This task is made all the more difficult because most of the world’s preventable deaths occur far from the appropriate health care – the combination of professionals, technicians, and diagnostic equipment necessary to find the answers. Here’s one example: Two-thirds of India’s 1.2 billion people live in rural settings, hundreds or even thousands of rutted miles from a decent hospital.

In the South Asian countries of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, newborn deaths — neonatal mortality — account for about 40 percent of all deaths of children younger than five. Newborn deaths in these three countries alone, with a combined population of more than 1.5 billion, make up more than a third of all neonatal deaths around the world.

Why are these babies dying? A current study – one of the most complex ongoing investigations in the world – aims to find out.

The project is called ANISA, for the Aetiology of Neonatal Infection in South Asia, and it’s as broad as it is deep, stretching more than 1,500 miles and two unfriendly borders across sites in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

ANISA is unusual for a number of reasons, and it’s producing a wealth of new knowledge that will have a long-term impact in Asia and elsewhere.

Unlike many other big public health studies conducted in the developing world, ANISA isn’t run from the cozy offices of a university on the US East Coast, but from a microbiology lab housed deep inside a hospital that caters to poor children here in Dhaka, a megacity that the Economist Intelligence Unit regularly rates one of the world’s worst places to live.

Researchers say this project puts the scientific resources – and control – on the ground, where they’re most effective. ANISA “is a good example of a complex multisite study being managed by a low-income country institution,” says Dr. Steve Luby, a professor of infectious diseases at Stanford University who was a technical advisor to ANISA.

Courtesy Child Health Research Foundation

This is the first-ever study to look comprehensively at the microbiological causes of early infant deaths in their home communities, where newborns die without ever having seen a health care practitioner. It combines massive urban and rural field surveillance with sophisticated lab work.

In six locations –- including, in Pakistan, the slums of Karachi and the rural district of Matiari; rural corners Tamil Nadu and Orissa states in India; and the Sylhet district in north-eastern Bangladesh –- local health workers are monitoring every woman between the ages of 13 and 49 to keep track of who gets pregnant and to follow the course of their pregnancy, childbirth, and post-natal period. That’s a study population of more than two million people.

The health workers provide these mothers-to-be with basic prenatal care, such as iron and folic acid, immunization counseling, and childbirth counseling, while collecting information on potential risk factors surrounding the birth. They aim to visit each new mother within the first 24 hours of delivery; babies with neonatal infections are referred to designated study facilities for immediate care. There, ANISA collects blood samples and  nasal and throat swabs from the newborns for analysis.

The logistical challenges are great and health workers sometimes don’t hear of a birth until days after the fact. Many children in the study areas are born prematurely, or are underweight.

“Though we have put a childbirth notification system in place, it remains challenging, for example when the delivery is happening late at night,” Samir K. Saha, who directs ANISA as executive director of the Dhaka-based Child Health Research Foundation, said in an interview.

The newborns who do see a community health worker receive immediate care that wasn’t previously available, and ANISA in turn gets clues to the bacteria and viruses that are ailing and sometimes killing newborns.

In other circumstances, those samples would be refrigerated and airlifted at great expense to North America or Europe, where technicians earning euro or dollar salaries would analyze them on advanced equipment.

In this case, however, site-based and central labs in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India are collecting, processing and preserving thousands of samples. Local technicians can do the work faster and at less expense, thanks to state-of-the-art equipment like the LifeTech Viia 7 Real-Time qPCR System. This highly automated machine uses specially-designed micro-fluidic cards that can test a single sample for dozens of specially-targeted viruses and bacteria, dramatically reducing the amount of time and work needed to check for pathogens.

“Most of the time, technologies like this are not available in developing countries where most of the children are dying,” Saha said. The LifeTich machine reduces testing time for 23 different pathogens from 20 hours to three hours, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

This kind of technology usually resides in affluent countries that have a very low disease burden. For ANISA, the Child Health Research Foundation secured money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to put the tech and know-how thousands of miles closer to where it’s most needed.

High technology does its job, and so does the low. When ANISA’s several hundred community health workers and study physicians are in the field to register pregnancies, births, and referrals, they are transmitting real time data back to their bases using SMS codes via inexpensive 2G mobile phones.

