Infrastructure

Source: The Guardian

Imagine an oil tanker plowing through the ocean, hauling valuable cargo from resource-rich nations of the world to the countries that need it: but instead of oil, the tanker holds millions of gallons of fresh water.

It's not a vision from some futuristic film or doomsday novel, but the present-day intention of companies trying to launch the bulk water export business. The idea has been around since the 1990's, yet no one has succeeded in making it a practical reality.

But last July, the US company S2C Global Systems, Inc. became the latest bulk water wanna-be by announcing it would begin shipping water from Alaska to India within the next six to eight months. Using large class vessels that can hold 50 million gallons at a time, S2C plans to sell the water for both manufacturing and drinking purposes to countries around the Arabian Sea.

"I think it's a dream," said Peter Gleick, a scientist and international water expert, in an interview with SolveClimate News. Gleick is President of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security. "I don't think bulk water transfers of any significant volume are ever going to happen, because the cost of moving water, especially across the ocean, is so high."

Rod Bartlett, managing partner of Alaska Resource Management (a partnership between S2C and True Alaska Bottling), told SolveClimate News that S2C is finalizing legal issues and logistics for a "World Water Hub" on the western coast of India. Once it's built, the hub will be a distribution point from which the company plans to deliver water to target destinations in the Middle East and northern Africa.

"Every nation within a four-day target of the hub is a potential customer or client that will need fresh water," said Bartlett. Without revealing specific details, Bartlett added that S2C has received both spoken and "written expressions of interest."

The water S2C plans to export will come from Alaska's Blue Lake near the city of Sitka, about 90 miles southwest of Juneau. Since 1999, Sitka has promoted itself as a source for bulk water exports; True Alaska Bottling owns the water rights to 8 million gallons per day from Blue Lake.

As to why humans would want to move water around the world, Bartlett explained: "(You move the water) because you can't move the population." Most of the world's freshwater is found near the Poles, while most people live closer to the equator.

Population growth, urbanization and irrigation place are creating increasing demand for water. But climate change is exacerbating the problem of supply, most notably in the Himalayan region, often referred to as Asia's water tower.

According to a report from King's College in London, about two-thirds of the Himalayan glaciers are shrinking, and decreased runoff will affect water levels in ten major rivers. All together, the rivers' drainage basins are home to 1.3 billion people—close to one-fifth of the world's population.

Many of them live in India. S2C originally chose to build their hub there because they couldn't find an appropriate port in the Middle East. But now, said Bartlett, "as you continue to look at the potential in India, it's going to be a natural place to sell water soon, no question about it."

Desalinated Water 18 Times Cheaper
The idea of moving vast quantities of water is hardly new. The Romans did it with aqueducts; today, California pipes the Colorado River's water hundreds of miles into its cities and farms. But when you ship water more than 1000 or 1500 miles, said Gleick, "the diesel costs kill you."

International water shipments do occur on small geographic scales. In 1997, Greece began shipping water to the island of Aegina, 13 miles from the Greek coast. Singapore currently imports freshwater from Malaysia but vowed to build desalination plants for increased water security. A plan for Turkey to sell water to Israel was recently suspended due to political tension between the two nations.

What S2C has proposed—moving water halfway around the world, 50 million gallons at a time—is on a scale that dwarfs existing bulk water transfer efforts.

The biggest problem, said Gleick, is that S2C will be competing with desalination plants, which are very popular in the Middle East. "Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are almost completely dependent on desalinated (sea)water."

Water from desalination plants costs about $1/cubic meter (this price includes the cost of building and running the plant), said Gleick. According to Bartlett, it will cost S2C $18/cubic meter to move the water from Alaska to India.

Source: The Peoples Voice

Iraq has between 25 and 50 percent unemployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life. What a havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq.

UN-HABITAT, an agency of the United Nations, recently published a 218-page report entitled State of the World’s Cities, 2010-2011. The report is full of statistics on the status of cities around the world and their demographics. It defines slum dwellers as those living in urban centers without one of the following: durable structures to protect them from climate, sufficient living area, sufficient access to water, access to sanitation facilities, and freedom from eviction.

