In these photos released Thursday, Dec. 30, 2004 by DigitalGlobe, the shoreline of Banda Aceh in Indonesia, is shown on June 23, 2004, above, and Dec. 28, 2004 below, after the tsunami attack. (AP Photo/DigitalGlobe)

The left image shows Khao Lak, Thailand, a popular tourist destination on the southern coast of Thailand. The right image shows the destruction caused by the tsunami.

The image on the left shows Male International Airport in the Maldive Islands on December 3, 2003. The image on the right was taken December 27, 2004, one day after the tsunamis. Notice the sand and debris on the runway, debris and damage to the coastline and damage to structures on the sand jetties. The airport is located in the center of a small island called Hulule and is the first point of contact for every visitor coming from overseas.

Op dit moment bevat m’n home page twee keer de brief van de HDF Mission in Bangkok. Eenmaal bij de brief van Paul, en eenmaal bij een post over wat foto’s uit phuket. Uit m’n serverlogs blijkt dat ik zowel bij Yahoo als bij Google op de eerste pagina te vinden ben. Kijk maar naar m’n log analyse (van middernacht tot 6:45 vandaag):

Ik vond dat ik deze internet-ramptoeristen best even een referentie mocht geven naar een plek om te doneren, dus ik heb die post aangepast…

[Quote:]

At least 42 islands in the tourist paradise of the Maldives were flattened with 117 people killed and missing after tsunamis raved the low-lying atoll nation, the president said.

President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom said 75 people were killed while another 42 were confirmed missing in Sunday’s devastating tidal waves that caused havoc in his nation of 1,192 coral islands.

“We were not in any way prepared to deal with this disaster,” Gayoom told a special session of the national parliament. The toll could be higher as the authorities re-establish contact with far flung islands, he said on Thursday.

“Maldives may be able to build a new life from scratch with financial assistance, but dealing with the widespread personal tragedy and despair would not be easy,” he said.

The tragedy struck the atoll nation of 330,000 Sunni Muslims which is already facing the prospect of extinction from sea level rise caused by global warming. Gayoom had warned that a one-meter (three foot four inch) rise in sea levels could submerge his country.

When walls of water washed over the Maldives, the nation lost all the infrastructure on 13 of its 202 inhabited islands while another 29 of the country’s 85 resort islands suffered similar damage.

Each island is a single resort hotel with the geographical formation allowing the country to keep foreigners and the local Sunni Muslim population separate except in the one square mile capital island Male.

Foreigners are not allowed to overnight on islands inhabited by Maldivians and special permission is required to visit them.

Gayoom, 67, who is Asia’s longest serving president in power since 1978, has already declared an emergency and put off parliamentary elections that were due Friday.

Voting has been re-scheduled for January 22, but officials said even that could be put off again as the country struggled to rebuild itself amid initial estimates that the damage was in excess of 1.5 billion dollars.

Gayoom said 9,000 people had been evacuated from damaged islands while another 12,000 were made homeless across the archipelago.

“There are shortcomings in the relief operations,” he admitted but urged all Maldivians to unite in the face of the worst disaster to hit the nation and said they were also getting international help.

[Quote:]

The airplane is a Gulfstream V turbojet, the sort favored by CEOs and celebrities. But since 2001 it has been seen at military airports from Pakistan to Indonesia to Jordan, sometimes being boarded by hooded and handcuffed passengers.

The plane’s owner of record, Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., lists directors and officers who appear to exist only on paper. And each one of those directors and officers has a recently issued Social Security number and an address consisting only of a post office box, according to an extensive search of state, federal and commercial records.

Bryan P. Dyess, Steven E. Kent, Timothy R. Sperling and Audrey M. Tailor are names without residential, work, telephone or corporate histories — just the kind of “sterile identities,” said current and former intelligence officials, that the CIA uses to conceal involvement in clandestine operations. In this case, the agency is flying captured terrorist suspects from one country to another for detention and interrogation.

The CIA calls this activity “rendition.” Premier Executive’s Gulfstream helps make it possible. According to civilian aircraft landing permits, the jet has permission to use U.S. military airfields worldwide.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, secret renditions have become a principal weapon in the CIA’s arsenal against suspected al Qaeda terrorists, according to congressional testimony by CIA officials. But as the practice has grown, the agency has had significantly more difficulty keeping it secret.

