NPR: What It Will Take For Trump To End AIDS 'Beyond' America

The president's record on addressing the virus in other countries has been inconsistent.

A staffer at the Right to Care AIDS clinic in Johannesburg administers an HIV test on a young boy. South Africa is one of the countries that receives funds from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

Gallo Images/Getty Images

This story first appeared in NPR.

When President Trump gave his State of the Union address last week, he made an ambitious promise to "eliminate the H.I.V. epidemic in the United States within 10 years." The announcement was followed by a blueprint from the Department of Health and Human Services that details the administration's plan to concentrate funding for treatment and preventative medicine in a few dozen counties nationwide with the highest rates of infection. Public health experts generally applauded the plan as achievable with existing tools and techniques.

The announcement also contained a second, less-noticed promise: To defeat AIDS "beyond" the U.S. But the president's own record on addressing the virus in other countries has been inconsistent.

In December, Trump signed a bill reauthorizing the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, a flagship foreign assistance program that was initiated in 2003 by President George W. Bush and has grown to be one of the biggest and most successful public health interventions in history, responsible for saving millions of lives around the world.

But in his budget proposal for fiscal year 2019, released this time last year, Trump called for more than $1 billion in cuts to PEPFAR and the Global Fund, an international public-private partnership that is the world's biggest funder of AIDS treatment and prevention programs, part of a broader package of cuts to foreign aid programs of all kinds. Those cuts are still embroiled in the ongoing budget negotiations that have shaken the capital since the beginning of the year. Jennifer Kates, director of Global Health & HIV Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, says Congress is expected to reject Trump's proposal as early as this week, and keep funding for foreign AIDS programs at roughly its current level.

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National Geographic: Climate change creates a new migration crisis for Bangladesh

The country, already grappling with the Rohingya crisis, now faces a devastating migration problem as hundreds of thousands face an impossible choice between battered coastlines and urban slums.

Forida Khatun stands behind her house in Gabura, Bangladesh, in November. Two of her sons migrated to Dhaka after the family home was destroyed by storms multiple times and agricultural jobs were lost due to salinity intrusion. “Only Allah can save us," she says. "We don’t have any power to save our children.” (Photo by Tim McDonnell)

This story was first published in National Geographic.

DHAKA, BANGLADESHGolam Mostafa Sarder starts every day before dawn, rising from a thin reed mat in the shed that he shares with fifteen roommates. Each has just enough space to lie flat. He dresses in gym shorts and t-shirt by the light of a single dangling bulb.

Outside the shed’s open doorway, in the outskirts of Dhaka, the sprawling megacity capital of Bangladesh, is the brick factory where Golam and his neighbors work for fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, at least six months a year. His home in Gabura, a remote village on the country’s southwestern coast, is more than a day’s journey from the city by bus, rickshaw, and ferry.

Golam’s job is to push wheelbarrows of mud down the production line. Waist-high rows of drying bricks spiral off from a towering kiln that belches smoke over an area the size of a city block. By 6 p.m. his lanky frame is spattered in gray mud. The evening air swims with mosquitoes. He has just enough strength left to clean his bare feet and angular face, inhale a dinner of lentils and rice, and collapse back onto his mat.

Golam has never heard of global warming. But he says he knows one thing for sure: “If the river didn’t take our land, I wouldn’t need to be here.”

Bangladesh, a densely populated, riverine South Asian nation, has always survived its share of tropical storms, flooding, and other natural disasters. But today, climate change is accelerating old forces of destruction, creating new patterns of displacement, and fueling an explosion of rapid, chaotic urbanization. A report last week from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the State Department and other foreign aid agencies have not done enough to combat climate change-induced migration in developing countries, and highlighted Bangladesh as particularly vulnerable. And as climate change drives the migration of up to 200 million people worldwide by 2050, Dhaka offers a cautionary tale for refuge cities around the globe.

