PRI's The World » 02/04/2010

Entire program – February 4, 2010

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:55:34 +0000

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Today on The World: Why US-China relations are rocky right now and could get rockier still; Also, the BBC helps a teenage quake survivor in Haiti get in touch with his mother in the US; Plus, new technology helps consumers find out the environmental cost of the products they buy.

Growing US-China rift over trade and arms

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:54:33 +0000

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China has hit back at the US a day after President Barack Obama promised to take a tougher line with Beijing over currency and trade. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu insisted the value of the Chinese yuan was not the main reason for China’s trade surplus with the US. Mr Obama vowed to ensure that countries were not giving their currencies an unfair advantage over the dollar. Ties between the US and China have been strained over an arms deal with Taiwan. Tensions have also risen over reports of Chinese cyber attacks on US-run websites and a planned visit to the US by the Dalai Lama. The World’s Matthew Bell takes at look at how strained US-China relations really are.

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KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark. This is The World. The value of China’s currency is a hot topic in Washington these days. U.S. officials believe the Chinese currency is undervalued against the dollar. That may be the cause of a trade imbalance between the two countries. We buy more Chinese goods because they’re cheaper, and the Chinese buy fewer American products because they’re too expensive. But the Chinese don’t buy the argument. The currency squabble is among a number of issues putting stress on Washington’s relations with Beijing. The World’s Matthew Bell reports.

MATTHEW BELL: China is not happy with the Obama Administration, not happy about a pending weapons sale to Taiwan, not happy about the President’s plans to meet with Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and not happy that China once again finds itself in the crosshairs of members of Congress over trade policy.

ARLEN SPECTER: We have lost 2,300,000 jobs as a result of the trade imbalance with China.

BELL: That’s Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter speaking at a meeting yesterday between Democratic Senators and President Obama. Specter, who happens to up for re-election in a state hard hit by job losses, said China is guilty of international banditry. And he asked President Obama what he’s planning to do about it.

SPECTER: China has not lived up to its obligations to have its markets open to U.S., but take our markets and take our jobs. Will you support an effort to revise, perhaps even rovoke that bilateral trading which gives China such an unfair trade advantage?

BELL: The president said no, he wouldn’t go that far, but he did promise to address the issue of currency rates as part of a broader strategy.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The approach that we’re taking is to try to get much tougher about enforcement of existing rules, putting constant pressure on China and other countries to open up their markets in reciprocal ways.

BELL: If that was meant to be a warning for Beijing, the Chinese government wasted no time in responding. Today, foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu rejected the accusation that China’s currency rates give it an unfair trade advantage.

MA ZHAOUX: [Speaking Chinese]

BELL: He said trade cooperation between the U.S. and China is mutually beneficial, and that accusations and pressure do not help. The Obama administration finds itself confronting China on other big issues as well. Climate change and Iran’s nuclear program are two more points of disagreement, but does it all add up to a crisis for U.S.-Chinese relations?

JOHN POMFRET: I don’t think U.S.-China relations are falling off the cliff. In fact, I think this is sort of the new normal between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

BELL: John Pomfret has covered China for years. He’s a diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post and the author of Chinese Lessons.

POMFRET: I don’t even think this whole narrative that the Obama Administration is starting to get tough with China is true either because the Obama Administration spent its first year trying to set a good foundation in relations with China. Whether they succeeded or not is an open question, but they tried. But they always knew and they always told the Chinese that these problems currencies, Taiwan arms sales and the Dalai Lama were going to be confronted at a certain point. And we’re confronting them now, and the problem is we’re confronting them now at the same time.

BELL: Past U.S. presidents had more leverage with Beijing than President Obama does. China expert Andrew Nathan at Columbia University says that has a lot to do with the financial crisis.

ANDREW NATHAN: That financial crisis does really put us in hock to the Chinese because they are continuing to lend us money. Now, it would hard for them to not lend us money. They actually need to lend us money. They have to put their money some place and there is no place else really to put it. So it’s a kind of scorpions in a bottle situation. We each need each other.

BELL: That maybe but this is an election year and the U.S. economy is still struggling mightily. And that means American politicians are all the more likely to keep raising the issue of jobs and the trade imbalance with China in the coming months. For The World, I’m Matthew Bell.

