Apparently, the BBC is trailing Lord Monckton around the United States for a documentary on the Lord’s climate scepticism (a superb use of license fee money).

Monckton, who compares climate activists to the Hitler Youth, appears to be latching onto another conspiracy theory – that Barack Obama is lying about being born in the United States, and is therefore not constitutionally allowed to serve as President.

Dave Weigel reports:

“America!” said Monckton at the start of his speech. “Land of opportunity! You can be born in Kenya and end up as president of the United States!”

That remark was well received in the crowd, if not as boisterously applauded as Monckton’s other jokes. After the speech… a reporter from USA Today and I both asked Monckton whether he was joking.

“I have no idea where he was born,” said Monckton, who was working the crowd and signing autographs. “What I do find strange is that the public records of his Hawaiian birth have been sealed, and can not be obtained by the public. His lawyers have spent a lot of money trying to seal the records of his public life. All of those records should be open to the public, as they always were for previous presidents.”

This morning, The Guardian’s website leads with a polling sensation. Apparently, Nick Clegg did so well is last night’s debate that the British election is now a two-horse race between the Lib Dems and the Tories, with Labour the UK’s new third party.

Such a sensational story – and so prominently placed – must be built on robust foundations, right? No. It turns out that:

• The Guardian has picked up a tweet from Tim Montogomerie, editor of the blog, ConservativeHome.com, referencing an -as-yet-unpublished poll from ComRes for ITV.
• Without even seeing the poll, it has decided to splash it all over the front page of its website, even while its own election blogger, Paul Sparrow, is warning readers that the sample is not nationally representative and the figures have not even yet been weighted.

This – apparently – is called journalism.

Update: Original headline pulled, replaced by the milder: “Lib Dem support surges after debate win.”

Update II: Andrew Sparrow writes:

I’ve been reading the comments about the way we reported the ComRes poll. Twitter is a wonderful source of information (if we didn’t use it, this blog would be slower and far less informative) and the figures were released by journalists who are normally reliable. But on this occasion the information was misleading. I should have waited until I had spoken to ComRes before going into overdrive. I’m sorry about that.

My beef is not really with Andrew’s live blog – which is clearly contingent and updated as new information is uncovered – but with the decision to use the information from a tweet as the basis for the main headline on the Guardian website front page. Would love to know which editor made that decision.

Update III: Here’s the Guardian’s description of the methodology for its own poll on the debate:

ICM Research interviewed a random sample of 505 people by telephone on 15th April 2010. It reinterviewed people who had previously been selected at random who told them they would be watching the debate and had agreed to be interviewed again. The sample has been weighted to the profile of all people selected at random who previously stated they would be watching the debate.

I have read this a dozen times and have no idea what it means.

“I can only say that I am deeply sorry that our management – starting with me – was not more prescient and that we did not foresee what lay before us.”

- Chuck Prince, former CEO of Citigroup, Congressional testimony, 8 April 2010

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”

- Chuck Prince, CEO of Citigroup, interview with Financial Times, 10 July 2007

Er…

Daniel Hannan – Euro MP and the most influential politician on the Internet – has been finding the election campaign pretty stressful. Fortunately, he’s an early adopter of what I am told is the latest new television sensation from across the Atlantic:

In the evenings, Mrs H and I unwind by watching The Wire which is, for my money, quite the best cop show around. Spreading itself comfortably over five series, it uses the space to develop its characters. There are no straightforward goodies or baddies here, any more than in Shakespeare’s plays. And the dialect is addictive. Several times, on the campaign trail, I have had to force myself to say “yes” rather than “true dat” or “mos def”.

This is much more than just downtime though.

Jimmy McNulty – in real life an Eton boy like David Cameron (“I didn’t know him then but I do now. I know his wife a bit because my best friend used to be crazy for her. When she wound up marrying Cameron, we were like, ‘Why do you want to be with that fucking Tory boy?’”) – has endorsed the Conservatives, sending Toby Young weak at the knees (“Dominic West is a genuinely cool famous person – a fantastically gifted actor and a movie star in the making. It was almost as if Jack Nicholson had come out for George W Bush.”)