Interviews with dozens of migrant families, scientists, urban planners, human rights advocates, and government officials across Bangladesh reveal that while the country is keenly aware of its vulnerability to climate change, not enough has been done to match the pace and scale of the resultant displacement and urbanization, toppling any prospect of a humane life for one of the world’s largest populations of climate migrants.

“Right now the government’s vision is to have no vision,” says Tasneem Siddiqui, a political scientist who leads the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit at the University of Dhaka. “It’s just that everything is in Dhaka, and people are all coming to Dhaka. And Dhaka is collapsing.”

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NPR: The Rule of Law Is Crumbling in Rural Nigeria

2018 was an exceptionally bloody year in the country’s ongoing conflict between farmers and pastoralists.

Saminu Mohammad is a Fulani cattle herder who decided to defy Benue State’s ban on cattle grazing. (Tim McDonnell)

This story first appeared in NPR.

Deadly conflicts between farmers and cattle herders in central Nigeria over land and natural resources reached a high point in 2018, according to a new report from Amnesty International.

In 2018, more than 2,000 people were killed in such conflicts, the report found. That's more than the previous two years combined, and hundreds more than were killed by the terrorist group Boko Haram. The death toll this year, the report found, was exacerbated by the government's failure to keep the peace and investigate and prosecute the attackers.

Overall, the report — which details three years of clashes — paints a picture of a conflict in which both farmers and pastoralists across Nigeria's Middle Belt region have lost confidence in the rule of law and feel empowered to retaliate against their neighbors with impunity.

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NPR: A Great African Kingdom Tells Its History In Fabulous Royal Clothes

A new exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art combines carbon dating, beautiful textiles, and a turbulent history.

This textile would have been used as an "overskirt." It has been dated to 1736‑1799 and is the oldest piece in the exhibition.

Courtesy of Baltimore Museum of Art

This story first appeared on NPR.

What can an old piece of cloth tell us about the rise and fall of a kingdom? Quite a lot, if you know how to read it.

That's the premise behind a new exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art titled "Kuba: Fabric of an Empire." It features an array of captivating patterned textiles from the Kuba Kingdom, which between the 17th and early 20th centuries was one of Africa's largest and most powerful societies, controlling trade in ivory and rubber in what is today the southeastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Kuba were renowned for their artistry, and today any museum of African art in the U.S. or Europe is likely to display Kuba sculpture, masks, beadwork or especially textiles, which were commissioned by royalty and worn or displayed for ceremonial occasions. The textiles are made of woven and dyed raffia palm fronds and feature hypnotic geometric designs mostly in shades of black and tan.

In some, the designs are stitched; in others, serpentine cutouts are appliquéd onto a raffia backing. Some are 20 feet long and meant to be worn as a wrapped unisex skirt; others are 2-foot-square panels meant to be hung on display behind a royal throne.

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Medium: The Life-or-Death Science of Evacuation Psychology

Scientists are gaining a better understanding of why, no matter the severity, many residents won’t heed orders to evacuate.

WILMINGTON, NC — September 13, 2018: Elizabeth Claire Toomer floats while swimming with friends in the Intracoastal Waterway as Hurricane Florence approached the area. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images News/Getty

This story first appeared on Medium.

Early Friday morning, Sept. 14, Hurricane Florence made landfall as a Category 1 storm near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. Although the storm has lost some of its offshore strength, it’s still considered highly dangerous by authorities and is already causing severe flooding. By Thursday, North Carolina officials had issued evacuation orders in 16 vulnerable counties. Some are voluntary, but most are mandatory, covering around 1 million people, according to the state’s Department of Public Safety (DPS).

But, as in the cases of Harvey, Maria, Katrina, and other recent high-profile hurricanes, many people have chosen not to follow evacuation orders, putting themselves and emergency responders at risk. Keith Acree, a North Carolina DPS spokesperson, said the state has no way to monitor exactly how many people evacuated ahead of Florence, although he reported a steady stream of inland-bound traffic.

