I confess, most of the time, I quickly skim or immediately file the Global Development Briefing away to the doom of a neglected email folder called "News."
Sometimes it catches my attention, though. Two items from today's:
"The Global Fund is asking for less than three-tenths of 1 per cent of that and can’t seem to get it."— Stephen Lewis, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on HIV/AIDS in Africa, noting that a United Nations report released last week showed that global expenditures on armaments had now reached $1 trillion a year, and appealing for governments to contribute more generously to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Utterly unsurprising, I guess. But a compelling quantification of things.
CONGO (DRC): The number of civilians uprooted by fighting in the eastern DRC this year has risen dramatically over the past week, with an additional 30,000 to 35,000 people displaced as of today beyond the more than 50,000 already reported, according to UNICEF. The area most affected is the territory of Djugu, just north of Bunia, capital of the Ituri region. Villages have been looted and burned down by armed factions linked to different ethnic groups. Interviews with terrified civilians confirm that there have been widespread killings, rapes, and looting, UNICEF said. "We need to bring the same sense of urgency to the Congo that we brought to the tsunami, in order to stop the killing of children," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy declared, referring to the Indian Ocean disaster which brought a massive outpouring of international aid to the dozen devastated countries. The latest fighting between Lendu and Hema militias is part of a larger conflict in the DRC, one of the bloodiest the world has known since World War II, in which some 3.8 million people are thought to have been killed in less than six years, the vast majority of them civilians and the majority of these most probably children.
Many insist that the conflict in the Great Lakes region is, in fact, World War III.
So, P. Diddy just can't seem to put his life story to paper. A shame, really. Perhaps if he sampled other people's memoirs and layered a crappy dance beat underneath...
My favorite observation from the BBC piece on Mr. Comb's unwritten-ness:
Other famous faces who have agreed to write memoirs and failed to deliver include Mick Jagger, who received a seven-figure sum for the project.But the Rolling Stone eventually returned the sum, saying that he was unable to remember anything of significance.
Maybe these folks just need to pay this guy a visit.