Though he admits it is a long shot, Gov. George E. Pataki has asked the Bush administration to offer a combination of disaster aid, tax-free bonds, supplements for city and state budgets, and transportation grants that total $54 billion.
While all countries experience occasional streaks of bad luck and unfortunate confluences of events, Britain has had a worse run than usual lately -- a combination of natural disasters and human bungling that has left many subject to malaise as they wonder what dreadful thing might befall them next.
Full report [PDF] Summary report [PDF] Regional report[PDF] Asia and the Pacific map[PDF] The Asia-Pacific region has an emergency profile characterized by a combination of natural disasters and civil/political unrest with pockets of conflict situations.
In Asia, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea remains the country affected more severely by chronic food supply difficulties, which are due to a combination of natural disasters since 1995 and economic problems that have constrained the supply of essential inputs to agriculture.
Shrimp cultivation became a necessity for the populations living on the external coastland when, by the 1970s, a combination of natural and manmade disasters had made the soil too salty to grow rice.
It is an old rhythm, particularly of rural life, but as Washington squabbles over how much the country should spend on disasters, a combination of new media and economic despair has helped turbocharge do-it-yourself relief efforts in regions hit hard by the storm.
With the legacy of Vietnam never far from the minds of decision-makers, it was decided from the off that the US "doesn't do body counts" and would, instead, prefer a combination of pure belligerence in the face of disaster, combined with Orwellian rhetoric from the steadily more erratic Donald Rumsfeld.
A combination of last year's Fukushima nuclear disaster, the German government's subsequent decision to phase out nuclear power and the general economic downturn has long made investments in new reactors look shaky.
A21 In the wreckage left by the devastating one-two punch of Hurricanes Charley and Frances, engineers, researchers and others are finding that this combination of disasters may do what no single storm has: cause everyone along the United States' southern and eastern coasts to toughen their building codes.
"In Haiti, it's the back-to-back accumulation and combination of disasters that puts pressure on the government and the people," said Thomas Pitaud, chief technical advisor to the government on national disaster risk management systems.
