Yesterday, Al-Jazeera English announced that it would be closing its bureau in Beijing after the Chinese government refused to renew the press credentials and visa of its China correspondent, Melissa Chan. Chan, based in Beijing since 2007, has an excellent reputation as a journalist, reporting hard-hitting stories on black jails, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and Chinese land grabs. (Disclosure: I worked with Chan on the board of the Foreign Correspondent's Club of China and consider her a friend.)

Chan's expulsion is believed to be the first for a foreign journalist based in China since the 1998 deportation of a Japanese journalist; writing in the New Yorker, Evan Osnos described it as the revival of "a Soviet-era strategy that will undermine [China's] own efforts to project soft power," and a clear step backwards for Beijing.

That it is, no doubt. But Chan also fits into the troubling pattern of the foreigners Beijing has targeted over the last decade: those the Chinese government views of having less protection because of their ethnicity and nationality; often with Chinese backgrounds. It appears that someone in the Chinese government wanted to give a warning to journalists without causing an international incident; Chan, a Chinese-American working for a Qatari-based television station, seemed to be an appropriate target. The thinking seems to be that a foreign government will more loudly protest the mistreatment of a citizen who is both born and raised in its own country and working for a domestic company.

It's not just journalists who are affected. In December 2009, China executed Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen accused of smuggling eight pounds of heroin into China. The execution of Shaikh, the first for a European in China in 50 years and despite protests from the British government, came as China wanted to appear tough against crime; Shaikh also happened to have been born in Pakistan.

In 2010 the Chinese government sentenced Stern Hu, a Chinese-born Australian who formerly ran Rio Tinto's iron ore operations in China, to 10 years in prison for accepting bribes and stealing trade secrets, in a case widely viewed as political; his former boss said Hu had been "thrown to the wolves." Xue Feng, a Chinese-born American citizen was sentenced to eight years in prison in July 2010 under China's menacingly vague state secrets laws for purchasing an oil database.

Following the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, a handful of journalists, including Americans working for American papers and Brits working for British papers, were expelled. British-born Andrew Higgins was expelled from China in 1991 while working for London's Independent newspaper for supposedly possessing confidential information. Some journalists expelled around that time were let back in, like John Pomfret, a former Washington Post bureau chief, kicked out in 1989 for what authorities called "stealing state secrets and violating martial law provisions" and what he called writing "about Tiananmen Square." Unlike Pomfret, Higgins, who now works for the Post, has not been given the standard long-term visa to report in China, and instead covers the region from Hong Kong.

The pattern seems to be that powerful countries like the United States will be less likely to protest the mistreatment of an American working for a non-American company, or a foreigner working for an American organization, when it becomes a more complicated procedure of coordinating responses between embassies and ministries. Executives and reporters with Chinese backgrounds have many advantages operating in China. Besides language skills and local networks, they can blend in a country where different color skin clearly identifies one as an outsider. Anecdotally speaking, they seem to be given less leniency when they don't follow China's laws; like they're supposed to "know better." 

Many foreign news bureaus are hosted in two diplomatic compounds in the Jianguomen neighborhood. As a reporter based out of the compound for two years, I entered freely, while foreign reporters who looked Chinese (and, of course, those that were Chinese),  often had to show their IDs to get in. Injustice in China affects more than just the locals.   

Gallup and the Meridian International Center released their annual U.S. global leadership Report today. (You can find the full version here and highlights here.)

The big takeaway is that global approval of U.S. leadership in 2011 continued its slow slide since the excitement of Barack Obama's election -- though the country is still much more popular than it was in the last years of the Bush administration:

While some of luster of the Obama administration does seem to be wearing off, what's interesting is that it's not in the countries you might think, given the rhetoric of the presidential election. The "allies" that most frequently come up in Republican rhetoric still pretty much like us. Even after a contentious year in mideast diplomacy, approval for U.S. leadership in Israel is basically unchanged at 55 percent. In Britain, despite various perceived snubs, approval of U.S. leadership improved by 13 points.  As for the countries that Obama has supposedly thrown under the bus as part of the Russia reset, Georgia and Poland both showed slight improvements.

