American emergency response, said the U.S. government has delivered 34 metric tons of water treatment tablets to Haiti, enough to supply the entire country for three months. But getting them to families is another matter because roads are impassable or nonexistent in the worst-affected areas. The 2010 earthquake killed at least 200,000 and damaged many of the government buildings in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. The city was largely spared by the recent storm, and that has allowed the Haitian government to take a more active role in directing the relief effort, Callahan and others say. Peter Mulrean, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, said the fact that so many international relief organizations were doing post-quake reconstruction left them better prepared to respond to the hurricane. Unlike in the post-quake period, when aid efforts were often haphazard and inefficient, international relief organizations have been coordinating their donations and activities with Haitian officials, using the network of modern, air-conditioned emergency response centers set up in every region after the earthquake. “We want Haitian institutions to come out stronger than before,” Mulrean said. But the man-made disasters of Haitian politics remain an obstacle. Last year’s contested presidential election led to a political impasse and the installation of a caretaker government. New elections are scheduled for Nov. 20, but it’s hard to see how Haitian officials can deliver and count ballots in hurricane-hit areas. Making matters worse, the public schools that double as polling stations are being used as homeless shelters. At the Lycee Nord Alexis in Jeremie, the battered capital of Grand’Anse, children sleep on the cement floors of classrooms, some naked or clothed in adult-sized T-shirts that hang below the knee. Food comes irregularly. The blind, disabled and maimed lie around in dark, stifling rooms, swarmed by mosquitoes. Guerline Brumaches, 40, was languishing in a corner, naked from the waist up, with a suppurating wound the size of a baseball on her swollen left foot where she had been cut by flying debris. A month-old chemistry lesson was written on the chalkboard above her. Flies nibbled at her foot. “If I lose my foot, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said. The school had no running water. One of the stairwells had become a latrine. Xavier Charlemagne, 20, said there were several hundred people sleepingevery night in the classrooms and corridors. “We’re not leaving until they give us tarps,” he said. Jeremie is the only town with large-scale daily food distribution in Grand’Anse, in part because it is the only place with armed security to suppress potential rioting. The U.N. World Food Program gives out 1,000 one-month rations of rice, chickpeas and cooking oil each day in the central plaza, in the shadow of a 200-year-old cathedral with a ripped-off roof. But the sight of so many convoys headed to Jeremie has stirred resentment in towns that say they are not getting their share. At one highway junction where a broken-down truck carrying beans had been attacked a day earlier, dozens of young men lingered on a recent day, watching for signs of mechanical trouble among the vehicles groaning up the pass, as if stalking wounded herd animals. “We are starving, too,” said Ricardo Dauphin, 29, alongside dozens of other men in the town of Carrefour Charles, watching U.N. trucks roll by in a cloud of dust, escorted by police and Brazilian soldiers. There is no electricity across a wide swath of southern Haiti where utility lines are down, so at night families burn storm debris and garbage with huge bonfires that leap into the darkness and foul the air. On a muddy hillside near the town of Cavaillon, scores of people have settled in crude lean-tos made of sticks, plastic and tattered bedsheets. The nearby river flooded in the storm, forcing those living along the banks to higher ground. Olicia Jean-Louis, 23, said her widowed mother was washed away in the storm, along with the family’s house and all the secondhand footwear they used to sell in the market. Now Jean-Louis was in charge of her siblings, ages 12, 10, 5 and 2. The youngest ones had started calling her “mama,” she said. None of them had eaten that day, Jean-Louis said. It was raining again, and the 2-year-old boy, naked, leaned into her threadbare blue dress, his nose running. Asked what she would do next, Jean-Louis shook her head. “I will rely on you,” she said. “Can you help me?”

I wonder why there aren't more people trying to help these people. I understand Haiti is not the richest nor less corrupt country but surely there must be a way to help. Supplies being looted by crowds is understandable because they are hungry and people need food and water to survive. We must think of other ways to distribute the food and water.


Bid for strongest protection for all African elephants defeated at wildlife summit —  A bid to give the highest level of international legal protection to all African elephants was defeated on Monday at a global wildlife summit. But the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), meeting this week in Johannesburg, passed other new measures for elephants that conservationists say will add vital protection. All 182 nations agreed for the first time that legal ivory markets within nations must be closed. Separately, a process that could allow one-off sales of ivory stockpiles was killed and tougher measures to deal with nations failing to control poached ivory were agreed. More than 140,000 of Africa’s savannah elephants were killed for their ivory between 2007 and 2014, wiping out almost a third of their population, and one elephant is still being killed by poachers every 15 minutes on average. The price of ivory has soared threefold since 2009, leading conservationists to fear the survival of the species is at risk. Ambitious Great Elephant Census finds nearly one-third of continent’s largest elephants were wiped out between 2007-14, largely due to poaching for ivory The acrimonious debate over elephant poaching has split African countries. Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, which host about a third of all remaining elephants, have stable or increasing populations. They argue passionately that elephant numbers are also suffering from loss of habitat and killings by farmers and that they can only be protected by making money from ivory sales and trophy hunting. However, a group of 29 African nations, which host about 40% of all elephants and are led by Kenya and Benin, have smaller and plummeting populations and countered that poaching and the illegal trade in ivory is the greatest threat. Most African elephants already have the highest level of international legal protection – a Cites “appendix 1” listing – which bans all trade. But the elephants in Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, are listed on “appendix 2”, a lower level of protection. On Monday a proposal to add the elephants in Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana to appendix 1 was defeated. Critics said the proposal would do little to protect elephants as all international trade is already banned, but proponents argued it was a crucial signal to poachers and criminals of a global crackdown on the illegal ivory trade. Botswana has the world’s largest elephant population, about a third of all elephants, and it is growing. But it broke ranks with Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe and argued vehemently for appendix 1 protection. Tshekedi Khama, Botswana’s minister of environment, said: “There is concerning evidence that elephant poaching is moving south. The criminal networks that facilitate much of this trade are highly organised and fluid, operating over several regions in the continent. Therefore no population should be considered secure. Put simply, a threat to elephants anywhere is a threat to elephants everywhere.” The Cote D’Ivoire delegate said it was absurd to have some elephants on appendix 1 and some on appendix 2: “An elephant that crosses a border may have protection on one side and not on the other. Elephants do not have passports.” Lee White, the British-born director of Gabon’s national parks and Cites delegate, said poachers were now shooting on sight at his rangers. The upgrading of all elephants to the highest protection would have sent “a signal that we will come down as hard on poaching as we do on the trafficking of drugs, arms and people”. However, Namibia’s delegate threatened to withdraw entirely from Cites protections for elephants if the all populations were upgraded the highest levels. “It is completely fallacious that legal ivory trade covers illegal trade,” he said, a statement flatly rejected by other nations. South Africa’s environment minister, Edna Molewa, said rural communities must benefit from elephants if they are to tolerate the damage caused to crops and the lives sometimes lost. “We dare not ignore their voices,” she said. “Trophy hunting is the best return on investment [in elephant protection] with the least impact.” The EU, which with 28 votes is a powerful force at Cites, also opposed the upgrade to appendix 1. It said that Cites rules meant the highest level protection is reserved for populations that are in steep decline, and that this did not apply to the elephants in Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Some scientific and conservation groups agreed with this, including WWF, Traffic and the Zoological Society of London, arguing the integrity of the Cites was at risk. The EU delegate to Cites said: “The proposal does not meet the biological criteria. [But] this does not mean in any way we are not concerned about the decline of elephants across the continent.” Several nations said cutting the demand for ivory, through education, and better enforcement against poachers were key. The issue was forced to a vote and was defeated, leaving the southern African elephants on appendix 2. Earlier on Monday, Namibia and Zimbabwe had attempted to legalise the trade in ivory from those countries. Namibia said its elephant population had doubled to 20,000 in the last 15 years. Charles Jonga, from the Campfire Programme, a rural development group in Zimbabwe, told the Cites summit: “The people in my community say: ‘These elephants they eat our crops, they damage our houses, what benefit do we get?’ If they get benefits, they will protect and not poach.” But Patrick Omondi, Kenya’s delegate, said: “Poaching levels and trafficking in ivory are at their highest peak. History has shown the ivory trade cannot be controlled. We are reaching a tipping point and need to give elephants time to recover.” Both Namibia’s and Zimbabwe’s proposals, supported by Japan but opposed by the EU and US, were soundly defeated. Observers believe Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa did not expect to unpick the ban on the ivory trade at this summit, but wanted to keep the debate open, in the hope of future success. Another proposal, from Swaziland, to legalise the trade in its rhino horn was heavily defeated. Advertisement Many conservation groups wanted all elephants to get the highest protection, but Tom Milliken, an elephant expert from wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic, said: “Where elephants fall on the Cites appendices is inconsequential to their survival. All the paper protection in the world is not going to compensate for poor law enforcement, rampant corruption and ineffective management.” He said the real success of the summit were measures to crack down on countries failing to halt illegal trade. But Kelvin Alie, at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said the failure to put all elephants on appendix one was a disaster: “This is a tragedy for elephants. At a time when we are seeing such a dramatic increase in the slaughter of elephants for ivory, now was the time for the global community to step up and say no more.”