According to airport officials, public documents and hobbyist plane spotters, the Gulfstream V, with tail number N379P, has been used to whisk detainees into or out of Jakarta, Indonesia; Pakistan; Egypt; and Sweden, usually at night, and has landed at well-known U.S. government refueling stops.

As the outlines of the rendition system have been revealed, criticism of the practice has grown. Human rights groups are working on legal challenges to renditions, said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, because one of their purposes is to transfer captives to countries that use harsh interrogation methods outlawed in the United States. That, he said, is prohibited by the U.N. Convention on Torture.

The CIA has the authority to carry out renditions under a presidential directive dating to the Clinton administration, which the Bush administration has reviewed and renewed. The CIA declined to comment for this article.

[Quote:]

I still can’t believe that it really could have happened. Just look at the facts on the table: He’d gone into a war having misled people–whether deliberately or not–about why he went to war. You would think that would have knocked him out [of the race.] It didn’t. Look at the number of American soldiers who have died since he claimed that the war had ended. And yet it seems this doesn’t make most Americans worry too much. I was teaching in Jacksonville, Fla., [during the election campaign] and I was shocked, because I had naively believed all these many years that Americans genuinely believed in freedom of speech. [But I] discovered there that when you made an utterance that was remotely contrary to what the White House was saying, then they attacked you. For a South African the d�j� vu was frightening. They behaved exactly the same way that used to happen here [during apartheid]–vilifying those who are putting forward a slightly different view.

[..]

Look at the [detentions in] Guantanamo Bay. You say, why do you detain people without trial in the fashion that you have done? And when they give the answer security, you say no, no, no, this can’t be America. This is what we used to hear in South Africa. It’s unbelievable that a country that many of us have looked to as the bastion of true freedom could now have eroded so many of the liberties we believed were upheld almost religiously. [But] feeling as devastated in many ways as I am, it is wonderful to find that there are [also] Americans who have felt very strongly [about administration policies]–the people who turned out for rallies against the war. One always has to be very careful not to do what we used to do here, where you generalize very facilely, and one has to remember that there are very many Americans who are feeling deeply distressed about what has taken place in their country. We take our hats off to them.

Number of deaths due to four Florida hurricanes in 2004: 117
Number of deaths due to Aceh earthquake and tsunami in 2004: 120,000+
Homeless due to Florida hurricanes: 11,000
Homeless due to Aceh earthquake/tsunami: 5,000,000
US government aid to help Florida hurricane victims: $2.04 billion
US government aid to help Aceh earthquake/tsunami victims: $35 million
Pfizer (the company) $10 million in Funds to Relief Organizations, $25 Million Worth of Medicines and Healthcare Products, total $35 million
Estimated cost of George Bush’s upcoming inaguration celebration, not including security costs: $40 million
US government direct cost, per hour, of the US war in Iraq: $9 million
Netherlands per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $2.45
Spain per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $2.30
Norway per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $1.80
Australia per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $1.30
UK per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $0.48
France per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $0.50
US per capita government contribution to help earthquake/tsunami victims: $0.12
Number of barrels of oil in the ground in Iraq: 115 billion
Number of barrels of oil in the ground in Indonesia: 9.6 billion
Bill Gates personal contribution (on top of his Foundation efforts): $3 million

[Quote:]

Once one learns the complex mathematical language required to express his ideas, Einstein’s theories are the simplest and most obvious of any in physics.

Sorry dat ik zo op de valreep van het oude jaar even bij je aanklop. Onverwacht misschien, omdat je wellicht al langer niets van me gehoord hebt. Maar een extreme gebeurtenis was voor mij de directe aanleiding in ieder adresboekje dat ik nog heb te duiken, om te zien hoe ik zo veel mogelijk van jullie kan bereiken.

De gebeurtenis waar ik het over heb is natuurlijk de tsunami die afgelopen zondag hier in Zuid Oost Azi� zo veel leed veroorzaakte. Zelf zit ik hoog en droog in Bangkok en zat op het moment van de ramp zelfs nog noordelijker.
Maar toch zit ik er dicht genoeg bij om de ongelofelijke impact te voelen, die deze ramp op de levens van velen heeft gehad en zal hebben. Want dat deze schok nog lang zal na dreunen staat vast. Niet alleen door het verlies van zoveel dierbaren, maar ook omdat het hier, anders dan in Nederland en Belgi�, zeker geen gewoonte is om voor alles en nog wat verzekeringen af te sluiten. Veel mensen zijn dus alles kwijt wat ze hebben.

