Nigeria: do donors know what they’re spending? David Steven

You see plenty of reports from development agencies castigating development countries for one reason or another, but the boot is much less often on the other foot.

Interesting then to see this 2008 review (huge pdf download) from Nigeria’s National Planning Commission, which sets out to analyse ‘the volume and quality of Official Development Assistance to Nigeria between 1999 and 2007.’

During this time, $6bn of aid has been spent in Nigeria, almost all of it spent by donors themselves, rather than being rooted through the government’s budget. The Planning Commission’s first job, therefore, was to try and work out who had spent what.

So it sent a template to donors asking for information on what they’d spent and where:

Of all the agencies, USAID was the only agency able to provide almost all the requested information with a little delay. EU was also able to meet most of our requirement, only after about three months delay…

CIDA’s [Canada] claimed disbursement did not tally with what they had actually spent…[It] refused to supply more information when asked [to]…

DFID is another donor that could not account for all its activities. When asked to provide information on the sectors and states DFID is operating in, it simply wrote saying ‘we do not require our programme managers to collect expenditure on a state-by-state basis.’…

JICA [Japan]…did not cooperate at all despite our many efforts to get JICA to collaborate with us.

The UN system was also only ‘partially cooperative’. UNICEF did not provide a breakdown of its health spending, for example (nor did DFID or CIDA). “We do not know exactly what [this] money was spent on,” the report notes. The Chinese government was also asked for data – but the review does not tell us what its response was (read into that what you will).

Donors should be much more transparent accountable for their activities, the Planning Commission concludes, while the Nigerian government “needs to offer clearer and more effective leadership to her development partners both in terms of how and where to operate.”

It lauds the example of Kano and Ondo states. They are robust in their response to ‘intruder donors’ who operate outside a framework established by the state government. That allows leaders to set, and be accountable for, their own development priorities.

Moody’s – it’s time to stop hiding David Steven

Michael Lewis, in his highly entertaining new book, The Big Short, has a pop at ratings agencies (amongst a bazillion other targets). All the big Wall Street firms, he writes, were highly effective at manipulating Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s:

Everyone on Wall Street knew that the people who ran the models were ripe for exploitation. ‘Guys who can’t get a job on Wall Street get a job at Moody’s,’ as one Goldman Sachs trader-turned-hedge fund manager put it.

Inside the rating agency there was another hierarchy, even less flattering to the subprime mortgage bond raters. ‘At the rating agencies the corporate credit people at the least bad,’ says a quant who engineered mortgage bonds for Morgan Stanley. “Next are the prime mortgage people. Then you have the asset-backed people [dealing with sub-prime mortgages, for the most part], who are basically like brain dead.

Wall Street bond trading desks, staffed by people making seven figures a year, set out to coax from the brain-dead guys making high five figures the highest possible rating for the worst possible loans. They performed the task with Ivy League thoroughness and efficiency.

Despite their pivotal and disastrous role in the financial crisis, business for the ratings agencies is booming. If anything, their influence, meanwhile, has grown, especially over governments, as they threaten countries with a sovereign debt downgrade.

I was especially intrigued by media coverage for a recent report from Moody’s, which claimed that the US, UK, Germany, France and Spain are all at risk of social unrest as governments struggle to get their finances under control. According to Moody’s Chief International Economic and Financial Policy Analyst, Pierre Cailleteau:

Growth alone will not resolve an increasingly complicated debt equation. Preserving debt affordability at levels consistent with AAA ratings will invariably require fiscal adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion.

We are not talking about revolution, but the severity of the crisis will force governments to make painful choices that expose weaknesses in society.

Strong stuff. And interesting too. One of the key questions for the next few years is whether the fallout from the financial crisis will be toxic enough to damage, or even break, some societies.

So I thought I’d read Mr Cailleteau’s report, rather than just relying on the Telegraph’s summary. I wondered how strong his analysis was. Was he a smart guy or one of those dubbed in Lewis’s book as the ‘brain dead’?

But then I hit the buffers. Go to Moody’s website and there’s no content at all available unless you register (which includes pretending to read a 6103 word user agreement – the site knows if you haven’t at least scrolled through it).

