A troubling trend has been emerging in recent years across Central Asia, as terrorist cells have been increasingly turning to women to carry out their dirty work. Facing a declining pool of potential male recruits due to war casualties, extremist groups in that region have been enlisting females for a number of reasons. Not only are women available, but they are also unlikely suspects who can often catch security forces off-guard. The fact that females can easily conceal weapons in their clothing and are rarely subjected to body searches makes them even more effective from a strategic point of view.

Terrorist groups also know that the economic and political marginalization faced by many Central Asian women makes females more willing to engage in extremist activity. Indeed, living under highly oppressive societal conditions with few prospects for improvement, women become highly vulnerable to terrorist recruitment, whether it be from male relatives, other women, or religious leaders.

The Internet has done a great deal to facilitate the recruitment process. For example, as early as 2004, articles printed in Sawt al-Jihad—an online magazine sponsored by al Qaeda—highlighted why women should join the ranks of Islamic extremists. Sensing al Qaeda’s success with female recruitment, other extremist groups then turned to the web as well. The Internet provides access to women who might be otherwise secluded, creating a vast new pool of potential recruits. The web also serves as a forum for women to communicate freely and anonymously with one another, allowing them to operate ‘under the radar’ in comparison to other members of extremist outfits.

Unfortunately, the trend of female recruitment is unlikely to dissipate in the near-term. A growing number of Central Asia’s marginalized women may simply see joining extremist organizations as a way ‘out’ of their current situation. Perhaps an improvement in economic conditions or a greater respect for women’s rights in the region would be a panacea for this growing problem, but those developments do not seem likely anytime soon.

-Samantha Brletich

(Japan USEF/SSPS Project)

The Japanese government has announced ambitious new plans to harvest solar energy high above the Earth’s atmosphere. The project, known as the Space Solar Power System (SSPS), is arguably the world’s most adventurous to date in terms of harnessing renewable energy.

The SSPS will carry a price tag of several billion dollars, and is not expected to be fully operational until 2030. Between now and then, a handful of elite Japanese technology firms and researchers handpicked by the government will be developing prototypes and figuring out how to turn something straight out of a sci-fi flick into reality.

If all goes according to plan, it would work a little something like this. First, giant solar photovoltaic cells or “dishes” would be brought up to space, where they would remain in a geostationary orbit. Covering an area of several square miles, they would capture the sun’s energy, which is five times more powerful above the atmosphere than it is on the Earth’s surface. Once harnessed, that energy would then be beamed down to Japan via microwaves or laser beams, and converted into electricity. Heady stuff.

The overhead costs for a project like this are enormous, but the Japanese are confident the investment will pay off in the long run. That’s because the fully operational model of SSPS is projected to generate power equivalent of a mid-sized nuclear plant, and create electricity at a cost six times cheaper than the current going rate for electricity in Japan. Plus, the fact that there’s no cloud cover in space also would mean that the supply of energy would flow essentially uninterrupted.

The daring SSPS initiative reasserts Japan’s position at the forefront of the clean-energy movement, but the country is also undertaking the project out of necessity: Japan currently relies heavily on oil imports, and doesn’t have many domestic energy resources. Viewed through that lens, its huge down payment on SSPS is a means of heightening the country’s energy independence in the coming decades.

You’ve got to credit Japan for thinking boldly outside the box. It’s this type of innovative drive that the U.S. energy sector would be wise to emulate in the years ahead.

-Russell Sticklor

(REUTERS/Petr Josek)

At a speech in Washington, DC yesterday at Georgetown University, Czech President Vaclav Klaus threw a series of bombs at some of Europe’s most sacred shibboleths in his typical no-nonsense style. Just days after reluctantly dropping his refusal to sign the Lisbon Treaty, Klaus reiterated opposition to many of the ideas and structures of “political Europe.” He also expressed his well-known skepticism over the veracity of global warming, portraying the green movement as a collectivist ideological force with ulterior aims, eerily similar, in his thinking, to the communism he’d fought against his entire life—if wrapped in more innocuous language.

Klaus also responded to criticism that the Czech Republic and his Civic Democratic Party had lost influence in the European Parliament and the EU by dropping its affiliation with the mainstream European People’s Party in favor of a right-wing alliance with the British Conservatives, Polish Law and Justice, and others. He brushed off the criticism, noting that his party had much more in common politically with the Tories than Angela Merkel’s CDU.