I feel sad that elephants can't even be protected how they should be. The fact that a bid to give them high level protection was defeated tells me that money rules overall and it has been that way and will always be that way and it is something I can not just grasp my head around and accept as a fact of life because it just is not fair.


French school bullying deaths stir intense debate —  Two stories about two French girls who killed themselves after being bullied at school have prompted an emotional response and intense debate about how teenagers can be better protected. Emilie, 17, took her life in January and a graphic account of the torment she suffered emerged this week when her diary appeared in a newspaper. It was immediately followed by a French TV dramatisation of the story of Marion Fraisse, who died three years ago. The France 3 film was poignantly entitled Marion, 13 ans pour toujours - Marion, Forever 13. The question for France is whether their deaths will help change the way bullying is tackled. It starts so gradually, you hardly notice it. In a classroom of rowdy students, Marion is marked out as one of the good girls. Over the course of the 90-minute drama, she loses her friends, is the victim of rumours, insults and isolation, and then is cornered by a group of boys in the corridor, who grab her, pin her down and throw her shoes away. "She was asking for it," says a passing girl. Marion breaks down and cries. From there the drama follows her descent into desperation, depression, and finally suicide. The film was adapted from a book by Marion's mother, Nora, who found a letter from the teenager after her death and decided to tell her story. A poignant act, because one of the most striking elements of that story is how Marion's parents knew about what was happening to their daughter at the time. Interviewed by a French newspaper to mark the launch of the dramatisation, actress Julie Gayet, who plays Nora, said the film had two points of view: Marion's and her mother's. The script "shows that parents never really know their child. Half a child's life escapes them". More than four million people tuned in to watch the drama, which was followed by a one-hour debate. Many took to social media afterwards to share their stories and express their anger. "It's not a suicide, it's murder," wrote one Twitter user, called Sara. Another suggested that the film be shown in schools. Others wrote of their own experiences of bullying, with some saying the experience had haunted them for years after they had left full-time education. For help and advice on bullying, visit BBC Advice BBC iWonder: How do we talk about teen suicide? Read more here: * French Periscope death stirs social media fears * Quarter of bullied children bully others How France has tried to address bullying According to official figures, 700,000 pupils are bullied each year in France, and activists say more than 90% of children have access to social networks. France has tried to improve awareness of bullying in schools, as well as support for the victims. In 2014, a new anti-bullying law was brought in, and a hotline set up for pupils to report incidents. But activists say France is still not tackling the problem effectively. "The authorities' response is improving very slowly," says psychologist and campaigner Catherine Verdier. "But France is dragging behind other countries. If you look at Finland, Sweden, where it's a national cause, there was a real impulse from the top to change things." "A few schools have improved, but not enough," says Willy Pierre who runs 'You Are Heroes', set up after Marion's death to break the taboo around bullying. "The hotline is only open in school hours, and it can take weeks or months to find a designated adult for the child to talk to face to face." The problem has also grown to encompass cyber-bullying and harassment outside the school gates. The solution, he says, is for parents, teachers and pupils to talk openly about the problem. Emilie's story Emilie was four years older than Marion when she died in January after jumping out of a window at her father's house. A bright pupil at a private school in the northern city of Lille, Emilie's parents say she endured years of terror up to the age of 13 because she was not considered cool and trendy and loved reading. Eventually she snapped and they pulled her out of the school. For three years she tried other schools and distance learning, but she developed a phobia of schools and her parents believe her death was linked to depression as a result of the bullying. ________________   Excerpts from Emilie's diary Dodging blows, being tripped up and spat at. Closing your ears to insults and mockery. Keeping an eye on your bag and your hair. Holding back the tears. Again and again Hey, you know what? a boy exclaimed loud enough for everyone in the class to hear but the teacher. Apparently they're going to award a prize to the ugliest clever-clogs in every country. Oh yeah? his neighbour tittered. I bet you we've got the winner in the class I don't want my parents to know how pathetic I am, and think they've given birth to a piece of crap The diary was published in La Voix du Nord (in French) ________________   A report by Unicef two years ago found that bullying was a worldwide problem that "exists at some level and in some form in every country". Children who are bullied, it says, are prone to a vast range of negative effects "including depression, anxiety, thoughts of suicide". One mother told a French newspaper that her daughter's school had responded to the problem of bullying with "a conspiracy of silence". But after days of debate about the sad lives of two French teenagers, those taboos may finally be crumbling. Are you being bullied? Useful contacts * BullyingUK - Tel 0808 800 2222 * Childline - Tel 0800 1111 * Bullying at school - UK government website * Non au harcelement - French government website - Tel 3020

Bullying isn't a new thing and it is something that must be dealt with swiftly. We must find a way to fix this stuff because it is not new and keeps happening around us. Not only in France but all around the world kids suffer from this and it leads to many suicides. The pressure from other kids is huge.


