June 2011 Archives

The United Nations Refugee Agency urges us to do 1 thing to help.

Some facts from an Agency report released today:

"The 2010 Global Trends report shows that 43.7 million people are now displaced worldwide - roughly equalling the entire populations of Colombia or South Korea, or of Scandinavia and Sri Lanka combined. Within this total are 15.4 million refugees . . . 27.5 million people displaced within their own country by conflict, and nearly 850,000 asylum-seekers . . ."

National Public Radio reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will open up the types of domain names that can be use for Web sites. In addition to the traditional .com, .org., .gov, .edu, and .net, expect to see an explosion of new "dots": anything and everything from .green to .think, plus domain names in many different languages and alphabets.

The NPR blog discusses possible effects of this major Web shake-up.

The Washington DC Public Library announces summer reading programs for children and for teens.

Of course, reading is its own reward . . . but the DC Public Library is offering prizes, too, for kids who participate in the summer reading program!

Maryland and Virginia residents (and public library users everywhere!)--check out your local library for similar summer programs.

The British Library and Google announced a major initiative to digitize a quarter-of-a-million books, providing free online access to an important historical collection. The press release states:

"This project will digitise a huge range of printed books, pamphlets and periodicals dated 1700 to 1870, the period that saw the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the invention of rail travel and of the telegraph, the beginning of UK income tax, and the end of slavery. It will include material in a variety of major European languages, and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form online."

The books will be available on the British Library Web site and on Google books.

Image source: http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Resource-Library/Buffon-Georges-Louis-Leclerc-The-Natural-History-of-the-Hippopotamusor-River-horse-1775-2-British-Library-Board-42b.aspx

Approximately 2,500 firefighters from across the country are battling devastating wildfires in Arizona.

It's prudent to learn how to protect yourself, especially if you are in area vulnerable to wildfire. The Federal Emergency Management Agency offers these guidelines.