As climate change increases the severity and frequency of catastrophic storms, emergency management authorities are looking for new ways to motivate people to take precautionary action. The answer may be more psychological than technological. Over the last decade, meteorologists have made huge strides in precision weather forecasting, but it hasn’t proven to be enough to get more people to move themselves out of harm’s way, said Jennifer Marlon, an environmental scientist at Yale. “We need to invest in communication,” Marlon said. “There’s a recognition that what’s going on in people’s minds is as important as us getting the models right.”

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Mother Jones: Families Who Fled Hurricane Maria Could Lose Their Homes. Again.

“It’s a crisis that we’re facing.”

Betzaida Crespo and her family have shared this Orlando hotel room since November. (Tim McDonnell)

This story first appeared in Mother Jones. 

Nearly 2,000 families who fled Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria could once again find themselves without a place to live if a federal court allows the US government to cut off housing subsidies for people displaced by the storm.

One of those families is led by Betzaida Crespo. Betsy, as she’s known, left Dorado, Puerto Rico, in November with her husband Erín and their young son and daughter after their home was severely damaged by the hurricane. Like an estimated 150,000 other Puerto Ricans, the family boarded a plane to Florida. When they arrived in Orlando, they signed up to receive temporary housing aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They moved into a room with two queen-size beds at a Holiday Inn just down the street from Disney World, and they’ve lived there ever since.

The room has all the trappings of any young family’s home, condensed into less than 200 square feet. The walls are lined with plastic footlockers that have been jammed full of clothing. Action figures are piled on the floor next to tools belonging to Erín, a handyman. Ramen and canned food are stacked on a rickety table alongside a single electric burner and a rice cooker. A bouquet of fresh-cut flowers fills a pink plastic water bottle on the window ledge.

Living in this cramped space has put the whole family on edge, Betsy says. Their months-long search for their own apartment—on what Erín can earn from odd jobs, in a sprawling metropolitan area with one of the country’s worst affordable housing markets—has been unsuccessful. Betsy struggles with crippling anxiety and depression and suffers from back pain caused by scoliosis. She has bad credit from a dispute with a previous landlord. After she gets her children to sleep and steals a rare private moment with Erín in the bathroom, she often lays awake until 4 a.m., scrolling aimlessly on her phone.

Her mind constantly circles the same question: What next?

“The reality is we have nowhere else to go,” she says. “After here, we could be on the streets.”

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NPR: The Refugees The World Barely Pays Attention To

Attention on people displaced by environmental chaos is growing, but new international policies are toothless.

“Things now are changing. It might become very difficult to stay here if things don’t improve,” says Maigari Lawal, the chief of Saidagyada village in northern Nigeria. “But God wants us to live here. It’s only God who can decide.” (Tim McDonnell)

This story originally appeared on NPR.

This month, diplomats from around the world met in New York and Geneva to hash out a pair of new global agreements that aim to lay out new guidelines for how countries should deal with an unprecedented surge in the number of displaced people, which has now reached 65.6 million worldwide.

But there's one emerging category that seems to be getting short shrift in the conversation: so-called "climate refugees," who currently lack any formal definition, recognition or protection under international law even as the scope of their predicament becomes more clear.

Since 2008, an average of 24 million people have been displaced by catastrophic weather disasters each year. As climate change worsens storms and droughts, climate scientists and migration experts expect that number to rise.

Meanwhile, climate impacts that unravel over time, like desert expansion and sea level rise, are also forcing people from their homes: A World Bank report in March projects that within three of the most vulnerable regions — sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America — 143 million people could be displaced by these impacts by 2050.

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NPR: Why Are Some of Africa's Biggest Baobab Trees Dying Off?

One of the continent's oldest and weirdest living things is facing a sudden decline-and scientists think they know why. 

The Platland tree in South Africa was the home of a cocktail bar until it started to split apart. (Courtesy Adrian Patrut)

This story first appeared in NPR. 

