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POPSThe Animal Notorious One Mumba was very famous. He was a silverback gorilla who lived most of his life in captivity and recently died, 48 years old, i.e. 90 years in human years.
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POPSThe Population of China’s Provinces Compared # Zhejiang (47 million) South Africa # Yunnan (44 million) Colombia # Jiangxi (43 million) Tanzania # Liaoning (42 million) Argentina # Guizhou (39 million) Sudan # Heilongjiang (38 million) Poland # Shaanxi (37 million) Kenya # Fujian (35 million) Algeria # Shanxi (33 million) Canada # Chongqing (31 million) Morocco # Jilin (27 million) Afghanistan # Gansu (26 million) Saudi Arabia # Inner Mongolia (24 million) North Korea # Taiwan (23 million) Yemen # Xinjiang (20 million) Madagascar # Shanghai (18 million) Cameroon # Beijing (16 million) Angola # Tianjin (12 million) Cuba # Hainan (8 million) Austria # Hong Kong (7 million) El Salvador # Ningxia (6 million) Sierra Leone # Qinghai (5 million) Slovakia # Tibet (3 million) Jamaica # Macau (0,5 million) Cape Verde
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POPSX-frogs In my wildest dream, I would not be able to make that up..........
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POPSWildlife in the DMZ: Vanishing rainforest of the Congo basin 1, The demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating South and North Korea is home to over 1,000 plant species and rare animals. The DMZ Forum is a lobby group promoting the idea of turning the area into a nature reserve. 2. The forest is the world's biggest after the Amazon. Now Britain and Norway have created a £108m fund to help protect it from logging and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The Congo basin forest is home to around 50 million people in six countries including Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Congo-Brazzaville. The Congo basin forest is twice the size of France and exceeded in size only by the Amazon. It is estimated that logging - much of it illegal - destroys an area the size of 25,000 football pitches every week. The UN estimates that at present rates two-thirds of the forest will have vanished by the year 2040.
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POPSA Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice The drought’s effect on rice has produced the greatest impact on the rest of the world, so far. It is one factor contributing to skyrocketing prices, and many scientists believe it is among the earliest signs that a warming planet is starting to affect food production. It is difficult to definitely link short-term changes in weather to long-term climate change, but the unusually severe drought is consistent with what climatologists predict will be a problem of increasing frequency.
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POPSWorld's New Crisis: Soaring Food Prices
"Frankly speaking, that G8 meeting is in June and we cannot wait," Mr Zoellick said, after meeting the IMF and the World Bank's Development Committee. "We estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty." The World Bank has warned that food prices will remain elevated this year and will probably stay above 2004 levels until 2015. "We estimate that the effect of this food crisis on poverty reduction worldwide is in the order of seven lost years," Mr Zoellick said. He said that almost half of $500 million that the World Food Program recently requested in additional pledges for food aid had been committed, but the May 1 deadline for raising the money would not be met. The parliamentary secretary for international development assistance, Bob McMullan, said yesterday Australia was one of the largest donors through the World Food Program, giving $61.7 million last year.
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POPSPygmies go all Hi-Tec Dr Jerome Lewis is a British anthropologist from University College London who has devoted much of the last 20 years studying the pygmy groups who live in the forests of the Congo basin. Dr Lewis together with the UK-based software company Helveta, Forest People's Programme, and the Cameroonian Centre for Environment and Development, are working together to pioneer the use of hand-held computers among the Baka pygmies. Now, when the villagers go into the forest to hunt and gather, they carry a GPS on which they can record the exact location of their hunting grounds, sacred trees and important rivers. "Before, if somebody wanted to come in and chop down one of their trees, there was no record, no proof that it ever existed on their lands. Now we have the proof," explains Dr Lewis.
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POPSLinguistic superpowers The book Limits of Language by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall is a sort of languages-only Guinness Book of Records, listing everything that’s large, small and otherwise interesting about the manifold manners of human speech and associated forms of communication. One item deals with the world’s most linguistically diverse countries, and is illustrated with this map, of the world’s ‘linguistic superpowers’.
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