Once I’d gone through all this rigmarole and logged in, I was told that access to Cailleteau’s report “is not part of your current service”. (I was allowed to read the report’s press release. Big deal. I struggle to think of another organisation that requires registration for that.) Nor could I find a biography for Cailleteau. Only one of his reports was freely available to subscribers (a research note on methodologies). And even the link to pricing information for his ‘social unrest’ report was not working.

So I am left none the wiser about Cailleteau’s argument or credentials. All I do know is that he dismissed talk of a systemic global banking crisis in August 2007, a year before [corrected] Lehman’s nearly brought down the world’s economy.

Of course, anyone can make a mistake (though that one’s a doozy) – but surely it is no longer acceptable for the ratings agencies to hype their work to the press and lord it over the world’s economies, without letting us see the evidence on which they base their diagnosis and prescriptions.

More transparency please. Either on a voluntary basis. Or enforced through regulation.

The UN, EU and civilian peace ops Richard Gowan

Yesterday, Ban Ki-moon announced the formation of a Senior Advisory Group for the Review of International Civilian Capacities (which will hopefully not be known as SAGRICC).  “Another UN panel,” I hear you cry, “whoopy-ruddy-doo!”  But this is a serious panel dealing with a serious problem: the shortage of decent police, justice experts and other civilian specalists to deploy to post-conflict countries.  Many UN missions have only 60-70% of their planned civilian staff, leaving them overstretched and unable to deal with day-to-day political issues, human rights and so on.

The new advisory group (involving former UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Marie Guéhenno and my boss, Bruce Jones) will oversee a review “to improve the international response in the aftermath of conflict by strengthening the availability, deployment and appropriateness of civilian capacities for peacebuilding.” My colleague Rahul Chandran is leading the team conducting this review.  I think they’re the right team for the job.

I also think that this would be a good moment for the EU to learn a lesson from the UN.  As Daniel and I pointed out in a tough paper for ECFR last year (with a foreword by Jean-Marie Guéhenno…) the EU’s own civilian peacekeeping efforts have big problems.  EU missions suffer from staff short-falls almost as bad as the UN’s.  In part, that’s because demand (for UN and EU ops alike) outstrips supply – which also creates technical headaches, as we pointed out in Internationale Politik:

Since the European Council sent a police mission to Bosnia in 2003, the European Union has deployed fifteen civilian operations worldwide—compared to just six military operations. These have ranged from small police reform missions in Congo to a 3,000-strong mission in Kosovo, launched in 2008, that handles not only policing issues but judicial reform, war crimes investigations, and customs.

The Union’s ability to deploy so many missions—even sending personnel as far away as Aceh, Indonesia—was one of the great successes of Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief from 1999 to 2009. Working with a relatively small group of officials, Solana used personal diplomacy and sheer persistence to get each mission on the ground.

The EU’s bureaucratic systems have often struggled to keep up. Financing has been a particular headache: when the first personnel arrived in Aceh, they had to use their personal credit cards to fund the mission start-up. European officials also admit that they have been lucky. Although EU civilian personnel have come under attack in the Balkans and Afghanistan, they have yet to suffer any fatalities. Had a European mission suffered significant casualties—as the United Nations suffered in Iraq in 2003 and in Haiti —EU governments might have recoiled from approving missions at such a high rate.

So I’d argue that the EU should match the UN’s review with a formal self-analysis of its civilian operations (in fairness, the Swedish EU presidency made some progress in this direction by asking member-states to review their national civilian capacities).

Actually, I’d go further. Ten years ago, the UN published the highly influential Brahimi Report – an in-depth study of all aspects of peacekeeping. Succeeding reform initiatives, including this new review, all build on this extremely strong basis. The EU doesn’t have any equivalent ur-text for its operations. The Union should put together a team of wise persons to start drafting one, the sooner the better.

Africa’s growth rates Alex Evans

Engrossing graph encountered while researching the effect of Chinese investment in Africa (click on it for the full size version):

From the excellent World Bank report, Africa’s Silk Road.

