If a participating city-state would engage in any conflict and violate the truce, they were given stiff fines and forbidden from competing in the games. Something which was considered a big disgrace.

There is a modern movement created to uphold the Olympic Truce. The United Nations have adopted the “Olympic Truce Resolution” for the Beijing 2008 games. Yet we see two of the countries competing in the games at this moment, Georgia and Russia, engaging in military conflicts over land disputes in South Ossetia.

A land dispute which has been ongoing for more than 15 years, since Ossetian separatists started a fight for independence from Georgia in 1991-1992.

And for some reason, it had to escalate to armed conflicts over innocent civilians now, during the Olympic Games. Of course, I am not saying that should problems arise a country should just be “non-violent” and not defend it’s sovereignty.The political agenda here seems to be far more complicated and sinister in this case. Both parts could have tried diplomacy before waging war on one another. That did not happen. It was a “fight first, and then make pleas for sympathy to our cause to the international community”.

There should be more education on what the Olympic Truce is about, and nations need to start respecting it again. If we cannot respect and uphold peace for a couple of weeks every four years, what kind of civilization is this we’re supposed to have produced for ourselves. How hostile and unstable modern society has become?

I can only hope these conflicts will soon seize, and that the two countries will follow the example of their athletes and reconcile.

Imagine in the near future, you can have a website address in the form of www.john.doe, www.mary.lovescats, www.government.office and www.summer.vacation.

Whether this will all lead to confusion or it will aid in the direction of an even more semantic web, it remains to be seen. Trademarks on web addresses will be hard to keep up with though. With the 21 top-level domains currently available, many companies choose to register their name with all in order to avoid consumer confusion and fraud. If there where hundreds of possible web address suffixes, that’d be a nearly impossible task to handle.

Among other decisions reached by the ICANN board in Paris, is the future support of other languages in web address extensions. Presently, you can only use 37 roman characters in a web address. Support for Asian, Arabic, Eastern European and Greek scripts should become available once that decision goes into implementation.

According to the ICANN this is the “biggest expansion to Internet in forty years”, and with a constantly growing demand for more websites and domain names, a much awaited for expansion by many.

Japan has long been one of the worse enemies to the world’s whale population, continuing to hunt and kill them, often over the pretenses of research while all the whale meat ends up in the market.

Education, and building environmental awareness among the younger generation Japanese is apparently how the government of Australia has decided could in the future cause a switch in the country’s blood lust for whale meat.

Click here to watch the video

Earlier this year, on another post, I discussed OLPC’s plans to make their laptops available to the public for purchase, should each buyer agree to also donate one laptop. It seems this plan is becoming a reality.

Head over at the XO laptop giving website to find out more about it. Official launch date for the give one – take one project is November 12th.

Most of the places damaged in these fires, I have been fortunate enough to have visited in the past. A fact which multiplies my sadness over the unparalleled beauty which I know has been destroyed. The site of Ancient Olympia, birthplace to the first Olympic Games was threatened and only managed to survive the flames at the last moment thanks to the dedicated efforts of fire fighters and volunteers.

Nature has suffered damage unlike ever before in Greece. Some of the most beautiful forests are no longer. Yet nature has a magical way in which, should it be allowed to rest, it can be reborn. The people though, will require a lot of help in order to recover and get back on their feet.

One of the best organized initiatives to aid victims and provide for disaster relief is located at the following website:

www.ihelp.gr

Please consider spreading the word over the “I HELP GREECE” initiative by telling your friends about it, or posting on your blog.

“Live Earth is a 24-hour, 7-continent concert series taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.”

Sounds exciting yet? Live Earth concerts will be taking place on the 7th of July in New York, London, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Tokyo, Sydney and Hamburg. Local talents will be performing alongside international names such as, Alicia Keys (US), Black Eyed Peas (UK), Duran Duran (UK), Madonna (UK), Macy Gray (Brazil), Rihanna (Japan), Sarah Brightman (China), Shakira (Germany), and some many more (see complete artist lineup).

If you cannot make it to any of these venue locations in time for the concerts, there is no reason to miss out on Live Earth. The message these concerts convey will be broadcasted live via satellite, from all eight cities. It will be on television, the radio as well as a live streaming web broadcast by MSN.

Live Earth follows on the footsteps of Live 8 which brought together world audiences before in an effort to bring attention to the global problem of poverty as to initiate awareness and actions that would bring forth solutions.

Founded by Kevin Wall, the worldwide Executive Producer of Live 8, and backed by Former U.S. Vice President and climate awareness guru Al Gore, Live Earth carries a message “that everyone, everywhere can and must Answer the Call to solve the climate crisis”. Initiatives such as this are a brilliant display of hope. Hope for the future of this planet and an involved, caring society.

Get tickets and more information by following this link to the official Live Earth website.

Space Adventures, Ltd. was founded in 1998 and is the world’s first private company offering space travel to private individuals. One of the company’s goals is to develop technologies that will allow for safe, and more affordable private space travel in the future. Opening up a new frontier to those amongst us who’ve already been everywhere there is to go on Earth and are just looking for something different.

Granted, $100 million to fly to the moon and back sounds expensive, correction – is expensive. I guess these are the costs involved with today’s means and technological resources. However, there is other things space exploration enthusiasts can keep themselves busy with while waiting for prices to go down.

These include sub-orbital and orbital space flights with stop-overs at the International Space Station. Also, you may simply want to experience weightlessness on a zero gravity flight, watch a spacecraft’s launch, or visit and train at the Star City cosmonaut center in Moscow, Russia.

It does sound like fun. I wonder if I could blog from space. I don’t know if I would be able to put enough weight to what I write up there. Oh, well.

Write journal entries, post photo albums, invite and make friends. Among the wonderful features of My Life Of Travel is the ability to have an interactive Google Map pinning out the places you’ve been at, and the ability to earn revenue on the ads displayed on your journals. Something not all free blog / journal services allow.

Most important, it’s fun, and you can start by adding the places you’ve already traveled to.

One of the newest additions to Google’s already wonderful Google Maps is the “Street View” feature. Clicking on this button is made available on several locations across the United States already. Doing so makes certain streets appear with a blue outline. Clicking on any of the blue streets will transport you to “Street View” which pretty much simulates you actually being there. Making use of interactive, 360 degree view, high resolution photography.

You can walk up and down a street, turn around, zoom in. It is the next best thing to actually being there. Google, has once again made a nice video on YouTube to introduce this new feature on the Maps service, which you can watch below. Enjoy

Click here to view the embedded video.

What is most important though is that what was broken is well underway to being completely restored for those who survived. When I blogged the news about it last year, I was skeptical as to whether the wounds of those left behind will begin to heal, and whether state aid would work. According to the Sunday Herald Sun the government has taken the necessary steps to aid and relief the survivors.

I can only hope humanity has witnessed the last natural disaster of such massive scale and high death toll. Meanwhile, I’ve tracked a beautiful video on YouTube about Jogjakarta you can watch below.

Click here to view the embedded video.