Cast Adrift, a report from the pressure groups Greenpeace and the New Economic Foundation, highlights the gap between the developing and developed worlds as the latest round of climate change talks gather pace in Argentina. Global average temperatures have been rising for more than a decade, increasing the risk of more frequent windstorms, floods, droughts and even ice storms.

These would mean extra insurance liability and business risk, additional construction costs, warning systems, sea and river defences, and greater spending on water, health, agriculture and tourism.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has estimated that the annual construction costs alone for adaptation to climate change could fall somewhere between $14bn and $73bn.

The Association of British Insurers predicts that weather insurance claims in an "extreme" year in the UK will have quadrupled by 2050, to an estimated $50bn. Worldwide economic losses due to natural disasters could hit an average of $150bn a year in the next decade. This is three times the present global aid budget.

"The world's richest nations are set to hold back the flames of global warming with one hand while pouring oil on the fire with the other," said Andrew Simms of the New Economic Foundation.

"The law of the sea dictates able ships should always respond to an SOS, but on top of the double standards, rich countries are also abandoning the rest of the world, who are being cast adrift to cope with a warming world."

Our correspondents and news agencies report today on the grim consequences for the people of Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Maldives. Sri Lanka, over 1,500km from the epicentre with no experience of sea surges of such magnitude, was one of the hardest hit with at least 3,500 people killed. A national disaster was declared after the giant tsunami hit its east and southern coastlines sweeping away people, cars and villages. Landmines from its civil war were dislodged, adding several mine-related accidents. About 2,000km of southern India's coastline was badly affected. Fishing villages in the state of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh were particularly hard hit with many fishermen being swept out to sea and other villages reporting beaches strewn with their dead bodies.

The health hazards were obvious: the unburied bodies which will quickly decompose in tropical temperatures; water supplies polluted from both huge quantities of salt water sloshing around and overflowing sewage; plus already over-stretched and under-funded health systems with acute shortages of medical supplies facing huge extra numbers of injured people. Further complications will be caused by disrupted communications and power supplies.

Similarly, the nations face severe economic consequences, not least those especially dependent on tourists - such as Thailand, the Maldives and Sri Lanka - with the disruption and damage the tsunamis have wreaked on their frail infrastructures. The floods have coincided with the peak of their tourism season. British travel agents estimated yesterday that up to 20,000 British holiday-makers will have had their plans disrupted.

Indonesia: Shock hits at 7.58am local time: 4,400 dead in Aceh and North Sumatra
Thailand: Shock hits at 8am: 400 dead, dozens of foreign tourists feared missing, more than 5,000 injured

Malaysia: Tsunami hits soon after 8 am: 42 dead

India: Tremors at 6.30am; tsunami hits at 9am: at least 3,000 dead, including 1,625 in Tamil Nadu

Sri Lanka: Tsunami hits at 9am: 4,500 dead

Maldives: Tsunami hits at 9am: 32 dead

The chief UN relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, said the recovery effort was unlike anything the UN had ever attempted because so many different areas were affected.

"This may be the worst natural disaster in recent history because it is affecting so many heavily populated, coastal areas," he told CNN.

Assessing needs in areas with disrupted communications and on isolated islands is a formidable challenge, as are the logistical complexities of delivering aid. It is also a race against time to prevent more deaths from disease, hunger and thirst.

"Many more people could die in the coming days," said Jasmine Whitbread, the international director of Oxfam. "The flood waters will have contaminated drinking water and food will be scarce."

The relief efforts will also have to tackle the longer-term problems of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods. "We will be at it for many months to come," said David Alexander, international director of the British Red Cross....

Australia, which has thousands of miles of coast facing the Indian Ocean but was largely unaffected, pledged almost £4m and sent two freight planes to Malaysia with water purification supplies, blankets and bottled water.

The US released $400,000 (£208,000) and said it expected to increase that to $15m. "Some 20,000-plus lives have been lost in a few moments but the lingering effects will be there for years," the secretary of state, Colin Powell, said.

The EU promised €3m (£2.1m), with the prospect of more to come. "There is no doubt that we are talking about substantial sums as this is one of the world's worst natural disasters for many years," said Louis Michel, the commissioner responsible for humanitarian aid. "The commission is able to mobilise up to €30m promptly through its emergency procedures."
...

US $400,000 released; total pledge anticipated at $15m
UK £400,000 through EU, aid flight sent
Norway £500,000 to Sri Lanka
Kuwait $1m
Belgium €500,000
Australia $10m Australian (£4m)
EU Donated €3m (£2.1m), more to follow

Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said the death toll in the region "could be between 5,000 and 10,000. This is a national disaster".

