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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.

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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?

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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”?

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.