Members of the Maldives Cabinet meet underwater on October 17. Photo: 350.org on Flickr

In December, delegates from most of the countries from around the globe gathered in Copenhagen to discuss how to slow the pace of climate change.

While no full-scale agreement was reached, a political accord emerged from the conference, which China and India endorsed just last week.

But rather than discussing the big greenhouse gas emitters, we want to look deeper at the immediate consequences of climate change on small islands — from the Caribbean to the South Pacific.

Joining Martin Savidge are Ronald Jumeau and May Boeve to discuss:

• Copenhagen conference: results, shortcomings and lessons
• Best/worst-case scenarios: small islands, climate change and the future
• U.S./wider world: carbon emissions, regulation and Obama’s policies

GUESTS:

Ronald Jumeau has been the Permanent Representative of the Seychelles to the United Nations since 2007. Previously, he served as Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources, and as Minister for Culture and Infomation.

May Boeve is a co-founder of the climate change group 350.org, where she works on international partnerships and political strategy. Previously, she worked on the Step It Up campaign, which helped shape the debate about global warming policy in the U.S.

CREDITS:
Host: Martin Savidge
Producer: Ben Piven

The Ushahidi-Chile project map on March 2.

The Ushahidi crisis mapping site, which recently collated information from Haitian earthquake victims, has set up a sister site to aggregate similar data from Chile, a country recovering from a devastating 8.8-magnitude quake.

Ushahidi-Chile collects, filters and then maps information submitted by citizens via email, text message and Twitter feeds. This Ushahidi project is coordinated by students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and its goal is to guide the relief effort and identify immediate needs.

“The idea behind the site is to provide as much information as possible to organizations in the field and to people in Chile,” said Anahi Ayala Iacucci, co-director of the SIPA team for Ushahidi-Chile. “We put available information onto a map that anyone can access.”

An advantage of the site, she says, is that it combines individual nuggets of information in one place and can help establish an overview of the situation on the ground.

Messages currently on the site include information on medical emergencies, trapped survivors and structural damage. For example, from Santa Cruz: “No Electricity, Buildings Down in Santa Cruz”. Another message from Santiago reads “Plz Help: im stuck under a building with my child”. According to Ayala Iacucci, information on missing people is passed on to Google’s Missing Person Finder site.

“Our major source of information is from Twitter feeds, the web and from monitoring local media,” said Ayala Iacucci, adding that there is still reasonable access to the internet in Chile. In Haiti, by contrast, most information that Ushahidi received was by text message. Around 50 student volunteers at SIPA - many of them from Latin America - translate the collected information and then input the data onto the interactive map.

The project will continue at SIPA until the operation is handed over to Chilean volunteers. “In this sense it is a full circle,” said Ayala Iacucci. “We receive information from the field, and put it back into field.”

Ushahidi means “testimony” in Swahili and was initially founded in early 2008 to monitor and map post-election violence in Kenya.

To send Ushahidi information about the aftermath of Chile’s earthquake: International text message +44 7624802524/e-mail chile@ushahidi.com/Twitter #chile or #terremotochile. Information can also be submitted via the web.

- James Matthews

Listen to an audio interview with freelance journalist Annie Murphy in Concepción.

A famous American adage states, “As General Motors goes, so goes the nation.” In Japan, many are wondering if the same principle applies to Toyota, which has recently recalled more than 8 million vehicles.

Our German partner Deutsche Welle reports from Japan.

Has Toyota done enough to restore customer confidence in the safety and quality of its cars?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please be respectful and on-point. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted, and repeat offenders will be banned.

A street in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum. Photo: Ben Piven

The government of India announced plans earlier this week to do comprehensive mapping of slums in the entire country.

In many of India’s big cities such as Mumbai, well over half the population reside in slums.

Using Geographical Information System mapping, the project aims to produce reliable numbers about slum populations — to further the government’s ambitious goal of making India slum-free within five years.

Officials say that the detailed geographic information will also make it easier for municipalities to provide basic services to slum dwellers, including water and electricity.

Yet some advocacy groups argue that the effort, hatched by Housing Minister Kumari Selja and reliant on technology used by the Indian Space Research Organisation, would merely facilitate redevelopment plans and the relocation of slum dwellers.

