Category: Black Horse

Aftershock in Afghanistan as Quake Toll Rises to 1,150 Dead

Ebrahim Nooroozi – June 24, 2022

GAYAN, Afghanistan (AP) — An aftershock took more lives Friday and threatened to pile even more misery on an area of eastern Afghanistan reeling from a powerful earthquake that state media said killed 1,150 people this week.

Wednesday’s magnitude 6 quake struck a remote, mountainous region already grappling with staggering poverty at a time when the country as a whole is spiraling deeper into economic crisis after many countries pulled back critical financing and development aid in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover.

That aid had been keeping the country afloat, and its withdrawal left millions unable to afford food and further strained already struggling medical facilities. Nearly half the population of 38 million cannot meet their basic food needs, while some civil servants, like doctors, nurses, and teachers, weren’t paid for months because the Taliban government is unable to access frozen foreign reserves. Salary delays continue throughout the public sector.

Afghanistan’s international isolation is also complicating relief efforts since fewer aid organizations have a presence in the country, and many governments are wary of putting money in the Taliban’s hands.

Aid groups lament that means they have to pay local staff with bags of cash delivered by hand.

Aid organizations like the local Red Crescent and U.N. agencies like the World Food Program have sent food, tents, sleeping mats, and other essentials to families in Paktika province, the epicenter of the earthquake, and neighboring Khost province.

Still, residents appeared to be largely on their own to deal with the aftermath as their new Taliban-led government and the international aid community struggled to bring in help. The shoddy mountain roads leading to the affected areas were made worse by damage and rain.

Thousands of stone and mud-brick homes crumbled in the quake, which struck at night, often trapping whole families in the rubble. Many of those who survived spent the first night outside in a cold rain. Since then, villagers have been burying their dead and digging through the rubble by hand in search of survivors.

The Taliban director of the state-run Bakhtar News Agency said Friday the death toll from the first quake had risen to 1,150 people. Abdul Wahid Rayan said at least 1,600 people were injured.

https://www1.cbn.com

A mega-tsunami in the Pacific north-west? It could be worse than predicted, new study says

Strange Sounds – June 9, 2022

Scientists have discovered the size of the ‘outer wedge’ of a faultline can magnify a rupture’s impact. That’s a worrying news for the people living along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault running from Vancouver Island to northern California…

Scientists have long predicted a giant 9.0-magnitude earthquake that reverberates out from the Pacific north-west’s Cascadia fault and quickly triggers colossal waves barreling to shore.

But what if these predictions were missing an important piece of information – one that, in certain scenarios, could tell an even more extreme story?

A new study, published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Earth-Science Reviews, points toward such a missing piece. Researchers revealed a previously unknown relationship between the severity of a tsunami triggered by an earthquake and something known as “the outer wedge”, the area between the main earthquake fault and the seafloor.

Sylvain Barbot, a co-author of the study, described the outer wedge as the “garbage bag of subduction zones”, the place where two tectonic plates crash into each other and can produce an earthquake, because it’s where sediment piles up.

The researchers’ findings suggest that the wider it is, the larger the maximum size of the tsunami will be.

The connection adds a new element to consider when making tsunami predictions, one that the authors suggest could mean heightened worst-case scenario predictions for some faults, including Cascadia.

https://strangesounds.org

Dying children reflect brutal toll of Somalia drought

Mustafa HAJI ABDINUR – June 9, 2022

Arbay Mahad Qasim has already lost two children to a vicious drought, and now the Somali villager fears she could lose a third as her malnourished toddler Ifrah awaits treatment in a Mogadishu hospital.

Barely out of her teens, Qasim is among dozens of weary parents crowding Banadir Maternity & Children Hospital, which has become ground zero for the starvation crisis sweeping across Somalia as a record drought grips the Horn of Africa.

Entire villages have been forced to uproot their lives and flee their homes after poor rainfall destroyed crops and killed livestock.

When the rains failed for a fourth consecutive season last month, UN aid agencies and meteorologists warned that a famine was looming in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia.

But for many Somalis like Qasim, who has been surviving on government handouts for the past few months, catastrophe has already struck.

Two of her children died of hunger in the last 18 months.

When two-year-old Ifrah’s tiny body began to swell, showing symptoms of severe malnutrition, Qasim wasted no time, spending a day traveling to Mogadishu from her village in the southwest in a desperate bid to save her youngest child’s life.

https://www.spacedaily.com

Countries hoarding food supplies as prices spike, hunger crisis looms

Laurel Duggan – May 25, 2022

Countries are imposing export restrictions on food in light of shortage concerns sparked by the war in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Export restrictions were quickly imposed after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine to increase domestic supply and slow the rise of prices, but the trend could exacerbate rising global food prices and shortages, according to the WSJ. Ukraine and Russia are both major exporters of grains and vegetable oils.