Overal komen hulpacties op gang om de nood te verlichten. Maar ik weet dat er veel mensen zijn die nogal wat twijfels hebben over de effectiviteit van grote hulp organisaties, over welk deel van het geld nuttig besteed wordt. Als je toch een steentje wilt bijdragen en op zoek met naar een manier om maximaal effect te bereiken met je donatie, dan kan ik Father Joe en zijn Human Development Foundation van harte aanbevelen.
Ik heb hier in Bangkok de afgelopen vier jaar verschillende malen met Father Joe en zijn Mercy Centre mogen werken en het is ongelofelijk om te zien hoe zij met bescheiden middelen de echte zwakken en kansloze in de Thaise samenleving weten te helpen. Geen mooie facades, maar simpele, eerlijke mensen die keihard werken om anderen te helpen. Iedere Euro, Dollar of Thaise Baht die zij ontvangen wordt volledig benut om mensen weer een beetje toekomst te geven.

De onderstaande brief spreekt voor zich. Mocht je niet rechtstreeks vanuit Nederland geld over kunnen maken naar Thailand, maar toch wat willen doen, mail me dan even met het bedrag wat je wilt geven en ik zorg dat het bij Father Joe komt, terwijl jij het bedrag op mijn Nederlandse rekening kunt storten. Maar ik weet dat veel banken, waaronder ABN Amro tegenwoordig zelfs via internet bankieren rechtstreeks geld naar Thailand kunnen laten overmaken.

Mocht je iets meer over de organisatie van Father Joe te weten willen komen, kijk dan eens op:

http://www.mercycentre.org/

Dit is de email die ik vanmorgen van hun ontving:

—– Original Message —– ����

From: “tom crowley”

Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 12:41 PM ����
Subject: HDF Mission to the South

Dear all, ��HDF Mission to the South ���

As tens of thousands of Thai people are homeless, indigent, grieving �for their dead and suffering from the effects of the Tsunami in the South, the �Human Development Foundation (HDF) should play a direct role in helping �those affected especially children as we are a children�s �organization. ���

Thus �it is decided that, as we have assisted our slum neighbors after over �70 �fires in the past 30 years, and thus lots of hands on experience, HDF staff �should, after coordination with local leaders in mosques, temples and �churches, and Government, �travel to the South and help in the �recovery and �rebuilding effort. ��

The basic principals of the mission are as follows: ��

1) HDF will stay within our usual mission as a �partnership with the ���poor�. �In this regard we will look to help poor communities to help �themselves to rebuild by providing a jump start to their local efforts. �

2) HDF�s mission to the South must not, and absolutely can not, �detract �from the current school, shelter and AIDS effort in Bangkok. �

3) The basis for the mission will be to utilize the many lessons �learned ���in �emergency help in the Bangkok slums after fires have devastated whole �communities: �

a. Our help will focus on a bottoms up approach, working directly with ���the �community leaders to develop the plan of rebuilding. (Note it is ���expected �that Amway Thailand, which has volunteered the use of the their house �to �house sales network in the South, �will help us to make these �contacts) �
b. HDF works with the poorest of the poor, especially the women and ���children �survivors. �
c. HDF�s effort will be to help those in need to help themselves �rather ���than �to do the work for them. ��

The timing of the mission will be within two weeks or after the �foreign �disaster relief teams leave off from recovering bodies and those still �missing and the rescue effort is considered finished.

The duration of ���the �mission will be for five to seven days. Roughly one hundred HDF staff �and several vehicles will be involved. ��

Many of our supporters have asked if and how we will be involved and �how �they can donate support. At present we are asking donations to be sent ��to �the following address: ��

Name of Bank: Standard Chartered Bank �100 North Sathorn Road, Bangrak, Bankok 10500 �

Swift Code: �SCBL THB xxxx T/T ��

Savings account number : 001-002-9519-3 ��

Account name: Human Development Foundation ��

Thank you for your support and prayers, ��

�

Fr. Joe ��
Om te beginnen� wil ik je al bedanken voor je aandacht, dat je de tijd genomen hebt dit even te lezen. En in het geval je mocht besluiten daadwerkelijk wat geld te storten (en echt, iedere Euro helpt), wees er dan zeker van dat velen hier, die het nieuwe jaar niet echt leuk beginnen, je zeer dankbaar zullen zijn. En mocht je anderen weten die wellicht ge�nteresseerd zijn om iets te doen, schroom dan niet deze brief door te sturen.

