Are we onto World War Three or even Four? House swapping in Iraq, Nepal's monarchy gets a dose of gender equality, and China siphons off Tibetan water...

What do world wars look like nowadays?

Sifting through the daily flow of news on various conflicts around the world is a fairly depressing business. Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon - the list goes on ... and it's getting long and violent enough to make some people think we're embroiled in the start of a new world war.

But who gets to decide? What is a world war? And if this is one, is it number three or four? You'd be forgiven for feeling a little confused.

When war was about clearly defined enemies, armies, trenches, tank battles and geographical boundaries, things seemed easier to grasp. Now some are saying World War Four has begun before many had even realised World War Three was over.

The Toronto Star newspaper takes an insightful look at the controversy surrounding world wars and what constitutes one. It argues that, due to the changing nature of warfare - which is becoming more high-tech, fluid and open-ended - the next world war is unlikely to be wearing the T-shirt. It's more likely to be sporting a cunning disguise.

Some military strategists like to think of the Cold War between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union in the second half of the twentieth century as World War Three. While the ideological standoff may not have ended in a military face-off between the two superpowers, it fuelled a huge nuclear build-up and led to many proxy wars in Africa, as both sides channelled money and arms to sympathetic strongmen.

Now, it seems U.S. efforts to deal with the perceived threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism are being interpreted in some quarters as world war number four.

"This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars One and Two did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War," former CIA director James Woolsey is quoted as saying in the Toronto Star.

Others think wars have changed and can no longer be looked at through the traditional 'world war' lens. "It's much less important what you call these wars than how you fight them," Bruce Berkowitz, a research fellow at Stanford University tells the paper. "The wars we're preparing for and fighting now are qualitatively different."

Another argument against rushing to label the globe's current conflicts as a world war is that there are less of them than in the past. The Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia found that by 2003 there were 40 percent fewer wars than in 1992, and those that killed more than 1,000 people in battle dropped by 80 percent.

The trouble with these kind of stats is that everyone measures wars differently. What counts as a war for one research institute doesn't for another, and they seem to pick different years as a basis for a meaningful comparison.

The media may also be complicating the picture. Switch on any 24-hour news channel and it certainly feels like there are a lot of conflicts in the world, irrespective of whether they can all huddle under a 'world war' umbrella.

Most news editors will tell you peace is pretty boring from a news perspective. So we'd better get used to the idea that wars are here to stay on our TV screens.

The trouble is that, when it comes to making sense of them, or even knowing what to call them, blanket coverage doesn't seem to help all that much - not least because some of the world's wars are deemed to be much more worthy of media attention than others...

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House swapping in Iraq

The question of whether the conflict in Iraq is part of a wider world war probably doesn't seem so pressing to the growing ranks of Iraqis forced to leave their homes by raging sectarian violence. On Monday, the migration ministry said the number of refugees in Iraq had swelled by 20,000 in the last 10 days alone.

Overall, the official figure for those displaced since the February 22 bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra sparked new tensions between Shia and minority Sunni groups is 182,154. But the actual number is likely to be higher as the government counts people who request aid but not those who leave the country or find shelter with relatives.

Among families remaining in cities, many are moving to neighbourhoods where their sect is in the majority - and some are managing to avoid homelessness by swapping houses with friends from another sect, Associated Press reports.

"Friends from different sects say 'Let's trade houses, then we'll move back when things settle down'," the commander of Iraqi forces in the religiously mixed city of Nasser Wa Salaam told AP.

The general also noted that sectarian splits are "something new" for his generation and "a bit of a shocking situation". "For people of my age, we never had this. We never knew what sect we were. We interacted with each other, intermarried." For younger Iraqis, that looks increasingly difficult.

Megan Rowling
AlertNet journalist

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Could Nepal one day see a Queen?

Surprise news from Nepal where plans are afoot to allow women on the throne.

The radical move comes amid growing debate about the future of Nepal's monarchy, which has hardly covered itself in glory in recent years.

At the moment only a male can ascend the throne and the king has sole authority to name his successor. But the government has finalised draft legislation that would make the monarch's first child automatic heir to the throne, regardless of their sex.

Only a few years ago this would have been unthinkable in a country which has traditionally seen the king as a reincarnation of the Hindu god, Vishnu.

But Nepal's royal family has recently been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

In 2001, Crown Prince Dipendra killed his father, King Birendra, his mother and other royal family members in a drunken rage before shooting himself in the head.

Birendra's brother Gyanendra, who escaped the palace massacre, succeeded to the throne, but became deeply unpopular after sacking the government and taking absolute power in early 2005.

He was forced to restore democracy in April this year after weeks of massive protests.

Parliament has now taken away his control over the army, stripped him of his legislative roles and turned the world's only Hindu kingdom into a secular state.

If the plan to allow a woman on the throne becomes law, Nepal's royal family would be further ahead in the gender equality stakes than monarchies like Britain's where a daughter only becomes queen if there's no direct male descendent.

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China's next big engineering feat?

China is preparing a controversial scheme to channel water from Tibet to the parched Yellow River in the country's west.

Officials say the 300 km (190 mile) relay of tunnels is a vital link in a vast system of projects to move water from relatively abundant rivers in the south to the increasingly dry north and northwest.

Northern China has been vulnerable to drought in recent decades, and underground water tables have been rapidly depleting. Two-thirds of China's cities - and there about 600 of them - suffer water shortages.

The ambitious plan, which would cost more than $37 billion at today's prices, will involve drilling tunnels through mountains to siphon off water cascading from the Tibetan highlands.

But environmentalists and advocates of Tibetan autonomy say the project threatens the region's ecology and culture.

"It epitomises this assumption that Tibet is the water tower of Asia," says Tashi Tsering, a Tibetan expert on the region's resources at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

"Tibet's water availability is actually quite limited and these rivers depend on glaciers that are receding."

Emma Batha
AlertNet journalist