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Blair Peterson

As Ebola Rages, Poor Planning Thwarts Efforts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But one piece is missing: staff. The facility opened recently with a skeleton crew. Now, in an especially hard-hit area where people are dying every day because they cannot get into an Ebola clinic, 60 of the 80 beds at the Kerry Town Ebola clinic are not being used.
  • It is like this with a lot here: good intentions, bad planning. Aid officials in Sierra Leone say poor coordination among aid groups, government mismanagement and some glaring inefficiencies are costing countless lives.
  • Even after patients recover, many treatment centers delay releasing them for more than a week until there are enough other survivors, sometimes dozens, to hold one huge goodbye ceremony for everyone — again, keeping desperately needed beds occupied. “I just wanted to get home and see my wife,” said Suliman Wafta, a recent Ebola survivor treated nearby. “But I had to wait eight extra days.
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  • “Why are the British here? To end Ebola, or party?” read a headline in a local newspaper. It added, “While their American counterparts are working hard to end Ebola in Liberia, our so-called colonial masters are busy living the life of Riley.”
  • Like others, the official kept citing the “Brits’ primacy” in Sierra Leone — a reference to how, several months ago, Western powers divided Ebola responsibilities in West Africa along historical lines, with the United States helping Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves in 1822; France helping a former colony, Guinea; and Britain helping its own former colony, Sierra Leone.
  • Many aid officials in Sierra Leone said they crave a more effective command structure. The government runs a national emergency center, but aid officials said that with scores of foreign experts, government delegations and private charities flocking here, coordination was still messy, with many gaps and overlaps. It is extremely difficult, they said, to get even the most basic information, including how many treatment centers exist.
  • There are also growing questions about corruption, with the government announcing recently that it had found 6,000 “ghost medical workers” on its payroll, even as real Ebola burial teams and front-line health officers say they have not been paid in weeks.
Blair Peterson

Syria's refugees: fears of abuse grow as Turkish men snap up wives | World news | The G... - 0 views

  • Aminah is one of an increasing number of Syrian refugees who opt to marry Turkish men. Women's rights groups are worried: "A lot of women agree to these marriages out of sheer desperation. All they think about is how to feed their family, how to make ends meet. These arrangements might seem like the only way out, and men exploit this," says one activist from Gaziantep, who wished to remain anonymous. "At the same time, local women feel helpless and anxious about their own families breaking apart. Women on both sides of the border become victims this way."
    • Blair Peterson
       
      Down below is says that 4000 Syrian women have married Turkish men. Are they all being taken advantage of?
  • Turkish authorities put the number of Syrian refugees in the country at nearly 1 million, a figure projected to rise by the end of the year to 1.4 million.
  • women and children constitute 75% of refugees in Turkey, with under-18s accounting for 50%. I
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  • Human trafficking and all problems associated with it – abuse, rape and exploitation – have increased since 2012,"
  • Turkish human rights groups warn that polygamy, outlawed in Turkey almost a century ago but still practised in conservative rural areas in south-eastern Anatolia, is on the rise. Second, third, or even fourth wives – called kuma in Turkish – lack legal protection and are especially vulnerable to abuse.
Blair Peterson

Right slams purported security cabinet decision to withdraw from Gaza Strip | JPost | I... - 3 views

  • They said the decision projects weakness to Hamas and its Islamist fundamentalist allies and sponsors led by Iran.
  • “The rest of the tentacles of Islamist fundamentalism are happy tonight,” Likud MK Moshe Feiglin said. “There is no doubt that the picture of the IDF ending its ground operation without defeating Hamas encourages our Islamist fundamentalist enemies. If you don’t annihilate Hamas, the next round will be against Iran, Hizbullah, ISIS, and the Islamists inside Israel.”
  • “Calling the goal merely neutralizing the tunnels is to fight the symptom, not the problem,” Feiglin said.
bobbycivita

BBC News - Libya gunmen attack Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli - 0 views

  • Libya gunmen attack Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli
  • Corinthia Hotel,
  • car bomb exploded near the premises
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  • popular with foreigners in Libya's capital, killing three guards
  • Tripoli's Corinthia Hotel
  • reception area.
  • car bomb also exploded outside the hotel.
  • not clear whether the gunmen are still inside the hotel, and whether any staff or guests are trapped there.
  • "I suddenly heard shots and saw people running towards me, and we all escaped from the back [of the hotel] through the underground garage. The hotel did a lockdown after that."
  • number of attackers is not clear.
  • between three and five.
  • one gunman had been arrested
  • two assailants were still inside the hotel.
  • received a threat "a few days ago" warning managers "to empty the building".
  • popular with foreign diplomats and government officials.
Blair Peterson

