September 11, 1906: Indian-born lawyer and South African resident Mohandas Gandhi spoke in Johannesburg calling for non-violent resistance to racial discrimination, in particular Transvaal’s Asiatic Laws. This week is the centenary of Gandhi’s first satyagraha.

It’s a pity that the date of September 11 has become associated with an audacious act of mass murder. With both events in mind, the Mahatma’s grandson, Arun Gandhi, has submitted that September 11 be observed as a Day of Prayer for Peace and Harmony. There’s more information at the Gandhi Institute, including a PDF document of Arun’s paper “The Duality of September 11“.

Rather more fitting, I think, than the Bushite proclamation of September 11 as Patriot Day.

July 22, 1946: The Zionist militant group Irgun bombs the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the British Mandate Secretariat in Palestine. A total of 91 people were killed. The Irgun were led by Menachem Begin, who was subsequently Prime Minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983.

Wikipedia describes the events in more detail. The Times’ reportage of the outrage in 1946 can be read in a PDF of page five of the July 23, 1946 edition. Sixtieth anniversary commemorations are taking place this week in Jerusalem, and have been condemned by the British Ambassador to Israel and its Consul-General in Jerusalem.

Uncle George Galloway has had a spray on the topic in today’s Guardian.

My fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.
- George W Bush, on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln off San Diego, 1.5.03

How much accomplishment does a mission need before it is accomplished?

Dedicated to all the men and women who have fought in armed combat, and in particular:

My father, Frederick George Theodore Eyre, who died on 2 March 2004, aged 85. Served in Borneo, West Papua and Rabaul during the Second World War. He spoke very, very little about his war service during his lifetime.

His brother, Percy Walter Ellis Eyre, who died on 23 October 1942, aged 22, in the Battle of El Alamein.

One of the names I remember hearing in the news often in my pre-teens was that of General William Westmoreland. He was the commander of US forces in Vietnam while Lyndon Johnson was President.

Westmoreland died on Monday at the age of 91. Clearly a major figure in one of the nastier of America’s many incursions into foreign affairs.

I’ll keep this post open for a while to link to obituaries and reaction to Westmoreland’s passing. I’ll kick it off with the Wikipedia page on Westmoreland, and a lengthy piece by New York Times obituarist Eric Pace.

• Washington Post obituary
• NPR Morning Edition - audio profile by Stanley Karnow
• The Guardian newsblog

A remarkable story that I was unaware of until today. April 22, 1959, and the acclaimed ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn is detained in a Panama City lock-up for 24 hours while her husband is on the run attempting a coup against the Panamanian government.

BBC Online’s On This Day section picks up the story.

April 15, 1955, and the first McDonald’s “restaurant” opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, named by milk shaker-salesman Ray Kroc after the McDonald brothers, Dick and Mac, whose hamburger stand in San Bernadino, California became his inspiration. The rest… yeah well you know.

I’m going to commemorate half a century of Macca’s today in the most symbolic fashion I can think of: by eating a works hamburger from the corner shop. It will be more nutritious (though how nutritious will be open to debate), contain none of that chemical mixture they call “special sauce”, and I’ll be supporting local small business.

And tonight I might get out the “Super Size Me” DVD again.

I stopped going to Macca’s about three years ago (though I did have a dinner at the now-defunct McDonald’s subsidiary Boston Market next to the RPA the night after Adara was born). At my worst I was a twice-a-day Maccas person, when they had an outlet across the road from my place of work in Hunter Street, Newcastle. Then the 1989 earthquake shut the McDonald’s (and most business in Hunter Street) down rather abruptly. Perhaps the one and only reason to be thankful for the earthquake.

These days, the only fast-food franchises I visit are Australian-owned, in particular Oporto and Michel’s Patisserie.

Read the Corporate Responsibility section of the McDonald’s website. The McDonald’s Australia website has a PDF download of a piece of glowing propaganda called the MacPack (it’s 3.4 megs and they don’t tell you much about corporate responsibility or community involvement on their non-flash website).

And when are we going to get McDelivery like they have in Mumbai?

Perhaps a more useful resource is McSpotlight, the official website of the McLibel case. The updated documentary of McLibel was screened on BBC Four a few hours ago and had its world premiere in the cinemas last weekend.

And this Sydney Morning Herald article from 2003 documents the successful resistance to McDonald’s expansion in and around the city.

January 2, 1967: Project Nassau (AKA Operation Istanbul) was aborted. This was a failed attempt by a band of mercenaries to invade Haiti. US customs officers arrested about 80 people in a beach house at Florida Keys which contained a cache of arms.

