The news....

Today as always before I start work I try to catch up on what has been happening overnight. Because I usually check Australian sources rather than international ones, its fairly common to find that nothing has changed since yesterday, probably because everyone closes their newsrooms down overnight, even the news organizations that advocate that web services are now and important part of their news delivery.
What strikes me most is how we often ignore international events of significance which occur in Asia. We see all the stuff out of the US, and to a large degree out of Europe but Asia, the region we claim to be part of, well thats secondary stuff.
Today is a case in point. Local sites are reporting as headlines that a football player has been "Outed for 12 Months", that a Hollywood movie actress was "Really frightened" when a wayward photographer drove his car over a median strip to pursue her chauffeur driven car. We learned that a Minister of the Crown allegedly knew of the AWB kickback scandal, now that wouldn't be a timed political statement would it!
However is you are prepared to look really hard, a couple of news sources and I do stress a couple.. report that the cyclone in Bangladesh four days ago has killed at least 2,500 people with the local Red Cross reporting that the toll has a good chance of topping 10,000. Can you imagine what would happen here if a natural disaster killed thousands of people in Australia.
But Bangladesh is a long way away and it really doesn't matter to us, they're poor, lacking in education and they don't have any oil for us. Apparently they are also going to be one of the first countries to really suffer the effects of global warming . Low lying coastal areas will be flooded by rising sea water, and inland rivers swollen from snow melting in the Himalayas forcing up to a third of the population off their lands. That amounts to tens of millions of very poor uneducated climate refugees, with no were to go.
Bangladesh shares a common land border with India, who have commenced building a fence along the border to stop refugees from entering India. Now there is a neighborly gesture if ever there was one. Your neighbor is drowning in flood water so you build a fence to stop him getting out.
I guess the real irony is that these people are going to be the first to be effected by climate change, but if you accept that man has contributed to global warming by production of greenhouse gases, then these people because of their lifestyle will be the first effected but will have contributed least to the problem.
Anyway who cares? Back to the important news, did you see that a well known celebrity was filmed running a red light with her children in the car... Shocking!