Child Health Research Foundation

Who came up with all this? It wasn’t Americans.

ANISA was designed by a large international team and is led by pre-eminent scientists in Bangladesh. Notably, the Child Health Research Foundation, based in Dhaka Shishu (Children’s) Hospital, controls the purse-strings, and has contracted leading institutions and scientists from the CDC, the World Health Organization, Aga Khan University, and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, for expert input.

ANISA also crosses trigger-happy borders. In a true South-South partnership, scientists from three countries with snarled histories of war, terrorism, and mass murder are in full collaboration, with centralized training and methods.

This approach has so far put more than 160,000 women under active surveillance, and resulted in the collection of thousands of important biological specimens from their children. Project researchers say these specimens are yielding interesting results that will soon be analyzed in fuller detail by a committee of leading microbiological and neonatal experts.

These and future results will leave ANISA well placed for influencing future public health policy. The people driving the project will remain on the case long-term. The samples – more than 6,300 so far — are banked in Dhaka and Karachi; and future studies of these samples will be performed by local people with a direct stake in the well-being of the region.

This is the opposite of what one friend of mine calls “parachute epidemiology,” where a foreign researcher arrives on the scene, takes blood samples from a study population, and leaves.

Policymakers in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh will see proposals coming from their own scientists, based on quality studies they themselves conducted, drawing on data from local populations – the best way toward the adoption of life-saving interventions.

When the Republic of South Sudan broke away from its northern namesake in 2011 to become the world’s newest country after a lengthy and brutal civil war, southerners gained control of a vast territory rich in oil, forests, wildlife – and tribal discord. Over the last year and half of independence, South Sudan has seen severe outbreaks of tribal violence that have left thousands dead.

My friend Matthew LeRiche, whom I first met on a Nile River barge while writing my book The Black Nile, has spent the last decade criss-crossing South Sudan to research its 50-year struggle for freedom. LeRiche follows warfare, humanitarianism, and how opposing communities can find their way out of conflict. In this slideshow LeRiche, a fellow at the London School of Economics and co-author of South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence, narrates a series of photos by photojournalist Ally Ngethi, on a government program that uses traditional wrestling matches as a way of bringing together communities with histories of armed conflict. LeRiche writes:

“The event, in September 2012, was called ’Wrestling for Peace and Unity,’ and featured matches by two rival tribal groups, the Bor-Dinka and the Mundari. This was the first of a series of events planned in South Sudan with a focus on using the sport of wrestling to build relations between communities. Wrestling is popular among most tribal groups in South Sudan, and these matches have a long history as a customary method of resolving conflict.  The goal is to use this sport to provide a space in which to build peace. It’s also a good business opportunity, considering how popular wrestling is.“

An article I wrote on the illegal trade in Asian pangolins for National Geographic News nearly five years ago ended on a portentous note. The endangered scaly anteaters, prized as a delicacy and folk remedy in China and parts of Southeast Asia, had been hunted out to such an extent — and the demand for pangolin meat, blood, and scales had increased to such great levels — that conservationists feared African pangolins would soon become an important source for the lucrative Chinese market.

Recent research indicates that’s exactly what’s come to pass. Reports from the wildlife trade monitoring organization Traffic, African media outlets, and scholarly researchers point to well-developed trade in pangolins from African source countries to China.

“A number of seizures of in Asia of African pangolins provide evidence of an intercontinental trade in African pangolins to Asia that has long been suspected, but little is known about the extent of this trade or the figures involved,” Daniel W.S. Callender and Lisa Hywood write in the most recent issue of Traffic Bulletin. Callender and Hywood cite cases in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Gabon.

A July 2012 seizure of 115 kilograms (253 pounds) of pangolin scales in Uganda is one case in point. Ugandan wildlife officials told the New Age newspaper that alleged smuggler James Busanani had been supplying pangolins from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Chinese buyers in Uganda. A separate wildlife seizure in May netted pangolin scales and hippopotamus teeth bound for China.

