My colleages at Berkman and in the larger Open Net Initiative have been busy this weekend working on new strategies to test Google’s new Chinese search engine, Google.cn. Rebecca MacKinnon gave us a list of 80+ Chinese keywords to test on google.com and google.cn – I spent part of Saturday watching the Bruins lose and comparing results between the two search engines.

Because I don’t speak Chinese, my comparison of results is generally restricted to two observations: Does one engine give meaningfully more results than another engine? And is the search on Google.cn performed against the whole set of webpages? Or is it rewritten as a search of only pages hosted in China?

I’m especially fascinated by this latter phenomenon. What topics are so out of bounds that Google and/or the Chinese government won’t alow pages outside of China to be listed as a search result?

For an English-language example, it’s instructive to look at a pair of searches. Search for “falun gong” on Google.com and you’ll get 2.2 million results, leading with falundafa.org, a multilingual site dedicated to the promotion of Falun Gong. Perform the same search on google.cn, and you’ll receive 12,500 results, leading with “Truth of Falun Gong”, a site that calls Falun Gong a harmful cult and explains why it’s banned.

Most interesting for our purposes, if we look at a screenshot of this search, the rightmost radio box under the Google search box has been checked – this indicates that the search results come from a search of Chinese-hosted pages only. Check the leftmost box – search all pages – and repeat the search. You’ll get the same result, and the rightmost box will be selected. Certain keywords force Google.cn to perform searches only against Chinese pages, probably to ensure that Chinese users don’t encounter pages hosted outside of China on highly controversial topics.

Working from Rebecca’s list of keywords, I was surprised to discover how few search terms triggered this behavior. Of the 82 terms I tested, only 27 generated significantly different result counts between google.com and google.cn. (For my purposes, I flagged any difference of 25% or greater as “significant”. There are going to be minor differences between google.com and google.cn on most terms, as google.cn blocks results from sites like geocities.com, which host many million pages.) Only 16 generated the “forced” result that I find most interesting – a mandatory search against pages hosted in China.

So what are Chinese censors concerned about? It’s not sex. Rebecca’s list includes 20 sexually oriented keywords (suggesting that if Rebecca were to curse you out in Mandarin, it would leave a mark…). None trigger the Chinese-only page search. The vast majority have similar results on the .com and .cn sites – the Chinese words for “bra”, “make love” and “butthole” have more significantly more results on Google.cn, while “penis”, “condom” and “big penis” have significantly more on Google.com.

Falun Gong, on the other hand, is clearly a sensitive topic. Searches for “Dafa”, “disciple”, “truth righteousness endurance”, and Li Hongzhi (the founder of the Falun Gong movement) all have fewer results on .cn and force a Chinese language search. “Falun” – 法轮 – is particularly fascinating. There are three times as many results on google.cn rather than on google.com – possibly because the engine points to many anti-Falun Gong pages approved of by the government.

(Interestingly, two alternate spellings of Hongzi, the founder of Falun Gong, don’t give forced Chinese searches. This is consistent with a result Paul Boutin found – misspelled results don’t appear to be blocked on google.cn – spell “Tiananmen” poorly and you’ll get images of tanks and defiance. I’d argue this is further evidence that Google is attempting to follow the letter of the restrictions presented by the Chinese authorities, but not the spirit of them… but that’s nothing but pure speculation, based on my sense that Google engineers are easily talented enough to program misspellings into their filters.)

Searches for “independence” are interesting as well. “Taiwan independence” and “Mongolian indepedence” don’t have major disparities between the two engines and don’t trigger a forced search. One spelling of “Taiwan Independence” has almost twice as many results on google.cn as on google.com. Tibet and Xinjiang independence do, both forcing Chinese-only searches and yielding less than half of the pages the Google.com searches do.

Some other words that force a search of sites hosted in China: “6 4″ (the date of the Tiananmen crackdown), “Tiananmen”, “violent action”, “immolate”, “Dalai” (as in “Lama”), “communist dogs”, “taishi village” (site of recent democracy protests), and Liu Xiaobo (dissident university professor).

