"This rarely seen image of the city of San Fransisco lying in ruins after the devastating earthquake of 1906 was captured by an ingenious photographer using a camera attached kites. 

The panoramic shot, which is of outstanding quality considering the basic equipment available, shows the full scale of the disaster which claimed the lives of over 3,000, injured 225,000 and caused $400,000,000 worth of property damage.

Commercial photographer George Lawrence, who used home-made large format cameras, was well known at the time for his wide angle photographs of banqueting groups, national political conventions, and state legislature sessions."

"These quasi-monopolistic movements are tolerated, or even encouraged, in the name of securing the economy's future stability…significantly the case in energy sector, with policies friendly to centralised production & quasi-monopolistic ownership designed, for example, to revive nuclear power industry or to kick-start capital-intensive pseudo-green "alternatives" like biofuels & mythical "clean" coal – precisely kinds of choices that will render the global situation even more precarious in long run…As long as disaster capitalism reigns – which no doubt will be as long as capitalism itself reigns – world will be caught in vicious circle: that of responding by increasingly draconian & ill-advised means to threat environment whose dangers response only contributes to intensifying.<br />
The only way out is to militate for an alternate interlinkage: between global anticapitalist political contestation & a renascent environmental movement with opposition to nuclear power at its heart."

"California faces the risk not just of devastating earthquakes but also of a catastrophic storm that could tear at the coasts, inundate the Central Valley and cause four to five times as much economic damage as a large quake, scientists and emergency planners warn.<br />
The potential for such a storm was described at a conference of federal and California officials that ended Friday. Combining advanced flood mapping and atmospheric projections with data on California’s geologic flood history, over 100 scientists calculated the probable consequences of a “superstorm” carrying tropical moisture from the South Pacific and dropping up to 10 feet of rain across the state."