Almost intentionally hidden in these statistics is one shocking fact about urban Iraqi populations. For the past few decades, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percentage of the urban population living in slums in Iraq hovered just below 20 percent. Today, that percentage has risen to 53 percent: 11 million of the 19 million total urban dwellers. In the past decade, most countries have made progress toward reducing slum dwellers. But Iraq has gone rapidly and dangerously in the opposite direction.

According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 80 percent of the 285 million people living in the United States are urban dwellers. Those living in slums are well below 5 percent. If we translate the Iraqi statistic into the U.S. context, 121 million people in the United States would be living in slums.

If the United States had an unemployment rate of 25-50 percent and 121 million people living in slums, riots would ensue, the military would take over, and democracy would evaporate. So why are people in the United States not concerned and saddened by the conditions in Iraq? Because most people in the United States do not know what happened in Iraq and what is happening there now. Our government, including the current administration, looks the other way and perpetuates the myth that life has improved in post-invasion Iraq. Our major news media reinforces this message.

I had high hopes that the new administration would tell the truth to its citizens about why we invaded Iraq and what we are doing currently in the country. President Obama promised to move forward and not look to the past. However problematic this refusal to examine on the past — particularly for historians — the president should at least inform the U.S. public of the current conditions in Iraq. How else can we expect our government to formulate appropriate policy?

Source: Spiegel

While America's super-rich congratulate themselves on donating billions to charity, the rest of the country is worse off than ever. Long-term unemployment is rising and millions of Americans are struggling to survive. The gap between rich and poor is wider than ever and the middle class is disappearing.

Ventura is a small city on the Pacific coast, about an hour's drive north of Los Angeles. Luxury homes with a view of the ocean dot the hillsides, and the beaches are popular with surfers. Ventura is storybook California. "It's a well-off place," says Captain William Finley. "But about 20 percent of the city is what we call at risk of homelessness." Finley heads the local branch of the Salvation Army.

Last summer Ventura launched a pilot program, managed by Finley, that allows people to sleep in their cars within city limits. This is normally illegal, both in Ventura and in the rest of the country, where local officials and residents are worried about seeing run-down vans full of Mexican migrant workers parked on residential streets.

But sometime at the beginning of last year, people in Ventura realized that the cars parked in front of their driveways at night weren't old wrecks, but well-tended station wagons and hatchbacks. And the people sleeping in them weren't fruit pickers or the homeless, but their former neighbors.

Finley also noticed a change. Suddenly twice as many people were taking advantage of his social service organization's free meals program, and some were even driving up in BMWs -- apparently reluctant to give up the expensive cars that reminded them of better times.

Finley calls them "the new poor." "That is a different category of people that I think we're seeing," he says. "They are people who never in their wildest imaginations thought they would be homeless." They're people who had enough money -- a lot of money, in some cases -- until recently.

"The image of what is a poor person in today's day and age doesn't fly. When I was growing up a poor person, and we grew up fairly poor, you drove a 10-year-old car that probably had some dents in it. You know, there was one car for the family and you lived out of the food bank," says Finley. "In the past, you got yourself out of poverty and were on your way up."

American Way Heads in Opposite Direction

It was the American way, a path taken by millions. "Today the image is you're getting newer late model cars that at one point cost somebody 40, 50 grand, and they're at wits end, now they're living out of the food banks. And for many of them it takes a lot to swallow their pride," says Finley.

Today the American way is often headed in the opposite direction: downward.

For a while, America seemed to have emerged relatively unscathed from the worst economic crisis in decades -- with renewed vigor and energy -- just as it had done in the wake of past crises.

The government was announcing new economic growth figures by as early as last fall, much earlier than expected. The banks, moribund until recently, were back to earning billions. Companies nationwide are reporting strong growth, and the stock market has almost returned to it pre-crisis levels. Even the number of billionaires grew by a healthy 17 percent in 2009.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and 40 other billionaires pledged to donate at least half of their fortunes to philanthropy, either while still alive or after death. Is America a country so blessed with affluence that it can afford to give away billions, just like that?

Growing Resentment

Gates' move could also be interpreted as a PR campaign, in a country where the super-rich sense that although they are profiting from the crisis, as was to be expected, the number of people adversely affected has grown enormously. They also sense that there is growing resentment in American society against those at the top.

For people in the lower income brackets, the recovery already seems to be falling apart. Experts fear that the US economy could remain weak for many years to come. And despite the many government assistance programs, the small amount of hope they engender has yet to be felt by the general public. On the contrary, for many people things are still headed dramatically downward.

