• 1.5 million children in imminent danger of starvation in West Africa

    A million and a half children are in imminent danger of starvation in West Africa. NBC's Rohit Kachroo reports on the crisis in the heart of the region, Niger. Warning: Some of the images in this report are distressing.

    By Rohit Kachroo, NBC News in Niger, west Africa

    One-and-a-half-million children are in imminent danger of starvation in West Africa, according to The United Nations Children's Fund, despite recent pledges of international aid.

    As world leaders gathered for the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, aid workers warned there were only four weeks left to treat the effects of acute hunger before the rainy season makes huge swathes of the Sahel region inaccessible.

    Across western Africa, communities are caught between climate change, conflict and poverty -- yet the global economic crisis means international priorities lie elsewhere.

    For example, during its financial crisis Greece has received a hundred times more from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) than Niger during the last few years.

    Analysis: Mali coup shakes cocktail of instability in Sahel

    In hospitals here in southern Niger, a crisis is developing. Many children are at serious risk of dying and for each bed there is a skeletal frame as yet another hunger crisis strikes.

    Hair turned red by hunger
    Patients include a girl, Amina, whose hair has turned red by a lifetime without enough food, and Ibrahim, an eight-month-old whose tiny body is consumed by the effects of severe malnutrition.


    From many miles around, more young patients arrive all the time -- more work for the doctors who've rarely seen anything like this.

    Women complain about a lack of rain, but also about a lack of food. Their families may not survive the coming months, they say.

    Twenty years later, will world make good on Rio Earth Summit's 'broken promises'?

    “What you’re looking at are communities across wide areas that need assistance because, despite best efforts, they have been pushed off their ability to cope,” said Martin Dawes, regional spokesman for UNICEF.

    UNICEF Niger overview

    Some help is here: The international response has been swifter than it has been in the past. Earlier this month, the United States pledged over $81 million in additional assistance.

    But this is a crisis across many counties, affecting many millions, leaving many lives on a knife-edge – and the U.N. has already said it needs another $1.5 billion to tackle the problem.

    The months ahead are crucial here, amid grim warnings about more dry weather, even an influx of locusts. The world has been warned.

    Editor's note: Yahaman, the eight-month-old boy featured in our video report on the hunger crisis in Niger died late Tuesday night.

    Rohit Kachroo is NBC News' Africa Correspondent. Additional editing by Alastair Jamieson, msnbc.com.

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  • Announcement of election result delayed in Egypt


     

    By msnbc.com news services

    Egypt's elections authorities say they will delay announcing who won Egypt's presidential election but have not given a new date.

    The Supreme Elections Commission said in a statement Wednesday that results won't be announced on Thursday as scheduled because the commission is looking into complaints presented by rival candidates.

    A panel of judges must examine some 400 complaints over voting submitted by both Ahmed Shafiq, ousted leader Hosni Mubarak's prime minister, and the campaign of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi.

    Amid reports that Hosni Mubarak is clinically dead, the Muslim Brotherhood thinks it won the Egypt elections and now wants full power. But the campaign of Ahmed Shafiq, ousted President Mubarak's old prime minister, said he really won the elections. NBC's Richard Engel reports.

    "We cannot announce when exactly the timing of the announcement of the election results will be because now we are at the stage of listening to the representatives," Committee Secretary-General Hatem Bagato told Reuters.

    Egypt's Hosni Mubarak reportedly clinging to life in military hospital

    "The committee will meet afterwards to decide on whether to accept the appeals or not. After that there will be a time set to announce the final result," Bagato added, speaking by phone.

    He issued an official statement later in the day with more detail.

    "The committee has decided to continue to examine the appeals, which involves looking at records and logs related to the electoral process, and this will necessitate more time before announcing the final results," the statement said.

    The instability in Egypt poses a dilemma for the United States. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.