Baobab trees — ancient, otherworldly behemoths with bulbous trunks that splinter into a constellation of spindly branches — are some of Africa's most iconic living things.

Until late last year, the Platland tree in South Africa, also known as Sunland, was their queen. It was the continent's biggest baobab, at 111 ft. around, 62 ft. high and more than 1,000 years old. It had a cavernous central hollow that hosted a fully functional cocktail bar with seating for 15 people.

Beginning in Spring 2016, the tree began to split apart. By November 2017, it had crumbled completely.

The bar's owners blamed rot caused by heavy rain and threw a barbeque to honor its passing.

But if the Platland's demise was sudden and tragic, it wasn't unique: A new survey of baobab trees across several countries in southern Africa found that most of the two dozen oldest and biggest trees have died or significantly deteriorated in the last decade.

Scientists are wondering what's behind the mysterious die-off — and are looking at climate change as a likely culprit.

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NPR: Why Ghana's Clam Farmers Are Digging GPS

New technology is helping solve the entrenched problem of land rights in Africa. 

Samuel-Richard Bogobley holds a GPS-enabled tablet to capture the location of one corner of an underwater clam "farm" belonging to Kofi Amatey, in pink, in Ghana's Volta River estuary.

Tim McDonnell /for NPR

This story first appeared in NPR.

Samuel-Richard Bogobley is wearing a bright orange life vest and leaning precariously over the edge of a fishing canoe on the Volta River estuary, a gorgeous wildlife refuge where Ghana's biggest river meets the Gulf of Guinea.

He's looking for a bamboo rod poking a couple feet above the surface. When he finds it, he holds out a computer tablet and taps the screen. Then he motions for the captain to move the boat forward as he scans the water for the next rod.

It's slow work. But once it's completed, it could pave the way for significant new legal protections for the property rights of marginalized communities across Africa.

"Before you can start to recognize a fishery, you need to have a lot of data," says Bogobley, a researcher with Hen Mpoano, a Ghanaian nonprofit that supports small-scale fishers. "These people don't have any platform to fight for what is theirs."

The Volta River is rich with clams, harvested year-round by a bustling community of several hundred fishermen and women. The meat is packaged for sale across West Africa, while the shells are ground into an additive for whitewash and chicken feed.

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OZY: This Small Island Paradise Is Showing Africa How to Beat Malaria

Malaria remains a tenacious disease. Not in Sao Tome. 

People enjoy a New Year’s day swim in São Tomé city on Jan. 1, 2018. Tourists to São Tomé and Principe, a scattering of islands off the coast of western equatorial Africa that once served the slave and sugar trades of Portuguese colonial rulers, are rare.

SOURCE RUTH MCDOWALL/AFP/GETTY

This story first appeared on OZY.

Hamilton Nascimento remembers missing months of school as a child when he repeatedly got sick with malaria. It used to be an unavoidable part of life in São Tomé and Príncipe, a nation of two tiny islands in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, where Nascimento grew up. But not anymore.

“Most people in São Tomé knew someone who died from malaria, but now we haven’t had a death in years,” says Nascimento, who leads the government’s anti-malaria office and has helped steer the islands through a dramatic turnaround.

São Tomé and Príncipe is best known for stunning beaches, Galapagos-caliber birdwatching and historic coffee plantations. But in recent years, the maritime nation has acquired a new reputation as one of Africa’s most successful countries in fighting malaria, a disease that kills more than 400,000 people across the continent every year. According to the World Health Organization:

SINCE 2014, THE NATION OF SÃO TOMÉ AND PRINCIPE HAS HAD ZERO MALARIA DEATHS, MAKING IT THE ONLY COUNTRY IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA TO MAINTAIN THAT ACHIEVEMENT FOR SEVERAL CONSECUTIVE YEARS.

