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.

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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.

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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?

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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):

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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