Mr. Putin Resumes His War in Ukraine - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Meanwhile, Ukraine is broke, and without the military means to move against the Russian-backed rebels. Most of the victims are civilians who struggle with hunger and dislocation in the rubble of the combat zones and die in the constant exchanges of shells and rockets.
  • resident Vladimir Putin has sharply cranked up his direct support for the rebels in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, while continuing to baldly deny it and to blame all the violence on the United States.
  • its allies will actively use their good offices with Kiev to seek a workable
Blair Peterson

BBC News - Ebola crisis: The economic impact - 0 views

  • He said President Ernest Bai Koroma revealed this staggering and depressing news to ministers at a special cabinet meeting. "The agricultural sector is the most impacted in terms of Ebola because the majority of the people of Sierra Leone - about 66% - are farmers," he said.
  • Rio Tinto, the world's third largest mining company, which owns a share in Simandou, has donated $100,000 to the World Health Organization's work in the area and is also making sanitation equipment available to local people there.
  • A smaller British company, London Mining, has moved out some its non-essential expatriate staff from Sierra Leone, where mining has accounted for much of the country's recent growth. According to the International Monetary Fund, Sierra Leone's output grew by 20% last year; excluding iron ore mining, it grew by 5.5%.
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  • Sierra Leone and Liberia have both emerged from horrific civil wars and managed to rebuild their economies.
Blair Peterson

WHO | Global health diplomacy: training across disciplines - 0 views

  • foreign policy is now being driven substantially by health to protect national security, free trade and economic advancement.
  • he United Kingdom is attempting to establish policy coherence with the development of a central governmental global health strategy based on health as a human right and global public good.
  • Switzerland has prioritized health in foreign policy by emphasizing policy coherence through mapping global health across all government sectors.3 Through the Departments of Interior (Public Health) and Foreign Affairs, an agreement on the objectives of international health policy was submitted to the Swiss Federal Council to assure coordinated development assistance, trade policies and national health policies that serve global health.
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  • Today, Brazilian diplomats serve key roles in health and other ministries to assure policy coherence across the government; they have also provided leadership in key multinational health negotiations such as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. The Global Health Security Initiative (GHSI) is an international partnership to strengthen health preparedness and response globally to biological, chemical, radio-nuclear and pandemic influenza threats.
  • he interface between trade and health is, in fact, on the cutting edge of health diplomacy. Health professionals need to understand this interaction to assure rational trade agreements, informed by health needs and supported through progressive foreign policy.6
  • It may not matter which takes preference, but it is clear that the growing concern for multilateral cooperation on critical global health problems requires purposeful engagement in learning across these two sectors. In addition, there is a need to include nongovernmental actors, philanthropy and the private sector in this exciting new field of study.
Blair Peterson

Dear America: Don't Panic About Ebola. Seriously. | TakePart - 0 views

  • Our strategy for eradicating smallpox in the first instance was mass vaccination—vaccinate everybody in the room. Well, that didn’t work.
  • We’re able to isolate in an almost perfect way once he enters into isolation, so we reduce the density of susceptibles down to zero. Either there’s nobody in the room with him, or people in the room are wearing space suits. If there are no suspeptibles around you, it doesn’t matter how bad the disease is once you’re in a room and there’s no one you can catch the disease from.
  • Why do we see it in Liberia and Guinea? Because these are the poorest countries in the world, and they are all post-conflict. Their public health systems and economies are in shambles, and in America, we don’t understand because for us, if you go to Canton, Ohio, California or New York, they’re all part of the United States.
Blair Peterson

Brazil's Foreign Policy Ambitions And Global Geopolitics - Analysis - Eurasia Review - 0 views

