There really isn't much anyone can say anymore about the horror. As always, hard working photojournalists have captured this moment as a nation mourns and rallies to help its neighbors in Oklahoma. Click here for more photographs and photographer credits.
The damage from this mile wide monster tornado is massive. Some long time observers describe it as the worse they have seen. Here is the first clear video of the tornado. It was hard to get clear shots because it was so massive and rain-wrapped.
Warning in second video you can hear people cry for help. Just click on the second one to start it.
Yesterday saw well over two dozen tornado's hit across five states. Some towns, like Shawnee (Oklahoma), saw massive damage. Two of the weather communities most famous personalities and icons, the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore and Storm Chaser Reed Timmer, were in Oklahoma following the storm.
What resulted was this both terrifying and exciting video.
The Department of Environmental Affairs in South Africa announced that last week nineteen rhino were killed in Kruger National park. This brings the total for the first months of this year to 313 in South Africa. At this rate, it is expected the death toll from poaching in South Africa alone could surpass 1,000 this year alone. This would be up almost 40% over last year's total.
Kruger has been particularly hard hit with 229 rhino's killed. Just two weeks ago it was announced that the very last rhino was killed in Limpopo National Park in Mozambique which adjoins Kruger.
In other poaching news, over two dozen elephants were massacred at a world heritage park in Central Africa. It is the first time that the poacher syndicate has hit this park. Last year over 25,000 elephants were killed by poachers.
At the current pace, it is estimated that elephants and rhino will no longer exist in the wild within 15 years.
MailOnline has published animations by Google which shows the impact that man has had on our planet in just less than three decades. The animations take you from 1982 to 2012. You can see desert's changed in front of your eyes. Forests disappear from the earth. Lakes vanish in just a decade.
Watch and learn and then speak out!
Hurricane Sandy was the biggest (in size) Atlantic hurricane ever to travel up the East Coast and it slammed into New York and New Jersey happen just six months ago. While others states were heavily impacted, areas around metropolitan New York City were devastated. Tens of thousands of homes were destroyed along the coast. It was the worse weather disaster in the history of New York City. New Jersey had its worst hurricane in its history.
Over 250 people died in the path of the hurricane and it was the second most costly storm to every hit America. Only Katrina did more damage in its attack on the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Ike comes in at a close third. An estimated $70 billion was tallied by the all the impacted areas from storm Sandy.
Now Six months have passed and still the devastation is everywhere but progress is being made by the communities. Hospitals have reopened, transit systems are working, shelter is provided for everyone and New York city tunnels are no longer filled with water. However if you journey down to the sea the impact of Hurricane Sandy is still seen everywhere. There are glimmers of rebuilding taking place and some seaside cities will be fully operational by summer.
Boston.com's Big Picture this week did a photo essay on the area six months later.
YOU CAN SEE ALL THE PHOTOGRAPHS, CREDITS AND DESCRIPTINS BY CLICKING HERE>>>>>
If you hope to see a rhino in the wild, you can now cross off Mozambique's Limpopo National Park. Poachers have just killed the very last rhino in that national park. Just ten years ago when Limpopo was formed, there were 300 rhino. Now there is not even one left. Unless drastic action is taken soon, it will be soon the reality in most national parks in Africa.
The Mozambique park ispart of the famous 'Peace Park' that also straddles South Africa and Zimbabwe. The South African portion, Kruger National Park, has seen 180 rhino poached since January 1 of this year. Already there has been 250 rhino killed in all of South Africa.
News24 reports:
The IFAW will later this year partner with Interpol in providing training for customs and wildlife law enforcement officers in Mozambique.
This forms part of a worldwide capacity building initiative.
IFAW has since 2006 trained more than 1 600 government representatives at the forefront of the struggle against wildlife crime in several countries throughout Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania and the Caribbean.
The IFAW director for Southern Africa, Jason Bell, said: "“Cross border co-operation and intelligence-led enforcement are the only way we can halt poaching and trafficking.
"It is too big a problem for any one country to tackle.
"We need range states, transit countries and destination countries to share their law enforcement resources, including intelligence, or we’ll never be in a position to shut down the kingpins of the international ivory trade.
"Poaching and the illegal trade in ivory and rhino horn is an issue of global significance and needs a global response if we are to turn the tables on the killers.
