SAJAforum

BREAKING NEWS: Indian Embassy attacked in Kabul, 41 Dead

According to the BBC News, at least 40 people have been killed and 141 injured after a suicide bomber rammed a car full of explosives into the gates of Indian embassy in Kabul. However, the New York Times reports that according to witnesses, the bomber rammed the car into two senior diplomats' cars as they entered the gate.

This has been called the deadliest attack in Kabul since the Taliban overthrow in 2001.

From BBC's website:

Five embassy personnel were killed - India's defence attache, a senior diplomat and two security guards - as well as an Afghan man.

Five Afghans died at Indonesia's embassy nearby.<snip>

The bomb exploded as people were queuing for visas at the embassy.

"We were standing in a line to get visas, the police told us to stand on one side, the women were in another line, then suddenly I heard a huge bang and I sat down. I was very afraid," Khan Zaman said.

Ali Hassan Fahimi said shrapnel had landed in his office, which is close to the site of the blast.

"It was so strong... and our staff were shocked," he said.

AFP reports that taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahed denied any involvement in the explosion.

UPDATE: Read Shashi Tharoor's Times of India column from two days BEFORE the explosion, "How America Made a Mess in Afghanistan" - its last paragraph is prophetic:

Some in India may feel that as long as Pakistan is tied up on its western border, we can breathe a little easier, since it keeps the Islamic radicals too busy to stir up trouble in the east. Such complacency is premature. As long as al-Qaida and the Taliban are at large and free to plan their next spectacular assault, there is no guarantee they will confine their targets to NATO or New York. After all, New Delhi is a lot closer to Waziristan.

Any thoughts? Please post them below.

AFGHANISTAN: The Trouble with Translators

Without translators, foreign troops in Afghanistan would only be able to communicate with locals by pointing to simple pictures on brightly colored cartoon cards. Translators are indispensable, and yet they rarely appear in media coverage of the conflict.

A remarkable 8-minute video report by John D McHugh on The Guardian’s website, "Afghanistan: Lost in Translation," highlights the extent of the problem by following some American soldiers whose work is hampered and whose lives are in danger because their Afghan interpreter literally lies to them. [Readers should be warned that the soldiers’ language is a bit salty.] As McHugh notes, “The translators have become unexpected powerbrokers…, and sometimes they just don’t translate everything they hear.” [photo by John D McHugh]

Of course, the media have often pointed out the fact that there aren’t enough trained interpreters who know the languages spoken in Afghanistan, but this 8 minute long report breaks new ground by showing what the stakes are for a soldier in a battlezone to be able to communicate with local people. This is my summary of the video:

An American position in Khost Province is hit by rockets launched from somewhere near a village. Soldiers from Charlie Company of the 173^rd Airborne Division go to the village to find out if the inhabitants know anything about the attack. They arrive to find the place deserted—“This is just like every other town, everybody disappeared,” says the American commander.

A lone, frightened-looking man carrying a shovel appears on the road. The translator asks where the elders are. The conversation is a bit confused but the man seems to be saying that they are in their houses. Here it becomes clear that the translator himself does not speak particularly good English. The commander snaps at the translator. “They’re in their house? Are they sick? What did he just say?” The translator tells the man to fetch the elders but he walks off seemingly in the wrong direction. Time passes.

AFGHANISTAN: Tae Kwon Do Athlete Hopes for Olympic Triumph

Usually, the stories coming out of Afghanistan in the American media are about the Taliban, the political chaos, underlying violence or the poppy business.

But NPR's Ivan Watson brings an interesting story of a 23-year-old Afghani guy who hopes to be the first one from his country to win an Olympic medal, as he heads to Beijing this summer, representing the Afghanistan national tae kwon do team.

From NPR.com:

At dawn one morning, Afghan tae kwon do champion Nisar Ahmad Bahawe is among the men jogging in Kabul's Charinaw Park.

By evening, Bahawe is barefoot, dripping sweat and yelling battle cries as he unleashes a series of powerful spin kicks against a padded target held by a trainer.

