BOGOTA, Colombia – A Boeing 737 jetliner filled with vacationers crashed in a thunderstorm and broke apart as it slid onto the runway on a Caribbean island Monday. Only one of the 131 people on board died, and the island’s governor called it a miracle.
The plane hit short of the runway on Colombia’s San Andres Island and skidded on its belly as the fuselage fractured and bits of landinggear and at least one engine were ripped off. The jet wound up on one end of the runway, crumpled and in pieces, as passengers scrambled or were helped to safety.
Fewer than 200 were left in the north Indian state of Assam a century ago. Agriculture had taken over most of the fertile river valleys that the species depends on, and the survivors were under relentless assault by trophy hunters and poachers. Kaziranga was set aside in 1908 primarily to save the rhinos. It held maybe a dozen. But the reserve was expanded over the years, given national park status in 1974, and named a World Heritage site in 1985. During the late 1990s it grew again, doubling in size (although legal issues remain to be settled). Now Asia’s premier rhino sanctuary and a reservoir for seeding other reserves, Kaziranga is the key to R. unicornis’s future.
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Grassland Kingdom – This World Heritage site is considered a conservation success story
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Nearly four dozen nations signed a non-binding agreement Tuesday to secure vulnerable nuclear material by 2014, a goal President Obama said would make the world safer from a stockpile big enough to produce 120,000 nuclear bombs.
“This is an ambitious goal, and we are under no illusions that it will be easy,” Obama said at the close of a two-day Nuclear Security Summit focused on ways to prevent terrorists from getting hold of the material that could be used to make a bomb.
