meehawl

Should all of [Greenland's] ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world’s coastal cities, home to a billion people … the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago … The increasingly erratic behavior of the Greenland ice has scientists wondering whether the climate, after thousands of years of relative stability, may again start oscillating … computer models on which climate predictions are based did not take the dynamics of the glaciers into account … the monolith of ice is constantly on the move … [they have] accelerated in response to warmer temperatures, as summer meltwater lubricated the base of the ice sheet and allowed it to slide faster toward the sea. In a way no one had detected, the warm water made its way through thousands of feet of ice to the bedrock in weeks, not decades or centuries … On the eastern edge of Greenland, the Kangerlussuaq Glacier, like the Jakobshavn, has surged, doubling its pace. To the west, the Helheim Glacier now appears to be moving about half a football field every day … If they all slide too quickly, there is a possibility that … they could collapse suddenly and release the entire ice sheet into the ocean.

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A fundamentalist Muslim whom the U.S. suspects of collaborating with Al Qaeda terrorists was named Saturday as the new leader of an Islamist militia that has seized control of [Mogadishu]. The militia … appointed Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys as its new leader. The Bush administration has alleged that Aweys was an associate of Osama bin Laden in the 1990s … Aweys replaces Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who is considered a moderate in comparison … Ahmed also agreed last week to stop military action and recognize the largely powerless interim government, which is based in Baidoa, 140 miles northwest of Mogadishu. Aweys has condemned that government and any attempts to install a Western-style democracy.

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At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion … a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration … Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

Using this scaling that makes the equivalent of roughly 3,500 killed each week, week after week, since 2003. That’s a vaguely comparable death toll to the jetliner attacks of September 11th, 2001, on the United States. Except for the Iraqis it’s now a weekly occurrence.

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