-Brian Forest

Places like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland have long been known as global destinations for illicit money. But according to a new report released by the Tax Justice Network, an independent British research firm specializing in international financial transparency, there is another financial jurisdiction that is even more shady—and it’s just a stone’s throw from Washington, DC.

That’s right, folks—Delaware, of all places, tops the list of the world’s most secretive tax havens. In that state, tax loopholes that have been around for decades have allowed many of the U.S.’ biggest corporations to collectively avoid billions of dollars in tax payments every year. (I wonder what Vice President Biden has to say about that.)

Rounding out the TJN report’s top five are Luxembourg (#2), Switzerland (#3), the Cayman Islands (#4) and the United Kingdom (#5). The full list can be viewed at: www.financialsecrecyindex.com.

-Russell Sticklor

(Jeff Mitchell/Getty Images)

With just a few weeks to go before the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, a Japanese company is thinking outside the box about how to limit greenhouse gas pollution. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is thinking below the ground.

Engineers at Toshiba Corp. have recently started experimenting with what is known as “carbon capture and storage” (CCS), a technique that calls for pumping liquified CO2 deep into the Earth’s crust. And if that sounds controversial, well, it is.

The idea is simple enough: Trap carbon dioxide emissions from a coal-burning power plant (or other source) before the gases rise into the atmosphere, and convert those gases into liquid. Then the liquid gets piped down into depleted oil reservoirs or other subsurface repositories, where it is stored in perpetuity—far away from the planet’s delicate atmosphere.

No one has successfully pulled this off yet, so as you might expect, skeptics abound. Environmentalists warn that if CCS technology becomes commonplace, groundwater supplies the world over could be at risk. Some geologists say a human-induced build-up of carbon dioxide underground could even cause earthquakes or surface eruptions. Yikes.

While the technology isn’t anywhere close to being ready for market, CCS is being actively developed—not only in Japan, but in North Africa, Europe and North America as well. No one is suggesting that burying liquified carbon dioxide is the solution to combating global warming. But CCS advocates say that coupled with greater use of renewable energy technology, the technique could make a big difference in fighting climate change down the road.

-Russell Sticklor

(REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch)

Over the weekend, the one-time leaders of the U.S., Germany and the Soviet Union gathered to observe the anniversary of one of the 20th century’s defining political moments—the fall of the Berlin Wall in early November 1989. Saturday’s event, held in a theater just a few steps from where the wall once stood, also marked the first time in years that former President George H.W. Bush, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had met with one another.

As expected, emotions ran high during the ceremony. But it was a love-fest all around. All three men said credit for the wall’s collapse should go not to the politicians who held office at the time, but rather to the East Germans who attended protest after protest, often at great personal risk. At the same time, Bush did make a point of heaping praise on Gorbachev—who remains something of a national hero in Germany—for his bold reform-minded leadership two decades ago.

The three leaders’ reunion marked the first of many events that will be taking place across Berlin during the coming week, leading up to November 9th—the actual day that the wall, and East Germany, opened to the West. “We Germans don’t have very much in our history to be proud of,” Kohl reflected on Saturday. “But we’ve got every reason to be proud about German reunification.”

-Russell Sticklor

Sebastian Rich

I am not a clever wordsmith. I am a photographer. I capture moments, frequently moments of acute suffering.

While covering a story on blood diamonds in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I captured a moment that continues to haunt me. It did not take place in a mineshaft but rather a rural clinic. The village hospice was erected out of flattened oil drums, broken wooden boxes, and old USAID grain sacks. The heat inside was unbearable; I had never seen a cat sweat before. Mosquitoes the size of house flies clung to the ceiling waiting for nightfall.

While I was inside the structure, a mother stumbled in with her nine-year-old daughter, Maria. She had just carried the girl 25 kilometers in the broiling sun.

The medic took Maria and placed her on the dirt floor. It was wrenching to listen to her labored breathing while watching the medic rummage through his supplies of sticky plasters and out-of-date ibuprofen tablets—nothing that could possibly help the girl.

I put my hand on Maria’s forehead and could not believe the level of heat trapped within her small frame. The artery on her neck was pounding like an angry snake. Her lips were bright blue, a sure sign of impaired oxygen exchange in the lungs. Pneumonia.

The medic jotted words down in a grimy notebook while Maria’s eyes filled with water and closed. I have had a few military medic courses so I abandoned my camera and placed an ear to Maria’s chest.