Incompetent multilateralism? Richard Gowan

The Economist’s David Rennie asked a disturbing question last week: if Obama’s America can’t make soft power work, what hope does Europe have? His thesis is that Obama has followed just the sort of multilateral, engagement-before-confrontation type of strategy that the EU advocates, and been rebuffed by Iran, Israel, China, etc.  Meanwhile, Baroness Ashton and her fellow EU-builders still hanker after soft power…

But here is the question that I am starting to turn over in my mind.If our big bet in Europe is that speaking with one voice will make our norms-based, soft power approach work, what lessons should we draw when Mr Obama’s outstretched hand of friendship is smacked away? Because even in a perfect, parallel universe, in which the EU magically falls in line behind Catherine Ashton and the new EU diplomatic service, we will struggle to become one half as united as the American government is. Our 27 countries will always find it hard to match America when it comes to identifying and defending our interests. And though there can of course be differences in the messages sent out by the White House, the State Department, Congress and so on, in general America speaks with one voice to the outside world, in a way that the EU can barely hope to match.

And yet all that speaking with one voice, in defence of agreed, common interests, does not seem to shield the Obama administration from snubs.

This is an eloquent version of a problem that wonks who worry about multilateralism and transatlantic relations have been aware of for some time. The EU did a huge amount to sustain multilateral institutions during the Bush years, and benefited from playing good cop to Washington’s bad cop. Now Washington wants to be a good cop too, and European leaders feel vulnerable. If Obama’s strategy fails it won’t just discredit him, but the EU’s international approach since 2001 (or earlier).

Rennie quotes a European official who claims the problem isn’t the strategy, but the execution: the Americans are guilty of “incompetent multilateralism”. The implication is that, if only the U.S. applied its power with a little more European finesse, Obama would be in a better place right now. I’m not so sure. more »

Ten things you probably didn’t know about Burkina Faso Mark Weston

We are now in Burkina Faso, the last stop on what has been a fascinating and somewhat challenging tour of West Africa. Here’s a beginner’s guide to one of the world’s poorest countries:

1. Located in the heart (and heat) of West Africa, between the Sahara desert and the forests of the south, Burkina Faso has one of the highest fertility rates in the world. The average Burkinabe woman has six children. As a consequence, the population has increased five-fold in the past half-century. At 15 million, however, it is still under-populated compared to Great Britain, which is of similar size but has four times more people. It’s still too crowded though for the 3.5 million Burkinabe who live and work in neighbouring Ivory Coast.

2. Known in colonial times as Upper Volta, Burkina Faso means ‘Land of the Honourable People.’ Burkinabes are known as among the most honest folk in Africa.

3. The country has arguably the world’s best place names. Its capital – one of the oldest cities on Earth – is Ouagadougou. Leafy Bobo-Dioulasso, from where I am writing this, is the second city. It also boasts the desert market town of Gorom-Gorom (so good they named it twice), Bouroum-Bouroum (ditto), Fada N’Gourma, Tin-Akof, Niangoloko and, er, Rambo.

4. Burkina has few natural resources. The French only colonised it because it was a bridge between their coastal territories of Benin and Ivory Coast and their desert holdings in modern-day Mali and Niger. It even stopped being a country for 15 years from 1932, when it was carved up between its more important neighbours. The French made good use of Upper Volta’s human resources, however, forcing hundreds of thousands to build railways, farm cocoa and fight in the First World War trenches.

5. The country is dominated by the Mossi ethnic group. A tribe of brilliant horsemen (which may account for the profusion of betting shops in Bobo), the Mossi repelled slave raiders and other rivals and remained intact for 400 years until their kingdom fell to the French. Captain Paul Voulet, who led the French expedition, was a real-life Kurtz figure, who stuck victims’ heads on poles, roasted children over fires, and strung up soldiers who displeased him at a height where their feet could be reached by hyenas’ hungry jaws. When his superiors tried to rein him in, he told his troops he was no longer French but a “black chief,” who would found his own empire. After he was killed, the French, embarrassed that their civilising mission in their colonies had gone awry, attributed Voulet’s activities to the maddening heat of Africa.