Restrictions on food or fertilizer exports were put in place in 26 countries in 2022, according to the WSJ. Economists told the outlet these restrictions would temporarily ease the pain of food shortages in the countries that use them, but are a temporary measure that contributes to higher food prices globally.

India, the world’s second-largest wheat producer, banned wheat exports May 13 as domestic prices jumped while Indonesia, which produces 60% of the world’s palm oil, blocked exports of the substance in late April before lifting the ban in late May. Ghana barred maize, rice and soybean exports; Argentina banned beef exports; and Iran and Egypt blocked the export of numerous foods, according to the WSJ.

“It’s one of these classic things where there’s really a short-term sugar high for the government … And then you end up with the same scarcity problem you had before,” said Simon Evenett, professor of international trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, according to the WSJ.

Food prices rose nearly 30% over the past year, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, with the trend accelerating following the invasion of Ukraine. President Joe Biden expressed concern about the food shortages March 24.

“With regard to food shortages, yes, we did talk about food shortages,” Biden said. “And it’s gonna be real.”

https://www.wnd.com

Blackouts This Summer: 1 Billion At Risk

Mac Slavo – May 25, 2022

The ruling classes of the globe are continuing to warn that the power grids all across the globe will be stretched thin this coming summer. There will not be electricity worldwide to meet the soaring demand for more energy, which is threatening more than one billion people with rolling blackouts.

Power grids are already being stretched thin by fuel shortages, droughts and heatwaves, commodity disruptions, soaring prices due to the war in Ukraine, and the failed green energy transition where grid operators retired too many fossil fuel generation plants. Combine this all together, and a perfect storm of blackouts threatens much of the Northern Hemisphere, according to a report by ZeroHedge.

This power crisis, which is going to be affecting much of the world’s top economies, could be less than a month away when summer begins on June 21. Regions that concerned Bloomberg are Asia, Europe, and the US, where there’s not enough power to go around when cooling demand is set to surge as households crank up their air conditions to escape the sweltering heat.

The warnings of blackouts continue as people begin to get ready for their summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Henning Gloystein, an analyst at Eurasia Group, warns if major blackouts spread across the world this summer, “that could trigger some form of humanitarian crisis in terms of food and energy shortages on a scale not seen in decades.”

Since we have already been experiencing food shortages, it is hard to say what we could experience next.

https://www.shtfplan.com

Huge 7.3 magnitude earthquake strikes near remote Australian island

Ricky Scaparo – May 19, 2022

A 7.3 magnitude earthquake has been recorded near a remote Australian island. The Bureau of Meteorology reported the quake near Macquarie Island in the southwest Pacific Ocean at 8.49 pm on Thursday.

According to the Daily Mail, The earthquake was at a depth of 29.3km. BOM and the Australian territory located south of New Zealand on was briefly on tsunami warning but this was lifted by 10pm.

The quake was also recorded by the US Geological Survey. Located 1,600km southeast of Tasmania, Macquarie Island is home is to the Australian Antarctic Division station, which is occupied all year round. It has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997 and is a refuge for large colonies of penguins and seals.

The island is particularly active in terms of seismic activity, sitting on the boundary between the Australian Plate and the Pacific plate. The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre initially put Australia on tsunami alert. According to the International Tsunami Information Centre, a “tsunami warning is issued when a tsunami with the potential to generate widespread inundation is imminent, expected, or occurring.

Warnings alert the public that dangerous coastal flooding accompanied by powerful currents is possible and may continue for several hours after initial arrival”. They later released an update confirming there was no risk of a tsunami.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

Meteorologists Warn ‘Megadrought’ in US Southwest is Worst in 1,200 Years

Sputnik – May 12, 2022

A new study has found that the 22-year-long water shortage plaguing the American Southwest and western Mexico is the region’s worst in more than a millennium – a phenomenon dubbed a “megadrought.”

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, found that soil moisture deprivation has exceeded that of a megadrought in the 16th century that was previously the region’s worst known drought.

It’s so bad that University of California Los Angeles geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, has warned it would take a prolonged shift in weather patterns to remedy things.

The researchers looked at tree rings to compare the present drought’s intensity with those of years past, since trees generally produce wider rings in wet years and narrower rings in drier years. They found that since 2000, the average soil moisture deficit was twice that of any drought of the past century, with nothing comparable being found until 1,200 years back.