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North Korea’s failing currency

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:53:08 +0000

The North Korean government recently knocked two zeros off its currency, the won. And it ordered citizens to turn in their old cash savings. The move caused panic and riots among North Koreans. There were food shortages as well, as people scrambled to buy whatever they could before their money became worthless. Now the North Korean government has apparently fired the official who led the currency revaluation program. Katy Clark talks with Marcus Noland who is an expert on North Korea’s economy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

KATY CLARK: Next door to China in North Korea the economy is in chaos. The problem is a government program to change the value of the North Korean currency the won. Citizens were ordered to trade in a limited amount of old money in exchange for new bank notes. If they had extra savings in the form of old cash, that money was declared worthless. The move has reportedly caused panic, food shortages and even riots. Marcus Noland is Deputy Director and Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He says as usual, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on in North Korea.

MARCUS NOLAND: The government has actually not made any official announcements at all about this currency reform. What happened was the government through its party apparatus announced that these changes were being made on November 30th and gave the populace one week to implement this reform. Foreign embassies were briefed verbally and then on New Year’s Day there is a very important editorial that is jointly issued by three publications. Interestingly enough the New Year’s editorial didn’t mention the currency reform. So it’s been a very strange episode all around.

CLARK: Can you talk a little bit about how North Korea’s currency revaluation and other recent moves caused the economic chaos there?

NOLAND: Well, North Korea is an extremely cash-oriented economy. The financial system is extremely under-developed, and the critical thing about this currency reform is not that they just knocked two zeros off the currency. Often times, good governments do this to signal that periods of high inflation in the past have come to an end, and there will be good economic policy in the future. What sets the North Korean case apart is there were very severe limits placed on how much currency you can convert. The effect of that was two-fold. One was to wipe out large amounts of household savings. Secondly, it had the effect of wiping out the working capital of private entrepreneurs which have developed over the last 15 years. And that really was the motivation for this policy to strike a blow at this burgeoning private economy. That makes the government very uncomfortable in that it offers an alternative pathway to wealth and prestige and possibly ultimately power that is beyond state control.

CLARK: Do you think that the government just didn’t think this through? I mean, it sounded like a good idea but they didn’t think about what this would actually mean when put into practice?

NOLAND: You know, Katy, that is an absolutely fantastic question that I’ve been wondering about myself since the very beginning. We know that someone at the Central Bank must have known the amount of currency in circulation, and when they put these confiscatory limits on it, how much of the money supply was effectively being destroyed. What we don’t know is if the people who actually made these decisions knew that information or even knew enough to ask the question and if they did, cared about the answer. What we’ve seen is this move has set off absolute chaos. The economy has really ground to a halt.

CLARK: There are reports of riots as a result of the currency revaluation. If those are true, how unusual is that for North Korea.

NOLAND: Well, I would underline for your listeners that it is very, very difficult to confirm these stories. There have been stories of people in effect engaging in civil obedience by burning their old currency. The old currency bears the likeness of the founder of the country, Kim Il Sung, and defacing anything with his likeness is treasonable. So there have been descriptions of acts like that as well as demonstrations and as you describe, riots. It’s very hard to tell really how wide spread these are and how large they are.

CLARK: So if I am a U.S. official in Washington watching what’s going on Pyongyang, what do I make of it?

NOLAND: If I were a U.S. official in Washington, I would be very concerned about this. There is an understandable tendency to focus on the nuclear issue when you think about Korea. As a consequence, speaking frankly, there has been a tendency in Washington to ignore what’s actually go on, on the ground. There has been an excessive focus on these sort of diplomatic negotiations. I would be concerned because North Korea is facing leadership transition. Kim Jong Il is old. He’s in poor health and what we could be looking at is the beginning of the end of this political regime in North Korea, and nobody has any idea how it’s going to end up. It could ultimately involve intervention by China and South Korea and the U.S. could be drawn in as well. The underlying political stability of that political regime I think is starting to be called into question.

CLARK: Marcus Noland, Deputy Director at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Good to speak with you. Thank you.

NOLAND: My pleasure.