The fall in support was actually driven by Africa, where approval fell by 10 percent last year but is still quite high at 74 percent, Latin America, where it fell by 6 percent, and European countries like France, Germany, Spain and Sweden, all of which posted double-digit declines in U.S. support. If, as Mitt Romney charges, “This president takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe," they don't seem very appreciative of it. I would guess that the culprit in Latin America is the perceived lack of change in U.S. policies on trade, immigration, and drugs under Obama. Africans might be upset that despite his Kenyan roots, the president hasn't made the region much of a priority in his foreign policy.

Gallup's data from the Middle East and North Africa is a little spotty, but there doesn't seem to have been that much of a change in approval following the Arab Spring -- the U.S. remains pretty unpopular.   

The country with the biggest drop popularity was Liberia, where approval of the U.S. when down 25 points. Perhaps non-Ellen Johnson Sirleaf supporting Liberians were unhappy with Washington's tacit endorsement of the Nobel Prize winner in last year's election? That doesn't really seem like a big enough factor to explain that big a drop, so I'm guessing this was something a fluke.

Belgium saw the biggest improvement from 29 percent to 45 percent. Anyone have any guesses on how America got out of the Belgian dog house?

Writing last year on the peer-to-peer digital currency Bitcoin, I noted that while "the disruptive power of Bitcoin on banks and central governments has surely been overstated, but these institutions might be better served to take its emergence as a warning rather than a reassurance: They may not be the only game in town forever."

It seems that at least one country is taking the Bitcoin phenomenon seriously: Canada. The Canadian mint is launching research and development on its own "virtual currency" with the tasty-sounding name MintChip. Jesse Brown of MacLeans explains: 

Like BitCoin, it’s as anonymous as cash, leaving no electronic record of who paid what to who.  Unlike BitCoin, it’s backed by a central authority, which is bad news for the anarcho-crypto Illuminati-fearing libertarian crowd, but good news for people who actually use it. Will it be hacked? Probably. But a currency guaranteed by a wealthy and stable mint can sustain a certain amount of fraud without collapsing.  The Royal Canadian Mint has launched an app challenge to kickstart MintChip. 

I suspect that a lot of potential users -- not just "the anarcho-crypto Illuminati-fearing libertarian crowd" -- are going to wonder just how anonymous a government-backed electronic payment method will be. I'd imagine there will be at least some safeguards to prevent the underground drug markets that have given Bitcoin a bad name. 

Whatever happens, it should be an interesting experiment to watch. This is been a month of currency innovation for Canada, which announced it was eliminating the penny last week. It still has a ways to go to catch up with increasingly-cashless Sweden though.

Update: I neglected to mention the glow-in-the-dark dinosaur coin. The hits just keep coming from those wild and crazy guys at the Canadian Mint. 

There's still a lot of confusion surrounding the death of Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika from a heart attack yesterday, but from what Reuters is reporting, it seems that his country's shoddy infrastructure and medical system may have played a role:

The 78-year-old was rushed to hospital in Lilongwe on Thursday after collapsing but was dead on arrival, the sources said. State media said he had been flown to South Africa for treatment although his immediate whereabouts remained unclear.

Medical sources said the former World Bank economist had been flown out because a power and energy crisis in the nation of 13 million was so severe the Lilongwe state hospital would have been unable to carry out a proper autopsy or even keep his body refrigerated.

Many Malawians blamed Mutharika personally for the economic woes, which stemmed ultimately from a diplomatic spat with former colonial power Britain a year ago.

"We know he is dead and unfortunately he died at a local, poor hospital which he never cared about - no drugs, no power," said Chimwemwe Phiri, a Lilongwe businessman waiting in a snaking line of cars for fuel at a petrol station.

