AUSTRALIA

AUSTRALIA
The Sydney Morning Herald, May 4: The grainy videotaped footage is chillingly familiar. But it is the distinct Australian accent that drives the reality home. What has been feared for so long has come to pass. An Australian life now hangs in the balance in that excruciatingly cruel ordeal of hostage-taking which has come to mark the depravity of the Iraq war. The accompanying media spectacle is a strategy in itself. Thus, terror resonates way beyond the Iraqi conflict zone.
That Australians are now haunted by images of a dishevelled, shaky Douglas Wood does not suggest that the life of this one Australian engineer is more valuable than the tens of thousands of Iraqis and foreigners who have died. It is just that Australia has, until now, experienced the Iraq war with a kind of charmed detachment.
Sharing the burden
Last week U.S. Gen. Richard Myers made the frank admission that coalition forces have made no measurable gains against insurgents over the past year. But like so many grinding conflicts, the daily bloodletting in Iraq has been slowly fading from view, obscured by sanitised casualty figures which read like sports scores. Australia joined the invasion of Iraq more than two years ago. It must continue to share the burden, and risks, of deployment.
BRITAIN
The Guardian, London, May 4: Disease control programmes have always been a challenge. Eradication programmes face even more daunting odds. In the history of man only one disease has been eradicated: smallpox, in 1977. Yesterday there was further bad news. The World Health Organisation confirmed that a Nigerian strain of polio had been detected in Indonesia. Indonesia has become the 16th country to be re-infected. When the eradication programme began in 1988, polio was endemic in 125 countries and paralysing 350,000 people annually. By 2000 -- the original target date -- it was down to 3,500 new cases a year.
What went wrong -- and indicates the global interdependence of health programmes -- was an 11-month halt in 2003 to vaccinations in the northern Muslim states of Nigeria, where rumours were rife that the programme was a Western plot to render Muslim girls infertile or to spread AIDS. Paradoxically, it restarted after vaccine was purchased from Indonesia, which because it was a Muslim country reassured wary local imams and politicians.
Protective bed nets
Last week an editorial in the Lancet medical journal suggested the U.N.-led partnership was failing to halt the spread of malaria, which kills one million people a year -- triple the fatality numbers of AIDS. Yesterday, in the first global report on the campaign, WHO pointed to some successes. They included a tenfold increase in protective bed nets in 14 African states and wider use of new and more effective drugs in 23 countries, but conceded overall success was hard to prove.
Reformers have rightly contrasted the wide media attention to natural disasters with the minimal reporting of infectious diseases. Remember: if smallpox had not been eradicated, 400 million would have been infected and over 50 million killed.
NORTHERN IRELAND
Belfast Telegraph, May 3: What was expected to be a predictable, lack-lustre election, both in Northern Ireland and Britain, is suddenly becoming much more interesting. Here, more seats are likely to change hands than ever and in Britain, another Labour landslide may yet be averted, thanks to the growing unpopularity of the Prime Minister.
It took a long time for Iraq, so closely linked with trust in Tony Blair, to become an election issue, but it is finally taking its toll on the government's standing. Although the Prime Minister can argue that going to war was a political decision, which people can disagree with, the way he presented it to the public was at odds with his intelligence briefings.
Regime change
The latest leaked document shows that nine months before the invasion, the government knew that Americans regarded military action as "inevitable" and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy". Regime change was the real objective, rather than the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, and when the Attorney General warned that it was not a legal basis for war, every attempt was made to demonstrate Iraq's defiance, in order to justify the war.
The public has been left with the impression that the Attorney General changed his advice under Prime Ministerial pressure.