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27. mai 2006
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Bad omen? Migrating birds can't be bothered to return to Europe.
"Some fairly iconic species have declined enormously in Europe. There is a very beautiful blue and purple bird called the roller - the population of that bird is crashing all over Eastern Europe," Dr Donald told the BBC News website.
"In the UK, other species that have declined enormously are spotted flycatchers, pied flycatchers, wheatears, wood warblers and tree pipits."
Researchers say they have no clue what the cause is, so just to be safe they blame it on climate change. Climate change is also known to cause acne, obesity and bad reality shows on TV.
8:07:57 PM 
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Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's correspondent in Gaza, is writing about the poverty in Palestinian territories, about the low wages, the lack of medicines, and also the "culture of violence." Apparantly, the family he visited could still afford an enormous quantity of weapons.
I visited a family called Kweitar. The men are all commanders in Fatah's various armed groups.
I walked into their living room which, like all Gazan living rooms, was full of children. [...]
It was also full of weapons.
One man, who was cuddling a boy of about three, had a rocket launcher propped up next to him. His cousin was walking around looking for his cigarettes with a backpack full of rockets.
There were more rockets on the sofa and machine guns in the kitchen.
The teenage sons of the family were armed and ready to fight.
The reason for all this? They said that men from Hamas had put bombs under their cars.
They were convinced Hamas would come back to kill them.
Paranoia is probably a healthy state of mind when you live in an area that has been run by one of the most corrupt rulers of the world for decades, and in now run by nazi-inspired Islamist terrorists.
8:02:12 PM
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Indonesian quake have killed thousands:
More than 2,700 people have been killed and thousands more injured by a strong earthquake that struck the Indonesian island of Java, officials have said.
The quake, measuring 6.2, flattened buildings in a densely-populated area south of the city of Yogyakarta, near the southern coast of Java.
Many more are feared trapped under the debris of their houses.
PS: The tragic fact is that a 6.2 quake would barely cause fatalities in a modern city of, say, Japan or the US, due to better building practices.
2:30:23 PM
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Tony Blair's third foreign policy speech outlined many of the serious challenges facing the world today. It is in many ways a good speech, by a leader I respect, but I just want to highlight a point where I disagree with Mr Blair.
All of the issues raised today, require immense focus, commitment and drive to get things done. Increasingly, there is a hopeless mismatch between the global challenges we face and the global institutions to confront them. After the Second World War, people realised that there needed to be a new international institutional architecture. In this new era, in the early 21st century, we need to renew it.
I want to make some tentative suggestions for change.
First, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has done an extraordinary job in often near impossible circumstances. He has also proposed reforms of the UN that should certainly be done.
But a Security Council which has France as a permanent member but not Germany, Britain but not Japan, China but not India to say nothing of the absence of proper representation from Latin America or Africa, cannot be legitimate in the modern world. I used to think this problem was intractable. The competing interests are so strong. But I am now sure we need reform. If necessary let us agree some form of interim change that can be a bridge to a future settlement. But we need to get it done.
I agree with Mr Blair about the disease, but certainly not his suggestion that the Secretary General should be strengthened. Not only because of Kofi Annan's pathetic failures - that is now - but because any SG is necessarily going to be a hopeless compromise candidate who is a threat to no major power, and therefor not effective in achieving anything.
The international organisations may have accomplished something in areas like health, development aid and humanitarian crisis handling (and even that is in dispute, to put it mildly), but for international security the UN has been an unmitigated disaster in all but one (arguably crucial) respect: keeping the US-Soviet cold war from going hot. There is simply no reason to believe a reformed and rehashed UN is going to be any better than the renewed League of Nations.
If there is to be an international organisation with merit, it has to be a United Democracies (if not with that name; the "united nations" is obviously not, so maybe we should find a more realistic name). This organisation should have true democracies as full members, aspiring democracies get increasing access as they improve, and everybody else are outside. Economic institutions, from the World Trade Organisation to the IAEA, should be giving preference to democracies. Contact with totalitarian states, even a coming superpower like China, could be through the new international organisation (or bilaterally), but these nations should not be given membership in it. There should be a clear difference between the privilegues given by the free world to totalitarian states and democracies.
Finally, the whole idea that there is such a thing as international law, more than contracts between sovereign states, should be rejected as the fiction it is. In a sphere where there is no real supreme court, there is no real law. In so-called international law, there is no independent judicial branch, thus the cornerstone of solid legal institutions is absent. When nobody can authoritatively rule on politicised disputes, there is free room for NGOs, politicians and enthusiastic individuals to throw around wild interpretations of this "international law" with impunity. The word "law" carries more prestige than the sordid business of international affairs deserves.
12:20:42 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.06.2006; 21:18:05.
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