What is Happening in This World?

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What is happening to this world? I am reading more and more stories that are alarming. I am going to start collecting them. My purpose is not to alarm or scare anyone. I think we need to keep clear in our minds that the world is in trouble and only the soon return of our Saviour can help us. Giant waves hurling boulders inland from British coasts: scientists Wed Aug 18,11:12 AM ET LONDON (AFP) - Massive waves created by violent storms off Britain and Ireland are ripping off chunks of cliff and hurling them inland over distances scientists did not think possible. North Atlantic storms are creating waves over 20 metres (65 feet) high, powerful enough to tear rocks up and throw them as far as 50 metres (yards) inland in places like the Shetland, Orkney and Western islands in Scotland and the Arran islands in Ireland. These boulders can be up to 50 tonnes and three metres in size -- as big as a van and much heavier, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph newspapers reported Wednesday. Previously, scientists believed the boulders hurled inland had been the product of tsunamis, generated by earthquakes or volcano erruptions, yet the last recorded tsunami dates back 4,900 years. It is estimated that around 100 giant waves smash British coasts every year. At least once a year, waves measuring more than 24 metres are recorded, and on average a 29-metre wave is thought to occur every 100 years. The research, conducted jointly by the Scottish universities of Glasgow, Saint Andrews and Strathclyde, was revealed by coastal geomorphologist Jim Hansom at the International Geographical Union congress in London on Tuesday. He said that this erosion phenomenon was recent, and likely to increase in the future due to rising sea levels and sinking coastlines. The average winter wave west of the Shetland Islands has grown by 15 percent between 1985 and 1995, and the sea level has increased by one millimetre (0.04 inch) per year in the past century, the Daily Telegraph reported. Hansom told the Guardian: "When I was asked to investigate the reason for hundreds of boulders piled up inland from 20 metre high cliffs, I did not believe that waves could be responsible." "The boulders were just to big and too heavy," he said. "But now we can show it is occuring and at an ever increasing rate." European Winters Could Disappear by 2080 - Report Wed Aug 18,11:45 AM ET By Anna Mudeva AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) - Europe is warming up more quickly than the rest of the world, and cold winters could disappear almost entirely by 2080 as a result of global warming, researchers predicted Wednesday. Heat waves and floods are likely to become more frequent, threatening the elderly and infirm, and three quarters of the Swiss Alps' glaciers might melt down by 2050, the study prepared by the European Environment Agency (EEA) said. "This report pulls together a wealth of evidence that climate change is already happening and having widespread impacts, many of them with substantial economic costs, on people and ecosystems in Europe," EEA executive director Jacqueline McGlade said in a statement. The average number of climate-related disasters per year doubled over the 1990s compared to the previous decade, costing economies around $11 billion a year, said the report, the first by the European Union body on the impact of global warming on Europe. "Projections show that by 2080 cold winters could disappear almost entirely and hot summers, droughts and incidents of heavy rain or hail could become much more frequent," the report said. Climate changes are likely to increase the frequency of floods and droughts like those that hit Europe in the past years, damaging agriculture and making plant species extinct, the Copenhagen-based EEA concluded. The floods that swept through 11 European countries in 2001 killed about 80 people, while last year's heat wave in western and southern Europe claimed the lives of more than 20,000. GREENHOUSE GASES The EEA findings echo those published last week by U.S. climate researchers who predicted that heat waves might become more common as global warming heats the earth and said regions already prone to heat, such as the U.S. Midwest and Europe's Mediterranean area, could suffer even more. The concentration of carbon dioxide, one of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, in the lower atmosphere is now at its highest level for at least 420,000 years and stands 34 percent above its level before the Industrial Revolution, the EEA report said. According to the agency's study, temperatures in Europe have risen by an average of 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years and are projected to climb by a further 3.6 to 11.3 degrees this century due to the rise in greenhouse gases emissions. This compared to a global rise in temperatures of 0.36 to 1.26 degrees in the past century and a forecast of another rise of 2.52 to 10.4 degrees this century, said the report. The researchers said glaciers in eight of Europe's nine glacial regions were at their lowest levels in terms of area and mass in 5,000 years. They forecast that sea levels in Europe would rise at a pace more than two-to-four times faster than the rise seen in the last century -- a threat to low-lying countries such as the Netherlands, where half the population lives below sea level. Young Couple's Dreams Ended on Isolated Beach Sat Aug 21, 7:55 AM ET Los Angeles Times