rickeyre.com

sydney declaration

1. Mike Atherton's closure of England's innings at the SCG when Graeme Hick was 98 not out.

2. An aspirational emission of greenhouse gases not worth the paper it is written on.

It's over. Martial law is gradually winding down and Mister Iemma is Tearing Down That Wall. GW Bush has found the right exit and left Austria following the conclusion of OPEC.

Friday at 3 in Hyde Park. I won't be there.

www.bumsnotbombs.org

UPDATE Friday evening: smh.com.au gets to the bottom of the story.

This really is one of Australia's darkest weeks as an independent nation. Parts of Sydney including the Opera House, Botanic Gardens and Circular Quay have been fenced off for the APEC gabfests. It's been called the biggest security operation in Australia since the 2000 Olympics. But at least with the Olympic Games, it was a celebratory occasion for all to join in. This is just a paranoid exercise in keeping Them (in upper case) away from us (in lower case).

This year is Australia's turn to host the APEC forums. Well and good. But why are the major conferences all being held in the Sydney central business district?

The proliferation of social networking sites is a subject that makes my brain want to explode. Myspace makes me cringe, for two reasons: (i) the encourages some really bad, lazy web layout; and (ii) it's now owned by Rupert Murdoch. Facebook has achieved flavour of the month status, and thanks to peer pressure I've beefed up my presence there.

My Facebook page is here, or if you're already a member you can go straight to my profile here.

I'm currently developing the Cricketista group. Feel free to join up and post a message on the wall.

Here begins my bloggage of the 2007 Australian federal election.

We don't know yet when it will be held. As of today, it could in theory be held any time from five weeks away (ie, September 22) up till January 19, 2008. I'm predicting it will be October 27.

The pseudo-campaigning has been on for ages, of course, and with the Howard government behind in the opinion polls, seemingly terminally, things are getting nasty.

HARARE, 2 August 2007 (IRIN) - The lifestyle normally associated with an urban society is fast disappearing from Zimbabwe's once bustling capital, Harare.

The city's 2.8 million residents are adopting a way of life more akin to the country's rural areas, where drinking water is drawn from shallow pits and electricity is all but unavailable, although the metropolitan area's population density has produced its own quirks, such as untreated sewage spilling onto the streets.

The prospect of a John Howard video turning up on Youtube at 5am is about as enticing as the news of a new Osama bin Laden video turning up on Al Jazeera's doorstep. Just as chilling a prospect and, for that matter, just as irrelevant in the final washup.

DAKAR, 27 July 2007 (IRIN) - Food imports are keeping Sierra Leone from realising agricultural self-sufficiency and meeting the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating hunger by 2015, experts say. In a country where 80 percent of food is imported, mostly from the USA and Europe, the local agricultural industry is feeble and local farmers struggle to compete.

The report http://www.i