“Because of the small nature of the animals, one would need to kill at least five pangolins to get one kilo of pangolin scales,” Lilian Nsubuga, a spokeswoman for the Ugandan Wildlife Authority, told the Daily Monitor. “This means that in order to have 115 kilograms of pangolin scales that Busanani was arrested with, about 575 pangolins were killed.”

Trade in pangolins is banned in China and Vietnam. That only makes them more desirable.

“As things become increasingly rare, we’re seeing the demand increase,” Traffic’s Chris Shepherd told me in 2008. In China, “you have luxury restaurants that serve prestige animals. It’s a status symbol to show you’re above the law.”

The trade “appears to be huge—professional and at an industrial scale,” Elizabeth Bennett, director of the wildlife-trade program at the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, told me in 2008. Last year, in a paper on the effects of organized crime on the illegal wildlife trade, Bennett noted that 24 tons of pangolin had been seized by authorities worldwide between January 2006 and September 2009.

How many pangolins is that?

River erosion is an age-old worry for farmers living in the basins of the Ganges, Bramhaputra, and Meghna rivers in India and Bangladesh.

Land that was yours one season can vanish, only to reappear as someone else’s home-stake a hundred miles – or a hundred yards – away.

Sometimes, it can spark a shooting war.

Nardeshwar Tiwari of India's Buxar district visits the farmland claimed by villagers on both sides of the shifting Ganges River. Photo by Dan Morrison

In India’s Buxar district, annual erosion and natural variation in the Ganges’ course has led to a perennial standoff between farmers here in the state of Bihar, and farmers just across the river in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Disputes over shifting farmland led to armed conflict in the 1990s, when six villagers were killed and a high ranking Bihar police official was injured by gunfire. Local administrators in Buxar even handed out rifles to farmers so they could defend their fields against raiders from over the state line.

“It’s like the India-Pakistan border here,” Nardeshwar Tiwari, a 72-year-old farmer from Buxar, told me during a visit to 6,000 disputed acres of prime farmland claimed by farmers in both states.

These land wars are a longstanding problem along the state border. “Some of their portion lies on our side, and some of our portion lies on their side,” Ajay Yadav, the district’s highest-ranking administrator, told me. Cases have been moldering in the courts and in Delhi since the 1930s.

Synthetic-fiber bags line a section of the Ganges River in Buxar, India, to stave off river erosion. Photo by Dan Morrison

Taming, or mitigating, river erosion is a thankless – and ultimately impossible — job. In Buxar, engineers are reinforcing portions of the district’s 51-kilometer Ganges River embankment with synthetic, sand-filled “geo-bags,” that resist wear and tear longer than traditional jute sandbags.

A.K. Prasad, the district’s executive engineer, escorts me to a riverside village where the geo-bags are being tested. The sloping riverbank, lined with hundreds of white 100-pound sacks, amplifies the intense summer sun. Despite the presence of the Ganges, the embankment, on this day, resembles a salt field. But when the floods come, nearby fields will be preserved.

Further downriver, Tiwari points to a fertile patch of land that is shared by farmers from both sides of the border under an informal peacekeeping agreement. Trust, but verify. Half a mile back sits a seasonal cluster of straw huts that farmers erected to keep an eye on their crops.

“Every year,” says Tiwari, “someone burns them down.”

A cluster of straw huts erected so local farmers can watch over their crops on a disputed stretch of farmland. Each year, someone torches the settlement. Photo by Dan Morrison

The Great Indian Outage, stretching from New Delhi to Kolkata, comes just a day after 300 million people in northern India lost power for much of Monday.

It is a disaster that’s caused untold damage to India’s economy, its prestige, and its well-being – think of the millions of patients in hospitals, the commuters stuck on trains, and farmers in need of irrigation. Hundreds of miners in the states of West Bengal and Jharkand were trapped underground by the blackout. Some 300 trains were reportedly stalled across the country.

There’s more damage to come, I fear: Forces that have been bridling against environmental regulations and science-based activism will use the Great Outage as a cudgel to demolish future restraints on dam construction, coal mining, and other projects.

India’s humiliating power failure is sure to birth a slogan as reductive and wrong as America’s own “Drill Baby Drill.”

The north Indian town of New Tehri, built above the reservoir of a 1,000-megawatt dam to house displaced villagers, suffers daily power outages.