By William Wan and Donna Horowitz JENNER, Calif. ? They came from a small town in Ohio with no stoplights, no stores, only a few houses and three churches. It was the life outdoors and a chance to help others that drew them to California. Over the summer, Lindsay Cutshall and her fiance, Jason Allen, had found both and planned to return to Ohio next month to get married. But before the trip home, they set out for one last trek into the wild, hiking down to a rugged beach and sleeping on the sand. They never woke up. Cutshall, 23, and Allen, 26, were shot in the head sometime this week on a remote beach near this coastal town in Sonoma County. The bodies were found side by side Wednesday, still in sleeping clothes and zipped tight in separate sleeping bags, police said. Beside them lay a Christian book, camping gear and wedding literature. Authorities have no suspects or possible motives. Nothing was stolen, and no weapon was found. "The case doesn't lend itself to an easy motive," said Sonoma County Sheriff's Lt. Dave Edmonds. "That's why it was so troubling." EPA: U.S. Waterways Contain Polluted Fish Tue Aug 24,10:40 PM ET By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - One of every three lakes in the United States, and nearly one-quarter of the nation's rivers contain enough pollution that people should limit or avoid eating fish caught there. Every state but Alaska and Wyoming issued fish advisories covering some and occasionally all of their lakes or rivers in 2003, according to a national databased maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency (news - websites) and updated every year. Though the number of advisories rose to 3,094, up from 2,814 in 2002, according to figures released Tuesday, EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt said the increase was due to more monitoring, not more pollution. Nearly all the advisories involve contaminants such as mercury, dioxins, PCBs, pesticides and heavy metals, including arsenic, copper and lead. Currently they cover 35 percent of the nation's lake acreage and 24 percent of river miles. Leavitt said mercury pollution from industry is decreasing, though he cited figures only as recent as five years ago. Primary sources of mercury pollution include coal-burning power plants, the burning of hazardous and medical waste and production of chlorine. It also occurs naturally in the environment. The advisories cover fish caught during recreational and sport fishing, not deep-sea commercial fishing or fish farming operations. "It's about trout, not tuna. It's about what you catch on the shore, not what you buy on the shelf," Leavitt said. "This is about the health of pregnant mothers and small children, that's the primary focus of our concern." But he also acknowledged that virtually every acre of lakes and mile of rivers could eventually be covered by advisories. Since pollution is found in fish nearly every time a state looks for it, the EPA assumes that whenever a state does that kind of monitoring it will wind up issuing a fish advisory, he said. "I want to make clear that this agency views mercury as a toxin. Manmade emissions need to be reduced and regulated. There has been an appropriate, heightened public concern," Leavitt said. U.S. Prepares for Possible Flu Outbreak Wed Aug 25, 6:40 PM ET By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer WASHINGTON - The United States may have to close schools, restrict travel and ration scarce medications if a powerful new flu strain spurs a worldwide outbreak, according to federal plans for the next pandemic, obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press. It will take months to brew a vaccine that works against the kind of super-flu that causes a pandemic, although government preparations include research to speed that production. The federal plans have been long-awaited by flu specialists, who say it's only a matter of time before the next pandemic strikes and the nation is woefully unprepared. There have been three flu pandemics in the last century, the worst in 1918, when more than half a million Americans and 20 million people worldwide died. Concern is rising that the next pandemic could be triggered by the recurring bird flu in Asia, if it mutates in a way that lets it spread easily among people. "We're all holding our breath," Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - websites), said in an interview Wednesday. About 36,000 Americans die from regular flu every winter. Pandemics strike when the easily mutable influenza virus shifts to a strain that people have never experienced before. It's impossible to predict the next pandemic's toll, but a bad one could kill up to 207,000 Americans, says the Pandemic Influenza Response and Preparedness Plan. Millions of sick patients could swarm doctors' offices and hospitals, says the plan, which stresses that states and hospitals must figure out now how they would free up hospital beds and perform triage. There could also be an economic and social wallop from disruption of transportation, commerce, even routine public safety, warns the plan, to be released Thursday by the Health and Human Services (news - websites) Department. Among its suggested preparations to limit the spread of infection and care for the ill, the plan stresses major federal research to create "seed strains" of worrisome flu types as potential vaccine candidates. Such work might shave a few months off the typical six to eight months it now takes to brew a new flu