Extra Extra,Read All About It! Global News Series coming to Nimo-ism

It has been obvious to me for quite awhile that my book review topics and other postings may not always be closely relevant to current events. {By the time I finish reading a book and reviewing it, the material may not be quite as 'hot off the presses}.While certain issues can almost always be considered current events, I have been wanting to incorporate current events,preferably in keeping with my blog's main topics; globalization, international relations, global economics/finance and international politics.

Enter: My new bi-weekly series titled " All The World's Estranged'. Eighty seconds is the amount of time it should take you to catch up on current events from around the world. The posts will be concise but will contain links for further information for those long Sundays for which spending hours catching up to the world simply seems appropriate. I will not designate specific days of the week for posting the series, although Tuesdays and Fridays seem best for keeping in the definition of the term 'current' :)

What will be different about this series from other news blogs and sites you ask? I aim to gather my information from a wide range of sources, from private and public, to independent sources in order to let you decide what is news and what isnt. In order to ensure comprehensive coverage, the news will be divided by continent- yes, even Antarctica!

Oh yes- the title. The title 'All The World's Estranged' is a play on words on the famous Shakespeare quote "all the world's a stage" from his play As You Like It. Jacques, a malcontent Lord  from the Exiled Court of Duke Senior in the Forest of Arden opines;

 Act II Scene VII

All the world's a stage

And all the men and women merely players

They have their exits and their entrances

And one man in his time plays many parts

His acts being seven ages

I do not concur with Thomas Friedman's view that the world is flat, nevertheless I find it a futile effort to deny that globalization has smoothed out some curves on the international relations landscape. The global interconnectivity of goods, services, ideologies and cultures has significantly contracted the conceptual distance between physically distant supply and demand marriages. As borders come down , the saying 'it's a small world' seems more relevant and simultaneouly, current events of one country are regurgiated by popular news media world wide, feeding into the idea that globalization = homogeneity.

All the world's a stage, indeed, but the monologue and dialogue of the players differ. Globalization brings the world to our fingertips, and the task at hand {pun intendend} is to determine the associations and correlations relayed by the information we have access to. In lieu of dealing with the seven stages of a man's life  pronounced byShakespeare's Jacques, I will attempt to provide snippets of associations in current events, from the seven grand theatres -Asia,Africa, Antarctica,Australia, Europe, North America and  South America.

Curtain Up.

The Works of William Shakespeare