On the outskirts of Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, people searched for relatives among 500 bodies lined up under plastic tents, decomposing in the tropical heat, said an Associated Press reporter at the scene.

Dozens of buildings were destroyed in Banda Aceh, whose streets were turned into rivers by the huge waves that followed the earthquake. Some 3,000 people, many of them young children, died in the city, which has been virtually cut off.

Scores more people were missing, including at least 200 police and family members believed buried under their barracks in Banda Aceh, a police spokesman said.

The government warned of the danger of disease spreading. "We are trying to give the bodies a proper burial but there are so many of them," said Dr Indrawadi Tamin, from the national disaster handling agency. "We fear the rapid spread of cholera and dysentery."

Sumatra island bore the brunt of the quake, which was centred just off its western coast. One million people had been left homeless, the health ministry said.

By last night it was clear that many people had not managed to escape in time. Soontorn Rieulueng, the interior ministry official coordinating the rescue operation, said 866 people were confirmed dead in Thailand and up to 1,000 more were missing.

"Some of these could be up in the hills - perhaps they are too afraid to come down," he told the Guardian. "But we think the majority are corpses and it's just a matter of time before we find them."

Added to that were some 500 European tourists and hotel workers, who were reported missing on the small island of Khao Lak, off the west coast of Phuket last night by the French hotel group Accor.

"At this stage, we have been able to identify 100 people who have been transferred to Bangkok but we have not heard news about several hundred other people," a spokeswoman said....

As in Krabi, Patong's main hospital was overwhelmed. "Our emergency room usually has to handle about 60 people a day," the hospital's deputy director, Padungkiat Uthoksenee, said. "For the last two days we've had more than 10 times that number.

"We ran out of even the most basic of medicine and equipment yesterday so I sent an urgent request to Bangkok for more supplies but they didn't send me what I asked for. Apparently there is not enough and everything has to be shared between all the affected areas."

Nowhere was this better reflected than at the mortuary, which was struggling to process the 133 bodies taken there. Almost everything was being done in the open air.

After the water had washed completely back to sea he found her body, lying on the ground barely 20 yards from their house. "She came here," he said, pointing at the spot, covered now by a pile of palm fronds and broken furniture.

Yesterday she was buried, along with a dozen others from the village, in a broad patch of sand half a mile to the north. There was a line of rough mounds in the ground, unmarked save for a small, square stone. There had been no time for the traditional Hindu rituals, Mr Shekar said, and this grieved him almost as much as the loss of his sister.

Grief had spread through the village. Among the dead was a young girl, Anousha, aged three.

"My house collapsed and I had my daughter's hand in mine as we ran back from the water," said her distraught father, Raja. "But the wave took her from my hands."

For most of human history people have tried to explain earthquakes as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even as the churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests insisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off the catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of their fellow citizens.

Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire asked what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did Lisbon really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he asked, that it should be punished in such a appalling and indiscriminate manner? Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what happened to Lisbon that he wrote three separate treatises on the problem of earthquakes.

Our own society seems to be more squeamish about such things. The need for mutual respect between peoples and traditions of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast seems to require that we must all respect religions in equal measure, too. The government, indeed, is legislating to prevent expressions of religious hatred in ways that could put a cordon around the critical discussion of religion itself.

Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that requires a more serious explanation from the forces of religion than this week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to Christians - why Lisbon? - ought to generate a whole series of 21st-century equivalents for all the religions of the world.

Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike.

He echoed claims that a relatively simple early warning system would have saved thousands of lives: "At least two-thirds of the people who died should not have died. They could have had an hour or so to get a kilometre or two inland or to reach high ground."

Such warning systems, common in the Pacific where seabed earthquakes are more frequent, combine seismic monitoring with sea level measurements to detect and predict the path of tsunamis while they are still in deep water. They also need effective communications and evacuation plans onshore.

Prof McGuire said: "I'm not surprised by this, but they've never experienced one there so they think one is never going to happen. There is a window of opportunity now to get a warning system set up because in a few years people will have forgotten about this."

With food, drink, sanitation, shelter and healthcare urgently needed in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, a vast international rescue effort was under way last night. Countries including Britain, the US and Kuwait pledged millions of dollars in aid. Jan Egeland, chief UN relief coordinator, said it would take "many billions of dollars" and years to help the region to recover.

Relief organisations were struggling to determine exactly what help was needed, and where, with communications cut or overloaded.

"We are used to dealing with disasters in one country. But I think something like this spread across many countries and islands is unprecedented," said Yvette Stevens of the OCHA, the UN body that coordinates emergency relief.

