With WYDstock 2008 happily out of the way for ten days now, time for me to make a few comments, having spent most of the WYDstock Week out of town taking my daughter on school holidays.

Firstly, this was a Northern Hemisphere event transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere. It's summer vacation time for students in the Global North, but in Sydney it's mid-winter. And, school holiday fortnight notwithstanding, not an especially quiet time for the Central Business District in July either.

Tens of thousands of migrant workers won't be recycling any trash this August as they are being pushed out of town as Beijing gears up to present a sanitized modern city to millions of Olympic visitors. Reuters picks up the story.

We're reliably informed that the spectacular breaking of ice from the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina on Monday has little to do with global warming, and more to go with the glacier's alignment.

Still, it's 91 years since ice has broken from this glacier during an Argentine winter. Video from Reuters:

It's a warm welcome to Bulgaria, Estonia and Turkey. One of the more sensible outcomes from this week's ICC meetings in The Home Of Cricket, Dubai, was the expansion of the governing body's membership by three, to now encompass a total of 104 countries.

This represents cricket's biggest incursion into eastern Europe to date. Estonia is the first state of the former Soviet Union to attain ICC membership, while neighbours Bulgaria and Turkey join Croatia and Greece as south-eastern Europe's representatives in the cricketing community.

There's been no official announcement yet, but if all the rumours are true then the ICC executive is about to alter the result of the 2006 Oval Test between England and Pakistan.

With five weeks remaining till the start of the Beijing Olympic Games, the laying of the turf at the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre is running ahead of schedule.

Wishful thinking. Sigh.

The Everything-New-Is-Old-Again Labour Party wasn't expected to win the Henley by-election. It was, after all, an extremely toffy-nosed Tory seat, made vacant when Boris Karloff became Lord Mayor of London. But how many people expected Labour to (a) come fifth, behind even the Greens and BNP, and (b) score less than five per cent of the primary vote, thereby losing its deposit, so to speak?

At least Richard McKenzie (Labour, 1066 votes) outpolled such lumninaries as Bananaman Owen (Monster Raving Loony Party, 242 votes) and Harry Bear (Fur Play Party, 73 votes).

One of the most shameful episodes in Australia's history has come to an end, with the commencement of the withdrawal of our combat troops from Iraq.

The withdrawal came more or less with a whimper, and certainly not telegraphed in advance. Earlier this year the Senate Estimates Committee was told that Australia's role in Iraq was complete, and this was confirmed by Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston yesterday (video). We, of course, should never have been there, an aggressor nation (along with the USA, UK and numerous smaller members of the "Coalition of the Willing") invading a sovereign entity on the other side of the world, on the basis of fabricated "intelligence". The acronym for the original (subsequently discarded) US name for the invasion, "Operation Iraqi Liberation", sums up the underhanded motives fairly well.

My third change of address in three years out of the way, it seems to becoming a seasonal thing. Ah well, back in business, and wireless broadband to boot.