  • Brazil’s Foreign Policy Ambitions And Global Geopolitics – Analysis
  • Brazil has been unable to acquire the decisive status it has long desired due to its failure to complement diplomacy with a commanding lead in its military power.
  • To gain the military status it desires, Brazil must not only increase investments in an expanded domestic infrastructure, but also must decide to strengthen its military capabilities and improve its cooperation with the United States as well as with the European Union.
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  • “Brazil’s approach to its emerging role in world politics is very much based on the efficacy of multilateral institutional power,”
  • illustrating the country’s formidable diplomatic strength.[3]
  • Due to this mixture of diplomatic and economic moves, Brazil has become a champion of the developing world, and has been afforded a powerful, as well as a continuing voice in multilateral organizations.
  • Similarly, Brazil’s peacekeeping efforts have been for the most part impressive, but not entirely without controversy.
  • As Professor Amado Cervo at the National University of Brasília put it, “Brazilian diplomacy has not been successful in its attempt to join the exclusive club of political and military power, which remains firmly closed.”
  • First, its defense capacities will need to be increased.
Blair Peterson

Lockdown Begins in Sierra Leone to Battle Ebola - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The United States is planning to build as many as 17 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia, with about 1,700 treatment beds, while the United Nations is planning an expanded mission in the region, based in Accra, Ghana, according to Anthony Banbury, the United Nation’s Ebola operation crisis manager. It is intended to be more nimble than the United Nations’ notoriously bureaucratic operations, bringing in as many as 500 trucks and jeeps from other missions in Africa, possibly paying teams in one country to speed up safe burials, buying fuel for monitoring teams in another country, or offering helicopters to transport health workers where they are needed.
  • Whether Sierra Leone’s lockdown will constitute an effective response is open to question. Despite the mobilization, the volunteers hardly appeared to be thick on the ground. In some neighborhoods, residents said they were yet to see any of the green-vested young men and women who had volunteered.
Blair Peterson

As Iran Nuclear Deadline Looms, France Holding Out | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

  • To be sure, analysts doubt that France would risk an international crisis by pulling the plug on a long-awaited deal. But it has certainly positioned itself as the Western country pushing hardest to satisfy the concerns of Iran's regional antagonists, Israel and the Gulf Arab nations, which oppose a deal that leaves Tehran in possession of the nuclear infrastructure that could, in theory, allow it to build a bomb. (To do so, it would have to break out of an international agreement and circumvent the stringent monitoring regime currently in place.)
  • hey also want the U.N. Security Council to oversee Iran's nuclear program rather than the International Atomic Energy Agency, as is currently the case, and argue that sanctions should be repealed only gradually once Western powers are satisfied by Iran's compliance.
Blair Peterson

Hezbollah in Syria | Institute for the Study of War - 0 views

  • This paper details Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria from the beginning of the conflict to the present. Much of the focus is on 2013, when Hezbollah publicly acknowledge its presence in Syria and deepened its commitment on the ground. The first part of the paper explores the relationship between Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria and Hezbollah’s rationale for its involvement in Syria.
saniyajoshi

U.S. Drone Kills 3 Qaeda Operatives in Yemen, Continuing Policy on Strikes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • since the resignation of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi
    • saniyajoshi
       
      the president resigned after Houthi rebels stormed his residence and clashed with government forces in recent days 
  • counterterrorism operations there despite the apparent takeover by Houthi fighters.
  • American counterterrorism efforts had not abated.
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  • The turmoil in Yemen comes at a particularly fraught time, just two weeks after A.Q.A.P. claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks in Paris
    • saniyajoshi
       
      This terrorist group was part of the Charlie Hedbo attacks
  • the current political standoff could lead to the partition of Yemen
    • saniyajoshi
       
      partition of Yemen could take place due to the current political turmoil 
Blair Peterson

allAfrica.com: Liberia: Ebola Private Sector Mobilization Group Formed to Fight Ebola - 4 views

  • s such our platform is comprised of the following: 1. To remain in the region and be apart of the nation’s long-term economic and social recovery and development. 2. To ensure employees, families and communities are aware of the disease and are taking the best precautions to avoid infection and stigma. 3. To share experiences and resources, including trained personnel and practices, to assist governments and partners to mobilize quickly to control the spread of the disease. 4. To offer loan or gift-appropriate assets and resources essential to the deployment of an integrated response by donors, militaries, host governments, NGOs and community-based organizations. 5. To make available information about needs of various organizations and first responders, so that they may be connected with corporate giving. 6. To commit to learning from this outbreak and working together to support a strong healthcare system in the affected counties. 7. To raise international awareness and advocate for a larger global coordinated effort to combat Ebola. 8. To advocate for open trade and humanitarian corridors by air, land and sea.
  • · African Mining Services · Kinkross · Alcoa · KRL International · ArcelorMittal · London Mining · Aureus Mining · MonuRent · BHP Billiton · Newcrest Mining · Chevron · Newmont · Dawnus · Pricewater-House Coopers · Diago · Putu Iron Ore · Equatarial Palm Oil · Rangold · Firestone · Rio Pinto · Golden Veroleum · Semato · Heineken · Shell · Hummingbird Resources · Tawana Resources · IAMGOLD Corporation · Teranga Gold · International Finance Corp · Western Cluster
Blair Peterson