Others have major disparities, but don’t force a search of Chinese-hosted pages. 三個代表 – “three represents” – Jiang Zemin’s political philosophy – and “eight immortals” – figures of Chinese legend – both have fewer results on google.cn than on google.com – “three represents” has a tiny fraction of the matches on google.com. “Brainwash” similarly has fewer results on google.cn, but no force. “Referendum”, on the other hand, has many more results on google.cn than on google.com.

What I find most interesting is that 50+ of the terms Rebecca suggested don’t trigger any meaningful differences between the two engines. Those terms include terms like “human rights”, “Michael Anti” (blogger whose site was removed by MSN), “mafia” and “military police”.

Two notes – rechecking results I first obtained Friday night suggests that the search catalogs are being tuned in real time on Google.cn. Rechecking a few of these terms today, it looks like many terms that had similar result counts between Google.cn and Google.com now have many more results on Google.com.

Second, if you’d like to test these results for yourself, my friends Nart Villeneuve and Boris Anthony have built a handy tool that performs searches on google.com and google.cn simultaneously and compares results – please do check my work and see if these observations from the other night still hold true. (The page includes all the keywords Rebecca provided…)

I’m in Cambridge today, enroute to Doha, Qatar, for the second annual Al Jazeera Forum, a meeting with the provocative title “Defending Freedoms, Defining Responsibility”. I’m either speaking on a panel on blogging on Wednesday or a panel on Thursday on “media and power”… or perhaps both – I’m sure I’ll find out once I hit the ground.

My trip to Doha will be my first trip to the Persian Gulf, and my first visit to one of the wealthier Arab nations. (I’ve travelled several times to Jordan, once each to Egypt and Tunis, but never to Saudi, Bahrain, UAE, etc.) The little I’m able to glean about Qatar from wikipedia and the CIA world factbook is fascinating – former British colony known for pearls, became a wealthy petrostate, one of the highest per capita incomes in the world… large Indian, Pakistani and Iranian populations, many in Qatar as economic migrants. Given my lack of Arabic, my full schedule, and the fact that I’m in the country a total of 60 hours means I’m not likely to get too many impressions of the country, but I have high hopes of making it out of the hotel for a walk to the harbor in Doha.

Like many Americans, I don’t entirely know what to think about Al Jazeera. I find some of the network’s policies baffling (the decision to air statements from Bin Laden), others provocative but understandable (a focus on showing civilian casualties in Iraq and Palestine) and others admirable (a willingness to run reports critical of governments in the Middle East.) I saw, and appreciated, the documentary “Control Room”, a sympathetic portrait of the Al Jazeera newsroom. And while I tend to dismiss a lot of anti-Jazeera rhetoric in the US as arabphobia, I am cautious about the fact that I don’t speak Arabic, don’t understand what’s being broadcast on the network, can’t get access to the network via my satellite provider and therefore am not in a position to make up my mind about the fairness of their coverage. I’m fascinated by this conference in part because I hope it will help me better understand what Al-J is trying to do, and whether or not it’s succeeding.

(I’m very lucky to be attending the conference with a number of good friends – Dan Gillmor; Haitham Sabbah, Global Voices’ Middle East editor; Daoud Kuttab of AmmanNet; and Marc “Abu Aardvark” Lynch of Williams College. I’m looking forward to triangulating my views and opinions with such smart media thinkers. I’m also hoping to meet some of the other GVO Middle East contributors – I’ll keep you posted.)

Emeka Okafor offered a provocative blog post a few days back: “Africa Needs an Al Jazeera”. (The question seems to have been raised first by Philip Fiske de Gouveia in a paper titled “An African Al Jazeera?) Emeka points to a new effort – “Africa TV” – being put together by Kenyan Salim Amin as a possible candidate for an international network that covers Africa with African reporters, an African perspective and focus, but doesn’t shy away from controversy and investigative journalism. It’s not a new idea, but it’s a very exciting one – and it’s interesting to see Al-J held up as the model, rather than thinkers advocating for “an African CNN”.

