Monday, August 2 - Disasters and News

There are three English language news stations and I usually watch one of those three (unless of course, I know a Chinese soap opera is on... I LOVE Chinese soap operas). On Channel 1 is Channel News Asia, Channel 9 is CNN and Channel 11 is Aljazeera. But the news has just been one heartbreaking thing after another.

The floods in China are completely devastating the south and the northeast of the country, and one of my students, Huang Qing qing has left the class because she comes from a flooded area and some of her family lost their home in the floods. And in one area in the northeast, 1500 barrels were washed into the river. Half of the barrels were empty, but half of them were filled with a dangerous and combustive gas. They have been trying to recover the barrels, but they haven't found them all and they think some of them have sunk to the bottom, sparking worry of contamination.

And then there was that devastating plane crash in Pakistan, where all 152 people aboard died. And immediately after came the floods. The death toll from the floods just keeps rising, with numbers hitting over 1,000 in just a few days.

The same rain that is flooding Pakistan is also flooding parts of Afghanistan.

And this past month, there have also been flash floods in Singapore that have been very costly and unprecedented, though thankfully not deadly.

I wish we could take some of the water that's destroying Pakistan and southern China and dump it over Russia, where the fires raging there have destroyed thousands of homes and displaced tens of thousands more people, and where temperatures are the highest ever since they started keeping those kinds of records.

Not to mention the horrendous drought in Niger that has been going for several years, leading to bad harvests and wide-spread starvation.

I don't know whether it is just because there is better coverage of this part of the world, or whether there is really an uptick, but it really seems like Mother Nature is trying her hardest to bitch-slap the world at the moment.