Haiti earthquake - 2 weeks on

The Haiti earthquake took place over two weeks ago now. The full extent of the horror is becoming clearer. Although there are some heart warming stories, as people are still being found alive (the latest is a 16 year old girl found under the rubble of a house, 15 days after the quake) there are also many terrible reports coming out of Haiti.

If you click the headline above you will be taken to a report that suggests that many of the orphans and vulnerable children left behind in Haiti (up to a million are estimated to have either no parents, one parent or be unattended) are in danger of being sold or abused.

There are also reports of increased sexual crimes against women and lawlessness in the country. Speaking on American TV on Wednesday night, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said he has received reports of kids being sold, and he believed human organs were also being taken from victims of the quake for profit.

Read more here

South Koreans told to go home and make babies

South Korean government workers are being given an unusual instruction - go home and multiply.

At 1900 on Wednesday, officials at the Ministry of Health will turn off all the lights in the building. The country has one of the world's lowest birth rates, lower even than neighbouring Japan. South Korea's birth rate stood at 1.19 children per woman in 2008

Boosting the number of newborn children is a priority for the government, which is staring into the abyss of a rapidly ageing society, falling levels of manpower and spiralling health care costs.

The Ministry of Health, now sometimes jokingly referred to as the Ministry of Matchmaking, is in charge of spearheading this drive, and it clearly believes its staff should lead by example.

Generous gift vouchers are on offer for officials who have more than one child, and the department organises social gatherings in the hope of fostering love amongst its bureaucrats.

Although this seems like an odd story, it is a really useful example of how to manage populations and the concern an ageing population can cause.

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Click the title to read more and see a video clip

Earthquake in Haiti

On Tuesday a big earthquake hit the poor Caribbean country of Haiti.

The extent of the devastation from the huge quake in Haiti is slowly emerging thousands of people feared dead.

Jordan, Brazil and China have all reported deaths, and France says it fears the Tunisian head of the UN mission in Haiti has been killed.

The 7.0-magnitude quake, Haiti's worst in two centuries, struck south of the capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday.

The Red Cross says up to three million people have been affected

The quake's epicentre was only 10 miles from the Capital city, Port-au-Prince, which has a population of about 1 million, and aftershocks as powerful as 5.9 rattled the city throughout the night and into today. Reports on casualties and damage were slow to get out of Haiti due to communication problems.

As the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti is ill-equipped to respond to such a disaster, lacking heavy equipment to move debris and a sufficient force of emergency personnel.


Click the headline to go to BBC reports about the disaster.

Why has it been so cold?

The Big Chill is being blamed on a change in the position of the jet stream – the current of air that moves from west to east. In a normal British winter – when conditions are mild and soggy – the jet stream lies over northern Europe, at an altitude of between 35,000 to 50,000 feet.

During these grey winters, Britain’s prevailing winds come from the west and south west, and bring with them warm and moist air from the sub-tropical Atlantic. But since mid December, the weather patterns high in the atmosphere have changed. The jet stream has shifted south hundreds of miles and is now positioned over North Africa.

The warm westerlies that usually keep away the snow are instead giving the Mediterranean an unusually mild winter. What wind the UK has experienced has blasted in from the Arctic, or from across the cold land masses of Siberia and Eastern Europe.

Helen Chivers, of the Met Office, said: ‘Because the jet stream is so far south, we have now got two areas of high pressure bringing cold weather to Britain.

‘One is over Greenland, and the other is over Russia. We are stuck in an area of low pressure between them and we are getting northerly winds from the Arctic and northern Scandinavia.’

No one knows why the jet stream has shifted so far south. Some believe its location may be linked to the emerging El Nino weather phenomena – where the surface temperatures of the Pacific periodically get warmer.

The Met Office said yesterday that the cold snap has nothing to do with climate change – but is part of the normal ebb and flow of normal local weather.


Read more here


You can also look at the BBC special report on the big freeze by clicking this link. It has lots of very useful information.

It's cold! A million Scottish sheep could die!

Welcome back to school and using the blog! I was going to put some information about the cold weather up here, but I'm sure you've all seen and heard of the main effects - travel disruption, schools closed, people staying off work and so on, so I looked for something a little more unusual......

Scottish farmers fear that up to a million sheep face being starved or frozen to death after being caught out on exposed hillsides.

The National Farmers' Union in Scotland said about a third of the country's sheep were on hills and warned that many flocks were "on a real knife edge". After weeks of snow and sub-zero temperatures, conditions are expected to worsen this weekend, with the cold lasting for at least another week.

The warning came as some dairy farmers had to dump milk and add it to their slurry after milk tankers were unable to reach them because local roads had become impassable.