Not only that, Hannan reckons that The Wire provides a model for policing Britain’s lawless streets:

The programme doesn’t immediately look like an endorsement of the Tory policy of elected police commissioners. On the contrary, it often shows honest rozzers being made to do the wrong thing by vote-grabbing politicians.

Then again, perfection is not of this world. An elected sheriff might make the wrong call, just as an unelected chief constable might. The difference is that we can’t get rid of the unelected chief constable… The last word ought surely to go to local people.

And you know what? Unless The Wire is lying, those Baltimore coppers are out patrolling every day. They have to, you see: their bosses answer to local voters. Messy as it can sometimes be, democracy is a pretty good idea.

As the man says, true dat. Mos def.

A couple of weeks ago in the small, poor Sahelian town of Dori in northern Burkina Faso, we were sitting at a roadside stall having a breakfast of coffee and dry bread. As we sat with our backs to the road, a group of five young boys, aged no more than twelve, hovered behind us like seagulls waiting for scraps. From time to time one would move closer, as if making to pounce on a morsel of bread, before retreating again when we looked round. They stood there for twenty minutes. After we got up and left, one of them ran to the table and downed the dregs of Ebru’s coffee.

These are the talibe children of West Africa. They are ubiquitous. In the towns of Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, posses of these young boys – uniformly skinny, dirty and covered in dust – have been constant companions on our trip. They roam the streets in packs, carrying empty, lidless tomato tins or little plastic buckets, and approach everyone they see for money or food. You never get used to the sight of them.

The boys’ story is grim. Many have been sent from their villages at the age of five or six by destitute parents to live with marabouts, Muslim “holy men” who promise to feed and shelter them and teach them about the Koran. ‘Their parents are too poor to look after them,’ says Karim, a Dori yoghurt seller, ‘and they are uneducated, so they believe the marabouts when they tell them they will house and clothe their kids.’ A few of these marabouts are genuine, and the children combine work in the fields with Arabic and Koranic education. But most are charlatans. ‘They go to the market, buy a cap and a gown and a Koran and say they are Koranic masters,’ Karim, a devout Muslim explains, ‘but it’s pure child exploitation.’

The children are sent out into the streets every morning. They are expected to earn 150 or 250 CFA francs per day (about 20-35p, or 50 cents) from begging. A former talibe child from Niger tells me that if they do not hit their target, the marabout beats or tortures them. Many therefore take to stealing if they haven’t begged enough near the end of the day.

Few receive any form of education, because their masters want them on the streets. Some of these Fagins have twenty or thirty boys. Twenty children can mean 5000 CFA (£8/$12) per day, huge money in these parts, so they do not waste time with teaching.

At night, the children sleep together on crowded floors in marabouts’ homes. Few get enough rest – we often see boys sleeping in the dust under trees in the afternoons. Those who surrounded us at the breakfast table were seriously underfed. In Ouagadougou a few days later, another feral-looking child asked us for money. When we refused, he began staring feverishly at Ebru’s bag and then made to snatch it – I pushed him away, and felt his ribs like a radiator through his T-shirt.

Karim is pessimistic about the children’s future. ‘They get used to this life of begging and stealing, so when they eventually grow up and escape they can only slip into a life of delincuency.’ The boys would make easy prey for extremists and warlords. The Burkina Faso government does occasional round-ups and places them in workshops so they can learn a trade, but this risks encouraging more parents to abandon their sons to the marabouts. Karim believes it is a ‘river that can’t be damned.’ Universal free education with meals seems the most promising solution, but Burkina’s performance in this area is abysmal – fewer than half of rural children are enrolled in school.

Much of the opposition to START (see previous posts) is embarrassingly hackish. Take this ‘analysis‘ from the Foreign Policy Initiative’s Jamie Fly and John Noonan:

A nuclear free world isn’t an ignoble goal, but it needs to be approached realistically. Focusing on the stockpiles of the United States and Russia and limiting U.S. options for use of nuclear weapons does nothing to change the calculus of Tehran and Pyongyang.

