Two quick Ghana stories (because, after all, my heart is in Accra…)

The New York Times has a wonderful story today titled “Studying Albany, and Giggling Politely”. A small group of Ghanaian parlimentarians was invited to Albany by USAID and the State University of New York to get a “firsthand look at American democracy in action” and, specifically, to understand how the budget process works in an American state.

Anyone who knows New York State politics is now laughing. Loudly. New York State’s budget has been late 20 years in a row. And the process that determines this budget appears to involve locking three extremely powerful, grumpy men in a room until they settle their differences. As the visiting parlimentarians observed, it’s a bit opaque:

“Here [in Ghana] we have to ask a lot of questions,” said Mr. Agyepong, a visitng parlimentarian “You [legislators in New York] just really don’t know how each allocation is spent. That is quite bleak.” (The additions in brackets are mine…)

It’s interesting to think what New York legislators could learn from going to Accra for a week or so and studying the national political process. One lesson would be the importance of being deeply informed on a wide range of issues so your views can survive public scrutiny - in Accra, several talk radio stations air daily call-in shows with ministers and parliamentarians. Government leaders routinely spend hours of their day answering questions on the air from callers around the country. It would be interesting to see whether New York State legislators could survive this sort of questioning, especially given how little decisionmaking power they wield.

BBC has a charming story titled Why Being Boring is Good for Ghana. The gist of the story - the danger of interviewing President Kufuor is that you’ll spend your time talking about HIPC and VAT taxes, rather than about political conflict. In a cheeky moment, the correspondent asked Kufuor if he wasn’t a bit, well, boring. The President’s response:

“If boredom gives us peace and stability for people to go about their normal businesses and live in dignity,” he said, “then I would say let’s have more boredom.”

The BBC is reporting a clash between the armies of Sudan and Chad in the Darfur region of Sudan. According to BBC, Janjawid militias crossed into Darfur to attack refugees from Darfur who had fled to camps in Chad. The Chadian army, defending the camps, attacked the militias and chased them back across the border. Crossing the border, the Chadian soldiers found themselves fighting Sudanese army troops who were defending the border.

The incident appears to confirm the suspicions of independent observers who say the Sudanese military has done little to disarm the militias and may be providing active support for their movements.

It’s hard to get a clear picture of the current situation in Darfur. Some of this is the result of typical media deployment - Sudan, like most African countries, generally gets very little mainstream media attention. But part of the problem is the Sudanese government’s crackdown on independent journalism in the region. The International Federation of Journalists reports that Khartoum is refusing to issue visas and travel permits to allow journalists to report on Darfur. Journalists already in the country are facing censorship and harrasment - the bureau chief for Al-Jazeera was imprisoned for two weeks for “disseminating false news” - his case is now on appeal.

In a bit of good news, it appears that Andrew Natsios’s press conference did its job - Khartoum has said that the 28-member USAID team will be issued visas, but not until the UN assessment team finishes its work.

Sorry folks - hadn’t meant for the blog to become All Sudan, All the Time, but the situation is changing very quickly, is badly under-reported and is critically important…

Andrew Natsios, Administrator of the US Agency for International Development, the US’s highest ranking aid official, gave an amazingly frank press conference yesterday regarding the situation in Darfur, Sudan - the transcript is available here.

Natsios’s reason for the press conference was simple: USAID and others have 80,000 tons of food ready to distribute to the 900,000 refugees internally displaced within Darfur. The food, medical supplies and tents need to get to refugees in the next couple of weeks, because the rainy season is coming. The spring rains will make roads impassible and make aid delivery impossible. Natsios says teams are ready to go and could be in place in a couple of days.

There’s one problem: the Sudanese government won’t issue visas. Natsios is demanding that they issue visas and travel permits that allow a team of 28 aid workers to travel from Khartoum to Darfur. His press conference appeared to an attempt to force the Khartoum government to choose between issuing the visas or be seen as blocking critically needed aid.

Natsios’s statements on Darfur appear to offer US government confirmation for a number of statements made by organizations like Human Rights Watch. Asked whether he believed that the Sudanese government was arming the Janjawid, Natsios responded:

“I have had members of the Sudanese Government tell me that they armed - this was last fall - they armed the Jingaweit militia. They told me that. They said there were hawks in the administration that supported that and they did it last year.”

Asked whether the situation in Darfur represented a genocide, Natsios gave an answer that, for a US government official, was surprisingly direct:

“This is clearly an ethnic cleansing campaign. Genocide has a particular meaning, which is that you are out to exterminate an entire population because of their religion or their race or their ethnic group. It does not appear to us right now that that term is appropriate. However, the atrocities that have been committed — the mass rape, systematic rape of women, many of whom have been branded, according to the Human Rights Watch report are branded after they’re raped — and this is done in a systematic basis. This is not soldiers out of control. So by the razing of villages, the creating of a large displaced population and the attacks on women, it is — the atrocities are very real.”

