For all the devastation that occurred across South-East Asia, particularly in Aceh and Sri Lanka, as a result of the December 26 tsunami, we must remember that it’s not just an Asian disaster. Somalia was hit hard. This report from IRIN:

Tsunami survivors need help to overcome the trauma

HAFUN PENINSULA, 28 Jan 2005 (IRIN) - Nurfo Ibrahim Mudey, a 27-year-old widow and mother of four, is still unable to go to the shore where her home once stood in the Somali hamlet of Hafun, destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami on 26 December. Her husband and her six-month-old baby drowned when the surging waves swamped their house.

“I do not want to see the sea again because it reminds me of my husband and my baby,” Mudey told visiting reporters, as she sat pensively next to a makeshift shelter made of plastic sheeting donated by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The people of Hafun, a fishing hub on the northeastern coastline of the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland, lost most of their homes as well as their fishing boats - and thereby their livelihoods - to the killer waves. Many are now terrified of the sea.

“A quarrel between a man and his wife recently caused people to run out of their shelters believing that the sea was surging again,” Said Muhammed, an education officer with UNICEF in Hafun, said.

“Children are seriously traumatised and counselling facilities are not available locally,” Maulid Warfa, an assistant programme officer with the UN World Food Programme (WFP), told IRIN. “They do not want to go anywhere near the beach.”

According to Hawa Said Ismail, a volunteer teacher in a makeshift primary school that UNICEF built, children are still in a state of shock.

“They speak of having dreams [about the tsunami] and look confused,” she said.

The mayor of Hafun, Abshir Abdi Tangi, said that the focus should now be on the rehabilitation of livelihoods and infrastructure in Hafun.

“We are a destroyed town that needs everything,” Tangi said. “We have received assistance, but it is not enough. Hafun was a historic town and was growing - we had facilities - water, shelter, education - but all that is now gone and we have to start from scratch. Our livelihoods depended on fishing and our fishing equipment has been destroyed.

A few days after the tsunami, WFP distributed some 83 mt of rice, maize, pulses and vegetable oils to an estimated 800 families who were in Hafun. The agency plans to distribute more food to 500 families in a week’s time.

“The old Hafun is still a ghost town,” Leo van der Velden, WFP’s deputy country director for Somalia, said. “Even the sand dunes that provided protection [from the sea] were washed away.

“We plan to assist the people for six months and after that we might think of doing food for work and school feeding,” he continued. “WFP is also handling logistics for others agencies.”

The tsunami disaster could not have come at a worse time for Hafun and the neighbouring communities. The northeastern region of Somalia has been ravaged by four years of drought that depleted livestock, the mainstay of the area’s economy.

Many people had turned to fishing as an alternative means of survival and the income was helping.

“The loss of fishing as a source of livelihood means that the vulnerability levels have gone up,” Warfa said. “The major issue now is rehabilitation and livelihood reconstruction.”

He pointed out that temporary shelters now housing those displaced by the tsunami could be swept away by the strong monsoon winds that lash the region from July.

“Nobody will be able to go to the sea [during the monsoons],” Warfa said. “This is a critical period for the people of Hafun.”

According to various relief agencies working in the region, about 150 people are estimated to have died throughout Somalia, while 54,000 were in need of emergency assistance. Northeastern Somalia was the worst affected, particularly a stretch of around 650 km between Hafun [Bari region] and Garacad [Mudug region].

The damage extended to other parts of the Somali coast, including the Lower Juba area, south of Mogadishu. The livelihoods of many people residing in small villages along the Somali coastline were devastated.

(This report is reproduced with permission via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. Copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2005.)

About 7000 Iraqi citizens live in New Zealand but they will not be voting in this weekend’s elections as the nearest polling booth is in Sydney and most of them cannot afford the airfare to exercise their democratic right.

The New Zealand Press Association picks up the story, while the Sydney Morning Herald reports on election day in Coalition Of The Willing Country.

I’m a big fan of those news sites that enable complete articles to be emailed for personal use. Two of my favourite on-line newspapers, the Guardian and the New York Times, are among those that have offered this facility. I think it is quite useful to be able to read an article off-line without having to continually retrieve it from the web. However, this week the NYT abandoned the idea.