According to a recent opinion poll, 70 percent of Americans believe that the recession is still in full swing. And this time it isn't just the poor who are especially hard-hit, as they usually are during recessions.

This time the recession is also affecting well-educated people who had been earning a good living until now. These people, who see themselves as solidly middle-class, now feel more threatened than ever before in the country's history. Four out of 10 Americans who consider themselves part of this class believe that they will be unable to maintain their social status.

Unemployment Persists

In a recent cover story titled "So long, middle class," the New York Post presented its readers with "25 statistics that prove that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America." Last week, the leading online columnist Arianna Huffington issued the almost apocalyptic warning that "America is in danger of becoming a Third World country."

In fact, the United States, in the wake of a real estate, financial economic and now debt crisis, which it still hasn't overcome, is threatened by a social Ice Age more severe than anything the country has seen since the Great Depression.

The United States is experiencing the problem of long-term unemployment for the first time since World War II. The number of the long-term unemployed is already three times as high as it was during any crisis in the past, and it is still rising.

More than a year after the official end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate remains consistently above 9.5 percent. But this is just the official figure. When adjusted to include the people who have already given up looking for work or are barely surviving on the few hundred dollars they earn with a part-time job and are using up their savings, the real unemployment figure jumps to more than 17 percent.

In its current annual report, the US Department of Agriculture notes that "food insecurity" is on the rise, and that 50 million Americans couldn't afford to buy enough food to stay healthy at some point last year. One in eight American adults and one in four children now survive on government food stamps. These are unbelievable numbers for the world's richest nation.

Even more unsettling is the fact that America, which has always been characterized by its unshakable belief in the American Dream, and in the conviction that anyone, even those at the very bottom, can rise to the top, is beginning to lose its famous optimism. According to recent figures, a significant minority of US citizens now believe that their children will be worse off than they are.

Many Americans are beginning to realize that for them, the American Dream has been more of a nightmare of late. They face a bitter reality of fewer and fewer jobs, decades of stagnating wages and dramatic increases in inequality. Only in recent months, as the economy has grown but jobs have not returned, as profits have returned but poverty figures have risen by the week, the country seems to have recognized that it is struggling with a deep-seated, structural crisis that has been building for years. As the Washington Post writes, the financial crisis was merely the final turning -- for the worse.

Where Did All the Money Go?

The boom in stocks and real estate, the country's wild borrowing spree and its excessive consumer spending have long masked the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans derived almost no benefit from 30 years of economic growth. In 1978, the average per capita income for men in the United States was $45,879 (about €35,570). The same figure for 2007, adjusted for inflation, was $45,113 (€35,051).

Where did all the money go? All the enormous market gains and corporate earnings, the profits from the boom in the financial markets and the 110-percent increase in the gross national product in the last 30 years? It went to those who had always had more than enough already.

While 90 percent of Americans have seen only modest gains in their incomes since 1973, incomes have almost tripled for people at the upper end of the scale. In 1979, one third of the profits the country produced went to the richest 1 percent of American society. Today it's almost 60 percent. In 1950, the average corporate CEO earned 30 times as much as an ordinary worker. Today it's 300 times as much. And today 1 percent of Americans own 37 percent of the total national wealth.

Income inequality in the United States is greater today than it has been since the 1920s, except that hardly anyone has minded until now.

Little Chance of the American Dream

In America, the free market is king, and people with low incomes are seen as having only themselves to blame. Those who make a lot of money are applauded -- and emulated. The only problem is that Americans have long overlooked the fact that the American Dream was becoming a reality for fewer and fewer people.

Statistically, less affluent Americans stand a 4-percent chance of becoming part of the upper middle class -- a number that is lower than in almost every other industrialized nation.

So far, politicians have failed to come up with solutions for the growing social crisis. Washington is still waiting for jobs that aren't coming. President Barack Obama and his administration seem to be pinning their hopes on the notion that Americans will eventually pull themselves up by their bootstraps -- preferably by doing the same thing they've always done: spending money. Domestic consumer spending is responsible for two-thirds of American economic output.

But even though Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke continues to pump money into the market, and even though the government deficit has now reached the dizzying level of $1.4 trillion, such efforts have remained unsuccessful.