He was very careful about terming the situation a genocide, a term which would obligate the US to a particular course of action as a signatory to the UN genocide convention:

“The United Nations — and I’m only quoting their reports — Mukesh Kapila talked about pre-genocide conditions. Kofi Annan used the same apocalyptic language in the statement he made on the 10th anniversary. I only refer you to their comments.”

Jim Moore has been blogging extensively about Sudan in recent posts. He’s been encouraging fellow bloggers to link to Passion of the Present, a site that draws parallels between the suffering depicted in “The Passion of the Christ” and the suffering people in Sudan are currently facing. The site also offers links to the major relief organizations focused on Sudan and to information on House and Senate resolutions condemning the Sudanese government’s lack of cooperation regarding the Darfur situation.

Wired News has an encouraging story which introduces a possible solution to malaria in sub-Saharan Africa - nuke the mosquitos.

It’s not quite as wacky as it sounds. The IAEA - yep, the guys responsible for monitoring nuclear programs in Iraq and Iran - evidently have entomology labs where they’re breeding sterile male mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are irradiated - enough to sterilize, but not enough to kill - and then released by airplane into mosquito-infested areas. The sterile males compete with breeding males to fertilize females. Since females mate only once in their two-week lives, every female a sterile male reaches is one that won’t produce offspring.

And it works. The IAEA used this technique to eliminate tsetse flies - and the sleeping sickness they carry - from Zanzibar. It requires a lot of sterile mosquitoes - 10 to 50 times as many as fertile, wild males. Previously, Sterile Insect Technique was used to eliminate New World Screwworm in North Africa. (I don’t know if NWS was a particularly nasty insect, or whether people just found the name so unpleasant that they worked to eradicate the buggers…)

Elimination of malaria from sub-Saharan Africa would have amazing economic and development consequences. An African child dies of malaria every 20 seconds. Economist Jeffery Sachs estimates that malaria retards economic growth in African nations by 1.3% annually, due to cost of treatment and lost productivity. Given that 90% of malaria cases annually are in sub-Saharan Africa, it’s worth asking whether malaria has been a major contributor to Africa’s economic stagnation.

Mosquito sterilization isn’t the only approach to eliminating malaria. Another possible strategy involves the reintroduction of DDT. Up until the early 1960s, DDT was viewed as a miracle chemical, used in enormous quantities (80 million kilograms in 1962!), especially by American cotton farmers. In 1962, Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring”, an emphatic condemnation of the impact of chemicals on the environment. She argued that DDT accumulated in the environment, leading to the weakening of eggshells in quail and, possibly, to carcinogenic effects in humans. (Many now argue that her science was shaky, at best, notably Junkscience.com, which condemns her work in excruciating detail.) Carson’s advocacy led to an EPA ban on the chemical in 1972.

As a result, DDT finds itself in funder limbo - the US generally won’t fund programs that use DDT for malaria control as they’re afraid of the question: “If it’s not safe for Americans, why are we spraying it on Africans?” (South Africa doesn’t share this concern, and has had great success, spraying houses in malarial areas once a year - in some villages, annual malaria cases have gone from thousands a year to single digits.) But concerns over the environmental impact of DDT suggest that USAID and WHO will continue to discourage countries from using it.

Some Africans are understandably resentful of the idea that environmental concerns outweigh concerns about human life. In a moving essay, Ugandan scholar Semakula Kiwanuka observes:

Developed countries and Western environmentalists who today lead the crusade against the use of DDT, cannot escape the accusation of criminal callousness about poor helpless peoples in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. They used DDT to eliminate Malaria in their own countries including the USA. They used DDT to eliminate Malaria in Southern Europe. Now that they are free from the deadly scourge, they care more about the birds than about African children.

Maybe sterilizing mosquitoes with radiation will get us out of this conundrum… but don’t bet on it. The IAEA acknowledges that their sterilization program has a high risk of failure. Unfortunately, efforts to balance humanitarian and environmental concerns likely do, too.

BBC reports that the UN will be allowed to send an investigative mission into Darfur “within days”. The mission has been postponed twice, as the Khartoum government has cited concerns over security. BBC now lists the death count on the conflict as 10,000, with over a million internally displaced persons and at least 100,000 refugees fleeing across the border into Chad.

The Addis Tribune is reporting that the African Union is sending monitors to Darfur to monitor the ceasefire. Military officers from Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Namibia are slated to be deployed “as soon as possible”; the US has offered “unspecified ‘logistical support’”.