6. Burkina Faso is one of Africa’s least urbanised societies. Despite plagues of locusts, catastrophic droughts, desertification, and the fatal effects of US cotton subsidies (Burkina produces cotton at one-quarter the cost of American cotton, but subsidies mean US producers can undercut Burkinabe farmers), over three-quarters still live in the countryside. The French colonial administrator R Delavignette wrote in 1946 that, ‘We came from an industrialised Europe where factories are joyless affairs, and found people who worked to music. Communal labour had its drums and tom-toms, its orchestras to cheer the workers on.’ Drummers still accompany farmers at planting and harvesting times today.

7. Burkina hosts Africa’s most important film festival, the biennial Fespaco (the next one is in 2011). Cinema attendances are falling, however, because of the proliferation of pirated DVDs.

8. Burkina was home to the ill-fated revolutionary Thomas Sankara, who as president alienated the French by calling them neo-colonialists, told the country’s creditors he wouldn’t pay them back (‘you played the game, you lost,’ he explained), slated African leaders for their corruption, and practised what he preached by ditching the ministerial Mercedes for a Renault 4, taking out a $2,000 mortgage to buy a house, and cycling around Ouagadougou on a rusty old bicycle (is David Cameron a secret fan?). Cheques he wrote often bounced. Sankara was killed in 1987 by soldiers close to his friend Blaise Compaore, who many suspect ordered the assassination. Frequently described as Africa’s Che Guevara, Sankara, who unlike most African revolutionaries died before he could sully his reputation, remains a hero to young idealists from all over the continent.

9. Blaise Compaore is still the Presdient of Burkina Faso today. Something of an eminence grise, as well as being linked to Sankara’s death he was also implicated in civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and is a longstanding supporter of the vicious Liberian warlord Charles Taylor (currently on trial in The Hague for war crimes). On the other hand, Compaore has also helped broker peace, for now, in Guinea. In the 2005 election, judged ‘free and fair’ by the 1500 (count ‘em) international observers who were flown in to watch, he gained 80% of the vote.

10. Burkina’s main cities saw violent street protests in 2008, as food and fuel prices climbed beyond the reach of most urbanites. As Compaore has loosened his dictatorial grip on the country, protests of all kinds have increased. One year, the authorities in Ouagadougou tried to force motorcycle riders to wear helmets. Vigorous rioting forced them to back down.

Economist – blogs make us yawn David Steven

Could the Economist be any more patronising?

“I noticed that the doormat was at a slightly crooked angle. I reached down and moved the mat back into its correct place.” Thus began a recent entry on The dullest blog in the world. Although this publication is something of a satire on the internet’s inane blogs, scientists are finding—to their surprise—that useful information can actually be mined from the tedium of the blogosphere.

Especially when, in the very same issue, it hangs the business end of an article on cloud computing around the work of two bloggers:

Amazon’s “Spot Instances” have also led to an animated debate among the cloud cognoscenti about how computing will evolve. Some argue that it will go the way of power and even financial markets, complete with arbitrage, derivatives and hedging. Reuven Cohen, a blogger and co-founder of Enomaly, a maker of software that allows firms to build public clouds, thinks that such things will come quickly as technology improves. In contrast, James Urquhart, a blogger who works for Cisco, argues that there are barriers that could prevent computing from becoming freely tradable. [etc. etc.]

No links, of course – after all the Economist wouldn’t want to risk diverting precious traffic to other websites. But for those of prepared to risk the boredom, you can find Cohen’s blog here, and Urquhart’s is here. Oh and here’s the Dullest Blog in the World.

Urquhart has an especially good piece on the intersection between the cloud and geopolitics – which I thoroughly recommend. Bet it’s had more hits than the average technology post the Economist puts online.

On the web: London’s global financial standing, EU security and defence policy, China and the West… Michael Harvey

- The FT has news that London’s position as the dominant global financial hub is slipping, with the UK capital now tied with New York for top spot in the latest rankings. Elsewhere Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke examine the latest economic data comparing the present crisis with the Great Depression across a range of indicators (including global output, world trade, and equity markets). Robert Shiller, meanwhile, explains the difficulties of using past experience to predict the course of the current crisis.

- European Geostrategy suggests that EU security and defence policy is like a jazz band and explains why a White Paper providing a “grand strategy” is needed. EUobserver, meanwhile, has news on the emerging shape of the European diplomatic service – its structure and staffing – as member states gear up to secure the important EEAS secretary general post.

