An at-a-glance guide to the most pressing development issues facing the world today. Highlights key social, economic, and environmental data for 208 of the world's economies.
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Green miniAtlas
A snapshot, presented in maps and charts, of the world's most urgent environmental challenges: increasing population, the rising demand for energy and food, declining biodiversity, and the pressure of water resources.
miniAtlas of Millennium Development Goals: Building a Better World
How far are we towards meeting the
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Millennium Development Goals? And what resources are needed to help those countries that are not on track? An insightful and practical guide to important contemporary global concerns.
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Human Security Report Project and the World Bank, this at-a-glance guide to global security issues provides a wealth of information on armed conflicts since 1946. It maps political violence, the links between poverty and conflict, assaults on human rights – including the use of child soldiers – and the causes of war and peace.
Extraordinary changes have taken place since the end of the Cold War. Despite the escalating violence in Iraq, and the widening war in Darfur, there has been a decline in armed conflict worldwide.
The fault responsible for the Jan. 12 magnitude 7.0 earthquake that devastated Haiti is visible in images created using NASA radar topography data acquired in 2000.
This perspective view of the pre-earthquake topography of the area, created using data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission that flew aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour in February 2000, clearly shows the Enriquillo fault that is apparently responsible for the earthquake. The fault is visible as a prominent linear landform that forms a sharp diagonal line at the center of the image. The city of Port-au-Prince is immediately to the left (north) at the mountain front and shoreline.
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Elevations in the image are color coded from dark green at low elevations to white at high elevations, and the topography is shaded with illumination from the left. The topography in this image is exaggerated by a factor of two.
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The key question from a strategic point of view ought to be: where is everyone now, and where do we want to encourage them to move to by providing a rich flow of community building materials properly located in relation to available potable water, arable land, etcetera. Below is the population density image.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haitians are fleeing their quake-ravaged capital by the hundreds of thousands, aid officials said Friday, as their government promised to help nearly a half-million more move from squalid camps on curbsides and vacant lots into safer, cleaner tent cities.
Aid officials said some 200,000 people have crammed into buses, nearly swamped ferries and set out even on foot to escape the ruined capital. For those who stay, foreign engineers have started leveling land on the fringes of the city for tent cities, supposedly temporary, that are meant to house 400,000 people.
The goal is to halt the spread of disease at hundreds of impromptu settlements that have no water and no place for sewage. Homeless families have erected tarps and tents, cardboard and scrap as shelter from the sun, but they will be useless once the summer rainy season hits.
With much of Port-au-Prince in ruins, there are about 600 impromptu settlements with a population of about 1 million scattered around Haiti, said Dr. Jon Angrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization.
Getting the people to safer quarters could take weeks.
“These settlements cannot be built overnight. There are standards that have to be designed by experts. There is the leveling of the land, procurement and delivery of tents, as well as water and sanitation,” said Vincent Houver, the IOM's mission chief in Haiti.
Phi Beta Iota: First off, Haiti is mountaneous, most of the options are in the narrow strip of land that is waterfront, but there are two big options, both on the tips of land furthest awar from Port au Prince. Second off, “built by experts” is a death wish. These folks are old school. We should be air dropping manna from heaven where we want them to move to, and get out of the way.
The earthquake in Haiti has left an estimated 1.5 million people homeless and tens of thousands without access to food, water and medical supplies. The UN says the scale of the disaster is “historic”, with its staff confronting devastation and logistical problems on a scale never seen before.
Port-de-Paix Airport (IATA: PAX, ICAO: MTPX) is in passenger numbers, the third airport in Haiti[1] and is located in the city with the same name, Port-de-Paix, on the north coast of Haiti.
Jacmel Airport: The airport is able to handle smaller commercial aircraft, but not large aircraft.[2]. However, a C-130 Hercules aircraft can land with utmost difficulty. Prior to the 12 January 2010 quake, there was no control tower at the airstrip, and its ramp area could only accommodate five aircraft at a time, [3] the runway also did not have lights,[4] and with no control tower, no radar to go with it. As such, it can only support good weather daylight operation.[5]
20 Jan: Army Maj. Gen. Daniel Allyn, deputy commander of the military operation in Haiti, said a runway in the town of Jacmel, on the south coast, will open for C-17 flights in 24 hours, and another field in the neighboring country of the Dominican Republic would also be used, though the timing was uncertain.
Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great: our university system, our receptiveness to immigration, our culture of innovation. In most significant ways, the U.S. remains the envy of the world. But here’s the alarming problem: our governing system is old and broken and dysfunctional. Fixing it—without resorting to a constitutional convention or a coup—is the key to securing the nation’s future.
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Image credit: Seamus Murphy
Since coming back to the United States after three years away in China, I have been asking experts around the country whether America is finally going to hell. The question is partly a joke.
. . . . . .
How should we feel? I spoke with historians and politicians, soldiers and ministers, civil engineers and broadcast executives and high-tech researchers. Overall, the news they gave was heartening—and alarming, too.
. . . . . .
One Reason Not to Worry: We Have Been Here Before
Another Reason Not to Worry: The Irrelevance of “Falling Behind”
The Crucial American Advantage
The Main Concerns
The full details are beyond us here, but the crucial point is that in principle, the United States itself has the power to correct what is wrong in each case.
The Biggest Problem
That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. . . . In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”
Scientists I spoke with said that as more and more research money is assigned by favoritism and earmark, it becomes harder for scientists to pursue the most-promising research opportunities.
What Is To Be Done?
I started out this process uncertain; I ended up convinced. America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not.
. . . . . .
What are the choices? Logically they come down to these, starting with the most fanciful:
We could hope for an enlightened military coup, or some other deus ex machina by the right kind of tyrants. . . .
We could hope to change the basic nature of our democracy, so it fits the times as our other institutions do. But this is about as likely as an enlightened coup. . . .
Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair. But Starr is right. Our only sane choice is to muddle through. . . .
