Five dangers caused by large wildfires.

An area of Australia half the size of Belgium has been ordered evacuated ahead of bushfires expected on Dec 30.

A crash vaccination campaign has ended Samoa's measles outbreak, at the cost of 81 deaths that could have been avoided by vaccinating babies earlier.

US drone bombings in Afghanistan grind on every day, killing enemies and killing civilians, all rarely mentioned in the US press because no American soldiers are present and the government says hardly anything about the casualties.

Any given Afghan civilian is not very likely to be killed in a drone bombing in a given year. But the author reports that millions of children feel terror every time they hear drones circling. How often does that typically happen? Perhaps, in some places, every day.

I don't think it is worse for people to be killed by drones than by fighter-bombers, artillery, or guns. The difference is in the systems of war that these weapons fit into.

Tree plantations are no substitute for natural forests. The other species that live in a forest can't survive in a plantation.

The Amazon forest is a sort of hybrid. The precolombian inhabitants planted useful trees, which still make up a large fraction of the trees there, but these were native trees and they did not wipe out the other tree species.