Bahawe and the rest of his team train every night in a cramped gym, located off a dirt road in Kabul.

Despite limited resources, Bahawe has been training since he was 12 and has won a silver medal at the tae kwon do world championship last year.

Watch Nisar Ahmad Bahawe's story in this NPR video. Click here to listen to the audio.

Thoughts? Please post them below.

PRESS FREEDOM: South Asian nations fail to solve journalists' murders

South Asian countries - Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India - are among the worst in the world at prosecuting the killers of journalists. A new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists, called the Impunity Index, only lists 13 countries, but it includes all the South Asian nations listed above, as well as Afghanistan, placing them in the company of Iraq (#1), Somalia (#3)and Sierra Leone (#2). India's press was praised as "one of the world's freest," but had 5 unsolved murders, making it a country where "politics and organized crime are dangerous stoies to cover."

More on the methodology:

CPJ’s Impunity Index, compiled for the first time this year, calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of the population in each country. CPJ examined every nation in the world for the years 1998 through 2007. Only those nations with five or more unsolved cases are included in this index. Cases are considered unsolved when no convictions have been obtained.

Some excerpts:

5. SRI LANKA

Fighting between government and separatist forces has long bled the nation. But journalists are more likely to be assassinated than to die in crossfire, with many of the victims ethnic Tamils. The victims include senior Tamil journalist Mylvaganam Nimalrajan, shot in his home in 2000. Nimalrajan’s murder is among eight unsolved cases here.

Impunity Index Rating: 0.408 unsolved journalist murders per 1 million inhabitants.

7. AFGHANISTAN

Despite the prolonged armed conflict in Afghanistan, journalists are more likely to be targeted for murder than to be killed in a combat situation. Seven cases are unsolved, including the 2007 slaying of local reporter Ajmal Naqshbandi. Running counter to the international trend, most victims have been foreign rather than local reporters.

Impunity Index Rating: 0.279 unsolved journalist murders per 1 million inhabitants.

PRESS FREEDOM: Canadian journo held by US military in Afghanistan

Another journalist is held without any charge by the American military forces. According to a recent press release by the Committee to Protect Journalists, Canadian TV journalist Jawed Ahmad has been arrested and detained by the US military forces at Bagram Air Base near Kabul in Afghanistan.

Ahmad, who is only 22 years old, has been detained since October 2007 according to his brother  Siddique Ahmad. From the CPJ press release (Read the full text below):

Siddique told CPJ that Ahmad said he was called to meet his CTV colleagues at Kandahar airport and then arrested. It is unclear who called him. CTV confirmed that Workman was in Kandahar at the time, but said that the correspondent had not planned to meet with Ahmad on that day. Ahmad told Siddique that he was being held because the U.S. military believed he had contacts with local Taliban leaders and was in possession of a video of Taliban materials, Siddique said.

Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders has called on U.S. defense secretary Robert M. Gates to intercede on behalf of this young journalist. (Read full text of RSF press release below).

"We call on US defence secretary Robert M. Gates to intercede on behalf of this young Afghan reporter who is clearly the victim of an arbitrary decision," the press freedom organisation said. "The lack of legal procedures and material evidence confirms that his detention is unjustified. We point out that it is not illegal for journalists to have professional contacts with all parties to a conflict including, in Afghanistan, the Taliban."

According to New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall, who knew Ahmad from her trips to Kandahar, Ahmad had only worked in journalism for one year. From the AP article:

"All of the local press corps have numbers of the Taliban and interview them regularly," she told the CPJ. "Jawed had nothing more than the others in the way of contacts with the Taliban."

With this, Ahmad becomes the third journalist to be held by U.S. forces in the Middle East. Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj has been detained in Guantanamo since December 2001 and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein was arrested in April 2006.

Any comments? Please post them below.

PRESS FREEDOM: President Karzai tells not to worry about sentenced journalist

Few weeks earlier, SAJAForum reported about a young Afghani journalist, Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, who has been sentenced to death by a court for alleged blasphemy. As journalist organizations all over the world, including groups such as Reporters Without Borders and Committee to Protect Journalists, continue to condemn this decision, something hopeful might be finally on its way.

