Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Byzantine Mosaic Unearthed In Southern Israel

” An exquisite 1,500-year-old mosaic has come to light in an excavation in southern Israel, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Sunday.

The mosaic appears to have been the floor of a public building in a thriving Byzantine-era village on the site, near the modern-day kibbutz of Beit Kama. The precise role of the building in the life of the community is unknown.”

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For the first time in human history, the concentration of climate-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm). The Guardian reports

The last time so much greenhouse gas was in the air was several million years ago, when the Arctic was ice-free, savannah spread across the Sahara desert and sea level was up to 40 metres higher than today.

These conditions are expected to return in time, with devastating consequences for civilisation, unless emissions of CO2 from the burning of coal, gas and oil are rapidly curtailed. But despite increasingly severe warnings from scientists and a major economic recession, global emissions have continued to soar unchecked.

“It is symbolic, a point to pause and think about where we have been and where we are going,” said Professor Ralph Keeling, who oversees the measurements on a Hawaian volcano, which were…

May 11, 2013– MYANMAR – A tropical cyclone in the Andaman Sea is headed close to an area in Myanmar where tens of thousands of victims of ethnic and religious violence are living in makeshift camps, adding urgency to fears of what the United Nations has termed a looming “humanitarian catastrophe” for displaced families. Of the more than 130,000 people forced to flee their homes in rioting between Buddhists and Muslims over the last year in western Myanmar, around half are living in low-lying camps near the sea, the United Nations says. Human rights organizations have issued repeated warnings that the displaced people are at risk of disease and hunger during the rainy season, which begins this month and continues until around September. “We’re definitely very concerned,” said Vivian Tan, a spokesperson for the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. “We are working around the clock, trying to get…