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Forget "Deadliest Catch," the Discovery Channel show about the peril of being an Alaskan king crab fisherman. The most dangerous job in the world has to be mining coal in China. Last year alone, 4,746 miners were killed in China, according to state figures.

Stop and think about that for a second. That's about 1,100 more deaths than the U.S. military has incurred in five years of fighting in Iraq.

Which is why China is ecstatic over yesterday's rescue of 69 miners from a flooded coal shaft in Henan Province. The shaft, part of a 50 year-old state-owned mine, collapsed Tuesday afternoon when a torrent of more than 1 million gallons of water rushed into the mine after a rainstorm. The government said 102 miners were working at the time of the flood. Thirty-three escaped. The remaining trapped miners were kept alive thanks to hundreds of rescuers, who poured 145 gallons of milk down a 2,600-foot ventilation shaft over the course of three days while crews pumped out the mine and cleared tons of mud. 

It was a death-defying escape from the jaws of "development at any cost"—and a fate denied to far too many.

UPDATE: A reader writes in, "What on earth are you doing comparing gross number of deaths of Chinese miners to the number of Americans killed in Iraq? At least give us the denominator on the Chinese miners, otherwise the comparison is meaningless."

Just so there's no misunderstanding: I wasn't dissing American servicemen and women. Nor was I comparing apples to apples or trying to make a point that a coal shaft in Shanxian is more dangerous than a pillbox in Baghdad. Neither sounds like much fun to me.

So let's set the record straight. There are about 7 million miners in China. Our in house statistician tells me that, based on back-of-the-napkin calculations, you're about 8 times more likely to die as a U.S. soldier in Iraq than as a coal miner in China. I still don't want to sign up.

Fast-rising oil prices and greenhouse gas emissions have reignited the debate over nuclear power. Some claim this type of energy is clean and safe; others argue that going nuclear is not the great green hope.  

KOICHI KAMOSHIDA/Getty Images News

On Monday, Mother Nature scored a point for the skeptics. An earthquake of magnitude 6.8 hit the coast of central Japan caused some leaks in the nuclear power plant near the city of Kashiwazaki. The Tokyo Electric Power Company told the BBC on Monday that "the small amount of radioactive material that leaked into the sea posed no environmental risk." The New York Times reports that this "small amount" was "317 gallons of water containing trace levels of radioactive materials."

This isn't the first time Japan has had problems with nukes, the BBC article notes:

The safety of Japan's nuclear installations, which supply much of Japan's power, have come under the spotlight in recent years after a string of accidents and mishaps.

But if Japan's jitters are enough to make us fret, what about Pakistan? President Musharraf's rule is not the only shaky thing in the country. Sitting right on top of the rift  between the Asian continent and the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan is one of the hottest seismological spots in the world. The latest brutal evidence of this came in in October of 2005, when an earthquake of magnitude 7.6 killed more than 86,000 people. 

Japan's sophisticated reactors shut down during Monday's earthquake, but I have my doubts that the same would have happened in Pakistan. Or consider Iran, where the same crowd that was responsible for Chernobyl is running the show. Are we sure nuclear energy is the best energy solution for developing countries? 

After several years of being buffeted by the Terrorism Tsunami and Hurricane Bush, the Middle East this week was struck by a non-metaphorical weather event: Cyclone Gonu. This latest storm, however, left only a slight imprint upon the region—evacuations and a small number of deaths and temporary port closings in Oman, and a brief uptick in the price of crude oil. Here's what Gonu looked like from above:

NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

(Hat tip: National Geographic)

If a great flood ravages the Earth in 2207, we won’t have to worry about losing the key to our food supply.

The Norwegian government is paying for the construction of a Noah's Ark that will house seeds of all the world’s food crops. The seed vault—which will hold up to 3 million seed samples—will be built 364 feet inside a mountain on a remote island near the North Pole. It would protect the seeds from apocalyptic catastrophes such as a nuclear Armageddon, an asteroid collision, and the much-feared consequences of climate change.

The site on Spitsbergen, one of Norway’s Svalbard islands, was chosen because of the long-term stability that it will provide. Designers modeled the worst-case scenario for climate change 200 years in the future and determined that the seed vault would still remain above water if the ice sheets of Greenland and the North and South Poles all melted. The surrounding permafrost will protect the precious seeds if the refrigeration system malfunctions.

My only question is: If humans get wiped out in a global catastrophe, who would take the seeds out of the vault?

ELIZABETH GLASSANOS/FP Original

It's a boy:

COVINGTON, La. - Sixteen months after being rescued as a frozen embryo from a hospital flooded by Hurricane Katrina, Noah Benton Markham entered the world Tuesday morning and was greeted by his cheering family.

The 8 pound, 6½-ounce boy was born by Caesarean section at 7:23 a.m. CST at St. Tammany Hospital. He was in good shape, doctors said.

Before the procedure Rebekah and Glen Markham had decided that if their baby was a boy, he would be named after the biblical builder of the Ark. A girl would have been Hannah Mae — Hannah means "God has favored us."

