• Via 'Aqoul, al-Qaeda blames the theory that the Israelis perpetrated the September 11th terrorist attacks on Iran.


• Centauri Dreams discusses the Great Filter that seems to be necessary in order to explain the Fermi paradoxi, "the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations."


• Aziz Poonawalla at City of Brass examines the motives behind the acceptance of pseudoscience by smart people, starting from the whole nasty IQ debate.


• Far Outliers quotes at length an analysis of China that blames many human rights violations on the weakness of the national government versus its nominally subordinate provincial and other local governments.


• Hunting Monsters takes a look at the "shadow countries" of Taiwan and Somaliland.


• Joe. My. God links to a survey in the United States suggesting that non-heterosexuals make up something in the area of 3% of the population.

Because of the clandestine nature of the business, it is not known how many migrants are processed or how many fishing boats set sail from Elinkine, nestled in the deep mangroves on the mouth of the Casamance River, in Senegal's southern province of the same name.

But what is certain is that it is a key departure point for west African illegal emigrants trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean to the so-called European Eldorado and that a network of smugglers are raking a fortune from the trade.

"Here everybody benefits, that is why people are careful," says Alioune who identifies himself by a pseudonym.

Residents of this tiny, leafy village are very cagey when it comes to talking about the booming trade that has prospered in recent years, from desperately poor Africans who exhaust their family's meagre resources for the risky 1,000-plus kilometre-long (625-plus miles) trip on high seas in ramshackle fishing boats.

When and if they talk, they neither give their full names nor details for fear of upsetting the system.

Boat owners and smugglers are directly involved in the trafficking, as are fishermen enlisted to sail the pirogues.

Along a sandy village street, a ferryman sitting on his veranda who gives his name as Joseph says that he is aware that he is on a police wanted list.

"We can make lots of money, but a lot of smugglers have been arrested," he said before dodging away.

According to Alioune, an average two boats set sail from Elinkine aiming for the Spanish Canary Islands every week, but it is generally not a subject of open discussion because "it is a very dangerous game" that concerns the entire village.

Some homes around the village serve as "lodges" where days before takeoff, the prospective migrants are gathered and prepared for the trip.

"Everybody is well aware and most of the people are involved. It comes with lots of money, it's a mafia here," added Alioune. Boats owners have created what he called a commission that "facilitates" the departures, he said.

Each boat owner contributes an annual fee to this commission of three million CFA francs (4,500 euros, 6,600 dollars) "and in return the departures are facilitated and the police get their share," he said.

The first wave of out-migration to Europe took place during the First World War, when many Senegalese worked in France as infantrymen (“tirailleurs” in French) (Guèye 2002: 284; Robinson 1991: 166). After Senegal gained independence from France in 1960, an increasing number of Senegalese left for France and settled in Paris and the main industrial centres such as Marseille. These migrants are mainly Soninké, Sereer and Tukulëë (Timera 1996) who lived primarily in the Senegal River valley regions. They were attracted by the European economic boom, and their out-migration was mainly supported by their families and facilitated by the fact that all Senegalese citizens at the time had both Senegalese and French citizenship. This structural affiliation to France continued for more than 20 years after Senegal’s independence (Garson 1992: 84–85). The out-migration of Senegalese citizens to France increased from 5,688 in 1968 to 32,350 in 1982 (INSEE 2004). Growing mass migration was also a response to the persistent drought as well as economic and politicalpressure on Senegal from the international community. For example, one of the major economic problems with deep social repercussions was the devaluation of the Franc CFA in 1994, which precipitated a harsh social crisis, particularly in the cities. The devaluation halved purchasing power, and resulted in price increases of 25–30 per cent for basic food stuffs such as rice. The high price of food had far-reaching effects on all social classes (Sane 1998; Vengroff and Creevey 1997). Thus, the deep economic and social crisis Senegal was facing induced more and more Senegalese from all social strata and ethnic and religious groups to migrate. Internally migrants went to the capital city Dakar; internationally, destinations included not only to France, but also new countries, such as Spain, Italy, Germany and beyond Europe to the USA, thereby shaping a new transnational space (see Guèye 2002, 2003; Robin 1997; Tall 2002).