Henry Kissinger, who is now among the chief proponents of nuclear disarmament, wrote in 1957 in his landmark study Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy that “A renunciation of force, by eliminating the penalty for intransigence, will therefore place the international order at the mercy of its most ruthless or irresponsible members.”

Our unwillingness to penalize countries such as Iran, North Korea, and Syria for their illicit activities only empowers them. It sends the message to other states potentially seeking nuclear weapons that the path to a weapon can be pursued with few repercussions.

If President Obama were truly concerned about the future of the international nonproliferation regime, he would follow his recent disarmament “accomplishments” with some serious action to ensure that rogue regimes realize that there is a price to be paid by those who choose to pursue nuclear weapons.

You have to love the “If President Obama were truly concerned…” line. Of course, the President is just pretending to be worried about the issue – it’s all part of his cunning plan to sell America out to foreign and socialist overlords. Or something like that.

A causal reader would also be left thinking that Kissinger opposed the treaty, when of course he is right behind it, issuing a joint statement with George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn:

We strongly endorse the goals of this Treaty, and we hope that after careful and expeditious review that both the United States Senate and the Russian Federal Assembly will be able to ratify the Treaty.

Obama is following the (bi-partisan) playbook that Kissinger, Schultz, Perry and Nunn set out in their 2008 A World Free of Nuclear Weapons op-ed. It recommended:

• “Changing the Cold War posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon.
• Continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.
• Eliminating short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward-deployed.
• Initiating a bipartisan process with the Senate, including understandings to increase confidence and provide for periodic review, to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking advantage of recent technical advances, and working to secure ratification by other key states.
• Providing the highest possible standards of security for all stocks of weapons, weapons-usable plutonium, and highly enriched uranium everywhere in the world.
• Getting control of the uranium enrichment process, combined with the guarantee that uranium for nuclear power reactors could be obtained at a reasonable price, first from the Nuclear Suppliers Group and then from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or other controlled international reserves. It will also be necessary to deal with proliferation issues presented by spent fuel from reactors producing electricity.
• Halting the production of fissile material for weapons globally; phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium in civil commerce and removing weapons-usable uranium from research facilities around the world and rendering the materials safe.
• Redoubling our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers.”

Is there any issue serious enough not be used as a partisan football in the US? I fear not.

The absurd price of  online access to academic journals is a scandal.

It costs $15 to look at this paper I co-wrote for Science on HIV/AIDS (for just 24 hours, too!) and £20 to buy this World Economics paper of mine. As a co-author, I wasn’t paid for either of them – the benefit from the copyright accrues solely to the journal publisher.

This absurd situation is made far worse when work has been funded by the taxpayer. Alex and I wrote a paper for the Foreign Office which Palgrave wanted to reprint in one of its journals. Again, no fee was on offer, but they wanted worldwide copyright until 70 years after Alex and I are both pushing up the daisies:

In consideration of us agreeing to publish the contribution referred to below (the “Contribution”), you assign to Palgrave Macmillan the copyright in the Contribution in all media throughout the world for the  full term of the copyright including all revivals and reversions.

Palgrave even has the cheek to argue they are doing this to protect my interests. ”Ownership of copyright by the journal owner facilitates international protection against infringement of copyright, libel or plagiarism, it argues, “It also ensures that requests by third parties to reprint… are handled efficiently in accordance with our general policy which encourages dissemination of knowledge within the framework of copyright.”

It also generously offers to let me “make and distribute copies of the contribution to colleagues, for the personal use by such colleagues (but not commercially or systematically, e.g. via an e-mail list or list serve).” Gee, thanks guys.

Although we refused to sign the rights away, online access to the Palgrave version of the paper will still cost $30. Our fee from the government was small, but the same principle holds for scientific research on which millions of pounds of public money has been lavished. The public pays. The academics do the work. And the public pays again if it was wants access to the results. Who benefits? The publisher and non-one else.