'My whole family has been wiped out': Victims of Dreamworld tragedy revealed as witnesses recall heartbreaking cries of girls who watched their mothers die on Thunder River Rapids ride —  Two young girls, aged 10 and 13, were miraculously thrown to safety from the doomed Thunder River Rapids ride at Dreamworld on Australia's Gold Coast and watched in horror as the four adults in their raft were killed. A malfunction with the ride's conveyor belt is suspected to have caused the six-person raft to flip, crushing and drowning two men, aged 38 and 35, and two women, aged 42 and 32, about 2.20pm on Tuesday. Those killed include Canberra woman Kate Goodchild, 32, her brother Luke Dorsett, 35, his partner Roozi Araghi, 38, and another woman.  The New Zealand Herald has named Cindy Low, 42, from Kawerau, as the fourth victim. She was believed to be holidaying in Queensland at the time.  One of the children thrown to safety from the raft was Ms Goodchild's daughter. She howled in horror as she watched her mother die, according to News Corp.  Top police officials said it was 'almost a miracle that anybody came out of that', saying they may have escaped through 'the providence of God or somebody'.   Both girls were recovering in hospital on Tuesday night. The tragedy happened after the raft the six people were riding on turned over and flipped, Assistant Queensland Police Commissioner Brian Codd said.   '(It fell) back on top of those persons and those persons (were) variously caught in machinery.' The catastrophe was captured on CCTV cameras and the footage would be reviewed as part of the investigation. The theme park is closed indefinitely.   The mother of the Dorsett siblings, Kim, took to Facebook to express her grief.  'My family have been completely wiped out,' she said. 'I have three children and two of them are now gone. 'My eight-month-old granddaughter is never going to know her mother and that truly breaks my heart.' Ms Dorsett's husband, daughter, and newborn baby girl, had to be consoled by paramedics. Families were being informed of the tragedy on Tuesday night.    Radio broadcaster Dom Knight, an old university friend of Mr Araghi, remembered him as a 'passionate, funny, brilliant man with an unquenchable love of retro pop'.  Other friends described Mr Araghi and Mr Dorsett as the 'most loving couple', 'intelligent and witty, filled with life and hope'.   Witnesses to the tragedy said they saw a young girl was wandering alone at the ride's exit calling out for her mum shortly afterwards.  A woman could be seen 'hanging by her foot, crushed from the ride'. Bystander Claire Wooley said she helped a child she believed was the daughter of one of those killed,Sunshine Coast Daily reported. Another witness said 'there were kids on board screaming while their mum was like trapped under'. A malfunction with the ride's conveyer belt was believed to have caused the tragedy, Queensland Ambulance acting supervisor Gavin Fuller told a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. flume be turned over and flipped, resulting in it falling back on top of those persons and those persons being variously caught in machinery - and I don't want to go into too much graphic detail.    The four adults and two children were in a raft that collided with an empty raft that had become stuck, Courier Mail reported. Reports suggest their raft flipped, crushing two of the adults. The other two adults were trapped in the conveyor belt underwater. Visitors to the theme park have claimed the ride had been plagued by mechanical issues earlier in the day. Lisa Walker said she had tried to board the ride with her daughter Kaylah, 25, and said rafts were piling up against each other, she told The Australian. 'Earlier in the day it had broken down,' the same witness told Sydney Morning Herald. 'It had broken down and we went back a couple of times to this particular ride. 'We were standing on the bridge watching and the water had stopped. 'There was no rapids.' The accident happened 10 minutes after she and her daughter left the scene, Lisa said. Another woman told Nine News engineers were called to the ride earlier in the day. 'They drained all the water out and then had to refill it back up, and then we were allowed to go. But, yeah, we were stuck there for about 30-40 minutes at least,' the woman said. Todd Reid, Inspector Regional Duty Officer, could not confirm reports the ride had been faulty earlier in the day. 'I'm not aware [if that's true], but that will be part of the investigation and that will be one of the aspects we will be looking at,' he said. The horrific accident happened towards the end of the ride. Mr Fuller, of Queensland Ambulance, would not elaborate on any of the injuries the four adults suffered. 'They sustained injuries incompatible with life,' he said. Dreamworld staff had drained water from the ride in an attempt to save the trapped passengers and desperately tried to treat two of those injured before paramedics arrived. The park was evacuated and hundreds of shocked patrons streaming out. Dreamworld will be closed until further notice. CEO of the theme park, Craig Davidson, said the team was 'deeply shocked and saddened by this and our hearts and our thoughts go to the families involved and to their loved ones'. The ride's annual maintenance, conducted by independent workplace health and safety engineers, had been done just three days before the accident, a Dreamworld spokesperson said. A certification was provided, which Daily Mail Australia has requested a copy of. Specialist forensic and scientific officers, as well as detectives were at the scene on Tuesday evening. Investigators have been interviewing a number of witnesses at nearby police stations with support services also being offered. The State Coroner and the Queensland Government's Forensic Pathologist also attended the scene. Police will prepare a report for the coroner. Dreamworld owners Ardent Leisure shares fell 7.8 per cent on news of the tragedy. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he was 'very saddened to learn of the tragic accident'. 'Theme parks are a place for family fun and happiness, not tragedy. This is a very, very, sad, tragic event. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who lost their lives,' Mr Turnbull said in a statement. 'This is a very sad day, and we trust there will be a thorough investigation into the causes of this accident over the days to follow.' Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said the news was 'heartbreaking'. Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she had heard the scene was 'horrific' and said counsellors were being rushed to Dreamworld to calm the 'many, many witnesses'. Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate said it was a 'very sad day for our city' in a statement. 'Our thoughts are with the families of those affected – and the emergency staff in attendance.' Shocked US Olympic gold medalist Matthew Centrowitz said he had been on the ride just a few minutes before the accident. 'Dude, just got off a ride 15 mins ago that has 1 person seriously injured and 2 others trapped,' he wrote on Twitter. A similar Dreamworld ride called Rocky Hollow Log Ride was shut down in April for a weekend after a man almost drowned, according to The Courier Mail. A Queensland Ambulance spokeswoman said at the time the man swallowed water after he fell from the ride. The Thunder River Rapids ride was built in 1986 and is said to be a 'moderate' with a maximum speed of 45km/h, according to Dreamland. Visitors as young as two-years-old are allowed to go on the ride. People sit on circular rafts that seat six.