Worldfocus spoke with Pratima Joshi, director of housing NGO Shelter Associates, based in Pune, India, for more about the issue:

Worldfocus: Do you support the new slum mapping plan?

Pratima Joshi: Yes, we support the government’s slum mapping program. This is largely based on our model of poverty mapping. Shelter Associates pioneered the use of GIS for mapping poverty in India way back in 1999, and ever since we have been urging cities to have this kind of spatial data in place for effective, inclusive planning.

Worldfocus: What are the primary reasons why the government wants to gather this information?

Joshi: We have been able to demonstrate through some of our projects — especially Sangli — that such information helps to develop a citywide approach to developing the degraded areas in your city and helps achieve optimal utilization of scarce resources like land, instead of the usual piecemeal approach.

Worldfocus: How are slum dweller advocacy groups trying to stop the mapping effort?

Joshi: We have not encountered this problem with our work.

Worldfocus: Will Mumbai benefit from highly-detailed information about its slums, where the majority of Mumbaikars reside?

Joshi: Absolutely. In fact I believe that the need of the hour is to look at slums within the neighborhood and citywide perspectives, rather than just see places liked Dharavi as isolated slum pockets. There could be better solutions emerging if a holistic approach is adopted.

- Ben Piven

This event added to fears of a digital attack that could cripple the information superhighway. In Washington, former security officials have met to role-play how the government would cope with such an attack.

For more, Martin Savidge interviews James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Lewis discusses the readiness of the government to deal with an attack and the likelihood of one taking place. He also talks about how this issue could impact U.S.-China relations.

Now you can take one of the great train journeys of the world without leaving the comfort of your own home.

A new joint venture between Google and Russian Railways provides a virtual gateway to the world’s longest continuous railway.

Look out the window and take in the scenery as you travel more than 5,600 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok. Here’s the portal in English and in Russian.

There are more than 150 hours of footage shot from a moving train, as it winds across seven times zones.

You’ll travel over the Volga, the Yenisei and the Ob Rivers; around Lake Baikal, the deepest freshwater lake in the world; into and out of cities like Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest; through the Barguzin mountains; and alongside wooden Siberian villages. The 30-minute-stretch from Petrovsk-Zabailkalsky city is particularly picturesque.

To accompany your voyage, you can choose to listen to the hypnotic, natural sound of wheels churning along the tracks. Or, you can select to have Russian radio or traditional balalaika music piping through the “train.”

Riders aren’t able to listen to literary classics like Tolstoi’s War and Peace and Gogol’s Dead Souls, but you can, provided you understand Russian.

If you’re feeling antsy and don’t think you’ll last cooped up on the train for the full six-to-seven days of the voyage, you can stop, jump off and explore fourteen cities en route (a luxury that a Moscow-to-Vladivostok ticket won’t allow).

Through Google maps, you can view video, look at photographs, and read facts and descriptions of historic sites, museums and markets.

Take, for instance, the city of Ulan-Ude — the capital of Russia’s Buryat Republic and major center of Tibetan Buddhism — about three-quarters of the way to the journey’s end.

On a short side trip, you can take a video excursion down Gagarin Street, view photos of the city’s panorama, and read about the Ivolginsky Datsan, where the body of Khambo Lama Itigelov, leader of Russian Buddhists from 1911-1918, is preserved.

View the full Ulan Ude map on Google

While you may not be able to feel the wind on your face, talk to your fellow passengers, or taste the fresh berries and homemade pirozhki sold along route, this virtual train ride will give you a sense of the vastness of the landscape of the world’s largest country.

My weekend plans? I’m finally jumping aboard the Trans-Siberian.

- Christine Kiernan

The Ministry of Railways estimates that more than 200 million passengers will be traveling by train alone.

Then there are those who travel on the cheap. CCTV, the English-language service of China’s state television, reports on how some are getting home for the holidays.

A Predator armed with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. Photo: USAF

This week, the Pakistani Taliban finally confirmed what the Pakistani army had claimed many days ago — that Hakimullah Mehsud was killed last month in a missile strike by U.S. drones.