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The New York Times: Surgery Lit by Cellphone: Togo Doctors Strike Over Deplorable Hospitals

Health care workers have moved to the forefront of a broad public uprising against the government.

Dr. David Dosseh helped organize a series of health care worker strikes at Lomé’s central hospital, where he is a surgeon. “When you accept to work in these conditions, you might be complicit in a situation that could cause death,” he says. (Tim McDonnell)

This story first appeared in The New York Times.

LOMÉ, Togo — The air-conditioner was broken in the sweltering neonatal ward of Togo’s largest hospital, and only one nurse was on duty to attend to the two dozen infants with life-threatening conditions.

Mothers with babies in the ward were imploring friends and family for loans to buy basic medical supplies from pharmacies around Lomé, the capital, because items like drugs, saline solution, latex gloves and packets of clean water were not available at Sylvanus Olympio University Teaching Hospital.

One infant, Tresor Tsolenyanou, was born in February with gastroschisis, a condition in which the intestines are partly exposed through a hole in the abdominal muscles. He shared a crib with several other babies, his bulging torso wrapped in gauze.

In the United States, the survival rate for gastroschisis is 90 percent. But because of the high risk of infection in this overcrowded, understaffed and undersupplied hospital, Tresor was likely to die, said Steven Kagni, the ward’s attending nurse.

Fed up with situations like Tresor’s, Togo’s public hospital workers are demonstrating their disgust with the level of care they are able to provide, adding their voices to a growing swell of political protests that have shaken this small, West African country.

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The New York Times: What’s the World’s Fastest-Growing Economy? Ghana Contends for the Crown

Mired in poverty not long ago, the West African nation’s economic growth is on track to outpace India’s. But with oil driving much of the expansion, experts worry about the so-called resource curse.

Kekeli Aryeetey, a shop owner in Accra, Ghana, says the country’s GDP growth doesn’t mean much for most people. “We’re still struggling for jobs,” she says. “You’re on your own to put money in your pocket.” (Tim McDonnell)

This story first appeared in The New York Times.

TEMA, Ghana — As recently as the 1980s, the West African nation of Ghana was in crisis, crippled by hunger after a series of military coups. But it has held peaceful elections since 1992, and its economic outlook turned considerably brighter about a decade ago, with the discovery of major offshore oil deposits.

Now, as oil prices rise again and the country’s oil production rapidly expands, Ghana is on track to make a remarkable claim for a country mired in poverty not long ago: It is likely to have one of the world’s fastest-growing economies this year, according to the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Brookings Institution.

Its projected growth in 2018, between 8.3 and 8.9 percent, might outpace even India, with its booming tech sector, and Ethiopia, which over the last decade has been one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies thanks to expanding agricultural production and coffee exports.

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NPR: Ghanaian Fans Have One Nit To Pick But Otherwise Adore 'Black Panther'

This story first appeared on NPR. 

There was no red carpet, but there were drums, dancing, and general mayhem. 

The premiere of Black Panther on Thursday night was definitely the wildest event in the history of the movie theater at the central mall in Accra, Ghana, says Joshua Nyamekye, who works as a ticket collector there. Before the night was over, fans trying to crowd into the theater left Nyamekye, 23, looking like he'd been roughed up by the titular clawed hero himself.

But Nyamekye doesn't resent his wounds; he was just as enthusiastic to see the movie himself.

"Marvel [Studios] movies are always crazy like this," he says. But this time, "we almost needed to call the police."

The movie, which builds off the popular "Avengers" superhero franchise, stars Chadwick Boseman as the butt-kicking King T'Challa of Wakanda, a mythical African nation that faces internal strife over whether to share its super-advanced technology with the outside world. Needless to say, the nearly all-black cast and African setting are a significant departure from typical Hollywood action-flick fare, and it has had a rapturous reception across the continent, starting with its global premiere in Kisumu, Kenya, co-star Lupita Nyong'o's hometown.