I think this is a terrible tragedy because the victims at dreamworld were there to have fun not to die. More needs to be done to test these roller coasters to make sure that it does not happen anymore. Unfortunately it happens too often more than it should and we do not hold these park authorities accountable.


Suicide deaths on the rise in kids —  Since 2007, the rate of suicide deaths among children between the ages of 10 and 14 has doubled, according to new government data released Thursday.   The death rate data, published in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, measured children's fatalities due to motor vehicle traffic injury, homicide and suicide between the years 1999 and 2014. On a positive note, the number of deaths due to motor vehicle traffic, or car crashes, has improved significantly through the years, the report says. In 2014, vehicle fatalities decreased by 58% from 1999, when there were 4.5 deaths per 100,000 children, to 1.2 deaths in 2014. Deaths from homicide have also declined over the same time period, though less dramatically, decreasing from 1.2 fatalities in 1999 to 0.8 in 2014. Conversely, the suicide death rates fluctuated from 1999 to 2007 but rose sharply after 2007. The lowest rate of suicide fatalities was 0.9 deaths per 100,000 kids in 2007, but that number doubled to 2.1, or 425 deaths, in 2014. Dr. Lisa Boesky, a private clinical psychologist and author who studies adolescent suicide, says younger kids will often take their own lives impulsively. Young kids may attempt to harm themselves for different reasons than teens. Most of the time, bad relationships between family and friends provoke kids to hurt themselves, Boesky says. On the other hand, a 14-year-old may kill herself because of a fight with her boyfriend. When looking for the warning signs for suicide in kids, "many people look for signs of depression," Boesky explained. "Teens (who attempt suicide) typically show mood swings and depression, but younger children are much more likely to suffer from (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). "Many people, including medical professionals, think suicide is a teenage problem," Boesky said. "But suicide can happen at very young ages, and we have to talk about this problem with all children." Though it can be more difficult to predict suicide in children, Boesky notes several warning signs. Any increased sadness, irritability or anger should be monitored. Guardians should also pay attention to children who suddenly lose interest in their friends or activities, or begin to isolate themselves more. Finally, adults should tune in to what kids are saying. Take heed if they start saying mean or derogatory things or if they say things like, "I wish I were dead" or "I wish I could go to sleep forever." "These sayings are not normal," Boesky emphasized. For parents, if children start displaying these behaviors, Boesky advises talking to the kids about their feelings and questioning why they feel that way. If the actions worsen, parents may want to contact a pediatrician or counselor. She added, "Although it is important to talk to your children, it is even more important to listen." There is very little research regarding suicide in children in the 10 to 14 age group and younger, according to Boesky. She hopes that the CDC's report will highlight the problem of suicide rates increasing in kids and that both medical professionals and parents will be better prepared to prevent harm before it happens. "This is a wakeup call for more research on why young children are taking their lives and how we can intervene," Boesky said.

We need to stop bullying of kids because in my opinion it is the main culprit in kids committing suicide! We need to find a way to stop that because kids dont deal with peer pressure like us adults do! The faster we find a way to stop this the quicker we find a solution to deaths of kids by suicide methods!


Nigeria investigates reports that officials raped displaced women —  Nigeria has launched an investigation into reports alleging that government officials raped and sexually abused women and girls who survived Boko Haram violence.   The move comes after Human Rights Watch published a report detailing accounts by dozens of women and girls who said they were sexually abused or coerced into sex. The women said they were raped or abused by camp leaders, vigilante group members, policemen and soldiers at camps in Borno State's capital, Maiduguri. The camps were set up to offer aid to people displaced by fighting in Nigeria's northeast. Nigeria's Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, has set up a special team "to immediately commence thorough Investigation into all cases of alleged sexual abuses, exploitation, harassments, gender-based violence and professional misconduct," a statement from the inspector general's office said Thursday. Police: Security at camps to be beefed up Some of the victims had escaped captivity by terror group Boko Haram, only to become victims at the camps where they sought refuge, the rights group said. Many of the women were impregnated by their abusers at the camps. Several victims were drugged before they were raped. The inspector general called on HRW to make available to the investigation team any additional information about the 43 cases of abuse featured in the report that could assist the police inquiry. He has taken measures to beef up security at the camps and said any acts that violate the human dignity of displaced people by individuals or groups in the camps or anywhere in the country will be handled in accordance with the law, according to the statement. Borno State governor: 'We must act now' Following the HRW report, Borno State Gov. Kashim Shettima has revealed plans to request law enforcement agencies to deploy female and male undercover detectives to all camps for internally displaced people in Borno State "to spy on culprits and bring them to book," according to a statement from his office. "Sadly and very sadly indeed, the (Internally Displaced People) camps have become avenues that horrible stories of sexual slavery, prostitution rings, drug peddling and other social vices are emanating from," the governor said. "Sexual harassment of female IDPs is a desperate situation," he said. "None of us would fold arms if his or her daughter is in position to be sexually harassed, so we must act now." Displaced by fighting Dubbed the world's deadliest terror group, Boko Haram has launched attacks in northern Nigeria and surrounding areas for years. More than 20,000 people have been killed since 2009 when the conflict began. Nearly 2.5 million have been displaced. Boko Haram, which in the local Hausa language means "western education is sin," wants to institute a strict form of Sharia law in Nigeria. Its mass abductions and attacks on soft targets, including schools, mosques and churches, have prompted stark international condemnation.

Unfortunately in countries like these the officials are so corrupt you can't expect any justice to be made. I feel like overall it is what makes the most sense to me. Not expecting justice is a normal thing in Nigeria. I feel like there is no two ways about it and overall I feel disappointed that us as a world can only sit back and watch and not do anything about it.