Now, the NYT offers the same limited service that many other newspapers offer: the opening paragraph and a link to the full article. (Some sites misleadingly call their facility “email this page to a friend” when all they send is the URL. Who’s want to be called a friend in a situation like that?)

The argument that I have seen used to support their decision is that the email service meant that users were not seeing any advertising. Bollocks. There was at least one advertisement plus an in-house ad, contained in each emailed article from the NYT, and in any case you had to visit the website in the first place to email the story. Well, as they say in the classics, d’oh!

The Poynter Institute’s excellent E-Media Tidbits group blog has been sympathetic to the Times’ decision, but the 3martini blog sees it the same way that I do, ie, a “horrible change”. 3martini also has a copy of a reply received from NYTimes.com customer service attempting to justify the decision.

(I should point out that the “email to a friend” facility on my Postnuke-based sites, cricket.rickeyre.com and cricketwoman.net only sends the link. I am seeking a solution to this deficiency.)

Here is a list of sites I visit that offers complete article email services:

• The Guardian (UK)
• The Washington Post
• Seattle Times
• Detroit Free Press
• New York Newsday
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Orlando Sentinel
• Baltimore Sun
• Minnesota Star-Tribune
• Christian Science Monitor
• Marketwatch.com
• Inter Press Service
• Slate
• The Nation
• Bizjournals.com
• Outlook India
• The Hindu
• South Florida Sun-Sentinel
• The Telegraph
• The Scotsman

I’ll add others as they come to mind. Disappointingly, none of them are Australian.

Add:

• Mother Jones
• Intergrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN)
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Tonight the 2005 Australian of the Year will be announced. It seems to be a shoe-in for Nicole Kidman.

Each state and mainland territory puts forward a nomination for the award, and Kidman is the New South Wales nomination. Her charity work is cited as much as her movie career.

Victoria is represented by Rodney Cocks, a UN peacekeeper who has worked in Timor Leste, Iraq and Afghanistan. Bill Bristow (Queensland) runs the Charity Flight service. Leading Greenpeace identity and dolphin conservationist Michael Bossley is South Australia’s nomination. Woodchopping legend David Foster represents Tasmania. Air Vice-Marshall Julie Hammer, the highest-ranked woman in the history of the Australian Defence Forces, is the ACT nomination, while legendary indigenous actor David Gulpilil is the Northern Territory’s candidate. (IMDb tells me that Gulpilil and Kidman have not made a movie together.)

But probably the other favourite for the award is WA’s Dr Fiona Wood, a plastic surgeon at the Royal Perth Burns Unit who used an innovative spray-on skin treatment to treat burns victims from the 2002 Bali terrorist attack. Dr Wood was widely expected to win last year, when the award went rather disappointingly to Steve Waugh.

I’d be happy with any one of Dr Wood, Michael Bossley or David Gulpilil winning the award, though I think the star of “BMX Bandits” has this one in the bag.

Since the award was instituted in 1960, no less than 14 winners have been sportspeople, including each of the last three male Test cricket captains (Allan Border 1989, Mark Taylor 1999, Steve Waugh 2004). Only nine have been women, and five of those (Dawn Fraser 1964, Evonne Goolagong 1971, Shane Gould 1972, Kay Cottee 1988, Cathy Freeman 1998) have been sportspeople. Thankfully not one sports representative nominated this year, despite the Athens Olympics.

No one has won the Australian of the Year award to date as the result of a motion picture career, although Paul Hogan (1985) won the year before his motion picture debut in “Crocodile Dundee”. The complete list of AOTY recipients can be found here.

Six, incidentally, have been aboriginal: Evonne Goolagong (1971), Galarrwuy Yunipingu (1978), Neville Bonner (1979), Lowitja O’Donohue (1984), Mandawuy Yunipingu (1992), and Cathy Freeman (1998).

There are also awards for Senior Australian of the Year, Young Australian of the Year and Local Hero. The full list of nominees can be found here. I can’t comment on too many of the names, but I will be cheering on Gardening Australia’s Peter Cundall, the Tasmanian nominee for Senior Australian of the Year.