Haitian mother reunited with her son

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:52:27 +0000

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A Boston Haitian mother was reunited with her son yesterday. The BBC’s Creole-language radio program helped reunite Penaisse Macary with his mother, Simone Macary (pictured). Penaisse had been studying in Haiti when the earthquake hit. Simone Macary had not heard from her son since the earthquake. Her son reached out to her through the BBC’s Creole language service. Anchor Katy Clark speaks with Simone Macary on today’s program. (Photo: Catherine Murphy)

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark. This is The World. Thousands of people were left without a home and stranded when last month’s earthquake hit Haiti. Penaisse Macary was one of those who was lost in the chaos after the disaster struck. Macary is a 16-year-old boy studying in Port au Prince. He was desperate to contact his mother in the U.S., but he wasn’t able to call her. So he texted the BBC’s Creole language radio station. He wrote, “I am homeless. The person responsible for me is dead, my mother is Simone Macary. She is American but cannot help me. The Embassy is closed and I am on the street.”

Penaisse gave his mother’s phone number to the BBC. It turned out to be the wrong number. So the BBC broadcast a message to Penaisse asking him to try again. The boy heard the message and texted the correct number again. This time it was correct. And earlier this week the BBC called Simone Macary to tell her that her son was alive and trying to reach her. Simone Macary joins us from Everett, Massachusetts. Simone, what happened? How did you find out that your son was okay?

SIMONE MACARY: My son, ah, my son was looking for me. They called me. They said, “Simone, somebody looking for you.” They say, “Simone,” They say, “Your son is looking for you.” He said, “Your son’s life is saved. We see him.” I say, “Oh, my God. I’m shaky.” I was happy. I’m so happy. My son talked to me. He called me yesterday and this morning he texted me this morning. I’m so happy.

CLARK: Simone, the BBC in Haiti found your son and interviewed him. We’re going to play a bit of that interview for you now. It’s in Creole so perhaps you can translate a bit of it for us.

PENAISSE MACARY: [Speaking Creole]

SIMONE MACARY: Hallaleujah, hallaleujah.

CLARK: Hello, what was your son Penaisse saying right there?

SIMONE: Yes, my son say, “I was looking for him. I can’t find him. So he say he listened to the radio, BBC so he call. He give my phone number. He give everything so they try to call him. And BBC go over there. They take my son and go to station radio and I hear my son’s voice.

CLARK: What was it like to hear his voice?

SIMONE: When I’m listen to my son’s voice, I think my son is talking to me. I’m confused. I say, “Yes, Penaisse, this is mommy. This is mommy.” But no he’s on the tape just listen to his voice. I just close my eyes so I put my knees on the floor. I say I hear my son’s voice I’m close my eyes and I say, “Praise the Lord. Thank you, hallaleujah and God bless America. God bless this.” I’m so happy.

CLARK: So are you going to be able to go to Haiti? Do you have plans now to get down there?

SIMONE: February 20. I buy my ticket, everything. I’m going there to see my people because I will now go there to cook my people. Whatever I can give five people, ten people food, I will now go there. I can stay. I can cook.

CLARK: So you have a ticket for February 20th?

SIMONE: Yeah, I get ticket already.

CLARK: Oh, good.

SIMONE: I got ticket.

CLARK: Will you be bringing Penaisse back to the U.S.?

SIMONE: That’s what I want. I want to bring him back because he was stay there for school. No school in Haiti. Nothing. And now he still sleep on the street. No school.

CLARK: He’s still living on the street?

SIMONE: Yeah, because everybody sleep on the street. They’re still living on the streets. Yes.

CLARK: Has he been able to been able to get enough to eat and to drink?

SIMONE: I don’t know but tomorrow I’m going to get my paycheck tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m going to send some money to buy something for him, but I can’t eat because I don’t know if my son is good. I don’t know. God, he knows. God, he knows.

CLARK: Simone Macary’s son Penaisse is in Port au Prince. She had not heard from him since the earthquake hit on January 12th. Her son reached out to her through the BBC’s Creole language service. Simone Macary, thank you for your time and all of the best to you and your son.

SIMONE: Thank you. I love you. I pray for you. Okay?

CLARK: And a footnote to that story. The BBC which co-produces this program launched its Creole language radio program in the days following the earthquake in Haiti. The program’s aim is to provide a lifeline to survivors, and to broadcast information about missing people.

