Slashgeo

GeoPlace links to a Khaleej Times article asking will redrawing the map of the Middle East end conflict? From the article: "LT. COL. Ralph Peters published an article in the US’ Armed Forces Journal last month where he outlines his vision as to what is needed to solve the many woes — and wars — troubling the Greater Middle East: redraw the maps of most countries in the turbulent region [...] What Peters omits from his expose is that these changes would produce winners and losers, which in turn would be the genesis of newer conflicts. [...] The basis of Peters’ thesis is that today’s borders were "most arbitrary and distorted," which he claims were "drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers).""

Very Spatial shortly discuss a New York Times aerial photography of Beirut's destruction from bombings. From the blog: "The area of interest is the area around the Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut. The leftmost tab shows that area as it looked on July 12th, 2006. The middle button shows the aftereffects of 19 days of bombing. The damaged areas are utterly clear."

The Ogle Earth blog share an interesting entry on the impact of geospatial technologies and data access on the Israel - Lebanon conflict. From a Defense-Update article: "Target analysis, including coordinates gathering has been dramatically improved in recent months, as a significant part of Israel was included in "Google Earth" service, offering everyone a free access to relatively high resolution satellite images of Israel, provided with fairly accurate GPS coordinates which are accurate enough to support the aiming of rocket attacks."

Ogle Earth reminds us of the impact of geospatial technologies with sharing a link to the Isreal-Lebanon conflict KML file. From the blog: "[...] wholly impressive KMZ file documenting with pinpoint accuracy (where possible) the events of the past week on both sides of the border."

Here's the most interesting Google related geonews I found for January so far. Google significantly updated Google Sky (a little more on the GEB), with many new layers and associated data. Still from the Official Google blog, some news an discussion about Google Transit. Not to miss is the impressive comparison of a real flight and a Google Earth flight in the Swiss Alps. Amongst the other GE news, there's the WarViews animated conflict geodata (via OE) and surface-to-air missile sites and range dataset for GE. The 3D Route Builder which uses GE which reached version 1.0. Here's a 3D-mouse working with GE. And finally, a few navigation shortcuts for Google Earth 4. See also the numerous related stories below.