Light blogging tomorrow, lots of blogging Wednesday and Thursday from Qatar, I hope.

My friend Marvin Hall has been working with middle school students from the Kingston, Jamaica neighborhood of Jones Town. The kids learned robotics, working with Lego Mindstorms, preparing for the First Lego League competition in northern California. Until the day of the trip, it wasn’t clear whether the team would get travel funding or visas to travel to San Jose and compete against top Californian teams. But ultimately Scotiabank stepped up as a sponsor and the team had the chance to compete. They were awarded a special Judges’ award as the team that “came the furthest and overcame the most obstacles.” Marvin’s work to help Jamaican kids discover that they’re able to create, invent and compete against peers anywhere in the world is, to me, very inspiring – congratulations to Marvin, Halls of Learning and “LEGO Yuh Mind”.

It’s cool that I can surf the Internet from my couch because I’ve got a Wifi access point in my house. But it’s far more than cool that people in Bamako can hook their businesses to the Internet without using Mali’s overstressed phone system due to inexpensive wireless networks.

My friend Tomas Krag has been fascinated for several years by the possibility of wireless as a solution to connectivity problems in the developing world. He’s built networks in Ghana and Armenia, led workshops in Uganda and India, and has forgotten more about wireless networks than most people will ever know.

In October 2005, Tomas and the Wireless Roadshow project brought together several wireless networking experts and O’Reilly editor Rob Flickenger for a “book sprint” in London: a four day event where the authors and editor worked together to create a detailed outline and assign chunks of the book to each other. Four months later, they’ve got a finished product, a book called Wireless Networking in the Developing World”.

The book will be available in a print-on-demand edition in the near future, but is currently available as a download. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons “share alike” license, which means you can do whatever you’d like with the text, so long as you share the output (which makes it possible for someone to translate the text into Kiswahili, for instance.) There’s a wiki for the book, which allows you to have input into the next edition, adding suggestions or corrections.

How do you run a wireless access point from a battery? How long will a Wifi signal carry in rain or dust storms? How do you keep an access point on a 30m mast from being damaged by rain or lightning? I don’t know, but I will after downloading and reading the book…!

The anti-censorship community has been hard at work today trying to figure out just how Google’s new Chinese search engine prevents access to controversial content. Nart Villeneuve, pretty much the smartest guy out there working on Internet censorship, offered a post yesterday with some early insights into how sites are being blocked.

One of the observations Nart made: Google.cn is working from a blacklist of URLs, possibly provided by Chinese authorities, possibly generated from following traffic to search results and adding domains that are consistently blocked by the firewall. This blacklist includes activist sites, news sites, homepage hosting and forum sites.

It’s worth noting that, with some knowledge of Google hackery, you can make some guesses about just how Google’s removing results from searches. Go to google.cn and enter a search for “site:hrw.org” – this should return results from Human Rights Watch’s website. Google.cn yields a page that tells us that no pages can be found to match our query, and includes a prominent notice that there are results which are not displayed, due to local laws and policies. Try again with a search for “inurl:hrw.org”, which should display all sites that include the string “hrw.org” in their URLs. Google.cn returns a page that lists 58,400 results… and provides links to only two of them, neither of which is a page on the hrw.org site. Again, the page ends with a prominent notice about the censorship of results. This suggests that there are many pages in the catalog with hrw.org URLs, but that somewhere between retrieving results from the catalog and presenting them to the user, Google is checking against a blacklist and eliminating most results.

This bit of hackery helps complicate the result I had last night searching for “太石村” – Taishi Village – I noted the absence of wikipedia results and concluded that this was because Wikipedia wasn’t indexed by Google.cn. The actual situation turns out to be far more interesting.

Search for “site:wikipedia.org” on Google.cn and you get 17 million results, including links to the English, Vietnamese, Spanish and Chinese-language Wikipedias. Search for “inurl:wikipedia.org” and you get 17,700,000 – this makes sense, as 700,000 urls not on the wikipedia.org domain might include the string “wikipedia.org”, especially if they’re mirroring Wikipedia content.

