Hurricane Isaac threatens Louisiana

This video from the USA is called New Orleans ‘on frontline’ of Hurricane Isaac.

By Kate Randall in the USA:

Hurricane Isaac takes aim at US Gulf Coast

29 August 2012

Hurricane Isaac was expected to make landfall early this morning as a Category 1 storm, threatening major flooding. States of emergency were declared in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi, as the region braced for the storm to hit exactly seven years after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the region on August 29, 2005.

The storm left at least 24 dead in the Dominican Republic and Haiti as it moved through the Caribbean and caused soaking rains in Florida, where 80,000 were without power as of Monday evening. The Republican Party delayed the start of its national convention as pounding rains hit Tampa, but caused minimal damage in the surrounding area.

Politicians, Democratic and Republican alike, are fearful of anything approaching a repeat of Katrina. More than 1,800 people were killed—with many more never accounted for—as a result of the storm and the criminal lack of response by authorities at both the federal and local level. Over 1 million people were displaced. The indifference of the Bush administration and the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to the suffering provoked widespread revulsion, both in the US and internationally.

Five years after Katrina, Gulf Coast residents and small businesses are still reeling from another disaster—the April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which crippled fishing and tourism and caused widespread ecological damage. Official unemployment in the Gulf region still stands above 8 percent, and nearly one in four residents relies on government assistance.

In the aftermath of Katrina, a $14.5 billion hurricane protection system has been constructed, ringing the greater New Orleans, Louisiana area with 350 miles of levees, floodwalls and floodgates. However, the system has yet to be tested, and several sections remain uncompleted. As the storm took dead aim at New Orleans on Tuesday, engineers closed 127 floodgates around the city, hoping to keep water from the Gulf from surging into the area.

While attention focused on New Orleans, the storm’s winds were expected to be felt more than 200 miles from the storm’s center. The effects of water were expected to be worse than wind, as the slow-moving storm picked up moisture from the Gulf. Isaac was predicted to bring 7 to 14 inches of rain to southeast Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, with some regions expecting up to 20 inches of rain. The storm could push walls of water, dumping rain and flooding the low-lying coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.

In low-lying areas and areas outside the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority East system, levees were expected to be breached. In Cocodrie, Louisiana, two major floodgates intended to protect this coastal community are still under construction, and one of them will not be completed until next hurricane season. Residents in the area are under a mandatory evacuation order.

From USA Today:

Isaac, upgraded from tropical storm to Category 1 hurricane earlier Tuesday, touched land in Plaquemines Parish, about 90 miles southeast of New Orleans Tuesday evening before heading back over the Gulf of Mexico. By 3 a.m. EST, the storm remained stationary about 70 miles south of New Orleans, according to the National Hurricane Center.

BREAKING: Forecasters say Isaac begins to move inland in southeast Louisiana, top winds still at 80 mph.

Isaac may stir up oil from BP Spill: here.

Post-Katrina Reforms in New Orleans Continue to Disenfranchise African-Americans, Poor: here.

US religious Right teaches children Loch Ness monster is real

This video is called HOW TO SEE THE LOCH NESS MONSTER.

By Laura Hibbard in the USA:

Louisiana Private Schools Teach Loch Ness Monster Is Real In Effort To Disprove Evolution Theory

06/25/2012 3:39 pm

Some students at private schools in Louisiana are being taught that Scotland’s fabled Loch Ness monster is real, a claim that is then held as evidence disproving Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution, the Scotsman reports.

Thousands of students across the state are eligible to receive publicly funded vouchers to allow them to attend private Christian schools where textbooks published by Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) claim the monster was actually a dinosaur that existed at the same time as man, an assertion which conflicts with the theory of evolution.

The Times Educational Supplement, a British publication for teachers, published an article in 2009 that included an excerpt from Accelerated Christian Education’s Biology 1099 textbook, which was published in 1995:

Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the `Loch Ness Monster‘ in Scotland? `Nessie,’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.

