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The specter of an uprising of reanimated corpses also poses a significant challenge to interpreters of international relations and the theories they use to understand the world. If the dead begin to rise from the grave and attack the living, what thinking would -- or should -- guide the human response?

For our purposes, a zombie is defined as a reanimated being occupying a human corpse, with a strong desire to eat human flesh

Because they can spread across borders and threaten states and civilizations, these zombies should command the attention of scholars and policymakers.

But the latest round of fighting appears to have given Israel the upper hand in a conflict that has already outlasted all expectations and is increasingly becoming a war of attrition.

Israel’s advantage has never looked more lopsided. In contrast to the earlier phase of the war, Israel this week deployed its extensive intelligence capabilities and overwhelming firepower in targeted bombings with limited civilian casualties less likely to raise the world’s ire.

“There’s a longstanding conventional wisdom that Israel doesn’t do well in wars of attrition,” said Michael B. Oren, an Israeli historian and a former ambassador to the United States. “That overlooks a broader historical view that Israel’s entire existence has been a war of attrition, and we’ve won that war.”

He sketched out three dominant approaches: realism, liberalism, and an updated form of idealism called "constructivism."

Realism focuses on the shifting distribution of power among states.

Liberalism highlights the rising number of democracies and the turbulence of democratic transitions.

System level analysis examines state behavior by looking at the international system. 

State level analysis examines the foreign policy behavior of states in terms of state characteristics.

Organizational level analysis examines the way in which organizations within a state function to influence foreign policy behavior. 

A senior European diplomat in Geneva involved in health issues, who was not authorized to speak publicly, lamented the limited international response. “The scale of the epidemic is what the international community is still not getting,” the diplomat said. “It’s becoming obvious that what you need is to scale up by a factor of 20. There’s not enough international coordination and imagination going into this.”

uba sent 165 doctors and nurses last week, China has expanded a medical team deployed there, and British personnel are scouting sites for at least five new centers and 700 additional beds that will bring the total closer to the World Health Organization’s target of about 1,300 beds.

United States delivers on a pledge to provide up to 17 100-bed units, said Dr. Ian Norton, who is coordinating foreign medical teams for the W.H.O. In Guinea, the W.H.O. says there are four treatment centers working with 160 beds available, with 100 more beds needed.

The Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS) created a ‘solidarity fund’ to contain and manage the outbreak, [17] and the World Health Organisation convened an emergency meeting of regional health ministers in Accra to strengthen surveillance operations and facilitate cross-border consultations. [18] The World Health Organisation also opened a Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordinating Center in Conakry. [19] Doctors Without Borders has deployed 300 personnel to assist in health care facilities, and both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the European Union have provided scientific personnel and resources to assist with laboratory testing and government coordination. [20]

The World Health Organisation fulfilled its coordinating mission by organising a meeting of regional health officials in Accra in early July—but that was three-and-a-half months after the first report of the disease. WHO’s Sub-Regional Outbreak Coordination Center has the potential to be a useful resource, but it took nearly four months from the outbreak’s beginning until WHO began such operations. Given how quickly Ebola spreads and its virulence, such a delay helped the disease gain a foothold in the region. Arresting the spread of infectious diseases requires quicker action.

First, the current response needs to be ratcheted up. Opening sub-regional command centers, deploying personnel from governmental and nongovernmental sources, and providing financial resources are all important—but they need to be done in greater number and with greater urgency. The initial efforts are not necessarily failures; they are just too small and slow in response to the overwhelming nature of this unprecedented outbreak.

The three months of increasingly intense fighting between pro-Kiev forces and eastern separatists have unleashed both sides' worst instincts and demonstrated their high tolerance for loss of civilian life.

These developments exclude any recovery of Ukrainian statehood, even in its dysfunctional post-Soviet form. The Ukrainian state, as it emerged after the Soviet dissolution, is finished.

One of the worst parts of the crisis is that the countries affected are being abandoned. Several airlines have cancelled flights, non-governmental agencies are calling their personnel home, and neighboring countries have closed their borders. Consequently, even those doctors and nurses recruited by foreign charities have difficulty accessing the countries.

The Ebola epidemic has overwhelmed its health professionals. With four million people, Liberia has only 200 doctors and 1,500 nurses, most of whom are in and around the capital of Monrovia.

As with most emergencies in developing countries, it is their health professionals that provide most of the care to their citizens. They are in a better position than the brave volunteers from foreign charities to manage a crisis, since they know the country’s customs, language, and are there for the long haul. However, one of the major problems faced by poor countries is the inadequate number of trained health workers.

The ball was set rolling by Ryan Crocker, the whiz diplomat who made his reputation as the US ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan. In an article for the New York Times, he argued that it was “time to consider a future for Syria without Assad’s ouster." His reason? “It is overwhelmingly likely that is what the future will be.” His circular logic found few takers, though notable among them was former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden.

Crudely defined, the US has no interests at stake in Syria, and the Obama administration was never enthusiastic about overthrowing Assad.

According to the Daily Beast, the administration is already debating whether to embrace Assad as an ally in a war against terror.

On the surface at least, it's very simple: the conflict is over who gets what land and how it is controlled. In execution, though, that gets into a lot of really thorny issues, like: Where are the borders? Can Palestinian refugees return to their former homes in present-day Israel?

Israeli forces have occupied and controlled the West Bank ever since. It withdrew its occupying troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but maintains a full blockade of the territory, which has turned Gaza into what human rights organizations sometimes call an "open-air prison" and has pushed the unemployment rate up to 40 percent.

Settlers are Israelis who move into the West Bank.

