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INTERVIEW: NANJING'S SUICIDE STRONGMAN

“The Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge is five kilometers long. It takes 20 minutes to cross on my scooter, and when I reach one end I turn back to cross again. I have a lot of experience spotting them. They always walk very slowly. A sick bird doesn’t sing, and a suicidal person behaves differently from a normal person. People who want to jump have glazed eyes, looking at nothing.

“There are two kinds of people: the forceful and the tender. If the suicider is a forceful person, I have to be tender with them and talk gently; if they are a weak person, I use force. Tender people don’t resist when I grab them. Just like a baby girl walking into danger – you can simply scoop them up from behind. The moment when I grab them used to scare me, but I am an expert now. I know I can’t be knocked off the bridge by someone suicidal. Depressed people are very passive – they’re not interested in harming anyone. I just grab them and hold on. At worst, someone might bite your thumb, but not break it.

“Every time I save someone, I bring them to an apartment in Nanjing I rent especially. There are two bedrooms (one for men, one for women), each with two beds. The first three days, I take time off from my job renting trucks and stay with them all the time. They have to follow a strict program. Before breakfast, they have to copy out five times with a large calligraphy brush, ‘Think about it! Death isn’t worth it.’ Then we go fishing, have lunch, take a nap, and do more calligraphy, but with a pen this time, copying out, ‘In the world, it doesn’t matter if people don’t like you. But you cannot dislike yourself.’

“After that I ask them to draw freely, and I look at their art and tell them what I see. In response they tell me about themselves and their problems. After three days, I hand them over to an American psychology professor from the University of Nanjing. Three months later, the people leave the apartment.

“Most people I rescue are in their twenties, but only about one in five are mentally ill. Young Chinese people attempt suicide because they are products of the one-child policy: as only children, they have been spoiled, but they also carry a whole family’s expectations. A third try to jump after a bad break-up, around 40 percent have social pressures, like not being accepted into university, and the rest have lost face because they wanted to marry but their fiancé’s family denied approval.

“I started coming to the bridge in 2003, when I heard about the suicides on TV. I had had a terrible time when I arrived here from the countryside. I had been working as a laborer, but my boss kept saying he would pay me later, and after one year he left town with all the money. I know how bad life can be. In a way, when I save people, I feel like I am saving myself.

“My work is sad, but there are happy moments. Every Christmas, I invite everyone I’ve saved to my favorite restaurant and we have a big meal together. When I feel troubled, I spend the night in a Buddhist monastery and listen to the chanting before I fall asleep. I’ve saved 228 people, but thousands still die. I don’t feel proud. I’m not big; I am small. I am like a pinky finger, not a thumb.”

— Interview with Chen Si, 43, Nanjing, China

GET TO THE ROOTS OF YOUR PROBLEMS [WITH DIY ANTIDEPRESSANTS]

“I was like a bulldozer,” says Marianna Lot. “I had a problem with everyone. I wouldn’t even speak. Tablets didn’t help, but once on kougoed I forgot about pills. Five minutes brewing in tea or one minute chewing in the mouth. Straight away you sit still for five or eight minutes without moving. You feel like your body is going to sleep. Then you feel like a person.”

Marianna’s transformation is just one of many cures which the Nama, Khoi, and San people of Paulshoek, South Africa, attribute to kougoed, a local wildflower. Jacobus Claassen, a 63-year-old farmer, remembers his father saying it made teeth strong, and his grandfather putting it in honeybee beer to get more drunk. It’s used by men who’ve eaten bad meat, pregnant women with morning sickness, and mourners seeking to ease the pain of bereavement. Hendrik Brandt, a caretaker, makes it into a tea to sooth stomach and headaches. Jacobus Brandt, 51, recalls how, to calm his child, he would wrap “kougoed in a piece of cloth, dip it into breast milk, then squeeze four drops into a tea spoon for the baby.”

“I was looking for a new high,” says Alan Sonnenberg, a botanist in Cape Town. “We prepared kougoed by sweating it in a bag underground and drying it in the sun. Then we milled it into a fine powder, snuffed it and counted the seconds until we got high. It’s like a line of coke, but doesn’t last as long.”