It's impossible to say if Mutharika would be alive today if he could have made it to a properly supplied hospital, but as BBC Kampala correspondent Joshua Mmali put it on Twitter last night, "Lessons outta #Malawi 4 #AfricanPresidents: You can't go to the UK or Germany to treat a heart attack. Improve your health systems"

It has indeed become a depressingly common occurence for leaders to head abroad for major medical treatment -- an option Mutharika didn't have. In recent years, we've seen Venezuela's Hugo Chavez travel to Cuba for cancer treatment, Saudi King Abdullah come to New York for tests, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh travel to Saudi Arabia to treat injuries sustained in an attack, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari go to Dubai for undisclosed medical treatment, and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani head to Jordan for treatment of exhaustion and dehydration. There are plenty of other examples from Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to New Guinea Prime Minister Michael Somare.

It's always a bit surprising that this isn't more politically embarrassing. If there isn't even one hospital in a leader's country where he feels confortable getting treated -- presumably by that country's best doctors and the most advanced equipment available -- that would seem to be a pretty damning indictment of his leadership. 

The New York Times reports on the ceasefire in Northern Mali:

France on Thursday ruled out a “military solution” in its former colony of Mali to counter rebels in the north, who announced that they had achieved their territorial objectives and sought outside backing for a secessionist state they call Azawad. 

The declaration by the main Tuareg rebel group on their Web site came after other Islamic rebel fighters, who helped seized the ancient city of Timbuktu over the weekend, were quoted by local officials as saying they planned to impose Islamic law there.  [...]

In their statement, the rebel Tuareg fighters, calling themselves the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, said that they had decided “to unilaterally proclaim the end of military operations as of midnight on Thursday April 5.” The rebels said they had achieved “the complete liberation” of the territory they claim.

The statement invited outside powers to “guarantee the people of Azawad against all aggression by Mali.”

This Reuters analysis has more on the security implications of the news, including the possibility that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb may exploit the instability in Northern Mali. (The MNLA has vowed to expel al Qaeda from the region in the past but in recent weeks has formed an uneasy partnership with the more stridently Islamist militant group Ansar Dine, who have vowed to impose sharia law.)

Security concerns aside, with the MNLA have staked its claim to a significant swathe of territory, including the city of Timbuktu, and the Malian army in something of a state of disarray after last week's coup, it raises the question of whether Azaria actually has a chance of emerging as a state -- or at least joining entities like Somaliland and Abkhazia among the world's established but mostly unrecognized states. 

As I've written before, the recognition of new states has much more to do with politics than any objective standard under international law. To get a better idea of the obstacles Azawad will face, I spoke with Carne Ross, executive director of Independent Diplomat, a diplomatic advisory group that worked with South Sudan and Kosovo on their statehood bids.

In Ross's view, the three main criteria for statehood are democratic legitimacy -- whether the people in a territory actually want to be independent -- protection of minority rights, and recognition by other states. The last is probably most important from a diplomatic point of view:

The thing that is most important for a state to be recognized is that other states recognize it. It sounds circular but it does happen that way.

This is bad news for prospective new states in Africa, says Ross, because of a strong political bias against recognizing new countries. With a couple of notable exceptions -- South Sudan, Eritrea, Namibia -- the continents borders haven't changed much since decolonization: 

Particularly problematic is the African Union. The AU’s constitution, when it was set up, says that there should not be any alteration to the original borders of Africa as established by various colonial authorities like the 1884 Berlin Conference. It’s a strange position and one that makes the establishment of new states in Africa problematic.

Aside from concerns about Islamist militancy and the fact that Azawad doesn't seem to have a government or defined territory yet, the region's history makes it an unlikely candidate for recognized statehood:

As far as I can tell, there is no legal basis, or indeed a particularly strong political basis for the establishment of a new state. At least in the case of Somaliland, there is a case that Somaliland pre-existed the establishment of the State of Somalia. In the case of the Western Sahara, there is a legal premise in the referendum. In this case, there seems to be no legal basis whatsoever. 

So far, there hasn't been much communication from the MNLA to the outside world other than some vaguely-worded proclamations on their website and Facebook page. It will be interesting to see if the new movement attempts to make its case to the world in the coming days. 