The irony is that this outage was likely caused in part by mismanagement at the Bhakra series of hydroelectric dams in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh states in northern India, according to Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People.

“Had these dams been operated more rationally, keeping in mind the emerging realities and forecasts, the situation in Northwest India would have been different,” Thakkar told me. “Higher [water] levels in these dams would have meant more power generation for each unit of water release and at the same time more water for agriculture, thus less water [for irrigation] pumped from aquifers, and thus less demand of power.”

Earlier this month, Thakkar’s organization published a short paper [pdf] criticizing dam administrators for allowing water levels to become alarmingly low.

Thakkar says the answer to India’s current power crisis isn’t more hydroelectric dams, as most currently existing dams aren’t built or operated for maximum efficiency. Instead, power can be saved by harvesting rainwater.

“Since most of our water is coming from groundwater, we need to store the rainfall in aquifers that are fast depleting,” he says. “This would have multiple spin-off benefits.” With healthier aquifers, farmers wouldn’t have to run electric-powered pumps as much to adequately irrigate their crops – a major drag on the power grid.

“More dams won’t help achieve that,” Thakkar says, adding that farmers should shift to less water-intensive crops. “It is amazing that, among all the crops, [acreage devoted to] sugarcane has gone up in this drought year!”

At the Center for Science and the Environment, Chandra Bushan provides some of the hard numbers behind today’s blackout, as well as a simple cause: Indian states are taking more power from the grid than they are supposed to, even as the power system lacks the flexibility to meet seasonal spikes in demand.

In this case, a weak and tardy annual monsoon has millions of households and businesses running their air conditioners for longer than they would under normal conditions. This from the CSE:

Electricity generation for the month of June illustrates this problem:

• In June 2012, India produced 8 per cent more electricity than in June 2011.
• The generation from thermal power plants was 11.4 per cent higher than in June 2011. Coal-based power plants generated 16.7 per cent more electricity.
• However, with low monsoon, the generation of electricity from hydropower plants reduced by 6 per cent compared to June 2011. In fact, hydropower plants produced 19 per cent lesser electricity in April-June, 2012 than the corresponding months in 2011. As hydro plants are also peak load plants, this reduction seems to have affected the peak power generation in the country significantly.

None of this logic – nor the many recent plans and ideas for improving the management and efficiency of India’s power grid – will make a difference to the contractors and bureaucrats in the “Build Baby Build” crowd that has much to gain from poorly-planned dam construction.

The scientist and environmentalist G.D. Agrawal, who now goes by the name Swami Gyan Swarup Anand. Photo by Dan Morrison.

The debate over dams has become so silly that earlier this month a minister from the government of Uttarakhand state went on a one-day hunger strike to support more construction on the Himalayan tributaries of the Ganges River. Mantri Prasad Naithani’s constituency is in the region of Tehri Gahrwal, which was submerged a decade ago by the giant Tehri dam. Residents of the doomed town of Tehri were relocated to a “model town” higher up the valley to make room for the $1 billion, 1,000 megawatt hydroelectric dam’s reservoir.

When I visited New Tehri last year, power outages were commonplace.

But it’s brute force, not the rhetorical kind, that truly keeps this movement alive.

On June 22, the Indian environmentalist Bharat Jhunjhunwala was attacked in his home in Uttarakhand state by a gang of 40 thugs purportedly working for a contracting company. At the time of the attack, Jhunjhunwala, 62, had been hosting G.D. Agrawal, an eminent scientist turned swami who is also known as Gyan Swarup Anand. Agrawal was in the region to protest the coming submergence of the Dhari Devi Temple on the Alaknanda river by a hydroelectric project.

In full view of local police and journalists, the crowd kicked in Jhunjhunwalla’s door and blackened his face with ink. He and his wife were forced to flee the area.

“They threatened him that they will burn him alive in the house if he did not stop opposing the dams within two days,” according to an account by Jhunjhunwala’s family.

India’s power grid suffers from inertia on one hand and from destructive greed on the other. It doesn’t suffer from a shortage of dams.