According to Reporters sans Frontiéres, Afghani president Hamid Karzai, during his meeting with a delegation from Afghanistan Independent Journalists Association, told  them that they had no reason to worry about Kambakhsh.

From the RSF press release (Full text below):

Reporters Without Borders welcomes the undertakings given today by President Hamid Karzai as regards Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, the young journalist who has been sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of distributing information that insulted Islam. Karzai told a delegation of Afghan journalists that they had no reason to worry about him.

"We want to believe that President Karzai really is determined to find a rapid solution to this appalling affair," the press freedom organisation said. "The death sentence passed on Kambakhsh by a court in Mazar-i-Sharif is unworthy of Afghanistan, whose constitution protects free expression. We call for the case to be quickly transferred to Kabul and for the conviction to be quashed."

Kambakhsh, 23, who is a journalism student at a local university, was sentenced for publishing, what the court called controversial articles on verses in the Koran about women. However, some have claimed that his sentence was an indication to warn his brother, Ibrahimi, who had been writing articles for the Institute on War and Peace Reporting criticizing some local authorities.

Do you think Karzai will free this young journalist? Please post your comments below.

Earlier on SAJAForum:

• CPJ on Attacks on Press in 2007 in South Asia
• Afghani Journalist Faces Death Sentence for Blasphemy
• Nepali Journalist's Hand Cut Off
• Two Nepalese Dailies Disrupted by Maoists
• Cartoonist Jailed Over Mohammad Cartoons
  
• 25 Journalists Killed in South Asia During 2007

PRESS FREEDOM: CPJ on Attacks on the Press in 2007 in South Asia

The year 2007 was not the best year for South Asian journalists. As we reported earlier, this was in fact the bloodiest year in South Asian history.

In his analysis, "Amid South Asian Conflict, Remarkable Resilience," CPJ's Asia Program coordinator Bob Deitz says that despite increased violence upon press in countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, news media are far from being daunted - instead they have done a remarkable job.

"The changes can be rapid, depending on leaders’ ambitions, the state of the economy, or a worsening security situation. But the media’s persistence, resourcefulness, and cohesion have often formed a bulwark against attacks.
<snip>
"Failed governments have come and gone. Their executives, legislatures, and judiciaries are easily and regularly corrupted, but South Asian journalists have persevered to uphold a higher ideal."

From the analysis, which is part of CPJ's Attacks on the Press in 2007:

Traffic is sparse during a late-night run to the Bandaranaike International Airport north of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo. Because of insecurity caused by war between the Sinhalese-dominated government and Tamil separatists in the country’s north and east, the streets are given over to police and army checkpoints. On this September night, the air still foggy from the day’s monsoon, reporter Iqbal Athas rides in a rental car, on his way to catch a Thai Airways flight that would take him to Bangkok. An award-winning defense columnist for the English-language Sunday Times, Athas is leaving the country for his own safety: His recent reports on arms sales irregularities have drawn threats, harassment, and, on one occasion, an unruly mob of protestors outside his home. “The harassment and threats have come and gone in the past,” Athas says, “and I have to assume they will again.” He would return to Colombo in less than two weeks.

Here are the 2007 country summaries and press freedom reports on India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Burma.

Please post your thoughts below.

Earlier on SAJAforum:

• Afghani Journalist Faces Death Sentence for Blasphemy
• Nepali Journalist's Hand Cut Off
• Two Nepalese Dailies Disrupted by Maoists
• Cartoonist Jailed Over Mohammad Cartoons
  
• 25 Journalists Killed in South Asia During 2007 

PRESS FREEDOM: Journalist faces death sentence for blasphemy

A young journalism student has been sentenced to death by a court in the northern Afghani city of Mazar-e-Sharif for alleged blasphemy. Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, 23, a Balkh University student who reported for the newspaper Jahan-e-Naw, was tried in court without any lawyer defending him, a Reporters san Frontiers report says.