"The lights are going out all over America," Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman wrote last week, and described communities that couldn't even afford to maintain their streets anymore.

The problem is that many Americans can no longer spend money on consumer products, because they have no savings. In some cases, their houses have lost half of their value. They no longer qualify for low-interest loans. They are making less money than before or they're unemployed. This in turn reduces or eliminates their ability to pay taxes.

Turning Out the Lights

As a result, many state and local governments are faced with enormous budget deficits. In Hawaii, for example, schools are closed on some Fridays to save the state money. A county in Georgia has eliminated all public bus services. Colorado Springs, a city of 380,000 people, has shut off a third of its streetlights to save electricity.

There are many discrepancies in America in the wake of the financial crisis. On the one hand, the Fed is constantly printing fresh money, and the government spent $182 billion to bail out a single company, the insurance giant AIG. On the other hand, the lights are in fact going out in some areas, because Washington, citing the need to reduce spending, is unwilling to provide local governments with financial assistance. "America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere," economist Krugman warns.

Chanelle Sabedra is already on that road. She and her husband have been sleeping in their car for almost three weeks now. "We never saw this coming, never ever," says Sabedra. She starts to cry. "I'm an adult, I can take care of myself one way or another, and same with my husband, but (my kids are) too little to go through these things." She has three children; they are nine, five and three years old.

"We had a house further south, in San Bernardino," says Sabedra. Her husband lost his job building prefab houses in July 2009. The utility company turned off the gas. "We were boiling water on the barbeque to bathe our kids," she says. No longer able to pay the rent, the Sabedras were evicted from their house in August.

Friends and relatives had few resources to help them. Now they live in a room at the Salvation Army homeless shelter in downtown Ventura, which is run by Captain Finley.

The sudden plunge into homelessness is a reality that's difficult to understand, given the images of America we are accustomed to seeing in television series and films. They always depict homes with well-kept yards and two-car garages with basketball hoops attached to them. This America still exists, but it's shrinking. And often those who are managing to keep the illusion alive can hardly afford to do so.

Americans have been struggling with a rising cost of living for the past 20 years. At the beginning of the decade, families were already paying twice as much for health insurance and their mortgages than the previous generation did.

"To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce," says Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, who President Obama appointed to chair the congressional panel to oversee the government's bank bailout program. According to Warren, the average family has spent all of its income and used up its savings "just to stay afloat a little while longer."

Spiraling Debt

Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.

Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck. As little as a single hospital bill can spell potential financial ruin.

Chanelle Sabedra's husband has found another job, this time as a warehouse worker for a company that makes aircraft turbines. But he doesn't earn enough to get the family out of the homeless shelter. "I haven't got a new job yet," says Sabedra. Her husband's job doesn't pay enough, and the couple has now joined the growing ranks of the working poor, for whom even two low-wage jobs are insufficient to feed their families. "We need the second income," says Sabedra. "Just the baby alone is $600 a month for half-day care."

In pre-recession America, she and her husband would have had two jobs each to make ends meet. They would have worked at the cash register at Wal-Mart during the day, flipped burgers at McDonald's in the early evening and perhaps spent half the night working as a security guard or cleaning buildings. These are all low-paying jobs, hardly careers, but the combined income is usually enough to keep a family afloat. In pre-recession America, life wasn't luxurious for Chanelle Sabedra, but it was doable if they were willing to work hard enough and sacrifice enough of their lives to stay afloat.

What kind of a job is she looking for now? "Anything right now. Mostly I'm looking for retail, or just anything to get me started, but there's just nothing out there," says Sabedra.

Source: Planet Ark

Mozambique has approved the construction of a $2 billion hydro-electric dam in a bid to increase power generation and attract foreign investments, the state-run Noticias daily newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The paper quoted Energy Minister Salvador Namburete as saying the new Mphanda Nkuwa dam would be built 60 kilometers downstream from the Cahora Bassa Hydro-electric dam (HCB) on the Zambezi River and would produce 1,500 megawatts of power.

Namburete said ownership of the dam would be split 20 percent by state-run Electricidade de Moçambique (EDM) and 80 percent by a 50-50 joint venture by local company Energia Capital and Brazil's Camargo Correia.

"It's an infrastructure that will bring quality investments that will contribute to industrialization and the economic and social development of the country," Namburete said.

