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Nearly a week after Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma, the first UN World Food Program and Red Cross planes were finally allowed to land in Yangon today. U.S. military planes carrying supplies are still waiting in Bangkok for permission to fly from the Burmese government.

Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis continues to worsen. The total number of casualties is anywhere between 23,000 and 100,000 depending on estimates and over 1 million people may have lost their homes. As the arresting images in FP's photo essay "Burma Picks up the Pieces" show, rebuilding after this catastrophe would be a monumental task for any state. For one as repressive and paranoid as Burma, it may be impossible.

While it might seem unimaginable to find a reason for optimism in suffering of this scale, the Burmese people can only hope that the cyclone, and the government's inept handling of it, might be the final blow that brings this odious regime to an end.

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North Korea is not a normal country. Its leaders and state mouthpieces rarely directly say what they mean. Instead, they resort to the same sorts of tactics a truculent toddler might use to get what he wants: screaming, refusing to budge, and so on. The latest? The country threatened to bolster its "deterrent capabilities" to counter "U.S. attempts to initiate nuclear war."

Faced with such bizarre outbursts, many reporters seem mystified as to why Kim Jong Il's regime would suddenly appear to renege on its commitment to disclose all of its nuclear programs. Just being fickle and untrustworthy? But when it comes to North Korea, there's always something else going on behind the craziness. Facing rising inflation back home, China has cut off food exports to the struggling North Koreans:

In Dandung, Liaoning Province, near China’s border with North Korea, food exports to the impoverished country have been completely suspended. Up until now, an average of approximately 1,200 tons of food has crossed the border every day, but as of the beginning of the year, the Chinese government has not issued any new permissions for exports. [...]

China began blocking grain exports in late December of last year in order to stabilize domestic food prices. On December 20, 2007, Beijing suddenly abolished tax incentives for grain exports. Since then, food assistance to North Korea has been completely stopped. As China has refused to permit food exports, officials are finding it useless to try to pay duties on grains.

Not knowing any other way to communicate, the North Koreans tend to lash out when their food supplies run low. And we could be talking about a humanitarian catastrophe soon:

Almost 80-90 percent of food aid to North Korea is delivered via Dandung. If the current situation continues for an extended period of time, North Korea’s food supplies are expected to deteriorate quickly.

The official in Dandung noted that the demand for food will climb in North Korea owing to what is anticipated to be another season of poverty in the spring. "If external shipments of food aid are blocked, North Korean residents will be forced to depend on smuggling or flee the nation," the official added.

Perhaps there's something more nefarious going on, but Occam's Razor suggests that an impending famine is the main reason for the North's latest tantrum. Until the country's leaders learns how to address such problems in a forthright manner, I'm afraid, this is the kind of thing we can expect.

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Vermiculate. Lobscouse. Desuetude. Macerate.

Just about every American high school student who has planned to attend university has had to learn words such as these in preparation for the SAT exam that is used as part of the college admissions process.

Now, by learning these words, whether for fun or for test preparation, you can also help end hunger. A computer programmer created a Web site, Freerice.com, that throws multiple-choice vocabulary questions at you. For every one you answer correctly, the site donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. The first few questions are relatively easy, but as you answer questions correctly, subsequent ones become progressively more difficult.

Advertising income pays for the donated rice. The site averages close to 200,000 hits daily, and since October 7, 6.9 billion grains have been donated. How munificent.

Google Earth is a cool tool that's fun to play around with. Now you can also use it for something more serious—monitoring countries' progress toward achieving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, eight objectives to be reached by 2015 that form the blueprint of a mighty effort to make poverty history.

Launch Google Earth (download it first if you don't already have it) from the MDG Monitor Web site and you'll be able to click on capital cities all around the world to monitor their corresponding countries' progress toward achieving the MDGs. For example, you can learn that due to improvements in health and education, Madagascar brought its poverty rate down from 85.1 percent in 2003 to 67.5 percent in 2006. (The goal is to reduce the percentage of Madagascarians living on less than $2 a day to 50 percent by 2012.) There are also links to complete country profiles, such as this one for Madagascar.