Better known by its other Afrikaans name, kanna, kougoed grows everywhere – beneath bushes, in backyards, on scrubland. Drying it out takes time, so a local healer, Jab Jab, sells two weeks’ worth for 100 rand (US$13). This may sound cheap, but Jab Jab has raised his prices 2,000 percent in the past two years. Although more than half of Paulshoek’s inhabitants are unemployed, few ever considered cultivating kougoed. Now they no longer can. Since 2010, when the South African government granted exclusive commercial rights to HGH Pharmaceutical, anyone who wants to pick kougoed has to have a license. In 2012, HGH’s new kanna extract, Zembrin, will go on sale internationally as an antidepressant dietary supplement.

Sonnenberg has known of kanna’s antidepressant potential for a while: “I’ve been taking it everyday for the last 10 years. It’s a proven natural serotonin uptake inhibitor.” Serotonin carries out many functions in the body, but many believe it plays a crucial role in contentment; selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) work by slowing serotonin’s progress through the brain so that good feelings last longer. The world’s favorite SSRI is Prozac: US$1.2 billion worth of it is consumed each year.

The problem is, SSRIs don’t seem to work. A 2010 University of Pennsylvania survey found that the difference in effect between placebos and SSRIs is “minimal or nonexistent,” and for most of the one in ten Americans who take it, Prozac’s green-and-white capsules might as well be empty. That’s not to say that placebos aren’t valuable. In a 2010 survey of 3,000 people at Harvard Medical School, USA, taking a placebo proved a much better cure for depression than doing nothing at all, and raising the price of a sugar pill labeled “antidepressant” may make it more effective still: a MIT study found that volunteers given an “expensive” placebo painkiller felt less pain than those told their placebo pills were cheap.

Back in Paulshoek, 73-year-old Johanna Jass may be part of the last generation to take wild kougoed, which the San tribe have been using for at least 400 years. Regardless, she is unperturbed by the fuss around the flower, and clear on what this latest antidepressant is good for: “When I don’t get out of bed with the right feet on me, kougoed helps.”

GET AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION

You’re probably sitting as you read this, and it’s killing you. The moment you sat down, your body stopped cleaning fat from the blood in your legs, and the electrical activity in the muscles below your waist went dead silent. Sitting for more than six hours per day doubles your risk of depression and makes you 30 percent more likely to die in the next decade. But a daily 15-minute stroll can add three years to your life, and 16 weeks of regular exercise will cure depression in 60% of sufferers. If you don’t want to end up on Prozac, stand up.

At midnight, a small ball rolls from the shadows and stops on a canyon path. Flaming torches soon emerge, illuminating a dozen running men wearing cowboy hats. They scuffle until one finds the ball in the dust, then kicks it down the canyon slope. Everyone surges after it into the dark, shouting.

Welcome to the 37th hour of a rarajipari, a traditional race of Mexico’s indigenous Tarahumara people. The running men have up to 11 more hours to go, kicking and chasing their ball along the gorges of the Barranca del Cobre. Spectators bet their own clothes on who will make it all the way to the finish line. “No one knows in advance when the race will be, who will show up, how deep a crevice a ricocheting ball may need to be retrieved from in mid-race, or who will take a midnight tumble and gash his head,” recounts Tarahumara racer Silvino in the book Going Long.

But then any event planned over drinks is bound to be a little messy. Traditional tesguino beer doesn’t keep, so when someone brews a vat, he invites friends and neighbors to a block party that only stops when there’s nothing left – sometimes days later. Etiquette requires drinking as much as possible, creating an anarchic alternate reality where the famously shy Tarahumara feel bold enough to issue race challenges.

Despite the frequent tesguinadas (anthropologist John Kennedy estimates that Tarahumara spend 100 days of the year drunk or hungover), the Tarahumara are superb athletes. Children start training for races at the age of two, and Victoriano Churro was 52 when he upset the field of the 1993 Leadville 100, a 160-kilometer ultramarathon in Colorado, USA, by finishing one hour ahead of the first non-Tarahumara. By some standards, the Tarahumara appear superhuman: a 1965 study found that rarajipari runners expend considerably more than the 10,000 kilocalories of energy a day commonly quoted as the upper limit of human effort – equivalent to burning off the energy from 72 cans of Coca Cola and still needing more. But their prowess is hard won; in 1981, anthropologists from the University of Padua observed blood in the urine of one in six Tarahumara men, and linked it to the notorious “kickball race.”