"This cannot happen in a vacuum.
"Consumer nations – China, Vietnam and Indonesia – have to make a concerted effort to reduce the demand for these products in their own backyards because otherwise the battle will be lost."
Middle age seems to get older and older with each new generation. In my childhood, people in their sixties were considered very old. As time progresses, sixties is a prime time now. People now expect to live well into their eighties. Of course, some of that can be chalked up to advance medicine and changing environmental surroundings. Americans are no longer plowing their fields with mules and digging trenches by with a shovel and pick.
However, the science of longevity has grown as people want to seize on to life for longer and longer periods. People who do reach that rarefied level pass 110 are always asked for their secret of life. Some say it is no alcohol and others say they have a glass of wine every day. What is clear is the number of people reaching over 100 is increasing by leaps and bounds. Willard Scott is soon going to have to get a bigger Smucker's jar for his Today Show acknowledgements of those past 100 years.
National Geographic has recently run an article on the science being conducted around aging. Here is an excerpt.
In Calabria the hunt for hidden molecules and mechanisms that confer longevity on people like Salvatore Caruso begins in places like the Ufficio Anagrafe Stato Civile (Civil Registry Office) in the medieval village of Luzzi. The office windows here offer stunning views of snow-covered mountains to the north, but to a population geneticist the truly breathtaking sights are hidden inside the tall file cabinets ringing the room and on shelf after shelf of precious ledgers numbered by year, starting in 1866. Despite its well-earned reputation for chaos and disorganization, the Italian government, shortly after the unification of the country in 1861, ordered local officials to record the birth, marriage, and death of every citizen in each comune, or township.
Since 1994 scientists at the University of Calabria have combed through these records in every one of Calabria’s 409 comuni to compile an extraordinary survey. Coupling family histories with simple physiological measurements of frailty and the latest genomic technologies, they set out to address fundamental questions about longevity. How much of it is determined by genetics? How much by the environment? And how do these factors interact to promote longevity—or, conversely, to hasten the aging process? To answer all those questions, scientists must start with rock-solid demographic data.
“Here is the book from 1905,” explained Marco Giordano, one of Giuseppe Passarino’s young colleagues, opening a tall, green ledger. He pointed to a record, in careful cursive, of the birth of Francesco D’Amato on March 3, 1905. “He died in 2007,” Giordano noted, describing D’Amato as the central figure, or proband, of an extensive genealogical tree. “We can reconstruct the pedigrees of families from these records.”
Cross-checking the ledger entries against meticulously detailed registry cards (pink for women, white for men) going back to the 19th century, Giordano, along with researchers Alberto Montesanto and Cinzia Martino, has reconstructed extensive family trees of 202 nonagenarians and centenarians in Calabria. The records document not only siblings of people who lived to 100 but also the spouses of siblings, which has allowed Passarino’s group to do a kind of historical experiment on longevity. “We compared the ages of D’Amato’s brothers and sisters to the ages of their spouses,” Giordano explained. “So they had the same environment. They ate the same food. They used the same medicines. They came from the same culture. But they did not have the same genes.” In a 2011 paper the Calabrian researchers reported a surprising conclusion: Although the parents and siblings of people who lived to at least 90 also lived longer than the general population, a finding in line with earlier research, the genetic factors involved seemed to benefit males more than females.
The Calabrian results on gender offer yet another hint that the genetic twists and turns that confer longevity may be unusually complex. Major European studies had previously reported that women are much likelier to live to 100, outnumbering male centenarians by a ratio of four or five to one, with the implication that some of the reasons are genetic. But by teasing out details from family trees, the Calabrian researchers discovered an intriguing paradox: The genetic component of longevity appears to be stronger in males—but women may take better advantage of external factors such as diet and medical care than men do.
In the dimly lit, chilly hallway outside Passarino’s university office stand several freezers full of tubes containing centenarian blood. The DNA from this blood and other tissue samples has revealed additional information about the Calabrian group. For example, people who live into their 90s and beyond tend to possess a particular version, or allele, of a gene important to taste and digestion. This allele not only gives people a taste for bitter foods like broccoli and field greens, which are typically rich in compounds known as polyphenols that promote cellular health, but also allows cells in the intestine to extract nutrients more efficiently from food as it’s being digested.