Now search for “site:wikipedia.org 太石村” – Taishi on a wikipedia.org page. You get an error page that tells you that no results are available and that you should use fewer, or more common, search terms. Ditto for “inurl:wikipedia.org 太石村”. But here’s what’s really interesting – even if you perform the searches with the leftmost radio button (Search the Web) depressed, the search executed has the rightmost radio button (Search Chinese Web pages) depressed.

This suggests that for some controversial keywords, Google.cn forces a search against a catalog of pages hosted in China rather than a search against the whole web. Some quick experiments:

法轮功 (falun gong) – Forces a Chinese page search, returns 866,000 results
法轮功 inurl:wikipedia.org – Forces a Chinese page search, returns no results, error page

太石村 (taishi) – Forces a Chinese page search, returns 11,400 results
太石村 inurl:wikipedia.org – Forces a Chinese page search, returns no results, error page

西藏 (tibet) – Allows a full web search, returns 17,100,000 results beginning with tibetonline.net

西藏 inurl:wikipedia.org – Allows a full web search, returns 2,400 results including Chinese-language wikipedia pages hosted on Wikipedia’s US servers.

民主 (democracy) also gives you full-web results. “falun gong” written in English forces a Chinese page search. “taishi” written in English doesn’t force a Chinese page search, though the Chinese string does.

Basically, it looks like two things are going on here: certain sites are simply so controversial, Google.cn won’t offer links to them. inurl: searches reveal that pages exist, but results won’t let you see them, and site: searches give you the same result as if you searched for a nonexistent domain. (There’s a slight difference – search for a non-existent domain and you don’t get the message that certain results may be removed…)

Use a particularly controversial keyword (falun gong, taishi – though not tibet or democracy) and you’re forced into a search only of pages hosted in China… generally pages approved by the government. (Search for “falun gong” on Google.cn for an example of the sorts of “impartial” content this turns up…)

If any of my Chinese-speaking readers (including Rebecca :-) would like to collaborate, I’d be very interested in testing a larger list of words in Chinese and English to see which ones trigger this “Chinese pages only” behavior – it would provide an interesting map of what topics are merely controversial and which are completely off limits.

As you’ve doubtless heard half a dozen times so far today, Google has launched a new service in China. For years, Google has provided a Chinese-language service. It was hosted in the United States and frequently blocked by the Great Firewall. As a result, Google started losing market share in China to Baidu, a Chinese search engine.

Now Google’s launched a service hosted in China, staffed by Chinese citizens, built to comply with Chinese law. What this means is that searches for certain terms will be filtered so that internet users in China see only sites unblocked by the firewall.

I’m confident that my colleague Rebecca Mackinnon will have a much more detailed comparison of the search engines, as she actually reads Chinese. But here’s an experiment I did, searching for “太石村” – Taishi, a village in Guangzhou, which experienced a severe government crackdown after attempts were made to oust a corrupt government official.

Here’s what the results look like on Google’s prior Chinese-language search, http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/:

And here’s what it looks like on Google.cn’s new search:

You’ll notice that the top results for the search on the US search engine are for wikipedia pages. Wikipedia is currently blocked in China – evidently, Google.cn is not providing links to these wikipedia pages in compliance with the wishes of the Chinese government – Google.cn results don’t include the wikipedia pages.

Update – I’m wrong about this. Google.cn does index wikipedia pages. But searches for certain sensitive keywords force google.cn to give you results only from pages hosted in China. So a search for a keyword like “falun gong” will only search Chinese pages and won’t return results from wikipedia. Far more about this on another blog post.

It’s also worth noting that the Google.cn search lists about 11,000 matches while the Google.com search lists almost 50,000 matches. That’s a pretty major disparity.

Google says that pages that have edited search results will have a message mentioning that some results are blocked – I don’t read Chinese, so I can’t confirm if this notice exists. Google also said there would be a prominent link to the old, more complete search interface.

