US - worst tornado season in 75 years

More than 520 people have been killed in tornadoes in the United States so far this year, making it the deadliest since 1936.

Between April 25 and 28, what has now been dubbed the 2011 Super Outbreak caused the deaths of 317 people in Alabama and seven other states.     Then on May 22, Joplin, Missouri was devastated with 138 people being killed.   

According to some estimates, up to 75% of the city of 50,000 was damaged, with around 2,000 buildings destroyed.   One relief worker described the devastation as ‘unimaginable’, and when President Obama visited Joplin, he said it was the worst destruction he had ever seen, calling the scene ‘heartbreaking’, but he promised government help to rebuild the city.

Scientists put the strength of the tornado at the top of the scale used to measure them.    (See also my blogs of April 18 and May 24.)

Carry on shooting + number crunching

Another mass shooting in the United States. This time a man walked into a room at Binghamton, New York State, where people were sitting exams to become US citizens. After killing 13 and critically injuring four more, the gunman, said to be of Vietnamese origin, shot himself.

Last Sunday, a man gunned down seven patients and a nurse at a nursing home in Carthage, North Carolina, before police shot and wounded him, while on March 10, a 28 year old Alabama man killed 10 people before shooting himself. (See my blog of March 12)

President Obama pronounced himself “shocked and saddened” at the latest shooting. Will he do anything significant to tighten up America’s gun laws? Same safety advice as yesterday – don’t hold your breath.

Number crunching. £300,000 - amount Labour MP Sir Stuart Bell claims mystery person is trying to make from selling details of MP’s expense claims. £93,000,000 – amount of our money MP’s claimed in expenses last year.

Helicopter crashes + spot the difference

It’s now accepted that there’s no hope of finding any survivors from Wednesday’s helicopter accident in the North Sea. Sixteen people were aboard the Super Puma that crashed into the water 14 miles from Peterhead on its journey back from BP’s Miller oil platform.

The whole North Sea oil industry depends on helicopters to ferry personnel back and forth, and more than a hundred people have died in crashes since production began. Only in February another Super Puma came down in the sea in fog. On that occasion, all 18 people aboard were rescued, but 11 men were killed in 1992 when their Super Puma fell into the sea on a 200 yard journey from a production platform to an accommodation barge.

The world’s worst ever civilian helicopter accident happened in the North Sea in 1986 when a Chinook carrying workers home from the Brent field crashed as it was approaching Sumburgh Airport on Shetland. Its rotor blades collided with each other, and the aircraft came down in the sea and sank, killing 45 of the 47 people aboard.

Spot the difference. When Palestine’s democratically elected Hamas government refused to be bound by agreements that earlier Palestinian administrations had made with Israel, US President George W Bush orchestrated an international conspiracy (in which Labour enthusiastically joined) to starve the Palestinians into submission. Now Israel’s new Foreign Minister has repudiated agreements earlier Israeli governments made with the Palestinians. When do you expect President Obama to start trying to starve the Israelis into submission? Safety warning – don’t hold your breath.

Palestine number crunching + strange shipwreck

Number crunching. As President Obama tries to pretend his Middle East policy is somehow different from George Bush’s, some interesting figures. 80 - number of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem Israel planned to demolish prompting half-hearted protests from the US. 73,000 - number of illegal homes Israel plans to build on land stolen from the Palestinians about which the US has not uttered a peep.

On this day.....131 years ago, HMS Eurydice, a Royal Navy training ship, was off the Isle of Wight almost at the end of her transatlantic crossing from Bermuda. The coastguard said she was “moving fast under plain sail.” Then off Sandown, she was hit by a blizzard, and sank within five minutes.

A quarter of an hour later, the squall had passed, and it was a lovely sunny day. Only two men survived from the crew of 366, and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem about the shipwreck. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of Britain.

Iraq - closing a disaster?

So, nearly six years after George W Bush announced American “victory” in Iraq, the US has finally found a way to scramble out of the morass it created. To a considerable fanfare, Barack Obama has announced that troops will leave by the end of August next year. As with all politicians, though, you have to look at the small print, and in fact, it turns out that a modest little contingent of 50,000 – the same size as half the entire British army – will not leave, and could stay until the end of 2011. It seems like a clear breach of President Obama’s promise, before he was elected, to withdraw all troops within 16 months of coming to power, but, hey, you know election promises sometimes turn out to be nothing more than, well....election promises.

The US-UK attack did remove a murderous, tyrannical regime – though this, of course, was not the reason for it. Indeed, a few days before the attack, Tony Blair promised Saddam Hussein that he could remain in power – and presumably continue to be a murderous tyrant – provided he gave up his (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction.

We do not know what Iraq would have been like today if we had not bombed it to smithereens. We do know that after the “shock and awe” we inflicted on them, nearly a million Iraqi people today do not have enough food, that many are without electricity for more than half the time, that only one person in three has clean drinking water, that only one in five is served by a proper sewerage system, that cholera is a constant danger, that the country is riven by bitter sectarian enmities, and that, as the BBC’s John Simpson so eloquently pointed out last night, although violence has fallen, it remains one of the most dangerous places on earth.

How many Iraqi deaths did we cause? As far as we and the Americans are concerned, the answer is the one given by Nikita Khruschev when asked about the victims of the great famine created by the Soviets in Russia in the 1930’s – “No one was counting.” A number of independent research organisations, though, have tried to answer the question and have come to the conclusion that we may have been responsible for the deaths of up to 1.4 million Iraqi people.