If running makes you pee blood, why not find another hobby? “Because they love it,” explains Will Harlan, a regular participant in the Tarahumara’s annual Copper Canyon Ultra race through the Barranca del Cobre. They love the “intoxicating experience of gliding across the warm earth.” Other distance runners feel it, too: Japanese Buddhist “marathon monks” believe they can reach living enlightenment by racking up 80 kilometers a day for seven years. So too, it seems, do participants in New York’s annual Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race, during which participants run 5,649 laps around a single city block in Queens. Harlan himself describes running the Copper Canyon Ultra as an out-of-body experience: “I wasn’t running… My legs seemed to spin beneath me without any interference from my conscious will.”

These raptures are no exaggeration. A 2004 experiment at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, found that just 50 minutes of hard exercise dramatically increase anandamide concentrations in blood. Anandamide is an endocannabinoid – literally, your body’s natural cannabis – and, says the study, it turns simple runs into “intense psychological experiences.” At the same time, a range of other homemade intoxicants charge through a runner’s body: endorphins block pain, norepinephrine speeds the heart, and dopamine sharpens desire.

And it’s the dopamine that keeps the Tarahumara running, regardless of the cost. It controls the body’s reward system, reminding runners of the chemical delights that await their brains on the next big race. According to Australian doctors who tested participants at the 1989 Sydney-Melbourne Ultramarathon, ultramarathoners have much more dopamine than anyone else, even when they’re resting, and these high levels of dopamine, combined with a blissful cocktail of neurotransmitters, have lead researchers to argue that the Tarahumara don’t just love running – they’re physically addicted to it. Seen that way, scrambling after a ball in the dark makes a lot more sense.

DIVE INTO A WHOLE NEW STATE OF MIND

The cold punches the breath out of you. Your heart slows – an automatic response to drowning. Your skin burns, crawls with a million vestigial body hairs springing to attention, then turns numb. Your bones ache. By the time you surface, you’re already screaming. But scrambling back onto the ice, you feel electric, giddy. The sub-zero wind is balmy.

That’s the 20-second sensation that seduces members of winter-swimming club Rastilan Talviuimaritry, who regularly dip into Helsinki’s frozen harbor, sometimes during lunch breaks, sometimes naked. Rastilan is not a strange splinter group; avantouinti – ice swimming – is a national tradition in Finland, and some 120,000 Finns are members of an avantouinti club. Such mass appeal is hard to fathom, and becomes only a little clearer when one enthusiast tries to explain it: “We don’t have sun – we need to be ready for the dark.”

During Finnish winters, the sun can disappear for 51 days, leaving one in eight Finns (about 650,000 people) suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) – depression that avantouinti is said to relieve. But SAD is just the beginning – avantouinti is touted as a cure for everything from rheumatism to tuberculosis, and regular ice-swimming improves mood and memory, while decreasing tension, fatigue, and the symptoms of asthma.

When cold-shocked, the human body releases a whole suite of chemicals, including norepinephrine, the same neurotransmitter that gives you a kick out of playing violent computer games or taking amphetamines. Norepinephrine is the little buzz you get every time you tick an item off a to-do list, and cold water will give you a blast of it: norepinephrine levels rise 200 percent after just two minutes of cold dunking. And you never get used to the rush of winter-swimming, either. A 2008 study in the Scandinavian Journal of Clinical and Laboratory Investigation reported that cold-stimulated norepinephrine levels were “remarkably similar between exposures,” consistently rising 200 percent every time subjects took a dip through the ice.

Simply refrigerating depressed people may also work. In 2003 and 2007, Polish researcher Joanna Rymaszewska led successful experiments in “whole-body cryotherapy” for the depressed: for a few minutes at a time, recruits from the local mental hospital walked around a room chilled to between -110 and -160ºC, wearing only swimsuits, headbands, woolen socks and clogs, feeling great.

For some people, all this science just confirms something they know instinctively. From the Spartans of Ancient Greece to Finns in the first century, all the way to New York’s “Polar Bears” jumping into the sea off Coney Island every New Year’s Day and the citizens of Harbin, China, who cut rectangular pools into the frozen Songhua River, wherever there is ice, there have been people jumping through holes in it.

In 1857, a patient being treated by hydrotherapy pioneer Vincent Priessnitz in Germany described feeling “so cold that we could not speak plainly,” followed by “a sensation of absolute physical pleasure... I began to think that, after all, water was my element, and that it was quite a mistake that I was not furnished... with a convenient long tail for sculling, like a tadpole.” Mariia Yrjö-Koskinen, president of the International Winter Swimming Association, puts it more plainly: “It’s like getting high, in a very healthy way.”