Across the continent Muslims have tried to make converts by arguing that the Christian West is decadent and sexually irresponsible--a belief that finds daily confirmation in Western films and television. If the Anglican Communion accepted gay bishops or approved gay unions, Muslims would gain an enormous propaganda victory in Nigeria--and in a dozen or so other African countries in which Christians and Muslims compete for converts, often violently. When Akinola speaks out, therefore, it is not because he wants to intrude on the affairs of other churches but, rather, because he feels that the very existence of Christianity in his own territory is under threat. At stake, he believes, is the religious map of much of Africa, and the global balance between Christianity and Islam.

At the time of the massacre, Archbishop Peter Akinola was the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, whose membership was implicated in the killings. He has since lost his bid for another term but, as primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, he is still the leader of 18 million Anglicans. He is a colleague of my father, who was the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America from 1997 to 2006. But the American Episcopals’ election of an openly homosexual bishop in 2003, which Archbishop Akinola denounced as 'satanic,' created distance between them. When I arrived in 2006 in the capital of Abuja to see the archbishop, his office door was locked. Its complicated buzzing-in system was malfunctioning, and he was trapped inside. Finally, after several minutes, the angry buzzes stopped and I could hear a man behind the door rise and come across the floor. The archbishop, in a pale-blue pantsuit and a darker-blue crushed-velvet hat, opened the door.

"My views on Islam are well known: I have nothing more to say," he said, as we sat down. Archbishop Akinola has repeatedly spoken critically about Islam and liberal Western Protestants, and he was understandably wary of my motives for asking his thoughts. For Akinola, the relationship between liberal Protestants and Islam is straightforward: if Western Christians abandon conservative morals, then the global Church will be weakened in its struggle against Islam. "When you have this attack on Christians in Yelwa, and there are no arrests, Christians become dhimmi, the vocabulary within Islam that allows Christians and Jews to be seen as second-class citizens. You are subject to the Muslims. You have no rights."

When asked if those wearing name tags that read 'Christian Association of Nigeria' had been sent to the Muslim part of Yelwa, the archbishop grinned. "No comment," he said. "No Christian would pray for violence, but it would be utterly naive to sweep this issue of Islam under the carpet." He went on, "I’m not out to combat anybody. I’m only doing what the Holy Spirit tells me to do. I’m living my faith, practicing and preaching that Jesus Christ is the one and only way to God, and they respect me for it. They know where we stand. I’ve said before: let no Muslim think they have the monopoly on violence."

Archbishop Akinola, 63, is a Yoruba, a member of an ethnic group from southwestern Nigeria, where Christians and Muslims coexist peacefully. But the archbishop’s understanding of Islam was forged by his experience in the north, where he watched the persecution of a Christian minority. He was more interested during our interview, though, in talking about the West than about Nigeria.

"People are thinking that Islam is an issue in Africa and Asia, but you in the West are sitting on explosives." What people in the West don’t understand, he said, "is that what Islam failed to accomplish by the sword in the eighth century, it’s trying to do by immigration so that Muslims become citizens and demand their rights. A Muslim man has four wives; the wives have four or five children each. This is how they turned Christians into a minority in North Africa."

He went on, "The West has thrown God out, and Islam is filling that vacuum for you, and now your Christian heritage is being destroyed ... You people are so afraid of being accused of being Islam-phobic. Consequently everyone recedes and says nothing. Over the years, Christians have been so naive--avoiding politics, economics, and the military because they’re dirty business. The missionaries taught that. Dress in tatters. Wear your bedroom slippers. Be poor. But Christians are beginning to wake up to the fact that money isn’t evil, the love of money is, and it isn’t wrong to have some of it. Neither is politics."

The Kikuyu, the biggest and most-prosperous group, have dominated Kenya since it won independence in 1963, fueling resentment and repeated spasms of violence. Rioters killed more than 600 after the Kikuyu-dominated government of Kibaki, 76, declared on Dec. 30 that he had been re-elected over Raila Odinga, 63, a Luo.

``The conflict is taking an ethnic form, but it's got its roots in a failure of governance, rising poverty and the growing exasperation of an extremely young population with a geriatric bunch of leaders,'' said Michela Wrong, a journalist and author of three books about Africa, including a coming one about Kenya.

Kenya is a patchwork of more than 40 ethnic groups. About 20 percent of its 32 million people are Kikuyu. Four other groups, including the Luo and the Kalenjin, each have 10 percent or more.