Read National Geographic’s news story on the India blackout>>

His ears tuned to an array of elaborately curved trumpets, Bulgam Bhai strains to hear the ever-present danger and then pounces. When an Indian coughs, this jocular public health avenger — all candy stripes and waxed mustache –- appears in a flash with a potentially life-saving question:

“Has it been two weeks?”

A persistent cough of more than two weeks can indicate tuberculosis. An estimated 330,000 Indians die each year from TB, according to the World Health Organization, and more than 2 million become infected.

Bulgam Bhai –- his appetizing name means Mr. Sputum in Hindi –- is part of a delightful public service campaign to convince more Indians to visit a clinic or lab if their coughs turn pernicious.

Most cases of tuberculosis are easily curable. Bulgam Bhai’s goal is to spread word f the ready availability of testing and treatment, says Dr. Sarabjit Chadha, project director at Project Axshya which created the engaging superhero. (Project Axshya is part of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.)

The Bulgam Bhai campaign ran on television and radio in 300 districts of 21 Indian states between February and March, with a potential audience of 234 million people, and was restarted again in July. A nationwide toll-free helpline received more than 1,600 calls during the ad’s first 30 days on the air.

“The campaign was primarily focused on creating awareness about symptoms of TB (i.e. 2 weeks of cough) and the call for action (sputum examination) in the community,” Dr. Chadha said via email. “Preliminary findings suggest that the campaign has been able to achieve the viewership. The response on the advert from the community including physicians has been extremely positive and encouraging.”

India needs more such campaigns, which harness to the public good the infectious humor and imagination of an advertising industry that’s usually devoted to selling products like cars and — much less delightfully — skin-whitening cream.

Bulgam Bhai couldn’t come at a better time.

Even as tuberculosis rates are falling in India and across most of the world, Indian doctors this year announced the first cases of a TB strain that is totally resistant to all antibiotic treatment. Government officials first denied these reports, the Wall Street Journal reported last month, and later – quietly – confirmed them.

Nalin Verma

Sukath Choudhary is dead. So is my father. But my village, thrown carelessly on the map of Bihar state in India, is still there.

I love my village, for it nurtured me and saw me through my wonder years. And it has zealously treasured my memories. I still remember the half-naked grazier locked in verbal duel with my father. My father had offered the man some money to graze the family cow.

“Don’t try to fool me with these pieces of paper,” Sukath shouted, throwing the money back at my father. “After all, I have guarded your cow in the blazing sun for months on end.”

Father was a bit bewildered. But, archetypal villager that he was, he soon sensed that currency notes were alien to Sukath. So he handed him a few coins instead. “Yes! Now you have given me genuine money. I will purchase tobacco with it.”

Sukath Choudhary lived in a world of his own. It was a world of cows, calves, and bulls. He talked to bovines and they responded. He lived among them at all times. On the banks of the canal and in the barren fields on the outskirts of the village — Daraily Mathia in Siwan district — he was often seen amid hundreds of cattle.

He did not remember when he started spending all his time in the company of longhorns. “My parents enlisted me to look after the cows even before I began to wear clothes!” Sukath told me.

My curiosity drove me to inquire about this herdsman in his late 60′s. I frequently saw him escorting the four-footed at the canal. It was in the mid-1970s, when I was in my teens. I initially thought Sukhath had hundreds of cows and calves in his possession. No farmer in my village owned more than three or four. One fine morning I learned the answer when my father asked me to take our cow to Sukath. Sukath was the caretaker of the cows of several other farmers, besides his own.

Every morning I took our cow to Sukath. And every evening I used to bring the creature back home. This routine enabled me learn more about him. Clad in a soiled dhoti and holding a baton on his shoulder, Sukath lorded over his animal kingdom. His knowledge of words appeared limited to “hat…hooh….aaha…hurr,” which he frequently uttered to command his subjects.

He had little time to interact with other people of the village. His day began at the crack of the dawn. With a bundle of sattu (a powder of fried grains) on his back, Sukath left home with his four-footed friends. And he returned home after the sunset to sleep beside the cattle at his door.

One story about Sukath, and the halcyon days of my childhood, sticks out.

