Twenty months after the tsunami in December 2004 brought Sri Lanka a rush of charity from abroad, international aid agencies are hemmed in by surging violence in the country’s long-running civil war. They are also encountering suspicion, hostility and deadly attacks.

It was the eve of independence and all through the house, not a creature was moving, not even a mouse…because all the creatures in the house, man and mouse, had stepped out in the streets, some shouting loud, some others enjoying the beat. Come 15th August any year, and a ‘true red-blood Indian’ gets a power surge of patriotism and bursts into trendy slogans celebrating the anniversary of our Independence. After four years, I am back in Ahmedabad on this day and last night, as the clock struck twelve and India awoke for its tryst with destiny, I was walking down the streets, coming home from the Flood Relief Office set up near home. Most of the work that can be done for the flood victims of Surat, from a distance, is done. More than 200 thousand people were stranded on roof tops and in high level buildings for more than three days without adequate food or water.

All week the BBC has been looking at the impact of the baby boomer generation in the run-up to the 60th birthday spectacular of the archetypal boomer Bill Clinton on Saturday.

The political, cultural, industrial and academic worlds on both sides of the Atlantic are currently dominated by baby boomers. This post-war generation have changed our world and are still in charge of it. But have they changed it for the better or worse? When we come to take stock, when the next generation take power, what will the legacy of the baby boomers be?

Blogs can remind us about the plight of others. Since many Bolivian bloggers write from various locations around the world, they can also capture the experience of other Bolivians, who are trying to make it in a land far from home. Isabella Fuente recently returned from a trip to Bolivia, where she ran into many of her fellow countrymen and women in the Madrid, Spain airport. These Bolivian immigrants were not as fortunate and faced an uncertain future. She writes in her blog, Ergoth (ES):

British Airways passengers endured more flight cancellations on Wednesday as the airline struggled to reunite missing bags with their owners.

BA said it would not be until Friday that its full service could be resumed.

BA cancelled 46 flights on Wednesday - 35 at Heathrow and 11 at Gatwick. This took the airline's total cancellations since the anti-terror measures were introduced last week to more than 1,100.

Three long-haul and 32 short-haul flights at Heathrow were axed by BA on Wednesday as well as 11 domestic services at Gatwick. BA said it would be cancelling 19 short-haul flights out of Heathrow on Saturday.

Trend watchers are phasing out the word YUPPIE and have come up with the term GOSSIPS to replace that.

An iPod and two mobile phones are the latest must-have accessories along with sushi for the status-conscious British office worker, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

The poll, conducted for recruitment firm Office Angels, found 67 per cent of 1,500 respondents considered so-called “micro-gadgets” like Blackberrys, laptop memory sticks and small mobile phones to be the ultimate status symbols.

Almost anytime we write anything about eBay, we get comments from frustrated users of the site complaining about some aspect of the company's practices. But so strong is the company's monopoly that no competitor has been able to make a dent in its business. Even the regular fee increases that it foists on its users haven't done much to turn people away. It's not surprising then that a group of angry customers are planning a symbolic one-day boycott of the company.

In Europe, the main threat of job loss comes not from China or India, but Central and Eastern Europe, which has skilled but cheap labour - and most of it now within the European single market. in the past the main impact has been on manufacturing. But what about services? A new Deutsche Bank publication by Thomas Meyer, Offshoring to new shores: Nearshoring to Central and Eastern Europe (PDF), tells us quite a lot about this phenomenon.

China has a long history of being a bureaucratic society -- and it seems they're really learned how to apply that bureaucracy to the internet. They have tens of thousands of people monitoring the internet, for example. However, they're really going to ridiculous extremes in trying to slow down the production of non-approved content. A year ago, we mentioned that they wanted every website to register with the government. Earlier this year, they wanted everyone who ran an email server to register as well. The latest, then, really isn't too surprising. With the rapid rise in popularity of online video sites, the Chinese government is now planning to require every user-created video to first be "approved" before it can be posted online.

Judging by stories in the media, you might think that India dominates the market for call centers, and we're probably a little guilty of feeding this perception as well. But the actual numbers paint a different picture; the US still dominates this space, as 62% of all global call center jobs are in the country. India's share is just 5%. And while the percentage has declined in the US, the net number of jobs has actually risen; in the past four years, the economy has created 183,000 new positions.