Kambakhsh was supposedly arrested because of a controversial article commenting on verses in the Koran about women, although it has now been established that he was not the article’s author. Rahimullah Samandar, the head of the Afghanistan Independent Journalists Association, said he was in fact arrested because of articles written by his brother, Ibrahimi, criticising the provincial authorities.

And earlier report by RSF said that mullahs had been calling for Kambakhsh's death penalty.

Committee to Protect Journalists writes that Kambakhsh was arrested on October 27 for distributing what officials said was anti-Islamic law.

He was detained by National Directorate of Security (NDS) forces after downloading and giving to friends an article that said the Prophet Mohammed ignored women’s rights, according to Samander and Reuters. He is also accused of possessing anti-Islamic books and starting un-Islamic debates in his classes. While Kambakhsh admits to circulating the article, he denies the accusations of blasphemy, which is punishable by death under Islamic law, Samander said.        

Ibrahimi’s office [Kambakhsh's brother] was sealed and his rooms searched by NDS officers at the time of Kambakhsh’s arrest, according to the institute. He has previously received anonymous death threats by phone and online as well as a visit from NDS officers at home, according to a statement from the institute.

The report also says that Kambakhsh's brother, Ibrahimi, writes for Institute of War and Peace Reporting and he has been the focus of escalating pressure over sensitive reports he has written criticizing local officials and warlords.

It and other Afghan sources say they fear that the charges against Kambakhsh are a pretext meant to stop his brother from reporting.

Full RSF Press Release below. Comments?
Earlier on SAJAForum:

• Nepali Journalist's Hand Cut Off
• Two Nepalese Dailies Disrupted by Maoists
• Cartoonist Jailed Over Mohammad Cartoons
  
• 25 Journalists Killed in South Asia During 2007 

AFGHANISTAN: What would we do without experts?

No comment.

[Thanks to David W. for sending this our way.]

AFGHANISTAN: Indian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan

This news comes as a shock to me because I had never heard that Indian soldiers were being involved in Afghanistan. But last week, the Hindustan Times reported that two Indian soldiers were killed in a suicide bomb attack in Razai village, in the southwest province of Nimroz.

In the first-ever suicide attack on Indian nationals in Afghanistan, two Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) men were killed and five others wounded in Razai village, in the southwest province of Nimroz, on Thursday.

The suicide bomber struck minutes after an Afghan police convoy was hit by a motorcycle bomb on the 218-km Zaranj-Delaram road being constructed  by the ITBP , officials said. At least six Afghan police personnel were killed.

National Review reporter Jonathan Foreman writes that the involvement of Indian soldiers in Afghanistan has gone unreported in the West and "perhaps some of the journalists in Kabul need to get out of town more."

  In fact there are at least 1,000 Indian paramilitary soldiers of the 'Indo-Tibetan Border Police' and the 'Border Roads Organization' — an adjunct to the Indian military similar to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — operating in Afghanistan.

These forces are not part of NATO/ISAF and have little or no contact with NATO or U.S. commands. Their official mission is the protection of Indian construction teams and businesses, India being one of the larger aid donors and investors in Afghanistan, up there with Iran. Two Indian contractors have been abducted and beheaded by militants in the last two years.

There were some references in 2001 about India's assistance in anti-Taliban coalition. But their current involvement  was definitely not known to most people.

Does anyone know more on this topic? Please post your comments below.

LISTS: Forbes list of "World's 100 Most Powerful Women"

Forbes is out with its list of "the world's 100 most power women" and there are a few South Asians on there. You will see two right in the top 10: Indra Nooyi at #5 and Sonia Gandhi at #6. Toward the rear at Dr. Dina Samar at #92 and Vidya Chhabria at #97. The #1 slot is held, not surprisingly, by Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany.

You will notice they forgot to put in the right description of Sonia Gandhi on at least one of the listings - she isn't president of India, but president of the ruling Congress Party:

5	Indra K. Nooyi	Chairman, chief executive, PepsiCo	U.S.
6	Sonia Gandhi	President	India

What do you think? Is this a good list? Post your comments below.