The path to several thousand private hells is all too public. In this small town 20 miles south of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, it leads down the open-sided corridors of the district hospital to a garden at the back, and the mortuary beyond.
Police men and women in crisp khaki uniforms sit at tables under a frangipani tree, writing out death certificates. Small knots of relatives stand in the shade of the covered walkway, waiting for the horrendous moment of identification.

Again and again, a shriek goes up as mortuary workers lift the blanket or plastic sheeting which protects the dignity of the drowned. With a nationwide death toll of more than 12,000, the same desperate drama of shock and grief was being played out in scores of other towns and villages yesterday.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Rescuers scoured Asia`s coastlines today for survivors of devastating tidal waves that obliterated seaside towns in nine countries, killing more than 19,930 people. Aid poured into the region, but morgues and hospitals struggled to cope with the tragedy.

A giant tsunami, rising silently from the deeps like a mythical sea monster, swept across southern Asia yesterday to turn a sunny Sunday morning into a scene of death and destruction across thousands of kilometres and nine nations.

DEHIWALA, Sri Lanka—Disaster crept up on them deceptively, the villagers said, and then pounced.

MANGINAPUDI BEACH, India - The women and children had ritual baths in the sea on the occasion of the Full Moon Day, an auspicious day for Hindus. Then, the tsunami struck, sweeping 35 of them out to sea before throwing their lifeless bodies back on shore.

COLOMBO— Still reeling from its worst natural disaster in history, Sri Lanka braced today for the painful fallout from the tidal waves that engulfed the island's shoreline. As dawn broke, survivors resumed the grim search for loved ones who might wash ashore, trudging through once-idyllic white sand beaches.

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off Indonesia moved the entire island of Sumatra about 30 metres to the southwest, pushing up a gigantic mass of water that collapsed into a tsunami and devastated shorelines around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

Thirst, hunger and disease are the newest threats to millions struggling to rebuild their lives in the wake of a tsunami that tore across much of southern Asia Sunday. The latest estimates are that 77,000 people have perished, with the toll still climbing.

Jude Silva had only moments to make a choice: who to save and who to leave behind. The young Sri Lankan fisherman gathered up his mother while his wife rescued their 4-year-old son. There was no way to carry his ailing 60-year-old father as well. Martin Cohn reports from Kalutara, Sri Lanka.

OTTAWA—Canada's special military team for humanitarian crises, which hasn't seen action since 1999, may be split up so at least one part can be used for relief work in the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster.

Despite the dramatic television and newspaper pictures, it is still incomprehensible: a tsunami roaring across the Indian Ocean at 800 kilometres an hour, building up into 10-metre waves as it nears land, slamming into 11 countries on two continents, killing at least 50,000 people, levelling entire towns, leaving millions of survivors in shock and grief.

Bodies were piled today along southern Asian coastlines devastated by massive waves that obliterated seaside towns and killed 23,700 people in nine countries. The tally was expected to rise, with thousands still missing. Hundreds of children were buried in mass graves in India, and morgues and hospitals struggled today to cope with the catastrophe.

I come across Naomi Klein's writing in the Canadian and US press a fair bit. The comment about breaking it and owning it goes back to Powell i believe (its in plan of attack) but has morphed...this is a "print out" from the page as it didn't format well. The link will also show you how to read past articles(The article is from The Nationhttp://www.thenation.com/doc....;s=klein which also has a nicer format for the article (i read quite a few when i found this spot)M

lookout by Naomi Klein

You Break It, You Pay For It

[from the January 10, 2005 issue]

So it turns out Pottery Barn doesn't even have a rule that says, "You break it, you own it." According to a company spokesperson, "in the rare instance that something is broken in the store, it's written off as a loss." Yet the nonexistent policy of a store selling $80 corkscrews continues to wield more influence in the United States than the Geneva Conventions and the US Army's Law of Land Warfare combined. As Bob Woodward has noted, Colin Powell invoked "the Pottery Barn rule" before the invasion, while John Kerry pledged his allegiance to it during the first presidential debate. And the imaginary rule is still the favored blunt instrument with which to whack anyone who dares to suggest that the time has come to withdraw troops from Iraq: Sure the war is a disaster, the argument goes, but we can't stop now--you break it, you own it.

Though not invoking the chain store by name, Nicholas Kristof laid out this argument in a recent New York Times column. "Our mistaken invasion has left millions of Iraqis desperately vulnerable, and it would be inhumane to abandon them now. If we stay in Iraq, there is still some hope that Iraqis will come to enjoy security and better lives, but if we pull out we will be condemning Iraqis to anarchy, terrorism and starvation, costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of children over the next decade."

