Michael Yon, the independent reporter in Iraq I mentioned yesterday, has published an update to his story on the graves found near Baqubah in Iraq. With the body count now in double figures, he has a question:

As the investigation unfolds more pertinent details, I’ll continue to update the story. But the biggest question rippling across the internet – “Why hasn’t the mainstream media picked this up?” – is something only representatives of mainstream media can answer.

In fairness, several large outlets did publish it online: National Review Online and Fox News were both quick to place the story prominently on their websites. A few others also published excerpts. It was even briefly up on the Drudge Report. On the blog front, Instapundit, Hugh Hewitt, Blackfive, Andrew Sullivan, Captain’s Quarters and many others picked it up.

But for those publications who actually had people embedded in Baqubah when the story first broke and still failed to cover it, their malaise is inexplicable. I do not know why all failed to report the murders and booby-trapped village: apparently no reporters bothered to go out there, even though it’s only about 3.5 miles from this base. Any one of the reporters currently in Baqubah could still go to these coordinates and follow his or her nose and find the gravesites.

Is it any wonder, then, that Americans find even the military more credible than the media on this particular war?

Fifty years of foreign aid not only has failed to help Africa reduce poverty and create prosperity, but because would-be African farmers and entrepreneurs have to compete against free stuff, the good intentions of the developed world have served to actively undermine its ability to create healthy economies. The first Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) event - described by The Economist has a “Davos for optimists” - has been held in Africa. This article explains why its fresh approach to building African prosperity might work a little better than the failed posturing of sanctimonious do-gooders:

Africans to Bono: ‘For God’s sake please stop!’

<excerpt:> “We can continue the endless cycle of need and dependency, or you can create jobs, develop indigenous capacity, and build a sustainable future.”
<excerpt:> “Many of Africa’s best and brightest become bureaucrats or NGO workers when they should be scientists or entrepreneurs.”

What is it about governments that they talk endlessly about market failure, and when the private sector does create competition in an effort to improve service and lower prices, they hijack the process in the interest of nice-sounding but misguided goals, such as “open access”? Don’t they realise that by denying private investors their rightful profit opportunity, those investors simply won’t invest? That they’ll take their capital somewhere they can earn a return safe from expropriation?

No wonder Africa is so woefully underserved by telecommunications infrastructure. The biggest undersea cable (SAT3/SAFE/WASC) is, in most countries it serves, owned by a state-owned or state-protected monopoly incumbent. Now that private investors are proposing to lay a new cable along the east coast of Africa (called EASSy), half the governments that were asked for help to make this legally possible have decided that it really should be their own little socialist tea party.

Duncan McLeod, the Financial Mail’s point man on everything telecoms and technology, has an excellent column on this latest interventionist disaster. It shows, as if more proof was needed, that the root of all evil is unnecessary government intervention. Perhaps governments should focus on things they can do, such as combating corruption, fighting crime and lowering the trade barriers that have ensured that Africa remains largely unmolested by the last few decade’s rising prosperity and decreasing poverty worldwide.