Four turbines each with a capacity of 375 MW would be built in phase one of the project, expected to start in 2011, he said.

Source: Global Research

Few people in the world know more about oil drilling disasters than Dr. Robert Bea.

Bea teaches engineering at the University of California Berkeley, and has 55 years of experience in engineering and management of design, construction, maintenance, operation, and decommissioning of engineered systems including offshore platforms, pipelines and floating facilities. Bea has worked for many years in governmental and quasi-governmental roles, and has been a high-level governmental adviser concerning disasters. He worked for 16 years as a top mechanical engineer and manager for Shell Oil, and has worked with Bechtel and the Army Corps of Engineers. One of the world's top experts in offshore drilling problems, Bea is a member of the Deepwater Horizon Study Group, and has been interviewed by news media around the world concerning the BP oil disaster.
Washington's Blog spoke with Dr. Bea yesterday.

WB: Is BP sharing information with the government?

Bea: No. BP is using a "cloak of silence". BP is not voluntarily sharing information or documents with the government.

In May, for example, Senator Boxer subpoenaed information from BP regarding footage of the seafloor taken before the blowout by BP's remotely operated vehicles (ROVs). We still have not received a response 12 weeks later.

[Bea subsequently clarified that he's not sure whether BP has failed to release the information, or Senator Boxer's committee has sat on the information. My bet is on BP. Indeed, BP has refused to answer some very basic written questions from Congressman Markey, chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. See this and this. Indeed, it is unclear whether BP is sharing vital details even with Thad Allen, Secretary of energy Chu, or the Unified Command].

WB: Might there be problems with the relief wells? I know that it took a couple of relief wells to finally stop the Ixtoc leak, and it has taken as many as 5 relief wells to stop some blowouts.

Bea: Yes, it could take repeated attempts.

WB: Are there any conditions at BP's well which might make killing the leak with relief wells more difficult than with the average deepwater oil spill?

Bea: That's an interesting question. You have to ask why did this location blow out when nearby wells drilled in even deeper water didn't blow out.

You have to look at the geology of the Macondo well. It is in a subsalt location, in a Sigsbee salt formation.

The geology is fractured.

Usually, the deeper you drill, the more pressure it takes to fracture rock. This is called the "fracture gradient".

But when BP was drilling this well, the fracture gradient reversed. Indeed, BP lost all pressure as it drilled into the formation.

WB: Is it possible that this fractured, subsea salt geology will make it difficult to permanently kill the oil leak using relief wells?

Bea: Yes, it could. The Santa Barbara channel seeps are still leaking, decades after the oil well was supposedly capped. This well could keep leaking for years.

Scripps mapped out seafloor seeps in the area of the well prior to the blowout. Some of the natural seeps penetrate 10,000 to 15,000 feet beneath the seafloor. The oil will follow lines of weakness in the geology. The leak can travel several horizontal miles from the location of the leak.

[In other words, the geology beneath the seafloor is so fractured, with soft and unstable salt formations, that we may never be able to fully kill the well even with relief wells. Instead, the loss of containment of the oil reservoir caused by the drilling accident could cause oil to leak out through seeps for years to come.

WB: I know that you've previously said that you're concerned that there might be damage to the well bore, which could make it more difficult for the relief wells to succeed.

Bea: Yes, that's still a concern.

WB: I have heard that BP is underestimating the size of the oil reservoir (and see this). Is it possible that the reservoir is bigger than BP is estimating, and so - if not completely killed - the leak could therefore go on for longer than most assume?

Bea: That's plausible.

WB: The chief electronics technician on the Deepwater Horizon said that the Macondo well was originally drilled in another location, but that "going faster caused the bottom of the well to split open, swallowing tools", and that BP abandoned that well. You've spoken to that technician and looked into the incident, and concluded that “they damn near blew up the rig.”.

Do you know where that abandoned well location is, and do you know if that well is still leaking?

Bea: The abandoned well is very close to the current well location. BP had to file reports showing the location of the abandoned well and the new well [with the Minerals Management Service], so the location of the abandoned well is known.

We don't know if the abandoned well is leaking.

WB: Matthew Simmons talked about a second leaking well. There are rumors on the Internet that the original well is still leaking. Do you have any information that can either disprove or confirm that allegation?

