America Makes the News!

All of you back home will be proud of the fact that all of the sordid details of life in the U.S. are frequently beamed across the world to Australia. The courtroom shooting and subsequent manhunt in Atlanta last week made the nightly news here, followed quickly by the shootings in Wisconsin. You will also be proud to know that you can catch COPS on TV here in Australia - although I have no idea why anyone in Australia would have any interest in watching COPS in Portland.

But then Aussies have their moments as well - violence is indeed a frequent event here too, but it typically invloves non-fatal knife wounds and other weapons of opportunity. Case in point, soccer hooliganism erupted before a game (yes, before the players even took the field) in Sydney over the weekend featuring rivalling Serb and Croat-backed teams. One soundbite on the news said something dismissing ethnic tension as a cause (hmmmm. . . Serbs and Croats in conflict - haven't we seen this somewhere before?). So I guess the question is what has more sway: a thousand years of Balkan unrest or a proud tradition of soccer hooliganism. Who knows?

And for those of you who thought it was a big deal last year when the U.S. was struck by four hurricanes, Australia is preparing to be hit a third time by the same cyclone. Cyclone Ingrid is circumnavigating the Australian coastline - first hitting Queensland, followed by a near miss on Darwin, and is now collecting herself once again for another strike on the west coast. How's that for persistence?