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…

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.