Bea: There are two uncorroborated reports. One is that there is a leak 400 feet West of the present well's surface location. There is another report that there is a leak several miles to the West.

[Bea does not know whether either report is true at this time, because BP is not sharing information with the government, let alone the public.]

WB: There are rumors on the Internet of huge pockets of methane gas under the well which could explode. I've looked into this rumor, and have come to the conclusion that - while the leak is releasing tremendous amounts of methane - there are no "pockets" of methane gas which could cause explosions. Do you have any information on this?

Bea: I have looked into this and discussed methane with people who know a tremendous amount about it. There is alot of liquid and solid methane at the Macondo site, but no pockets of methane gas.

WB: That's good news, indeed.

Bea: But there was one deepwater leak I worked with where tremendous amounts of hydrogen sulfite were released. We had to evacuate two towns because of the risk. [I didn't ask Dr. Bea if there were any dangerous compounds which could be formed from the interaction of the crude oil and methane with chemicals in the ocean water or dispersants].

And with the Bay Charman oil leak, more than 50% of the oil stayed below the surface of the ocean. [As I've previously pointed out, the US Minerals Management Service and a consortium of oil companies, including BP, found that as little as 2% of the oil which spill from deepwater wells ever makes it to the surface of the ocean. And the use of dispersant might decrease that number still further].

WB: I have previously argued that nuking the well would be a bad idea. What do you think?

Bea: [Bea agreed that nuking the well would be counter-productive. He told me a story about a leaking deepwater well that he was involved in killing. A nuclear package was on its way to the well site but - fortunately - the well stopped by itself before a nuke was deployed. I'm not sure whether this is classified information, so I won't disclose the name of the well. Bea also discussed alternatives in the form of high-pressure, high-temperature conventional explosives, echoing what Bill Clinton said recently].

WB: Thank you for your generous time and for sharing your expertise with us, Dr. Bea.

Bea: You're welcome.

Source: CBC

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday the flooding in Pakistan is the worst disaster he has ever seen, and he urged the world to do more for the flood-ravaged country.

"This has been a heart-wrenching day for me," he said after flying over some of the worst-hit areas.

"I will never forget the destruction and suffering I have witnessed today. In the past, I have witnessed many natural disasters around the world, but nothing like this."

The UN chief also pleaded for countries to speed up their assistance to the Pakistani people.

The UN has issued a global appeal for $460 million US in immediate help.

Canada announced Saturday it would give $33 million in humanitarian aid.

New flooding

The UN chief's visit came as new flooding in southern Sindh province threatened to worsen an already critical situation.

The Indus River and other waterways were registering more flood surges. Authorities said water levels weren't expected to peak until later Sunday.

The CBC's Adrienne Arsenault, reporting from Pakistan's Swat Valley, said the power of the flood waters is much in evidence.

"We saw places where there used to be cornfields and schools and roads and now it's just a river bed," she said.

"We spoke to mathematicians and engineers and principals who said, 'We were successful business people and we literally have nothing.'"

Arsenault reported that the Canadian Red Cross has been busy handing out mosquito nets, buckets and tarps to people who, in some instances, have walked six or seven hours from their villages to collect the supplies and must now walk six or seven hours back to their ruined towns.

Up to 20 million homeless

Floods, triggered by heavier than normal monsoon rains, have killed more than 1,500 people in the last couple of weeks and left 20 million homeless, according to government estimates.

Many people have diarrhea. Cholera and malaria are growing concerns, said Matt Capobianco, an emergency planning manager for the Canadian charity GlobalMedic.

His organization has set up aid stations in northwest Pakistan that are providing clean drinking water for 15,000 people a day.

But Capobianco said aid agencies are still struggling to get to many victims.

"The scope [of the disaster] is absolutely enormous," he told CBC News on Sunday. "With the amount of people that are affected here, there are definitely many falling though the cracks."

There can be many layers to a story such as this one - imagine a city where the private 'police' force soon overwhelms the public police force in a show of capitalism at work, and in an economy in, and based upon destructive decline, where state budgets are usurped by capital price inflation, and always a step behind, local governments are left holding a bag of social decay borne of rapid and successive cuts in employment and tax revenue based programs.