It’s been popular to ask Google whether they really think this new move is compatible with their unofficial corporate motto, “Don’t be evil.” Rebecca MacKinnon titles her post on the topic, “Degrees of Evil”, mentioning that she needs to look more closely at the implementation to see just how evil Google is being. David Weinberger observes that this situation “shows once and for all that Google’s motto is just silly in a world as complex as this one.”

As they so often are, my colleagues are both right. The devil’s in the details. And the attention taken to detail tells me that Google has thought long and hard about what they were doing and come up with a compromise. It’s a compromise that doesn’t make me happy, that probably doesn’t make most of the people who work for Google very happy, but which has been carefully thought through. And that, I think, gives some reason for optimism.

First, some disclosure: Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s Senior Policy Counsel, quoted in this WSJ story on the Chinese site, is a close friend, a colleague and someone I’ve authored papers with. While we’ve not talked about Google’s decision to launch this site, we’ve talked at length about other ethical issues involving net filtering and censorship. I know that he thinks very carefully about these issues and I feel comfortable asserting that he’s spent hundreds of hours looking for a solution for Google that tries to maintain Google’s integrity while allowing it to provide service to Chinese users. I’m also willing to admit that my fondness for Andrew personally means that I’m more willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt than I otherwise would be.

In launching Google.cn, Google made an interesting decision – they did not launch versions of Gmail or Blogger, both services where users create content. This helps Google escape situations like the one Yahoo faced when the Chinese government asked for information on Shi Tao, or when MSN pulled Michael Anti’s blog. This suggests to me that Google’s willing to sacrifice revenue and market share in exchange for minimizing situations where they’re asked to put Chinese users at risk of arrest or detention.

This, in turn, gives me some cause for hope. Google showed a willingness to stand up to the US DOJ by not offering information to help the department support a controversial anti-pornography statute. Is it possible that Google will stand up to the Chinese government to a greater extent than MSN or Yahoo? This isn’t as easy as it sounds – Google would need to construct very clear policies for their Chinese staff to ensure that members of staff with access to information didn’t release info to friends who work for the Chinese security services through “informal” channels.

But it’s possible that Google could do a great deal of good by demonstrating that US companies can stand up to Chinese authorities without losing their opportunity to operate within the country. If they demonstrated this, it’s possible that a code of conduct like the one proposed by Reporters Without Borders might be more realistic.

(Of course, it’s also possible that the Chinese government will pressure Google to remove the link to the old site and any text about censored results. Or that Google will worry they’re losing market share and introduce the services more likely to get users into trouble. My point: if one gives them the benefit of the doubt, it’s possible that Google might actually try hard not to be evil in this case. Or to be minimally evil.)

The Internet has been an amazing tool for freedom in repressive nations. Because the ‘net is capable of crossing international borders, it’s functionally outside a repressive state like Sudan or Myanmar… and, to a large extent, it’s functionally in the US or Europe, where protections of freedom of speech and individual liberties are historically well protected. But China’s changed this equation.

By creating an Internet effectively filtered at the national border, China’s created an Internet that’s Chinese. Internationalist sites will not work as well as Chinese sites, as Wikipedia and other sites have demonstrated. Now the question is, “Will Internet companies insist on remaining on the Internet, or be willing to compromise and be on the Chinese internet?” The answer, so far, is that everyone’s willing to play along with China and build tools for the Chinese internet. Does Google get credit for doing so carefully and thoughtfully? Or blame for not refusing to play the game at all?

I have a confession to make: I don’t read every post made to Global Voices.

Many days, I read the entire feed. Some days, only some of the posts. And on days when I’m on airplanes or hugely busy, sometimes very few of the posts. For god’s sakes, there’s been 43 posts so far today, and there will probably be more before I go to bed.

It’s worse than that. I don’t read everything posted to BlogAfrica. Or to Worldchanging. I’m a bad, bad person.

(I also don’t floss every day. And I sometimes wait 4,000 miles between oil changes.)

Fortunately, David Sasaki, GV’s Latin America editor, has a solution for me. He’s now writing a daily email that features some of the most interesting stories on Global Voices. It’s one screenlength long, links to half a dozen great blog posts, takes about two minutes to read, and helps me feel less like a deadbeat dad. You should subscribe to it.

