Word: lanka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...perceived parsimony, the Administration increased the contribution to $350 million. The Pentagon deployed the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and 11 other warships loaded with supplies, helicopters and soldiers to the coast of western Sumatra to help in the relief effort. Some 1,500 U.S. Marines headed for Sri Lanka. All told, governments around the world pledged more than $2 billion in the first week of the crisis, a figure that is sure to rise. The U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who earlier accused the world's richest nations of being "stingy," said he has "never, ever, seen such...
...willingly present the face of its tragedies to the outside world. Few places are like that today. What made last week's disaster so extraordinary was the way in which it was a truly global event. The tsunami placed a girdle of death around half the earth. In Sri Lanka and Thailand, tens of thousands of tourists fleeing the northern hemisphere's winter were enjoying Christmas vacations, some in swank hotels, many more in cheap rooms for rent along the beaches. According to the Swedish Foreign Ministry, 20,000 Swedes were celebrating Christmas in Thailand alone. Six days after...
...ubiquity of personal technology distorted the early news of the disaster. Because the first indications of its scale came from Sri Lanka and Thailand, it was easy to forget that the real devastation was not in well-heeled tourist enclaves but in dirt-poor Indonesian fishing villages. In any event, the earthquake reminded us--had we been foolish enough to forget it--that there are primal forces of nature that no amount of our wizard technology is able to confine. Yet technology can help. For decades, a sophisticated early-warning system has helped limit catastrophic damage from tsunamis...
...trick up their watery sleeve, one that can trap the unwary. If the trough of a wave hits the shore before a crest, the first thing that anyone on shore notices is not water rushing onto the land but the opposite. That is what happened in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In the Sri Lankan town of Trincomalee, a hotel manager remembers the sea rushing out so the beach became magically full of gorgeous, colorful, stranded fish. "Men ran down to the shore with gunny-bags and stuffed them full of fish," he says. On Phuket, Tiina Seppanen, a Finn...
...India and Sri Lanka are a different story. It took nearly two hours for the tsunami to reach those countries, but in neither country did residents receive any warning of the likely disaster. "That morning, the sea was like it always is," says Baalaramanan, 23, a fisherman in the Indian town of Akkarapettai. "Then suddenly it was on fire. Boiling. It lifted up 11 yards and paused, almost like it was surveying us below it. And then it fell. It consumed one house after another, like paper boxes." A day later, rescuers found the bodies of 300 fish sellers...