Rest me je langs deze weg ook nog even het beste voor 2005 te wensen.

Paul Warmer

[Quote:]

President Bush finally roused himself yesterday from his vacation in Crawford, Tex., to telephone his sympathy to the leaders of India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia, and to speak publicly about the devastation of Sunday’s tsunamis in Asia. He also hurried to put as much distance as possible between himself and America’s initial measly aid offer of $15 million, and he took issue with an earlier statement by the United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who had called the overall aid efforts by rich Western nations “stingy.” “The person who made that statement was very misguided and ill informed,” the president said.

We beg to differ. Mr. Egeland was right on target. We hope Secretary of State Colin Powell was privately embarrassed when, two days into a catastrophic disaster that hit 12 of the world’s poorer countries and will cost billions of dollars to meliorate, he held a press conference to say that America, the world’s richest nation, would contribute $15 million. That’s less than half of what Republicans plan to spend on the Bush inaugural festivities.

The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Mr. Bush’s turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the United States budget that we allocate for nonmilitary foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.

Bush administration officials help create that perception gap. Fuming at the charge of stinginess, Mr. Powell pointed to disaster relief and said the United States “has given more aid in the last four years than any other nation or combination of nations in the world.” But for development aid, America gave $16.2 billion in 2003; the European Union gave $37.1 billion. In 2002, those numbers were $13.2 billion for America, and $29.9 billion for Europe.

Making things worse, we often pledge more money than we actually deliver. Victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, a year ago are still living in tents because aid, including ours, has not materialized in the amounts pledged. And back in 2002, Mr. Bush announced his Millennium Challenge account to give African countries development assistance of up to $5 billion a year, but the account has yet to disperse a single dollar.

Mr. Bush said yesterday that the $35 million we’ve now pledged “is only the beginning” of the United States’ recovery effort. Let’s hope that is true, and that this time, our actions will match our promises.

[Quote:]

Wildlife officials in Sri Lanka expressed surprise Wednesday that they found no evidence of large-scale animal deaths from the tsunamis � indicating that animals may have sensed the wave coming and fled to higher ground.

An Associated Press photographer who flew over Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park in an air force helicopter saw abundant wildlife, including elephants, buffalo, deer, and not a single animal corpse.

Floodwaters from Sunday’s tsunami swept into the park, uprooting trees and toppling cars onto their roofs � one red car even ended up on top of a huge tree � but the animals apparently were not harmed and may have sought out high ground, said Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne, whose Jetwing Eco Holidays ran a hotel in the park.

What a Great Home Page.

[Quote:]

PvdA-raadslid Mohammed el Yaakoubi van het Amsterdamse stadsdeel Geuzenveld-Slotermeer is in opspraak gekomen, omdat hij tijdens de zomervakantie zijn echtgenote – de moeder van hun twee zoontjes – zou hebben gedumpt in Marokko.

De vrouw, Habiba el Yousfi (27), wist twee�nhalve maand na het incident naar Nederland terug te keren en stapte naar de politie in Amsterdam. Volgens de offici�le aangifte heeft El Yaakoubi in Marokko haar paspoort en verblijfsvergunning gestolen om haar terugkeer naar Nederland onmogelijk te maken. De Amsterdamse rechtbank stelde de vrouw onlangs op alle punten in het gelijk. El Yaakoubi moet haar identiteitspapieren teruggeven, evenals hun zoontjes Yassine en Rachid en de woning. El Yaakoubi moet ook per maand 1000 euro alimentatie betalen.