Food, water fears remain year after Brazil mine dam disaster —  COLATINA, Brazil — One year after a dam ruptured and sent a giant wave of metal-laden mud gushing into one of Brazil’s most important rivers, people who live along the banks won’t drink the water and fishermen are afraid to eat their catch. Upward of 10 billion gallons of mud filled with mining waste buried towns in the Nov. 5 dam break that has been described as the worst environmental disaster in Latin America’s largest country. Nineteen people perished. Across 5,000 acres — about six times the size of New York City’s Central Park — the onslaught of mud crushed thousands of trees and wildlife. In the river, more than 14 tons of fish died, mostly after mud got stuck in their gills. An equally large amount of aquatic plants died when turbid waters blocked out the sunlight needed to survive. The environmental damage was so vast that even a year later, many people in the area won’t drink or cook with water from their faucets because, unlike the groundwater, it’s connected to a network of reservoirs the Doce River feeds into. On a recent day, construction worker Samuel Alves de Andrade was among several people lining up outside a hut for well water sourced by an aquifer in the city of Colatina, about 407 miles (655 kilometers) northeast of Rio de Janeiro. “This water is a lot better than what comes from the river. We have to do what’s best for us,” he said as he filled plastic jugs for family members. Fishermen say they’re staying away from the river because they keep finding fish with red spots and wart-like bumps, prompting environmental authorities to launch their own studies. A judge has ordered Samarco— a venture between giants Vale of Brazil and BHP Billiton of Australia— to pay for independent studies, but it’s unclear when results will be released. “I have been fishing in the Doce River waters for more than 30 years, but now I don’t have the guts to eat that fish,” said Jose de Fatima Lemes, president of the Colatina fishermen’s association. Residents and environmental experts say subsequent cleanup efforts by mega mining company Samarco have been slow and ineffective. Doubts also persist about the local government’s assurances that Doce River’s water is safe to consume. “The mud is still all over the banks,” said Andre Dos Santos, a biologist at the Federal University of Sao Carlos who has collected samples along the Doce River since the disaster. “The river will never be the same.” Rich in history and commerce, the Doce River had long been a reliable source of water and food for millions of residents and thousands of companies along its banks. Samarco’s chief officer for sustainable projects, Maury de Souza Jr., said the company is advancing in its cleanup and has not found any water quality problems. Ubaldina Isaac, of Brazil’s environmental ministry, said a key government priority now is to reforest the banks to prevent rainwater from dragging back into the river the mine waste that remains wedged in the dirt. One recent morning, Isaac gestured to some recently planted bushes that had already died or rooted out even before the rainy season had fully kicked off in November. She said the plants should have lasted through the wet season that stretches into the first months of the year. Without sufficient vegetation “we have no system to hold the waste, and so it continues flowing into the river,” she said. Rio Doce was initially feared by Portuguese gold explorers because of the difficulties they encountered navigating its zig-zagging path. But in the 19th century, communities formed along the river’s path through the thick Atlantic rainforest as mining activity and cattle ranching gradually increased. Today, many businesses operate along the Doce, including fishing, steelmaking and companies that produce paper and charcoal. Hundreds of fishermen who lost their livelihood in the disaster receive a monthly compensation of about $400 from Samarco, plus $80 more for each of their dependents. Some say they used to sell their fish for as much as $1,200 a month. On a recent afternoon, fisherman Diomar Lordes visited the river with his son and they sat on the broken wooden boat that carried him through the waters for decades. “I have no hope I will fish here again,” Lordes said. “It’s like we lost a relative. A life ended.” Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Its a sad thing when this happens in teh world. I feel like these disasters can always be prevented but they rarely are. I think overall we need to be more careful and do measures to prevent these things from happening. I feel like the water when it comes from the river is better like it was said in the article.


'Utter devastation' after major quake, aftershocks hit New Zealand —  A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake pummeled central New Zealand early on Monday, killing at least two people, damaging roads and buildings and setting off hundreds of strong aftershocks.   Emergency response teams flew by helicopter to the region at the epicenter of the tremor, which struck just after midnight some 91 km (57 miles) northeast of Christchurch in the South Island, amid reports of injuries and collapsed buildings.   "It's just utter devastation, I just don't know ... that's months of work," New Zealand Prime Minister John Key told Civil Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee after flying over the coastal town of Kaikoura, according to Brownlee's Twitter account. He described landslips in the area as "just horrendous". In a statement seen by Reuters, Key said of the likely damage bill: "You’ve got to believe it’s in the billions of dollars to resolve."   Powerlines and telecommunications were down, with huge cracks in roads, land slips and other damage to infrastructure making it hard to reach the worst-affected areas.   A tsunami warning that led to mass evacuations after the original quake was downgraded after large swells hit New Zealand's capital Wellington, in the North Island, and Christchurch.   Wellington was a virtual ghost town with workers ordered to stay away while the city council assessed the risk to buildings, several of which were damaged by the tremor. There were concerns that loose glass and masonry could be dislodged by severe weather hitting the capital, with 140 km per hour (85 mph) winds forecast.   Hundreds of aftershocks, the strongest a 6.2 quake at about 1.45 p.m. local time (0045 GMT), rattled the South Pacific country, fraying nerves in an area where memories of a deadly 2011 quake are still fresh.   Christchurch, the largest city on New Zealand's ruggedly beautiful South Island, is still recovering from the 6.3 quake in 2011 that killed 185 people.   New Zealand's Civil Defence declared a state of emergency for the Kaikoura region, centered on a tourist town about 150 km (90 miles) northeast of Christchurch, soon after Monday's large aftershock.   Kaikoura, a popular spot for whale watching, appeared to have borne the brunt of the quake. "Our immediate priority is ensuring delivery of clean water, food and other essentials to the residents of Kaikoura and the estimated 1,000 tourists in the town," Brownlee said.   The Navy's multi-role vessel HMNZS Canterbury was heading to the area, he said.   Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) said a 20-person rescue team and two sniffer dogs had arrived in the town. A second team was on standby in Christchurch, USAR said in a statement.   Police in the area around Christchurch reported 19 burglaries of homes and commercial properties after the quake as residents headed for higher ground.   "It is extremely disappointing that at a time when people are facing such a traumatic event and communities are coming together to support one another, there are others who are only interested in taking advantage,” Canterbury District Commander Superintendent John Price said in a statement.   TWIN QUAKES   Hours after the quake, officials said a slip dam caused by the quakes that had blocked the Clarence River north of the town had breached, sending a wall of water downstream.   A group of kayakers missing on the river was later reported safe.   New Zealand's Geonet measured Monday's first quake at magnitude 7.5, while the U.S. Geological Survey put it at 7.8. The quakes and aftershocks rattled buildings and woke residents across the country, hundreds of kilometers from the epicenter.   Geonet said four faults had ruptured, with one at the coast appearing to have slipped as much as 10 meters (33 feet). Government research unit GNS Science said the overnight tremor appeared to have been two simultaneous quakes which together lasted more than two minutes.   New Zealand lies in the seismically active "Ring of Fire", a 40,000 km arc of volcanoes and oceanic trenches that partly encircles the Pacific Ocean. Around 90 percent of the world's earthquakes occur within this region.   Stock exchange operator NZX Ltd said markets traded normally, although many offices in the capital were closed. The New Zealand dollar initially fell to a one-month low before mostly recovering.   Fonterra, the world's biggest dairy exporter, said some its farms were without power and would likely have to dump milk.   Prime Minister Key postponed a trip to Argentina, where he had planned to hold a series of trade meetings ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in Peru this week, as he met disaster officials.   At least one of those killed was found in a house in Kaikoura that "collapsed like a stack of cards", Kaikoura Hospital's Dr Christopher Henry told Fairfax media. Two other people were pulled alive from the same building.   New Zealand media reported one of the pilots taking rescuers to the area was Richie McCaw, the recently retired captain of New Zealand's world champion All Blacks rugby team.   "At one point, the railway was way out over the sea - it had been pushed out by (land) slips. It would not have been a nice place to be at midnight last night," McCaw told the New Zealand Herald after helping fly the USAR team to Kaikoura.

