I’m starting up a page on Cricketwoman with the intention of listing fund-raising activities within the cricketing fraternity (games, auctions, collections etc) being conducted in aid of the tsunami relief effort. Please see the item at http://www.cricketwoman.net/portal/Article1222.html.

If you have any activities you wish publicised on that page (and they don’t have to be women’s cricket or even cricket) please drop me a message on my feedback page with the details.

News today of snow in the United Arab Emirates, for possibly the first time in recorded history. It happened in the al-Jiys mountain range of Ras al-Khayma.

Reports from the Khaleej Times, and an agency report with photo from Al-Jazeera.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are among the hardest hit locations as a result of Sunday’s earthquake and tsunami, being close to the epicentre of some of the quakes. There are fears that some or all of the races indigenous to the archipelago, namely the Great Andamanese, Onges, Jarawas, Sentinelese and Shompens, may have been wiped out entirely.

Wednesday afternoon however, India’s Union Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee said that the Ongi people had escaped to higher ground and were safe, and that some Sentinelese and Jarawas were known to have survived. Further information of course is still very very sketchy.

The Indian government website of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands has information about the indigenous tribes. See also this ANI report on the Union Defence Minister’s comments.

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lankan wildlife officials are stunned — the worst tsunami in memory has killed around 22,000 people along the Indian Ocean island’s coast, but they can’t find any dead animals.

Read on at Reuters.co.uk

It’s now about 72 hours since the tsunamis swept across the Indian Ocean, and the death toll is rising at an alarming rate. Current figures being reported range between 55000 and 70000.

The scope of the devastation is dumbfounding. At least a third of the population of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is believed to have died. The extent of the impact in east Africa is starting to become clearer. Thousands of people in Somalia require aid, deaths have been reported in Kenya and Tanzania, people are homeless in Madagascar, and even in South Africa there has been a death attributed to seismic wave activity.

Alongside all the resource websites I’ve mentioned previously giving information about this disaster, Wikipedia has put together an excellent page. As well as information and links, it also lists the humanitarian assistance being provided by various countries, plus a list of relief organisations around the world to whom online donations can be made.

Wikipedia’s critics cite concerns about the naivete of its concept and potential weaknesses in quality control, but it has shown on major occasions such as this just how reliable and comprehensive it can be. That URL again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake.

I am pleased to see today that the Australian government has added AUD 25 million to the AUD 10 million previously pledged in humanitarian aid. But even with our government giving $1.75 per head of Australian population, I am sure that those of us reading this can all give generously ourselves to the agencies on the ground in the disaster areas.

As well as the enormous number of people who have died, are injured or are at risk to disease, there are whole economies and infrastructures that have been destroyed and will need rebuilding. It is important that we all give whatever practical assistance we can, and for most of us that means financial.

Almost 48 hours after the tsunami struck, it seems impossible to fully comprehend the enormity of a tragedy that has hit so many countries. It seems now that at least 25000 people have died, almost half of those being in Sri Lanka. Over a million - goodness knows how many at this stage - are homeless, and there are serious concerns that disease will kill many more people before basic facilities can be restored. The fatalities have occurred right around the Indian Ocean rim from Aceh to Somalia and submerging island entities such as the Maldives and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

I think it’s important to stop and look at the images of destruction from the aftermath of December 26. Here’s some Yahoo news photo searches for Galle, Colombo, Phuket, and Aceh.

The international aid effort is gathering momentum, and I think it is important that we all help in any way that we can. Dianne and I have already made an online donation to the Australian Red Cross.

Here are links to press releases from some of the major Australian charities that have launched tsunami relief appeals to date:
Australian Red Cross
Oxfam Community Aid Abroad
World Vision Australia
UNICEF Australia
CARE Australia.

A year to the day since the city of Bam in Iran was devastated by an earthquake, we now see an amazing catastrophe unfolding across south-east Asia following a massive quake west of Sumatra.

Tsunamis have hit a wide arc of countries around the north-eastern Indian Ocean, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka. There appear to be thousands dead, and with it now being just eight hours since the quake occurred, we can expect the toll to rise much further. We still don’t really know the extent.

Reports at this stage from Al Jazeera, Antara, Bernama, Xinhua and Press Trust of India.

Update 9.22pm: ChennaiOnline has extensive reportage of the disaster in that city and other coastal regions of Tamil Nadu.

