Haitian earthquake: in pictures

Friday, January 15, 2010

Haiti was hit by a heavy earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 on Tuesday, killing an unknown number of people, and destroying up to ten percent of buildings in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

No official death toll has been released as of yet, although the United Nations says that up to fifty thousand people may potentially have been killed. An estimated 300,000 more were left without homes.

In a special photo report, Wikinews looks at the extensive damage caused by the disaster.

To find more information about a certain image or to enlarge it, click it. For an in-depth textual report on the same subject, please see Haiti relief efforts: in depth.

• A map indicating the strength of the earthquake, with redder areas being harder hit. The star indicates the epicentre.

• Another graphical representation of the earthquake’s epicentre. As can be seen, it is very close to the capital, which is home to over an estimated 2.5 million people.

• Downtown Port-au-Prince from a bird’s-eye perspective. Only a few buildings remain completely intact, most have been either damaged or completely leveled. Image: UNDP.

• Another aerial image of downtown. Rubble lines the city streets. Image: UNDP.

• Makeshift tents set up in a city square. Image: UNDP.

• A man exits a restaurant after looking for his belongings. Image: UNDP.

• The national palace, housing Haitian president Rene Preval, sustained serious damage. Both the president and his wife, however, survived the earthquake. Image: UNDP.

• Another shot of the presidential palace. Image: UNDP.

• Makeshift tents are set up at a soccer field, one of the few areas free from debris

• A poor neighbourhood in the capital. Again, most buildings have collapsed or sustained significant damage. Image: UNDP.

• The Hotel Montana, once five storeys tall, now lies in a collapsed heap in Port-au-Prince. Image: UNDP.

• Port-au-Prince harbour after the deadly earthquake. The port was too damaged to receive cargo from aid ships sent to the country.

• A shipping container floating in the waters near the seaport.

• More damage caused to the seaport

• Two US Coast Guard 270-foot cutters sit offshore of Haiti, ready to provide humanitarian aid to the earthquake-ravaged country. However, they had no place to dock since the port was inoperable

• An aerial view of the seaport. Note the cargo containers floating out at sea and lopsided cranes.

• The UN’s Haitian headquarters were heavily damaged by the earthquake; many UN officials are feared trapped under the rubble.

• View of the UN headquarters, from a different angle

• The US Coast Guard evacuating US personnel from Haiti by a Hercules C-130 airplane.

• Haitian civilians receiving assistance in a makeshift camp set up by the Brazilian Army in Port-au-Prince Image: Agencia Brasil.

• Brazilian soldiers in the camp giving medical aid to victims Image: Agencia Brasil.

• Another shot of the impromptu camp Image: Agencia Brasil.

• Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim and Commander of the Army Enzo Peri board a Brazilian Air Force plane headed to Haiti, to join relief efforts Image: Agencia Brasil.

• United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) peacekeepers trying to find survivors in the wreckage of a building Image: UNDP.

• MINUSTAH members loading an injured person aboard a lorry

• US Coast Guard delivering medical supplies by boat

• A US Coast Guard member giving a small child a bottle of water in Port-au-Prince

• US Army Lieutenant Colonel Hector Paz carrying an injured girl to receive medical treatment after being evacuated from Port-au-Prince

• A small boy receiving medical treatment by MINUSTAH members at their logistics base Image: UNDP.

• A body pulled out from the rubble of a school that collapsed after the earthquake Image: UNDP.

• Another body being pulled out of the school Image: UNDP.

• US president Barack Obama in the White House Situation Room, discussing response to the disaster

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Just days away from Halloween, Wikinews interviewed Kristian Hanson, producer-director of independent slasher film Sledge. The film has been a recent source of discussion in horror fan circles, primarily due to its production budget of only US$800. Sledge is Hanson’s fourth film to direct, according to Internet Movie Database.

Saturday, June 4, 2005

On Friday, the U.S. military released the results of their investigation and confirmed that in 5 separate incidents, American guards at the Guantánamo Bay prison “mishandled” the Islamic holy book. However, they stress that guards were usually “respectful” of the Qur’an.