USING YOUR SURROUNDINGS

Nuclear power could solve all your energy problems, but it comes at a price. Every country that developed nuclear weapons in the last 30 years began with a “peaceful” nuclear program, and every day in the USA, a source of lethally radioactive isotopes is lost, stolen or abandoned – potential material for “dirty” bombs designed to contaminate targets with radiation. Meanwhile, the irradiated 3,000 square kilometers around the site of the 1986 reactor meltdown in Chernobyl, Ukraine, will still be uninhabitable in 20,000 years time.

Your safest alternative should be renewables – human error can’t make the sun melt down and if a windmill falls into the wrong hands, well, fine. The energy from just 0.3 percent of the Saharan sun could power the whole of Europe, reports the European Commission’s Institute for Energy. Sadly, available technology isn’t up to it yet: a project already underway will, when it’s finished in 2050, only be capable of supplying a sixth of Europe’s energy needs.

“Use your surroundings,” says Siddappa, an illiterate 65-year-old farmer-turned-inventor from Karnataka, India. He used to charge his mobile phone† with a windmill generator, but has upgraded to a water wheel. “It produces more power than the windmill,” he says. “Now, my and my brother’s families are using electricity for TV, radio, recharging our mobile phone and having lights.”

But only for three months of the year; the other nine, Siddappa’s brightly colored water wheel stands still. Droughts dry out the stream it stands over, and are set to become 30 percent more frequent in Karnataka by 2030. Harnessing the climate is great, until the climate changes.

LIVING OFF THE SAND

Desertification threatens 38 percent of the world’s surface. Last year, fields in western France were baked into barren waves of clay; with no grass growing, soldiers were deployed to feed hungry cattle. The spring of 2011 was one of northern Europe’s driest on record, for the third year running. But climate is just part of the problem.

Try diverting rivers onto arid land and you may just make things worse. Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea shrank to a tenth of its original size after its tributaries were diverted under Soviet plans to irrigate cotton, while hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers turned northern China’s grasslands into dust with a series of intensive-agriculture projects during the Great Leap Forward. The resulting dust storms in Gansu Province eventually buried the former Silk-Road oasis Minqin under piles of reddish grit.

Central-government authorities tried to fix the agricultural gaffe with an army of trees†, but you can’t plant just anything in a desert. Today more than 870 square kilometers of petrified trunks poke from the sand. Tending them has wasted villagers’ remaining supply of groundwater, already under strain: “I haven’t taken a bath for nearly 20 years,” says Minqin farmer Sheng Tangguo.

To bring water back, let the wilderness return. Deserts feed on cleared, overfarmed land and rows of monoculture. Minqin peasants have started to bury grids of dry straw instead of crops. These stabilize the ground, trap wild spores and permit native bush species to take root. But the change is fragile. Dig a few centimeters down and you’ll find the desert waiting.

FINDING DRY LAND

Pack a lifeboat for your next trip to Thailand, and if you forget one, improvise. Rising sea temperatures may already have doubled the intensity of tropical storms worldwide, and tsunamis are predicted to become more frequent as the polar ice caps melt and redistribute weight on the Earth’s crust, triggering undersea earthquakes. In the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, nearly 230,000 people were swept away. On a 21st-century holiday, one sudden, giant wave may leave you out at sea.

When disaster strikes, paddle far. By 2057, there will be 900 million more people in South Asia, and, with the area’s crop yields expected to fall a third by 2100, they’ll be starving. Best not drift west, though. African countries are among the most vulnerable to climate change, and Europeans won’t want to go home, either†. A four degree Celsius rise in world temperatures would see coastal European cities battling rising seas, while inlanders suffer in extreme heat, similar to the 2003 heat wave that left 14,000 French people dead.

If you go East, avoid the Philippines, ranked the world’s most disaster-prone nation by Belgian researchers, and beware of the Americas, where millions of thirsty South and Central Americans will be on the move due to drought as early as the 2020s.

Instead, navigate north to the Bering Strait. Late-summer Arctic sea ice may have almost entirely disappeared by the end of the 21st century, so float right through to Greenland, which by 2060 may be a pleasant eight degrees Celsius warmer. Thanks to climate change, Greenland added two weeks to its growing season in 2007 compared to the 1970s, so settle down and start farming. Welcome to the new New World.

AUTOMATED COMPUTER ALGORITHMS NOW CARRY OUT 70% OF TRADES ON THE US STOCK MARKET.