Let's start with the idea that the United States is helping to provide security. On the contrary, the presence of US troops is provoking violence on a daily basis. The truth is that as long as the troops remain, the country's entire security apparatus--occupation forces as well as Iraqi soldiers and police officers--will be exclusively dedicated to fending off resistance attacks, leaving a security vacuum when it comes to protecting regular Iraqis. If the troops pulled out, Iraqis would still face insecurity, but they would be able to devote their local security resources to regaining control over their cities and neighborhoods.

As for preventing "anarchy," the US plan to bring elections to Iraq seems designed to spark a civil war--the civil war needed to justify an ongoing presence for US troops no matter who wins the elections. It was always clear that the Shiite majority, which has been calling for immediate elections for more than a year, was never going to accept any delay in the election timetable. And it was equally clear that by destroying Falluja in the name of preparing the city for elections, much of the Sunni leadership would be forced to call for an election boycott.

When Kristof asserts that US forces should stay in Iraq to save "hundreds of thousands of children" from starvation, it's hard to imagine what he has in mind. Hunger in Iraq is not merely the humanitarian fallout of a war--it is the direct result of the US decision to impose brutal "shock therapy" policies on a country that was already sickened and weakened by twelve years of sanctions. Paul Bremer's first act on the job was to lay off close to 500,000 Iraqis, and his primary accomplishment--for which he was just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom--was to oversee a "reconstruction" process that systematically stole jobs from needy Iraqis and handed them to foreign firms, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 67 percent. And the worst of the shocks are yet to come. On November 21, the group of industrialized countries known as the Paris Club finally unveiled its plan for Iraq's unpayable debt. Rather than forgiving it outright, the Paris Club laid out a three-year plan to write off 80 percent, contingent on Iraq's future governments adhering to a strict International Monetary Fund austerity program. According to early drafts, that program includes "restructuring of state-owned enterprises" (read: privatization), a plan that Iraq's Ministry of Industry predicts will require laying off an additional 145,000 workers. In the name of "free-market reforms," the IMF also wants to eliminate the program that provides each Iraqi family with a basket of food--the only barrier to starvation for millions of citizens. There is additional pressure to eliminate the food rations coming from the World Trade Organization, which, at Washington's urging, is considering accepting Iraq as a member--provided it adopts certain "reforms."

So let's be absolutely clear: The United States, having broken Iraq, is not in the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the country and its people by other means, using not only F-16s and Bradleys, but now the less flashy weaponry of WTO and IMF conditions, followed by elections designed to transfer as little power to Iraqis as possible. This is what famed Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh, writing before his 1977 assassination by the military junta, described as "planned misery." And the longer the United States stays in Iraq, the more misery it will plan.

But if staying in Iraq is not the solution, neither are easy bumper-sticker calls to pull the troops out and spend the money on schools and hospitals at home. Yes, the troops must leave, but that can be only one plank of a credible and moral antiwar platform. What of the schools and hospitals in Iraq--the ones that were supposed to be fixed by Bechtel but never were? Too often, antiwar forces have shied away from speaking about what Americans owe Iraq. Rarely is the word "compensation" spoken, let alone the more loaded "reparations."

Antiwar forces have also failed to offer concrete support for the political demands coming out of Iraq. For instance, when the Iraqi National Assembly forcefully condemned the Paris Club deal for forcing the Iraqi people to pay Saddam's "odious" debts and robbing them of their economic sovereignty, the antiwar movement was virtually silent, save the dogged but undersupported Jubilee Iraq. And while US soldiers aren't protecting Iraqis from starvation, the food rations certainly are--so why isn't safeguarding this desperately needed program one of our central demands?

The failure to develop a credible platform beyond "troops out" may be one reason the antiwar movement remains stalled, even as opposition to the war deepens. Because the Pottery Barn rulers do have a point: Breaking a country should have consequences for the breakers. Owning the broken country should not be one of them, but how about paying for the repairs?

NASA has been considering using a two-armed robot built in Canada to repair the observatory.

Judy McCann-Beranger, a counsellor at P.E.I.'s Alzheimer Society, wrote A Caregiver's Guide for Alzheimer and Related Diseases.

McCann-Beranger wrote the book based on what she learned from families. The easy-to-read guide includes basic information to help families cope.

Justice Minister Irwin Cotler is in the Middle East Monday, the first Canadian cabinet minister to make an official trip to the troubled region in a year and a half.

Tens of thousands of Congolese civilians have fled a week of fighting between renegade soldiers and army loyalists, hiding deep in the forest where humanitarian workers cannot reach them, according to United Nations officials.

The number of election observers headed to Iraq has been reduced significantly over security concerns, said Jean-Pierre Kingsley, the federal chief electoral officer on Monday. Remaining officials will monitor the election from another Middle Eastern post, possibly Amman, Jordan.