Storm

I couldn't believe this morning's news headline that the hurricane in the Caribbean is now the most intense Atlantic storm ever measured - but it turns out to be true. In fact, this year saw three of the five most intense Atlantic hurricanes ever, all in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. If this level of storminess continues over the next few years, the entire Gulf coast is likely to become depopulated, and the remaining houses will be built on stilts, like in pictures of certain Neolithic villages. For now, south Floridians should be watching out.

Also, Greenpeace is protesting European plywood imports from China, which gets timber from rainforests in Papua and elsewhere. The London Independent puts the story in the perspective of China's increasing dominance of world manufacturing.

China banned logging in large areas of its own natural forest in 1998 after catastrophic floods, themselves a direct result of deforestation, killed thousands of people. "This ban, coupled with massive growth in Chinese timber processing capacity and a liberalisation of trade barriers, led China to look overseas in its hunger for timber," says the Greenpeace report.