The Foreign Service Journal, April 2013

14 April 2013 | the foreign Service journal actors in Africa; the weakening of the inter-American human rights and press freedom system; the looming media vacuum in Afghanistan; China’s rela- tionship with the foreign press; mobile security; self-censorship in Mexico; citizen journalists in Syria; censorship by extremists on stories of religion; cov- erage of oil in Africa; and the prospects for a global press freedom charter in a time of increasing challenges. —Steven Alan Honley, Editor You’ve Got Mail! T here has certainly been plenty of gloom and doom lately about the future of snail mail, beginning with Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe’s January announcement that the United States Postal Service will end Saturday home delivery in August. But there is also some good news : A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research f ound that USPS remains the most efficient national mail delivery system in the world. Alberto Chong, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes and Andrei Shleifer, NBER researchers, set out to analyze the factors that promote effi- cient government service. They sent let- ters to non-existent business addresses in 159 countries (10 per country) to determine which governments would be able to return all of the letters to the sender, and how long it would take to do so. Only around 60 percent of the letters were returned, and the average global return time was six months. But USPS not only returned all of the false-address mail, but did so almost three times faster than other industrialized states, includ- ing Canada, Norway and New Zealand. The NBER researchers attribute this efficiency to the USPS’ high-quality management and technology. For exam- ple, the effective utilization of a postal code database renders delivery more efficient and promotes the detection of errors. (The researchers also found that countries using the Latin alphabet had a higher rate of return.) As further confirmation , an Oxford Strategic Consulting assessment found that America has the best postal service among the 20 largest economies in the world. This high level of efficiency is especially impressive when one consid- ers that USPS handles around 40 percent of the world’s mail. —Jeff Richards, Editorial Intern Dennis Does the DPRK B asketball star Dennis Rodman has always been a colorful figure, but his recent visit to Pyongyang at the invitation of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un may represent a new high (or Launching the U.S. Diplomatic Center and Museum I n her March President’s Views column, Susan Johnson highlighted the Jan. 25 reception in the Benjamin Franklin Room that marked the official launch and start of the construction phase of th e United States Diplomacy Center, which will be located at the 21st Street entrance of the State Department. Outgoing Secretary of State Hill- ary RodhamClinton, joined by former Secretary of State James A. Baker, Deputy Secretary William Burns and Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley (the project’s chief fund- raiser), among other luminaries, attended. A video of the event i s now available for viewing. Secretary of State John Kerry has asked Ms. Bagley to continue her fund- raising efforts, which recently brought in a million-dollar pledge from General Electric. As of late February, the Foreign Affairs Museum Council was holding more than $13 million, and another $3.5 million for the project was in the State Department’s Gift Fund. The General Services Administration recently issued the invitation to bid on construction of the external pavilion. As President Johnson noted in her column, AFSA has long endeavored to explain to the American people, whom we have the privilege to represent over- seas, what diplomacy is and why they should support a premier, professional diplomatic service. The USDC will serve as an important vehicle for this effort, and deserves and needs our concrete support. We invite all AFSA members to visit www.afsa.org/usdc t o make a contribu- tion, and watch for regular updates on our campaign to make the U.S. Diplo- macy Center a reality. — Steven Alan Honley, Editor