Footage shot in August shows explorers Sam Cossman and George Kourounis getting as close as possible to a violently boiling lake of lava inside an active volcano in the south Pacific. After scrambling 400 metres down into the crater of Marum volcano on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu, Kourounis wears protective clothing to stand extremely close to the edge for the camera Continue reading... ...
Tsunami warnings cancelled for Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck near the Solomon Islands on Sunday morning, triggering a tsunami warning that was later cancelled, according to US government agencies, and there were no immediate reports of damage. The quake was centred 60 miles south of Kira Kira on the island of Makira at a depth of 18 miles,...
Concerned government questions the character of Vanuatu's honorary consul in Britain after revelations about his history His appointment this year to the post of honorary consul in Britain for the republic of Vanuatu, a group of tropical islands proud to be known as the South Pacific's "premier tax haven", added to his prestige. Visitors from the republic to Dr Chen's office in north London...
Guardian Unlimited Money Just where are Campione, Niue, Ingushetia, Vanuatu, or the Keguelen Islands? You'll need a very large scale map to find them. But to the offshore money specialist, these can all be essential staging posts in the struggle to dodge tax. An estimated $7tn is held offshore - nearly three times the value of firms on the London Stock Exchange, with tax avoidance centres claiming...
Over the past year about 200,000 fish and other marine creatures have been exported from the country, and local tour firms are warning that the reefs will be at risk if the tropical fish trade is not regulated. "It's a very popular trade and on the back of Finding Nemo it's boomed," said Heidi Bartram, of Vanuatu's fisheries department. "It's developing faster than anyone can keep up...
Cheap labour from Vanuatu laid basis of sugar fortunes Thousands of Pacific islanders were kidnapped or tricked by European and South American traders and taken away for manual labour in Pacific colonies in the late 19th century. Labourers were sold to plantation owners for £6 to £9 a head and were typically paid £6 a year to work six days a week in cane plantations, where at times...
s neglected tropical diseases department who works on the yaws treatment programme in Papua New Guinea. "How can we morally justify not using such a simple and inexpensive tool to rid the children of these communities of an infection that causes years of suffering?" he said. The WHO set 2020 as the deadline for the eradication of yaws, and has successfully carried out treatment campaigns using the...
t the only danger the islands face. Unless poor policy is addressed, they also risk a homemade environmental and energy crisis A dead pig lolls among the flotsam on South Tarawa beach. No children play in the water – unusual in the Pacific islands, where a childhood spent splashing in the ocean is an age-old rite. In Kiribati's capital, years of poor waste disposal coupled with overpopulation and a...
Officers had to chisel through rock and concrete to get to 750kg of drug destined for Australian streets ...
s eastern region, the West Papua National Coalition for Liberation , to join the Pacific Islands region's power bloc, known as the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG). The membership bid was widely anticipated before a recent MSG leaders' summit in Noumea, the capital city of the French special collectivity of New Caledonia. A decision on the matter by the group's five members – Papua New Guinea, Fiji,...
s leadership of the group There aren't many international summits where the leaders sit down to a round of sedatives before settling into formal talks. But getting together around the kava bowl in laid-back Pacific style is their way of reaching consensus. So it was at the 18th Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) summit in Fiji, the beginning of a new era for the sub-regional grouping under the direction...
s apparent dissipation as it spread out over the ocean encouraged more distant shores to relax their preparations. Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were officially on a tsunami warning but were not expecting any of the devastation experienced in Japan, which was hit by waves of up to 10 metres. Lote Yates, from the Solomons Disaster Centre, told Australian Associated Press that it was only...
s travels, but also the story of their discovery. In 1909 Father Otto Meyer picked up a shard of pottery decorated with angular patterns on a Papua New Guinea beach. Then, in 1950 a French geologist compared Meyer's shards with recent finds from the Isle of Pines, south of New Caledonia , and realised that they belonged to the same tradition. The term "Lapita" was coined in 1952: an American, Edwin...
s low-lying states is shared the world over • Don't consign us to history, plead island states at Cancún Last year, heads of state from the world's largest economies gathered at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen to show solidarity with their counterparts from smaller, more vulnerable countries in the face of the largest environmental crisis in history. The failure of the negotiations to produce...
ve come a long way from trading fish and coconuts. There's discord in the Melanesian Spearhead Group over the accession of Fiji to the chairmanship, a battle that reflects recognition of the growing importance of Melanesia as global demand for resources heats up. That wasn't always the case. The inception of the group, initially as a trade bloc, in the mid-1980s drew derision from some. Vanuatu's ambassador...
Report says magnitude 7.4 quake has potential to generate tsunami striking Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia A magnitude 7.4 earthquake off the southern Pacific Ocean island of Vanuatu triggered a tsunami warning for the nearby Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said today. The quake, initially reported as a magnitude 7.6, struck at 17.14 GMT at...
A man who falls from a 100-storey building will survive the first 99 storeys unscathed," wrote the economist EJ Mishan in response to critics of his attack on the costs of economic growth. It was the 1960s and then, as now, it was heresy to question growth. The cry went up: "But natural resources haven't actually run out yet, and what about the costs of not growing?" Mishan returned to his falling...
David Munk gets up close and personal at a volcanic eruption David Munk ...
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s happiest country. Do you agree? Where to find happiness? Vanuatu is your best bet, according to a new report published today. The Happy Planet Index, a collaboration between the New Economics Foundation and Friends of the Earth, measured three factors - life expectancy, human wellbeing and ecological footprint - and the South Pacific island nation topped the list. (Britain came 108th; the US was...