Het vet-gedrukte stukje hierboven is vanwege een perfect uitgevoerde “hou de hand boven het hoofd van een collega” van PVDA fraktievoorzitter Wouter van der Wulp:

Het is volstrekt logisch dat de PvdA er faliekant tegen is dat vrouwen in Marokko worden gedumpt, maar in dit geval is mij daarvan niets gebleken. Ik heb de kwestie besproken met El Yaakoubi en die beweert dat het moddergooien is in een priv�-kwestie.”

Ik plaats normaliter geen banners op deze site. Boven aan deze pagina zie je een uitzondering.

Mag ik voorstellen het geld dat je voor vuurwerk-uitgaves in gedachten had hier aan te besteden?

[Quote:]

The illegal club drug Ecstasy can trigger euphoria among the dance club set, but can it ease the debilitating anxiety that cancer patients feel as they face their final days?

The Food and Drug Administration has approved a pilot study looking at whether the recreational hallucinogen can help terminally ill patients lessen their fears, quell thoughts of suicide and make it easier for them to deal with loved ones.

“End of life issues are very important and are getting more and more attention, and yet there are very few options for patients who are facing death,” Dr. John Halpern, the Harvard research psychiatrist in charge of the study, said Monday.

The small, four-month study is expected to begin early next spring. It will test the drug’s effects on 12 cancer patients from the Lahey Clinic Medical Center in the Boston area. The research is being sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit group that plans to raise $250,000 to fund it.

At the same time, The Feds continue to attempt to block medicinal marijuana through whatever means necessary.

I guess the difference is that people can grow pot themselves, but xtc would need to be bought from pharmaceutical companies. Guess which one is “profitable”?

[Quote:]

Tsunami Toll Nearly 70,000 and Rising Where’s Bush? The known death toll from the tsunami keeps rising so rapidly that a daily weblog cannot hope to keep up with it. Early Wednesday am Reuters was giving 68,000. The largest number of dead were in Indonesia, then Sri Lanka, then India and then Thailand. The horrific stories of corpses piled up on beaches or in trees, the neeed to bulldoze them into mass graves to dispel the spectre of disease, the wailing of relatives, the threat of cholera and other epidemics, finally filled the US media on Tuesday, as some sense of the full scale of the catastrophe finally began sinking in. The audio I heard of the wailing of relatives was the hardest to experience. The dead don’t mourn being dead, that is left to the living. Such catastrophes can have a political impact and can affect security affairs. The failure of the Turkish government to respond in a timely manner to the 1999 earthquake sounded the death knell for the government of then prime minister Bulent Ecevit, and set the stage for the later victory at the polls of the Muslim reform party, Ak. As John F. Harris and Robin Wright of the Washington Post cannily note, US President George W. Bush has missed an important opportunity to reach out to the Muslims of Indonesia. The Bush administration at first pledged a paltry $15 million, a mysteriously chintzy response to what was obviously an enormous calamity. Bush himself remained on vacation, and now has reluctantly agreed to a meeting of the National Security Council by video conference. If Bush were a statesman, he would have flown to Jakarta and announced his solidarity with the Muslims of Indonesia (which has suffered at least 40,000 dead and rising). Indeed, the worst-hit area of Indonesia is Aceh, the center of a Muslim separatist movement, and a gesture to Aceh from the US at this moment might have meant a lot in US-Muslim public relations. Bin Laden and Zawahiri sniffed around Aceh in hopes of recruiting operatives there, being experts in fishing in troubled waters. Doesn’t the US want to outflank al-Qaeda? As it is, the president of the United States is invisible and on vacation (unlike several European heads of state), and could think of nothing better to do than announce a paltry pledge. As Harris and Wright rightly say, the rest of the world treated the US much better than this after September 11. The Indonesian government itself has an opportunity to gain some good will in troubled Aceh, and appears to have taken a good first step by allowing international aid agencies into the area. Already the speaker of the provincial parliament in Kerala, India, has been mobbed by angry fishermen. He only escaped by promising to deliver their grievances to the chief minister. Tamil Nadu, another affected area, is important to the Congress government of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with five cabinet ministers in his government. How he handles the crisis could be important, since Congress came back to power precisely because it was supported by villagers. As of Wednesday, the Indian government was denying that the tsunami would affect over-all economic growth, which was only about 6.6 percent this year, less than the 8 percent PM Singh has said is necessary for the country to develop properly.