- Elsewhere, Constanze Stelzenmüller takes an in-depth look at the travails of German security policy, offering insights into how it might evolve. Highlighting the lack of strategy, she argues that “fundamental decisions regarding German security policy have been repeatedly forced into the Procrustean bed of moral necessity, domestic imperatives, or the demands of external alliances.”

- Finally, over at openDemocracy, Andy Yee explores the “hedgehog’s dilemma” between China and the West, highlighting a gradual acceptance of different core values. TIME magazine, meanwhile, assesses the slow progress toward democracy in Hong Kong and the possible wider implications from Beijing’s perspective.

The Telegraph on acid – France, the CIA, and a touch of plagiary (updated x4) David Steven

[Updates below: Maybe ergot, maybe not. The CIA's obsession with acid.]

After ‘Duke of Edinburgh asks female sea cadet if she works at a strip club’, the most popular story on the Telegraph website at the moment accuses the CIA of having secretly fed LSD to the villagers of Pont-Saint-Esprit in France in 1951.

It’s a serious accusation. Not only would this be chemical warfare against an ally (or quasi-ally at least), the Telegraph tells us that five people died and ‘dozens were interned in asylums’ after the ‘quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations.’

The timing of the story is very odd. It is based on an obscure book by HP Albarelli, which was published in 2008 and is now out of print in the UK.

[Albarelli has been in touch to say that the book is newly published, despite showing as 2008 on Amazon UK. According to his publisher, TrineDay, the book was out November 2009.]

Albarelli’s theories are dismissed out of hand by Steven Kaplan, the Goldwin Smith Professor of History at Cornell University and a noted bread expert (yes, really).

Kaplan has also written a book about Pont-Saint-Esprit, in French, entitled Le Pain Maudit. He was not interviewed by the Telegraph, however, but he made the following comment to France 24:

I have numerous objections to this paltry evidence against the CIA. First of all, it’s clinically incoherent: LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople…

It is absurd, this idea of transmitting a very toxic drug by putting it in bread. As for pulverising it [for ingestion through the air], that technology was not even possible at that time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half-destroyed by the US Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War. It makes no sense.

Now maybe Albarelli is right and Kaplan is wrong, but you’d think the Telegraph would make some effort to talk to Kaplan before publishing a story that has gone around the Internet like wildfire.  It’s not as if Henry Samuel, the Telegraph France correspondent, wasn’t aware of Kaplan’s work.

After all, parts of his article bear an extremely suspicious resemblance to a review of Kaplan’s book, published by the New York Times in 2008.

Here’s the NYT:

What became a national disaster began on Aug. 16, 1951, when the inhabitants… were suddenly stricken by frightful hallucinations of being consumed by fire or giant plants or horrid beasts.

A worker tried to drown himself because his belly was being eaten by snakes… A man saw his heart escaping through his feet and beseeched a doctor to put it back in place. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

And here’s the Telegraph:

On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes… Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

The details that are not from the Times (“An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs.”) come from this French blog post from Monday this week .

It presumably prompted the paper suddenly to jump on Albarelli’s conspiracy theory (and yes – it’s a fairly close translation):

Un gamin de 11 ans, Charles Granjhon, tente d’étrangler sa mère… Un homme saute du deuxième étage de l’hôpital en hurlant : “Je suis un avion.” Les jambes fracturées, il se relève et court cinquante mètres sur le boulevard avant qu’on puisse le rattraper.

Questions for the Telegraph’s editor:

1. Did Samuel read Albarelli’s book or speak to him? [Albarelli says he wasn't called by the Telegraph.]
2. Did he speak to Kaplan or any other sources?
3. Does he accept that the Telegraph plagiarized the Times?
4. And shouldn’t he set the bar a little higher before publishing stories of this type? more »

Labour, Tories – mixed messages on money David Steven

It’s no wonder the markets are raising questions about UK public finances – neither of the main parties has anything approaching a clear message on fiscal tightening.

From Labour, you get blithe assurances on taxes. Liam Byrne didn’t quite ask us to read his lips yesterday when promising no new tax increases, but he might as well have done. Carl Emmerson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies was unimpressed:

I cannot see how the Government can promise to not affect front line services when you look at the scale of the cuts they have got to plan for.