One incident involved splashing a Qur’an with urine by urinating near an air vent while others involved kicking, stepping on and writing in Qur’ans.

Brigadier-General Jay Hood, the commander of the jail, said that these incidents are the exception to the rule. In a statement issued late Friday, he said: “The inquiry … revealed a consistent, documented policy of respectful handling of the Qur’an dating back almost two-and-a-half years.”

Gen. Hood looked into the allegations, published and then retracted by Newsweek, that American personnel flushed a Qur’an down a toilet. He said that the inquiry did not find any evidence supporting this particular allegation. “The inquiry found no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed a Qur’an down a toilet. This matter is considered closed.”

The incidents reported are:

• a guard kicking a prisoner’s Qur’an;
• Qur’ans wetted by water balloons thrown by guards;
• a “two-word obscenity” written, in English, inside the cover of a Qur’an. Military officials state that it is equally possible that a guard wrote this in the prisoner’s Qur’an or that the prisoner wrote this in his own Qur’an;
• a guard who urinated too close to an air vent, spraying a Qur’an with urine;
• an interrogator who stepped on a Qur’an during an interrogation.

The investigation also revealed 15 alleged cases of Qur’an mistreatment by detainees themselves. Detainees used Qur’ans as pillows, urinated on them, and, several times, tore pages out of copies of the books, according to the report. For example, the report states that a guard observed a “detainee place two Qur’ans in his toilet and state he no longer cared about the Qur’an or his religion,” on February 23, 2004. It is believed that such behavior is intended to cause disruption and problems for the guards.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

In a report on cloud computing issued this week, the environmental group Greenpeace rated ten top Internet companies, including Apple, Google, Twitter and Amazon, on several factors such as each company’s willingness to be transparent by providing information on its energy sources and the energy efficiency of its data centers.

In the report entitled “How Dirty is your Data”, Apple, while receiving good marks for transparency, rated at the bottom for energy efficiency, primarily because its huge, new data center in North Carolina, called iDataCenter, relies largely on coal. Although Apple claimed its California operations used cleaner energy than that produced by most grids, iDataCenter has an estimated energy demand three times Apple’s current use, significantly increasing Apple’s environmental footprint. As Apple increases the online products it delivers from its iTunes platform, it will enlarge its cloud computing operations further.

“Apple’s decision to locate its iDataCenter in North Carolina, which has an electrical grid among the dirtiest in the country (61 percent coal, 31 percent nuclear), indicates a lack of a corporate commitment to clean energy supply for its cloud operations,” Greenpeace said in its report.

About 2 percent of worldwide energy use is consumed by data center computer servers, and this amount is increasing by 12 percent a year, Greenpeace reports, an energy demand that is more than that of Russia.

Greenpeace said many IT companies do not reveal the environmental impact of their energy consumption, and concentrate more on energy efficiency that on using clean energy. Most of their energy is supplied by coal and nuclear energy. Companies are locating their data centers in areas that afford cheap, abundant coal-powered electricity.

Yahoo was praised by Greenpeace for placing its data centers near sources of clean energy and its minor use of coal-based power.

Greenpeace noted that Google says that it is conscious of the need to use renewable sources of electricity to power cloud computing, but it does not acknowledge the size of its carbon footprint. The company claims it has seven data centers worldwide, but it is estimated to have 20 to 30.

The carbon footprint of cloud computing is a recent emphasis of Greenpeace in its attempt to disprove the belief that the biggest polluters are manufacturers.

In a response to the report, Timothy Prickett Morgan criticized Greenpeace for focusing on data centers which are responsible for using about 3 per cent of the US power generation and globally account for 1.5 to 2 percent. He noted that “the data centers of Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Apple, and Akamai . . . are probably not much different from the business where you work every day when it comes to dependency on coal for electricity generation. And ditto for the home that you return to every night.”

Morgan quotes data from a 2008 report by the International Energy Agency and cited by the World Coal Association, now known as the The World Coal Institute, that showed coal plants produce over 40 percent of the global electricity. The Institute determined that United States receives half of its power from coal plants. Some other countries, such as South Africa, Poland and China, use more coal. “The world is still dependent on non-renewable energy sources – coal and nuclear with a smattering of oil and gas – to generate electricity,” he says, suggesting the IT companies should not be singled out.