Nominations for the 2006 awards are now open.

Our favourite baseball team in the Mexican Winter League, the Tomato-growers of Culiacan, are finished for 2004-05. They lost their semi-final series in the seventh game on Thursday to the Venados of Mazatlan 8-2.

The Venados are taking on the Aguilas of Mexicali in the final series. Mexicali won game one on Saturday 7-3. Game two at Mexicali Sunday night.

With the college baseball season revving up this weekend, the playoffs are also well under way in Puerto Rico, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. More about those later.

An estimated 40 million USD has been spent on parties to commemorate the re-coronation of King George II and Queen Laura. Not one cent of this was given up to assist victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Nor, indeed, to the residents of Fallujah displaced by the US Army’s scorched earth pursuit of “freedom” and “liberty”.

The Washington Post did an extensive photo blog of Thursday night’s load of balls. The evening, of course, is a thank you for all those people and organisations who bankroll the GOP version of “freedom” and “liberty”. Check out whitehouseforsale.org.

Mike Carlton has said his bit on the coronation in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. But for classic fairandbalanced journalism, watch the video of Fox “News” Channel anchor Brigitte Quinn as a fluff interview with Vanity Fair contributing editor Judy Bachrach about coronation day fails to follow The Party Line.

Some interesting discussion of the Quinn-Bachrach exchange at newshounds.us.

Friday’s Democracy Now! has a wrap of the counter-inaugural protests held in Washington on Thursday, including footage of a speech by Ramsay Clark calling for George W Bush’s impeachment.

I couldn’t be bothered watching any of the telecasts of the load of balls yesterday. It was an appropriate time for me to go out and see a film about another great warrior for freedom and liberty, Ernesto (Che) Guevara. But more about “Diarios de motocicleta” later.

How many hereditary monarchies hold a second coronation for their King four years after the first one?

King George II was re-crowned today in Washington, DC. The full text of his inaugural speech can be found on the White House website, and of course many other places. Dubya invoked the word “freedom” 27 times, and “liberty” 15 times. How ironic.

Rahul Mahajan has commented on the day’s events in his excellent Empire Notes. I’m currently listening to the talkback on Pacifica Radio.

It’s barely 6pm in Washington. The night is young.

Today’s the day for King George’s second coronation. No expense is, of course, spared in providing this event of GOP extravagence.

The whole obscene day can be followed on the web with video coverage on C-Span1, starting from 8am (midnight here in Sydney). On C-Span2 there will be coverage from 10.30am ET of a protest rally being conducted across town by ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), while C-Span3 is dredging archives for Presidential inauguration speeches of the past.

Another way to follow all the action on audio is through Pacifica Radio’s 13 and a half hour coverage of the day’s play from both sides of the fence. WBAI’s website has the complete day’s lineup, and they have a live audio stream in realaudio. KPFA Berkeley streams Pacifica’s coverage in ogg vorbis, which is becoming my audio streaming format of choice.

It was a spectacle of surrealist theatre that brought back memories of the Lillehammer Winter Olympic closing ceremony. But the unveiling of the Airbus A380 in Toulouse yesterday was such an overblown spectacle, so much so that Sky News, BBC World and CNN International were all sucked in to taking this live informercial as a “breaking news” event during their 9pm AEDT bulletins last night.

The Guardian has analysis of the launch and the prospects for viability of the plane itself. If you feel inclined you can go to the Airbus website and drool over the specs of this new tyrannosaurus rex of the skies. Google News links to more items but I have yet to find online a copy of the video of those giant inflated puppets who somehow depicted the history of aviation. The Register has also done its take on the launch.

Four heads of government gave their ringing endorsements yesterday: Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and Senor Bean… er Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Ostensibly a socialist, Zapatero is quoted in an Airbus press release as saying “It’s the best example of civilised co-existence devised by man.” Maybe he was mis-translated from the Spanish.

Here in the inner west of Sydney, under one of the flight paths into and out of Mascot Airport, we are beside ourselves with excitement at the prospect of one of these A380s shaking hands with our rooftops.

It’s been fun (not) converting from one template to a set of others, but I’m just about back in business except for the newsfeed pages. Damn, Brian Lara got out.