While there are conflicting reports about which strike dealt Mehsud the mortal blow, the Pakistani Taliban are left leaderless for the second time in six months.

As the late Mehsud’s faction — as well as various other Taliban-affiliated groups — scramble to defend themselves from unmanned aerial vehicles, some policymakers are wondering whether these assassinations are strategically sound.

Although many of President Barack Obama’s harshest critics at home have lavished praise on the administration for its escalation of the drone campaign, some naysayers now contend that the U.S. may be killing high-value targets before being able to extract information from them — in northwest Pakistan, as well as in other anti-terror arenas such as Yemen.

Marc Thiessen explains this problem in Foreign Policy:

The Predator has become for President Obama what the cruise missile was to President Bill Clinton — an easy way to appear like he is taking tough action against terrorists, when he is really shying away from the hard decisions needed to protect the United States.

To be sure, unmanned drones are critical in the struggle against al-Qaeda. They allow the United States to reach terrorists hiding in remote regions where it would be difficult for special operations forces to reach them, or to act on perishable intelligence when the only choice is to kill a terrorist or lose him. Constantly hovering Predator (or Reaper) drones also have a psychological effect on the enemy, forcing al-Qaeda leaders to live in fear and spend time focusing on self-preservation that would otherwise be used planning the next attack. All this is for the good.

The problem is that Obama is increasingly using drone strikes as a substitute for operations to bring terrorist leaders in alive for questioning — and that is putting the country at risk…

With every drone strike that vaporizes a senior al-Qaeda leader, actionable intelligence is vaporized along with him. Dead terrorists can’t tell you their plans to strike America.

Meanwhile, Dawn reports that the Obama administration’s recent budget proposal includes a 75 percent increase in funds for the drone campaign, which also includes new, more advanced crafts.

View our interactive map showing approximate locations of all U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004:

See larger map. [Yellow = pre-2008 strikes / Red = 2008 strikes / Green = Obama administration strikes]

In a Sydney Morning Herald analysis piece America’s Deadly Robots Rewrite the Rules, Paul McGeough writes:

The changed ground rules making extrajudicial killing more acceptable are a product of post-September 11 thinking. In 2001 Bush overturned President Gerald Ford’s 1976 prohibition on assassinations by US intelligence agencies - but there’s something else in the works, too…

But, as critics of the drone wars struggle to get traction in public debate, it is curious that in the absence of any negative reaction to Obama’s expansion of his remote killing program last year, the former Bush administration was under attack for revelations that it had considered dispatching more traditional hit-squads abroad to take out al-Qaeda operatives.

Forty-four countries now use unmanned aircraft for surveillance - only the US and Israel deploy them as killers.

In the first weeks of his presidency Obama reportedly wrestled with the moral and strategic implications of the program. But, as reported in The New York Times, he pointedly declared to one of his earliest Situation Room gatherings: “The CIA gets what it needs.”

The American Civil Liberties Union explained in a Freedom of Information application last month: “It appears … that lethal force is being exercised by individuals who are not in the military chain of command, are not subject to military rules and discipline; and do not operate under any other public system of accountability or oversight.”

A Democrat’s targeted killings, it seems, are not quite the same as those of a Republican.

The first drones flew before the September 11 attacks - searching for Osama bin Laden. Now the US Air Force estimates that about 15 per cent of its $US230 billion ($260 billion) arms-procurement program will be spent on robot equipment within five years.

Predators can fly [420 miles], then hover for 30 hours at a stretch, feeding real-time video and other data through 10 simultaneous streams to controllers in 10 locations. Priced at $4.5 million, Predators carry sensors that intercept electronic signals and listen in on phone conversations - and they carry missiles. The newer Reapers cost $17 million and can fly nearly [3600 miles].

The US Air Force now has more drone operators in training than fighter and bomber pilots.

A recent article from the Associated Press argues that two main factors have enabled the drone war to take off: the drawdown of troops and resources in Iraq and the Obama administration’s increased intelligence-sharing with the governments of Pakistan and Yemen:

Intelligence officials and analysts say the drawdown of troops in an increasingly stable Iraq is part of the reason for the increase in drone strikes. The military once relied on drones for around-the-clock surveillance to flush out insurgents, support troops in battle and help avoid roadside bombs.

