By Katie Paul

It’s no surprise that journalism can be dangerous work. Reporters are routinely killed on assignment in conflict areas or covering other hazardous parts of the world. But what about those killed not in the course of their work but because of their work?

Like 54-year-old Philip Agustin, whose newspaper was about to publish a special edition on missing government funds in the Philippines when he was shot in the back of the head at his daughter’s home on May 10, 2005. Or Bautista Merino, 24, and Martínez Sánchez, 20, the hosts of a local radio station in Mexico’s tumultuous southern state of Oaxaca, who were driving home on a rural highway on April 7, 2008, when they were gunned down by unidentified assailants wielding assault rifles. Or Mahad Ahmed Elmi, a Somali morning talk show host shot dead outside the entrance of his radio station’s building as he arrived for work on Aug. 11, 2007. Later that day Elmi’s colleague Ali Iman Sharmarke was killed by a remote-controlled bomb that detonated under his car as he was returning from Elmi’s funeral.

Massoud Hossaini/AFP-Getty Images
Survivor: Karzai evades death one more time

By Jeffrey Stern

The first mortar round fell during a 21-gun salute, so that the thunder of the real cannonade was camouflaged by that of the staged.  When the parliamentarians struck by gunfire slumped back, those standing near appeared casually confused rather than frightened, as if a fellow dignitary had merely succumbed to a fainting spell, and had unbalanced a few others on his way down.  Then, visible on national television, was the accelerating reaction of people who recognize the presence of danger but not its exact location.  Troops in fatigues ran into those wearing ceremonial dress while men belly-flopped to check the undercarriages of SUVs for charges, pulled flak jackets out and threw them at those who didn’t already have them. Soldiers fled, and the president’s men took up firing positions while the president himself ducked into an SUV and was driven to safety. 

This was the scene in Kabul on Sunday, when Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai narrowly escaped yet another assassination attempt—the fourth since he took office. Three people, including a child and a parliamentarian from Paktia province where, ironically, the Taliban is far more active than here in Kabul, died in the attack.

By Kevin Peraino 

Jimmy Carter has been roundly pilloried on the cable news channels for his meetings last week in Damascus and Cairo with senior Hamas leaders. When I saw the former president at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem this afternoon, I asked him why he thought American public opinion was so harshly critical of his trip. "You know the answer to that," Carter replied. "Let me say this without criticizing the news media in America. There is no balanced coverage of what goes on in the Holy Land in the American news media. It's ridiculous, if you analyze it column by column and headline by headline. I would say it's not a bias on the part of the Washington Post or The New York Times or The L.A. Times or so forth. Or Newsweek. It's a fact that in the political discussion – which is the origin of most of your news – it's politically suicidal for any candidate to say anything that's displeasing to Israel. It's suicide. So far as I know, there's only one member of Congress since my book ["Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid"] came out that's had one thing to say that wasn't completely compliant with what the Israeli government's policy was at a certain time. And what you [in the media] have to do is cover what McCain says, and what Hillary says, and what Obama says, about my trip. They're all critical. It's inconceivable that Obama or Clinton could say 'We approve of Jimmy Carter's meeting with Hamas.' I'm not complaining. I've been in politics myself. There's no discussion, no debate, in the United States."

The ironic thing is that some recent polls have shown that a majority of Israelis – including large segments of the hawkish Likud party – favor direct negotiations with Hamas. "I was impressed with that," Carter said when I asked him about the polls. "These are people who know what they're talking about, and they know that there's no way to have peace unless Hamas is brought into the discussion. They also know – sometimes they may be reluctant to admit it – that in an honest and free and fair and transparent election, Hamas candidates prevailed."

By Andrew Ehrenkranz

Thursday’s swearing in of a broad coalition Cabinet  seems have ushered in a new era of peace in Kenya. While relief and in some cases, jubilation, is palpable on the streets  of Nairobi today, there’s also a growing dread at sticker shock of this new government of "unity". With opposition leader Raila Odinga as Kenya’s 2nd post-independence Prime Minster, the new Cabinet is the country’s largest ever, at 40 Kenyan cabinet ministers and 52 assistant ministers, and will cost Kenyan taxpayers  nearly  $800 million dollars more than last year's government, a huge burden  for average Kenyans already struggling to  make ends meet after months of unrest.

