Spanish rule for three hundred and fifty-odd years.According to Prevention Web, between 1980-2008, the Philippines (disaster statistics) had six times as many hurricanes but nearly 16 (yes, sixteen) times as many fatalities as the cigar smokers in Cuba (disaster statistics).
American rule by proxy during a good chunk of the 20th century.
Nominal independence for the Philippines after 1945.
Complete independence for Cuba since 1959.
Both countries are subject to extreme weather systems during the summer and early autumn: hurricanes and typhoons.
"A date which will live in infamy . . . Geocities, the evil multinational conglomerate that produces its shoddy and environmentally destructive Internet services in Dickensian sweatshops in its ruthless quest for profit, saw fit – as part of its imminent closure – to bar me, wild American friend Odell, the Big Boss and delectable Administrative Officer Winky Ip from our very own home from the middle of last week. They have let me back in briefly in order to retrieve a few essentials, but otherwise this is it. Cast out into the wilderness with maximum prejudice aforethought.Looking forward? A "blog" by D. Ah, here it is: Big Lychee
Souvenir hunters, the nostalgic, and the terminally bored are welcome to poke around here – the lights go out permanently at Geocities around the end of October."
Full text here: NYTThe lessons learned from SARS did not go to waste in Hong Kong. While Mexico struggles to confirm cases of swine flu and sends samples to the United States, Hong Kong is already performing swift genetic tests on patient samples and will have laboratories doing so at six local hospital by Thursday. Tens of thousands of doctors and nurses, including retirees and those with medical training who have moved to other occupations, are tracked on databases and ready to be mobilized.
Contingency plans are ready to keep public transport, electricity, food supplies, telecommunications and other vital services running even if large numbers of people fall ill. And at a time when many hospitals in the United States are already at full capacity and keep few extra beds in reserve, Hong Kong has 1,400 beds in respiratory isolation units, mostly built over the past six years for fear that bird flu or SARS would become a serious problem, and 15 times as many beds as the territory needs on an everyday basis.
For a population of seven million people, Hong Kong has stockpiled 20 million treatment courses of Tamiflu, a medicine to which the new swine flu virus has not yet developed resistance. Hong Kong also has Asia’s best-known flu specialists and extensive research labs that were expanded in response to fears of SARS or a long-feared pandemic of bird flu, which is caused by a different influenza virus from swine flu.
Government lawyers are also moving quickly, carrying out all the procedures on Monday to make swine flu a disease for which health professionals are required by law to notify the authorities of any suspected case. The Hong Kong government also has broad and detailed legal powers to quarantine possible cases and suspend a range of civil liberties in order to track down anyone who has been in contact with a carrier of a communicable disease; many other countries, including the United States, are still debating how to handle legal issues during a possible pandemic.
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