The Garifuna: African influence in Central America

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:51:54 +0000

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The story behind today’s Global Hit starts on the Caribbean Island of St. Vincent. In 1635, two slave ships wrecked there, and the African slaves escaped to freedom. They mixed in with the native Caribs, giving birth to a new Afro-Caribbean culture – the Garifuna (Gareefoonah). In the centuries since, the Garifuna migrated and founded villages along the Caribbean coast of Central America. Lonny Shavelson reports from Livingston, Guatemala. Download MP3

Lonny also sent this video:

Safer beer glasses for Britain

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:51:48 +0000

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The British government wants pubs to try out shatter proof pint glasses as a way to cut back on beer-related violence. The problem is the high number of binge drinkers who break pint glasses and use the jagged remains as weapons. Two prototypes designed not to break up into dangerous shards were introduced in London today. Laura Lynch had a look at the new glasses.

BBC video showing the new glasses

KATY CLARK: Britain has a drinking problem, too many binge drinkers and too many pub brawls. So today, the British government unveiled a solution of sorts, a new beer glass to make going to the pub a little safer. Here’s The World’s Laura Lynch.

LAURA LYNCH: Fosters, Guinness, lager, ale. Pub owner, Shane Reed, has them all on tap at the Ship Tavern in London. And being a connoisseur of beer, Reed pays a little extra to buy just the right glasses.

SHANE REED: Everybody likes a beer with a good head. These ones. They’re called, I think, Utopia ones. They basically will hold a head to the bottom.

LYNCH: But in someone else’s hands, a glass can become a lethal weapon. The British government estimates there are 87,000 violent incidents involving bar glasses each year. Michael Stark had a glass smashed into his face at a bar last November in an unprovoked attack. He lost six pints of blood. One side of his face is marked with scars.

MICHAEL STARK: When I’m talking to people now rather than them talking to me they’re looking past me and talking to me. And it’s made me very conscious of being out in the public because I just feel, you know, everybody is looking at one thing.

LYNCH: Stark was just another victim of growing violence from pub brawls. And the resulting injuries are costing the National Health Service almost $4.3 million a year. That’s why the government asked a design firm to create a new glass. The first overhaul for pub glassware since the 1960′s. David Kester of the Design Council says the biggest challenge has been to make a glass that will be popular as well as safe, and he thinks he’s achieved that.

DAVID KESTER: Same weight, same feel. In fact, there’s actually even some enhancements for the drinker. It will be able to keep your beer colder, and also apparently beer drinkers will like this. It will pour better into the glass as well.

LYNCH: There are actually two prototypes. The first is just a regular glass, coated with a bio-resin that prevents it from breaking into shards. The second is based on car windshields, two sheets of glass are bonded together with resin to keep them from shattering. This model is still in development, but it’s expected to be more durable. It may also cost more. Pubs across Britain have been struggling to survive. So the price matters a lot to pub owner Shane Reed.

REED: If it doesn’t cost anymore than an ordinary box of glasses then hey, give it a go, why not? It depends. It really is, cost is the thing. So if they don’t cost any more, fine. But if they do…

LYNCH: As for the notoriously fussy beer drinkers that inhabit these shores, there seems a willingness to try it out, especially if it means trips to the pub won’t end in blood and tears.

MALE SPEAKER: Hospital bills will go down. Why the hell they sell alcohol in a glass, I’ll never know. You don’t agree, Joe?

JOE: If you go drinking with people like you, I mean, that glass …

LYNCH: In the midst of today’s focus on fixing beer glasses, there was little talk about new solutions for the larger problem, Britain’s growing love affair with booze. No new glass is going to fix that. For the World, I’m Laura Lynch in London.

Brain activity detected in patients in vegetative states

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:55:37 +0000

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The World’s Rhitu Chatterjee reports on a new study by British and Belgian scientists that suggests that some patients in a “vegetative state” retain some level of consciousness.

KATY CLARK: A new study by British and Belgian scientists has raised provocative questions about the inner life of patients in what doctors call a vegetative state. They’re seemingly unconscious or unaware. The new research published online by the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that some of these patients can respond to simple “yes” and “no” questions with their brains. The World’s science correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee explains.