On his FP blog today, Stephen Walt writes:

"When Washington gets lucky and the African Union endorses a Nigerian economist with a B.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT, who also has ample experience at the World Bank, and who is a woman of color to boot, the smart thing to do is get behind it immediately. This course is such an obvious no-brainer that I'm amazed the Obama administration didn't leap at the opportunity."

As my former colleague Annie Lowrey writes in the Times, U.S. nominee Jim Yong Kim is still virtually assured victory because of the makeup of the World Bank's governing board, but the fact that this three-way race is even taking place -- José Antonio Ocampo of Columbia is also in the running -- marks a historic shift. It's also striking some of the voices most loudly advocating for the Bank to overturn half a century of tradition and nominate a non-American president, are some of the normally staunchest defenders of the economic status quo. 

The Economist editorializes: 

WHEN economists from the World Bank visit poor countries to dispense cash and advice, they routinely tell governments to reject cronyism and fill each important job with the best candidate available. It is good advice. The World Bank should take it.  In appointing its next president, the bank’s board should reject the nominee of its most influential shareholder, America, and pick Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

Felix Salmon of Reuters chimes in: 

Kim is still the favorite for the job, just because he has the full and awesome power of US international diplomatic pressure behind him. But in any fair fight, Okonjo-Iweala would win. And if there are any signs at all that the European vote might not be completely in the bag, we might yet have a real contest on our hands here.

The Financial Times has tripled-down on its support for the Nigerian finance minister with an editorial, a column by Washington bureau chief Edward Luce, and a letter from economist Jagdish Baghwati supporting her candidacy. 

Nationality may play something of a role here. These are all British publications and mostly British authors -- Bagwhati is Indian-American -- whereas the New York Times and Businessweek have both editorialized for Kim. 

But supporting Okonjo-Iweala is also an easy "reformist" stance for economic conservatives to take. As these sources all note in their endorsements, Okonjo-Iweala is a fairly orthodox, free market, growth-oriented economist with a long institutional history at the bank. Kim, meanwhile, is an outsider and something of an unknown quantity: A public health expert with little background in economics whose book on inequality and health expresses skepticism about growth-led development and was favorably blurbed by Noam Chomsky. The Economist quips drily: "Were Mr Kim hoping to lead Occupy Wall Street, such views would be unremarkable."

While picking Okonjo-Iweala would of course be historic for bank-- she's non-American, a person of color, and along with Christine Lagarde of the IMF, would put women in charge of the world's two main multilateral financial institutions. But from an ideological point of view, she may actually be the status-quo choice.

With all the talk about an April 13 date being set for nuclear talks between Iran and the world's top powers, another important milestone got lost in the shuffle: today, March 30, when President Obama is required by a U.S. sanctions law to determine whether, as Reuters puts it, "the price and supply of non-Iranian oil are sufficient to allow consumers to 'significantly' cut their purchases from Iran." If the answer to that question is yes, then, beginning in June, the United States can proceed with its effort to isolate Tehran by sanctioning foreign banks that continue to purchase Iranian oil.

Obama's conclusion? There may not be oil, oil everywhere, but there's enough of it to greenlight sanctions. The Associated Press has more:

The president said he based his determination on global economic conditions, the level of spare oil capacity, and increased production by some countries, among other factors. He said he would keep monitoring the global market closely to ensure it can handle a reduction of oil purchases from Iran.

With oil prices already rising this year amid rising tensions over the nuclear dispute between Iran and the West, U.S. officials have sought assurances that pushing countries to stop buying from Iran would not cause a further spike in prices.

That's particularly important for Obama in an election year that has seen an increasing focus on gas prices.

Iran meter: Obama's decision clears a path for the administration's aggressive sanctions strategy, which it favors over military conflict.

But there's a wrinkle. Globalization has proven a double-edged sword for sanctions regimes. As scholars Steve Smith, Amelia Hadfield, and Tim Dunne note, an interdependent world economy can make countries more vulnerable to international sanctions. Yet globalization also means that countries facing sanctions can seek out alternative markets and suppliers.

