Lightning flashes around the ash plume rising from the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano Entrelagos, Chile, on Sunday (Reuters photo by Carlos Gutierrez). Dormant for half a century, the volcano erupted in south-central Chile Saturday, throwing ash more than 10 km into the sky, as winds propelled to toward Argentina, prompting the evacuation of several thousand residents. José Pujol, graphics editor of the Spanish website público.es has assembled a stunning selection of photos of the eruption. Here’s one more, by Ian Salas of the Spanish news agency EFE. H/T: Adrian Noskwith...

09 June, 2011

Felix Solomon, a blogger for Reuters, proposes a Unified Theory of New York Biking that Halifax cyclists would do well to heed: Bikes can and should behave much more like cars than pedestrians. They should ride on the road, not the sidewalk. They should stop at lights, and pedestrians should be able to trust them to do so. They should use lights at night. And — of course, duh — they should ride in the right direction on one-way streets. None of this is a question of being polite; it’s the law. But in stark contrast to motorists, nearly all of whom...

12 September, 2010

Some reaction to yesterday's Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings. James Fallows: I can't pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again...

06 April, 2010

On the morning of July 12, 2007, US soldiers aboard two Apache helicopters used 30mm cannons to kill about a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. The US military caimed that all the dead were anti-Iraqi combatants, but among them were two Iraqi employees of the Reuters News Agency, driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, a father of four, and photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, described as on of the best war photographers in Iraq. Two children were also injured. Reuters demanded an investigation. US authorities concluded that their forces acted properly. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Reuters unsuccessfully sought...

05 April, 2010