[Quote:]

Amateur video (11.7 MB) of a Tsunami hitting Phuket Beach, Thailand from Dagbladet.no.
English translation of the news article.

Hat tip: Wes Roth

A informative video (421 KB) on what a tsunami actually is at KFTY.

NEW: Video (783 KB) from Penang, Malaysia
Video (7.6 MB) from Sri Lanka.
Video (10 MB) from Patong Beach, Thailand. English translation of the audio.
NEW: Tsunami’s batter exclusive Thai resorts (AP Video)
NEW: More than 800 killed on Sri Lanken Train (AP Video)
Video (9.5 MB) from the BBC.
Video (105.2 MB 14 min.) from the BBC. Lots of new footage and info.
(For those with trouble watching the BBC vids, download VLC, then right-click the link and save a copy to your computer. You should then be able to watch. It’s worth it for the long one, lots of good info and new videos.)

Hellmut Issels tsunami disaster photo gallery.

Hat tip: Wizbang, Powerline and here

Before and after images. More from DigitalGlobe.

Hat tip: Boing-Boing

Cox and Forkum has a fantastic editorial cartoon.

A NOAA animation of the path of the tsunami.

A Foreign Service Officer’s account of the aftermath in India.

Wikipedia has a great set of articles on tsunamis in general and the Christmas 2004 tsunami/earthquake in particular.

A country-by-country breakdown of deaths from CNN.

USAID has a list of relief organizations working in the disaster area.

My Foreign Aid perspective.

You can donate directly to the Red Cross through Amazon.com.

Instapundit has a nice post about this too.

Red Cross donations through Amazon.com: almost $1,000,000.00 at 4am est

[Quote:]

With iPod-savvy Windows users clearly in its sights, Apple is expected to announce a bare bones, G4-based iMac without a display at Macworld Expo on January 11 that will retail for $499, highly reliable sources have confirmed to Think Secret.

The new Mac, code-named Q88, will be part of the iMac family and is expected to sport a PowerPC G4 processor at a speed around 1.25GHz. The new Mac is said to be incredibly small and will be housed in a flat enclosure with a height similar to the 1.73 inches of Apple’s Xserve. Its size benefits will include the ability to stand the Mac on its side or put it below a display or monitor.

[Quote:]

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity gained this view of its own heat shield during the rover’s 325th martian day (Dec. 22, 2004). The main structure from the successfully used shield is to the far left. Additional fragments of the heat shield lie in the upper center of the image. The heat shield’s impact mark is visible just above and to the right of the foreground shadow of Opportunity’s camera mast. This view is a mosaic of three images taken with the rover’s navigation camera.

[Quote:]

The Department of Justice has landed its first conviction against an American defendant trapped via Operation Fastlink, a multinational law enforcement effort undertaken against online software piracy.

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa said that Jathan Desir, 26, of Iowa City, has pleaded guilty to charges related to his role in a criminal enterprise that distributed pirated software, games, movies and music over the Internet.

Appearing in the U.S. District Court in Des Moines last week, Desir pleaded guilty to a three-count felony that charged him with copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. Desir will face a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison when he is sentenced on March 18, 2005.

According to the National Criminal Justice Reference System (NCJRS), the following sentences are listed as the average:

- Homicide: Average sentence = 149 months.
- Rape: Average sentence = 117 months.
- Kidnapping: Average sentence = 104 months.
- Robbery: Average sentence = 95 months.
- Sexual assault: Average sentence = 72 months.
- Assault: Average sentence = 61 months.

Rescue and clean-up crew survey a flooded lobby at the Seapearl Beach Hotel along Patong Beach on Phuket Island, Thailand

[Quote:]

The deadly Asian earthquake may have permanently accelerated the Earth’s rotation — shortening days by a fraction of a second — and caused the planet to wobble on its axis, U.S. scientists said on Tuesday.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth’s center during the quake on Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or 3 millionths of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

When one huge tectonic plate beneath the Indian Ocean was forced below the edge of another “it had the effect of making the Earth more compact and spinning faster,” Gross said.

Gross said changes predicted by his model probably are too minuscule to be detected by a global positioning satellite network that routinely measures changes in Earth’s spin, but said the data may reveal a slight wobble.

The Earth’s poles travel a circular path that normally varies by about 33 feet, so an added wobble of an inch is unlikely to cause long-term effects, he said.