The economy used to rely on tourists, attracted by Kenya's abundant wildlife and beaches. Now its port in Mombasa has become East Africa's main transshipment point, and the manufacturing and service industries are thriving.

``A few years ago, Kenya was seen as a place for holidays which sold its tea to Asia,'' said Razia Khan, chief Africa economist at Standard Chartered Plc in London. ``Now 42 percent at least of Kenya's exports go to neighboring countries.''

Economic growth is at an 18-year-high of 7 percent, and the most prominent beneficiaries are Kikuyu. Among them: Jimnah Mbaru, chairman of the Nairobi Stock Exchange; Central Bank of Kenya Governor Njuguna Ndung'u; Eddy Njoroge, chief executive officer of Kenya Electricity Generating Co., east Africa's biggest power generator; Gerald Mahinda, CEO of East Africa Breweries Ltd., the region's largest beer maker; and Eunice Mbogo, head of Kenya Reinsurance Corp.

``There was generally a tendency to shower benefits and certainly to shower jobs in the ministries and civil service on their own tribe,'' Wrong said. ``People saw that and resented it.''

Ethnic rivalry can be traced to the 1950s, when the Kikuyu- led Mau Mau resistance movement fought British colonialists. A million Kikuyus were placed in detention camps by the British and 100,000 of them died, according to the book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, by Harvard University's Caroline Elkins.

In the 1960s, Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, oversaw a land-redistribution program that resettled many fellow Kikuyu onto fertile farms in the west's Rift Valley formerly owned by Europeans.

``Kikuyu farmers, pastoralists, were resettled in a land- reform exercise, and they did better than the nomadic groups,'' Khan said.

Kenyatta's successor, Daniel Arap Moi, was a Kalenjin who forged alliances with Kikuyu politicians. He was followed by Kibaki, a Kikuyu. He came to power in 2002 after bidding for the non-Kikuyu vote by promising to stamp out a culture of corruption that benefited his ethnic group and to appoint Odinga as prime minister.

Solomon Dlamini decided the numbers were wrong: When the Swazi government released preliminary results of the national census a few weeks back, Prof. Dlamini, head of the national university's department of demography and statistics, took one look and concluded that the bureaucrats had made a terrible error.

The census, a door-to-door count through all of this country's hilly villages, found 912,229 Swazis. That is 17,489 fewer than were counted at the last census, a decade before.

Shrinking populations aren't news in developed countries such as Germany or Japan, but in developing countries such as Swaziland, in African countries where half the population was aged 16 or under the last time they counted, populations do not shrink. Until now.

"My training says that in demographic history, this is unprecedented and it cannot be accurate," Prof. Dlamini said in an interview this month in a small office crammed with books. "But my reality says otherwise."

The Swazi government, reacting in consternation to what the statistics imply, is refusing to call the census figures final. But if they are accurate - and most experts believe they are - they mean that Swaziland's population has not only dropped by 17,000 people; it is 300,000 people, or nearly 30 per cent of the population, below what was projected as the likely rate of growth 20 years ago.

While the figures are debated, no one here is uncertain about the cause of the drop. "If I were to sit down to count the people I have lost to HIV, I wouldn't get up again," Prof. Dlamini said with a sigh. He found himself recently arguing with colleagues; some said that it simply isn't conceivable that the population has actually shrunk. No developing nation has ever shrunk. But others pointed out that no country has ever, in recorded history, had an epidemic like that of HIV in Swaziland. And nobody knows what it will mean for the country's future.

A toxic mix of factors combined to make the epidemic so bad here: a highly infectious and virulent strain of the virus circulating in the population; a culture that condones, even encourages, promiscuity and polygamy in men, while denying women the right to refuse to have sex or insist on the use of condoms; a limited economy that relies on sending workers away from home for long stretches to work in highly infected South Africa; and a government, led by a playboy king with an ever-expanding stable of wives, that has denied the scale of the problem, and, while people were dying, poured funds into luxury-car purchases and highway expansions.

Swaziland provides a horrific example of what an HIV epidemic can do to a fragile economy: In the early 1990s, economic growth was posted at about 6 per cent a year. But over the past decade, HIV is estimated to have reduced growth by at least 1.6 per cent, and in recent years as much as 2 per cent annually, so that the economy is now contracting.