EARLIER ON SAJAFORUM:

• Time 100 list of most powerful people includes Sonia Gandhi & Indra Nooyi.

TECHNOLOGY: Amy Smith and Her Students Try to Change the World

A nugget from Pakistani journalist (and former Nieman Fellow) Beena Sarwar's always-interesting e-mail list. "Check out this amazing video talk by Amy Smith, an MIT engineer," she says. It's from the legendary TED conferences ("Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers"). You can spend hours learning new things from the videos on the site. The online talks are free; the actual conference itself costs thousands of dollars.

About this Talk: Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. MIT engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for converting farm waste into cleaner-burning fuel. Plain-spoken and passionate, Smith talks about some other tools she and her students are creating, including an incubator that stays warm without electricity and a grain mill that frees women from hours of grinding every day. These are basic tools with world-changing results.

About Amy Smith: Amy Smith designs cheap, practical fixes for tough problems in developing countries. Among her many accomplishments, the MIT engineer received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2004 and was the first woman to win the Lemelson-MIT SPrize for turning her ideas into inventions. [ More on Amy here ]

MAGAZINES: 130+ South Asian Covers From 1921 to the Present

The cover on the right, "India: Liberty & Death" is what ran on the cover of Time on Oct. 27, 1947.  And it's a part of a major SAJA research project that you can participate in. Starting in Oct. 2006, we have been building right here the largest database of major U.S. magazines featuring South Asia and South Asians.

Below is a collage/slideshow of the covers we found - 75+ 85+ 100+ 125+ 130+ as of now. This not a comprehensive list and we need your help to make it better. If you know of a cover image we missed, please let us know in the comments section. Better yet, include the URL or file of the image. Or e-mail us at saja[at]columbia.edu - subject line = "South Asian covers." We will keep adding to this slideshow as you help us find more covers.

A quick analysis and trivia (add your own below).

• The images on the cover seem to fall into these major categories: photos/illustration/cartoons of newsmakers; and photo illustrations/cartoons featuring some typical subcontinental elements, including elephants (lots of elephants!), turbans, snake charmers, sari borders, multi-armed gods/goddesses, etc, etc.
• Since SAJA is most interested in tracking the American press, we are only including the U.S. editions of Time, Newsweek, Businessweek, etc. The Asian editions of these mags regularly feature South Asian themes. We have also included the U.S. edition of The Economist, which is a separate edition created for American audiences.
• Time is the only publication which has full archives of its covers online and easily accessible. It's search function, too, is very good. Once you find a cover you are interested in, you can read the table of contents and read the stories themselves. You can also buy the cover images, ready for framing or already framed.
  If you have access to Newsweek and other mags' covers, please help fill in the gaps.
• Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was popular with the editors of Time. He made the cover  six times, his daughter, Indira Gandhi  and the most famous Indian of them all, Mahatma Gandhi  (no relation, of course), only three times each (see results for a search of "Gandhi").
• Gandhi's first appearance, in March 1930, is in a drawing so unusual that you may not  recognize him.
• In the run-up to Partition, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and Sardar Patel, a major Congress leader, both made the cover once each.
• Nehru's repeated appearances show you how the world has changed. I can't easily imagine a near-term scenario when a leader from anywhere in South Asia makes multiple appearances on the covers of the U.S. editions of Time or Newsweek. I would love to be proven wrong, of course.
• While three other British Viceroys made the cover of Time (Irwin, Linlithgow, Wavell), Lord Louis Mountbatten never made the cover as Viceroy (he did make the cover, in June 1942, for his leadership during World Word II).
• The nuclear test of May 1998 by India and Pakistan did not get full cover treatment in the U.S. As you can see from this Time cover, Frank Sinatra's death moved the test to a secondary story and  a cover mention; same thing for that week's Newsweek.
• In the last couple of years, almost all the covers have to do with India's economy, rather than South Asia's politics, security, etc.
• We couldn't find Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf on a major U.S. magazine cover - though he must have made it at least one - let us know if you know if you find one.
• Naeem Mohaiemen says in the comments: "Bangladesh's independence war in 1971 was mostly covered as the 'India-Pakistan war' in US media, and most of the focus was on last 20 days when India intervened on behalf of Bangladesh."

