The World in Brief (3/30/06)

African colleges merge onto Internet fast lane

Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune… African colleges merge onto Internet fast lane

Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune

MAPUTO, Mozambique – Alfonso Pene, an information technology student at Eduardo Mondlane University, spends a lot of time on the Internet researching computer programming languages. But the University’s slow connection speed makes doing his homework an exercise in frustration.

“It’s too slow. It takes forever to download applications,” said the 24-year-old senior, slouched in front of a terminal in one of the University’s computer labs.

That is about to change as a result of an effort by six major U.S. foundations to boost Internet bandwidth at African universities.

Under the program, dubbed the Bandwidth Initiative, Eduardo Mondlane – Mozambique’s premier university – will see its bandwidth improved 50 percent in the next month or two without any increase in its monthly payments.

For students and teachers, the change also means, simply, that doing 15 minutes worth of work answering e-mail or posting lectures on the Web will no longer take an hour, said Americo Muchanga, director of the university’s Information Technology Center.

Right now, “you end up only doing the things that are necessary, like dealing with urgent e-mail,” he said. With the new bandwidth, “people won’t feel like they’re wasting their time.”

Mozambique, like many African countries, has little fast, cheap Internet access. Several new fiber-optic cables capable of offering broad bandwidth pass through neighboring South Africa, but the closest connection point is still 190 miles from Maputo. The cost of laying a cable to close the gap would be $6 million, well beyond the resources of a poor nation still recovering from a long civil war, Muchanga said.

Many African countries face similar problems, one reason that Internet access at most African universities costs $10,000 a month for the same bandwidth American and European universities enjoy for $100 a month.

The new initiative aims to overcome that problem by giving African universities broadband access via satellite and grouping them together as a single buyer to win bulk discounts. Right now, 11 universities in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa, as well as Mozambique, are part of the $200 million, five-year program.

Immigration bill finds bipartisan support in Senate

Dave Montgomery, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – A comprehensive immigration bill that answers President George W. Bush’s call for a guest-worker program appears to have enough bipartisan support to pass the Senate, guaranteeing a legislative collision with an enforcement-oriented House bill, several advocates on both sides of the issue predicted Tuesday.

“We’re in some trouble in the Senate,” said Paul Egan, government-relations director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports the House bill and opposes the guest-worker concept as a form of amnesty for illegal immigration.

The Senate may well deadlock with the House of Representatives because their positions differ so radically and the issue is too politically hot in this congressional election year for lawmakers on either side to compromise. That could doom all legislation to overhaul immigration this year.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 12-6 Monday to advance a comprehensive measure that would put millions of illegal immigrants on track to permanent legal status and allow up to 400,000 foreign workers each year to fill low-skilled jobs.

Egan said opponents of the measure put their hopes in the 435-member House, where a coalition of conservative Republicans has vowed to kill immigration legislation that includes a guest worker plan. The 94-member coalition blocked inclusion of a guest worker program in the immigration bill the House passed in December.

The House bill also makes illegal immigration a felony and calls for 700 miles of fences along the Southwest border.

Islanders ask: Where’s the cleanup?

Ray Quintanilla, Chicago Tribune

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico – Three years after U.S. military exercises were halted here, tempers still run hot when residents recall six decades of naval bombardments that transformed parts of this tropical island paradise into lands resembling the surface of the moon.

These days, residents’ hostilities are centered on why it is taking the U.S. government so long to begin what surely will become among the most ambitious Superfund cleanup campaigns in American history.

But while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says its plans are progressing on schedule, this bit of news is serving to stoke fresh local hostilities: Bombs are going off in Vieques again, and the blasts may last eight years or more.

This time the explosions are part of the military’s program to detonate missiles, rockets and other ordnance that struck the ground but didn’t explode during the years of military exercises. And until the work is complete, officials said, there can be no meaningful environmental cleanup here.

“It’s all a bit much to take,” said Nilda Medina Diaz, chairwoman of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques, a community group that helped lead a public fight that persuaded the Navy to leave Vieques. “A lot of us who live in Vieques look around and ask, ‘Where’s the cleanup?'”

These developments are disturbing, Medina Diaz and others say, because they believe substances such as depleted uranium, mercury, napalm and other toxic chemicals left in the soil from the military exercises are seeping into the ocean, damaging coral reefs and contaminating wildlife. There’s also a concern that dust from the new explosions might pose a health hazard to island residents.

“Our work is progressing as fast as it can,” said Jose Font, deputy director of the EPA’s Caribbean Environmental Protection Division.

He said there is no evidence to suggest that the new detonations pose a risk to anyone or that any contaminants on the ground pose a risk to plants or wildlife.