Liam Byrne is talking just about the first four years and after that there will undoubtedly have to be more pain and that is likely to be tax rises or even greater public sector cuts.

But the Tories are not in the clear either. I was baffled by William Hague’s recent speech at the Conservative Party Spring Forum. Half way through his speech, he lays out the Tory pitch to the undecided voter:

And to those who say they do not know what the Conservatives will do, let us tell them. We will cut the spending that cannot go on and the borrowing that leads to ruin.

So what follows? Here are all the commitments Hague makes that will cost money:

(i) Cutting taxes on business to give the UK the ‘most competitive’ tax environment in the G20

(ii) reversal of Labour’s planned national insurance increase

(iii) abolition or reduction of inheritance tax

(iv) two year freeze on Council tax (despite promises of the ‘biggest ever’ transfer of power to Councils)

(v) stamp duty abolished for first time buyers (despite unsustainable prices in the housing market)

(vi) more university places and apprenticeships

(vii) nursing care in their homes for the elderly.

And here are all the commitments is the only commitment that will clearly save money (though not much):

(i) Scrap ‘a large slice’ of expensive quangos.

And voters are supposed to be convinced this adds up to “vision of a Britain restored.”

Both parties need to convince the electorate they can get Britain back on its feet (the slogan I’d advise either to run their campaign under). But as Martin Wolf argues in today’s FT, at the moment it’s shaping up to be an election that both sides deserve to lose.

Daily Mail ’shops war hero David Steven

Just to press on with the Daily Mail vendetta for a tad longer, the superb Will Tooke has caught the ‘newspaper’ in another piece of fakery. This time, taking liberties with James McKie, the war hero who threw a grenade back at the Taliban.

I saw the grenade come over hit Captain Kerr on the back of his body armour and land between me and him, about a foot away from me, right next to him.

Instinctively, Captain Kerr dived, tried to get away from the grenade, but there wasn’t a lot of room. He ended up on top of me, away from the grenade.

I dived forward, picked up the grenade and threw it off the roof. It detonated half way down in the alley, two feet away from us, with most of the frag going into the wall…

When I saw the grenade there, I thought, I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.

(Do watch the whole interview with McKie – it’s quite extraordinary.)

A story that’s right up the Mail’s Straße but - as Tooke points out – there was a catch:

The problem was, the [only] picture was taken when all the action was over, and it seems [it] just wasn’t dramatic enough for the Daily Mail to match the story of intense bravery. If only there was a picture of Rifleman McKie doing the sort of high octane daring do you see in war movies, you know, like that film The Hurt Locker that just won a load of Oscars. Gosh, that would be perfect.

So what did the Mail do? They took this photo of McKie:

…purloined this one from the Hurt Locker (which pops up in Google image search)…

…and photoshopped the two together to make this doozy…

Journalism – it’s easy. If you’re shameless.

Daily Mail lies about Facebook (updated x7) David Steven

[Important updates below - Facebook says the Daily Mail knew its story was untrue, but printed it anyway. Legal action is promised. The BBC has now picked up on Global Dashboard's story. Journalism.co.uk has a piece as well. Guardian has followed our lead too. Mashable. Belle de Jour chips in.]

In the early hours of this morning, the Daily Mail published an astonishing attack on Facebook under the title “I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What followed will sicken you.”

Here’s the opener:

Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.

I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I’d never before communicated.

So I wasn’t surprised that a vulnerable teenager, Ashleigh Hall, was groomed on Facebook before being brutally raped and killed.

The article is written by Mark Williams-Thomas. Here’s his biog:

Mark is a former police detective who has far-reaching experience of working at the centre of high profile investigations. During Mark’s police service, he specialised in child protection and major crime and he is renowned throughout the UK’s police forces as well as the national media for his expertise in these areas.

It’s an odd story. Facebook isn’t really a chat site – and it’s certainly not Chatroulette, where there are plenty of men ready and waiting to jack off in front of you (sfw). Presumably Williams-Thomas set his privacy settings to zero and befriended loads of strangers. But how did those strangers find him (her) so quickly?

