Pray for Bangladesh


If we needed any reminder of how America-centric our news has become, the following report from Pharyngula (an outstanding science/atheism blog by Professor P.Z. Myers) is sobering:

Try checking the major American news sites: CNN, Fox, MSNBC, the New York Times, you can even try the BBC. There's a major news story missing.
You'll have to read Chris Mooney's blog to find it. There's a potential Category 5 cyclone, Cyclone Sidr, on its way to smash Bangladesh.

It's going to hit sometime tomorrow. While Sonny Perdue prays for a little rain, maybe we should be urging our news networks to pay attention to the important news, our government should be getting ready for emergency assistance, and we should all be preparing to loosen those checkbooks and possibly offer what aid we can.



Read it here.

Here is more coverage:

Tropical Cyclone Sidr's winds strengthened to 241 kilometers (150 miles) per hour as it moved across the Bay of Bengal toward Kolkata in India and the west coast of Bangladesh, the U.S. Navy's typhoon center said.

The eye of Sidr, a Category 4 storm, was 667 kilometers south of Kolkata at 11:30 p.m. local time yesterday, according to the latest advisory on the navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center Web site. The storm is moving north at 17 kilometers an hour.

Bangladesh authorities ordered thousands of people to evacuate coastal areas around Chittagong, Mongla and Cox's Bazaar and raised the highest alert, Associated Press reported. In India, authorities issued warnings to residents in Kolkata and nearby coastal areas, the Hindu Times said.

Northeastern India and Bangladesh are regularly hit by cyclones that form in the Bay of Bengal, bringing flooding and devastation to local communities. A cyclone that hit near Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh left 138,000 people dead in 1991, according to the New York Times.


Read it all here, and then pray for the people of Bangladesh and Eastern India.

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