The sequence with which the news un-folded followed the global economic order. First, early on December 26th, through the miracle of mobile telephony, came the horror stories of western tourists spending their Christmas breaks by the sea in places like Sri Lanka and Thailand, on opposite sides of the Bay of Bengal. Their beach-side haunts had been deluged by huge tidal waves. From then on, the known scale of the disaster has kept rising remorselessly. The victims-many tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands displaced, millions coping with loss-were, as usual, mostly the poor, vulnerable and remote. Entire villages of uncounted, nameless fishing people were swallowed by the sea that sustained them.
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