Vale 2006 - well, not quite!

As the year winds on to a close so too do the lives of some people who have actually had a major impact on the world as well as those who are there merely to make up the numbers

The death of former President Gerald Ford of the USA was announced today - he was 90+ years old.

Some will remember him as:

• the only president never to have been elected;
  
• the person who granted Tricky Dicky Nixon an unconditional pardon;
• the person who finally ended the Vietnam war;
  
• the person who tried to restore some dignity to the Presidency;
  
• someone who used to be a good athlete and yet had a history of stumbles when he was in office
  

Whatever the memories, another of the living US presidents is no more.

This day was also the day when the situation in Somalia got some action happening. In the past I have written about this disaster area where some of the Islamic Militia have been waging a war against the established government and creating a flood of refugees. Nothing seems to have been done in the past to either support the government in this country or to abandon them. Now the Ethiopian troops have taken a hand and the militia has fled abandoning all of the conquests that they have achieved to date.

Will this be the end of the situation? I suspect not. Indeed what is more likely is that Eritrea which is a neighbour and has reputedly been arming the militia will react, the African Union will probably want to take a hand now that things are happening and with any luck someone will notice that Ethiopia has a strong background to do with Christianity and so the conflict will be painted as a war of ideologies again.

It is interesting to speculate what finally tipped the Ethiopians into this conflict in a full scale assault and no doubt there will be speculation about the hand that was played in the conflict by one power or another.

Another major event of the day was the fact that the USA finally recognised the Polar Bear as being endangered by the melting of the polar ice cap, its native habitat. In doing so the USA has opened the floodgates for those ecologists who will use this small opening to wax lyrical about the USA's excessive use of energy, its lack of concern about the environment and create the thin edge of the wedge in moving their political agendas forward.

One item that has not yet surfaced in this discussion is what sort of effect the melting ice caps will have on the rest of the world. I wonder for example whether the massive increase in the amount of fresh water being injected into the world's oceans will have an impact on marine life, whether the rising water levels will mean doom for many low lying communities (those islands in the Pacific that are barely above water level now come to mind as well as a lot of coastlines around the world including those of England and the Netherlands and Bangladesh). I also wonder whether the fact that massive shifts in mass from the poles to the oceans combined with the earth's rotation and spin effect will create some issues for that rotation and if so what impact this will have in terms of earthquakes, tidal waves etc.?

2007 promises to be yet another interesting year and one in which yet another subject will absorb some of the interest of the world - this being the larger than 100% increase in top executive salaries while the rest of humanity is becoming more and more divided into the very rich and the very poor. I suspect that yet another 'correction' will be taking place.