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

Remember when Condi Rice was being touted as the most powerful woman in the world? (Take a bow, Pratibha Patil.) Recently, the S-o-S wrote an op-ed touting the success of public-private partnerships in the reconstruction of Lebanon. No newspaper would publish it. Anywhere.

The San Francisco Chronicle takes

It's three weeks since Uncle Joe Ratzinger issued a fatwa announcing that there was only one church (the one he runs).

This week, however, brings the news of the reconciliation of two extra-Benedict(XVI)ine denominations, with the declaration of unity issued in Cairo by the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The announcement by World Council of Churches General Secretary Samuel Kobia can be found here.

Grist, that marvellous online environmental news magazine, has released its list of the world's fifteen greenest cities.

Reykjavik at number one is interesting, as is Curitiba at three even if only because I hadn't previously heard of it (likewise Bahía de Caráquez at nine). But Sydney at 10? The reasons they give are unconvincing, though to be fair Sydney is not that bad in the post-Olympic era.

It may be a tad simplistic to describe the conflict in Darfur as "the world's first climate-change war", but the following press release from Boston University on July 11 gives hope of a science-driven resolution to probably the world's worst humanitarian crisis of the present day:

'1,000 Wells for Darfur' initiative launched