What a wonderful start to my day. Ate Musli with fresh bananas, fresh rockmelon and drank water. Perfect! I was feeling on top of the world in my small german appartment! Great to be alive.

Then I opened the paper, “Die Welt” (german daily Newspaper).

Started reading some articles which seemed to be interesting.

Günther Grass, a german Nobelprize author has admitted “now” to being part of the SS (Waffen SS) in the second World War. He can keep his Nobelprize.
Google is getting lawyers involved in its “googled” problem. Apparently the company has sent out letters to journalists worldwide asking them to write “I ran a Google search”, rather than them writing “I googled”. Interesting!
Now these are all quite, how can I put it, “standard”. These issues aren’t really a problem.
However, the majority of the paper is filled with articles relating to Israel and Lebanon, terrorists, other problems in the middle east, Nigeria and how American politicians make financial gains in war areas. Here we go!

Firstly, Syrian “leader” al-Assad made a nice statement yesterday, namely that “ofcourse Syria will not include Israel in the freedom prozess, Israel is the enemy”! Great work. That will surely calm things down.
Then there was an article on how it is now believed that some of the funds which UK citizens sent to Pakistan, after their devastating earthquake, have ended up funding the planed plain attacks from last week. Great to know! This makes me wonder why would you donate your money if you have no idea where it ends up? I suppose the english won’t be to open with their cheque books in future, should another disaster occur in Pakistan.

By the way, I still don’t understand how people originating from Pakistan, who were born in England and have lived there all their lives, would want to kill themselves in mid air along with hundreds of other fellow countrymen? WHY? Religion, I guess?!?!

Then there was an interesting article that the Sri Lanken government stated “that killing dozens of children in air attacks is ok, because they were training to become Tamil Tigers”.
German troups who are helping out sort out the problems in Nigeria were kidnapped in a night club last night. What on earth were they doing in a night club?
Japans Premier Koizumi, once again pissed off the chinese, after visiting a World War 2 memorial to remember Japans fallen soldiers. Now this one gets me as well - if you win a war your dead soldiers are heros, if you lose your dead soldiers are scum???? If you win you can hold special memorials everyday if you like, if you lose, don’t ever be seen at a grave. Interesting!

At this point my morning is sort of “not as nice as it once was”!

Then I read how a small group in LA is trying to get jobs for “gangbangers” as they like to be called. Apparently this group, named “Homeboy industries”, helps street kids, gang members etc. find jobs. So far it seems to be working. Great story actually. However what fascinated me the most was that in L.A. apparently there are 7,000 (registered) gang members. Registered gang members?!?!?! “Hi, I’d like to register to join this gang. Here are my contact details. Will I be able to mug elderly people, maybe steal somes cars and smash up some neighbourhoods?” WTF?
Anyway, apparently this is all related to intigration problems, since most the gangs are made up of poor hispanics. Haven’t heard that before.

However a comment by Jeffrey Gedmin really got me going. Now I personally think the whole Israel vs. Lebanon (or for that matter Arabs) issue is terrible and completely idiotic. I also believe that in this situation both sides are to blame. Israel should never have started a war and the hisbollah, well they should probably not even exist. Anyway he wrote,

“imagine this for a moment - would you tolerate a militia group that was funded and supported by dictator states and was arming itselves to its teath across the border? What would you do if this Militia would celebrate everytime they killed your fellow countrymen and wanted to destroy your country? How would you react if everyday hundreds of missiles would hit your third largest city?”

Now I am not a supporter of Israeli politics, not at all, but he does have a point. He ended the comment with a few words from a friend of his, “if someone is telling you he wants to destroy you, you’d better listen!”

What was the point of this post? (I forgot!) No, basically if we look at the world today there seem to be so many problems with so many different factors contributing to all these problems.

I like to think that there should always be simple solutions to problems, major key factors that once fixed will solve a problem, however maybe there are really some major problems that interact and can’t easily be fixed?

One thing for sure is that in the so-called time of globalisation, the only thing which seems to work globally, and only to an extent, are companies and the people working within them. For the rest of the people around the world however, globalisation and what it means is a comepletely foreign word. We are still hundreds of small villages trying to build one common village. We still need hundreds of years to understand the concept of “one village, let alone one people”.