You should floss, too, but that’s really your problem, not mine.

If, like me, you could use a smile today, I offer the following links:

The good folks at Rocketboom have produced a video field report on reactions from around the world to the pertinent question, “Why is George W. Bush so awesome?” Predictably, not everyone feels like it’s a particularly fair question. And, also predictably, other people are very happy to answer it as a straight question. I’m amused by the fact that most of the Boston interviews involve people I know, including the inimitable SJ Klein and Dr. David Weinberger. (That’s Dr. W in the final interview, standing in front of the Berkman Center copy machine…)

Global Voices friend Taran Rampersad offers an open letter to conservative pundit Michelle Malkin, trying to help her get a better understanding of the goings on in his home, Trinidad and Tobago. He appears to feel roughly as much warmth for Malkin in his letter as I do for Menes Zenawi in my recent letter.

On a slightly more serious note, Global Voices Middle East editor Haitham Sabbah speculates on future fatwahs against his friend and mine, Hossein Derakshan. Hoder is visiting Israel, hoping to report on the lives and opinions of Iranian jews living in Israel. He recognizes that this will almost certainly make it difficult for him to return to his native Iran, as Iran doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. (Hoder is now a Canadian citizen, but it’s very important to him to be able to return home to Iran.) I’m happy to see that Haitham – who is going through a complex process of assessing his own feelings about Israel and Palestine – is considering a trip to Israel: “… although I really wish to make a visit to Israel, but I would prefer to go through the checkpoints of the Occupied Territories rather than going through cozy gates of Ben Gurion airport… Why? Because if peace has to take a chance, we have to remove the barriers, not jump over them!”

(By the way, Haitham is nominated for a 2006 Bloggies Award in the Middle East and Africa category. His blog is very much worth your vote. But so is Sleepless in Sudan, Mahmoud’s Den and Subzero Blue, who are all also nominated…)

Updated: Where does an Iranian Global Voices author stay when visiting Israel? With an Israeli Global Voices author, of course. Read Lisa Goldman’s account of their first day hanging out together in Tel Aviv as well…

I know you’ve been asking yourself: Just what do those crazy folks in Western Massachusetts do for fun during those long, cold winters? We build gers, of course, and the occasional outdoor hot tub. But mostly we wait for exciting cultural events that force us out of our warm homes into the teeth of the cold wind. And what gets Western Mass people to hop in their pickup trucks and Priuses and drive all the way to the Pioneer Valley?

Khöömei, of course! Tuvan throat singinging!

And not just any Tuvan throat singers – the Tuvan supergroup, Huun-Huur-Tu! Not just Kaigal-ool Khovalyg – featured in the documentary Ghengis Blues – but also Sayan Bapa, Andrey Mongush and Alexei Saryglar!

I really thought I was the only Khöömei fan in the 413 area code. I couldn’t have been more wrong – the concert sold out weeks in advance, filling the three-hundred seat Memorial Hall in Shelburne Falls, MA. For the dozens of folks who showed up without tickets, Hill Town Folk sold standing room only tickets, filling the aisles and balcony stairs with Khöömei devotees.

(I talked my father-in-law, a Texan, into attending by telling him that the Tuvans sang cowboy music. Which is, in fact, true. Most Tuvan music was composed to be sung on horseback, and Saryglar accompanies most songs with a hoofbeat rhythm… played on a pair of actual horse hooves. These Tuvans are all about keeping it real…)

I wore my best Mongolian camelhair vest, figuring I’d show off my central Asian street cred. Standing by the table where the band was selling CDs, a tall dude asked me, “Where’d you get the vest?” Figuring I’d impress him, I said, “Ulaanbaatar. The capital of Mongolia.” Unfased, he said, “Yeah, I know that. I meant, what store did you buy it in? I saw a couple guys in UB wearing them and thought I’d pick one up the next time I was in town.” Turns out he’s lived in eastern Mongolia for the past seven years as a wildlife biologist and will be heading back when the weather warms up a bit…