    Any lengthy delay in disclosing the results risks prolonging uncertainty and stoking tension at a time when it is unclear how big a role the military will continue to play in leading the country. No official figures have been announced, but candidates had representatives at polling stations and were able to make their own tallies.

    "We must give both sides all the time they need to ensure that the process is fair and prevent any claims later on that not enough time was given to both sides," Bagato explained.

    The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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  • At G-20, developing nations are now the cavalry

    By JACK CHANG, Associated Press

    LOS CABOS, Mexico -- The scene at the just-concluded Group of 20 summit held in this seaside resort would have been unthinkable a decade ago: Hundreds of dignitaries gathered in opulent Mexican hotels and convention halls to hammer out an economic bailout for Europe. Meanwhile, the leaders of Brazil and China kicked in tens of billions of dollars to the International Monetary Fund to rescue downtrodden Spain and Greece.

    Although the gathering didn't produce a solution for the ailing euro zone, it did outline the globe's new balance of power. Developing countries projected optimism and wealth over the summit's two days, while European and U.S. leaders struggled just to stay solvent.

    A lot has clearly changed since the 1990s, when Asian and Latin American economies were slogging through recessions while Washington-based power brokers ordered up the very kind of austerity-minded prescriptions now sparking street protests in Europe.

    Even during recent economic crises in the U.S. and Europe, China has been posting annual growth rates topping 8 percent. Countries with booming Chinese trade, such as Argentina and Ethiopia, have similarly seen their economies thrive. China's economy surpassed Japan's over the past year to become the world's second biggest; Brazil's overtook the U.K.'s to take sixth place.

    "It is a different picture and reflects the fact that (developing) economies are not only the largest and fastest growing economies but are among the biggest economies in the world," said Uri Dadush, director of the international economics program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Clearly, neither the Americans nor the Europeans are in any position to tell the biggest economies what to do."

    Mexican President Felipe Calderon cut to the point while speaking to reporters Tuesday afternoon as he noted developing world contributions to the IMF for a possible European bailout. Although the countries still have lower standards of living, their economies are growing and many have amassed large foreign reserves.

    China had pledged $43 billion to the fund, while India, Mexico, Brazil and Russia each chipped in $10 billion. The United States, Calderon drily noted, was not giving a single penny, due to "serious restrictions of a legal and political nature." In other words, coughing up billions to save Europe was impossible for deadlocked U.S. politicians, especially in an election year and as the country struggled with its own budget deficits, economic analysts said.

    University of Maryland economist Phillip Swagel, a former Treasury Department official in the George W. Bush administration, said developing countries' new economic power was already translating into growing political might.

    In fact, the BRICS countries representing Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa were the ones making demands on Europe during the summit, saying they should be given a bigger role in the governance of the IMF if they were going to send billions to the fund. Europeans have traditionally led the organization since its founding nearly seven decades ago.

    "With their resources comes a greater say," Swagel said. "It's a big change. We were once telling Asian counties what to do."

    The power shift was clear in the air-conditioned hallways and balmy outdoor lounges of the G-20 where dignitaries and reporters mingled.

    News crews from Ethiopia and China filled press conferences, while Brazilian and Russian leaders drew the most attention. Humbled European heads of state stepped before TV cameras to thank China for helping out while promising that their countries would do better.

    Heloisa Castro, a Washington-based reporter for the Brazilian network Record TV, said Brazilians were energized by their new prominence, after so many decades of suffering dreadful busts and booms. Still, she said, they had no right to preach solutions to Europe, a point President Dilma Rousseff made to an international gaggle of reporters Tuesday.

    Preventing European and U.S. turmoil from dragging down Brazil was the order of the day, Castro said, as economic growth in some developing countries has slowed sharply this year.

    "I think it's very curious that now, we who have been through all these IMF adjustment programs in the past with their draconian conditions, we now are seeing European countries go through the same thing," Castro said. "But if the economies in Europe and the U.S. go down, we all suffer. We can't only live with the BRICS countries."