A village lad, Mangru, opened a tea stall on the canal on the outskirts of the village. Mangru had learned to prepare tea while working as a busboy in a restaurant somewhere in Punjab. Most of the old people in my poor and remote village were still unaware of this hot beverage. Sukath was walking lazily along the canal while his cows were grazing in a nearby field. Mangru offered him an earthen vessel of tea. Sukath readily took the cup and raised it to his lips.

And then all hell broke loose.

Sukath started beating Mangru with his baton. “You have given me poison, it burnt my lips, I will not spare you,” Sukath screamed. The shopkeeper, bruised and battered, somehow escaped with his life. Other villagers gathered around to convince Sukath that tea was not a poison and that, if consumed slowly, it would not burn his tongue. But Sukath was not convinced.

Mangru was my neighbor. Later that evening, I saw Sukath standing at Mangru’s door. He was holding a pail full of milk. “Come out Mangru,” he shouted. Mangru, still bruised, hobbled out.

“Take this milk,” Sukath said. “Boil it, add haldi [turmeric], and drink it. You will be relieved of your aches.” Then he explained: “I beat you because you were playing a prank on me. You are now a grown man, stop playing tricks on old people.” Mangru accepted the milk meekly and peace was restored.

Sukath had no enemies. His needs were limited. He was more than content with his bovine friends. He was closest to what I know of a happy man.

On a recent visit to my village, I heard Sukath had passed away. He had three sons. His eldest died of tuberculosis. The second son died in a road accident. The third, Harekrishna, is alive. Sixteen-year-old Harekrishna is married to the 32-year-old widow of his eldest brother. He is an active member of a Maoist insurgent group that has gained ground in my village.

“Clever people fooled my innocent father. They paid him only a rupee for an entire month of grazing their cows,” Harekrishna said. “I am not going to carry on what my father did. He led an animal’s life.”

Unlike his late father, Harekrishna is aware of his rights. He works as a farm laborer, “But no one dares to pay me less than the legal wage.” Harekrishna and his generation are aware of both currency notes and coins. His father would be an anachronism today.

Several tea shops and paan shops have come up along the canal. People are aware of tea and paan. They keep their cows in sheds or staked near their doors. There is no Sukath to lead the herds.

But with the passing away of Sukath, peace and harmony have also disappeared from my village. It too is plagued by trouble and unrest, like many other villages in Bihar state of India.

The upper castes and the lower castes are on the warpath. Society is divided. People do not gather as they used to. Friendliness and good-neighborliness have been replaced by distrust and suspicion.

The baton that Sukath carried is out of fashion now. Firearms have replaced it.

Mangru is still alive. When reminded of Sukath’s assault on him, Mangru becomes nostalgic. He says: “Babu, do you remember how Sukath-bhai offered me milk after beating me?

“The injuries caused by guns will not be cured by hot milk and turmeric.”

Five thousand years after that fictional outbreak, another zombie is trying to rise from the dead in Egypt. Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s longtime intelligence czar and, briefly, Hosni Mubarak’s vice-president, emerged this week from the crypt to announce his candidacy for president

Egyptians should re-inter their old torturer-in-chief.

Suleiman was last seen in February 2011 when, pallid and unsteady, he appeared on state television to announce Mubarak’s resignation following an 18-day uprising that saw the murders of more than 680 Egyptians.

After 29 turgid years in power, Mubarak left Cairo, waving, Nixon-like, from a helicopter. Suleiman all but disappeared from public view, an archduke of intelligence deposed by a clique of generals out to save the system that had fattened them.

Now Suleiman’s back, claiming to be a democrat and pretending that the two decades of torture he oversaw never happened. Make no mistake, Suleiman isn’t running as some lone wolf – there’s a zombie horde backing him, the old deep state of spooks and securocrats.

Some Egyptians, unsettled by more than a year of turmoil caused by epic street demonstrations and the ruling military’s tragic incompetence, are happy to forget about the violence and humiliation on which Suleiman’s power was based. They want a familiar, reassuring face –- not to mention the promise of a strong hand. And they fear rule by the Islamists who dominate Egypt’s first freely-elected parliament.

There may even be voters who agreed with Suleiman when he told ABC News, just days before Mubarak’s ouster, that Egyptians weren’t ready for democracy.

