Two years after receiving its first deposits, a “doomsday” seed vault on an Arctic island has amassed half a million seed samples, making it the world’s most diverse repository of crop seeds, the vault’s operators announced Thursday.
Cary Fowler — who heads the trust that oversees the seed collection, which is 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) from [...]

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The 8.8 quake caused widespread damage, destroying buildings, bridges and roads in many areas. Electricity, water and phone lines were cut.
Chilean President Michele Bachelet said that altogether two million people had been affected.
Several Pacific countries were hit by waves higher than usual after a tsunami was set off by the quake.
BBC News – Massive [...]

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Japan and Russia went on alert Sunday, clearing tens of thousands of people out of vulnerable coastal areas as a tsunami triggered by Chile’s massive killer quake powered across the Pacific.
DAWN.COM | World | Japan, Russia on tsunami alert after Chile quake

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A deadly 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck central Chile early Saturday, ripping apart buildings, highways and bridges and leaving a path of smoky rubble across a long swath of this earthquake-tested country before sending waves rumbling across the Pacific Basin.
‘State of Catastrophe’ After Chile Quake – NYTimes.com

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The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris last year is one of the most mysterious accidents in the history of aviation. After months of investigation, a clear picture has emerged of what went wrong. The reconstruction of the horrific final four minutes reveal continuing safety problems in civil aviation.
Death in the [...]

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Without vastly expanded efforts to change construction practices and educate people, from mayors to masons, on simple ways to bolster structures, he said, Haiti’s tragedy is almost certain to be surpassed sometime this century when a major quake hits Karachi, Pakistan, Katmandu, Nepal, Lima, Peru, or one of a long list of big poor cities [...]

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The Great Paris Flood of 1910 will happen again—and it’ll be even worse than last time.
The Great Paris Flood of 1910 began a century ago this week, but it never quite subsided. Indeed, as locals ponder surreal archival photographs on display now in Paris to mark that epic disaster, there is something patently eerie about [...]

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But what is surely the strangest film about our doomsday fantasies arrives this Friday. Called “Collapse,” it features a spellbindingly weird one-man monologue by Michael Ruppert, a former LAPD officer and investigative journalist who believes that we are about to run out of oil, an event sure to plunge the world into a state of [...]

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A survival expert offers preparation tips for calamities—natural and manmade.
1. Assume that a disaster can happen. Don’t assume that it won’t. Survival is 90 percent psychology, so being mentally and emotionally unprepared lowers your survival odds.

10 Survival Tips for Disaster Preparedness – Newsweek.com

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Lisa Bedford is one of the new survivalists. She’s a normal mom, but is very concerned about the things she’s seeing. Her family is preparing for the worst.
Do you have a sense that something is wrong? Are you thinking that you need some kind of survival kit for an emergency?
If you feel that you [...]

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