Ruth Gidley
Ruth Gidley has been on the AlertNet team since late 1999. Before that, she lived in Guatemala, working first with a small local NGO and then as a journalist for a Central American news service. Ruth, who has a Masters in Latin American Studies, has edited a book on human rights in Guatemala, and written chapters for books on truth monuments and on Native American traditions.
Post-Katrina New Orleans takes the good with the bad
Author: Ruth Gidley
New Orleans has some things to be happy about, and plenty to make you angry. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is bringing some of the top, top names in jazz, country and all kinds of music. And the basketball team - the Hornets - are back in the city full-time after basing themselves partly in Oklahoma City since Hurricane Katrina, having a good season with play-offs against the Dallas Mavericks.
But homelessness is up, rents are still high and the buses are nowhere near back to normal.
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Author: Ruth Gidley
New Orleans has some things to be happy about, and plenty to make you angry. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is bringing some of the top, top names in jazz, country and all kinds of music. And the basketball team - the Hornets - are back in the city full-time after basing themselves partly in Oklahoma City since Hurricane Katrina, having a good season with play-offs against the Dallas Mavericks.
But homelessness is up, rents are still high and the buses are nowhere near back to normal.
...
BOOKS: Hurricane Katrina, fact and fiction
Author: Ruth Gidley
Ahead of World Book Day on 23 April, I've been reading a lot about Hurricane Katrina.
Some of the best accounts I've come across of the storms that ripped into the U.S. Gulf coast in August 2005 have been in the fiction of James Lee Burke. His stories in Jesus out to Sea and his detective novel The Tin Roof Blowdown are throbbing with anger at the authorities who let more than 1,800 people die and left elderly women, tiny children, hospital patients and chained-up prisoners sweating in tropical heat with no electricty, clean water or food, surrounded by sewage and hostile police.
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Author: Ruth Gidley
Ahead of World Book Day on 23 April, I've been reading a lot about Hurricane Katrina.
Some of the best accounts I've come across of the storms that ripped into the U.S. Gulf coast in August 2005 have been in the fiction of James Lee Burke. His stories in Jesus out to Sea and his detective novel The Tin Roof Blowdown are throbbing with anger at the authorities who let more than 1,800 people die and left elderly women, tiny children, hospital patients and chained-up prisoners sweating in tropical heat with no electricty, clean water or food, surrounded by sewage and hostile police.
...
Health damage from climate change has already started
Author: Megan Rowling
We've already had several sneak previews of how climate change is going to be bad for our health.
From mosquito-borne diseases that jump from cows to people in East Africa, to a heatwave that killed thousands of elderly Europeans, to malaria starting to appear in the highlands of Rwanda and Swaziland in abnormally hot summers. And outbreaks of cholera as more floods hit coastal communities with poor sanitation, mixing sewage with drinking water supplies amid fetid heat.
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Author: Megan Rowling
We've already had several sneak previews of how climate change is going to be bad for our health.
From mosquito-borne diseases that jump from cows to people in East Africa, to a heatwave that killed thousands of elderly Europeans, to malaria starting to appear in the highlands of Rwanda and Swaziland in abnormally hot summers. And outbreaks of cholera as more floods hit coastal communities with poor sanitation, mixing sewage with drinking water supplies amid fetid heat.
...
TIPSHEET: What will climate change do to our health?
Author: Megan Rowling
Scientists and health experts are working to gather more data and evidence on how climate change affects diseases and other aspects of health. Statistics are hard to come by.
Between 1997 and 2006, weather-related disasters killed an average of 71,000 people a year, according to the Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. But it's impossible to say to what extent those disasters were caused by climate change.
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Author: Megan Rowling
Scientists and health experts are working to gather more data and evidence on how climate change affects diseases and other aspects of health. Statistics are hard to come by.
Between 1997 and 2006, weather-related disasters killed an average of 71,000 people a year, according to the Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. But it's impossible to say to what extent those disasters were caused by climate change.
...
Colombia's displaced women sexually abused and forced into early motherhood
Author: Ruth Gidley
If you're a Colombian girl displaced by the war, there's almost a one in three chance you'll have at least one baby before your 20th birthday. And over your lifetime, there's a one in five chance you'll be raped.
Occasionally the four-decade-long civil war hits the international spotlight when guerrillas release some hostages or paramilitaries give up their weapons, but on the whole, not much has changed for millions of people caught up in the crossfire.
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Next entries
Author: Ruth Gidley
If you're a Colombian girl displaced by the war, there's almost a one in three chance you'll have at least one baby before your 20th birthday. And over your lifetime, there's a one in five chance you'll be raped.
Occasionally the four-decade-long civil war hits the international spotlight when guerrillas release some hostages or paramilitaries give up their weapons, but on the whole, not much has changed for millions of people caught up in the crossfire.
...