With fewer of those missions required, the U.S. has moved many of those planes to Afghanistan, roughly doubling the size of the military and CIA fleet that can patrol the lawless border with Pakistan, officials said.

“These tools were not Obama creations, but he’s increased their use and he has shifted the U.S. attention full front to Afghanistan,” said Thomas Sanderson, a defense analyst and national security fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The article goes on to explain the second reason for the drone war’s escalation:

Obama has also abandoned terms like “radical Islam” and “Islamo-fascism,” rhetoric that was seen as anti-Muslim by many in the Arab world and which [Yemen's Ambassador to the UN] al-Saidi said made it harder for governments to openly cooperate with Washington.

View our original post: U.S. intensifies drone attacks on Pakistan’s tribal region

- Ben Piven

Solar panels in Shanghai. Photo: Flickr user jcrakow

China, the world’s largest producer of wind turbines and solar panels, is rapidly becoming the leading global manufacturer of clean energy.

According to the U.S. News and World Report, China also provides almost 97 percent of the world’s supply of rare-earth materials, which are used in many electronics and may be the future of clean technologies. China is also the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

Some critics are concerned that, as the the U.S. and other countries become less dependent on oil, they may become increasingly dependent on China for alternative energy technologies.

A New York Times article by Keith Bradsher analyzes these concerns and how this shift may be more positive for the Chinese economy than for the planet:

These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.

“Most of the energy equipment will carry a brass plate, ‘Made in China,’” said K. K. Chan, the chief executive of Nature Elements Capital, a private equity fund in Beijing that focuses on renewable energy.

President Obama, in his State of the Union speech last [month], sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind other countries, especially China, on energy. “I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders.”

Foreign Policy blogger Elizabeth Balkan writes how a Chinese solar company plans to build a U.S.-based manufacturing plant to take advantage of the market demand and government incentives. She explains what this could mean for China-U.S. green energy cooperation:

Suntech, the world’s largest solar energy company in terms of photovoltaic module production, said it could cut transport costs and emissions by building closer to its market. The cost of shipping heavy renewable units, combined with the fact that the U.S. and EU currently constitute the majority of clean tech demand, makes local manufacturing facilities a sensible strategy for long-term growth.

Political considerations were also not lost on the company. Appealing to both green jobs enthusiasts and those who perceive China as taking manufacturing jobs from the U.S., Shi said he is hopeful that “initiating manufacturing in the U.S. will drive further growth of green jobs.”

A study last year by the Georgia Tech Research Institute concluded that China would surpass the United States in technology and science by using demand for clean energy as a catalyst for economic growth:

The study’s indicators predict that China will soon pass the United States in the critical ability to develop basic science and technology, turn those developments into products and services – and then market them to the world. Though China is often seen as just a low-cost producer of manufactured goods, the new “High Tech Indicators” study done by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology clearly shows that the Asian powerhouse has much bigger aspirations.

“For the first time in nearly a century, we see leadership in basic research and the economic ability to pursue the benefits of that research – to create and market products based on research – in more than one place on the planet,” said Nils Newman, co-author of the National Science Foundation-funded study. “Since World War II, the United States has been the main driver of the global economy. Now we have a situation in which technology products are going to be appearing in the marketplace that were not developed or commercialized here. We won’t have had any involvement with them and may not even know they are coming.”

Blogger CC Huang at ResponsibleChina.com, writes citizen participation in China’s clean energy push:

Another way in which China could be an example to other countries is rooted in the habits of its citizens. The 2009 Greendex survey showed that China ranked third in terms of environmentally friendly consumer behavior. Chinese citizens drink boiled tap water instead of bottled water, use bikes for transportation more often than cars (China scoring highest overall in the transportation category), and practice energy-saving activities when it comes to housing.

Of course, China is still very much a coal-guzzling economy. Due to the massive amounts of coal found within China’s borders, this might not change anytime soon. Also, as China still has a ways to go before being fully “developed,” consumption is likely to increase.