Nairobi’s The East African observes that the “ceasefire” in Darfur is likely to give the Bush administration some breathing room just as the administration was starting to receive some pressure to investigate the situation in Darfur and determine whether or not it constituted genocide. IRIN reminds us that the ceasefire doesn’t guarantee a cessation of fighting, as the Janjawid militias aren’t signatories to the ceasefire. (Indeed, the Khartoum government doesn’t acknowledge the Janjawid, referring to incidents of “banditry”, rather than to an organized campaign to eliminate ethnic groups.) A day after the ceasefire was declared, a Janjawid group attacked a refugee camp in southern Darfur.

Reporters sans Frontieres is calling for the release of Islam Salih, Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief for Sudan, imprisoned on April 10th for “reporting false news”. Salih’s arrest is part of a news blackout the Khartoum authorities are attempting to impose on Darfur.

The Boston Globe is running a Reuters article regarding one of the most horrific aspects of the violence in Darfur - the gang rape of young girls. Nick Kristoff writes about rape as a tool of war in his powerful NYT op-ed - he notes that families in Darfur face a terrible decision in choosing who goes to the well for water - men or boys who are shot by the Janjawid, or women or girls, who are raped by them.

For those following the events in Sudan, All Africa is an invaluable resource - their Sudan newswire gives an overview of some of the major stories coming out of the country. It’s also available as an RSS feed.

Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Daily News offers her perspective on the situation in Darfur, Sudan:

Unfortunately h2odev.law.harvard.edu, the machine that runs my media research scripts, was down for over a week - as a result, I’m very far behind on my research comparing international news in the blogosphere to news in the mainstream American media. I hope to have some solid results to post early next week. In the meantime, the scripts referenced in this post should be working, with the caveat that they have very little data to reference.

Research I’m not really ready to share yet… but hey, it’s Bloggercon and I’ve got to have something to show off…

For almost a year, I’ve been tracking the appearance of a set of keywords on some major media websites: BBC, CNN, Google News, etc. The keywords try (to the best of their little boolean abilities) to find international news stories that mention each of 187 countries. I’ve been using this to build maps of media attention, which you can find on my research site.

With the help of the good folks at Intelliseek, I’ve been polling the Blogpulse engine for the last week or so to build maps of international reporting in blogspace. Here’s today’s map:

Countries in red are getting a lot of mentions in the blogosphere - the darkest red represents countries that have 3.2% or more of the international news stories I’m retrieving. Blue countries are getting few mentions, down to the deep blue ones, which are generally seeing single mentions. This map measures the last two weeks as spidered by Blogpulse - I’m also running scripts on 90-day data sets - results of both are available online here and here.

The main reason I started building these maps was to test whether the blogosphere is more or less interested news from developing nations than the mainstream media. It’s a question I don’t have an answer to, but I’m starting to have some theories.

Much of the work I’ve done on attention compares actual distribution of stories to models which posit a relationship between distribution and an outside factor, like national GDP, population, surface area, etc. My research suggests that story distribution, on most media I’ve studied, is tightly correlated to GDP and loosely, if at all, correlated to national population. The result - rich, small nations get covered a lot more frequently than big, poor nations.

The blogpulse data I’ve got so far seems to fit a similar pattern - the data fits a GDP model pretty tightly (R^2=0.68 for the 90-day blogpulse data, as compared to an 0.70 fit for Google News data.) It fits a population model even less tightly than mainstream media (R^2=0.43 versus 0.48).

I’ve also built a tool that allows me to compare two media sources on a given day. (There’s a web interface to this tool - it’s an alpha, so don’t be surprised if it breaks often and in ugly ways.)

Here’s a map of the last two weeks of blogpulse, versus two weeks of Google news.

Countries in red were better represented in the blogosphere than in Google news; in blue, were less well represented. The maps suggests that, for the most part, folks in the blogosphere talk about Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and parts of Latin America less than the media sources covered by Google News do.

I don’t claim to fully understand the data yet. I see some reasons for optimism, though - while Africa is, for the most part, a sea of blue, there are about three times as many mentions of Rwanda in the blogosphere, proportionately, as in Google News. One theory suggests that folks in the blogosphere may pick up and amplify timely conversations about the developing world - Rwanda has been getting lots of press attention because of the 10th anniversary of the genocide, and these conversations have extended into the world of blogs. Is it possible that when the mainstream media focuses on a developing nation in a big way that the blogosphere picks up the ball? I’ll be trying to answer that question by watching this sort of data closely.

Wired reports that a growing number of people are mistaking stories in The Onion for “real news” and reacting with predictable outrage, protest, etc.

Of course, it’s hard to know The Onion’s not reporting the “news” when they’re so often spot on, as with their recent Zambian coverage:

(From this week’s news in brief.)

Commenting on the rash of Onion outrage in the Wired article, Chris Taylor, the San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine, offers good advice for all media consumers: “Average readers do themselves no disservice if they’re skeptical about every news story they read,” he says, “fake or not.”