Haiti : A Nightmare Beyond Comprehension

Appalling scenes, as bodies are piled in the street and moved by diggers and bulldozers into trucks for transportation to mass graves.



Hundreds of thousands homeless in a city with no water, no food, nowhere to go :


A two day wait at hospitals, few working toilets or showers. Now the mass cremations have begun.

New York Times photographer Damon Winter (here for his photo gallery) :

"People are out on the street at night...all night you could hear them singing prayers. It’s pretty amazing the ways that people are dealing with this tragedy. It says a lot about the Haitian character. They are an amazing people."

The death toll looks likely to rise beyond 50,000.

The War On Terror : Sell The Fear, However Misplaced

A poignant, reality-shattering piece from Gary Younge that didn't get anything like the attention and Redditing and Digging that it should have (excerpts) :

"Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack," explains Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. During the Bush years that terror was routinely leveraged for the purposes of social control, military mobilisation and electoral advantage. Meanwhile, the administrative processes that might prevent the next attack were tragically lacking. In short, Bush's anti-terror strategy was not about protecting people but about scaring them.

To galvanise the nation for war abroad and sedate it for repression at home, the previous administration constructed a terror threat that was ubiquitous in character, apocalyptic in scale and imminent in nature. Only then could they counterpose human rights against security as though they were not only contradictory but mutually exclusive.

Al-Qaida was only too happy to oblige. In such a state of perpetual crisis both terrorists and reactionaries thrive. Terrorists successfully create a climate of fear; governments successfully exploit that fear to extend their own powers.

"I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it," said former vice-president Dick Cheney.

....in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the US government undertook the "preventative detention" of about 5,000 men on the basis of their birthplace and later sought a further 19,000 "voluntary interviews". Over the next year, more than 170,000 men from 24 predominantly Muslim countries and North Korea were fingerprinted and interviewed in a programme of "special registration". None of these produced a single terrorism conviction.

This set the pattern for the years to come: wiretapping, rendition, torture, secrecy. Those who otherwise rail against the inefficiency of government argued for more extensive, intrusive state power even as it produced little in the way of results. When confronted with this lamentable record, their only defence was the threat of the next attack. "The next time, the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud" said Condoleezza Rice, adding. "They only have to be right once. We have to be right every time." Over the last week even once in a while would have looked good.

Al-Qaida is now more likely to be found in Pakistan, an American ally, than in Afghanistan and the latest threat came via Yemen. Terrorism is a strategy, not a place – attempts to carpet-bomb it or occupy it or conquer it will inevitably fail.

Thanks to war and torture it has swelled the number of people who might want to do it harm.

Read The Full Story Here

First New Zealand Woman to ski to South Pole

In this photo taken Friday, Jan. 1, 2010, the participants of Kaspersky Commonwealth all women South Pole expedition, pose with the expedition founder, CEO of Britain's Kaspersky Lab, Russian born Eugene Kaspersky, at base camp in Patriot Hills in Antarctica, after their 904-Km (562-miles) cross-country skiing expedition. Eight women from the Commonwealth countries of Cyprus, Ghana, India, Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand, Jamaica and Britain took part in the ski expedition across Antarctica, arriving at the South Pole on Tuesday, Dec. 29, 2009. One of the eight, Kim-Marie Spence, 30, from Jamaica, was forced to quit the adventure after suffering frostbite just three days into the 40-day journey.

A Twizel woman who was part of an all-female expedition to ski to the South Pole has just returned home - mission accomplished.
Kylie Wakelin only got the call to go on the expedition in October but says it was a real adventure that also brought with it some unexpected pay-offs.
While Wakelin may be New Zealand’s first woman to ski to the South Pole she says she never set out to collect lofty titles.
“Really for me the journey was what it was all about and the relationship I've formed with the girls has been far more moving and significant for me than I thought it would be” she said.

Kylie Wakelin arrived at Christchurch airport yesterday afternoon, Friday 15 January 2010

When the initial squad of 16 began training in Norway last February it highlighted the huge task ahead.
Once they were underway the group of 8 quickly became 7 - one member was forced to pull out due to frost bite.
Wakelin said “That was a huge wakeup call for us and it was like this is serious stuff, you can't relent for 10 minutes because it's so cold” she said.
The dangers were also very real for Wakelin’s anxious mum Maye Dunn.
“It was a worry for a start but as she got into it we weren't quite so worried” she said.
Wakelin says while she was on the ice she dreamed of relaxing beach holidays and marmite on toast but she's already planning her next Arctic adventure


The team at the South Pole

Each woman has towed an 80-kilogram sled loaded with food, fuel and equipment for the past 39 days - skiing for six to 10 hours a day - to travel nearly 900 kilometres to the pole and mark the 60th anniversary of the Commonwealth.
The group was airlifted from the pole back to their starting point, a commercial expedition base at Patriot Hills, before flying back to London via Chile.
The women will soon have their first showers since November 12, with each rationed to one baby-wipe tissue a day for hygiene.
Wakelin stepped in as New Zealand's representative in early October after the expedition's British leader, Felicity Aston, axed a New Zealand Army doctor, Major Charmaine Tate, 33.
Tate had trained for the expedition with the international team in Norway and New Zealand.
Aston said at the time that the "team dynamics weren't quite right, so I decided to change the personnel before the team got anywhere near the Ice".
Wakelin was selected after spending 16 years running Glacier Explorers' boat trips in the small lake at the foot of the Tasman Glacier and taking part in ski-touring and mountaineering expeditions, as well as working for the British Antarctic Survey.
Christchurch was an appropriate place for Kylie to arrive after her historic expedition.
Explorers associated with both Christchurch and Antarctica include Robert Falcon Scott who left from the port of Lyttelton to again try to reach the South Pole after his earlier attempt had failed. Terra Nova returned to the port in 1913 bringing news of the death of Scott and his four companions on their way back from the South Pole.

Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole in 1911 and later gave a popular public lecture in Christchurch. In gratitude to the Canterbury Museum for their help, he donated the penknife used to cut the flagstaff marking the South Pole; and Irishman Ernest Shackleton who first travelled to Antarctica with Scott but was invalided out and later tried again with his own expedition on Nimrod.

For people bought up in Christchurch during the 50s and 60s – a period of intense activity in the Antarctic – ‘Operation Deep Freeze’ and the early morning sound of DC3s heading ‘to the ice’ are part of our imbedded personal history and its seems highly appropriate the International Antarctic Centre should be sited there.
Monika Kristensen, the Norwegian glaciologist passed through Christchurch in 1986/87 en route to Antarctica with her dog team.

For me, I left Christchurch for Antarctica in October 1969 where I spent 13 months at the remote Vanda Station in the Wright Dry Valley. So Christchurch as a gate way to Antarctica has an emotional attachment for many of us who have spent time in Antarctica.

Congratulations Kylie for a wonderful achievement. We are immensely proud of you.

It's not every day you see a gunman in a wheelchair surrendering to a police robot :





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Earthquake in Haiti

Paul Conneally my colleague and friend in Geneva should have arrived in Haiti by now. Here is his latest posting from his blog:

The news reached me as it happened, at around 23h00 Geneva time. Twitter and Skype burst into action and since then it has been non-stop (hence the delayed blog post altho I have managed to tweet a bit with the emphasis on sharing content).
I began this job in August 2008 and the first major disaster I was involved in was the horrendous suffering caused by the Hurricane season in 2008 which repeatedly battered Haiti and sparked off several fatal landslides. Four major hurricanes - Gustave, Fay, Hanna and Ike - cruelly emptied their cargo ontop of the population, stripping away 98% of the top soil and the rampaging waters killed more than one thousand people.


For this to happen in any country would set it back a generation but to happen in Haiti, the most impoverished and under developed country in the world - well this was simply cruel and disproportionate. Almost impossible to get back up on your feet again. But Haitians are resilient people and arise they did though understandably still haunted by hurricanes. And now, to fall victim to a devastating earthquake is the cruelest of blows to this struggling nation (interesting that we don't name earthquakes - surely they are worthy of such acknowledgement?).


From an operational point of view our local partners, the Haitian Red Cross, have been hit hard - buildings (where we also have our offices) damaged and personnel still missing. Nevertheless, their first instinct was to clear the rubble and set up an operational centre to tend to the wounded with emergency first aid and reinforce the search and rescue operation with their 2000 or so trained volunteers. Focus was also placed in parallel on getting operational, assessing the situation and coordinating the 'surge' capacity needed to boost water, shelter, food and medical activities.


It has been an incredible 36 hours or so. From a media point of view there is a level of interest of tsunami proportions. We have done interviews around the clock with all major news and media networks including CNN, New York Times, Al Jazeera and BBC et al. We also managed to get some great photos out which were used widely on as leads on all major news networks and this morning we received these images from our first proper aerial assessment. The photos were taken by American Red Cross delegate Matt Merrick on the ground and I found them to be extremely intimate and compassionate, retaining full respect for the dignity of the people and not preying on gore and horror like so many others.

Our next big challenge will be to provide our national red cross and red crescent societies around the world with compelling content to support their national fund raising drives, as well of course to maintain and feed the media interest and help to tell the story of Haiti as honestly as possible. I am leaving in the next hours for Haiti via Santo Domingo and will do my best to post from their, certainly thru my Twitter account. At times like this you realize the privilege it is to have an opportunity to contribute to such an important humanitarian operation - I am especially looking forward to supporting, working alongside and learning from my colleagues with Haiti Red Cross. Stay Tuned.
PC
If you want to read Paul's blog, go to Favourite Blogs on my home page. Bob

Haiti. The earthquake :



The aftermath :



The prime minister of Haiti worries that "hundreds of thousands may have been killed."

Hey Now, Don't Go Forgetting Who Made All Those Pretty Trees....

The Vatican reviews Avatar, with some hard-to-hide nervousness about how religiously influential the movie, and its sequels and prequels and vidgames and TV series and books, its eco-theology, will become, or what they might inspire :

"(Avatar) gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature."

"...it cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium."

"So much stupefying, enchanting technology, but few genuine emotions...."

"Everything is reduced to an overly simple anti-imperialistic and anti-militaristic parable."

"Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship."

The Vatican is afraid of the competition.

It's crystal clear already that eco-worship, what I and many others have described as 'Green Jesus', will become the most popular, and most powerful, religious movement in the second half of the 21st century.



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