Could a fish have developed into a dinosaur? As astonishing as it may seem, many evolutionists theorize that fish evolved into amphibians and amphibians into reptiles. This gradual change from fish to reptiles has no scientific basis. No transitional fossils have been or ever will be discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsmen fashioned them all.

Let us presume for the sake of argument that Nessie exists, is a plesiosaur, and still lives 65 million years after all other plesiosaurs became extinct (err … creationists don’t accept 65 miliion years) … If it is a plesiosaur, then it is not a dinosaur, as Accelerated Christian Education claims. Though dinosaurs and plesiosaurs lived at the same time, plesiosaurs were not dinosaurs.

Loch Ness monster tour guide Tony Drummond, 47, told the Scottish Sun the curriculum is “ridiculous propaganda.”

And Bruce Wilson, a researcher specializing in the American political religious right, told the Scotsman that one of the texts also claims “dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons.”

“It has little to do with science as we currently understand. It’s more like medieval scholasticism,” Wilson told the paper.

According to Scotland’s the Herald, one of the textbooks also provides a somewhat controversial look at the Ku Klux Klan.

“The [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross … In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians,” the textbook reads, according to the Herald.

Migratory bird research

This video from the USA says about itself:

Louisiana’s barrier islands provide critical and unique habitat for a range of migrant and wintering bird species. Shorebirds in particular utilize a variety of specialized feeding techniques to harvest their own favored types of prey.

Louisiana’s barrier islands are rapidly disappearing.

From BirdLife:

VBN funds expansion of migratory shorebird research

Thu, May 31, 2012

Vogelbescherming Nederland (VBN, BirdLife in The Netherlands) and WWF-Netherlands are funding a new chair in migratory bird ecology at the University of Groningen. The chair is held by Professor Theunis Piersma, a world authority on the ecology of migratory birds, whose work includes studies on the links between shorebirds breeding in the Wadden Sea and their wintering grounds on intertidal wetlands along the West African coast.

VBN director Fred Wouters and WWF-NL director Johan van de Gronden signed a covenant on 14 May 2012 to enable this chair. The support from the two organisations includes at least 10 years of funding for PhD and postdoctoral researchers.

Professor Piersma and his team at Groningen are part of the Global Flyway Network (GFN), an alliance of wader research groups from all over the world. VBN has supported the work of the GFN since 2007, including long-term studies of migratory shorebirds involving biologists from the Netherlands, Canada, Argentina, Australia, China and other countries along the world’s great flyways.

Migratory shorebirds depend on a diminishing number of wetlands, which are often seriously degraded and under threat from reclamation projects. “Now that there is a chair that concentrates very specifically on migratory bird ecology, I expect we will be able to expand the scope of this global research even further”, said Professor Piersma. “This is urgently needed, because thanks to human co-use of their habitats, most of the migratory bird populations we have studied are declining rapidly.”

VBN’s Fred Wouters said: “Scientific knowledge is crucial for the protection of migratory birds. Vogelbescherming was able to successfully challenge the Dutch mussel farming policy in the Wadden Sea partly thanks to the results of research by Theunis Piersma and his group. The insights generated by the new chair in Global Flyway Ecology will help in devising conservation strategies for this vulnerable group of birds.”

Find out more about BirdLife’s Flyway Programme here.

Marshes of Louisiana, USA, threatened

This video is called Sylvia Earle: How to protect the oceans.

From the Sylvia Earle Alliance blog in the USA:

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Journey OnEarth: An American Beauty

Referred to as part of America’s hardest working wetlands, Louisiana’s marshes are breathtaking, but it’s a natural treasure that’s disappearing at an alarming rate.

In the second episode for Journey OnEarth, Sylvia Earle tells us why the once resilient marshes might be on the verge of extinction. To take a closer look at this unique ecosystem and examine what losing it means for us watch as Sylvia Earle and others share their knowledge about these precious resources in the short documentary below.