     

     

  • Chinese artist Ai Weiwei warned not to attend his own court case

    Andy Wong / AP

    Ai Weiwei, second from left, stopped by a plain clothes policeman while he argues with another policeman, foreground, outside his home in Beijing on Wednesday.

    By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

    BEIJING – While Ai Weiwei didn’t get his day in court Wednesday, he did get his case heard.

    The Chinese artist and social activist was noticeably absent from opening arguments at a Beijing courtroom after he was warned off by police. Instead, Ai, 54, stayed home at his studio while his wife, Lu Qing, represented their design company, Beijing Fake Cultural Development Ltd., with a team of lawyers.

    Ai and his wife are challenging a ruling by the tax office that rejected their appeal against a steep fine imposed for alleged tax evasion, a charge roundly rejected as false and trumped up by Ai and his supporters.

    NBC News spoke to Ai Weiwei by phone late Wednesday afternoon, but he could not comment on how legal proceedings had gone.

    The government previously ordered Ai’s company to pay a staggering 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) in alleged back taxes and additional fines. Surprisingly, Ai raised the money needed to pay an 8.45 million yuan ($1.3 million) bond needed to contest the tax charges through donations and contributions from around 30,000 supporters after he called for assistance through social media, a favored tool of his and other activists in China.

    Stunts like these as well as his pokes at authority – see the photo he posted yesterday on Twitter sporting a too-tight Chinese police uniform – anger authorities who view Ai as a troublemaker. 

    In April 2011, Ai was detained without charge during a national roundup of activists and dissidents following the many pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East.

    It was only after his 81-day detention that tax-evasion charges against Ai and his company were made, lending credence to claims made by human rights watchers and Ai supporters that the move was retaliation by the government.

    The case against Ai has been shrouded in secrecy due to the government’s unwillingness, or inability, to reveal any original tax documents as evidence of tax evasion they purport to have.

    Slideshow: The artist strikes a nerve

    Sharron Lovell / Polaris

    Click to see a slideshow of photos of projects done by the Chinese artist and activist Ai Wei Wei.

    Launch slideshow

    A hearing held last July during which the government’s evidence would ostensibly have been revealed was closed and the company’s lawyers were barred from attending, a decision Ai’s lawyers claim was illegal.

    It is a sensitive time politically in China as President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are poised to step down later this year. Despite the political drama swirling around the fleeing of dissident Chen Guangcheng to the United States and the ongoing Bo Xilai scandal, Beijing desperately wants to make the transition peaceful and is doing everything possible this year to mitigate sensitive stories.

    Yet, as has sometimes proven the case when it comes to Ai, attempts to muzzle or contain him can backfire.

    While Beijing police have discouraged local dissidents from going to the courthouse to support Ai, security was said to be intense around the court with a ring of police cars around it and officers telling foreign press to stay away as well. Still, supporters of Ai were seen outside holding small signs that said “Ai Weiwei, we love you” and “No justice without a fight.”


    Meanwhile, the detention of Ai’s legal consultant, Liu Xiaoyuan, by security forces Tuesday outraged Ai, who announced it on Twitter and called for Liu’s immediate release. Ai told NBC News that Liu’s phone had been turned off and that he had been “taken away to the countryside for some sort of treatment by the police.”

    Additionally, Ai has also been using Twitter to call attention to the heavy police presence outside his home. He pointed to a bust up at his home yesterday when someone in his studio took a photo of what Ai described as “30-40 police cars.” Ai alleges that police rushed the photographer to grab the camera, causing some minor scratches and bruises which were tweeted here.

    As part of his conditional release late last year, Ai’s travel rights were taken away and he was told to refrain from criticism of the government through social media.

    Friday was supposed to be the day those restrictions would be lifted, but in lieu of Ai’s continued defiance, it is hard to believe local authorities won’t extend these restraints in order to rein him in. 

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