RHITU CHATTERJEE: The patients in the study had all suffered severe brain injuries. Neuroscientist Adrian Owen of Britain’s Medical Research Council says the patients could involuntarily open and shut their eyes, but they appeared to be permanently unconscious

ADRIAN OWEN: They’d had had all sorts of clinical tests and assessments to verify that they were vegetative. And on that basis, the assumption is that they are entirely unaware of their current circumstances and anything that may be going on around them.

CHATTERJEE: But Owen wanted to look deeper for signs of consciousness. So he decided to use a technology called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI. It enabled scientists to detect tell-tale patterns of activity in the brain when people perform specific mental tasks.

OWEN: When you perform a mental task like imagining making a movement or imagining going from place to place, areas of the brain that are involved in those processes will require more oxygen delivery and we can pick that up with the MRI machine. And it will appear as bright blobs on the brain.

CHATTERJEE: So Owen and his team devised a clever experiment. They asked the seemingly unconscious patients simple “yes” and “no” questions. They told the patients to respond yes by for instance thinking about playing tennis. They could respond no by imagining themselves walking from room to room in their own homes. In healthy people, these two different tasks light up different regions of the brain. Now, for the vast majority of the 23 patients in the study the experiment yielded nothing interesting. It showed no sign that they could understand the questions or respond to them. But Adrian Owen says that wasn’t the case for four patients.

OWEN: The patients could activate the area of the brain precisely when we asked the to do so and they could keep activating it until we asked them to stop. So we were very sure that people were completely in control of this brain activity. So they weren’t vegetative at all.

CHATTERJEE: Owen emphasizes that it’s not clear how conscious these patients are or whether their brains are capable of complex thought. But the study raises a host of difficult questions. Have some people supposedly in vegetative states been misdiagnosed? Might it be possible some day to communicate with these patients about whether they want to be kept alive?

GEORGE ANNAS: The real question is not how it’s going to change diagnosis, it’s how it’s going to prognosis.

CHATTERJEE: That’s George Annas, a Bioethicist at Boston University.

ANNAS: What are the long-term consequences of being in what looks a persistent vegetative state, but actually having some minimal activity in your brain? Does that mean that you might be able to recover more activity in your brain while you’re locked into that small activity? In which case, we really haven’t changed the decision-making of what should be done with these patients.

CHATTERJEE: That question: What should be done with such patients, how long they should be kept alive has long been a point of controversy both in the US and abroad. The new study in itself can’t answer that question, but it may offer some valuable new tools. Doctors can now probe inside the brains of people who were otherwise thought to be unreachable, and perhaps some day find out what they’re thinking. For The World, I’m Rhitu Chatterjee

Out on patrol with Aceh’s Sharia police

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:54:51 +0000

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In Indonesia, the conservative province of Aceh recently passed a law that imposes death by stoning on Muslim adulterers. In some places, women are banned from wearing tight pants. The BBC’s Karishma Vaswani recently spent some time with the Sharia police who enforce the laws.

KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH-Boston. The province of Aceh is one of the most conservative regions in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. Aceh has special autonomy, and recently it passed a law that imposes the death penalty for Muslim adulterers. The method? Stoning. Parts of Aceh have also banned women from wearing tight trousers. The people in charge of enforcing the new rules are the Sharia police. The BBC’s Karishma Vaswani recently went out on patrol with them.

KARISHMA VASWANI: It’s Saturday night and the Sharia police are cruising the streets. First stop, the beach, a popular destination for teenagers. A well-known ballad plays on the radio. Couples lounge on plastic chairs in front of make-shift cafes. But the party doesn’t last for long. The Sharia police zero in on their first target. Well, the Sharia Police have just caught a couple who they say was sitting too close to one another, and that’s against Islamic law. Now, we tried to speak to this couple but they didn’t want to be interviewed and the Sharia police have told them that they need to go home and leave this secluded area. Once of the police told me why.

POLICEMAN: Under our laws an unmarried man and woman who sit together alone in the dark are immoral. To prevent them from committing adultery we stop them.

VASWANI: Religious law has penetrated all parts of Aceh’s life. It’s even made its presence felt here at an ordinary high school basketball game. Boys and girls sit on opposite sides of the court forced apart by the Sharia police. 18-year-old Nindi [PH] is here with her friends, but she stands out. She refuses to wear the traditional Muslim head scarf because she doesn’t agree with the Sharia Police’s rules.

