Cyclone // Current

Dalai Lama in Taiwan, China protests

The Dalai Lama will go in Taiwan, from 31 August to 3 September, to bring his blessing... more

bibabiba
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3 months ago
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Cyclone kills at least 73 in India, Bangladesh

Cyclone Aila lashed low-lying areas in eastern India and Bangladesh, destroying... more

Future_America
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6 months ago
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Hundreds dead after killer wave capsizes Indonesian passenger ferry

Hundreds were feared drowned in the cyclone-whipped seas off the island of Sulawesi... more

Crazyotto
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10 months ago
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Natural disasters 'killed more than 220,000 in 2008'

Natural disasters killed more than 220,000 people in 2008, making it one of the most... more

Scott_Logan
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11 months ago
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Cyclones at Saturn’s poles

New images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have revealed a giant cyclone at... more

goldenways
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1 year ago
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Flooded villages in rural balochistan

A year back Pakistan was hit with a massive cyclone destroying homes of millions of... more

jibranjawaid
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1 year ago
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MYANMAR: Hope fades for cyclone missing

Soe Naing was in the town of Labutta at the far end of Myanmar’s Ayeyarwaddy Delta... more

goldenways
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1 year ago
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Why one girl refuses to remember

Nway pretends that it never happened. The storm didn't come. The wind didn't tear... more

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1 year ago
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World's poorest people hit hardest by disasters

More poor people are falling victim to global disasters than ever before, says a new report that tracks carnage.

This higher level of vulnerability is occurring even though emergency preparedness is generally better and there were fewer floods, droughts and earthquakes in 2007 than in previous years, says the 2008 World Disasters Report released Thursday by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

More than 201 million people were affected by disasters, a 40 per cent increase over 2006. But of those killed, a disproportionate number came from vulnerable people in developing countries.

Almost two-thirds of the world's disasters dating back to 2004 have occurred in Asia and the Pacific and in Africa, the report said. "It is a sad reality that the people most affected and hardest hit by disasters are amongst the poorest in the world," Charlie Musoka, manager of emergency response for the Canadian Red Cross, said in a statement.
In all, 405 natural disasters were reported in 2007 and they inflicted a cost of almost $63.5 billion. Another 141 "technical disasters" occurred, industrial, transport or miscellaneous accidents, such as a ferry sinking or a mine collapse.

Together, they claimed the lives of 23,167 people across the globe in 2007. While that is far lower than the yearly average of 113,000 deaths of the last decade, those figures take into account the year that most skewed the average - 2004, when the Asian tsunami that followed the earthquake off the coast of Indonesia killed more than 230,000.
But this year is shaping up to be just as bad.

The toll of dead or missing from the May 2 cyclone that struck Myanmar rose this week to 138,000, while the number of dead in the China earthquake 10 days later has risen to almost 69,000 and is expected to keep climbing, amid fears that rivers now blocked by landslides could burst. In all, more than two billion people have been affected by disasters in the last decade, the report said. Floods, at 28 per cent, tropical cyclones at 12 per cent, earthquakes at 11 per cent and epidemics at nine per cent accounted for the majority of disasters categorized between 2004 and 2008, the study said.

- Mike Blanchfield, Canwest News ServiceMore poor people are falling victim to global disasters than ever before, says a new... more