I've personally been involved in a major quake when I was In Mexico City on vacation a few years back. The floor scrambling under me was quite scary and overall one of the most fearful thing. I think it was one of the most dangerous things I have seen in quite some time. I also felt a lot as a kid in california.


'They Were Just Like Us, and They Lost Everything' —  Can empathy for refugees be taught? A few weeks ago, I scrambled to evacuate my area with the only five items I could grab—my phone, passport, water, money, and medicine—in the 30 seconds before I had to flee. Many of the roughly 65 million refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced people around the world today have had to make panicked choices like these; more than 4,000 have died at sea in overcrowded boats and rafts attempting to reach Europe from the Middle East. On Thursday last week, more than 200 additional people lost their lives in two separate shipwrecks off Libya. But my own “escape” was far away from that, on the safety of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had organized the Forced From Home exhibit. The aim was, in part, to put the staggering numbers of the crisis into tangible terms for those of us who don’t have to contemplate actually being forced from home. So I took on the identity of an asylum-seeker from Honduras while my tour guide, Ahmed Abdalrazag, pled with the group to hurry up. If we were really fleeing, he explained, our time would be up and it might be too late. We got on a raft like the ones in which so many have risked, and lost, their lives in recent years—though this one stayed on dry land—and later, we were detained at a fenced border where our various legal classifications determined our future. At each stop, hardships from the journey forced us to give up one item, until we were left empty-handed in front of staged refugee tents—where in real life another series of ordeals await those who make it that far. MSF, or Doctors Without Borders, the international aid group and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is touring the exhibit through five U.S. cities this fall, with a series of West Coast stops planned for next year. So far, according to an MSF spokesman, more than 17,000 people have attended, including over 3,400 students. MSF provides medical and related humanitarian aid in over 60 countries, often in dangerous circumstances—the group describes its mission as assisting “victims of conflict, natural disasters, epidemics, or healthcare exclusion.” In Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan recently, MSF-supported hospitals and the people who work there have themselves been victims of conflict. With the Forced From Home exhibit, MSF is trying to communicate, in concrete terms, the reality of people fleeing from those places and elsewhere, including Burundi, South Sudan, and Central America. Official action to mitigate this reality has been frustratingly slow. It has been more than two years since the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) first reported that the number of displaced people worldwide had surpassed the figures following World War II.  But as my colleague Uri Friedman wrote in September, the UN General Assembly only recently held its inaugural Summit for Refugees and Migrants, and the declaration that emerged from the meeting delays specific measures by UN member states for two more years. The timeline of the UN plan is not comforting to the refugees or concerned observers. The crisis figures are familiar, but remain unfathomable—one in 113 people displaced “by conflict and persecution in 2015;” and 54 percent of 21 million refugees from just three volatile countries: Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia. It’s easy to be numbed by the numbers. Or even actively repelled—across Europe and the United States, 2016 has seen a surge of anti-refugee protests and rhetoric conflatingrefugees and terrorists—sentiments that influence elections and produce significant legislative and societal results. In a sense, the refugee crisis has helped generate a corresponding crisis in empathy. But if national and international political solutions seem sluggish or even impossible, what hope is there for refugees in the meantime if not for the empathy of individuals? Where there is a confluence of human suffering and nationalistic backlash, can empathy be taught, sparked, or successfully deployed? The MSF exhibit can be seen as a test of these questions. It creates an empathetic response by tying the visitor’s experience to an individual’s—each participant is assigned a specific displaced person’s identity, and each tour is given by an aid-worker who has served in an MSF camp. Throughout the journey, the guides share their own personal stories about people they lived with, worked with, and ministered to, further illuminating the individual suffering behind the numbers. Abdalrazag, a physician with MSF originally from Iraq, first got involved with the organization when he was in a camp as a refugee. On his tours, he talks about a friend of his who, after living in a refugee camp tent for years, so desperately missed a wall to lean his back on that he hugged the first wall he saw in his new home. After the tour, Abdalrazag admitted that this was his own experience, one he sometimes obscures because his memories are painful to recount. Another guide, Sarah Khenati, a psychologist with MSF-France who has worked in the Central African Republic (CAR) and the West Bank, shares a story on her tours about a woman who was raped and impregnated while fleeing her home, then involves her groups in the ensuing MSF discussion about how best to treat the woman after her psychotic breakdown. Tatiana Chiarella, an MSF nurse from Brazil who has been touring with the exhibit, explained how she sees the value of these kinds of personal stories: “For people living in the U.S., or even my people in Brazil, we are so far from the situation that you may hear their stories but you don’t realize it could happen to any one of us.” The people she treated “were just like us, they were doctors, nurses, engineers, lawyers, and suddenly this happened—they have war in their countries and they have to flee for their life and for their families—and they lost everything.” Maybe it’s strange to shift the discussion of a massive problem down to the granular level, especially when the world needs a response to match the scale of the crisis. Yet individuals generate a human response that statistics can’t. Updated crisis figures from UNHCR don’t go viral. Images of a drowned Syrian toddler on a beach in Turkey, or a wounded boy in an Aleppo ambulance, do. And they focus observers, however briefly, on the human cost of conflict.   Still, the problem is bigger than the tragedies of Alan Kurdi and Omran Daqneesh, so the question remains whether concentrating on a single victim can generate an empathy that expands to include others suffering outside those particular frames. According to Jamil Zaki, assistant professor of psychology and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, even though empathy is a fundamental human emotion, people are not exactly wired for a globalized response. “When we evolved, we were in small groups of interdependent individuals, so the people that you would run into and subsequently empathize with were probably family or extended family,” he explained. “And nowadays, we’re given the unprecedented opportunity to empathize, reach out to and help, not just the people who are right around us, but people all around the world. That’s a really enormous challenge as well as an opportunity, and I think that sometimes, our more evolutionarily old or primitive … emotional responses are not really perfectly designed for the modern world.” This is even true of people who are already inclined to be sympathetic to refugees—the people, in other words, likely to visit an exhibit like MSF’s in the first place. On the tour I took, I met Cameron, a student from Charleston, South Carolina, who said: “It pains me to see how unaccepting communities can be of refugees especially when a good amount of people in the U.S. can trace their ancestry to people who left their home because of economic or political issues.” He added, “I think it definitely made me more empathetic and understanding because you only get so much information from the news and other media sources.” U.S. President Barack Obama, in his 2006 Northwestern University commencement speech, called attention to what he saw as a national “empathy deficit.” He advised the graduates that, in a culture that does not encourage empathy, “as you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier.  There’s no community-service requirement in the real world; no one forcing you to care. You’ll be free to live in neighborhoods with people who are exactly like yourself, and send your kids to the same schools, and narrow your concerns to what’s going in your own little circle.” That warning came 10 years ago; five years before the Syrian Civil War began, and eight years before UNHCR first identified a new record in the number of refugees worldwide. As David Desteno wrote for The Atlantic last summer, a recent study from the University of Michigan found, based on empathy assessments of 13,000 college students between 1979 and 2009, that “levels of compassion and empathy are lower now than at any time in the past 30 years, and perhaps most alarming, they are declining at an increasing rate.” If we think of empathy as malleable, it’s an emotion that we can actively choose to engage with and develop. The barrier that the MSF exhibit and other calls to empathy might bump up against is our basic wiring: If our relationship to empathy is naturally individual and impulsive—Zaki describes it as “staccato”—how do we create the sustained empathy suited to an ongoing and outsized crisis? Will the impact of an exhibit like Forced from Home—or photos of children whose lives have been ended or upended by war—be momentary or lasting? And what difference does any one person’s feelings make to finding a genuine solution? Some of the answers may lie in the way we think about empathy. If we think of it as malleable, it’s an emotion that we can actively choose to engage with and develop. Zaki emphasizes that empathy can be strengthened with practice: “Empathy is under our control more than we think it is. ... It’s our responsibility to exercise empathy responsibly, and it’s an opportunity for us to connect with more and more people if we work hard at building it.” Most importantly, Zaki says, “convincing people that they can build their empathy actually helps them to build [it].” He points to training programs that can change people’s responses to others’ suffering. A sampling of these empathy interventions across the country range from increasing care for homeless people in the Bay Area, to teaching empathy in middle schools to prevent bullying, to training police officers in Washington state to have compassion for citizens with mental illness so that they can be helped or hospitalized rather than arrested, though it’s too early to judge their effects. The refugee and the empathy crises can—but don’t have to—leave us with an action crisis. Even if MSF succeeds in generating empathy, the feeling by itself is not a solution. Still, it’s hard to see how there can be a solution without it.