NINDI: I really don’t like them at all. I really hope that the government, you know, don’t rule our lives, my life. I mean, this is my personal life and my own choice. I have my own belief, my own faith. So you shouldn’t really like judge me like that. If I don’t wear this, for instance, it doesn’t mean that I’m a bad Muslim.

VASWANI: Many in Aceh are concerned about how their Province is changing. Now, there’s a new law that’s got people worried. Only in place in one part of Aceh, the law bans women from wearing tight trousers. Nofi [PH] sells tight trousers for a living. Her store is in Banda Aceh. The ban doesn’t yet apply here, but already she’s seen sales slump by 50%.

NOFI: [Translated] They can’t impose that kind of ban. What we wear doesn’t reflect our morality. It’s our right to wear what we want as long as we don’t go against our religion.

VASWANI: But lawmakers who support Sharia law say before it was introduced, opinions were sought from Aceh’s citizens. And for the most part, people approved. Stonings for adulterers and banning tight trousers may sound harsh but they point out strict laws exist in other parts of the world, too. Bohan Noodan [PH] is one of the men who passed the stoning law.

NOODAN: [Translated] China has a death penalty. So does America. They’ve even beat trial there. Why do people only point the finger at Aceh?

VASWANI: For Nindi and her friends, the answer to that question is glaringly obviously. Hanging out the beach they’re like teenagers all over the world, but in Aceh defying bans risks serious consequences. Adultery can lead to stoning although no one has been punished yet. And if girls like Nindi are caught in tight trousers, the Sharia police can make them change into a modest skirt, which the police carry with them. For The World this is Karishma Vaswani, Banda Aceh.”

Geo Quiz

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:54:11 +0000

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Where will our Geo Quiz take us today?

Tracking environmental footprints

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:52:29 +0000

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Correspondent Murray Carpenter reports on some of the new technologies that help consumers trace the global journey of their purchases and calculate their environmental cost.

<http://www.patagonia.com/web/us/footprint/
http://www.sourcemap.org/
http://www.ceres.org/
http://www.loveearthinfo.com/
http://www.doleorganic.com/
http://www.timberland.com/corp/index.jsp?page=csr_strategy
https://www.cdproject.net/

KATY CLARK: If you’re like most Americans, the shirt you’re wearing today probably has a label telling you it was made in say Indonesia, or Mexico. And a label on your computer probably tells you that it was made in China. But those country of origin labels don’t tell you anything about how the product was made, or about its environmental impact. Murray Carpenter reports from Boston on new web-based technologies that help track the origins. and environmental footprints of consumer goods.

MURRAY CARPENTER: At the Patagonia store in Boston, shoppers are stocking up on gear for the New England winter. Salesman Chris Pirrello shows off a new product that’s been selling like hotcakes.

CHRIS PIRRELLO: So this is our brand new Nano-Puff pullover. The entire jacket weighs about nine ounces, and it packs into its own pocket.

CARPENTER: Let’s take a look at the computer and see what we can see about where this comes.

PIRRELLO: Sounds good.

CARPENTER: Pirrello walks over to a terminal and pulls up a web page called the Footprint Chronicles, Patagonia’s effort to show the environmental impacts of its products. The site shows the jacket was stitched together in Vietnam using fabric and insulation from Japan and China, then sent to Reno, Nevada for distribution. Along the way, it traveled 12,000 miles and used the energy equivalent of burning an 18-watt bulb non-stop for a month. That might not sound like much, until you think about the resource stream of the billions of other products zooming around the world every day.

LEONARDO BONANNI: You’ll have a hard time finding any product that doesn’t involve a dozen countries or more.

CARPENTER: That’s Leonardo Bonanni at MIT’s Media Lab, across the Charles River from the Patagonia store. He’s in Cambridge, but the world of global manufacturing sits at his fingertips via a website he and some colleagues have designed. It’s called SourceMap, and it’s a sort of open-source analog to Patagonia’s site. Bonanni enters some basic information and pulls up a SourceMap for a typical laptop computer.

BONANNI: We’re actually zooming around the earth from satellite imagery, and if we go into this particular supply chain, we can actually go right down and see, in this case, the largest gold mine in the world from the air. And this brings a level of precision in the way we can understand supply chains that many people have never seen before.