In 1973, when mathematicians invented an algorithm that could model the financial market, investment traders refused to use it – punching a calculator’s buttons wasted time. Now algorithms control 70 percent of the US equity market, running on supercomputers that buy and sell millions of shares at nearly the speed of light. Automized trading has become a race measured in milliseconds: a new fiberoptic cable is being laid on the Atlantic seabed that will shave five milliseconds off the communication time between financial markets in London and New York. It takes a human 300 milliseconds just to blink.

At such speeds, programming mistakes are explosive. During the 2010 “Flash Crash,” an errant algorithm flooded the US stock market with US$4.1 billion worth of contracts. Within seconds, other algorithms magnified the error, distorting the entire market. Expensive stocks sold for pennies, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 9 percent: a loss of $1 trillion. Hours later, the market inexplicably rebounded. But when the system doesn’t autocorrect, humans can only try to contain the damage. In August 2012, an investment program at the US Knight Capital Group went rogue and was caught after 45 minutes. By then the firm had lost $440 million: $10 million a minute.

MORE THAN HALF OF THE COMMERCIAL OIL PAINTINGS PRODUCED EVERY YEAR ARE MADE IN THE TOWN OF DAFEN, CHINA.

In 1960, David Rockefeller paid US$8,500 for White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), a painting by Mark Rothko. In 2007, he put White Center up for auction at Sotheby’s, where it took only three minutes of bidding to sell for $72.84 million – the highest price ever paid for a post-war painting.

The market in modern and contemporary art is booming. From 2003 to 2007, it grew faster than the US subprime housing market, and even when the US real-estate bubble burst and the global economy collapsed in 2008, the art market kept on growing. Eleven of the 20 highest prices ever paid for art at auction have occurred since then.

Investors, dealers and speculators often buy art to “flip” it: paintings and sculptures are bought, then almost immediately resold for an easy profit. Even non-millionaires can join the boom by buying into one of 41 “art investment funds” worldwide or by investing as little as €10 ($13) in the Paris Art Exchange, since 2011 the world’s first stock exchange for art.

According to interviews with New York dealers carried out by art economist Don Thompson, the rules of art investing are simple: horizontal landscapes make more money than vertical ones; roosters sell better than chickens; pictures with flowers are worth more than pictures with fruit; spaniels outprice dachshunds; and human nudes are the most prized of all.

The day after Rothko’s White Center made history, Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) sold for US$71.72 million, the second highest price paid for a post-war painting. The same image, made using the same process (silkscreen printing an enlarged photograph), can be bought for about $50 on a street corner in Dafen, China, a town where the art-copying industry accounts for 60 percent of the world’s annual output of commercial oil paintings. One painting is a million times more valuable than the other, but few experts will tell you which is which. An error could cost a fortune in lawsuits, which is why Chinese auction houses are among those forbidden by law from claiming that the art they sell is genuine, and the Andy Warhol Foundation refuses to say whether any artwork is an authentic Warhol or not. The stakes are simply too high.

A SINGLE CAMEL CAN BE BOUGHT FOR US$260 AT BIRQASH MARKET, CAIRO

Camels may be the perfect product for export. Like oranges and bananas, they are thick-skinned, weather-resistant, heat-resistant, and long-lived. Even better, they can walk themselves to market.

Every year, more than 200,000 camels do just that, trekking from Sudanese pasturelands into Egypt along the Darb al-Arba’in: the 40 Days Road. They’ve been doing it since at least the 14th century, when medieval historian Ibn Khaldun first recorded merchant caravans 12,000-camels long. The animals walk for a month until they reach the Egyptian city of Aswan, where they are packed into trucks and driven to auction at Birqash camel market, 35 kilometers northwest of Cairo. An adult camel typically attracts bids of about LE11,000 (US$1,800), and buyers are given eight days to pay, during which time they will slaughter the camel, sell the meat, and return to Birqash with the cash.

In Egypt’s capital, camel meat retails for LE55 ($9) a kilogram, but many camels never make it as far as the butcher’s block. Passage across the Libyan Desert can be deadly; a 1946 survey described the route as “one mile wide marked with white camel bones.” Emaciated after the long trip, humps of fat nearly flat to their backs, a few camels topple lifeless from the truck-beds on arrival in Birqash. Today, in a country where one in five Egyptians do not have enough to eat, a single camel carcass could provide 200 kilograms of meat, but fallen animals are left to spoil under the flies and sun, instead.

