And we might as well face it; a large fraction of Americans are content with tabloid-journalism. Some of us want more; so we go to places like Rantburg or roundups of Liberian news reports to find things that not even the BBC bothers to notice. (And the BBC, for all its biases, provides an order of magnitude more Africa news than my local newspaper.)

Does racism play a role in reporting? Maybe not, but the value of an overseas story does seem to correlate with the race of the participants. You can explain it in terms of connections instead or racism. Most of us have more connections to people and events in richer countries; so stories from those countries will get more audience bang for the buck (unless there's lots of blood involved).

But back to the story at hand: armies are proving to be very effective at spreading AIDS, whatever else they do. There are several kinds of armies, of course. I suspect gang rape is more common in the militias and fighting units, and stealing women to bring along for cooking and sex. The garrison troops seem more likely to use prostitutes and pick up a new woman for cooking and sex at each redeployment--less likely to go in for rape. I don't have hard numbers, but that's the impression I get from reports.