Countries that never seem to be in the news...

[Anton Gramscescu]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

My mistake on the Comoros, PT. I was thinking of Mauritius. Or do they have the same Dpgs of war issues?

Bahrain makes remarkably little news given its location.

Djibouti is pretty quiet, too. Mauritania barely gets a mention. And as long as their rulers aren;t engaging in cannibalism, the Central African Republic might as well not exist.

[Disco Child Ballads]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Madagascar never seems to get mentioned that much.

[Guest]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

We'd never hear from Belgium if it wasn't for the EEC.

[San Bernardhinault]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

I posit Suriname, of the Guyanese countries, as it doesn't even have rockets or cricket, and the best it can do is a 1990s dutch footballer.

Otherwise, Angola's been pretty quiet of late (Namibia, too, but only about 25 people live there so it's bound to be). In North Africa, I would have said Mauritania, but they had an aborted coup about three years ago. Mali's pretty unobtrusive.

Considering its location, I reckon Oman doesn't get much reporting.

There are lots of Pacific countries without much news. Micronesia or Vanuatu or Kiribati. But they have the "almost nobody lives there" excuse that Namibia has.

[matt j]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Cape Verde & Comoros & The Seychelles & Vanuatu

I think this would be a brilliant foursome to do a world trip to see.

[Ginger Yellow]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

"Considering its location, I reckon Oman doesn't get much reporting."

See also: Yemen.

[matt j]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Maldives. Make it a fivesome.

[San Bernardhinault]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Ginger Yellow wrote:

"Considering its location, I reckon Oman doesn't get much reporting."

See also: Yemen.

Yemen has occasional bouts of marxist civil war stuff and fighting in the mountains, doesn't it? And the odd US invasion force stopping off en route to Iraq?

[Reed John]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Former Sharks, Canes and I believe Canucks goalie Arturs Irbe is from Latvia. That's all I know about it.

I forgot about Niger's 15 minutes a few years ago. We also don't hear much about their famine/drought/flood (I forget which) these days.

[Alderman Barnes]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Togo

You never hear of anything happening in Togo. In fact, all I know about it is that Bachirou Salou, formerly of Mönchengladbach and Duisburg, comes from there.

[Incandenza]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

I would suggest for as big as it is, Mexico gets very little attention.

The LA Times over the last few years has really increased its coverage of Mexico (Hector Tobar, a very good reporter that writes about soccer sometimes, is based in Mexico City) and even a few weeks ago had a story about Tijuana as the lead on the front page, but it was about drug killings--the coverage in the Times on Mexico seems focused mainly on drug trade-related violence.

[WOM]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

We're Mexico'd up the yin-yang. Last year it was Canadian tourists being murdered there. This year, it's this dingbat Brenda Martin woman, who worked as a personal chef for a fraudster, being 'erroneously' jailed for two years.

[San Bernardhinault]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Togo is mentioned indirectly every now and again because Lome, of Lome Trade Convention fame, is the capital.

[Jon]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

"French Guyana"

French Guyana, as every schoolboy used to know, was the birthplace of Cyrille Regis.

[Wyatt Earp]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Aidan wrote:

We'd never hear from Belgium if it wasn't for the EEC.

As it is, you seem not to have heard of it since 1992.

[Wyatt Earp]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

In any case, there's also that whole "NATO headquarters" thing.

[Spearmint Rhino]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Matej wrote:

Maldives. Make it a fivesome.

I (and a couple of classmates) had to represent the Maldives in a mock United Nations conference at Westminster Methodist Central Hall in approx 1985. We felt really cheated: the juicy countries (USA, USSR) were represented by, like, Eton and Harrow, and we were stuck with an irrelevant little island. In order to have anything to say at all at the lectern for our two minutes in the spotlight, we had to cobble together some sort of protest against proposed nuclear testing in the Indian Ocean.

[Reed John]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

I did mock UN for one year at an event in NYC. Ours was a small club, but our teacher had enough clout to get us a small but interesting country. The US, USSR, etc, were big rich schools, but he managed to get us Poland. This was 1990, so it was an interesting year to be Poland.

My partner was the smartest kid I'd ever met (and fairly cocky, actually) and knew far more about just about everything than anyone else in the room. We were in the Security and Defense Committee (or whatever its called). We hung out with the other eastern block countries. USSR should have been telling us what to do, but deferred to the superior knowlege of my partner. So essentially Poland was setting security policy for the whole former Warsaw Pact. The propositions that came to a vote were so stupid that we decided to abstain out of disgust.

The Belarus delegate was hot and delegates from around the "world" were passing her notes throughout the proceedings.

After that year, our teacher realized that it was stupid so we, the International Relations club, decided it would be more useful to blow a week in New York touring the UN and various consulates instead of ever going back to the stupid Model UN conference. That was a fucking blast.

[Incandenza]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

I was never in with the MUN crowd in high school. They were kind of rivals to us in speech--seriously, there was no overlap. There was always a big MUN conference at UCLA, which was basically used by the MUN kids to try to get liquor and have parties in their hotel rooms. I guess the teacher accompanying them wasn't too strict. One year the conference was apparently in a hotel where a local LA sex expert was recording her X-rated public access TV show, and some of the kids stood in the back of the room and got an eye-full.

[Reed John]

Countries that never seem to be in the news...

Model UN was a farce. I joined because I was vaguely interested in international relations and because we got to go to New York.