Kenyan politicians are not just among the highest paid in Africa, but around the world, says Tiberius Barasa, a research fellow at Nairobi’s Institute of Policy Analysis and Research .  In a country where the average salary is less than $400 US dollars per year, a Kenyan Cabinet minister makes $18,000 per month,  plus thousands more in allowances and a host of other perks like country homes, club membership, and two new cars.  Earning approximately $216,000 annually (of which only $3,000 is taxable income), Kenyan Cabinet members  make more than their counterparts  in the United States. Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki earns $615,000 US dollars a year, tax-free, far more than that of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (about $373,000 ) or President George W. Bush($400,000).    “The salaries are actually nearing the level of  comparable politicians  in Italy, currently the  highest in the world. “Barasa says.  Though the original argument had been that higher government salaries prevent corruption,  there’s little evidence to support that justification in Kenya, where a number of high profile corruption scandals have been unearthed over the past few years. A movement amongst civil society groups for a re-adjustment of the pay scale of politicians was thwarted last year, unsurprisingly voted down by the politicians themselves when it came to vote in Kenyan parliament.  At this current moment in Kenya, with a severely hobbled economy after months of unrest and where  more than 300,000  displaced Kenyans still  languish in internal displacement camps,   it remains to be seen if a bigger government will yield results. “Kenya is  struggling to move up the ladder of industrialized nations, we can’t afford to sustain such high salaries.”

A bout of dengue starts with a pounding headache and a blazing fever. Next come excruciating body cramps and joint pain that render the stricken listless and useless for days on end. And that's if you're lucky. In its most extreme or "hemorrhagic" version, dengue is a killer. So far, 88 people have succumbed in this year's outbreak in the state of Rio de Janeiro, almost half of them children. And although the epidemic that turned the hospitals in Brazil's signature city into refugee camps now looks to have peaked, the balmy tropical autumn will surely keep the body count ticking higher over the next few months.

That's the bad news. The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. Yes, dengue fever is now the bug of the millennium, infecting close to a hundred million people in 100 countries wordwide every year. And there is no vaccine for dengue or even the faint hope that the mosquito, aedes aegypti, that spreads the contagion can be erradicated. But there are ways to fight back, if not to wipe out the disease then at least to keep every outbreak from becoming a funeral procession.

By Andrew Ehrenkranz

Where to first, the driver asked:  Baghdad, Somalia or Darfur?  Even as a hypothetical, it’s not the easiest question to answer. But along a hectic stretch of highway just outside the west Kenyan city of Kisumu, I learned, all these places could be visited in a couple hours on a Friday afternoon.
Kenyan nicknames often seem odd choices for an African nation. Gangs are named after Muslim groups like the

Taliban-even though its members are Christian-and after fighters in remote Kosovo.
Naming places after some of the world’s more troubled areas, though, has a curious logic.  “Baghdad” is an intimidating sprawl of ramshackle houses and shops known as a no-go zone even for police, who keep watch there only during the daylight.  A few hundred meters down the road, you hit the “ Somali Base”, a small roadside of enclave where a large pack of touts and hustlers looking for any way to survive assemble en masse each day.  “We call it Somali base because we don’t have a leader,” says a teenager in a camouflage ball cap named Steven, citing the lack of a government in Somalia as the inspiration for the area’s name.  Crossing into a vast dirt parking lot, a burned-out metallic blue Bedford pickup truck lay wrecked, the words “South Sudan” graffiti on its side door. “You are in Darfur now“ says Ojijio, a curious passerby pointing towards another overturned car with, what else, “Darfur” painted on its hood. Nearby a group of men argued over their pay for transporting a coffin, moving the body from the back of one flatbed truck to the other, to the bereaved family’s dismay.

By Karen MacGregor

For the past eight years, the majority of Zimbabweans have made it clear that they want to be rid of an increasingly autocratic, corrupt and incompetent Zanu-PF government led by President Robert Mugabe. But in elections Saturday their hopes might for the third time be dashed, amid mounting evidence of large-scale vote rigging that will ensure a poll that is anything but free and fair. Still, with the stiffest competition he has ever faced from two other candidates, Mugabe’s sacked finance minister Simba Makoni and opposition Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe is holding its breath for polling results that are expected to begin rolling in on Sunday.

