The Foreign Service Journal, February 2006

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 11 C YBERNOTES The pipeline to Kribi, on Camer- oon’s Atlantic coast, was inaugurated in July 2003. It is fed by some 300 new oil wells at Doba, and currently delivers 225,000 barrels a day, des- tined for Western countries. Accord- ing to the World Bank, as of the end of September 2005 Chad had received about $306 million in oil revenues, $27.4 million of which had been placed in reserve for the future ( http: / /allafrica.com/stories/printable/ 200512200736.html ). Government officials have accused the World Bank of using Chad’s peo- ple as guinea pigs to test different types of management. They insist that they want equitable development and peace in Chad, and need the funds to address immediate problems. But local watchdog groups and inter- national NGOs charge that the money will only be used to buy arms to shore up the foundering regime. Chad ranks 173th among the 177 poorest nations of the world, accord- ing to the 2005 U.N Development Index, and is tied with Bangladesh for the worst corruption rating in the most recent survey by Transparency International ( www.transparency. org ). Aside from financial woes, the country suffers internal conflict, army desertions, betrayals and the risk of civil war along the border with Sudan’s Darfur region. World Digital Library on the Drawing Board On Nov. 22 Library of Congress head James H. Billington announced that Google was the first company to embrace the LOC’s campaign to build a World Digital Library, an online col- lection of rare books, manuscripts, maps, posters, stamps and other materials from its own holdings and those of other national libraries that would be freely accessible on the Internet. Google contributed $3 mil- lion to the project ( http://www.loc. gov/today/pr/2005/05-250.html ). “We are aiming for a cooperative undertaking in which each culture can articulate its own cultural identity within a shared global undertaking,” Billington told the Washington Post Nov. 22. “This is the old dream of bet- ter international understanding. The dream is that this could make a con- tribution, particularly among young people brought up in the multimedia age.” The initiative is envisioned as a public-private partnership in collabo- ration with UNESCO. “To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone,” said Google president and co-founder Sergey Brin, who explain- ed that he and Billington had been discussing the effort for a year. Dur- ing the year, Google digitized some 5,000 books from the Library as part of a pilot project to refine techniques for making copies of fragile books without damaging them. Google will only digitize materials from the LOC that are in the public domain and therefore free of copy- right restrictions. This ensures that the project is not subject to the kind of legal action being pursued by a group of publishers and authors testing Google’s claim that its scanning of books from the collections of Stanford University, Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library is legal and in the public interest. The World Digital Library initia- tive is separate from the LOC’s already significant footprint on the Internet as the largest library in the world. Its Web site features catalogs of all holdings, periodic exhibitions of rare materials on different topics, a section devoted to “American Memory” and “Global Gateway,” a portal to world culture and resources ( www.loc.gov ). New Risks in Life Insurance According to testimony at the House Financial Services Committee in November, rejections based on travel to countries insurers consider risky is an increasingly common prac- tice in the insurance industry. It is a trend that Foreign Service families will want to keep an eye on. “Historically, life insurance was life insurance, no matter where you died,” J. Robert Hunter, director of insur- ance for the Consumer Federation of America ( www.consumerfed.org ), told the Washington Post on Nov. 20. But when Rep. Debbie Wasser- man-Schultz, D-Fla., a mother of three, decided to boost her life insur- ance coverage, and applied to the American General Life unit of American International Group, she was denied. On the application, she had checked a box indicating Israel was a place she might visit. “We are unable to approve the policy ... because of potential travel to Israel,”