For more on clean energy developments in China, check out our Worldfocus signature video on Chinese knockoff electric cars and multimedia features at the Asia Society’s China Green.

Also, The Green Leap Forward, by energy analyst Julian L. Wong, who appeared on Worldfocus Radio: Red China Goes Green, takes a look at the most recent solar power developments in China.

In Tokyo today, the company announced its latest recall — more than 400,000 Prius and other hybrid vehicles worldwide — bringing the total recalls to 8.5 million.

The announcement was accompanied by a new apology by Toyota’s chairman, who said the company will face up to the facts and correct the brake problem — putting customers’ safety first.

For more, Daljit Dhaliwal interview Roben Farzad, a senior writer at Bloomberg Business Week. He talks about who might benefit from Toyota’s troubles– including Hyundai and Ford.

What do you think about Toyota’s response to the problems with its cars?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please be respectful and on-point. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted, and repeat offenders will be banned.

The country’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency informed that U.N. organization in Vienna of Iran’s decision to enrich some of its low-enriched uranium to a higher level.

While the ambassador said the purpose was for medical treatment, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the international community had no choice but to move toward imposing new sanctions on Iran.

Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, joins Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss the issue. He talks about why the medical use rationale is dubious and how the upcoming anniversary of the Islamic republic may be affecting the Iranian leadership.

Our German partner Deutsche Welle has more on how Iran has raised the stakes.

Is Iran putting itself on the fast track toward developing nuclear weapons?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please be respectful and on-point. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted, and repeat offenders will be banned.

But some of our viewers commented that most of the electricity that these vehicles use is generated by coal, which increases air pollution and greenhouse gases.

We take a deeper look at China’s battle against air pollution and highlight more multimedia features produced by the Clearing the Air project by China Green at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.

To visualize the difference between a smoggy day and a clear day in Bejing, China Green created a photo slider where you can move your mouse across to see the contrast in one frame:

The project has also included a daily photo diary of Beijing’s air quality, listing the best and worst days for air pollution levels.

This project recently expanded to include a Twitter competition BeijingAirPix between photos of Beijing and New York. Beijing defintely does not always lose!

In addition to the visuals, the site explains how air pollution is measured:

Air pollution index (API), published by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, is derived from measurements of five pollutants: Sulfur Dioxide, Nitrogen Dioxide, PM10, Carbon Monoxide and Ozone. The average concentration for each pollutant is calculated daily and the concentration of the pollutant with the highest API (0-500) will become that day’s major pollutant, recorded as that day’s API figure. In Beijing, PM10–particulate matter 10 microns or smaller–is the major pollutant most days.

And, there is an explanation of what the government has done thus far:

The Chinese have invested about 120 billion yuan ($17.3 billion) over the last 10 years to improve air quality in the capital. Although the levels of many major pollutants like Sulfur Dioxide and Nitrogen Dioxide are now at target levels, the concentration of PM10, or inhalable particulate matter, remains above national targets. During the Olympic Games, Beijing shut down upwind factories, halted construction and imposed strict traffic controls to control emissions.

The site also offers a news feed of recent articles on China’s air quality.

Longing for Blue Skies explains the attempts by China’s government to rein in air pollution during a period of major economic growth:

As the company continues to grapple with the fallout from its recent recalls, we look at the likely effect on Toyota sales and the wider implications for the Japanese economy.

Edward Lincoln, Director of the Center for Japan-U.S. Business and Economic Studies and Clinical Professor of Economics at New York University Stern School of Business, joins Daljit Dhaliwal to discuss the issue.

He estimates the debacle may cost Toyota one billion dollars. Lincoln says the company can probably weather the crisis — but not without some damage to its reputation.

Photo by Ben Piven for Worldfocus

North Korea is one of the most closed-off societies in the world. Information from inside the country is notoriously difficult to gather.

Radio signals are jammed, internet connections blocked and cell phones monitored. To combat this lack of information some news organizations pay informants to smuggle news out.

