The boat capsized in Indonesian waters and the rescue efforts are being coordinated by Indonesia, which is a common stagingpoint for refugees seeking to reach Australia.
The smuggling business that has thrived for decades between Dubai and Iran will graduate to Dubai becoming the full-blown stagingpoint for all parties involved in Iran's economic rehabilitation.
Together with a newly created economic zone at Bandar Abbas, they are almost on top of the busy shipping lanes through which much of the world's oil passes and offer a logical staging-point for the trade from landlocked Central Asia to the sea.
The Olympics have probably gone past the point of no return, but staging another sporting jamboree so soon, when money is so tight, may look like a luxury too far.
But the Dow industrials stormed back from a more than 82-point drop to trade firmly in the black, staging their biggest swing from negative to positive territory in nearly six months.
No Spanish government would agree to abandon its claim to Gibraltar: from that point of view, a deal with Britain would be merely a staging-post on the road to outright sovereignty.