Update 9.55pm: See the US Geological Survey report on the earthquake. More Indian reportage from Newindpress.com.

Update 11.05pm: Sri Lanka is already calling for international assistance. The Maldive Islands apparently are devastated. The coastline along Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh states have reported large numbers of casualties, and death tolls are rising in Indonesia and Thailand. I have seen no reports from Burma. Cocos Islands experienced a half-metre wave this afternoon. The north-west coast of Australia was put on alert but the tsunami did not reach there. The toll currently exceeds four thousand lives.

Eyewitness accounts from Chennai: Alienation, Adventures with Yardboy, Wannakam, Lightning Strikes Everyday, “Just Another Blog”, “Useless Conversations.

An interesting intellectual property case in the US. Associated Press has told the NCAA’s Bowl Championship Series organisers to stop using its polls as part of means of determining which colleges take part.

The Washington Post’s Michael Wilbon comments, while AP sports editor Terry Taylor explains the reasons (video).

Happy holidays indeed. It shouldn’t be offensive to anyone to wish a Merry Christmas on December 25, regardless of religious belief (or lack thereof). Instead of denying the spiritual significance of Christmas Day in nations of predominantly Christian heritage, we should be embracing the religious celebrations of other faiths when they arise.

Christmas Day is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, traditionally believed to have been born on December 25 in Bethlehem. Regardless of whether you accept the events as fact or meaningful allegory, Christmas is a celebration of the values espoused by Jesus as an adult prior to his crucifixion. Christian values being, of course, embraced to differing degrees by many faiths.

As December 25, 2004 enters its last hour here I do hope all of us have had a great day. Dianne, Adara and I certainly have. But against this backdrop we must not lose sight of the hardships facing millions upon millions of people around the world. Sadly, many of these cases do not even rate a mention in our media, or to our political leaders.

Disease, especially HIV/AIDS, run rampant around the world. The wealthiest nations give little more than lip service to the elimination of poverty in the poorest countries. The Geneva Conventions relating to wars are flagrantly disregarded by the United States in their prison camps in Iraq and Cuba, while outlaws in Iraq use online video as a medium to convey the most barbaric of acts towards innocent men and women in the name of bankrupt ideologies. Islam is a valid and respectable religion - the interpretation espoused by these fanatics is not.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur continues, while the world’s worst conflict since 1945 - that in the Congo - appears to be flaring again. Jesus’ birthplace, Palestine, is a land of people dispossessed for more than half a century and kept in perpetual indignity by an Israel that wields the bulldozer as a weapon of mass destruction.

In Australia, our national moral fibre is at threat of unravelling by a government that conveys, by its behaviour, that it’s OK to be selfish, OK to lie, OK to be inhumane to those worse off than us, OK to be a nation of arrogant xenophobes. Does John Winston Howard even know there’s a war going on in the DR Congo? Well, they don’t have a cricket team, so how could he?

As our government’s relationship with its indigenous brethren degenerates towards a Hansonite policy of “mutual obligation” - we’ll give you a petrol bowser if your children wash their faces twice a day - its inhumanity towards refugees becomes ever more repugnant. The case of the Bakhtiyari family, Afghan asylum-seekers about to be deported to Pakistan because our government claims that is their true nationality, is truly appalling and an embarrassment to those of us who have faith in the generosity of Australians.

Make no mistake, John Howard is the most un-Christian prime minister of Australia in my lifetime, and that includes the self-styled agnostic, Bob Hawke.

I’m sorry about making a Christmas message sound so bitter and negative. I have faith that good sense and humanity will prevail, but there may yet be a lot of damage along the way before this happens. A huge responsibility rests on the shoulders of those political and corporate masters who have the power, and often misuse it.

I’ll put together some coverage of Christmas 2004 in the next day or so. Merry Christmas to you all.

Some useful links for an audiovisual celebration of the Advent and Christmas online:

BBC Online - surely the best English language information resource on the net - has areas in its Religion and Ethics section related to Advent and, in particular, Christmas. There are clips, both audio and video, of carols online.

From WBUR in Boston: “For its 50th anniversary, the early music group Boston Camerata teamed up with several Arabic musicians to recreate Christian music from the Middle Ages. They’ve used medieval texts and illustrations, and arranged music played by Christians, Muslims and Jews, exploring musical traditions that merged religions and cultures.” (Real Audio)

See also the ABC’s Religion and Ethics website, but they don’t seem to have anything particularly special for Christmas.