Polling stations around the country were open for 12 hours on Saturday, with an electorate of just under six million people voting for president as well as members of a 210-seat parliament and local councils. Security has been tight but voting appeared to proceed peacefully--though extremely slowly at urban stations, where most opposition supporters reside. Almost all Western journalists have been denied accreditation to cover the election, and only observers from “friendly,” mostly African countries, have been invited. Zimbabweans abroad, now thought to number more than three million of a former population of 13 million people--many of them opposition supporters who have fled to South Africa to escape intimidation and economic collapse--have not been allowed to vote.

The past eight years have been a nightmare for most Zimbabweans. In 2000 Mugabe had already been in power for 20 years, and in February of that year citizens said, “no” to him in a referendum on constitutional changes. Faced for the first time with a real threat to his rule, Mugabe--once the darling of the West for running sub-Saharan Africa's major post-colonial success story--reacted with ruthless speed in cracking down on a swelling trade union-led opposition movement and white farmers, whom he perceived as its funders. Since then white farmers have been chased off their land, thousands of opposition supporters have been assaulted (and many killed) by security forces and militia, draconian laws have been passed, corruption has run rampant and the economy has collapsed. Inflation is running at 100,000 percent and unemployment at 80 percent.

Mikhail Kalashnikov got a fairly raw deal out of Communism. The assault rifle he designed while lying wounded in hospital at the end of the Second World War became a Twentieth Century icon. His name is the world's best-known brand (think about it - there may be Kalahari bushmen who havent heard of Coca Cola, but odds are they've heard of Kalashnikov). According to Jane's Defense Weekly, up to 100 million Kalashnikovs of various

types have been produced since the gun went into production in 1947, largely thanks to the Soviet habit of giving friendly foreign allies the technology to produce the weapons free of charge. But Kalashnikov himself, who will be 90 this year, lives in a modest apartment in the Volga city of Izhevsk. He hasn't received a penny of royalties on his famous invention - though he is a Lieutenant-General and boasts a chestful of medals.

Now, the Russian state is trying to do its best to redress that injustice - if not in the interests of the AK-47's inventor, then at least in the interests of his country. First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov announced today

By Brian Byrnes

The Queen’s honeymoon was over before it even began. Less than 72 hours after she donned the azure-and-white sash as Argentina’s first elected female president, her highness had already gone to battle.
 
Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s reputation as strong-willed, outspoken and sometimes flippant had earned her the faux-royal title, and it was proven in spades on December 13,  when she took the podium at the Pink House in downtown Buenos Aires to blast U.S. allegations that  Venezuela's Hugo Chavez had tried to fund her presidential campaign with clandestine petrodollars.
 
With pointing fingers and a steely glare, “garbage” was how she described a U.S. prosecutor’s charges that a suitcase from Venezuela stuffed with $800,000 in cash had been destined for her campaign coffers before it was detained at a Buenos Aires airport in August. Fully aware of the moment, Cristina played the gender card, vowing not to be “pressured” because she was a woman and -- in a not-so-subtle dig at the Bush administration -- promising to strengthen relations with “friendly” countries, like Venezuela.
 
Not exactly a winning start for a president who was expected to improve ties with the U.S. following a frosty four-and-a-half years under her predecessor (and husband) Nestor Kirchner, who routinely blamed the IMF and Wall Street for Argentina’s catastrophic economic collapse in 2001. Cristina--with her penchant for globetrotting, high fashion and political discourse--would surely be able to patch up foreign relations, or so everyone thought.

Politicians on both sides of the partisan divide in the U.S. rarely miss a chance to beat the drums over the perils of the immigrant tide and the imperative to "secure our borders." That might be a good idea. With the world's largest economy on a slide, the dream of making America is looking less lustrous every day, and now the U.S. risks seeing one of its most dynamic and creative sources of human capital blow away with the prairie dust. 

There are already troubling signs. A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank reports that the flow of dollars Latin American and Caribbean immigrants send back home is slackening. In 2007, Latins living in the U.S. remitted $66 billion to their native countries. That's not half bad (a record amount, in fact) but what drew the Bank's attention was the modest 7 percent increase over the previous year. Until then the flow of dollars back home had been expanding at double digit rates every year. Last year the nominal sum of incoming migrant dollars actually fell in Brazil, from $7.4 billion to $7.1 billion.