This reality has been on vivid display recently. Bloomberg takes a look today at how China and India are evading U.S. and EU financial sanctions by buying Iranian oil in exchange for local currencies or goods such as wheat, soybean meal, and consumer products. During a meeting in New Delhi this week, the BRICS group of emerging world powers -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa -- declared that they would continue trading with Iran in defiance of U.S. sanctions.

This doesn't necessarily mean Western sanctions are doomed. Turkey, the fifth largest buyer of Iranian oil, announced today that it would cut imports of oil from Iran by a tenth in the face of U.S. pressure. And the Congressional Research Service's Kenneth Katzman tells Bloomberg that Iran's "junk-for-oil" program with countries such as China and India is economically unsustainable. "Iran cannot stabilize the value of its currency with such unorthodox payment methods," he explains.

But the big question is whether, come June, the United States will actually sanction Chinese and Indian banks -- an action fraught with political landmines. Obama's announcement today doesn't get us much closer to answering that question.

For more support for keeping the Iran meter at Natanz to Worry About, check out Amir Oren's argument for why Israel may be postponing an attack on Iran and Karl Vick's report on Israel's intelligence services scaling back covert operations inside Iran. (And for a gripping account of how an Israeli strike might play out, read Gary Sick.) 

Note to readers: Earlier this month, I dismissed the importance of Azerbaijan's pledge to prevent any country from using its territory as a launching pad for an attack on Iran, arguing that Israel probably wouldn't strike Iran through its neighbor to the north anyway.

This week, Mark Perry reported at Foreign Policy that Azerbaijan has granted Israel access to airbases near its border with Iran, which could heighten the prospect of an Israeli strike. Authorities in Azerbaijan have denied the allegations, and some others have expressed doubt that Israel would actually use Azeri airbases as part of an attack. But the report does raise the question of whether my headline -- "You can stop worrying about Azerbaijan" -- needs revising. 

The once proud Communist Party propaganda arm-turned-supermarket tabloid/LOL-aggregator unloads on the GOP frontrunner:

Electing Mitt Romney as the next President of the United States of America would be like appointing a serial paedophile as a kindergarten teacher, a rapist as a janitor at a girls' dormitory or a psychopath with a fixation on knives as a kitchen hand. His comments on Russia are a puerile attempt at making the grand stage and boy, did he blow it...

Romney's "number one geopolitical foe" remark seems to be bringing out the best in Russian official bombast:

...Public Chamber Foreign Affairs working group head Alexander Sokolov [compared] him to one of the “Marlboro men, those so-called cool guys, for whom only America’s interests exist and all other countries are potential enemies – or at best, rivals.”

Even the normally staid Dmitry Medvedev said Romney's remark "smacks of Hollywood" and advised him to "check his watch": “It’s 2012, not the middle of the 1970s,”  

Romney reiterated his attacks on the president's open-mic incident in a piece for FP yesterday, in which he said, "It is not an accident that Mr. Medvedev is now busy attacking me. The Russians clearly prefer to do business with the current incumbent of the White House."

Obama's foreign-policy advisors responded here.  

Today's news paints a picture of an Iran increasingly hemmed in by sanctions. SWIFT, a Belgium-based organization that facilitates banking transactions, announced that it will block Iranian banks targeted by EU sanctions, effectively cutting Iran off from the global financial system. Reuters reports that Iran has been frantically stockpiling wheat to blunt the impact of sanctions, while the Obama administration is threatening to impose sanctions on India if it keeps buying Iranian oil. These developments have been accompanied by spurts of tough talk from Tehran; Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, for instance, declared that an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites would spell "the end of the Jewish state."

And yet, out of the headlines of isolation, comes a surprising glimmer of cooperation: Israel and Iran are actually collaborating on something. Haaretz reports:   

In an extraordinary act of regional cooperation, Israel, Iran, Jordan, and Turkey are to jointly provide funds for a particle accelerator as part of their commitment to a UNESCO-sponsored scientific project, it was announced on Wednesday.

