Women in China got lung cancer from indoor pollution

Well, this is absolutely true.

Indoor pollution could be responsible for more than 20 000 lung cancer death worldwide. Doses of air pollutants inside buildings can be much higher than anything outside and Chinese custom of open fire cooking is really damaging.

In this study - Chinese food cooking and lung cancer in women nonsmokers[1]
not only associate lung cancer with cooking, but shows increased risk with larger number of meals cooked every day and without using fume extractor.



Nevertheless everything women are experiencing is dwarfed by nicotinism in men.

Transparency in African Union

This is good initiative, but transparency wasn't African Union's priority in the times of Mbeki and Obasanjo, when they was trying to stop numerous civil and international wars. And this was only five years ago.

First comprehensive and effective transparency law was probably Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative[1]
passed in 2007. It was mildly successful only because Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, anti-corruption agency, investigated 30 Nigerian governors, ministers, members of parliament including speaker and finally arested police chief. Still investigating corruption in some African countries isn't safe thing to do.



You can find guidelines for better resource deals in the places like Publish What You Pay[2]
or Natural Resource Charter[3]
. There are many NGOs working better governance, notably Open Society[4]
and Mo Ibrahim[5]
and African Union should be good forum to share natural resource policies, but currently poor countries's leaders want to listen to Norway more than to each other and Bono explaining advance of royalty model over profit tax model during management of large scale bauxite exploration should be averted at all costs.

First attempts in development of poor countries

I'm thinking about period after Marshall Plan.

There was optimistic view about building functioning states after relative success in Germany.

It was, when notion of "development" was created. It was real attempt to Denmark-like functioning governments with Ministry of Finance and all that. From Taiwan to Senegal.

Around 1970 everyone was discouraged and attempts for development stopped, there were several wars, elections ended with one man-one vote-one time scheme and generally structural changes in low-income countries were abandoned.

There was after that period, when there was attempt to build infrastructure and reform industries in low-income and middle-income countries, by pouring money into them. Foreign aid was meant to replace internal savings, which were of course impossible for them. In 1980 this ended. Effect were very slight improvement, in some countries. Because effects were so slim aid was stopped. Nevertheless you can hardly any poor country without hospitals, roads or power plants build in 70's from foreign money. There are just few of them.

Both waves of development were real and discounting all policies of high-income countries towards middle-income and low-income as looting is disingenuous.

North Korea food aid

Government was sending mostly regular food, not aid to Pyongyang. Aid wasn't ended, because malversation (although it was present), but because the government threw everybody away, when it felt stronger.

Currently World Food Programme is working under "no access, no food aid" principle, which includes:

• Household food information. Every four months the WFP would undertake baseline household surveys, interview local officials and others (e.g., farmers, factory officials, etc.), hold focus group discussions, and take observational walks.
• Distribution monitoring. The WFP would shift at the margin to monitoring distribution centers and food-for-work projects, interview those receiving food aid there, and increase monitoring visits to non-household sites (e.g., county warehouses, factories producing food products with WFP commodities, and institutions receiving food aid).
• Ration cards. All WFP beneficiaries would be given a WFP-designed and printed ration card that would be checked by the WFP at distributions.
• Commodity tracking. WFP staff would be allowed to physically follow food aid from the port of entry, to county warehouses, to three to six Public Distribution Centers (PDCs) per county, as well as implement a more uniform and consistent system to track commodities by waybill number, with the ultimate goal of eventually introducing an electronic system that would allow tracking of individual bags from port to final point of delivery.
  
  
  

  You do anthropometric measurements, computerized food intake analysis, nutrition body composition and verifies surveys.

  This is actually novelty in North Korea, before 2009 the government wasn't allowing this before 2009.

Swaziland has probably highest rate of unwanted births, surely highest in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Causes of Educational Differences in Fertility in sub-Saharan Africa

Development of post-commust European countries

Look at this graph. Almost all of them surpassed relatively sluggish growth in Brazil. Moldova and Ukraine performed badly, but they are hardly examples of economic and political liberation. On the other hand starting point of Kyrgystan or Tajikistan were in position of today's Sub-Saharan Africa, so they were never in competition with Poland.

Europe seen from ISS