I could hear fluid building up alarmingly in her lungs. Her heart rate slowed and she stopped breathing. I started CPR. This caused great consternation in the medic, who was probably never trained to recognize the symptoms of pneumonia even though the DRC’s cases rank some of the highest in the world. He probably was never trained in much at all.

I resisted his attempts to pull me away and continued administering CPR, but I could not revive the girl with the long eyelashes. She died in my arms. She died from a disease a cheap vaccine could have prevented.

Immense funds are poured into HIV/AIDs research each year—while this is unarguably important, we must not neglect the diseases we can already treat. According to the World Health Organization, pneumonia is the world’s leading killer of young children, claiming a life every 15 seconds.

- Sebastian Rich

(REUTERS/Stringer)

Say what you will about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s inaugural visit to Pakistan this week, but it has not been short on fireworks. Clinton made it clear she has some bones to pick with the Pakistani government, bluntly asserting that it has not been aggressive enough in its pursuit of al Qaeda’s top leaders, who the U.S. government believes are located in the country’s lawless northwest. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” she charged.

Such heated words come at a very delicate moment for the U.S.-Pakistan alliance, with tensions between the two countries running high. In the U.S., the Obama administration has been plotting a new Afghanistan strategy that will undoubtedly have huge implications for Pakistan, while Congress has been trying to craft an acceptable economic aid package for Pakistan to stabilize the country. Meanwhile, the Pakistani military finds itself in the second week of a controversial U.S.-backed campaign to root out Taliban militants in South Waziristan, near the Afghan border.

But Clinton hasn’t been the only one hurling accusations or asking pointed questions during her visit. At a heated question-and-answer session with Pakistani university students, Clinton was asked why Pakistan should trust the U.S. to remain a long-term partner in maintaining the stability of Afghanistan. After all, the questioner pointed out, the U.S. largely abandoned both Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late 1980s after helping drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Clinton called that a “fair criticism,” but added the U.S. and Pakistan needed to look to the future, not the past—essentially implying that ‘this time around’ would be different.

That sort of attitude may fly from an American point of view, but from a Pakistani perspective—where memories of betrayal remain fresh even after 20 years—it will not be so easy to turn the page.

-Russell Sticklor

(REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro)

With English considered the language of international business, it may come as little surprise that all Internet domain names are written using Latin-based letters. It has been done this way since the Internet first came into being during the late 1960s, and many overseas web users these days have come to accept English as the common language of the online world. That, however, might be about to change.

This week, the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will meet in Seoul, South Korea, to vote on whether to approve the creation and use of web domain names written in languages besides English. The ICANN board is widely expected to pass the measure, which would mean that web addresses may soon be written in scripts like Hindi, Cyrillic, Japanese and Arabic, to name a few. To pave the way for such sweeping changes in the Internet landscape, a translation system has been developed and tested over the past several years to coordinate the scripts. If the ICANN measure is approved, officials say the first non-English web site addresses should start popping up online around 2010.

This would be good news all around. A multilingual Internet domain-name system will more accurately reflect the world’s linguistic diversity, as more than half of world’s 1.6 billion web users already use non-Latin-based scripts in their everyday lives. The ICANN reform may also make the online world more inclusive, opening the Internet up to potential users who may have previously kept the web at arm’s length due to language barriers.

-Russell Sticklor

(REUTERS/Phil Noble)

Just in time for December’s U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen, a new survey out today shows that fewer and fewer Americans think global warming is linked to human pollution. The poll, released by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, reveals that just 36% of Americans believe there is convincing scientific proof that climate change has manmade causes. (By comparison, that figure stood at 47% only 18 months ago.)

Every year, the average American pumps about 20 tons of carbon into the atmosphere, making the U.S. the world’s second largest per capita emitter of carbon dioxide. (Australia is first.) Those soaring pollution levels make today’s poll results especially disheartening, considering the U.S. is expected to take a lead on creating new international standards for emissions reductions this December.

While self-awareness has never been one of the American public’s strong suits, it is still surprising that many poll respondents seem to think we are out of the woods as far as global warming is concerned. For example, only 57% of respondents say there is concrete evidence that the planet is even getting hotter, down from 71% in April 2008. Only one-third of Americans now consider global warming to be a “very serious” problem.

But thankfully, there remains cause for a small degree of optimism. More than 50% of respondents contend that caps on greenhouse gas emissions are still needed, while 56% of those polled say the U.S. should work with other countries to set those standards. So maybe there is some hope for Copenhagen, after all.

-Russell Sticklor