Passarino has also found in his centenarians a revved-up version of a gene for what is called an uncoupling protein. The protein plays a central role in metabolism—the way a person consumes energy and regulates body heat—which in turn affects the rate of aging.
“We have dissected five or six pathways that most influence longevity,” says Passarino. “Most of them involve the response to stress, the metabolism of nutrients, or metabolism in general—the storage and use of energy.” His group is currently examining how environmental influences—everything from childhood diet to how long a person attends school—might modify the activity of genes in a way that either promotes or curtails longevity.
The American Lung Association has issued its annual 'State of the Air' report. Combining the three different segments for both the cleanest and dirtiest cities, the site 24/7 Wall Street has come up with America's best and worst!
Interestingly, eight of the worst cities for clean air are in California and six of the best are in the Rockies!
Here are the cleanest cities:
1. Cheyenne, Wyo.
2. St. George, Utah
2. Santa Fe-Espanola, N.M.
4. Prescott, Ariz.
5. Farmington, N.M.
6. Pocatello, Idaho
7. Redding, Calif.
8. Tucson, Ariz.
9. Flagstaff, Ariz.
9. Rapid City, S.D.
9. Colorado Springs, Colo.
9. Albuquerque, N.M.
13. Salinas, Calif.
Here are the dirtiest cities:
1. Bakersfield-Delano, Calif.
1. Merced, Calif.
3. Fresno-Madera, Calif.
4. Hanford-Corcoran, Calif.
4. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, Calif.
6. Modesto, Calif.
7. Visalia-Porterville, Calif.
8. Pittsburgh-New Castle, Pa.
9. El Centro, Calif.
10. Cincinnati-Middletown-Wilmington, Ohio-Ky.-Ind.
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FULL REPORT......
Code: Red is worst then yellow, green and finally blue is best
The news about Elephants in Tanzania is not good and continues the increasingly depressing news coming out of Africa. Stuff.co.za reports that an epidemic of poaching in Tanzania is putting the huge animal in jeopardy. This is especially disturbing since the nation is one of the most enlighten in Africa when it comes to conservation policies.
The nation has one of the largest populations of elephants in the world with somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000. The site reports:
Pratik Patel gazed glumly as the herder's scrawny brown dogs moved between piles of bones to eat the rotting elephant flesh. He pointed to the nearby road and wondered aloud: How could poachers kill an elephant just five kilometres from Tanzania's main safari highway?
Conservationists have long warned of the existential danger that poachers pose to Africa's elephants. And it's in Tanzania, home of the Serengeti game reserve and one of the world's two largest elephant populations, that the scale of the killings and the involvement of government employees may be the most chilling.
The three elephant corpses seen by an Associated Press reporter eight weeks ago lay in a game park just a few miles from a busy junction outside Arusha, a city of 500,000 people.
"Twenty-four elephants were shot within 10 square miles over the last three months. Thirty miles from here there are another 26 carcasses," said Patel, a safari tour operator trying to raise the alarm about the country's dying elephants. "And this is just a teaser. If we go to southern Tanzania I can show you 70 carcasses in one day," he said, referring to the Selous, the world's largest game reserve.
The man tasked with saving Tanzania's elephants is Khamis Suedi Kagasheki, minister for natural resources and tourism. Patel believes Kagasheki, a former intelligence officer, is trying hard to beat the poachers, but is up against a government cabal unwilling to give up illegal profits.
Much of the demand for ivory is in Asia, especially China, luring poachers across Africa to slay the giants and cut out their tusks for rewards far beyond the daily wage. According to CITES, the international body that monitors endangered species, the illegal ivory trade has more than doubled since 2007.
Every week brings new reports of elephant deaths and the government workers alleged to have killed them - soldiers, game wardens, police, customs officials, all complicit in the killings of the top tourism treasure for this poor East African nation of 50 million people.
Botswana, the Central African Republic, Chad, Congo and Kenya are also suffering from elephant poaching. But Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of the London-based nonprofit Save The Elephants, says he is most worried about Tanzania's because of its huge population - somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000.
Poaching here "is far bigger than is happening anywhere else in Africa," he said.
Subscribe