The region has always been quite dry, of course, with four large deserts dominating the terrain and the rest being fairly arid. Indigenous civilization was well-adapted to the precarious conditions, but modern cities have been built without respect to climate – and may soon suffer the consequences.

Reservoirs created by hydroelectric dams, like the famous Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas, Nevada, that holds back Lake Mead, are reaching historic lows. The lake provides the City That Never Sleeps with its freshwater, but has suffered steady water loss since 1983, which has accelerated in recent years, requiring modifications to Hoover Dam’s turbines to allow it to continue producing electricity despite the low water level.

https://sputniknews.com

Global Food Crisis: ‘Perfect Storm’ of World Hunger Thanks to the Ukraine Crisis and COVID Could Starve Millions

Peter Caddle – May 5, 2022

Millions are at risk of starvation thanks to COVID and the ongoing war in Ukraine, both of which have helped create a “perfect storm” of a global food crisis.

Experts have warned that millions of people across the world are on the brink of starvation thanks to a “perfect storm” of a global food crisis.

A report by the Global Network Against Food Crises — a multinational organisation founded by the European Union as well as various United Nations bodies — found that 2021 represented the worst year for world hunger, but that things could soon get a whole lot worse thanks to a wide variety of ongoing geopolitical problems.

According to the organisation’s annual Global Report on Food Crises, 193 million people face acute food insecurity in 2021, which they define as being in a state where a person’s food intake is so low as to put their lives or livelihoods in immediate danger.

By far the single largest cause of this food insecurity last year was conflict, while the issue of economic shocks and climate change came in as very distant second and third place causes respectively.

However, despite how bad things got last year, experts who participated in the creation and publication of the report now fear that things could get a whole lot worse in 2022 as a result of a wide number of ongoing crises.

“Acute hunger is soaring to unprecedented levels and the global situation just keeps on getting worse,” said David Beasley, a former Republican Party governor who now serves as the executive director of the World Food Programme.

“Conflict, the climate crisis, COVID-19 and surging food and fuel costs have created a perfect storm — and now we’ve got the war in Ukraine piling catastrophe on top of catastrophe,” he continued. “Millions of people in dozens of countries are being driven to the edge of starvation.”

https://www.breitbart.com

Israel heeds Joseph’s advice; Stocks up on wheat for upcoming famine

– March 24, 2022

Citing fears of possible food shortages amid the Ukraine crisis, Israel’s transportation minister instructed that cargo ships importing grain and animal feed be given priority for unloading at the port docks over the next month.

This solution of stocking up on grains before a predicted famine mirrors the Bible’s Joseph. Joseph, son of Jacob, was promoted to be the prince of Egypt after he interpreted Pharaoh’s dream of withering grain stocks devouring healthy ones as an imminent famine in Egypt. Joseph then advised Pharaoh to stock up on wheat to have enough reserves once the famine strikes.

Let that food be a reserve for the land for the seven years of famine which will come upon the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish in the famine.”(Genesis 41:36)

Israel appears to be heeding Joseph’s ancient advice in prioritizing wheat over other imported goods. “We face challenges to our food security at the time being because of the worrying developments in Ukraine,” noted Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli in a statement on Thursday.

“The State of Israel must safeguard its food security by strengthening our domestic agriculture. Taking steps to get the grain and fodder that Israeli agriculture relies on, the nation will quickly ensure that we maintain Israeli food security despite changes worldwide.”

According to the statement, shipping and Ports head Yigal Maor already took “several steps” to implement the decision.

https://www.israel365news.com

Strong and shallow M6.7 earthquake hits near the coast of Nicaragua

The Watchers – April 21, 2022

A strong and shallow earthquake registered by the USGS as M6.7 hit near the coast of Panama at 07:24 UTC on April 21, 2022. The agency is reporting a depth of 25.3 km (15.7 miles). EMSC is reporting M6.7 at a depth of 40 km (24.8 miles).

The epicenter was located about 58.2 km (36.2 miles) WSW of Masachapa (population 5 000), 68.7 km (42.7 miles) WSW of San Rafael del Sur (population 29 836), and 88.8 km (55.2 miles) WSW El Crucero (population 16 469), Managua, Nicaragua.

There are 910 000 people living within 100 km (62 miles).

1 000 people are estimated to have felt strong shaking and 807 000 moderate.

Based on all available data, there is no tsunami threat from this earthquake, PTWC said.

The USGS issued a Green alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. There is a low likelihood of casualties and damage.

Overall, the population in this region resides in structures that are highly vulnerable to earthquake shaking, though some resistant structures exist. The predominant vulnerable building types are mud wall and adobe block construction.

Recent earthquakes in this area have caused secondary hazards such as landslides that might have contributed to losses.

https://watchers.news