On the film's second night in Accra, the drums had died down, but the house was still packed, including a large contingent of self-avowed comic book nerds who say the movie held a special resonance for African audiences.

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NPR: Africa Is Suffering A Silent Crisis Of Stroke

The largest-ever study of stroke in Africa reveals how economic development is changing the picture of disease on the continent.

Courtesy Fredua Agyemang

This story first appeared on NPR.

Last April, Fredua Agyemang, a musician in Kumasi, Ghana, was performing onstage at a funeral, which in this country is often a festive affair with hundreds of guests. Suddenly, he began to feel dizzy, then lost consciousness and collapsed.

When he woke up three days later, his bandmates broke the news: He had suffered a stroke. Immediately, he thought of another doctor visit eight years earlier, when, at the age of 34, he had been diagnosed with hypertension and prescribed medication to reduce his blood pressure. The medication had given him problems with erectile dysfunction, a common side effect, and he soon stopped taking it regularly. That decision seemed foolish, he recalls. He was having difficulty moving and speaking and knew that he wouldn't be back onstage anytime soon.

"I still have weakness," he says, nine months later. "I'm not able to walk well, I can't use my left arm, I can't sing."

Doctors found that Agyemang's stroke was hemorrhagic, meaning that a blood vessel in his brain burst from excessive pressure. In the U.S., this type of stroke is rare; nearly 90 percent of strokes in the U.S. are "ischemic," meaning they're caused by a clot or other blockage of a blood vessel in the brain. But according to a new study, the largest-ever of stroke patients in Africa, up to one-third of strokes in this area of the world are hemorrhagic. And while the survival rate for ischemic strokes is around 80 percent, for hemorrhagic strokes the odds of survival are only 50/50. Agyemang is lucky to be alive.

The study surveyed 2,000 stroke patients in Ghana and Nigeria (including Agyemang) to better understand what factors are most likely to put people at risk. The results were released Friday at the International Stroke Conference in Los Angeles and will be published next month in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet.

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Bloomberg Businessweek: How Nigerians Beat Bitcoin Scams

The country’s embrace of the cryptocurrency has led to some old-school precautions against fraud.

“Ambassador” Smart Oluwadola, a cryptocurrency peddler in the city of Kano, in the hotel lobby where he often does business. (Tim McDonnell for Businessweek)

This story first appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.

Depending on your feelings about Bitcoin, it may seem appropriate that Nigeria’s love for the cryptocurrency began with a scam. Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox (MMM), a 30-year-long global Ponzi scheme that began in Russia, roped in millions of Nigerians from late 2015 to the end of 2016 with promises of 30 percent returns in as little as 30 days. When the government began to crack down on bank accounts linked to the scheme, MMM’s operators cut the banks out and started requiring victims to use Bitcoin. By the time MMM suspended its payouts, shortly before Christmas 2016, it had robbed an estimated 3 million people in Nigeria—where the per capita annual income is less than $3,000—of $50 million.

It had also convinced many of them that, the scam notwithstanding, Bitcoin was the future. “It was MMM that made Nigerians understand how Bitcoin worked,” says Lucky Uwakwe, co-founder of Blockchain Solutions Ltd., a cryptocurrency consulting firm in Lagos. Today, Nigerians are trading about $4.7 million in Bitcoin a week, Uwakwe says, up from about $300,000 per week a year ago. That’s No. 23 globally, according to researcher CryptoCompare—far below the more than $1 billion traded daily in U.S. dollars or Japanese yen, but comparable to the volume of activity in Chinese yuan or Indian rupees. “The growth has been crazy,” says David Ajala, who runs NairaEx, one of about a dozen digital currency exchanges in Nigeria. “It took us two years to get 10,000 customers. Within the last year, we’ve added 90,000.”

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NPR: What 'The Crown' Gets Wrong About the Queen's Visit to Ghana

The Netflix show says one dance changed history. The truth isn't so simple.