Not to be outdone, the World Bank has put a bunch of its own data and links to its projects around the world into a Google Maps mashup. It's not quite as flashy, but you don't need to download any special software to view it. Is this the beginning of a map war between the World Bank and the U.N.?

(Hat tip: Mark Leon Goldberg)

Want to know why China is finding it so easy to make inroads in Africa? Here's what Serge Mombouli, the Republic of Congo's ambassador to the United States, told NPR's Tom Gljelten recently:

Tangible development means you can see, you can touch," Mombouli says. "We need both. We cannot be talking just about democracy, transparency, good governance. At the end of the day the population does not have anything to eat, does not have water to drink, no electricity at night, industry to provide work, so we need both. People do not eat democracy."

Just a few years ago, protests by 10,000 demonstrators at a G-8 summit would have been front page news. But yesterday's protests in Heiligendamm, Germany earned merely a few paragraphs on page 21 of today's Washington Post. That tells you just about everything you need to know about the strength and influence of the anti-globalization movement today.

Writing in the latest issue of Britain's Spectator, Ross Clark makes the argument that, "one of the little-remarked side effects of 9/11 was the eclipse of the anti-globalisation movement." It certainly seems that, following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many in the anti-globalization movement decided that globalization would simply go away. The reality, of course, as FP pointed in its September/October 2006 issue, couldn't be further from the truth. Globalization is not only alive and well, it is thriving in all corners of the globe.

So why hasn't the anti-globalization movement come back? It doesn't make sense. Globalization is bigger and badder than ever. The World Bank—anti-globalization's Enemy No. 1—has just been hit by a nasty ethics scandal. Yet the "movement," which just a few years ago was so powerful, is nowhere to be found. Why? Iraq probably has something to do with it. Rich, disillusioned youth and the tenured professors who teach them used to sit around vilifying well-intentioned bureaucrats at the World Bank. Now they spend their days vilifying well-intentioned bureaucrats at Embassy Baghdad.

But, perhaps more importantly, the reality is that the anti-globalization movement doesn't have a U.S. president to kick around anymore. It certainly doesn't have one in the Bush Administration, which has delivered more for the poor in Africa than Clinton or Carter did. That, as Al Gore would say, is an inconvenient truth for the anti-globalization left, particularly in Europe. As Bono told CNN (video) this week, "Europeans say Americans don't care, [that] it's a continent behaving like an island. They are wrong."

The sucking sound you hear in Heiligendamm isn't the riot police firing up their water cannons, which appeared to do nothing more than give the protestors a much needed shower. It is the gaping chest wound the Bush administration has inflicted upon the anti-globalization movement. And, if this week's protests are any indication, that wound appears to be fatal.

Of course, that isn't stopping Hollywood from trying its best to resuscitate the fledgling anti-globalization activists. Watch for the movie "Battle in Seattle" coming out in December, starring Charlize Theron and Woody Harrelson as erstwhile heroes.

In yesterday's New York Times, FP editor-in-chief Moisès Naim nicely dissected the growing problem of what he termed "rogue aid"—development aid by dictatorships like China and Venezuela with no strings and little social conscience:

In recent years, wealthy nondemocratic regimes have begun to undermine development policy through their own activist aid programs. Call it rogue aid. It is development assistance that is nondemocratic in origin and nontransparent in practice, and its effect is typically to stifle real progress while hurting ordinary citizens. China is actively backing such deals throughout Africa; its financing of roads, electrical plants, ports and the like boomed from $700 million in 2003 to nearly $3 billion for each of the past two years.