Please take a look and post your comments, analysis, etc, below. You can control each image by clicking on the forward, pause and back buttons.

SOUTH ASIA-RELATED COVERS, 1926-2007 (in reverse order)

Post your comments below - help us make this list better! If you can't see the covers above, click here.

[This is just an example of the kinds of activities that SAJA does. You can support us by becoming a member - just $10 a year for students, $20 for journalists, $40 for everyone else. Sign up now. Or you can make a donation of any amount (click "I will attend" on that link).]

PAKISTAN: A British Woman's Impact on Remotest Pakistan

Jonathan Foreman, a British-New Yorker who has been in and out of South Asia for more than 15 years, has a big piece in the Telegraph Magazine on July 28, 2007. It's a piece called "Titan of Kalash" and is about an eccentric 69-year-old Englishwoman known as "Bibi Doe." The subhead reads: "The last enclave of pagan tribespeople in remotest Pakistan might already have fallen to the combined ravages of modernity and militant Islam were it not for a redoubtable, eccentric Englishwoman." From the article:

It is hard to believe that anyone could make the journey from Peshawar to Chitral so often - but last October alone Bibi Doe did it 12 times. She regularly puts up with dangers and physical discomforts that would fell a woman half her age. In 1990, for instance, she almost drowned when her Land Cruiser was hit by a flash flood while crossing a river. (She never now wears a seatbelt.)

For Bibi Doe, death threats are a fact of life. She has battled corrupt officials, the frontier timber mafia, Kalash distillers of lethal moonshine liquor, bigoted mullahs, pimps, jihadist militants, insensitive tourists, unscrupulous entrepreneurs, giant aid agencies, foreign academics and do-gooders she considers exploitative. 'If you ever read that I've died in accident,' she said as we loaded up her Land Cruiser before leaving for Birir, 'you'd better come back and investigate what really happened.'

Bibi Doe is named after her favourite Kalash dog - an orphaned pup she adopted in 1986 after its mother was taken by a wolf. The children of the valleys heard her shouting, 'Bibi Doe! Bibi Doe!' as she tramped up and down the trails with a backpack full of medicines. It became their name for her, and then everyone's name for her. When she raised money for the repair of a 1927 suspension bridge across the Chitral river, on which the commerce of the valleys depends, she ensured that a plaque on the bridge read, 'Repaired 2006 by Bibi Doe'.

The caption for the photo above, by Mark Read, reads: "Maureen Lines, aka Bibi Doe, with her Kalash 'sister' Sainusar, left, and one of the men who help run her medical dispensary"

Read the full piece here and post your comments below.

MICROFINANCE: World Bank Looks at Impact on South Asia

The World Bank has released a new report on microfinance and its impact on South Asia: "Microfinance in South Asia: Toward Financial Inclusion For The Poor."
Highlights:

Three decades after the modern microfinance movement was born in Bangladesh, a new World Bank report looks at how microfinance has impacted the lives of poor people in South Asia.

Key Data:
- Microfinance reaches at least 35 million families in South Asia
- Coverage is particularly impressive in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka,
where microfinance reaches more than 60 percent of the poor
- Women in South Asia are the majority client for Microfinance
- Even in a socially conservative country such as Afghanistan,
microfinance activity focuses on women

Read the whole report here and post your comments below. Do you agree with the conclusions?

EARLIER ON SAJAforum:

• SAJA Newsmaker Q&A with Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank

PAKISTAN: U.S. Continues Large Payouts

This is running on the NYT site tonight and will be a big story in the paper on Sunday: David E. Sanger and former New Delhi co-bureau chief David Rohde report that the "U.S. Pays Pakistan to Fight Terror, But Patrols Ebb."

