Ahem. Nigeria, Angola... Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil....

But I agree, where there isn't oil, they can hack or starve themselves to death for all we care. If fact, they can do that even where there is oil, as long as the government gets enough bribes to let the oil companies in.

Spent it trying to get hold of my brother in New York, who had some meetings at unspecified locations around Wall Street. Lord, what a nightmare. He was fine, BTW, but having relatives all over the world can be a nightmare on occasions.

Aha... some ersatz-erudite bawl-locks for the conspiracy theorists.

September 11th, 2001 happened to be the day of my mother's funeral... so instead of being on duty in the newsroom, I spent the morning singing her to rest in a Welsh chapel followed by a wake at the familly home. About 1.50pm one of my team rang from TVC to let me know all hell had broken loose - actually to mock-complain that of all days to go awol I had chosen a humdinger. I then sat transfixed in front of the TV. Funny thing is when you report on a disaster, the pressure of work keeps feelings at arm's length - when you watch it happen as a member of the audience, the impact is far greater.

Of course Edo and his ilk can think what they like... the moon is made of cheese, the world was created in 7 days, George W Bush is a great intellect.... fortunately for the rest of us there is plenty of well-documented evidence (including the suicide notes, the money trail and so on) to show that it was not a home-grown conspiracy but a dastardly attack on innocent civilians by a group of battle-trained Islamofascist suicide bombers.

It's not that this was a greater tragedy than so many others in the world... just that the aftermath of the attacks happened as a live televisual event so we could all witness the deaths in real time. That horror is usually reserved for the likes of combatants and war correspondents. Also as a terrorist attack on innocent civilians using aircraft as the weapons, it was a new and shocking twist.

I think AC and Newshoney have it right. The attack itself - flying hijacked planes into a building or two, a few thousand civilian casualties - was a new and macabre twist on what was already the fundamental premise of terrorism, which is after all to terrorise the population.

To the British, who had had 30 years of (albeit somewhat less spectacular) terrorist attacks in Ulster and on the mainland to contend with, the New York and Washington attacks were horrific only because of the scale of events, rather than the fundamental altering of national psyche they appear to have been to the Americans. I think that's probably why 9/11 has more impact on the Americans than 7/7, or the Bishopsgate bomb, or the Manchester bomb, or the Hyde Park bomb, or any others had on the UK.

Sure, there had been terrorism in the US before, but Oklahoma, the Unabomber, the Atlanta Olympic bomb, had all been essentially deranged Americans with an axe to grind. International terrorism had only peripherally hit the US through the likes of the Lockerbie or Air India bombs, where there were some US citizens involved but it was all at one remove from the immediacy of a "live televisual event" happening right there in the Big Apple.

If the world hadn't watched as the WTC collapsed, and all we'd seen were edited highlights of, say, a hole in the Pentagon, the resulting political backlash wouldn't have been as widely supported by the US Congress as it was at the time (there were few dissenting voices from Bush's hawkish stance) and we may not have ended up in the geopolitical mess we're in today.

So yes, I think 9/11 was world-changing: but not because of the events themselves, rather because of the media and political feeding-frenzy that they instigated.

Well said that man ^^^.

x 2

x 3.

My abiding memory of the day, apart from the TV newscasts we all saw, was driving past Vancouver airport and seeing dozens upon dozens of 747s parked wing-tip to wing-tip all over the airport runways and apron. It made it real in a way the TV pictures never could.

The whole thing had a surreal air for me until I received an email 2 days later from a friend who informed us that his mother was on the plane that crashed in to the Pentagon. This was less than 2 weeks after his father died of cancer - he had become an orphan aged 27.

Just horrific.

you're all too kind... I only rote wot I thunk.

I was working in London on 9/11, we hade a big flat screen TV in the reception lobby, we ended up opening the windows and turning the volume up so that the increasing crowd on the street outside could hear as well as see what was going on. Very bizarre day: the NY office of the company I worked for was in midtown, so out of immediate danger, but several colleagues were downtown or on their way downtown for morning meetings. Took a long time to account for everyone, but they did, eventually, thank goodness.

On July 7 2005 I was on my way from my office in Victoria to a meeting just off High Holborn. Didn't know what had happened until midmorning - at that stage the most pressing concern was that with all the public transport halted I'd have a long walk home to Chiswick. The sheer bloody inconvenience was top of mind, until it became apparent that there had been serious casualties. There was never a thought, though, of doing anything except carrying on business as usual. That would have let the buggers think they might win.

I remember being moved almost to tears a week later at noon on the 14th when everybody piled out of offices right across London to stand on the pavement in silence for a couple of minutes. All the traffic stopped, bus passengers got off the buses and stood in the road, even somewhat bemused tourists could see something profound was happening and stood still for a while. It was really quite a show of solidarity.

Man made disasters are still dwarfed by natural ones but they generally are in remote areas of the world.

The death and destruction these events cause are rarely seen on CNN etc until well after the event.

We who live in the richest countries on this planet seem to be immune from the affects on millions of people in poorer countries.

As tragic that 9/11 was for those who lost loved ones, it's still an event made larger than life by the media.

This event happened last Thursday.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Te...285/story.html

Don't forget Somalia; I'm not sure whether oil was actually found, but from what I remember one Western oil company had organised oil exploration rights with the government shortly before the Somalians decided they didn't actually want a government anymore.

And, oil aside, Africa has large amounts of various resources, not to mention gold and diamonds.

Oil-producing countries in Africa are (in no particular order):

Algeria
Cameroon
Republic of Congo
Equatiorial Guineau
Libya
Sudan
Angola
Chad
Egypt
Gabon
Nigeria
Tunisia

Some, some of the poorest people in the world live in countries where members of the governments enrich themselves outrageously, with the support and enablement of major oil companies. This arrangement is accepted because the major oil companies have secure sources of supply and get to keep the oil, as long as Mr. President gets his Swiss millions and a garage full of shiny Mercedes.

Nice and sorted, no need to rock any boats in Africa.

The Middle East is different. There the ruling families haven't actually allowed the western oil companies to come in and 'loot the shop' in the same way. The pesky Arabs are just too darned sneaky and shifty to con. The rulers can't be bribed because they're richer than Croesus anyway.

The Middle East supply to the West isn't secure... that's why it's so volatile. And where that supply is is a little bit more secure, e.g. Saudi Arabia, that's why you see Western governments shamelessly befriending 'regimes' that would otherwise be abhorred.

Amen to that ...

I hope you got the answer el_richo. But I will also add Afghanistan to it as well.