The entire town was filled with throat singing enthusiasts. Eating dinner before the show, the table next to ours started singing Sygyt, the high “flute” style of overtone singing. It’s one of those rare moments in life when I’ve felt bad about myself because I can sing only one note at the same time…

Just in case you’re not from Western Mass, a couple of questions and answers about Khöömei:

Q: What’s Khöömei?
A: It’s a gorgeous style of singing where the singer creates a drone tone and shapes his or her mouth to emphasize overtones, sounding a second or third note. Some styles, like Sygyt, create a high tone above the drone. Others, like Kagyraa, create a deep bass tone. Khöömei can be performed acapella, or with drums and horsehead fiddles.

Q: What does it sound like?
A: NPR has done a couple of pieces on Kh̦̦mei and Huun-Huur-Tu recently РA Musical Trip to the Mongolian Steppes, and The Art of Tuvan Throat Singing. Check them out.

Q: Where’s Tuva?
A: Just to the northwest of Mongolia, slightly south of Siberia. Tannu Tuva was an independent republic for about twenty years, then joined the Soviet Union. It’s currently part of Russia.

Q: Why do so many people know about Tuva?
A: Richard Feynman. The brilliant Рand batshit crazy Рphysicist helped found an organization called Friends of Tuva, which is dedicated to the appreciation of this lovely land. Friends of Tuva helped send blind bluesman Paul Pena to Tuva to compete in a Kh̦̦mei competition Рthis was documented in the documentary Genghis Blues.

Q: How do I learn to sing khöömei?
A:Steve Sklar has a bunch of lessons available online for purchase. Dan Bennet offers his advice on a FAQ on the Friends of Tuva site.

Q: Just how long does winter last out there in Western MA?
A: A long, long time. Last year, it snowed on June 1st. Lots of time to learn how to sing khöömei. Or write bizarre, off-topic blog posts.

Two quick Ethiopia updates – my open letter to Zenawi has been linked to by several other bloggers and reposted in The Witness, an online magazine oriented towards progressive Episcopalians and Anglicans. A progressive Episcopalian myself, I was particularly pleased to discover The Witness, and thrilled to discover that the piece they’d last published was by my friend Elijah Zarwan. I also realized that I’m not nearly as snarky and mean as I think I am, reading Richard Thiemes’ “High Time for Torture”, which he wisely subtitles “A Satire”.

Not a satire: Ethiopia’s government has kicked out Anthony Mitchell, the AP correspondent for the country. Andrew Heavens, a freelance journalist and the blogger behind Meskel Square, has the story of his friend’s departure, including the list of charges:

According to the Ethiopian News Agency, he was guilty of “tarnishing the image of the nation”, “repeatedly contravening journalism ethics”, “disseminating information far from the truth about Ethiopia” and, once again for luck, “[disseminating] information bent on tarnishing the image of the country”.

Mitchell is a tough reporter, but certainly not an unfair or unethical one – as Heavens points out, you just need to read his reporting via Google News to get a sense of the work he did in Ethiopia. It’s worth noting that Zenawi has been cracking down on journalists and opposition groups, charging 129 people with crimes ranging from “genocide” to “treason” – that group includes five Voice of America reporters.

Heavens points out that kicking out a good journalist just hurts the nation trying to avoid critical coverage – there’s been far more coverage of Mitchell’s expulsion than of recent requests for relief funds for Ethiopia. He’s got a good point, but I worry that the long-term damage from losing a hard-hitting correspondent is very serious. Most major newspapers don’t have Addis Ababa correspondents – we rely on AP, Reuters, AFP and other newswires – as well as bloggers like Heavens – to tell us what’s going on in Ethiopia… because, Lord knows, the Ethiopian News Agency isn’t going to tell us. I’m confident that AP will send someone else hard-hitting to cover the nation, but it takes a while to build local contacts, understand the local situation, and a new reporter won’t be as effective as a seasoned one at first.

Many thanks to Andrew Heavens for his insights on the situation, and to Anthony Mitchell for all the hard work and good reporting from Addis.