Each of the four countries has pledged $5 million toward the SESAME facility, which is being built near Amman. SESAME stands for Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East. According to the UNESCO website, the project aims to "foster scientific and technological excellence in the Middle East and neighboring countries (and prevent or reverse brain drain) by enabling world-class research," and to "build scientific and cultural bridges between neighboring countries."

If the $100 million SESAME center, which is slated to go online in 2015, succeeds, the Middle East will get its first synchrotron.

Iran meter: Could science be both central to the nuclear dispute and key to resolving it peacefully? Sadly, the SESAME project has been as much a source of tension as teamwork. Last year, the Financial Times noted that two Iranian scientists who had worked at the center -- Massoud Ali Mohammadi and Majid Shahriari  -- had died under mysterious circumstances in the course of a year.

Some speculate that their involvement in SESAME "exposed the scientists to suspicion that they were complicit in sabotaging Iran's nuclear program," the FT explained. "In Tehran's political and diplomatic circles, the killing of Ali Mohammadi was seen as a possible act of revenge by the regime" (at the time of Ali Mohammadi's death, an Iranian researcher who was also involved in the project maintained that there were no direct meetings between his delegation and the Israelis). Iranian news outlets and officials blamed both deaths on Israel and the West.

Beyond particle physics, Israeli-Iranian contacts are very limited, but they're not nonexistent. Last May, Ynet reported that dozens of Israeli companies trade with Iran secretly through third parties in countries such as Dubai, Jordan, and Turkey. 

Israeli exports to Iran focus on agricultural production means: Organic fertilizers, pierced irrigation pipes, hormones boosting milk productions, and seeds.

The Iranians sell the Israelis pistachio, cashew nuts, and mainly marble -- one of Iran's biggest industries.

The news today about cooperation on SESAME is heartening, of course. But we have a long way to go between particles and peace.

The AP reports on today's Caucus in American Samoa:

What do you get when 50 or so Republicans gather in a restaurant-bar? In American Samoa, you get a presidential caucus.

The U.S. territory, located about 2,300 miles south of Hawaii, gets its chance Tuesday to choose delegates to the Republican National Convention and vote on a presidential candidate. It’s a decidedly local affair.

Republicans will meet at Toa Bar & Grill.

The six delegates picked at the caucus will join three American Samoa “superdelegates” at the convention.

So roughly one delegate for every 5 voters -- not too shabby. (For what it's worth, Washington D.C.'s 30,000 registered Republicans have to make do with 19 delegates.)

Mitt Romney is likely to win today among Samoa's few registered Republicans. (For one thing 25 percent of Samoans are Mormon.)

The territorial contests are a weird quirk of the U.S. primary system. Residents of these territories don't get to vote in November's presidential election, but both parties allow them to vote in primaries.

The territorial contests generally don't get much attention unless the primary is close, as it was four years ago when both Bill and Hillary Clinton campaigned in Puerto Rico. The "island caucus" as a whole, as David Cohen points out,  is worth 59 delegates, more than Virginia or Missouri.

Romney appears likely to sweep the contests this year, even dispatching his son Matt to campaign in Northern Mariana and Guam.  (Delegate hungry Rick Santorum may have forgotten about Guam's 9 votes when joked about exiling liberal judges there.) Romney took both those territories as well as most of the delegates from the U.S. Virgin Islands, despite the fact that Ron Paul got more votes there. (It's complicated.)

Puerto Rico, where Romney is also favored, votes this Sunday. 

Released last week by the NGO Invisible Children, the 30 minute film KONY 2012 has already been viewed more than 70 million times on YouTube and made the eponymous Ugandan militia leader a household name, at least for now. (For more information on Kony, here's a slideshow of the Lord's Resistance Army, and a post about some of the complexities of the viral video.) Nicholas D. Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer prize winning columnist with the New York Times, writes twice weekly columns that often focus on under-reported humanitarian issues around the world. What follows is an interview with Kristof about social media, the importance of individualizing Kony, and the far more serious problem of worms; edited and condensed for clarity.