The result? An equally rapidly expanding epidemic of poverty. The amount of land being tilled has dropped, the level of agricultural productivity has dropped, people have sold their assets to survive. A third of all children are orphaned, and more than half of the poorest households are taking care of orphans. This year, 40 per cent of the population survived on food aid from the United Nations.

"We're in a chronic disaster situation; there is no ability for society to cope," said Derek von Wissell, who heads the national AIDS agency. "There is no spare, no fat, no cushion in communities, in families."

Mangaliso Shongwe, a farmer in Nkambeni village 100 kilometres from the capital who lost his wife, two children and a brother to AIDS and is himself living with the virus, explained how it works. "A person gets sick and the family pays [for medical care]; a person dies and they pay for the funeral," he said. "Very soon you have no savings, you cannot pay to send children to school, you cannot pay to hire an ox to plow your field." He was moderately prosperous a decade ago, he said. These days he eats only one meal a day.

Even with the fear of greater bloodshed, the main problem in the borderlands remains the stark environmental fact that there are simply too many people and too many animals and not enough grass. Some experts, such as Lammert Zwaagstra, an adviser to the European Union, believe that without outside intervention whole stretches of the Horn will come to look as wretched as Darfur in Sudan, with its people fighting over water, grazing, firewood and other scarce natural resources.

Mr Zwaagstra has been studying the borderlands for decades. Not known as an alarmist, he is now pressing the red alert button. There are too many cattle for the capacity of the land, he says, but too few to sustain the community. Population growth is part of the problem; drought is another. The Horn appears to be drying up. This may or may not be a result of climate change, but experts give warning that if the predicted increase in temperatures does come about, if only by one or two degrees, the borderlands will become unsustainable.

Rainfall is even less predictable. The drought cycle has shrunk from once every eight years to once every three years, according to the American government's Famine Early Warning System. "That means no recovery time for the cattle, for the land, for the people," says Mr Zwaagstra. And the changes are happening at breakneck speed.

Even the WFP admits that their delivery of aid is no more than sticking plaster. Others are even more critical. Food aid is like "crack", says one Nairobi-based aid chief: "It is addictive and creates an unhealthy dependency." Well, maybe. But any attempt to swing the balance from humanitarian aid to development aid comes against the imperative of saving the starving today. The scale of potential misery is becoming clearer. Rough estimates of famine victims in the next few years range upwards from 10m.

The risk of whole areas of the Horn collapsing with famine and irreversible environmental damage, urged on by jihadist and tribal clashes, is clear cause for alarm. A first task, if Somalia is to be salvaged, is to support a moderate and competent government there. That will be hard, to put it at its mildest. The transitional government is moderate but inept: the Islamists well-organised but given to jihadist tendencies.

Ethiopian troops in armored vehicles rolled into Somali Thursday and set up a camp near the home of the interim president, residents said, less than a day after Islamic militants reached the outskirts of the base of a U.N.-backed, but largely powerless government.

A leader of the Islamic group controlling large parts of southern Somalia demanded that Ethiopian troops withdraw. "We will declare Jihad if the Ethiopian government refuses to withdraw their troops from Somalia. They must withdraw as soon as possible ... We will wait for some time to see if they respect our demands," Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed told The Associated Press.

A spokesman for the Ethiopian government had said that his country would protect Somalia's transitional government from attack by the Somali Islamic militias. Numerous witnesses told The AP that Ethiopian soldiers arrived Thursday afternoon in Baidoa, the only town held by the government, 240 kilometers (150 miles) northwest of Mogadishu and about 150 kilometers (100 miles) east of the Ethiopian border.

• The widely distributed article "Africans risk all to breach fortress Europe" examines the phenomenon of West African immigration to western Europe, particularly from Senegal. Senegal's interior minister recently estimated that two or three million Senegalese live outside their country, itself home to ten million people. The funds acquired through immigration, by the workers themselves or via remittances, play a critical role in the domestic economy of Sengegal, and help advance the status of the migrants. The extreme dangers facing potential migrants, and the lack of welcome they receive on arrival, are the only things holding back the exodus.


• Ghana, in the meantime, is trying to attract African-Americans as tourists and even as immigrants, as Ghanaweb's "Ghana’s Uneasy Embrace of Slavery’s Diaspora" reports. The problem facing Ghanaians is that any sense of common identity uniting African-Americans and Ghanaians seems to be weak indeed.