vaccine, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health (news - web sites)'s infectious disease chief. The plan is a first draft, open for public comment through October. Some big questions remain, including how to ration scarce vaccines and anti-flu drugs during such a crisis. Doctors and public safety workers may be just as important to treat early as frail patients, the HHS plan notes. "This is a very sensitive issue," said Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, who advises the federal government on flu vaccine issues. "Should it be like the Titanic ? women and children first ? or should it be police and firefighters first? You can see the dilemmas." Other preparations are under way: _The CDC is increasing surveillance to better spot dangerous flu strains as soon as they emerge anywhere in the world. _First on the list of potential pandemic vaccine candidates is the bird flu, which has killed 27 people in Asia this year and prompted destruction of 100 million poultry. Although this H5N1 flu has struck periodically for a few years now, "we've never seen so many birds infected with this virus at one point in time," Gerberding said Wednesday. The NIH is funding production of a few thousand doses of experimental H5N1 vaccine; safety testing is set to begin in November. _Four drugs can treat the flu if given soon after symptoms begin, and decrease chances of catching it. One, Tamiflu, is considered the top choice for a pandemic, particularly as it seems effective against bird flu, but supplies are limited. HHS has stockpiled enough to treat 1 million people, with more on the way, said Dr. Bruce Gellin, the National Vaccine Program's director. Depending on where a pandemic begins and how virulent it seems, the first protections probably will include travel restrictions, schools closures, restrictions on public gatherings and even quarantines to limit the spread of infection, Gerberding said. "Good, old-fashioned isolation and quarantine have a special role to play in any pandemic," she said. "One of the things we have to do now, before we're in the middle of this situation, is do our very best to make sure people understand what would be the first steps, why they'd be necessary and what they can do to minimize the disruption." Judge Stops Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Wed Aug 26, 1:00 PM ET By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press Writer NEW YORK - In a highly anticipated ruling, a federal judge found the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act unconstitutional Thursday because it does not include a health exception. U.S. District Judge Richard C. Casey in Manhattan said the Supreme Court has made it clear that a law that prohibits the performance of a particular abortion procedure must include an exception to preserve a woman's life and health. Casey issued the ruling two months after hearing closing arguments in the case. A San Francisco judge has already declared the 2003 law unconstitutional, and a judge in Lincoln, Neb., is still considering the question. The three judges suspended the ban while they held the trials. The law, signed in November, represented the first substantial federal legislation limiting a woman's right to choose an abortion. Abortion rights activists said it conflicted with three decades of Supreme Court precedent. It banned a procedure that is known to doctors as intact dilation and extraction, but is called "partial-birth abortion" by abortion foes. During the procedure, the fetus is partially removed from the womb, and its skull is punctured or crushed. The judge challenged the conclusion by Congress that there is no significant body of medical opinion that the procedure has safety advantages for women. Casey said the congressional record itself undermined the finding because it included contradictory views, including nine medical associations which opposed the act because they believed the abortion procedure provides safety advantages for some women. In the San Francisco ruling, issued June 1, U.S. District Judge said the act places an undue burden on a woman's right to choose. California Quake Area a Seismic Hot Spot Tue Sep 28, 2004 Science - AP By MATTHEW FORDAHL, Associated Press Writer PARKFIELD, Calif. - The area of the San Andreas fault where a magnitude-6.0 earthquake struck Tuesday is a seismic hot spot that has produced similar temblors every two or three decades and, as a consequence, is among the most-monitored quake sites in the world. Dozens of sensors ? seismometers, strainmeters, creepmeters ? dot the remote, sparsely populated region midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Drilling is underway there to go 1.4 miles down into the bowels of the 800-mile-long fault that forms the boundary between immense geological plates that grind and produce ground movement. Tuesday's quake may prove a boon to researchers who hope the intense scrutiny of the Parkfield zone may one day help them predict earthquakes. "This will probably be the most well-recorded earthquake in history," said Mike Blanpied, associate coordinator with the U.S. Geological Survey (news - web sites)'s earthquake hazards program in Reston, Va. "The jury is still out about whether the earth gives out reliable signals about whether an earthquake can be predicted." So far, all that seismologists can say for sure is that the Parkfield region will breed more large temblors, but they can't predict when. Kate Hutton, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said there was a 1 in 20 chance