Naim acknowledges, of course, that Western governments have often dabbled in the strategic aid business, particularly during the Cold War. And today's Christian Science Monitor has an interesting take on France's struggle with its own rogue aid problem, which has come to a head at this year's Franco-African summit in Cannes. For years, France has given succor to shady Francophone regimes in a bid to maintain influence in its erstwhile colonial realm. It's a practice that's becoming untenable at home, however:

PATRICK KOVARIK/AFP

African protesters, along with international aid organizations, led protests outside of the Cannes summit this week, and France's ties with illiberal African regimes has become a hot-button topic in the ongoing presidential race to replace President Jacques Chirac. "By favoring personal friendships to the detriment of the general interest, the presidential practice has tarnished the image of our country, which is associated in African minds with the most questionable regimes on the continent," wrote French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, in an editorial for the Témoignage Chrétien, a Catholic weekly.

France's bout of conscience makes Naim's point well. For all its flaws, Western development aid has inched toward transparency. Beijing and Caracas are nowhere close.

 

It's a sadly typical story: Nearly 2 years after the Asian tsunami struck, aid to countries like Sri Lanka is being handicapped by undelivered funds. The numbers are more shocking than usual, however:

• Only 30 to 35 percent of the affected population has been put back into permanent housing.
• Only half of the 6.7 billion pledged by the U.N. Department for Aid and Development has been spent.
• Only 8,000 of the 50,000 permanent houses that the Red Cross promised to build in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives have been completed.
• A whopping 16 houses have been completed by the British Red Cross, of the 2,000 planned. Three hundred are near completion.

Pledges by countries are falling far below the mark:

• According to a U.N. database, Spain promised $60m and delivered less than $1m, while France pledged $79m and came up with just over $1m.
• Kuwait pledged $10m to the Maldives, but has yet to contribute a penny.
• The United States promised over $400m in aid to Indonesia, but has delivered less than $70m.
• Perhaps most disappointing of all is China, which pledged $301m and delivered only $1m.

One of the striking things as I was traveling through Africa: everybody said that the United States' absence is as noticeable and prominent as the Chinese's presence."

Ever wonder what happened to all the foreign donations given to the United States in the aftermath of Katrina? It's not good news. It turns out that, like so much of the federal response to the crisis, the largest influx of foreign assistance to the US in memory was met with foot-dragging and clumsy bureaucracy. None of the donated funds has actually made its way to evacuees.

Some of the donated funds were stuck in a non-interest bearing account for nearly six months - so long that they lost value due to inflation. Back in March, the State Department finally agreed to give a portion of the funds to the Department of Education. When I contacted the DoE recently to find out how they'd put the foreign donations to good use, I was shocked to learn that the money hadn't yet been spent.

Today, the DoE announced that it plans to spend $60 million donated by foreign governments - about half the total received by the federal government - to help rebuild schools on the Gulf Coast. To that, I say kudos; it's money much-needed. But why so late? Why did DoE sit on the funds for so long? Shouldn't those schools have been rebuilt in time for this school year?

On Sunday, the Democratic Republic of the Congo will hold its first free elections in more than 40 years. International donors have chipped in nearly half a billion dollars to finance the vote - this in a country with only a few hundred miles of paved roads, crippling poverty, little access to health care, and the world's largest U.N. peacekeeping force. But I'm all in favor of freedom, and there's good news out of the country's war-torn east today: three of the main warring militias there have agreed to lay down their arms. Still, the election is a huge logistical challenge: thousands of candidates, rampant intimidation, and the very real possibility of fraud (5 million extra ballots have been printed).

That's just the election. There's the other small matter of rebuilding the country's infrastructure after a devastating civil war that ended in 2002, after killing 4 million people. That war sucked in not just neighboring countries, but tens of thousands of child soldiers, who are now slowly being demobilized. But how do you integrate kids who extorted, murdered, and raped, most because they were forced by elder soldiers, but some because they wanted to?

In a new ForeignPolicy.com exclusive, Paule Bouvier and Pierre Englebert examine the incredible challenges the DRC faces, not just in pulling off this weekend's election, but in making the democratic experiment stick by securing the country and pulling its devastated population out of poverty. Despite all the international investment and the domestic enthusiasm, it's unlikely this weekend's election will deliver a miracle.