[Quote:]

In his article “T-Mobile Tells BlackBerry Users: GetLess!” PowerPage editor Emory Lundberg reports about how T-Mobile effectively crippled the Blackberry smartphone on its network by disallowing outbound requests on TCP port 80. A real sin considering that T-Mo Blackberry users pay US$40 per month for “BlackBerry Unlimited w/Enterprise E-mail” that includes “Unlimited Web Browsing.”

[Quote:]

The computer software that crashed and grounded Comair’s entire fleet on Christmas Day was an antiquated system due to be replaced in the coming months.

Comair was lurching toward normalcy Monday with about 60 percent of its flights operating after canceling all 1,100 flights system-wide Saturday after the computer crash. The Hebron-based Delta Air Lines subsidiary hopes to be back to 100 percent by Wednesday.

[..]

Tom Carter, a computer consultant with Clover Link Systems of Los Angeles, said the application has a hard limit of 32,000 changes in a single month.

“This probably seemed like plenty to the designers, but when the storms hit last week, they caused many, many crew reassignments, and the value of 32,000 was exceeded,” he said.

Ironically enough for sale on walmart.com:

List Price: $10.95
Our Price: $7.55
You Save: $3.40�(31%)

This article is a nice summary of the current idiocy in the Netherlands…

If you haven’t been in the country for a while, of if you’re just wondering what has been happening to the Netherlands recently, read it!

Here is an absolutely stunning photo gallery of the tsunami in action. The above picture by itself is impressive, the but sequence clearly shows how massive the water was…

and here is some Patong footage by Dutch tourists..

�� Original Message �� ����

From: �tom crowley�

Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 12:41 PM ����
Subject: HDF Mission to the South

Dear all, ��HDF Mission to the South ���

As tens of thousands of Thai people are homeless, indigent, grieving �for their dead and suffering from the effects of the Tsunami in the South, the �Human Development Foundation (HDF) should play a direct role in helping �those affected especially children as we are a children�s �organization. ���

Thus �it is decided that, as we have assisted our slum neighbors after over �70 �fires in the past 30 years, and thus lots of hands on experience, HDF staff �should, after coordination with local leaders in mosques, temples and �churches, and Government, �travel to the South and help in the �recovery and �rebuilding effort. ��

The basic principals of the mission are as follows: ��

1) HDF will stay within our usual mission as a �partnership with the ���poor�. �In this regard we will look to help poor communities to help �themselves to rebuild by providing a jump start to their local efforts. �

2) HDF�s mission to the South must not, and absolutely can not, �detract �from the current school, shelter and AIDS effort in Bangkok. �

3) The basis for the mission will be to utilize the many lessons �learned ���in �emergency help in the Bangkok slums after fires have devastated whole �communities: �

a. Our help will focus on a bottoms up approach, working directly with ���the �community leaders to develop the plan of rebuilding. (Note it is ���expected �that Amway Thailand, which has volunteered the use of the their house �to �house sales network in the South, �will help us to make these �contacts) �
b. HDF works with the poorest of the poor, especially the women and ���children �survivors. �
c. HDF�s effort will be to help those in need to help themselves �rather ���than �to do the work for them. ��

The timing of the mission will be within two weeks or after the �foreign �disaster relief teams leave off from recovering bodies and those still �missing and the rescue effort is considered finished.

The duration of ���the �mission will be for five to seven days. Roughly one hundred HDF staff �and several vehicles will be involved. ��

Many of our supporters have asked if and how we will be involved and �how �they can donate support. At present we are asking donations to be sent ��to �the following address: ��

Name of Bank: Standard Chartered Bank �100 North Sathorn Road, Bangrak, Bankok 10500 �
Swift Code: �SCBL THB xxxx T/T ��
Savings account number : 001-002-9519-3 ��
Account name: Human Development Foundation ��

Thank you for your support and prayers, ��

Fr. Joe ��

Residents of Maldives wade through a flooded street after a series of tsunami waves hit the popular holiday destination.

Indian men walk pass damaged fishing boats hit by tsunami at Nagapattinam port, 350 km (219 miles) south of Madras

Acehnese people look at victim’s bodies in Banda Aceh, western Indonesia.

Sri Lankan residents pick throught debris in Galle.