Joni Praded, Truthout: “Renegade activist and Texas shrimper Diane Wilson was arrested in London on April 14, 2011, while protesting outside BP’s annual meeting. Wilson, who successfully fought Formosa Plastics to keep them from dumping toxins in the bay near her home and chained herself to an oxide tower to protest Dow Chemical’s refusal to take responsibility for Bhopal, was attempting to enter the meeting and present BP directors with a Black Planet Award (begun in 2006 by a grassroots group in Germany to call attention to the world’s worst polluters) when she was taken into custody. Wilson recently spoke with Chelsea Green’s editorial director, Joni Praded, about her latest book”: here.

“A year after BP caps well, fishermen still fight for survival”: here.

Mississippi flooding in the USA continues

This video from the USA says about itself:

Sun, 15 May Bayou Pigeon camp – before the flood

Bayou Pigeon Camp #1, Taking video before the flood.

Bayou Pigeon is a small unincorporated Cajun village located near the southern extremities of Iberville Parish in the U.S. state of Louisiana. The hamlet is primarily composed of fishers and plant workers. A great majority of the village’s population are of Cajun descent. It is bordered by the Atchafalaya Basin on the west, Louisiana Highway 404 to the north, White Castle Cannal on the east, and Iberia Parish to the south. The main thoroughfare is Louisiana Highway 75.

There is one bridge across the Grand River near the Catholic church. It was erected in 1957. An interesting note, Hwy. 75 terminates on the east bank of the Grand River in Bayou Pigeon at a location dubbed “The End of the World.”

By E.P. Bannon and Tom Hall in the USA:

“This is man-made—it’s going to hurt a lot of people”

Louisiana residents speak on flood disaster

20 May 2011

The Louisiana bayou region has been deliberately flooded by the US Army Corps of Engineers in a bid to prevent the inundation of cities and industrial operations along the Mississippi River.

As a result, 25,000 residents will feel the effects, and thousands of the poorest people will lose everything they own. The World Socialist Web Site interviewed residents Wednesday on their experiences.

As the flood-stricken area widened Wednesday, the Mississippi River’s swollen waters claimed the life of a Vicksburg man: here.

As Mississippi River Recedes, Risk Remains: here.

Large sections of rural and small-town America are being laid waste by storms, floods and wildfires, with little or no assistance from the federal government: here.

Scientists see increasing floods with changing climate: here.

Money for Big Oil, not for US flood victims

This video from the United States Senate is called End Big Oil’s Tax Breaks, Invest in Efficiency.

USA: While bowing to the interests of Big Oil, the Obama administration is providing essentially no compensation to those losing their homes and livelihoods in the Mississippi flood: here.

In a bid to protect Louisiana’s urban centers from catastrophic flooding, federal officials have deliberately inundated thousands of mostly poor bayou residents: here.

Obama preaches individual responsibility in flooded Memphis: here.

Our director of freshwater science in Louisiana analyzes the floods as a scientist & as a father: here.

Mississippi floods in the USA

Impoverished river towns in Mississippi and Louisiana are faced with catastrophic flooding: here. And here.

Hundreds of thousands of acres in Louisiana at risk of flooding: here.

The historic flooding along the Mississippi River casts a spotlight on the crumbling and patchwork state of America’s levees, roads and bridges: here.

This and this are Dutch TV videos on the Mississippi flood.

Australia: Chaotic official response during Queensland flood emergency: here.

Ivory-billed woodpecker not extinct?

This video from the USA says about itself:

How do you tell an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker from a Pileated Woodpecker? There are several distinct differences as this video shows. The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was thought to be extinct, but may have been re-discovered as discussed in the video.

The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is the one on the right and the Pileated is the one on the left. (This Ivory-Billed Woodpecker specimen was taken in Florida.)

From Wildlife Extra:

New sightings claimed for Ivory-Billed woodpecker

Ivory Billed woodpecker photos and recordings claimed from Louisiana

April 2011. Dr. Michael Collins, Naval Research Laboratory scientist and bird watcher, has published an article titled “Putative audio recordings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis)” which appears in the March issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Europe faces extinction of many species, EU says: here.