that the most recent quake was a foreshock to a larger quake that could hit within five days. In 1857, a Parkfield temblor was followed by what has been estimated to be a magnitude-7.8 to -8.0 quake that was felt from Monterey County to an area hundreds of miles to the south in Cajon Pass. However, it's unlikely the San Andreas fault has built up enough stress since then to unleash a quake of that magnitude again, researchers said. Tuesday's quake was centered 17 miles northeast of Paso Robles, the scene of a magnitude-6.5 earthquake that killed two people in December 2003. It was unclear whether there was any connection between the two temblors, Hutton said. She also said there was probably no connection between Tuesday's quake and recent seismic activity at Mount St. Helen's, an active volcano in Washington state. "We don't know any way that a volcano in Washington can influence earthquakes in California because it's too far," Hutton said. But she noted that Mount St. Helen's last erupted in May 1980, within a week after a series of earthquakes in the Mammoth Lakes area in the eastern Sierra Nevada. "So who knows?" she said. The Parkfield quake occurred on the southeastern end of what is called a rupture zone and moved northwest. It occurred at a depth of 4.9 miles and was a "strike-slip quake," which means it caused the ground to move horizontally. Parkfield, population 37, is subject to small, unfelt shocks all the time. The temblors are so prevalent that the U.S. Geological Survey named its major long-term earthquake research project the Parkfield Experiment. In 1985, scientists forecast a magnitude-5.5 to -6 earthquake would hit the Parkfield area by 1993. The forecast was based on the 22-year average interval between six quakes of a similar magnitude that struck Parkfield between 1857 and 1966. Some scientists speculated that Tuesday's quake was the one predicted by 1993 ? though a decade late. "It was very much the anticipated earthquake, the anticipated magnitude and the anticipated section of the San Andreas fault," Blanpied said. "Of course, it was long overdue." Hutton wasn't so sure. "Clearly, the cycle was not as regular as they thought it was," she said. "Probably the most obvious feature is that the quakes are random." Earthquake prediction is notoriously unreliable. In January, a team of scientists said there was a 50-50 chance that a magnitude-6.4 quake would hit a 12,000-quare-mile area east of Los Angeles by Sept. 5. It didn't happen. Experts Predict Mount St. Helens Eruption September 30, 2004 Science - AP By GENE JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer SEATTLE - The flurry of earthquakes at Mount St. Helens intensified further Thursday, and scientists warn that a small or moderate blast could spew ash and rock as far as three miles from the crater in the next few days. The volcano began rumbling last week, and by Wednesday earthquakes ranging from magnitude 2 to 2.8 were coming about four times a minute, possibly weakening the lava dome in the crater of the 8,364-foot mountain, the U.S. Geological Survey (news - websites) said. The quakes continued to strengthen early Thursday with several exceeding magnitude 3, according to the Web site of the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network. Still, scientists did not expect anything like the mountain's devastating eruption in 1980, which killed 57 people and coated towns 250 miles away with ash. Few people live near the mountain, which is in a national forest about 100 miles south of Seattle. The closest structure is the Johnston Ridge Observatory, about five miles from the crater. The heightened alert has drawn a throng of sightseers to observation areas. Dawn Smith, co-owner of Eco Park Resort west of the mountain, told The News Tribune of Tacoma, "It's just been crazy the past couple of days." A sign in front of the business reads, "Here we go again." The Geological Survey raised the mountain's eruption advisory from Level 2 to Level 3 out of a possible 4 on Wednesday, prompting officials to begin notifying various state and federal agencies of a possible eruption. The USGS (news - web sites) also has asked the National Weather Service (news - websites) to be ready to track an ash plume with its radar system. In addition, scientists called off a plan to have two researchers study water rushing from the crater's north face for signs of magma. A plane was still able to fly over the crater Wednesday to collect gas samples. Negligible amounts of volcanic gas were found. "An aircraft can move ... out of the way fast," said Jeff Wynn, the chief scientist at the survey's Cascade Volcano Observatory. "We don't want anyone in there on foot." The USGS has been monitoring St. Helens closely since last Thursday, when swarms of tiny earthquakes were first recorded. On Sunday, scientists issued a notice of volcanic unrest, closing the crater and upper flanks of the volcano to hikers and climbers. Scientists said they believe the seismic activity is being caused by pressure from a reservoir of molten rock a little more than a mile below the crater. That magma apparently rose from a depth of about six miles in 1998, but never reached the surface, Wynn said. The mountain's eruption on May 18, 1980, blasted away its top 1,300 feet, spawned mudflows that choked the Columbia River shipping channel, leveled hundreds of square miles of forests and paralyzed towns and cities more than 250 miles to the east with volcanic ash. Next: 2004-10-22 Good Afternoon

Revised 2004-10-26