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I am very aware that there are many of you who have friends and loved ones in the areas affected by this storm who have been displaced or who have not yet been accounted for.

It is a quiet and peaceful place - and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest.

No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

Los Angeles, the sun shines a lot, and it's blue, and there's palm trees; it's a bit like Sydney, I guess, but the underbelly is a vicious, mean, cruel, awful place.

I've been at the very bottom of poverty, and it's not so bad. It's even kind of interesting. You can live there with a certain amount of style.

One of the cries from the people was, don't forget us. They have a long road ahead of them. Operation Blessing has found those little fishing towns. They will not be getting what other towns are getting from the government.

I don't think estates are grim places.

There are more than 300,000 families in the Gulf region that lost their homes and are waiting for peace of mind. The hurricane exposed the sad reality of poverty in America. We saw, in all its horrific detail, the vulnerabilities of living in inadequate housing and the heartbreak of losing one's home.

What happens in one region affects people across the world.

I grew up in Colombo but was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the countryside as well. Although there was considerable turbulence, even in the 1950s, it did not throw a shadow on my consciousness.