Half of the women in the world give birth without skilled assistance. To meet their needs it is estimated 334,000 more midwives are needed worldwide. Without then, it is estimated 529,000 women worldwide die in chilldbirth or from related conditions every year.
Bald facts – hideous human pain.
(Thanks Harry!) A nifty little web version of a booklet on waste from the UN Environment Programme. It is particularly good on bottled water – possibly the most ridiculous commodity to be shipped around the world: worldwide trade by value rose 25% between 2002 and 2004.
No, it is a flying squirrel – dodging the Pterodactyli back when mammals were still young.
It has been named Volatico therium antiquus, meaning ancient gliding beast, and was so well preserved that impressions of fur and part of a skin membrane survive in the rock in which it was found.
The animal, being light and boasting large skin membranes that stretched between the limbs, was one of the most accomplished gliders known.
It is by far the earliest mammalian flier discovered and predates the earliest known bat, which is 51 million years old, by more than 70 million years. The earliest gliding rodent is 30 million years old.
British people often express astonishment that I should chose to live in London rather than Australia. Well I lived in Tamworth, NSW, Australia for two years, and this story doesn’t surprise me at all. But it does provide you with a pretty fair hint as to the explanation for my decision – Australia has gone politically and socially backward over the past decade.
Tamworth City Council voted this week to spurn an offer by the Department of Immigration to resettle the families [five Sudanese refugee families] for fear it could lead to a repetition of the Cronulla riots, said the Mayor, James Treloar.
Cr Treloar told the Herald people were worried that allowing the families to move to Tamworth “could lead to a Cronulla riots-type situation. Ask the people at Cronulla if they want more refugees.”
He added that “of the 12 Sudanese people who live in Tamworth, eight have been before the courts for everything from dangerous driving to rape. These people don’t respect authority … they come from countries where there are outbreaks of TB [tuberculosis] and polio. How can we trust the department to screen those things?”
The council lacked the health services to support the families, he said. Claims that racist elements had guided the vote were “a media beat-up”, he said.
This is not some tiny Hicksville, but a city of more than 100,000 – one of the biggest in country NSW.
Santa’s home is melting: children and parents flying to Lapland this year are finding not the usual heavy snowdrifts and -20C temperatures, but messy slush.
A spokesman for First Choice holidays, the British tour operator that takes thousands of Britons to Lapland, said yesterday that the conditions were “incredibly unusual”. However, they have occurred in the week that US scientists warned that the Arctic region is now warming so fast that all the ice in the Arctic ocean, which covers the North Pole, could melt away in as little as 35 years – meaning extinction for polar bears, which depend on the floating ice to hunt.
Now I wonder how all of those Briton tourists got there? Yes, that was a rhetorical question – of course they flew, adding to the greenhouse gases that are destroying the very thing they went to see.
At home, it is going to be the warmest year in Britain on record.
The record year has astounded scientists. “What’s phenomenal about this year is that some of these months have broken records by incredible amounts. This year it was 0.8C warmer in autumn and 0.5C warmer between April and October than the previous warmest years. Normally these records are broken by around one tenth of a degree or so,” said Prof Jones.
But it is no surprise to the geranium on my (rather windy and east-facing) balcony – it is still actively flowering now – when it should be dead from cold.
There’s talk of the government introducing personal carbon rationing (gosh, wonder where they got that from, surely not Green Party policy…), but some people have started already, with carbon rationing action groups.
A CRAG is a group of people who have decided to act together to reduce their individual and collective carbon footprints. They do this in annual cycle. First they set themselves an annual emissions target or “carbon ration”. Then they keep track of their emissions over the year by keeping a record of their household energy use and private car and plane travel.
Finally, at the end of the year, they take responsibility for any “carbon debt” (i.e. emissions over and above their ration) that they have built up. All carbon debts are paid into the group’s “carbon fund” at an agreed rate per kilo of CO2 debt. The fund is then distributed as agreed by the members of the group.
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