CARPENTER: In addition to the huge gold mine in South Africa, the map leads to a massive copper mine in Chile, and lead mines in Indonesia. Links lead to videos of some of the operations. In this case, the laptop involves 43 suppliers from five continents. Where Patagonia’s website is a small window into one company’s supply chain, SourceMap allows anyone to evaluate the sustainability claims of a growing number of corporations.

BONANNI: We found out there was basically no public resource to allow you to find out what the supply chain is behind a product, or what the carbon footprint is. So while you might be told that something is green, you almost never get to see the math and the auditing underlying those assumptions. And as long as the consumer, or even the designer is not exposed to the underlying calculations, it is very hard to imagine that we are going to have sustainable products on the market.

CARPENTER: The two new website, one open source and the other corporate, are part of a growing movement to use the Internet to illuminate the usually obscured environmental impacts of consumer products. The movement is being led by activists but a growing number of companies are signing up. Brooke Barton is a corporate manager for Ceres, a network of environmentally-minded investors.

BROOKE BARTON: Ceres is committed to asking all the companies that we work with to unravel their supply chains to understand these environmental and social impacts.

CARPENTER: Barton says niche companies like Timberland, the footwear manufacturer, are leading the pack in transparency, but bigger firms are getting involved, too. Dole, for instance, now lets consumers use the web to track its organic bananas all the way back to the plantations where they were grown. Barton says even WalMart is starting to put its supply chain online.

BARTON: They have partnered with some environmental groups concerned about the impacts of mining to produce a set of jewelry that allows the consumer to go online and understand exactly which mines the gold and silver was sourced from, where it was processed, and how it got to you as a consumer.

CARPENTER: The movement toward more disclosure of resource use and pollution is being facilitated by ever-better information technology. But Paul Dickinson, of the Carbon Disclosure Project in London, says it’s really all about the power of consumers.

PAUL DICKINSON: When we shop, we vote for the corporations who administer the production and distribution of the goods and services that we consume. And I think it’s absolutely inevitable that people are going to put less and less money into the problem and more and more money into the solution.

CARPENTER: Back at the Patagonia store in Boston, information from the Footprint Chronicles helps shoppers make more informed choices. But those choices aren’t only about where a product comes from. Showing off a down sweater whose travels he looked up on the Footprint Chronicles, clerk Chris Pirrello says it’s still about where it can take you. The sweater starts with feathers from geese grown in Hungary.

PIRELLO: And then went from Hungary to California, to Japan, to China, to Reno, Nevada.

CARPENTER: And then from Reno to Boston.

PIRELLO: Sure, from Reno to Boston, and hopefully on an adventure after that.

CARPENTER: For the World, I’m Murray Carpenter.

CLARK: You can find links to MIT’s SourceMap and Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles at The world dot org.

New Apple app causes stir in Italy

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:50:11 +0000

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Anchor Katy Clark tells us about the controversy surrounding a popular new iPhone app in Italy called iMussolini.

KATY CLARK: Now, here’s a quick technology story we wanted to pass along. It’s kind of an interactive story. So we’ll start by letting you take a guess. What i-Phone application do you think is most popular in Italy? The one that gives fans the latest soccer scores? Nope. It’s an app call “i-Mussolini.” It’s a collection of samples from il Duce’s speeches. Sales of the app have skyrocketed to about a thousand a day on Apple’s Italian i-Tunes store. Some protested saying i-Mussolini is slide toward legitimizing fascism. And the institute that owns the images has threatened a lawsuit. So the apps developer has removed it from the iTunes store for now. Apple in Italy has refused to comment.

Geo answer

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:48:45 +0000

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For today’s Geo Quiz, we’re looking for a Canadian town where severe winter storms can hit unexpectedly. A group of international finance ministers is meeting there this weekend. The answer is Iqaluit, Nunavut. Chris Windeyer reports for the Nunatsiaq News — he tells anchor Katy Clark why it’s been chosen as the site for the meeting.

Gay Bollywood movie challenges censors

The World — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:08:35 +0000

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The new Bollywood film “Don’t Know Why” is scheduled for release in May, but it’s already making waves across the country. The film features the industry’s first gay male kiss. Anchor Katy Clark finds out more from correspondent Harshita Kohli, who’s in Mumbai.