Queen Elizabeth II dances with Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah at a ball in Accra, Ghana, in 1961. (Central Press/Getty Images)

This story first appeared on National Public Radio.

It was a highlight of the latest season of the Netflix series The Crown, which chronicles the early years of Queen Elizabeth II's reign: The year is 1961, the Cold War is heating up and the queen (played by Claire Foy), feeling self-conscious after learning that First Lady Jackie Kennedy (Jodi Balfour) called her "incurious" at a dinner party, decides to take a more proactive role in dealing with Ghana, a former colony whose new leader, Kwame Nkrumah (Danny Sapani), appears to be getting too cozy with the Soviets.

Her solution: A dance with Nkrumah at a ball in the capital, Accra. The foxtrot, specifically, to the extreme, hilarious consternation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (Anton Lesser).

It's a high-stakes political gamble that could decide the balance of Soviet power in Africa, which in the early 1960s was fast emerging as a Cold War battleground. To everyone's relief, the dance is a success. The implication is that, in exchange for his photo op dancing with the queen, Nkrumah will "come back to the fold" and squash Soviet hopes for Africa. Later, JFK (Michael Hall) crows to Jackie that her jab at the queen precipitated a major foreign policy victory for the U.S. and U.K. It's the foxtrot that changes the course of history.

"Well, that's nice," says Nat Nuno-Amarteifio, an architect and amateur historian who served as mayor of Accra from 1994-98 and remembers the queen's supposedly fateful visit from when he was a teenage student. "It's a lot of bulls**t."

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NPR: Why It's Now A Crime To Let Cattle Graze Freely In 2 Nigerian States

Farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria is now deadlier than Boko Haram. Will this controversial approach to peacebuilding help, or only make matters worse?

Sale Tambaya, a cattle herder in central Nigeria, grazes his cows. After his home state criminalized open grazing on November 1, he and his family fled with their livestock to a neighboring state where grazing is allowed. Two of his sons died on the journey. (Tim McDonnell)

This story first appeared on NPR.

As a cattle herder in Benue, a rural state in central Nigeria, Sale Tambaya's life revolved around his herd of roughly 100 cows and a few dozen sheep. Normally, he would take them out from a pen near his thatched hut every morning to graze freely in the surrounding grassland. But on November 1, taking grazing animals in the open was designated a criminal activity in Benue. Overnight, his family's livelihood had become a threat to their safety.

So at 6 a.m., he made his decision: The only way to keep both family and herd safe was to flee.

Tambaya, his wife Hafsat, and their six children walked all day with the herd. In the evening they finally reached the Benue River, a powerful tributary of the Niger that separated their home state from neighboring Nasarawa, where they hoped to find refuge and a place to graze the livestock. While Tambaya, Hafsat and four of the children boarded a ferry, two of the boys drove the cows and sheep into the water, clinging to the cows' tails because they didn't know how to swim. Both sons, as well as most of the sheep and 20 cows, drowned before reaching the opposite bank.

Benue is now the second Nigerian state to implement a ban on the open grazing of cattle, after nearby Taraba implemented a ban this summer. It's a controversial new approach to resolving a long saga of conflict between Nigeria's pastoralists and their farmer neighbors that has come with unintended violence and displacement, as shown in this video from the scene.

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Washington Post: Did President Trump’s Ancestors Migrate to the United States Because of Climate Change?

This story first appeared in the Washington Post.

The number of migrants across the world is at a record high — 244 million people left their homes in 2015, according to the United Nations. They were driven by war, dire economic straits, and for some, worsening environmental conditions brought on by climate change.

There’s a growing body of evidence linking migration and climate change, from Pacific island nations being subsumed by the rising ocean,to the drought-wracked Horn of Africa. In a speech this spring, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “as regions become unlivable, more and more people will be forced to move from degraded lands to cities and to other nations.”

A recent report from Oxfam found that more than 20 million people a year have been displaced by extreme weather events since 2008, mostly in developing countries.