When Katrina slammed New Orleans, Louisiana's governor had already put into motion a plan to rescue of a number of frozen embryos being stored in a local fertility treatment center.

The embryos were carried out by a team of troopers and policemen in four large liquid nitrogen containers, each of which held many separate vials. After a long wade into the flooded building,  juggling power outages and an entire city in lock down, they brought the embryos to safety. Noah's the happy result of their foresight.

Last month, FP published The Top Ten Stories You Missed in 2006. Today, the French NGO Doctors Without Borders posted its own list of what was overlooked last year, only from a humanitarian angle. Their list includes the plight of Somalians, refugees fleeing the Central African Republic, victims of tuberculosis, the effects of malnutrition, and those fleeing violence in Colombia, which has more internally displaced people than any country in the world except Sudan. Check out the NGO's website to see what you can do to help.

Amanda McCoy/Getty Images

When John Edwards showed up at Orelia Tyler's door on Wednesday in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans, she was surprised. Tyler had asked local students for help spreading a mound of dirt in her backyard. Instead, she got a few dozen out-of-town reporters, some national news vans, a gaggle of children, and one presidential aspirant. Edwards returned to her front yard the next morning (with cameras in tow) to announce his candidacy for the White House. 

Ms. Tyler was grateful for the help—the dirt mound became, in the end, something resembling a backyard—but many New Orleanians aren't so happy to serve as a backdrop for John Edwards's political ambitions. I've been down in New Orleans visiting family this week. Residents who are even aware of the Edwards announcement see yet another politician swooping in, finishing a photo-op in the poor Ninth Ward, and moving on. Reaction on the Times-Picayune website is mixed, but many readers used words like "grandstanding," "fake," and "opportunist."

Any news about New Orleans sheds light on this city's stalling recovery effort, and that's a good thing. But I can't help but feel that Edwards's choice of venue was about himself more than it was about the Big Easy. His spokesman said that New Orleans epitomizes the "two Americas" theme that Edwards invokes frequently in his speeches. Yes, New Orleans's struggle is a story about poverty—but it's also about corruption, inept bureaucracy at all levels, chronic underfunding, and the dangers of inertia. And there are plenty of other places in the U.S. where poverty is just as acute.

As for Ms. Tyler, her fixed-up house and backyard shouldn't make you think that New Orleans is back on its feet. Filling the blocks surrounding her home are empty shells of gutted houses. Further south, the Lower Ninth is a wasteland of houses waiting to be bulldozed, some of them mere foundations. Other devastated neighborhoods never even make the news, but they're almost as bad. Ms. Tyler's house, one of the few inhabitable houses in the vicinity, is thus both a hopeful sign and an inaccurate picture of the larger story.

The International Crisis Group has been issuing monthly reports tracking the escalation or dissolution of conflicts around the world for the past 40 months. So, it's extremely sad to report that, with the month ending yesterday, November 2006 is the worst month for conflict since ICG first began issuing reports in 2002. Iraq experienced its worst sectarian violence since the U.S. invaded in 2003. The Lebanese government is on increasingly shaky ground. The peace deal in Sudan has been seriously threatened by new slaughter, and fighting in Darfur is spilling over into Chad and the Central African Republic. The president and prime minister are fighting in Cote d'Ivoire. A coup is on the horizon in Fiji. And there are problems brewing in Azerbaijan, Burundi, Colombia, non-Kashmiri India, and Tonga. (Not that there isn't a little bit of a silver lining in this grim world: Maoist rebels and the Nepalese government finally signed a peace deal after 10 years of war.) Here's hoping that December will see better days.

NASA is developing plans to land an astronaut on an asteroid in case there's a future collision-course-with-Earth scenario in the near future. But NASA's Chris McKay, speaking in an interview with Space.com, doesn't inspire much confidence as to our goals.

The public wants us to have mastered the problem of dealing with asteroids. So being able to have astronauts go out there and sort of poke one with a stick would be scientifically valuable as well as demonstrate human capabilities."

Ever wonder what happened to all the foreign donations given to the United States in the aftermath of Katrina? It's not good news. It turns out that, like so much of the federal response to the crisis, the largest influx of foreign assistance to the US in memory was met with foot-dragging and clumsy bureaucracy. None of the donated funds has actually made its way to evacuees.

Some of the donated funds were stuck in a non-interest bearing account for nearly six months - so long that they lost value due to inflation. Back in March, the State Department finally agreed to give a portion of the funds to the Department of Education. When I contacted the DoE recently to find out how they'd put the foreign donations to good use, I was shocked to learn that the money hadn't yet been spent.

Today, the DoE announced that it plans to spend $60 million donated by foreign governments - about half the total received by the federal government - to help rebuild schools on the Gulf Coast. To that, I say kudos; it's money much-needed. But why so late? Why did DoE sit on the funds for so long? Shouldn't those schools have been rebuilt in time for this school year?