These sources, often cultivated by South Korean news agencies as “underground stringers,” risk their lives for little pay. But as many as half of their reports are false, according to a recent New York Times article by Choe Sang-hun:

The reports are sketchy at best, covering small pockets of North Korea society. Many prove wrong, contradict each other or remain unconfirmed. But they have also produced important scoops, like the currency devaluation and a recent outbreak of swine flu in North Korea. The mainstream media in South Korea now regularly quote these cottage-industry news services.

“Technology made this possible,” said Sohn Kwang-joo, the chief editor of Daily NK. “We infiltrate the wall of North Korea with cellphones.”

Over the past decade, the North’s border with China has grown more porous as famine drove many North Koreans out in search of food and an increasing traffic in goods — and information — developed. A new tribe of North Korean merchants negotiates smuggling deals with Chinese partners, using Chinese cellphones that pick up signals inside the North Korean border.

Worldfocus also spoke with Barbara Demick, Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, about North Korean informants:

Regarding the underground news agencies, I’ve found that their reports are plausible, but a little exaggerated. For example, Good Friends’ NK Today was the first to report the famine in the 90s, but I think their claims of the death toll were overstated. These agencies have on occasion given vague reports of protests that I think have a kernel of truth — but are also exaggerated.

For example, I have never interviewed a defector who personally witnessed any kind of public protest in North Korea, although I think there have been localized incidents at the markets where vendors complained to market management or resisted arrest by the police. There have also been a fair number of incidents in which security officials were murdered.

On the ethics of the agencies paying informants, I think it would be unethical for them not to pay — in that these people are risking their lives. According to Choe Sang-hun’s recent piece [above], some of the informants are actually considered to be reporters who are working. But there is no doubt just the same that paying taints the quality of information. It creates an incentive for them to tell you what they think you would want to hear. We don’t pay for interviews with defectors, although when I interview them I am usually with a missionary who might be providing food and clothing.

Worldfocus put together a list of English-language news agencies and blogs that cover North Korea. These sites try to gather information from within North Korea:

• Daily NK was created by activists from the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights. As the world’s first dedicated North Korean online news site, The Daily NK reports in real time.
• NK Today is produced by Good Friends USA to help the North Korean people from a humanistic point of view and describe the way North Korean people live as accurately as possible.
• North Korean Economy Watch is intended for business people, policy makers, academics and journalists but does not generally focus on human rights or the nuclear issue.

• DPRK Studies promotes awareness of North Korean security, social, political and historical issues. It is a portal to news, research, opinion, and organizations on North Korea.

• The Hankyoreh is a progressive newspaper decisively committed to journalistic freedom, democracy, peaceful coexistence and national reconciliation between South and North Korea.

• Kyodo News is distributed to almost all newspapers and radio-TV networks in Japan. Kyodo has a special English-language section dedicated to North Korea.

• Yonhap News Agency is based in Seoul and is the largest news-gathering network in Korea. There is a monthly magazine and a weekly e-newsletter dedicated to covering news from North Korea.

And these sites serve as North Korea’s official media, propagating pro-government news and information.

• Korean Central News Agency is the Pyongyang-based state-run news agency of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. News is transmitted to other countries in English, Russian, and Spanish.

• Korean Friendship Association was founded on November of the year 2000 with the purpose of building international ties with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

For more Worldfocus coverage of North Korea, visit our extended coverage page: Behind the Korean Curtain.

Today, Toyota admitted that some Prius models — considered by many to be the pride of the company’s fleet — may have faulty brakes.

The announcement comes only a week after Toyota suspended the production and sale of 8 other models because of a sticky gas pedal problem.

The U.S. Dept. of Transportation and the Japanese government say they are widening their investigations of the embattled automaker.

Divya Gopalan of Al Jazeera English has more.

Would you be willing to buy a Toyota after all the recent news?

Tell us what you think in the comments section below. Please be respectful and on-point. Malicious or offensive comments will be deleted, and repeat offenders will be banned.

Chinese consumers in second-tier cities can’t get enough of these small, cheap electric cars that require around six hours of charging to go 75 miles — at a maximum speed around 35 mph.

Video journalist Jimmy Wang reported and produced the video for TIME and the Asia Society.

See other posts on Chinese environmental change produced with China Green at the Asia Society: In pursuit of 8% growth, China wields double-edged sword and Tibetan plateau experiences ill effects of climate change.