BP bans Louisiana fishing folk from meeting

This video from the USA is called BP Oil Spill Effect on Wildlife.

From daily News Line in London, England:

Friday, 15 April 2011

No admission at BP AGM!

BP yesterday faced angry protesters – including Louisiana fishermen, Canadian Indians opposed to Tar Sands, and locked out UK construction workers – at its first annual general meeting since the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Fishermen representing Louisiana Gulf communities were refused entry into the AGM.

Byron Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association, told reporters: ‘We’ve had no money, no interim payments. We lost everything after the spill. We had good faith that BP were going to make our communities whole, but they’ve gone down the wrong road.’

‘All we’re asking for is to rehabilitate our oyster beds. Give us what was promised us. I don’t know why we’re not welcome here.’ He warned BP, ‘You can’t think you can do this and get away with it. We’re going to keep the pressure on BP. The quicker we can get funds, the quicker we can recover.’

Locked-out Hull rigger and Unite branch chairman, Bob Webster was with work colleagues outside the AGM.

He told News Line: ‘Vivergo is a diluted version of BP, Tate and Lyle and Dupont producing ethanol fuel off the plant that we were building. They pulled the contract, with no consultation, no redundancy notice, effectively putting 400 men out of work.’

‘There is no redundancy money as we are not officially made redundant. This is a lock-out but we haven’t been told that. This happened around six weeks ago.’

‘At present there are no prospects of getting a TUPE contract back onto the job. We don’t know who the new contractors will be.’

‘If there is no resolution in the next 38 hours, we are taking it to national level, involving all construction workers throughout the country, for moral and financial support. We’re asking for more than that if we don’t get it resolved, i.e. a stoppage.’

‘We have a meeting on Monday with national shop stewards and the union hierarchy.’

With everything Big Oil and the government have learned in the year since the Gulf of Mexico disaster, could it happen again? Absolutely, according to an Associated Press examination of the industry and interviews with experts on the perils of deep-sea drilling: here.

Protesters angry at BP’s failures over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill will descend on Tate Modern tomorrow in protest at the London gallery’s links with the oil giant: here.

More than 150 protesters stormed London’s Tate Modern art gallery yesterday in a colourful demonstration against its sponsorship by oil giant BP: here.

Emails expose BP’s attempts to control research into impact of Gulf oil spill: here.

BP tried to control oil spill damage science, White House helped too: here.

Kim Barker, ProPublica: “The oil spill that was once expected to bring economic ruin to the Gulf Coast appears to have delivered something entirely different: a gusher of money. Some people profiteered from the spill by charging BP outrageous rates for cleanup. Others profited from BP claims money, handed out in arbitrary ways. So many people cashed in that they earned nicknames – ‘spillionaires’ or ‘BP rich.’ Meanwhile, others hurt by the spill ended up getting comparatively little”: here.

“5 Million Barrels of Oil Does Not Disappear,” says @AntoniaJuhasz about BP Oil Spill, 1 Year Later: here.

Sue Sturgis, Facing South: “As the one-year anniversary of the BP drilling disaster nears, the American public has largely turned its attention away from the Gulf Coast. But for the people and other living creatures who make the region their home, the oil spill’s impacts are still being felt acutely today. In an effort to correct the misperception that the BP disaster is over and the 200 million gallons of oil that spill into the Gulf of Mexico have magically disappeared, staff with the Louisiana-based Gulf Restoration Network last week took reporters on a tour of areas that are still heavily impacted by BP’s oil”: here.

10 Reasons to Still Be Pissed Off About the BP Disaster: here.

One Year After BP Oil Disaster, UN General Assembly to Debate Whether Nature Has Rights: here.

This article, the first of a four-part series marking the first anniversary of the BP Gulf oil disaster, reviews the systematic corporate and government cover-up of the BP disaster and its consequences: here.

Report: Big Oil continues to pollute with dangerous chemicals: here.