Catching up

Well...I had my bout with the flu, so now I'm back, and where do I start?

They held an election in Belarus...and sitting President Aleksander Lukashenko won... again. (wink...nudge.) Of course he had to arrest a few opposition leaders, and stuff a few ballot boxes but hey...it's the Chicago way.

Africa is coming apart at the seams. Trouble and strife in....well...pretty much everywhere. Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia...and the Sudan continues to fester. People continue to die in Darfur. Hey...if there was someone from Darfur on American Idol, maybe we'd notice. But until then...

The Fourth World Water Conference was held in Mexico City and gee...where does one begin with this issue?

The news is not all that good. One of the big issues was the privatisation of water delivery systems in developing countries. The Guardian sums it up quite well in this paragraph:

"Water privatisation was seen by the World Bank and G8 countries as the most effective way to bring clean water to large numbers of poor countries throughout the 1990s, but in spite of investments of $25bn (£14bn) between 1990 and 1997, the rich have mostly benefited at the expense of the poor. Sub-Saharan Africa has received less than 1% of all the money invested in water supplies by private companies in the last 10 years."

Wow....the poor didn't have any money! What were the odds?!

And for those of you keeping score, bird flu deaths are now at 103. Slowly, slowly, creeping inexorably to full scale pandemic.

Have a lovely day.