Now, of course, he’s singing a different tune. “Egypt will always be and continue to be a national democratic state where its children enjoy full rights,” Suleiman told the state-owned Al-Akhbar newspaper in an interview published Monday. He denied he was a representative of the old order, and even tried to cast himself as a dissident in Mubarak’s government.

“Those who think that my candidacy for president means reinventing the former regime must realize that being the head of the General Intelligence Agency or vice president for a few days does not mean that I was part of an institution against which people revolted,” Suleiman told the paper. (Wire reports of the Arabic-language interview make no mention of whether this statement was accompanied by laughter.)

He is, of course, just that – a representative of an undead government that held its people in contempt while feeding them a steady diet of conspiracy, beatings, and low-quality subsidized bread.

Nobody thinks Suleiman will legally win the presidential election scheduled for May 23 and 24. Right now, the real contest is between businessman Khairat el-Shater, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate; Sheik Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a Salafi Islamist who may be disqualified amid reports his mother took American citizenship before her death; Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a more liberal Islamist who was expelled from the Brotherhood; and Amr Moussa, the former foreign minister. The key word is “legally.”

The Brotherhood, which holds almost half the seats in Parliament, is up in arms over Suleiman’s candidacy (“I consider his entry an insult to the revolution and the Egyptian people,” Shater told Reuters), but its leaders were more than happy to negotiate with Suleiman during the uprising.

The months since then have been violent and traumatic. When armored vehicles crushed to death Coptic Christians demonstrating peacefully against attacks on their churches, state television claimed it was they who fired on the army. When more than 70 Cairo soccer fans – rabid opponents of Egypt’s brutal Interior Ministry – were massacred in a stadium in Port Said, police stood by and did nothing. The physical toll obscures deeper injuries to the spirit.

Some Americans may feel uncomfortable with the ideology of Egypt’s presidential frontrunners. That’s too bad. As much as anything, democracy is about the right of the people to make mistakes at the ballot box, and the right to correct those errors the next time around.

Very soon, Egyptians will choose a president to chart the frightful and promising future. They may choose right and they might choose wrong. But they will surely leave behind the monsters of the past.

Dan Morrison is author of The Black Nile.

The views expressed in this guest blog are those of Dan Morrison and not necessarily those of the National Geographic Society. Readers are invited to comment, so long as their tone is civil and their comments are on topic. Please read our rules of conduct.

Now comes Clean and Dry “intimate wash,” which promises women “protection, fairness and freshness” below the waistline. A new ad for the ph-balanced cleanser features an attractive young bride who lacks confidence around her husband, presumably because her vagina is too dark. After one splash of Clean and Dry, however, love blooms anew.

The media’s reception has been harsh. “This is a wonder product,” Manjula Narayan writes in India’s Sunday Guardian, “it’s an Itch Guard that promises to bleach my oyster.”

While skin lightening products and advertising are ubiquitous in India, this isn’t just a local, or regional, phenomenon. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Rupa Subramanya points out that intimate skin-lightening got its start in the West, and notes that studies demonstrate the negative effect that darker skin can have on job-seekers in the United States:

To round out this picture, Joni Hersch, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, documents that the fairest skinned immigrants earn an average of 16-23% more than comparable immigrants with the darkest skin tone. This is over and above any difference due to education, ethnicity, race, or anything else which influences labor market outcomes. Her conclusion is that there’s “persistent skin color discrimination” affecting immigrants in the U.S. labor market.

The scorn of India’s educated and liberated may not be enough to stop Clean and Dry. Skin lightening products are prevalent in Africa and Asia. I have encountered Fair and Lovely, the Coca-Cola of skin lighteners, in Darfur and South Sudan, Cairo and Tokyo.

Fair & Lovely "fairness cream" in a drug store window, Malakal, South Sudan, 2007.

I spoke recently with a dermatologist and plastic surgeon who practices in a mid-size Indian city. He told me that no matter what the client comes in for, he sends them out with a free tube of prescription-only skin-lightener. “They always come back” for more, he said.