Worldwide, 1.2 billion tonnes of edible food are thrown away every year. In the West, most food is wasted at home, withering uneaten in consumers’ refrigerators and cupboards, but in the developing world, food is lost well before it ever reaches a kitchen. Bad shipping and storage conditions mean that 40 percent of India’s fresh fruit and vegetables rot before they are sold, while in sub-Saharan Africa, an annual $4 billion-worth of grain is lost to rats and insects – enough to feed 48 million people for a year. Overall, developing nations lose one-third of the food they produce just taking it to market.

HOW TO TAKE A CAMEL TO CAIRO

The Khabir

Along the Darb al-Arba’in trade route, a camel caravan’s khabir (leader) must find oases to water his US$50,000 worth of livestock. He earns twice the pay of the other herders – roughly $600 a journey.

The cook

The youngest herder cooks for the others, following Sudanese tradition. Dinner is millet porridge with powdered okra and tomatoes, sweet tea and, once in a while, fresh camel meat.

The food

A lagging camel will only slow the caravan, so traders slaughter those that are too tired to continue. Mutter bismillah (“in the name of God”) and cut the long throat at its base.

The end

In Egypt, the camels will be loaded into trucks for the final journey to Birqash market. The khabir will go with them. The remaining four herders must find their own way home.

MELILLA’S PORTEADORAS CROSS THE BORDER BETWEEN SPAIN AND MOROCCO UP TO FIVE TIMES A DAY, CARRYING LOADS OF UP TO 90 KILOGRAMS.

“Give me the passports!” demands a middle-aged man. A dozen women comply. “Taking our passports ensures that his stuff arrives in Morocco,” explains Fatiha, 62. “He will return them later, when we need to cross the border with our packages.”

It is 7am at the customs gate of Melilla, a Spanish enclave on the coast of Morocco. Fatiha and hundreds of other Moroccan women – mostly widows and divorcées – have come across the border from Morocco to begin their day’s work as porters or porteadoras. Once released from the checkpoint, they will race to pick up their loads in Spain for delivery to Morocco. If Fatiha hurries, she may make as many as five trips in the next six hours, tottering under giant packages across the border and back again.

Travelers may only carry personal luggage from Spain into Morocco without incurring a customs duty. Fatiha’s “personal luggage” is full of someone else’s merchandise: bolts of delicate fabric for wedding dresses, bound for markets in the rest of Africa. Three hundred meters away, Moroccan trucks idle, waiting to be loaded with cheap Spanish exports. Fatiha is paid for every bundle of cloth delivered. “Yesterday, nobody wanted to take them,” says Said, a truck driver.

“The fabric weighs over 90 kilos and they were paying only €3 [US$4]. But today, [the men organizing the export] offered €4 [$5]. The bundles were all taken in 10 minutes.” Every year, more than €1.4 billion ($1.8 billion) worth of goods stagger into Morocco across the borders of Melilla and Ceuta, another Spanish territory on the Moroccan coast.

With each crossing, porteadoras lose a few dirhams to Moroccan border police. Around the world, policemen receive one-third of all bribes paid, according to anti-corruption organization Transparency International; back in 2002, border officials at Ceuta and Melilla were estimated to have been taking as much as €90 million ($116 million) in bribes every year, according to Moroccan newspaper Al-Ayam. In order to keep porteadoras’ bribes coming, border police invent paperwork problems, send women to the back of the line, or simply beat them.

Melilla’s border closes at noon, so porteadoras are desperate to be quick. A missed crossing can cost a quarter of a day’s wages. During an early morning rush into Melilla in 2008, porteadora Safia Azizi fell and was promptly trampled to death. “They just didn’t stop,” recounts a former porter. “Hundreds of men and women laden with huge bundles ran right over her.”

UK JOURNALISTS ARE NOW ASKED TO WRITE THREE TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY DID 20 YEARS AGO, IN THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME.

In 2008, researchers at the Cardiff School of Journalism, UK, discovered that 60 percent of the articles in British newspapers the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Independent had been copied from wire reports and press announcements issued by various corporations, businesses and universities. Three out of four such stories had also gone to print without being fact-checked, a trend that seems widespread: in 2012, an audit sponsored by the European Observatory of Journalism found factual errors in approximately half of all news stories published in Switzerland, Italy and the United States, where only one in four Americans say they trust their newspapers.

