Some reports coming out of Myanmar suggests that the expected second catastrophe there may not come to pass. Thankfully, there doesn’t appear to be a huge aftershock of disease and death. So the estimated 84,537 people killed during the cyclone itself will probably make up the bulk of the total casualties.
This is a challenging thing to report, given how closed Myanmar remains to outside aid organizations and reporters. But the fundamental point about the resilience of the locals is worth investigating further. From a recent AP story:
“The concept of ‘helpless victims’ is…
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Lots of great points in the comments. If guns made people safer, I would agree wholeheartedly that they should be legal and accessible to (almost) everyone. I would have one at home. The problem is, I have yet to see any evidence that they make us safer. In fact, all the evidence I have seen shows that the opposite is true.
This 2004 study analyzes U.S. mortality data to find out whether having a gun in your home affected your risk of dying by gun. It turned out that people with guns were at greater…
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I’ve been thinking about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn DC’s ban on guns. As someone who lives in DC and has in the past covered random, drive-by shootings and seen boys bleeding on the street become a routine part of the landscape, I am having a hard time understanding how more guns will make things better.
Before this decision, it was still easy to get a gun in DC, partly because it was easy to get one in neighboring states. DC is tiny, keep in mind. It’s an intersection,…
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And now we pause to celebrate that most rare and precious of news: FEMA may be getting stronger. At least in some places.
I wouldn’t trust everyone on this, but I trust Eric Holdeman. Based in Seattle, Eric ran King County’s Office of Emergency
Management in Washington state for 11 years, and he is a reporter’s lifesaver: he knows a ton; he will tell you the truth; and if he doesn’t know the answer, he’ll send you to someone who does.
Anyway, Eric’s blog is a useful clearinghouse for news in…
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An adaptation of the book is running in TIME this week. One of the many cool things about this is that TIME included a photograph of Kent Härstedt, who survived the sinking of the Estonia ferry in 1994. I had not photographed him for the book, though I wish I had. A very thoughtful, interesting guy who is now a member of Sweden’s parliament.
Also, the print edition includes a fetching news-you-can-use sidebar about 5 ways to boost your survival IQ. Always nice to have sparkly accessories next to your story, if I…
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I was in the Los Angeles Airport this weekend when I caught the best headline I have seen in a while: “Hurricane High-Risk Areas Have Lost Residents.” My wheeling suitcase came to a screeching halt.
According to USA Today’s analysis (complete with rad roll-over map), the number of people who live in the most vulnerable areas of Florida, Texas, and the rest of the Gulf Coast has fallen slightly since 2000.
The steepest decline is in the places smashed flat by Hurricane Katrina, naturally. But even excluding those spots, these high-risk zones…
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The New York Times had a telling story about how China tried to suppress media coverage of the massive earthquake that struck Sichuan Province the other day. How a government deals with reporters in the immediate aftermath of a disaster says a lot about how healthy that government was to begin with--and how grueling the recovery may be.
Two and a half hours after the quake, China’s Central Propaganda Department issued a mandate to newspapers: “No media is allowed to send reporters to the disaster zone.”
Wow. That’s a pretty speedy…
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If you survive the initial jolt of an earthquake, or if you hear a warning of a hurricane or cyclone that’s on its way, your brain will go through certain, somewhat predictable stages in response. Here’s an MSNBC.com interview I recently did on the importance of understanding those phases before you find yourself in a disaster.
Getting to know your disaster personality is just as important as stashing away water and food. And way more interesting.
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