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NEWS OF THE WORLD
Associated Press
AFRICA
Google uses email via text
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
An unidentified man walks past a Google advertisement in Lagos, Nigeria. With all its cutting-edge technology, Google Inc. has reverted back to text messaging in its efforts to break into Nigeria's booming economy.
LAGOS, Nigeria — Despite all its cutting-edge technology, Google Inc. has turned to the humble text message to break into Nigeria's booming economy.
The search engine has started a service in Nigeria, as well as in Ghana and Kenya, which enables mobile phone users to access emails through text messaging.
access to electricity, let alone the Internet, and a $20 mobile phone is as close as many will ever come to owning a computer.
That comes as Google's office in Lagos has begun working with small business owners in this nation of more than 160 million people, bringing more than 25,000 businesses online over the past year.
Google's choice of using text messages to reach consumers highlights the challenges of doing business in Africa most populous nation. There is money to be made, but most people rarely have
"We don't want to just come in and start looking for how to generate profit," said Affiong Osuchukwu, Google's Nigeria marketing manager. "We consider (sub-Saharan Africa) to be an investment region. We know we have to invest resources and time to develop the market in order for the market to become valuable to us in a way that we can do business."
Google makes tens of billions of dollars a year from advertising, much of it coming from simple text ads that pop up next to its search results. But such ads are rarely relevant to Nigerians looking for goods and services in their neighborhoods. Only a fraction of business owners have websites,
Google Nigeria is trying to "develop the ecosystem" by making the Internet part of more people's lives, Osuchukwu said. Its most recent push came in July as the company began advertis-
and those that do rarely offer consumers many services online.
ing its text message email service, which allows users to receive their emails through Gmail for free as text messages. Users also can reply to the emails for only the cost of sending a text message. They also can access local classified ads hosted by Google.
More than half of the 44 million people who use the Internet in Nigeria access the web through smartphones, according to International Telecommunications Union, but that represents only a fraction of mobile phone users in Nigeria.
EUROPE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Journalist beaten in Belarus
Belarus plainclothes security officers detain opposition activist Paavel Vinogradov during a protest in Minsk on Tuesday. Sergei Grits says he was among eight journalists covering a protest.
I ASSOCIATED PRESS
explanation, Grits said.
"Such violence by police against a journalist peacefully going about his work is unacceptable and must be protested in the strongest possible terms," said John Daniszewski, AP's senior managing editor for international news.
Grits said one of the men grabbed him by the neck from behind, while another punched him in the eye, breaking his glasses and leaving a gash. They then pushed the journalists into a van without license plates and drove them to a police station, where they were held for two hours before being released without charges or
clothes security officers attacked them in downtown Minsk.
MINSK, Belarus (AP) — An Associated Press photographer was beaten and briefly detained Tuesday by plainclothes security officers in the Belarusian capital.
Sergei Grits was among eight journalists covering a protest by four opposition activists calling for a boycott of this weekend's parliamentary election when plain-
MIDDLE EAST
NATO to restrict forces
ASSOCIATED PRESS
KABUL, Afghanistan — NATO's decision to restrict operations with small Afghan forces to mitigate the threat of insider attacks means fewer boots on patrols and a shift in how the U.S.-led coalition will fight the war in Afghanistan.
It's unclear whether the coalition's exit strategy can succeed with less partnering with Afghan policemen and soldiers, who are slated to take over for foreign combat troops by the end of 2014, just 27 months from now.
What is clear is that the mantra that Afghans and coalition forces are fighting the Taliban "shoulder to shoulder" is looking more and more like they're standing at arm's length.
Earlier this year, the U.S. military stopped training about 1,000 members of the Afghan Local Police, a controversial network of village-defense units. U.S. commanders have assigned some troops to be "guardian angels" who watch over their comrades in interactions with Afghan forces and even as they sleep.
U. S. officials also recently ordered American troops to carry loaded weapons at all times in Afghanistan, even when they are on their bases.
Until now, coalition troops routinely conducted operations such as patrolling or manning outposts with small units of their Afghan counterparts.