I am not feeling well this weekend ... all achy with a thumping head and a dodgy stomach ... and perhaps that is why all the news I'm coming across is annoying the dooky out of me, or maybe it's just that we're in a dooky news phase. Either way, consider yourself warned before taking the time to read: you will come to the end of today's blog either annoyed with me, or annoyed with me ... if you get my meaning.

Few global circumstances are as guaranteed to raise my hackles as frustratingly repeatedly than news out of Darfur. It doesn't change. Not even the numbers change, as it seems those counting refugees and dead got tired of the practice a couple of years ago so just keep regurgitating the same ones over and over.

This story, at least begins with that acknowledgment:

Since 2003, Janjaweed bandits have been preying on the women of Darfur. Nobody knows how many they have raped, nobody knows how many pregnancies have resulted from these attacks, or how many babies have been killed by their ‘disgraced’ mothers.

A story of rape in the name of racial cleansing that's been going on for a very long time, there is no hope presented alongside the information that tells us that a Sudanese child's ethnic identity is determined by the father. How could there be when the rape itself, no matter how brutal, how young the victim, how prolific the perpetrator, is considered a good deed?

Babies conceived though such horrid physical joinings are legion, those that live. Thousands scramble daily for food, for cooking fuel, for water for those babies with mothers that overcome hatred for the men who started them. Those that don't let their babies die.

Those babies that make it through childhood have a life expectancy of 49.11 years.

Flip a page, and find this story in the NY Times about "baby-starved" Germany where they have begun paying people to have babies.

Worried about the "graying" of the population, Germany is now starting to realize the long-term implications of rising life expectancies and falling birth rates ... "exponential negative growth" ... a present-day reality a UN report released earlier this year called “a process without parallel in the history of humanity” as it predicted that by 2047 there will be more people over 60 than under 15.

Okay ... maybe it is because I'm feeling poorly today, but I can't seem to get my aching head around the fact that these completely disparate accounts of life take place in the world we live in today. Not only is it the same world at the same time that has Germany worrying about the impact of over-60s while people in Sudan can't expect to live to see 50, and Germans fret over a dearth of new little Germans while Sudanese are being raped into massive reproduction, these two places are only 23 miles more distant from each other than Seattle is from Miami.

How can this be? Really. How can this be?