World

The survey is using the same methods as Darwin – basically wandering through and doing a grand sweep – alongside modern botanical techniques.
All the flowering plants will be collected over a one-year period as part of a wider programme of activities to train wildlife and conservation enthusiasts.
“These meadows are incredibly valuable to our understanding of the natural world,” said Johannes Vogel, keeper of botany at the Natural History Museum.
“The survey provides a rare insight into changes over the course of 150 years and will help us conserve these historically important meadows.”
Charles Darwin lived at Down House from 1842 to 1882. It is now a museum managed by English Heritage and a proposed World Heritage Site.

New Orleans sells itself to the world as the Big Easy. But one year after Hurricane Katrina there’s nothing easy about life in New Orleans.
The hurricane swept past the city in a matter of hours, but New Orleanians will be living with its legacy for years to come.
True, the photogenic French Quarter and the grand homes of the white establishment in the Garden District have regained much of their former charm but don’t be fooled – even on Bourbon Street amid the jazz clubs and stores touting souvenir kitsch there is a pervasive sense of desolation.
And elsewhere in the city, away from the expensive real estate on the higher ground, the physical recovery from the catastrophic flooding has barely begun.
More than 1,000 people lost their lives to Katrina – the floodwaters left the city uninhabitable.
A year on and still New Orleans is eerily empty. Of a pre-Katrina population of half-a-million fewer than 200,000 have returned.
Ken Wilkens, social worker by day and a rapper known as Snoop by night, is one New Orleanian who made it back. In May he took me on a drive down Interstate 10, into the Ninth Ward, the heart of the city’s black community.
“Katrina still has a smell,” he said and he was right.
Sickly sweet, fetid fumes were still coming up from the residue of filth left behind when the floodwaters receded.
“There’s no sign of life in a neighbourhood that used to be thriving,” Snoop reflected. “We’re in an American city and there’s just miles and miles of devastation.”