Among the people arrested were three cameramen from CBS. It was later revealed that CBS had paid the mercenaries for exclusive rights to film the invasion.

It seems, also, that Haiti was to be used as a springboard for recapturing Cuba. What might have been: “Bay of Pigs 2, Sunday at 9 on CBS…”

The US House of Representatives later conducted a hearing to determine whether CBS was funding foreign revolutions. As we all know, that’s the government’s job, not private enterprise.

One can only wonder what Roone Arledge of ABC’s Wide World of Sports would have made of the opportunity.

Cuban-Exile.com has a stack of resource material about Project Nassau.

These are my top ten world news stories of 2004, in reverse order (actually, it’s eleven):

=10. People power in Venezuela and the Ukraine
In Venezuela, attempt after attempt to remove Hugo Chavez from power came to an end when his presidency was reaffirmed in a recall vote in August. In the Ukraine, a presidential election was so blatantly rigged that public pressure forced a fresh poll, and a win for opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko after he survived a bizarre assassination attempt.

9. The overthrow of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Aristide was removed from office in February in dubious circumstances, kidnapped and flown to Africa. Who was behind the coup?

8. The Athens Olympic Games
The facilities were ready in time, even if there were a few corners cut. There were no problems with terrorism. But medal tallies went down as well as up as athletes galore tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Even a gold-medal winning horse was later found to have been high during his event. Add bad sportsmanship (Sally Robbins’ team-mates) and blatant acts of bribery (Craig Stevens’ withdrawal from the Australian swimming after selling exclusive TV rights for his withdrawal announcement to the highest bidder) and you had more proof than ever that the Olympic ideals are dead.

7. The expansion of the European Union
The EU expanded to cover most of the continent on May 1 with the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Malta, Slovenia and Cyprus.

6. Bombings on the Madrid railway
More than two hundred people were murdered by terrorists with multiple bomb blasts on the Madrid rail system. Jose Maria Aznar’s government lacked transparency in their handling of the atrocity, and was swept from power at the general election four days later. Those who said that this outcome encouraged terrorists missed the point.

5. Massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan
No matter how wrong Russia’s treatment of Chechnya has been, nothing justifies the gruesome booby-trapping and slaughter of hundreds of innocent children in their classrooms.

4. Warfare and atrocities in Iraq
Possibly America’s most inept foreign incursion in history. The removal of a foul, but internationally benign, dictator on false pretences has lead to an unwinnable war, the creating of a fertile breeding ground for terrorists, and flagrant disregard of not just the Geneva Convention but fundamental decency on both sides. The webcasting of the murder of innocent people represents perhaps the nadir of humanity.

3. The US presidential election
Over a billion US dollars was squandered on this travesty of democracy. A year-long circus leads up to an utterly shambolic poll, where the system used varies from state to state and sometimes from county to county. Even the composition of the antiquated electoral college is not consistent across the nation. This might be the first presidential election won by party operatives hacking into electoral computers… and is it true that many voting machines were set by default in favour of Bush before a vote was cast? The US electoral system will be neither free nor fair until (a) voting procedures are consistent across all fifty states, and (b) the recount is seen as a basic democratic right.

2. Humanitarian crisis in Darfur
The brutal civil war in western Sudan has been going for more than twenty years. It could be drawing to its conclusion. Could. Out of the gaze of live television, thousands upon thousands of people have been murdered, more than million dispossessed from their homes. Prior to December 26 there was no greater humanitarian crisis this year.

1. The Indian Ocean tsunami
For all the fear in recent years of a terrorist-driven catastrophe, it was natural causes that led to the death of more than 150,000 people and the destruction of basic facilities for millions of others. Maybe an early warning system could have prevented many of the deaths. It wouldn’t have stopped the destruction of whole towns and economies. The full geopolitical implications of this tragedy are yet to unfold.

The “top 10 news stories of 2004″ lists from around the world tell more about the quality of media these days than they chronicle the year’s major events. But bear in mind that most were announced before the tsunami struck on December 26.

The Associated Press named their top 10 world news stories of 2004. Make of them what you will:

1. The US election
2. The war in Iraq
3. Hurricanes in Florida
4. Abu Gharib
5. The release of the September 11, 2001 report
6. Gay marriage
7. Yasser Arafat dies
8. Ronald Reagan dies
9. Russian school seizure
10. Madrid bombings

The government-owned Xinhua News Agency’s list of the top 10 Chinese news stories is eye-opening. Among the list: “The CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued two documents in March and November, urging all local departments to strengthen work in the ideological and ethical education of college students and minors.”