Daljit Dhaliwal speaks with Vijay Vaitheeswaran, a correspondent for The Economist and the co-author of “Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future,” about what he calls the coming “end of the age of oil.”

Ushahidi’s Haiti site on 1/29/10.

Ushahidi, which is Swahili for “testimony,” is an innovative web platform that aggregates info from many sources — “crowd-sourcing.” Worldfocus spoke to Ushahidi about crisis-mapping in Haiti.

To give info to Ushahidi about events in Haiti: send a local text message to 4636 or int’l SMS to +44 7624802524 / e-mail Haiti@ushahidi.com / Twitter with #Haiti or #Haitiquake

Worldfocus: How does Ushahidi work?

Ushahidi: The Ushahidi platform, initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008, aggregates information received via email, SMS, twitter and web reports.

The information is then collated into a dashboard where the administrator of the instance or group of approved volunteers can approve the message (geo-locating it on a map) and thus making it display on the map front-end as a red dot and/or icon.

Each report includes location, date, time and description and allows users to posts additional information as comments. Reports are also flagged as “verified” or “unverified.” The team is working on adding another flag for “acted upon.” The platform is Free and Open Source Software that is continually being improved upon by programmers around the world.

[For the Haiti quake], we set up situation rooms at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston and in Washington, DC. As of Monday, 1/18/10, another situation room was set up in Geneva, Switzerland, and a training was held on Tuesday evening in Boston to recruit additional volunteers, a critical concern for sustainability of the project. Volunteers have mainly focused on “crowd-sourcing the filter” which includes combing news reports and Twitter feeds.

We’re also gathering photos and video footage. We’re mapping that information as quickly as we possibly can. We are processing hundreds of incoming text messages direct from Haiti in near real-time.

90% of incoming SMS are in Creole, and they are translated by a group of Haitian volunteers in the United States.

Worldfocus: How quickly did Ushahidi respond to the earthquake in Haiti?

Ushahidi: Patrick Meier found out about the earthquake around 7pm on 1/12/10. He immediately contacted David Kobia, our director of technology development and within half an hour we had a basic Ushahidi install for Haiti up and running.

We then collaborated with a number of our colleagues within the Ushahidi family, especially the International Network of Crisis Mappers, which Ushahidi co-founded and launched in October of 2009. It’s a group of about 500 people who are specialists in technology and humanitarian response.

Worldfocus: Who uses Ushahidi?

Ushahidi: Ushahidi is an open source project. The code is available for free download and as such is not a traditional for-profit-modeled competitive organization.

The more data that’s available, the better. It’s important that information is shared, not siloed. Data on the Ushahidi platform is available for anybody to take.

We’ve got RSS feeds, we’ve got an open API; people can just scrape that information right off and do whatever they need to do with it. We’re hoping that they also contribute information, so that we have at least one go-to place that people can visit to find what they need.

We simply need to get this information to as many people on the ground in Haiti as possible — that they know about Ushahidi, that they know the short code, that they know that humanitarian response teams are monitoring it in order to form their operational responses.

Currently, the following organizations are using Ushahidi to track incidents in Haiti: Red Cross, United Nations Foundation, Clinton Foundation, U.S. State Department, International Medical Corps, USAID, FEMA, U.S. Coast Guard Task Force, World Food Program and the UNDP Newsroom.

Worldfocus: What’s one example of your success in Haiti?

Ushahidi: Here’s the transcript of a 1/18 event from one of our translators in the Ushahidi chat room:

(18:27:24) Jennifer: “This is from the clinic that my friend is operating in on the ground: ‘Just received an email to put the diesel need on [the] map. Then I got a call from Hal Newman to see if the need was legit. He is an emergency manager supporting the Haiti response. He just sent the deisel [sic] request to Marcie Roth, the senior FEMA advisor, who will contact the State Department. They will contact the military and the diesel should be on its way.’”

(18:27:41) Jennifer: “They were desperate for fuel yesterday.”

(18:28:16) Jennifer: “And very grateful for the fast response they got back once entering their clinic location and need on the map.”