At the moment, Tom Watson is canvassing suggestions for his Digital Manifesto for the upcoming British general election (he is standing for re-election in West Brom East). I added the following pledge for him to consider:

As a commenter on Tom’s User Voice site points out, this would mean boosting “open manuscript repositories, open access journals, and/or new hybrid publication models.” The government would be using its buying power to push much more research into the public domain, where it can seed further news ideas and create a dynamic knowledge commons.

If it joined with a few other governments, it could permanently change the academic publication model almost overnight.

As Iain Dale has pointed out, Tom Watson is setting himself up as the unofficial Member of Parliament for the Internet – and is very keen to hear what web users have to say. So do head over to his site to comment and vote on this and other digital economy ideas, or to add your own suggestions…

It seems that the START treaty is going to struggle to make it through the Senate, despite President Obama’s confidence that a swift passage is possible.

Today, Joe Lieberman (an independent these days, who caucuses with the Democrats) took to Fox News to claim that ratification would be impossible unless the administration extracted concessions from Russia on missile defence and began to build a new generation of nuclear weapons:

We have to make darned sure our nuclear warheads are capable, are modern as world leaders arrived in Washington for the start of a major nuclear summit. I’m going to be real hesitant to vote for this treaty unless we have a commitment from the administration that they’re prepared to modernize our nuclear stockpile.

For the Republicans, Lamar Alexander said there was ‘not  a chance’ of ratification in 2010 – and that consideration of the treaty should wait until 2011.

What credibility does Obama’s nuclear strategy have if it lacks backing at home? Not much, I fear.

- From the streets of Bishkek, Standpoint‘s Ben Judah offers an eyewitness account of the uprising in Kyrgyzstan. The Boston Globe has photos here. Alexey Semyonov and Baktybek Abdrisaev suggest what the new interim leader and former foreign minister, Roza Otunbayeva, must now do to restore order and democracy. openDemocracy, meanwhile, puts Kyrgyzstan’s experience in broader Central Asian context, suggesting the role that the OSCE could play in promoting regional stability.

- Writing in The American Prospect, Spencer Ackerman reassesses Obama’s foreign policy doctrine, evaluating attempts to achieve progress on the international stage in the face of domestic opposition. Philip Stephens suggests why the current US President is no Jimmy Carter, with the passing of healthcare and success on the nuclear front beginning to overturn an initial “perception of failure”.

- Elsewhere, with the UK election campaign now in full swing, Bloomberg has news of the Queen’s preparations in the event of a hung parliament. Over at the Institute for Government, meanwhile, Peter Riddell suggests how the language of public policy might shift should there be a change in government.

- Finally, the National Post has news (complete with photos!) that Kim Jong-Il has assumed his place at the sartorial avant-garde.

Jonah Golderg (of cheese-eating surrender monkey and liberal fascism fame) is no fan of Europe (Switzerland, excepted). Today, he frets that, if Obama is allowed to continue with his big gubmint ways, the world is likely to stop having new ideas.

Europe, he argues, is only able to keep afloat because it is propped up by US innovation:

America invents a lot of stuff. When was the last time you used a Portuguese electronic device? How often does Europe come out with a breakthrough drug? Not often, and when they do, it’s usually because companies like Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline increasingly conduct their research here. Indeed, the top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single country combined. We nearly monopolize the Nobel Prize in medicine, and we create stuff at a rate Europe hasn’t seen since da Vinci was in his workshop.

If America truly Europeanized, where would the innovations come from?

Comparing rates of innovation between nations is no easy task, but the Economist Intelligence Unit produces an index – the last of which came out in April 2009. Here’s the top twenty, with the Europeans appearing to hold their own:

1. Japan. 2. Switzerland. 3. Finland. 4. United States. 5. Sweden. 6. Germany. 7. Taiwan. 8. Netherlands. 9. Israel. 10. Denmark. 11. South Korea. 12. Austria. 13. France. 14. Canada. 15. Belgium. 16. Singapore. 17. Norway. 18. United Kingdom. 19. Ireland. 20. Australia.