The United States is continuing to make large payments of roughly $1 billion a year to Pakistan  for what it calls reimbursements to the country’s military for conducting counterterrorism efforts along the border with Afghanistan, even though Pakistan’s president decided eight months ago to slash patrols through the area where Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are most active.

The monthly payments, called coalition support funds, are not widely advertised. Buried in public budget numbers, the payments are intended to reimburse Pakistan’s military for the cost of the operations. So far, Pakistan has received more than $5.6 billion under the program over five years, more than half of the total aid the United States has sent to the country since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, not counting covert funds.

Read the entire piece. Post your reax in the comments section below.

AFGHANISTAN: What it Takes to be a Woman Entrepreneur

An unusual item about Afghanistan, via the blog of Guy Kawasaki, the famous Silicon Valley pioneer.

What’s the most inspiring story of entrepreneurship that you’ve heard in 2006? My answer does not involve two guys in a garage who sell their company to Google for $1.6 billion. No way...my answer is a woman who runs a soccer-ball factory in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Her name is Aziza Mohmmand, and she told me what it takes to be a woman entrepreneur in Afghanistan. I met Aziza when I spoke to a group of Afghani women who were attending a class in entrepreneurship at Thunderbird in Glendale, Arizona. (Interestingly, Thunderbird is a former Air Force base.)

Read the full interview. Post your comments below.

CURRENT AFFAIRS: HuffPost NewsRanker for South Asia

A lot of SAJA's work is about how the various countries of South Asia are covered in the press. But what about how often the countries are covered? Using a free web tool created by The Huffington Post called NewsRanker, here are two fun little live graphics. 

The first is a constantly updated look at how often the countries are mentioned on the web in the last seven days. It's not comprehensive, of course, but it's fun to take a look. You can click on any country's figures to get some links from the HuffPost and other sites. [As of Jan. 1, 2007, at 11:42 pm, the numbers for the countries below are: 7,796; 2,559; 652; 1,389; 392; 47; 79; 4,006.]

The second is a constantly updated comparison between the mentions of Prime Minister Singh and President Musharraf. [As of Jan. 1, 2007, at 11:42 pm, the numbers are 470 to 268.]

 

You can put any names you are interested in and track them yourself. You can also e-mail these to your friends or embed these on your own site.

Please post your comments below.

MEDIA: Press freedom rankings 2006

Reporters Without Borders (that's Reporters sans frontières to all you French speakers) has released its annual press freedom rankings. The report, Reporters Without Borders Worldwide Press Freedom Index, paints a chilling portrait of the restrictions (and worse) under which journalists toil in many parts of the world. All the press coverage of the report is going to focus on two items: North Korea, Turkmenistan and Eritrea as the worst offenders (168, 167 and 166, respectively, out of 168 countries) and the U.S. slipping nine places further in the rankings, to 53 (after being at 17 in the inaugural list in 2002). Finland, Iceland, Ireland and Netherlands are tied for first.

Here's how the South Asian countries did (along with last year's ranking):

• Bhutan: 98 (148), up 135 in 2002
• India: 105 (106), down from 80 in 2002
• Afghanistan: 130 (125), down from 104 in 2002
• Bangladesh: 137 (151), down from 118 in 2002
• Sri Lanka: 141 (115), down from 51 in 2002
• Maldives: 144 (148), unranked in 2002
  
• Pakistan: 157 (150), down from 119 in 2002
• Nepal: 159 (160), down from 127 in 2002

Overall, the South Asian picture is pretty dismal, and the trends are bad, too.

See the full reports here: 2006 | 2005 | 2002
How the report was compiled
Asia evaluation in PDF

Reporters Without Borders compiled the Index by asking the 14 freedom of expression organisations that are its partners worldwide, its network of 130 correspondents, as well as journalists, researchers, jurists and human rights activists, to answer 50 questions about press freedom in their countries. The Index covers 168 nations. Others were not included for lack of data about them.

Reax? Got an analysis of the rankings? Post your comments below (requires free, one-time TypePad registration)

MAGS: South Asia Covers, Anyone?

This posting has been updated and moved to July 31, 2007.