Tourism Somali style, alternative football championship, hard times for Indonesia's rice farmers...

With reports that an Islamic militia has taken Somalia's capital, defeating warlords that have run the city for 15 years, I do what I usually when a conflict flares up somewhere around the world, and rush to online travel website Trip Advisor to see how much a trip to that particular hotspot would cost me (we all have our strange little habits, I know). When I checked this morning, Safari Hotel was the only listing for a hotel in Mogadishu, offering rooms at $30 a night.

Alongside, I find a discussion about the pros and cons of visiting Mogadishu. While a few of the reviews are downright negative, most are more nuanced. For example: "Somalia is like a paradise, it has nice weather every day, it also has fresh food unlike the western food that is packed in a pack or in a tin."

But most of all what got me was the hopeful tone of some the posts. As one said, "Let's be honest here, Somalia is not safe to holiday in just yet. But I pray to my alaah every day to make my motherland a peaceful place to live once again so we could all go back."

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While aid is flowing to tens of thousands of survivors of Indonesia's earthquake, the U.N.'s food agency warns that the country's agricultural sector has been devastated, leaving more than half of the impacted region's farmers without the money to plant rice this month.

Around 50,600 families depend on agriculture in Central Java's Bantul district, and nearly two-thirds have lost either their homes or had them severely damaged, Indonesia's national news service ANTARA says.

The island of Java is one of Indonesia's rice bowls and aid workers say times could get very tough if farmers aren't able to plant rice to plant or feed themselves in the coming months.

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We're thinking of launching our own international soccer team here at AlertNet. Seems that if we form a breakaway regions we can compete in the FIFI Wild Cup, an alternative to the Federation of International Football Association (FIFA) World Cup. As Spiegel Online reports, competitors in the Federation of International Football Nations tournament are from regions not recognised as independent countries by the United Nations - Gibraltar, Tibet and Northern Cyprus. It also includes Greenland, which can't stage a FIFA-sanctioned event because it doesn't have any grass. The host was the Republic of St. Pauli (isn't this a beer?!), which seceded from Germany to host the cup.

This all sounds grand, but what I'd like to see is a FIFI world cup that represents more breakaway regions, like Somaliland and Western Sahara.

F. Brinley Bruton
AlertNet journalist