Projects : Ebola Emergency Response Project | The World Bank - 1 views

  • The first component, support to the EVD outbreak response plans and strengthening essential health services will contribute to finance critical gaps in ongoing emergency response efforts funded by governments and development partners in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
  • he second component, human resources scale up for outbreak response and essential health services will supplement the efforts of governments and other partners to motivate and reward health workers in the affected countries to work on the EVD emergency response and provide other essential health services.
  • The third component, provision of food and basic supplies to quarantined populations and EVD affected household's aims to improve access to food and other basic supplies for the EVD affected households in the quarantined areas and other hot zones in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. 
Blair Peterson

Review - Brazilian Foreign Policy in Changing Times - 0 views

  • This quest for influence, prestige and power—not for autonomy as such—has constituted the guiding principle of Brazilian foreign policy for many decades, since long before the time period investigated by Vigevani and Cepaluni. It provides a constant goal and explains the broadest gamut of foreign policy initiatives, ranging from the efforts at territorial aggrandizement under the Baron of Rio Branco in the early 20th century (pp. 65, 82), to the somewhat quixotic desire for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council in the early 21st century.
Blair Peterson

The case for decriminalizing heroin, cocaine, and all other drugs - Vox - 0 views

  • At the same time, the war on drugs has fallen short of its key economic goal: to make drugs more expensive, and therefore make them less accessible to drug users.
  • Michael Botticelli, acting director of ONDCP, wrote, "This Strategy … rejects the notion that we can arrest and incarcerate our way out of the nation's drug problem."
  • The idea is to cut down the supply, so drugs are more expensive and, therefore, less affordable and accessible for a drug user.
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  • Campos, who's analyzed the historical numbers in his research, says drug abuse has never strongly correlated with drug policy.
Blair Peterson

BBC News - Ebola crisis: Five ways to break the epidemic - 0 views

  • The aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has urged other countries to "deploy their civil defence and military assets, and medical teams, to contain the epidemic".
  • "As soon as their family member shows more severe symptoms, like bleeding, they will seek to bring them in a treatment centre anyway," says Brice de la Vigne, MSF's director of operations.
  • Senegal, where many UN agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have their regional offices, is expected to become a logistical hub.
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  • "If the CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention) hadn't sent 50 experts to Nigeria, they would not have it under control," Dr Maughan says.
  • "We are working with the authorities in Mali to get all the 86 health centres and hospitals we sponsor there ready," says Alexis Smigielski, head of the Dakar-based medical charity Alima.
  • The WHO has also indicated that people who have survived can now provide blood to treat patients who are sick.
gabsandres

The impact of Charlie Hebdo: Americans now back Muhammad cartoons - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Ever since the terrorist attacks in Paris shortly after the New Year, U.S. media have been debating within their newsrooms whether to publish the cartoon that ran immediately before the terrorist attack. 
  • About twice as many Americans thought the European newspapers who published such images were acting irresponsibly (61 percent) than those who thought it was responsible to publish them (29 percent).
smenegh Meneghini

Framing Health and Foreign Policy: lessons for global health diplomacy - 10 views

  •  
    This article talks about how health is becoming part of diplomacy and how it is being discussed as part of security: "Several governments have issued specific foreign policy statements on global health and a new term, global health diplomacy , has been coined to describe the processes by which state and non-state actors engage to position health issues more prominently in foreign policy decision-making". "Security, alongside development, is the most recently encountered frame in the documents we reviewed, with the securitization of health now claimed to be a permanent feature of public health governance in the 21st century. Although "health security" is recent in coinage, its history dates back at least to the 14th century when epidemics threatened to destabilize sovereign power and to compromise the material interest of the elite groups".
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