“These crises hammer home the full cost of the international community’s failure to prevent conflict,” Pillay said. “None of these crises erupted without warning.”

Pillay said Syria’s conflict “is metastasing outwards in an uncontrollable process whose eventual limits we cannot predict”. She also cited conflicts in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Congo, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza.

The resolution acknowledged that the United Nations has not always used the tools in its charter for preventing conflict. It prescribed several steps for improvement, focusing on addressing human rights violations earlier and recognizing that such abuses are often warning signs of looming conflicts.

While many have emphasized the enormous assistance hauled into the region by the United States and international organizations, there is strong evidence, especially here in Monrovia, that the biggest change came from the precautions taken by residents themselves.“Fundamentally, this is about the extent to whi

Reeling from the explosion of infections in August, volunteer Ebola watchdog groups sprang up in many neighborhoods, typically overseen by local elders and led by educated youths, drawing from a long history of community organizing to survive war, poverty and government neglect.

“Heroes emerged in every community,” said Dr. Mosoka Fallah, a Harvard-trained Liberian epidemiologist who often acted as a liaison between neighborhoods and the government. “The volunteer task forces may be the biggest reason behind the drop in October.”

The U.S. government is sending flimsy plastic aprons and gauze masks to the Africans with assurances that the donning and removal processes are where the majority of the risk to caregivers is realized. This is simply not true. As is evident by the precautions currently being taken in the U.S. and other developed countries, multiple layers of protection are employed by health workers, and cadavers are treated as highly infectious.

President Obama has sent nearly 5,000 members of the U.S. military to West Africa to assist in trying to stop the spread of the disease for a very good reason — the problem is quickly spinning out of control, and has the potential to become a serious national security concern.

Since 2010, the Department of Defense has partnered with Tekmira Pharmaceuticals to develop a vaccine for Ebola. Tekmira was given ‘fast track’ authority to develop a vaccine earlier this year.

Kennedy was the first of five American airports to introduce Ebola screening protocols, and the new measures were the latest indication of the risk that the disease presented.

Beginning next week, Washington Dulles, Newark Liberty, Chicago O’Hare and Atlanta international airports will employ the same screenings as those put in place at J.F.K.

Since at least the 14th century, when the bubonic plague devastated Europe, posting medical officers at a port of entry has been one of the main tools used to try to halt the spread of disease.An outbreak of yellow fever in 1878 led the United States Congress to grant the federal government the authority to order a quarantine to prevent its spread.

The main Kurdish political party in Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and its armed wing, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), say they are obvious allies for Western states as the only force with a proven track record of combating ISIS there. The Kurds are dismissive of the moderate Syrian opposition that has been backed by the West but outgunned by Islamist groups.

Since ISIS overran the Iraqi city of Mosul in June, the PYD has been offered a chance to address both issues in a flurry of contacts with foreign officials, including some from “major powers,” said Khaled Eissa, the PYD’s representative in France. He declined to identify the countries involved, citing diplomatic protocol.

Part of the White House’s plan is to enhance support for moderate Sunni Arab groups, who are fighting against both Assad and ISIS.

The effort has been messy, inefficient and expensive, often lagging the epidemic’s twists in tragic ways.

Despite difficulty filling positions, the W.H.O. now reports that it has more than 700 people working at 77 field sites, the largest emergency response in its history.

Charities with no background treating Ebola patients began running hospitals specialized for Ebola care, some of which were built by militaries and others staffed by hundreds of personnel from China and Cuba who were also facing Ebola for the first time and trying to overcome language challenges.

The Palestinians are divided between the secular Fatah movement which controls the West Bank, and the Islamist Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Growing Israeli disillusionment over the prospects for a peace agreement with the Palestinians and the wider Arab world promises more Jewish settlements on occupied territories and constant confrontation with Hamas.

Regional instability threatens to disrupt the relatively favorable geopolitical balance Israel has enjoyed in recent years. Egypt and Jordan are the only Arab countries that recognize the State of Israel, and Israel’s long-time ally in Egypt, former president Hosni Mubarak, has already been swept away and replaced with an Islamist government.

It says a great deal that Hamas’s former Arab backers, which historically have included Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, long ago abandoned the terrorist group. Only a few nations still stand by Hamas. Among the most prominent is the tiny Persian Gulf emirate Qatar.

In recent years, the sheikhs of Doha, Qatar’s capital, have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza. Every one of Hamas’s tunnels and rockets might as well have had a sign that read “Made possible through a kind donation from the emir of Qatar.”

Qatar’s proxies of choice have been radical regimes and extremist groups.

The spread of Ebola virus occurs because health infrastructure in the region is fragmented, under-resourced, or non-existent. And the therapeutic response to the illness is constrained by failure of markets to drive drug and vaccine development that would help the world’s

But drugs and a vaccine are being sent to the region, after a ruling from an ethics panel convened by the World Health Organization decided their use was acceptable even though they haven’t been definitively shown to be safe or effective.

Think about it this way: if Ebola virus outbreaks had occurred in New York, London, or Sydney, effective therapies surely would have been developed long ago.

But it is only now, four or six months later, that the great machine of the so-called "international community", the United Nations, is lumbering into action.

Imagine trying to set up and run a medium sized multinational company. But then imagine trying to set it up in countries with very bad roads and electricity supply, dodgy telecommunications and mostly badly-educated populations

To establish your "multinational company" you have to do some mundane tasks. You have to bring in people from all over the world. Then you have to feed and house them. You have to get them cars and desks and telephones. You have to make sure each bit of the machine knows what the other bits are doing. And that's before your aid workers can move to the front line and actually do their job.