News And Developments You May Not Have Heard Of
1. Major elections are coming up in Ireland and Italy. Which seem to garnering about 1/100th of the attention that the Israeli ones did (well, except for the Berlusconi-Mills-Jowell connection). Not an original point but one that needs repeating: there's more to the world than the UK, US and the Middle East. ETA: The one's in Thailand got a bit of coverage though.
2. UK oil production has declined from its 1999 peak of 128 thousand tonnes of crude to a mere 87 thousand tonnes in 2004 (Table F.1), this is almost certainly an irretrievable trend (with the obvious caveat). This is not a fact that is being discussed much in the UK media, and even then only in fleeting relation to the recent Budget, oil company profits and the recent natural gas pinch. While the high taxes on fuel, the major exception being aviation fuel, are actually going to cushion the impact,* the UK is still facing a massive increase in its demand for oil imports at the same time as a probable world peak in oil production. While the discovery and development of North Sea oil was a big issue back in the 1970s and 1980s, being part of the reason for a Scottish Nationalist revival (why should the rest of the UK get the lion's share of "Scottish" oil income?), the equivalent decline into impotence now seems to be being ignored.
*Compare and contrast with the US which has very low taxes on fuel, which means that a greater proportion of the retail price is determined by the production price, or somewhere like Indonesia which has very recently become the first member of OPEC to be a net importer of oil and has removed government subsidies to the oil price with some considerable economic and political turmoil as a result.
3. The US supposedly now has a nuclear first strike capability against Russia.