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| ?A protest march from Lansdowne Road stadium to the nearby French embassy was planned for Saturday.Many in France have urged FIFA to sanction a replay, casting the incident as a national embarrassment.Francois Bayrou, leader of France's third biggest political party, Modem, said that the match should ideally be replayed, while government Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said she felt "very sad" that the national team had qualified for the World Cup by "cheating.""FIFA would do well to look at the rules because I think it would be good, in such circumstances, to decide maybe to replay the match," Lagarde said on French radio. "Firstly, we should respect the referee. Secondly we respect the rules."But if the rules are bad, they have to be challenged."___AP Sports Writer Samuel Petrequin in Paris and Associated Press Writer Shawn Pogatchnik in Dublin contributed to this report. The news came from South Africa. It was about an expensive new soccer stadium that had been built in a city where the drinking water is often dirty and many people have neither electric lights nor toilets. It was an outsized example of what keeps happening with government spending in so much of the world and how it be thatdecade after decade more than one billion people around the world struggle along without a reliable supply of clean drinking water.They are routinely sick and, each year, about two million die -- mostly children. They shouldn't be dying. We know how to provide clean water and the cost is not overwhelming. But we're not making much progress.The barriers seem to involve human nature, politics and, often, good intentions. Instead of putting in wells and pumps and pipelines to get clean water to everyone, government officials put up hospitals and schools and sport facilities. Or they put their money into joint projects with businesses that promise to help the economy, and often do. Or they just squander the money, sometimes on themselves.Compared with building hospitals and schools and even soccer stadiums, water projects are not that interesting. But clean drinking water underpins cheap fifa coins everything. More than half the people in hospitals in developing countries are there because they drank foul water. School attendance is much lower than it might be because children get sick from the only water available to them and can't go to classes. The United Nations, in its latest global report on water, said that work in this area "has been plagued by lack of political support, poor governance, under-resourcing and under-investment." The U.N. estimated that $148 billion was needed for water projects over the next 20 years, but that somewhere between $33 billion and $81.5 billion might be available.The story from South Africa involved much more money than is often in play. |
The barriers seem to involve human nature