Were you surprised by the popularity of the Kony video?

Absolutely. It's been so hard for the humanitarian world to get attention for any kind of disaster. I go places and do my videos, and my mother watches them. These guys do one about Kony and seventy million people see it.

What other international humanitarian problems would benefit from this type of attention?

Global health is hugely under-covered. (Like Kony) it's always there, it's not really news on one day. Malnutrition remains a vast problem. Kids who are malnourished early in life lag in cognitive development, and we tend not to write about it or cover it. Pneumonia likewise, I don't think people realize that it's perhaps the single greatest killer of kids around the world. Something as simple as worms: few remedies would matter more for more kids than de-worming kids around the world. Yet obviously we never write about de-worming or kids, it's just part of the backdrop.

Congo remains very under-covered, considering it's probably the most lethal conflict since World War 2. In Mali and its neighbors, there's been a growing security crisis and refugee crisis, and it's gotten very little attention.

Why have Congo and Mali gotten comparatively such little attention?

Not much happens in the way of a big event. We tend to be good at covering events but not good at just covering underlying realities. More people die in Congo from diarrhea than bullets, because you can't deliver food and health care to the middle of a conflict zone. The story in Mali is in Northern Mali, and that's very difficult to reach safely, so it's been largely off the radar. And when I write about these kinds of global issues, my readership falls. Any journalist, especially television, is better off putting a Democrat and a Republican in a room together and having them yell at each other.

Is this going to make it easier for news organizations to argue that there should be more attention paid to these far off crises?

Maybe at the margin, but these organizations have a pretty good idea of what gets viewers. If ABC had sent a crew out to Central African Republic to try to report on Joseph Kony it would have been amazingly expensive, somewhat dangerous, and I think very few people would have watched. I don't think viewers are desperate for information about Joseph Kony, I think that the producers of this video were quite brilliant in the way they did it. I wish that the larger lesson was that people cared about humanitarian crises around the world. I'm skeptical that's the case.

Will the attention this video brought to Kony make a difference in tracking him down?

Hard to know, but attention creates pressure on officials at home and around the world. I think Kony's prospects are worse this week than they were two weeks ago.

What advice would you give to young, ambitious people working in the humanitarian sphere on how to publicize things like what's going on in Congo, or with things like pneumonia?

I think the humanitarian world has traditionally been quite awful at marketing. Full of earnestness but very unsophisticated about how to get people interested in issues. These guys had an amazing marketing success that is a reminder that sometimes social media really can make something go viral. (Telling) individual stories are certainly part of that, as are stories that connect Americans to people abroad. Likewise, moving from the LRA as a whole to Kony as an individual, I think made it more specific and individual. There's always a tension between getting people's attention without over-simplifying, but I think that it made sense for them to focus on Kony as an individual.

What humanitarian crises have you covered in the past where grassroots pressure from Americans helped; conversely, any areas where you think extra pressure actually hurt the cause?

I think that in the case of Darfur, there are lots and lots of people alive today because college students and churches and synagogues around the country protested. Likewise Eastern Congo has made progress in part because it became an issue. In terms of cases where things were made worse, I think one can make a case that the sweatshop movement may have pushed companies to source in ways that were more capital intensive and less labor intensive, in ways that ultimately meant fewer jobs in the neediest part of the world.

Any of our tech-savvy readers looking for work? How about censoring free expression in Pakistan?

Few nations have so publicly revealed their plans to censor the Web as Pakistan is doing, however. Last month, the government took out newspaper and Web advertisements asking for companies or institutions to develop the national filtering and blocking system.[...]

The government advertisements state it wants a system capable of shutting down up to 50 million Web addresses in multiple languages with a processing delay of not less than one millisecond.

Pakistan's internet filtering efforts aren't particularly extensive, though it did get international attention in 2010 for briefly blocking Facebook because of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed. Evidently, the authorities are looking to upgrade to something a bit more sophisticated. 