Its really sad when these types of things happen. I feel like we need to do more to help these sort of people. I also understand that they are human like us and they have feelings too. Doctors without Borders does what it can  but it can only do so much without external help. The fact  that they are displaced by conflict and persecution makes me feel like we need to help countries first.


TRAGEDY: Tampa man lost wife, 2 children, in horrific crash that killed 5 —  TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — The heartache of losing a loved one in a sudden, unexpected moment is devastating.   The shock is jarring and confusing. Families and friends are left with broken hearts and aching spirits. Losing one person is painful. But, for a Tampa husband, the grief is paralyzing and unbearable.   On Wednesday night, John Bernal lost his wife, his youngest daughter and his youngest son in a horrific car accident on MLK.   Mother Marianela Murillo and her two youngest children, John Bernal, Jr.  and Isabell Bernal, along with her teenager, Lina Bernal, were returning home from church when they were hit head-on in a fiery crash.   Their minivan burst into flames with the family trapped inside. The teenage daughter and her cousin visiting from Colombia, Luisa Louisa, were the only ones to survive in that van.   A relative began sobbing as she recalled the events while speaking to WFLA at Tampa General Hospital.   “My biggest thing is, I hope they didn’t suffer,” Gisela Martinez cried. “The car did catch on fire, and there were children in that car.”   While eyewitnesses claim it was street racing, the Florida Highway Patrol says there’s no evidence to prove it.   However, troopers say that the young man who caused the accident, 22-year-old Pablo Cortes III, was traveling at a high rate of speed when he lost control of his Volkswagen Golf. Both he and his passenger, Jolie Bartolome, were killed.   Family members are heartbroken and their hearts go out to the husband who lost his wife and two children.   “He’s suffering right now. He’s in pieces. I don’t wish this upon anybody at all. I mean, he is really in pieces,” said Mizrah Medina, a cousin.

this is just sad no one expects to die in a crash like this. I feel like overall it is very depressing and just quite sad. The fact that Lina was returning home from church when they were hit makes it even sadder. I feel like they need to find a way to prevent these crashes although it is quite hard for me to pinpoint exactly what to do.


Billy Bob Thornton says he 'never felt good enough' for Angelina Jolie —  Billy Bob Thornton is opening up about his three-year marriage to Angelina Jolie as the 41-year-old actress is in the midst of a divorce from Brad Pitt.   The 61-year-old actor married Jolie, who is 20 years his junior, in 2000 after the two met on set of the 1999 movie, "Pushing Tin." They separated in June 2002 and divorced the following year.   "I never felt good enough for her," Thornton tells November issue of GQ magazine. The Oscar winner says Jolie's high-profile life wasn't his speed, and that he's "real uncomfortable around rich and important people."   That being said, Thornton adds that he's still friends with his ex-wife and speaks to her every few months.   In 2014, the actor told The Hollywood Reporter that he was "not fond" of that "crazy time" when he was married to Jolie, which included wearing vials of each other's blood around their necks. "Vial of blood is very simple," he explained. "You know those lockets you buy that are clear and you put a picture of your grannie in and wear it around your neck? She bought two of those. We were apart a lot because she's off making Tomb Raider and I'm making Monster's Ball. She thought it would be interesting and romantic if we took a little razor blade and sliced our fingers, smeared a little blood on these lockets and you wear it around your neck just like you wear your son or daughter's baby hair in one. Same thing."   After her split with Thornton, Jolie struck up a relationship with Pitt after meeting him on set of their 2005 film, "Mr. & Mrs. Smith." In September of this year, Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt after two years of marriage and 11 years together. Just this week, the 52-year-old actor was cleared of child abuse allegations by Department of Child and Family Services.   In a statement to ET, Jolie's rep said the mother of six was "relieved" that the investigation had concluded, and that her focus has always been the health of the family.

This tends to happen a lot in relationships. It seems like a lot of people don't feel good enough for the other person and this tends to lead to these feelings. I feel like everyone goes through this and it is up to us to change that by thinking positively more so than not. I feel like pressure from others leads to these negative feelings.