- Ben Piven

The Defense Department actually posts its drone attack footage on YouTube via DVidsHub. Some of the videos have caught the attention of millions, but critics ask whether the videos are newsworthy — or just lowbrow entertainment.

And while the drone strikes have undoubtedly taken out militants in many places that soldiers just can’t go, there is disagreement about whether UAVs are an effective anti-terror deterrent.

The military’s Predators and Reapers routinely strike Iraq, Afghanistan — and increasingly in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Additionally, the C.I.A. is using drones to hit al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in northwest Pakistan.

The most watched “drone porn” segments are from Iraq. This video of Baghdad has over 1 million views:

Blogger Keith Thomson writes on Alternet about drone porn’s impact on the news media.

“In researching remotely piloted aircraft, I visited the stretch of Southern Nevada desert that has become to UAVs what Silicon Valley is to the device on which you’re reading this column. In 2007, Creech Air Force Base was made the home of the 432d Air Expeditionary Wing, the first Air Force wing dedicated to unmanned aircraft systems. Its daily missions in Afghanistan and Iraq could provide the military version of a SportsCenter highlight reel.

With an aim of promoting UAVs domestically as well as “enlightening” our enemies, the Defense Department recently began placing the Predator and Reaper mission clips on YouTube. Ranging from relatively detached wide shots of bombings taken by onboard cameras to startlingly graphic close-ups, the so-called “drone porn” has been a smash hit, as it were, tallying over 10 million views.

Perhaps best explaining its popularity are the thousands of YouTube commenters. Some marvel at the new technology and discuss the resulting paradigm shift in warfare. Some raise questions, including whether it’s principled, dignified or otherwise in America’s best interest to post drone prone in the first place. Most comments are along the lines of, “Hell yeah HOOOAH BABY!”

This video shows footage of a drone that destroyed two rocket rails in the Sadr City section of Baghdad:

Now, I don’t want to launch into a “kids these days” diatribe about how the human race is de-evolving into a pack of bloodthirsty, warmongering savages. I don’t believe video games, or violent films, make kids any less human or more prone to attack each other. However, I do blame a disconnection from the consequences of battle for this kind of war fetishism.

The drone footage looks like a video game (admittedly a shitty one), and of course the footage doesn’t show the targets’ lives (if they had a family, what their favorite book is, when they had their first kiss, etc.) The clips don’t even really show their faces. They are anonymous targets. The US military tells us these are The Bad Guys, so they are guilty, and deserve to die. Trials: unnecessary. Evidence: superfluous…

But the drone aspects of war are also clearly appealing to young people. The “point and shoot” video games are all the rage right now, which is partly why drone porn exists. Yet, the moral hazards of such extrajudicial killings are never explored in video games, or drone attacks, and all the usual human safeguards against killing during a ground invasion (namely that you have to look your target in the eye while killing them with your bare hands) are no longer an obstacle. Long ago, hand-to-hand combat gave way to guns, which gave way to better guns, which gave way to human-navigated aerial assault that has now been replaced by robotic drones.

The next video shows an aerial weapons team, also in Sadr City:

Nick Turse, associate editor of TomDispatch.com, writes about drone attacks in AfPak and modern warfare:

What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of suspected militants or terrorists in the Bush years have become commonplace under the Obama administration. And since a devastating December 30th suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the Af-Pak war zone at a record pace. In Pakistan, an “unprecedented number” of strikes — which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike — have led to more fear, anger, and outrage in the tribal areas, as the CIA, with help from the U.S. Air Force, wages the most public “secret” war of modern times.

In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has significantly outpaced the highly publicized “surge” of ground forces now underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

See our Worldfocus map of U.S. drone attacks in northwest Pakistan.

Google’s Beijing headquarters. Photo: Flickr user HunXue-er

Today the Chinese government criticized Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call for China and other countries to stop censoring web content, including Google searches.

Those restrictions have prompted Google to threaten to pull out of China.

China’s Foreign Ministry has urged the U.S. to “respect facts and stop using so-called freedom of the internet to make unjustified accusations against China.”

Did Hillary Clinton do the right thing by publicly criticizing China for censoring Google and other web content?

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