Fast forward twelve hours and the online version of Williams-Thomas’s article has undergone some editing. New title: I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you. And new text, with Facebook replaced with an unnamed ’social networking site’.

Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on a social networking site posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me.

The url, though, has not been changed: I-posed-girl-14-Facebook-What-followed-sicken-you.html [This url was subsequently set to redirect to a new one - 12/03/2010]

So what gives? If it was Facebook that Williams-Thomas was using, then why turn so coy? And if it wasn’t, how on earth could the Mail have pretended it was?

Update: Via Twitter, I asked Williams-Thomas for clarification. Here’s his reply:

So why was Facebook named in the first place?

Update 2: Apparently the story – with Facebook named – was a front page splash in the print edition, and then a double page spread inside.

Update 3: Just had a call from Facebook – they’re incandescent and say that:

• Williams-Thomas claims that he was 100% clear that his social network experiment had not involved Facebook.
• When the Mail sent him a first draft of the story with Facebook named, he asked for them to make a correction.
• Even so, they went ahead and published a story their own expert had warned them was untrue.

When Facebook protested, the Mail corrected the online story, but not the printed version, which had already hit the news stands. Their online retraction failed to include any apology or explanation of their mistake.

Facebook says that legal action against the Mail is pending. What an extraordinary piece of negligence and/or malice from the paper!

Update 4: The Mail appended a fairly mealy mouthed correction last night:

In an earlier version of this article, we wrongly stated that the criminologist had conducted an experiment into social networking sites by posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook with the result that he quickly attracted sexually motivated messages. In fact he had used a different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set the record straight.

Will they be happy to pay damages to Facebook too? Another version here, which begins: “In an article by a criminologist yesterday, we wrongly stated…” – half-maintaining the fiction that Williams-Thomas actually wrote the piece…

Update 5: From last year, another great Daily Mail headline: “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer.”

Update 6: Instead of retreating to lick her wounds, Mail journo, Laura Topham has doubled down with another article on Internet safety – again using the Facebook killer as a hook and with the same oddly prurient image from yesterday’s story.

Before her Facebook howler, Topham’s main claim to fame was dating 100 men and writing about it, outing Belle de Jour [or not - see Belle's comment], and running up huge amounts of debt because the government inveigled her into taking out a student loan.

Her big break in journalism came in 2005 when she shafted David Blunkett.

Update 7: PC Pro quotes Facebook’s spokeswoman as challenging the Daily Mail to name the social networking platform that is really to blame. I was given exactly the same message. Facebook think it knows which service Williams-Thomas used and is desperate for one of its competitors to get shafted.

A representative of Williams-Thomas justifies anonymity thus: “The reason he does not want to [name the service] is because he does not want there to be another opening for paedophiles to head straight for.” Hmm. Maybe.

Ripple effects on camera Alex Evans

This image shows NOAA modelling of the tsunami that followed Chile’s earthquake – which proved to be highly accurate.  Yale Environment 360 explains how to decipher the map:

Researchers used seismic information, wave measurements collected from buoy-based equipment, and computer modeling technology to predict the maximum wave amplitude, wave arrival time, and the extent of wave inundation. The colors illustrate the maximum computed tsunami amplitude in centimeters during the 24 hours after the quake, with the highest waves in purple and red and smaller waves in orange and yellow. The red triangles represent buoys.

Ingham on Europe David Steven

In today’s FT, William Hague underlines (again) that a new Conservative government will see the European Union as a platform for achieving progress on global issues.

With David Miliband’s enthusiasm for a G3, we’re left with robust cross-party consensus on Europe’s role as a foreign policy actor (whether it can fulfil this role is another matter).

I’m reminded of how Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham reacted when asked, shortly after the new Tory government took office, to write a report on how the government could build public support for the European Community.

According to Robert Harris, Ingam wrote that:

A community of 250 million could achieve more than a ‘debilitated nation of 55 million, however much the latter may trade on past imperial glory‘.

Government publicity should stress this, ‘with all the instruments of the orchestra, not only central Government, reading the same score, playing the same tune and coming in on cue.’

True in 1980. Even more so thirty years’ later.

(Photo from Iain Dale.)