Haze from Indonesian fires may have killed more than 100,000 people – study —  Harvard and Columbia universities estimate tens of thousands of premature deaths in areas closest to blazes clearing forest and peatland A smog outbreak in Southeast Asia last year may have caused over 100,000 premature deaths, according to a new study released Monday that triggered calls for action to tackle the “killer haze”. Researchers from Harvard and Columbia universities in the US estimated there were more than 90,000 early deaths in Indonesia in areas closest to haze-belching fires, and several thousand more in neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia. The new estimate, reached using a complex analytical model, is far higher than the previous official death toll given by authorities of just 19 deaths in Indonesia. “If nothing changes, this killer haze will carry on taking a terrible toll, year after year,” said Greenpeace Indonesia forest campaign Yuyun Indradi. “Failure to act immediately to stem the loss of life would be a crime.” A spokesman for Indonesia’s environment ministry did not immediately have any comment. Indonesian authorities have previously insisted they are stepping up haze-fighting efforts, through such actions as banning the granting of new land for palm oil plantations and establishing an agency to restore devastated peatlands. The haze is an annual problem caused by fires set in forest and on carbon-rich peatland in Indonesia to quickly and cheaply clear land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations. The blazes occur mainly on Indonesia’s western Sumatra island and the Indonesian part of Borneo, with monsoon winds typically blowing the haze over Singapore and Malaysia. But last year’s fires were among the worst in memory and cloaked large parts of the region in choking smog for weeks, causing huge numbers to fall ill and sending diplomatic tensions soaring. The new study to be published in journal Environmental Research Letters, which combined satellite data with models of health impacts from smoke exposure and readings from pollution monitoring stations, estimated that 100,300 had died prematurely due to last year’s fires across the three countries. They estimated there were 91,600 deaths in Indonesia, 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore. Greenpeace hailed a “groundbreaking” study they said for the first time gave a detailed breakdown of deaths from last year’s fires, but cautioned that the figure was a “conservative estimate”. It only looked at health impacts on adults and the effect of dangerous fine-particulate matter, known as PM 2.5. It did not examine the effect on youngsters or of the other toxins produced by the blazes. In reality, infants are some of the most at risk from the haze, said Nursyam Ibrahim, from the West Kalimantan province branch of the Indonesian Medical Association on Borneo. “We are the doctors who care for the vulnerable groups exposed to toxic smoke in every medical centre, and we know how awful it is to see the disease symptoms experienced by babies and children in our care,” said Ibrahim. The study found an increase in the number of fires in peatland and in timber concessions in 2015, compared to the last haze outbreak considered major, in 2006, and that the number of fires in palm oil plantations fell. Shannon Koplitz, a Harvard scientist who worked on the study, said she also hoped the model they had developed could help those involved with tackling the annual blazes make quick decisions “as extreme haze events are unfolding”. Last year’s haze outbreak was the worst since 1997 due to a strong El Nino weather system, which created tinder-dry conditions in Indonesia and made peatland and forests more vulnerable to going up in flames.       Article Title:Samoa hit by hail storm so rare residents thought it was a hoax   Article URL:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/19/samoa-hit-by-hail-storm-so-rare-residents-thought-it-was-a-hoax   Article author(s)Eleanor Ainge Roy   Article date:Monday 19 September 2016 00.11 EDT   News source: theguardian    Meteorologist forced to release satellite images of the storm to convince some locals that the hail wasn’t part of a practical joke Samoa has been hit by a hail storm so rare that it was believed to be a hoax by many of the island’s inhabitants. The tropical nation of Samoa lies in the Pacific Ocean, where the average temperature at this time of year is 29C. But on Friday evening an unexpected hail storm struck the eastern side of the island of Savai’i, accompanied by heavy rain and strong wind gusts. It was only the second time since records began that hail has fallen on Samoa, the first was in 2011. The storm lasted 10 to 15 minutes and produced hail stones roughly 2cm wide. “The ice was very small and there were no reports of damage,” said Luteru Tauvale, principal meteorologist for the Samoan Meteorology Service. “Because it was so unexpected a lot of people thought it had been invented. We had to release satellite images of the conditions that led to to the hail for people to believe it was real.” Samoans took to social media to share their photos of the hail, many voicing disbelief at the incident, and then saying it was the “first time” they had been convinced of the the phenomenon of climate change. “Climate change is here!” wrote one Samoan on Facebook. “More like we have just woken up to the fact it had been with us for a while but we refuse to accept/believe it.” Hailstorms form within a unusually unstable air mass in which the temperature falloff with height is much greater than normal.       Article Title:Dozens dead and missing after typhoon lashes eastern China     Article URL:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/18/dozens-dead-and-missing-after-typhoon-lashes-eastern-china   Article author(s)   Article date:Saturday 17 September 2016 22.40 EDT   News source: theguardian    Typhoon Meranti has damaged more than 18,300 houses and caused direct economic losses of more than 16.9bn yuan ($2.5bn)   The strongest typhoon to hit China this year has left 28 people dead and 15 others missing in the east of the country. Typhoon Meranti made landfall early Thursday in Fujian province after winds and rains associated with it pounded Taiwan, leaving one person dead and more than 50 injured. Authorities in Fujian said Saturday that the typhoon had left 18 people dead and 11 missing, damaged more than 18,300 houses and caused direct economic losses of more than 16.9 billion yuan ($2.5bn).   Authorities in neighboring Zhejiang province say that 10 people died and four remained unaccounted for following landslides and flash floods in rural areas. Taiwan saw wind and rain from a second typhoon, Malakas, that caused no apparent deaths.

The fires that killed more than 100,000 people just disappoint me honestly. I feel like overall there has to be a better way to go about things this is just depressing and we need to find better ways to help them out. I feel like there needs to be people held accountable for this just leaving it like this is not going to cut it.


Visitors bring trouble to Norway's polar bears —  Officials in Norway say an increasing number of visitors to their Arctic region have triggered an increase in the number of endangered polar bears killed. Diane Hodges reports on efforts to protect the bears. Video provided by Reuters

We as a whole community of human beings must come together to save this beautiful majestic animals. WE have obviously not learned our lesson of past animal extinctions and still put endangered animals in even more danger. Norway should put out strict laws for visitors and harsh sentences should they break these laws as well!


With Much Sadness We Report Baby Isibindi Has Passed —  Rhino Update From Thula Thula Rhino Orphanage: It is with many tears, a heavy heart and very mixed emotions that I write that little Isibindi passed away shortly before midnight after a very, very rough 56 hours. She went through such deep sadness in her short life. I was so hoping and fighting to give her a second chance at life. A part of me feels a deep relief – the last two days were very difficult and she had so much to cope with. Little Bindi left this earth lying in my arms (the orphanage had no power so I wrapped us both in a duvet to keep her warm) It never gets easier. RIP little Bindi – may your spirit fly free! To the team on the ground here – humbled and proud. I have been with Isibindi constantly since she arrived a few days ago with no water, no power, wet cold conditions and security issues, this young and amazing group have made sure that the other rhinos have been cared for. Thank you to: Axel Tarifa, Shannon Westphal- very special people and Steven and Nicole. May God Bless all of the orphaned babies who are fighting for their life! -WAN

This is just depressing because the little rhino was a famous one. I feel like I lost a pet of mine to be honest. It seems this rhino was quite important and when someone like that goes it is quite depressing and hard to put in to words.The fact the orphanage had no power is depressing. We need to do better