Hat tip: Jillian York

As usual, the restive region of Chechnya went a bit over the top with the election fraud in Russia's presidential contest, with 99.59 percent reported turnout and 99.82 percent of voters backing Vladimir Putin. One precinct, according to the New York Times, really went above and beyond: 

The final tally: Putin, 1,482 votes; Gennady A. Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, one vote.

This result was in itself statistically improbable. But even more difficult for the teachers who had been drafted onto the electoral commission to explain was the turnout: there were only 1,389 people registered in the precinct, meaning that the turnout was 107 percent.

Given what was going on elsewhere in the region, it's not really hard to understand how this happened: 

Through the day in this neighborhood of Grozny, dozens of minibuses, some bearing the emblem of the local Gazprom affiliate, ChechenRegionGaz, shuttled voters to, from and — significantly — between polling stations.

It was hardly concealed. Asked what she was doing entering more than one polling station, one woman replied without hesitation, “We’re voting.”

Marieta N. Beshirova, a nurse, bundled in a felt coat against a frigid mist drifting down from the Caucasus Mountains, piled out of an ambulance at one polling station with other hospital employees. “If our Ramzan needs us to vote, we will vote,” she said, referring to the region’s leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov. “And we will do it wholeheartedly,” she added, without any enthusiasm.

This goes back to a recent post I wrote on election results in non-democratic elections. While the contests are equally undemocratic, there's a significant difference between countries like Iran and Russia -- where victories tend to be in the 60s -- and places like Cuba and North Korea -- where they're closer to 95 or even 99 percent. 

Russia's something of a hybrid case. Nationwide, Putin took a high but certainly statistically possible 63 percent. Chechnya is essentially a North Korea-like island of absolute dictatorship within Putin's managed democracy. 

One wonders why the Kremlin continues to allow this sort of thing to go on in Chechnya -- it doesn't exactly help Putin's global image to have the fraud be quite this blatant. It seems like either Putin is essentialy giving Ramzan Kadyrov pretty free rein to rule Chechnya as he sees fit, or he views the election as an opportunity to demonstrate absolute power over a previously rebellious region.  

An would-be suicide bomber was arrested on Capitol Hill today after accepting what he thought was an explosive vest from undercover agents. Roll Call's Emma Dumain has the details:

Capitol Police were “intimately involved in the investigation for the duration of the operation” and assisted in today’s arrest, spokeswoman Sgt. Kimberly Schneider said in a statement.

“The arrest was the culmination of a lengthy and extensive operation,” the statement continued. “At no time was the public or Congressional community in any danger.”[...]

Local reports by Fox News describe the individual in custody as “a man, in his 30s and of Moroccan descent” who has been a target of a lengthy FBI investigation. Fox News reported that the suspect believed the undercover FBI agents assisting him were al-Qaida operatives.

Roll Call notes that the story is similar to that of Rezwan Ferdaus, who was arrested last September in the midst of a plot to attack the Capitol with a remote-controlled aircraft.  Ferdaus was also in communication with FBI agents posing as al Qaeda members.

The case is also similar to that Farooque Ahmed, who thought he was going to blow up the DC Metro system in 2010, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who thought he was going to blow up a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland Oregon in 2010, David Williams, who thought he was going to blow up a Bronx synagogue in 2009, and the "Fort Dix Five," who thought they were going to attack a New Jersey military base in 2006.

In each case, undercover FBI agents spent months communicating and providing fake resources to the suspects before springing the trap. (This isn't even addressing the numerous sting operations run by the NYPD without the FBI's help, described by Louis Klarevas in his piece, "The Idiot Jihadist Next Door.") 

The increasing frequency of these operations is bound to raise some questions about whether law enforcement agencies are pushing along the development of plots that the individuals involved might never have acted on without the longterm encouragement of their "al Qaeda contacts."

The other question is just how many times the FBI can get would-be terrorists to fall for this.