Slashgeo

The Cartography blog links to beautiful and informative New York Times maps of the Middle-East conflict. One of the maps shows ethnic groups, population size, location of oil wealth and, very informative, the diplomatic relations between each Middle-East country.

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."

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."

Ogle Earth discuss the launch by Amnesty International of their Eyes on Darfur project, which uses satellite imagery as evidence. Here's the Eyes on Darfur website. OE shares this with us: "Every initiative on Darfur is a worthy initiative. I would love, however, for this weeks-old data from Darfur to be made available in an open, georeferenced formats, in time series and on a much wider scale, so that GIS volunteers really can monitor villages for change. I'd gladly "adopt" one of the 1,600 villages and monitor it, given the data. I also think Flash is not the best visualization tool for geospatial data [...]" OE also informs us Beirut imagery has been updated to reflect the situation after the 2006 Lebanon War.

Ogle Earth discuss and links the quick demolition of a potential Syrian nuclear facility after the Israel September 6th attack shown through satellite imagery (with screenshots). There's a link to a BBC News article and a New York Times article. While the geospatial content of this story is rather low, it clearly shows how satellite imagery is more than ever before a effective detective tool for the military and the general public. From the NYT article: "David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that this week released a report on the Syrian site, said Thursday that the building’s removal was inherently suspicious. “It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” Mr. Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector, said in an interview. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.”" See other interesting related previous stories below. And if you wonder, high resolution satellite imagery for this area is available in Google Earth but not Google Maps at the moment.

Some interesting news item: Spatial Sustain discuss a long Nature article on Earth Monitoring. Meanwhile, Space.com tells us Italy successfully launched COSMO (previously mentioned), dubbed "the second of four Italian mapping satellites that are planned for the Constellation of Small Satellites for Mediterranean basin Observation (COSMO)" by SS. Additionally, SS underlines the launch of the Mapping Center of Israel with 120 layers (in Hebrew only). And finally, APB tells us about Localvore, the 2007 word of the year for the Oxford American Dictionary, as you have probably guessed, a locavore is someone who eats food grown or produced locally. From the Nature article: "If that increase in technological capability can be turned into usable systems, then the ability to monitor Earth's environment will be revolutionized. Real-time and near-real-time data will be available on soil moisture, greenhouse-gas concentrations, biological productivity, aerosol concentrations and so on, all around the world. With those data, scientists will be able to build and study models of Earth as a system far beyond what they have today."

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.

Spatial Sustain runs a short entry on Israel's launch of an advanced spy satellite. From the blog: "[...] Israel launched an advanced spy satellite that will be able to track events in Iran. The TECSAR satellite is equipped with a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor, and it was launched from India aboard an Indian rocket." This related Jerusalem Post article is also interesting: "Teheran's attempts to sabotage the operation may demonstrate concerns over Israel's advancing intelligence capabilities. "The Iranians are scared of the potential this new satellite will bring Israel," a Western defense official had said earlier. "They are doing everything they can to prevent its launch.""