Morgan is also critical of Greenpeace’s methodology in gathering the data, as it included only a sample of the data centers of these companies, and some that were not yet completely operational. He noted that because the companies were not always cooperative in disclosing information, Greenpeace estimated a portion of the data. He said that the reader has to “drill down into the report” to see the the complete picture.

Another criticism of Greenpeace is its definition of coal and nuclear power as “dirty energy”. Because it does not discharge greenhouse gases, nuclear power is rated more favorably than coal by some environmental organizations. Greenpeace is adamantly against nuclear power’s radiation risks.

April 12, 2005

In what authorities call a terrible tragedy, a four-year-old boy was killed Sunday afternoon by the family dog. The Orange County, Virginia USA boy was playing in his back yard while their dog, a Rottweiler–German Shepherd mix, was chained to a stake.

The parents of the boy were home when the mauling occurred, but there were no direct eye witnesses to the attack that took place in the Placid Pines mobile home park. County Sheriff C.G. Feldman said, “We’ll probably never know what provoked the attack.” he told the Associated Press, “The boy had grown up with the dog.”

A CBS6 broadcast said investigators saw no signs of parental negligence, and the boy was their only child. No charges against the parents were filed. The dog was euthanised Monday.

Sheriff Feldman stressed there were no similarities or connection with an earlier case of an elderly woman killed in an attack by 3 pit bulls in the nearby county of Spotsylvania just over a month ago.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

A suicide car bomb attack in northwestern Pakistan has killed at least 30 people, including some children.

Investigators say the bomb exploded Tuesday on a busy street near a market in the city of Charsadda, 40 kilometers north of Peshawar. The blast wounded dozens of people and destroyed several buildings.

“The death toll has gone up to 32 and more than 100 people have been wounded in this suicide attack,” said Bashir Bilour, the Senior Minister of North West Frontier Province.

Hazrat Ali, a shopkeeper, was a witness to the event. He recounted his experiences to the Agence France-Presse news agency. “I was buying something before closing my shop. A car was parked on the other side of the road and all of a sudden there was a huge blast. There was smoke and darkness everywhere. I passed out.” Ali sustained shrapnel injuries to his forehead and torso.

This was the third bombing in the area in three days. On Monday, a suicide bomber in a rickshaw blew himself up at a checkpoint in Peshawar, killing three people. A suicide bomber killed thirteen people in a crowded market outside the city on Sunday.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Researchers say that new, ten million-year-old fossils found in Ethiopia, prove that the theory that humans may have evolved from a species of great apes eight million years ago, may not be true, but that humans may have split from apes as long as 10.5 million years ago.

At least nine fossilized teeth, one canine tooth and eight molars, of a previously unknown species of apes found in Africa were discovered by a team of researchers from Ethiopia and Japan who then compared the 3-D make up of the teeth to other fossils that date back as far as 8 million years and found that the fossils are likely a “direct ancestor” of apes currently living in Africa and that the new ape fossils were that of a species of gorilla who ate mostly plants high in fiber.

Current fossils and research say that the evolutionary split from apes to humans occurred at least eight million years ago. The new fossils say that the split may have happened as long as 10.5 million years ago.

“Based on this fossil, that means the split is much earlier than has been anticipated by the molecular evidence. That means everything has to be put back,” said researcher at the Rift Valley Research Service in Ethiopia and a co-author of the study, Berhane Asfaw.

Despite the finds, other researchers are not convinced that the findings are correct.

“It is stretching the evidence to base a time scale for the evolution of the great apes on this new fossil. These structures appear on at least three independent lineages of apes, including gorillas, and they could relate to a dietary shift rather than indicating a new genetic trait,” said a Professor at the London Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom, Peter Andrews who also added, “but the fossil evidence for the evolution of our closest living relatives, the great apes, is almost non-existent.

Researchers have named the newly discovered species Cororapithecus abyssinicus whose remains were found in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, the same place where the remains of Lucy were discovered in 1974.