Such evidence, I fear, is unlikely to sway Goldberg. He prints, approvingly, an email from a reader which supports his thesis as follows:

I think that everything we need to know about the state of innovation in Europe is supplied by the search list results and the fact that the fifth-highest listing is this: Top 10 Inventions of the Middle Ages.

QED, say I.

I’ve been wondering whether the new US-Russia nuclear pact is a cert for ratification (it needs 67 votes to get through the Senate). If this treaty (uncontroversial as it is) was rejected by Republicans, it would raise serious questions about whether the US can any longer be regarded as a coherent foreign policy actor.

Asked about this, President Obama sounds reasonably confident that all will run smoothly. He also has harsh words for Sarah Palin too, who has suggested that American citizens would ‘rise up’ against his ‘unbelievable’ and ‘unacceptable’ nuclear posture (great cartoon version of her oratory, here).

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, you have no doubt you’re going to get the eight Republicans you need to ratify this treaty?

OBAMA: Well, you know, the — listen, I’ve now been in Washington for long enough that, for me to say I have no doubt (LAUGHS) about how the Senate operates would be foolish. I feel confident that leaders like Dick Lugar — who actually was somebody I worked very closely with when I was in the Senate on issues of bomb control — when they have had the opportunity to fully evaluate this treaty, [they] will come to the conclusion that this is in the best interest of the United States. But I will also say to those in the Senate who have questions, is that this is absolutely vital for us to deal with the broader issues of nuclear proliferation, that are probably the number one threat that we face in the future.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to get to some of those broader issues. Because you’re also facing criticism on that. Sarah Palin, taking aim at your decision to restrict the use of nuclear weapons. Your pledge not to strike nations, non-nuclear nations, who abide by the nonproliferation treaty. Here’s what she said. She said, “It’s unbelievable, no other administration would do it.” And then she likened it to kids on the playground. She said you’re like a kid who says, “Punch me in the face, and I’m not going to retaliate.” Your response?

OBAMA: I really have no response. Because last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But the string of criticism has been out there among other Republicans as well. They think you’re restricting use of nuclear weapons too much.

OBAMA: And what I would say to them is that if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But not concerned about her criticisms?

OBAMA: No.

An unfortunate glitch in a story from the UN News Center*:

Mr. Ban will begin his official visit [to Central Asia] in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, where he will tour the UN Regional Centre for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia (UNRCCA) and the National Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, according to information released by his spokesperson today.

UNRCCA, which is headed by Miroslav Jenca, was launched at the end of 2007 with the aim of helping the five governments in the region to increase their capacities to peacefully prevent dialogue, facilitate dialogue and respond to cross-border threats and challenges such as terrorism, drug trafficking and environmental degradation.

Well, it’s better than forcefully preventing dialogue I suppose…

* If the UN clears this up, you can find the original story reprinted here.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT: Very shortly after Ban left Kyrgyzstan on his Central Asian tour, the country descended into chaos.  Today, the opposition seems to have taken control of the security services, although the President has yet to resign.  Two questions arise.  First, did the UN Secretary-General consider rushing back to help mediate the situation?  He had, after all said he sensed tension “in the air” while he was there.  Second, is it conceivable that his visit stimulated an up-tick in violence that might otherwise have been avoided?  Colum Lynch has a nice take on Ban’s visit here, arguing he was just unlucky.

Back in January, I posted the text below (I subsequently took it down for re-posting at a later date because of a bizarre and unnerving incident that happened to me in Dakar):

“The airstrip on the island of Bubaque in Guinea-Bissau’s Bijagos archipelago is, appropriately, a white line cut out of the bush, a narrow sandy strip hemmed in on both sides by thick forest. Only small planes can land there, but small planes can carry large quantities of cocaine.

