The strongest Earthquake to hit Haiti in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers. Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon's 7.0-magnitude tremor or to estimate the number of dead lying among the collapsed buildings in Haiti's capital of about 2 million people. International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally told the...

The Earthquake that has hit Haiti, raising fears that thousands have been killed, is the latest in a long line of natural disasters to befall a country ill-equipped to deal with such events. Hurricanes and flooding are perennial concerns for the poorest country in the western hemisphere, which has time and again been dependent on foreign aid in emergencies. In 1963 hurricane Flora, the sixth deadliest Atlantic hurricane in history,...

There is an alarming rise in sea level along the Indian coast since 2004, said Shailesh Nayak, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences. Addressing the Indian Science Congress session on ‘Weather, Climate and Environment,’ Nayak said the seal-level rise during 2004-08 along the Indian coast was about 9 mm. The global average sea-level rise from 1961 to 2003 was 1.8 mm per year. The annual rate along the Indian coast was...

Five years after the massive Indian Ocean tsunami, which left a devastating trail of death and destruction, millions of people have benefited from the influx of aid by rebuilding stronger infrastructure, social services and disaster warning systems than existed before the catastrophe, according to the United Nations agencies at the core of the recovery effort. The largest emergency relief response in history was prompted by the Earthquake off the coast...

Breaking decades of silence over unjust social norms, widowed, abandoned and destitute women from different states in India came together at the national capital to launch the National Forum for Single Women's Rights to demand food, healthcare, employment and rights to property. It has been more than eight years since the January 2001 Earthquake struck the Indian state of Gujarat, but Hansa Rathore still cannot quite shake off memories of...