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KATY CLARK: Strict moral codes are not the stuff of Bollywood. India’s movie industry is known for its romantic if predictable plots. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love and they dance happily most of the time. Well, a new Bollywood movie is shaking up that predictable image. Correspondent Harshita Kohli is in Mumbai. She says the film “Don’t Ask Why” which isn’t in theaters yet adds a twist to the traditional story line.

HARSHITA KOHLI: It’s about a man who comes into the big city. He’s trying to make his life here. Along the way he meets somebody, and that person just happens to be another man.

CLARK: Some have called it Bollywood’s answer to Brokeback Mountain. Is that a fair comparison?

KOHLI: It does not have huge directors, you know, big production houses or it does not have huge actors doing this. If you were to see a huge A-list actor do this role, what that would mean is that it is … You know, in India these actors are treated almost as gods. So you’re having somebody whom you look up to as a role model taking a stand. Because we almost look at it is that if you were doing the role, which deals with homosexuality and if you’re playing with the actor, that means you’re okay with it. You’re okay with homosexuality, and you support it. So yes, I think to an extent you can compare it to Brokeback Mountain. The big, big difference is that Brokeback Mountain had a huge director behind it. It had two huge actors as the lead roles in the movie. In this case, that’s not the thing. I think the only thing that you could compare it to is the fact that yes there is an element of homosexuality in both the movies.

CLARK: An element of actually rather an explicit relationship between two gay men?

KOHLI: Absolutely. Sometimes in our movies here we will almost see the homosexuality being reflected more in like a comic way. You know, maybe a tongue-in-cheek remark. Maybe somewhat of a [INDISCERNIBLE]. This time, and don’t know why, they’re actually trying to show you, you know, how a gay relationship works, how it functions, how it difficult it may be. And in doing that, they have been quite explicit. You know, I believe there is a full on kiss in the movie. There is a complete love making scene. I’ve been told there’s some amount of action in a bath tub as well.

CLARK: Okay, we’ll leave it at that. So you’re saying that Bollywood has had gay characters in films before but they haven’t been treated very seriously?

KOHLI: No, they haven’t been. You know, sometimes they’ve just been about certain mannerisms. I think the most recent film that dealt with a certain amount of homosexuality in a very small way was a movie called Dostana. It was out of a production house by one of the biggest directors in this country, Karan Johar, who is currently in the news for another movie called, “My Name is Khan.” You know, the actors have been all over America for that movie. But, yes, coming back to Dostana, that was more about two straight men pretending to be gay because of certain conditions in the movie. You know, it was a comedy movie. Again, you know, it has dealt with homosexuality, but without really dealing with it.

CLARK: Now, “Don’t Know Why” isn’t due out for another few months, but it’s getting a lot of attention. I’m wondering how religious conservatives in India are reacting to the build up to the film?

KOHLI: I think the big question is going to come up is when it gets passed through the Censor Board, how much will the Censor Board leave in the movie? How much will the director agree to leave in the movie, if he is not ready to edit it? Will he go with an adults only certificate? You know, that means half of your audience is going to stay out of the theaters and not see a movie. Because you have to realize in India a Friday night, a Saturday night is all about families going out. So you’ll have the parents accompanied by their children going to watch movies. So, you know, you have to look at an audience that may start from say 6 and go up to 60.

CLARK: Our listeners might remember that an Indian high court ruling overturned a law against homosexuality in India last year. Has that led to gays being more visible in Indian media, not just movies but across the board since then?

KOHLI: I think yes when this law was overturned it did give a lot of people in this society in India a chance to come out and be open about themselves. It was a great move. You will not see gays overnight displaying their sexuality, displaying their choices because at the end of the day our society is still very, very conservative. We have not yet accepted the fact that two men or two women have as much a right to live as a man and woman. Some people thing it’s right. Some people think it’s wrong. So yes, that’s always open for discussion and it does not matter which court, you know, says it’s all right or says it’s not all right. People will still to a certain extent have to hold back and not be very open about it.

CLARK: Correspondent Harshita Kohli joined us from Mumbai. Great to hear from you. Thanks.

KOHLI: [INDISCERNIBLE]