The dermatologist had nothing good to say about the over-the-counter lighteners: “They make the skin darker over time,” he said, before launching into a short lecture on the chemistry of artificial fairness. The doctor’s real problem wasn’t getting patients interested in skin-lightening techniques – it was in getting them to stop.

One can only have so many dermabrasions and chemical peels, he explained with sigh. “You have to let your face rest. They don’t want to listen.”

Skin-lightening is a $400 million business with customers across the economic spectrum. Where does the Pigmentation Anxiety Industrial Complex go from here? Iris lightening? Eyeball-bleaching?

Maybe something to do with the feet?

Children at the Labuje internal displaced person camp near Kitgum, northern Uganda, March 2006. More than 1.5 million people were forced into squalid camps like Labuje by the Lord's Resistance Army. Just five months after my visit to Labuje, the LRA left Uganda for South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic, and residents began returning home after more than a decade away. Photo by Dan Morrison.

Invisible Children has released a new film in its Kony2012 campaign, one that, unlike its predecessor, puts the focus on the countries in central Africa where the murderous Lord’s Resistance Army is currently operating. The filmmakers clearly hope to make the most of the phenomenal reach of the first Kony2012 video, which has garnered more than 90 million views since it launched one month ago, and to address some of the fierce criticism the campaign attracted.

Four weeks since the groundbreaking video appeared, the campaign to “Make Kony Famous” and bring LRA leader Joseph Kony to justice continues to inspire a lot of smart analysis, as well as a fair bit of invective.

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Betty Bigombe, a Ugandan cabinet minister and former peace negotiator, summed up a lot of what appalled some viewers, in particular many with on-the-ground experience in humanitarian aid and conflict resolution. “My problem with all this,” Bigombe says, “is that it’s being portrayed as ‘This is us; it’s all we Americans, we can do it; we, the world, can do it; we don’t need them; we don’t need the Ugandans; we don’t need the countries that are actually going through this.’”

Writing in National Geographic, Anyway “Ricky” Richard, the former child soldier who I met while researching the LRA for my book The Black Nile, said he opposed Invisible Children’s call for a military solution. Ricky, the founder of the Ugandan NGO Friends of Orphans, followed up on this point in an interview with CNN, quoting the proverb that “when elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.” Every major attempt at killing Kony since 2006 has resulted in deadly reprisal massacres by the LRA. (Still, I don’t think the LRA would have ever participated in the failed 2006 Juba peace talks if it weren’t for military pressure.)

But every action has a reaction. Kony’s October 2005 indictment by the International Criminal Court also didn’t go unanswered. Two weeks after charges were filed against Kony in The Hague, a group of NGO managers at a conference in Kampala noticed their silenced phones had all started vibrating at the same time. Those calls were the first indication in the capital that two aid workers had been gunned down in northern Uganda. Another was killed the following week in South Sudan.

The brief passage of time has brought with it increasingly dispassionate analyses of Kony2012. The Zimbabwean human rights lawyer Tendayi Achiume, a teaching fellow at the UCLA School of Law, took a nuanced look. Writing last week in Jadaliyya, she notes the acid rhetorical counterattack against Kony2012’s critics by Invisible Children supporters, including the heavyweight New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. “In an interview with the BBC in which he responded to the backlash against Kony2012, ICC Chief Prosecutor Moreno-Ocampo declared: ‘Criticism is stupid,’” Achiume notes.

We should reject out of hand and with suspicion (sneering scorn is optional) any attempt to muzzle intellectual contestation of the norms and politics advanced even by compassionate responses to embroiled conflict. This is particularly the case when confronted by those who would have us believe that Africa’s problems are the stuff of an old-school Batman comic —- two dimensional, gripping, and conveniently shelvable once the caped hero has zinged the baddy into prison.

In London, panelists at the Frontline Club were annoyed, dismayed — and impressed with Kony2012′s reach, while back in Uganda, Norbert Mao, an Acholi politician who knows as much as anyone about the horrors of the LRA, took a kinder view. “Is the video a bad thing? I would say no,” he wrote. “Has it got gaps? Plenty.”

With this new video, Invisible Children makes good faith effort to address those gaps, and make the most of Kony2012’s surprising reach and momentum.