The newspaper industry in the United States has shrunk by nearly half since 2000 and, in the past five years, 35,000 American newspaper employees have lost their jobs. They aren’t the only ones: UK-based news corporation Guardian News and Media has fired more than 300 employees over the past three years and, last October, workers at Israeli daily Ha’aretz went on strike because 100 posts were to be cut. But in some places, journalists may find a richer future: across Africa, for example, newspaper circulation rose by more than 30 percent between 2004 and 2009, while the Times of India now boasts the highest circulation of any English-language newspaper in the world.

According to an internal memo, in 2005, BBC News Interactive journalists were expected to write a one-line ticker of breaking news, compose a four-paragraph article, and fact-check everything in five minutes. In 2008, the Columbia Journalism Review reported that some writers at US-based Bloomberg News were afraid to stop typing for more than 15 minutes, for fear of a rumored electronic monitoring system. But the rush to file a story can lead you straight into fiction: when US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in January 2011, national news networks NPR, Fox, CBS and CNN all pronounced her dead within the hour. But she survived, and so did the reputation of wire agency Associated Press, which tweeted: “Let the record show that @AP did not report that Rep. #Giffords was slain. Thanks.”

THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER USED TO HAVE FOREIGN BUREAUS IN BEIJING, DELHI, TEL AVIV, ROME AND LONDON. TODAY IT HAS NONE.

“It’s been a gradual attrition over time. When I came here, there were 600 people in the newsroom. The Inquirer’s old owners were making loads of money, but they weren’t happy with the profit margin. They wanted to have a 15-percent margin or an 18-percent margin. The most expensive thing for a newspaper is people; we have 200 now.

“If you have fewer people, you’re going to have fewer scoops. Newspaper reporters here are under pressure to produce more than they did before. It’s expected that you have a story a day, if not three or four per week. We have to fill a paper. Unless you’re at a big paper like the New York Times, you depend on wire copy. A lot of companies and police departments release their announcements on Facebook, too. You write a story off their Facebook press release. I had to have my inbox expanded to four times the average allowable limit because we got so many press releases.

“I still think we put out a damn good newspaper. But the new owners say they’re losing money and they want to make more cuts – either in pay or in staff. So people are being invited to sign up for a 20-percent pay cut. They say that if they can’t come to an agreement with all the unions by this Friday, they’re going to liquidate.”

Joseph Gambardello, Breaking News Desk editor, Inquirer.com

NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY HOW MANY CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN KILLED BY DRONES IN WAZIRISTAN, PAKISTAN.

In 2011, US security analysts received 327,384 hours of video transmission from drones, enough to watch nonstop for 37 years. It’s called “pattern of life” surveillance, meant to reveal suspicious behavior in the United States’ areas of interest. In Waziristan, a region in northwest Pakistan, three or four US drones now buzz overhead day and night.

The robotic voyeurs come armed: drone-launched Hellfire missiles have blasted more than 300 Waziristani homes, mosques and streets in a “covert” CIA-run war against Islamic militants since 2004. Yet despite constant video surveillance, facts about the war’s effect on local patterns of life are hard to find; drone footage is classified, and foreign journalists are barred from the region by the Pakistani government. No one knows how many civilians have died.

In May 2012, an anonymous US “senior administration official” assured the New York Times that accidental casualties in Waziristan numbered only in the “single digits.” Noor Behram, of Mirin Shah, Waziristan, disagrees. Since 2007, he has tracked down and photographed more than 70 drone-strike sites. He digs out missile fragments, bloody ID cards, scraps of clothing. Many of his photos show the bodies of children, wrapped in bright funeral robes or covered in dust, lying next to the rubble of their homes. Noor has seen more than 600 bodies, and makes his own estimate: every extremist killed by a drone costs 15 civilian lives.

In Waziristan, the US administration counts all “military-age males” killed in a strike zone as “combatants” unless their bodies are identified and posthumously proven innocent. But after an attack, it’s hard to prove anything. “We can’t say that it is exactly four persons,” a local recounted to Stanford University researchers of one February 2012 strike. “It could be five or six as well because they were cut into pieces.”

ON NOVEMBER 14, 2012, ISRAEL DECLARED WAR ON GAZA BY TWEET.

When the Israeli Defense Forces (@IDFSpokesperson) tweet-announced its November 2012 “Pillar of Defense” assault, it added: “We recommend that no Hamas operative… show their faces above ground in the days ahead.” The military wing of Gaza’s Hamas government (@AlqassamBrigade) replied: “You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves.” As missiles crashed into Gaza and mortars fell on Israel, Twitter users around the world commented under their chosen hashtag of allegiance: #PillarofDefense versus #GazaUnderAttack.

