SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Stu Jay Raj puts us all to shame.  He speaks 29 languages. Fifteen fluently. Amazingly, he is Australian.

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SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – Now that Sarah Palin’s brief and spectacularly ephemeral star has, for now at least, burnt out brilliantly in the international night sky, a small sigh of relief has been exhaled around the world.

But the relief is just as palpable for reasons other than having someone who can’t distinguish between nations and continents at the helm of the world’s most powerful nation. I’m a brunette with a fringe, you see, and I wear spectacles. For reasons entirely to do with slackness and nothing to do with fashion, I very frequently like to pile my hair up on top of my head, albeit for a lot less than a $10,000 a month stylist. For the past two months I’ve had to think twice. I’ve cringed as I’ve walked out the door wearing a red jumper, only to have some wit gafaw at my hair and ask me if I can pronounce “nuclear.”

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Race is still a white hot issue in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA — Circa 1987, the flavour of the month for ethnic Malays was the soaking of traditional daggers with the blood of fellow countrymen (Chinese, sweet and sour). The idea of the “Kris drinking Chinese blood” was plastered across placards in a particular rally as the speaker poured gasoline upon a crowd burning with racist hate. As the country hovered on the brink of another racial crisis, a kris was unsheathed, lifted and waved around with gusto — for an Oscar-worthy effect — by the speaker on the podium.

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In a world increasingly conscious of cultural relativism, some things remain absolute

L’VIV, UKRAINE — There are very few absolutes in life. Having spent a lot of time at university, I once thought that there were no absolutes. This is the disease known as post-modernism.

But I always knew this was wrong. Even when I was most vehemently arguing that everything is relative, I knew that some things aren’t.

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SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Newspaper endorsements are an intriguing aspect of elections.  They reveal how well the opposing parties have curried favour with the fourth estate and who the media barons want to cozy up to in order to expand their empires.  Check out this super-charged bubble chart for a visual map of endorsements in the US election.  Like the Intrade prediction markets, where Obama is currently priced at an 85% probability of winning, Obama slaughters McCain in the number of newspaper endorsements: 233 to 105.

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