The Guinean government claims that the drug trade through the islands (which South American dealers have adopted as a transit point on the way to the lucrative European market) has abated in recent months. The country’s leaders are reluctant to forfeit European Union aid, so they are keen to show that they are fighting this new scourge.

I spent ten days on Bubaque over the Christmas period and heard a dozen or so planes in the night. More may have arrived while I was asleep. Given that the airstrip sees no commercial traffic, with the islands’ few visitors and provisions being shipped in on pirogues and the weekly ferry from Bissau, the obvious conclusion to draw is that the planes were from Latin America.

Nor are there signs in the capital, Bissau, of any let-up. The city is in the midst of a minor building boom, as smart new villas spring up, with gardens, fences and security guards – all funded, according to locals, by drug money.

But even if it does show resolve, the government’s capacity is limited. Only around twenty of the eighty Bijagos islands are inhabited, so they are extremely difficult to police (more so when your navy has no ships and your air force no planes). And the resourceful South Americans are putting in contingency plans to pre-empt EU and government pressure. Two of them, I was told, recently scoped out a hitherto unused island, posing as tourists and asking villagers if there was an airstrip (there isn’t) or a forest clearing (there is) where they can land small jets or helicopters. But even landing areas are not essential – the traffickers can also drop the drugs into the sea for collection.

In the islands, few are willing to discuss the drug trade – many believe Colombian or Venezuelan drug lords killed their president, Nino Vieira, last year after he failed to pay them for a consignment of cocaine, so they are understandably fearful. But the return to the country of Admiral Bubo has put the cat among the pigeons and sent tremors through the highest levels of government.

Before he fled into exile after a failed attempt to topple Vieira, Admiral Bubo was head of the Guinean navy. This position gave him privileged access to the narco-traffickers, who use boats as well as planes to transport cocaine across the Atlantic. Admiral Bubo therefore knows many things, which is why the government was so keen for the UN to hand him over, which it agreed to do last week. He knows the extent of Nino’s involvement in the trade (some believe the president carried cocaine to Europe himself, taking advantage of his immunity from customs searches). He knows who killed Nino, and whether senior members of the new government are involved in drug trafficking.

But Bubo is playing a dangerous game. Guinea-Bissau has no prisons, so he will either be freed or “disappeared”. It is almost certain that he profited from the drug boom himself, so if the government doesn’t protect him he will be at the mercy of rival navy or army factions and of the Latin Americans. How Bubo is dealt with will be a test case of the government’s seriousness in combating the trade.”

Last Thursday, the Admiral Bubo story took a new twist. Bubo was taken into the protection of a group of soldiers headed by a General Antonio Indjai, who at the same time arrested the Prime Minister, Carlos Gomes, and forty army officers including the army chief, who had opposed Bubo’s release. As Indjai took control of the armed forces, Bubo announced that Gomes is “a criminal who must be judged.”

When news of the PM’s arrest broke, hundreds of Guineans took to the streets to demand his release. The plotters relented, placing him under house arrest instead.

Admiral Bubo, as I suggested in January, was likely to have been implicated in the cocaine trade. Vincent Foucher, a researcher with the Bordeaux-based Centre d’etudes d’Afrique Noire, claimed in this weekend’s Libération newspaper that Carlos Gomes had been trying to sideline General Indjai because of the latter’s involvement in drug trafficking. The alliance between the admiral and the general is not surprising, therefore.

But what of the Prime Minister himself? Vincent Fourcher believes he is taking a strong hand against the narco-traffickers. Bubo, who knows exactly who is involved, argues the opposite. While in Guinea-Bissau myself in December and January, I heard many conflicting opinions over whether or not Gomes was abetting the traffickers – some even believe he had Nino Vieira killed in the turf war for control of the trade.

Whatever the truth, it seems that battle lines are being drawn, with Bubo and Indjai on one side, Gomes on the other. Where the country’s president, Malam Bacai Sanha, stands is not yet clear, and nor, perhaps most crucially for the future of Guinea-Bissau, is the allegiance of the Latin American drug cartels…