That's the Way of the World
17 Nov Edition

What's happening outside the confined media borders of the U.S. today? Let's take a spin 'round the globe, starting with the coming elections in Israel (oh yes, they're a comin'):

WaPo - Sharon Agrees to Hold Early Elections
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the new Labor Party leader, Amir Peretz, agreed Thursday to hold early general elections, setting the stage for a quick campaign season even though Sharon has yet to decide which party he will lead into the voting.

In their first meeting since Peretz won the Labor leadership vote last week, the men agreed in principle to hold elections between late February and the end of March, Peretz told reporters after the 20-minute encounter. The next election had been scheduled for November 2006.
[...]
Promising to withdraw Labor from the government, Peretz stunned Sharon's old friend and key coalition partner, Shimon Peres, by winning the right to lead Israel's founding Zionist party into the next elections.

More election news, this time from Egypt:

WaPo - Islamic Candidates Make Gains In Egypt
The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest Islamic group, more than doubled its legislative representation in runoff parliamentary elections, according to initial results announced Wednesday.

The Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 and has been banned since 1954, had won 34 seats after a first-round runoff vote Tuesday, and the ruling National Democratic Party about 70 seats. [...] The result was "a shock," said Abdel Gelil Sharnoubi, editor of the Brotherhood's Web site. "I'm now praying to God to protect us from future government wrath."

As a banned organization, the Brotherhood is not allowed to run as a political party, but it fields candidates who run as independents. It had 15 members in the outgoing parliament.

An update on the post-earthquake recovery in Pakistan from the Christian Science Monitor:

CSM - Shortages hurt quake relief
Nearly six weeks after the Oct. 8 earthquake, the urgency in a town like Balakot is palpable. Ninety percent of the 250,000 people who used to live here are either homeless or dead. Nearly 32,000 families now are either living in tents or in makeshift homes.

In the mountains a few thousand feet above, the peaks are already covered in snow. Time is running short.

But relief agencies cannot put their efforts into overdrive because of critical shortages of money and manpower in a year chock full of disasters competing for resources. The World Food Program, for instance, has an additional 14,000 metric tons of food in stock, but only enough funds to run helicopter air-drop operations for another two or three weeks. Meanwhile, UNICEF has only spent a fraction of the money it has been given because of staff shortages.
[...]
Both in terms of staff and money, the world response to the quake - a 7.6 temblor that killed more than 87,000 people and left an estimated 2.8 million homeless - has not been encouraging. Only about one-quarter of the relief funds, roughly $118 million, has been committed by donor nations. Donors arriving Saturday in Islamabad will be under pressure to produce actual contributions, not just pledges, to meet a needed $550 million in emergency relief, and an additional $5.2 billion in reconstruction costs.

And an update on the French riots from Agence France Press:

AFP - French rioting dies down -- as political debate heats up
French police declared the all-clear after three weeks of rioting which has left the government stunned, bruised and casting around for explanations.

The national police service said there was a "return to a normal situation everywhere in France" overnight, with just 98 vehicles torched nationwide.

[ed note: 98 still doesn't seem like a small number]

That figure was within the average nightly range seen before the riots, France worst civil unrest in nearly four decades, broke out on October 27.
[...]
The political class has been left struggling to explain the reasons that fuelled the unrest, which spread around most major towns and cities, creating the worst urban violence since the 1968 student revolt.
[...]
But Sarkozy also warned that "we have not yet left the crisis behind," explaining that the large number of minors and repeat offenders arrested raised questions about how future law-and-order policies should be formulated.

Some sad news coming from the UK:

CBC - Prince Charles pulls out of polo
Prince Charles is giving up polo, one of his favourite pastimes, according to a spokesman.

The office of the heir to the throne, Clarence House, announced Thursday the Royal, who turned 57 this week, "felt the time was right."

Hey man, we all get to that point--I had to give up soccer goalkeeping cos my bunion would ache for days after a game. Hmmm... that might be too much information.

OK, now, for some Happy News:

HappyNews.com - Asia expected to surpass Europe in wealth this year
In a stunning shift of the power balance in global wealth management, Asia-Pacific will likely become a larger private wealth market than continental Europe (which excludes Britain) this year.

This is the forecast of John Evans, editor of Private Banker International, the leading London-based wealth journal. Evans cited data showing that the assets of high net-worth individuals in Europe totalled $8.9 trillion at end-2004, after growing only 3.7 percent last year. The data, in the Merrill Lynch/Capgemini World Wealth Report 2005, shows that the comparable figure for Britain was $1.5 trillion. By contrast, in the same period, Asia experienced a growth of 8.5 percent in assets under management for clients, to total $7.2 trillion.

Well, maybe not so happy for Europe--they've got a lot of riots yet to quell. OK, how 'bout something even happier, something that will make the world sing with joy:

HappyNews.com - Kenny Rogers to release '21 Number Ones'
A beloved, universally-known icon of American entertainment, Kenny Rogers is a living legend with an extensive history of success, including 26 Gold records and a Diamond-certified "Greatest Hits" album that has sold more than 12 million copies. On January 24, 2006, Capitol Nashville/EMI Music Catalog Marketing updates this stellar hits collection with a new title, "Kenny Rogers: 21 Number Ones," a winning hand of chart-topping aces from the Gambler.

I'm delerious. Wait, that's Prince...