Well, Honolulu remains beautiful.  A couple of photos from where I sit composing this posting. There have been good trips and bad.  Since I retired a quarter century ago, the 50 or so I've taken have all been good to great.  However, I've been thinking about all my travels, and a few did not go right. Some particularly worried me.  For the next few Tuesday nostalgia days, I'll focus on the worst ones.  There was danger in Papua New Guinea, concern that I might not be able to leave China, an incident at Machu Picchu, Peru, the weirdness of Cairo, Egypt and scare in Delhi, India.  These experiences were sufficient so that I can't imagine my ever returning to those countries. The first I'll report on occurred in 2010.  This was a global journey, and here is how it started. Today, I begin my journey. I will visit Seoul, Hanoi and other parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Chiang Mai and Bangkok in Thailand, New Delhi, Barcelona, Munich, Helsinki, Copenhagen, A...

There are  very few places in the world where you can breathe air clean enough to meet WHO standards . The focus is on a type of air pollution called PM2.5, which is smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, and mostly comes from auto emission and burning of biomass and fossil fuels.  This fine particulate matter is associated with a wide range of heart and lung disorders, plus cancers. In the  study,  scientists examined pollution data from monitoring stations in 6,475 cities in 117 countries and territories.   Only 3.4% got an acceptable grade. 93 cities had PM2.5 concentrations  10 times higher  than WHO standards. Central and South Asia had 46 of the world's most polluted cities. In Africa only one of 65 cities examined met WHO air quality standards. Asia?  Only 4 of 1887 cities. Europe should be okay, right?  Nope.  Only 55 of 1588 cities achieve this. What about the USA? This report  said:  not a pretty picture. 2408...