In the U.S. in many locations, the 'new city' would be a city state among city regions, many regions would become progressively defined no-go-zones, except by heavily guarded escort, where tribal lords (gangsters, drug-pins, thug militias) would control virtually all internal trade, acting as proxy agents (funnels) for the central power base of the cities financial heart - its London City State - which would exist in a heavily fortified safety zone - think 'green zone'. These safe city zones would remain under governed rule and the zone would exert its perimeter with an increasingly capable police force whose armaments would become dramatically more powerful over time.

This story hints at the direction of things to come for many areas of the world. One where corporations rule, and Power IS Law.


Source: New York Times

In a basement office that serves as a police headquarters and community center, Oakland Chinatown leaders pored over maps of the neighborhood with representatives from a private security firm last week.

“Many of our merchants are already installing cameras,” said Carl Chan, the chairman of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, outlining in highlighter the several blocks that form the core of the area. “Eventually, we will be hiring security guards to patrol Chinatown.”

In the wake of the city’s laying off 80 police officers last month, Chinatown is leading a new trend in the crime-ridden city: an increase in privately financed public safety. Mr. Chan has asked every business owner to install a street-facing camera. A new Chinatown security force, perhaps staffed by armed guards, could be on the streets as soon as next month, he said.

The layoffs, which helped close a budget deficit of more than $30 million, eliminated a community-policing program that assigned officers to walk their beats and attend neighborhood meetings. Now some residents are pooling resources to restore a law-enforcement presence. The affluent Montclair District in the Oakland Hills and the Kings Estates neighborhood in East Oakland are also looking into private patrols.

Experts say the combination of police and private security that Chinatown is pursuing reflects a new approach to public safety.

“We’ve been doing policing more or less the same way for a couple hundred years,” said Barry Krisberg, a criminologist at the Center for Criminal Justice at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’ve reached a point financially where we have to start exploring new ways to deliver law enforcement.”

Private guards have a limited scope. They can make citizen’s arrests but cannot investigate accusations of criminal activity or detain a suspect. Unlike police officers, they are not required to undergo psychological counseling or background checks. Public safety experts say they should play a collaborative role, referring crime reports to the police, and making arrests only rarely.

Chinatown’s video surveillance has already led to arrests, and suspects in a killing nearby at Webster and 19th Streets this month were apprehended thanks to video supplied to the police.

Police Chief Anthony Batts lauded the video surveillance efforts, but stopped short of endorsing the hiring of private patrols. “I hope people are not doing that because they are scared,” Chief Batts said.

Oakland’s budget deficit is expected to grow for the next five years. Its crime rate is among the highest in the state. The City Council hopes to put a $360-per-household parcel tax on the November ballot to restore the officers, avoid more layoffs and balance the budget.

But Mr. Chan indicated the residents of Chinatown might prefer to put that money into a private program.

Source: Google - AP

Swollen rivers surged north Monday in central Europe after carving a swath of destruction across Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. Hundreds of people had to be evacuated and one monastery suffered the worst flood damage in almost 800 years.

Days of flooding have killed at least 11 people in central Europe and damaged hundreds of homes and businesses.

The southwestern Polish town of Bogatynia, on the border with the Czech Republic, was one of the worst-hit areas. Video from the TVN24 news station showed roads that were torn up, rubble strewn all over and heavy damage to many homes. One house was left tilting badly.

A bridge in the town was also badly damaged, and soldiers had to set up a temporary crossing to bring in food and other supplies.

TVN24 reported that some vendors were taking advantage of food shortages and charging 20 zlotys ($6.60) for a loaf of bread, far above the usual price.

In Germany, the situation was most critical in the state of Saxony, along the Neisse River, which forms the border with Poland. Hundreds of residents had to be evacuated.

"We will have massive damage to the infrastructure, but of course also to private property," Saxony governor Stanislaw Tillich said. He asked Polish authorities to explain how a retaining dam on their side broke down, making the situation worse, the German news agency DAPD reported.

A 775-year-old Cistercian monastery near the Neisse, St. Marienthal, was also flooded and the diocese said the damage will likely reach several million euros (dollars).

"Inside the church, the water was about two meters (6 feet) high," a statement said, calling it the worst flooding since the monastery's founding in 1234.

The Neisse was expected to top 23 feet (7 meters)_ nearly 15 feet (4.5 meters) above its normal level. Some 1,400 people in the region were evacuated over the weekend, and more than 500 have not yet been able to return to their houses, the German news agency DDP reported.