UniqueDaily.com

“Some call it the City of 1001 Churches, others the City of Forty Gates. Yet no one has called it home for more than three centuries. Abandoned by its once prosperous and powerful inhabitants, it is situated on the Turkish side of a militarised zone between the border of Turkey and Armenia. The city of Ani is no stranger to death, destruction and desertion. It is a ghost city today but once its Armenian inhabitants numbered close to 200 thousand. In its heyday it was a metropolis which rivalled Constantinople, Cairo or Baghdad as a center of culture and enterprise. Although it was never on traditional trade routes its sheer size and power commanded visits by merchants from all directions. Yet what happened to reduce this once magnificent and regionally dominant city to virtually dust?” w/ photos

“Torrential rain has brought chaos to Australia, and not just to the humans who live there. Australian Bat Clinic and Wildlife Trauma Centre director Trish Wimberley and her carers have helped save 130 orphaned bats on the Gold Coast in past weeks. They saved 350 young bats during the 2008 storm season but this year think there’s more going on than just wild weather. Carers have visited several bat ‘camps’ on the coast in recent weeks to find four-week-old babies on the ground covered in maggots and fly eggs. Trish said: ‘They’re coming down to feed on the ground. That makes them vulnerable. It’s not a natural occurrence and shows there is trouble in the environment. ‘Bats are a barometer to what is going on in the environment. They’re our canaries down the coal mine’. The surviving youngsters will be bottle fed and kept either hanging on clothes lines or in special intensive care units until they are ready to fly again in about four weeks.” w/ photos