Yes, we all realize that the internet and all that "long tail" stuff means that perhaps there really is a space for narrowly focused niche sites... but did anyone really expect an online dating site for orangutans? Turns out some zookeepers are setting up such a site with the hope of seeing if orangutans from different zoos are compatible with each other. The mating ritual will involve allowing the orangutans to give each other some food at the push of a button.

For past few weeks, we have devoted a lot of coverage to Mountain View-based GoogleFi, but now it is time to move on, and turn our attention to other Silicon Valley cities. Like san Jose.

This morning, I went down to San Jose to conduct a panel on Broadband Video at the Building Blocks/Digital Hollywood conference. After finishing the panel, I decided to duck out for a quick nicotine fix, and a cup of coffee. Sitting outside the Tech Museum Cafe in Downtown San Jose, I decided to fire up the browser and catch up with the world at large.

Google Talk is offering an update today, according to reports, that will enable users to easily transfer files, set presence with music, and send and receive voice mails. According to the article its also Google Talk’s first birthday. We haven’t checked out the upgrade because it doesn’t look like its available on the site as of yet. But we’re eagerly waiting to see it. Google’s blog says the upgrade has been available only to select Google users for a few weeks.

Yahoo Photos is now out of beta–so it seems that web 2.0 is really and truly coming to the masses. Yahoo is the biggest photo-sharing service out there, with 30 million unique monthly visitors worldwide, according to comScore*, and more than 2 billion hosted images, according to the company. And Yahoo Photos (not to be confused with Flickr), has an impressive array of features–drag and drop with lassoing, free unlimited storage, high-res downloads, all the social sharing stuff.

There is a website—one that is so stupid I feel embarrassed to even give it free publicity—called www.whotohate.com. The idea behind the site is you pay them five bucks, write in the name of someone you hate, and the website writes to the person telling them that there is someone who hates them.

I got one of those hate mails today, meaning that someone hates me enough to be willing to pay $5 to have me receive such an email.

It is an interesting product they are providing from an economic perspective. Does the person spending the $5 get utility from the act of declaring (albeit completely anonymously) their hatred? Or does the utility come from the (real or imagined) pain on the part of the recipient when he or she discovers the depth of another’s hatred?

All these, though very important, have had very little impact on the essential aspects of the average Indan's life. In terms of that thrust in public domain, in a country that was living on foreign aid of wheat not long ago, no one can even come close to the contributions of Dr MS Swaminathan. To quote another man, who is the best judge,

The green revolution has been a team effort and much of the credit for its spectacular development must go to Indian officials, Organisations, Scientists and farmers. However, to you, Dr. Swaminathan, a great deal of the credit must go for first recognising the potential value of the Mexican dwarfs. Had this not occurred, it is quite possible that there would not have been a green revolution in Asia

- Dr. N.E. Borlaug,

On the occasion of his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970

Food security was a real issue. My uncle still tells me about the abysmal yields in the 60s. Dr Swaminathan, was the single biggest factor in changing the lives of 70% of this nation. Almost at a personal level. That is something that makes the man, quite simply, the greatest Indian of the last 60 years. He is still involved with active research and hopes to bring a second revolution through sustainable agricultural practices.

Rory Carroll is leaving the country after four years as our man in Johannesburg. Here he tries to unpick why such a beautiful, complex, vibrant nation ended up leaving him cold

Glenn Reynolds puts up a post on the British terror plot and says :

"Some people have decided that the war on terror is passe. But although you may not be interested in terrorism, terrorism is still interested in you."

When Glenn Greenwald takes him to task (via) on making such an arbitrary statement without backing it up with evidence, Reynolds amends his post, adding a link to someone who, one would think, would presumably be supplying the evidence needed to back up Reynolds' statement by providing a list of people arranged in alphabetical order who've decided that terror is passe.

Google announced two new conquests on August 7th. It struck a deal with Viacom, an “old” media firm, under which it will syndicate video clips from Viacom brands such as MTV and Nickelodeon to other websites, and integrate advertisements into them. This makes Google the clear leader in the fledgling but promising market for web-video advertising. It also announced a deal with News Corporation, another media giant, under which it will provide all the search and text-advertising technology on News Corporation's websites, including MySpace, an enormously popular social-networking site.

There is another threat of terrorist attacks in two metro cities of India. The US Embassy in New Delhi has issued a warning for the Indian government that some of the members of Al-Oaeda are possibly planning to carry out bomb blasts in two big cities.