AL QAEDA’S MEDIA PRODUCTION HOUSE RELEASES A NEW VIDEO EVERY THREE DAYS.

Fox News “falls into the abyss,” and CNN “seems to be in cooperation with the government.” But the American Broadcasting Channel, ABC, is “one of the best [news] channels, as far as we are concerned,” according to a 2011 memo discovered in Osama bin Laden’s safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Mixed up with notes on the ideal number of suicide bombers for a mission – two – and jotted worries about global warming, the internal Al Qaeda document is titled The Issue of Preparing for the Tenth Anniversary, and How It Will Be Marketed, and How to Exploit the Media in General.

Terrorists have always courted the press. In the 1950s, Algerian revolutionaries had “Directive Number Nine”: it is always better to kill one man where the American press hear of it than nine where no one will find out. In the 1980s, the leader of Northern Irish political party Sinn Féin described its relationship to its militant wing, the Irish Republican Army, as “armed struggle becomes armed propaganda.” And in the 1990s, Al Qaeda provided Qatari news network Al Jazeera with pre-recorded press releases.

But since 2001, Al Qaeda has become the press. It has launched an online news channel, two magazines (one, aimed at women, recommends skincare tricks like staying indoors with your face covered), and a prolific video production house called Al Sahab, “the cloud,” which creates feature-length documentaries and slick viral videos packed with speeches and explosions, designed for smartphones and iPods. By 2007, Al Sahab was releasing a new video online every three days, distributed through a growing network of jihadi web forums whose members added subtitles in every language and shared across social-media platforms.

“Nowadays, Al Qaeda is going local,” says Augusto Valeriani, associate fellow of the Arab Media Centre at the University of Westminster, London, UK. “Much of the Al Qaeda social-media effort has been focused on ‘inspiring’ potential followers, showing them that they can easily join the jihad even with small actions, even just sharing a video on Facebook or liking a post.” It’s a new era of terrorism recruitment, pioneered by the recently assassinated “Facebook Sheik” Anwar al-Awlaki, whose Facebook fans numbered in the thousands and whose YouTube videos were viewed more than 3.5 million times before being removed.

Terrorists’ interests rarely fall within the acceptable limits of netiquette. In January 2013, Al Shabaab (“the boys”), an Al Qaeda affiliate in Somalia, tweeted a video of two kidnapped Kenyans to its followers, and claimed that the hostages would be executed if Kenya’s government did not release all Muslim prisoners from its jails. Twitter simply suspended the group’s account, citing terms of use: “You may not publish or post direct, specific threats of violence against others.”

SOCIAL MEDIA LESSONS

In 2000, Serbian police apprehended a rogue oil barrel and hauled it away for having then-president Slobodan Milosevic’s face painted on its side. Bystanders laughed, and after watching the “arrest” on anti-government TV news channels, much of the country joined in. Later that year, more than 60 percent of Serbs voted Milosevic out of office.

For making their revolutionary spirit nationally infectious, the students who painted that barrel credit From Dictatorship to Democracy, a pragmatic guide to nonviolent revolution written by US professor Gene Sharp. First published 20 years ago, the booklet advocates public relations for the people: mockery, symbolic gestures and front-page-worthy acts of defiance. In Egypt, demonstrators used similar strategies during the 2011 overthrow of president Hosni Mubarak, arming themselves with humorous signs such as, “Please leave, my hand is hurting me” and “You must leave because I need to cut my hair,” while activists distributed pamphlets explaining how to protest peacefully: “After Friday prayer, fill the streets in orderly lines carrying flowers and roses.” Others organized a “Sunday of Martyrs” to publicly mourn those who had died during the demonstrations. Egyptian newspapers soon began repeating clever slogans, while film crews discovered fallen heroes from photos that activists carried. Another pamphlet found in Tahrir Square urged: “Draw police and military officers into the ranks of the people.” Once the Egyptian military refused to fire on protestors, Mubarak was finished. It only took 18 days.

Nearly a year after Egypt’s 2011 revolution, soldiers stripped and beat another protester in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Footage of “blue bra girl” went viral online and she became an icon for Egyptians critical of the ruling military junta. But Egyptians without Internet access or satellite television only receive state-controlled news, so media collective Mosireen projects this video onto an outdoor screen, where anyone can see.

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