But linking migration to climate change is tricky because the environment is just one of many pressure points, many all happening at the same time. Take the case of northeastern Nigeria, where nearly 2 million people are displaced. Climate change is clearly a factor: Lake Chad, the region’s main water source, has been drying up as the Sahel Desert expands southward. 

But at the same time, the Islamic insurgence of Boko Haram has run a brutal terrorism campaign. Rural poverty and food insecurity were already major problems. Economic opportunities are better in the south. So what combination of factors is causing people to leave home?

For any given instance of migration, how can we know the impact of climate change, if at all?

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Washington Post: Trump's Tax Reform Is Bad News for the Climate

This story first appeared in the Washington Post. 

When President Trump made a speech a few weeks ago to kick off his push for an overhaul of the tax code, he chose a telling backdrop: An oil refinery in North Dakota, a state that over the last decade exploded from backwater to boom town thanks to a massive spike in oil production.

“I want all of America to be inspired by what’s happened in North Dakota and the North Dakota example,” Trump said. Standing with him at the podium was Harold Hamm, the North Dakota oil billionaire who has helped shape Trump's views on energy. So when Trump said he wanted to “restore America’s competitive edge by passing tax cuts,” he seemed to have at least one particular industry in mind: oil.

When the Republican tax plan came out last week, it was short on details, leaving much of the nitty-gritty for Congress to hash out. It limits some benefits that oil companies traditionally rely on, like deductions for interest payments that make it easier to raise money for expensive infrastructure like pipelines.

But the oil industry is still calling it a win, citing proposals that would make it easier for oil companies to recover their investments in exploration and to shield profits earned from drilling overseas, in addition to lowering the corporate tax rate to 20 percent.

The oil and gas producers lobby group, Independent Petroleum Association of America, called it a “positive step forward,” while the American Petroleum Institute said the reforms would “strengthen the U.S. energy renaissance.”

The tax blueprint also expands Trump’s reversal of Obama-era climate measures. In 2009, Obama joined other G20 leaders in a pledge to eventually phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

The GOP tax plan gives little indication of keeping that commitment -- and that could have significant implications for U.S. oil production and the climate.

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National Geographic: A Drying Climate Threatens Africa’s Coffee, But Hope Remains

Uganda is pinning its hopes on its most valuable crop, though climate change is an obstacle to overcome.

Gerald Katabazi, aka "The Hustler," wants his fellow Ugandans to drink more coffee. (Tim McDonnell)

This story first appeared on National Geographic. 

UGANDA--Sam Massa doesn’t drink coffee. Like many Ugandans, he prefers milky spiced tea. Yet, like many Ugandans, he says, “we are part of the coffee, and the coffee is in our blood.”

Massa lives at the top of an extinct volcano that straddles the border between Uganda and Kenya, in a small mud-brick house at the center of a grove of coffee trees. Some of the trees were planted here by his great-grandfather more than 100 years ago. Like his ancestors, Massa is a coffee farmer, and derives nearly all of his annual income from the produce of those trees, some of which ends up in the cups of coffee drinkers in the U.S. and other distant lands.

This place is among the oldest and most venerated coffee-producing regions of East Africa. The air is fresh and cool, the slopes studded with sweeping vistas and sparkling waterfalls. But trouble is coming up the mountain. In fact, it’s already at Massa’s door.

Uganda historically has two rainy seasons, from March through May and from October through December. Small farms in East Africa, like Massa’s, are almost exclusively without irrigation, meaning that reliable rainfall is a prerequisite to produce crops, including coffee. But in 2016, Massa’s area received almost no rain during the second season, and when it came time to harvest coffee in January, the yield was very poor. This was no freak accident, he says: In the last few years, the weather has been all wrong.

“Over the last, say, twenty years, the rain pattern has completely changed,” he says. “Rain comes at a time when you don’t expect it. Sunshine or drought come at time when you should be having rain.”

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