The World Health Organization says a vaccine which can prevent a diarrhoea and vomiting virus should be given to all children as a routine vaccination.
Even if it is "too costly," as some scientists have argued, this vaccine could drastically reduce the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by diarrhoea, mostly in Africa, every year.
Vaccines make sense. The benefits of eyeglasses may be less intuitive, but, it turns out that's not unreasonable advice either.
Giving away free glasses is a cheap way of boosting the global economy with billions of dollars lost every year due to visual impairments, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Tuesday.
Ahhh, I see. Heh.
(image from flickr user Muffet under a Creative Commons license)
It's probably no surprise that AEI's Danielle Pletka would dismiss Obama's speech in Cairo yesterday as mere "jawboning." Her implication, though, is much broader: that basically all efforts at negotiations with nefarious or intransigent actors -- the usual suspects of Iran, North Korea, and Palestine -- are not only wasteful and ineffective "jawboning," but provide a near-treasonous benefit to America's adversaries.
The underlying fallacy of Pletka's argument comes exactly here, in the assumption that negotiation -- the entire act of diplomacy -- is a zero-sum game. No one is arguing that negotiations don't come with trade-offs, or setbacks, or, yes, disingenuousness on the part of one's unsavory interlocutors. But continuing to engage in talks despite these problems is not, as Pletka would have it, to allow these problems to win the day. It is simply giving up.
In fact, Pletka seems more exercised by the medium of diplomacy than of the rotten fruit that she sees it begetting. The question she does not answer, though, is what method besides the "negotiation" and "engagement" that she derides -- and beyond simply giving up talking to other counties -- she would have us employ. Recklessly wielding sticks (or bombs) just limits our options -- and will only make the negative outcomes that she disdains all the more likely.
Obama's Cairo speech, moreover, seems a rather awkward hook on which to hang a denunciation of diplomacy. Obama was not involved in negotiations yesterday; he was making a broad outreach to Muslim populations. This use of "smart power" is a very different exercise than that of negotiating with, say, Hamas. When commentators like Pletka shudder at that latter thought, they are merely misunderstanding both the futility of isolation and the point of "smart power." While Hamas may still rail against Obama's outreach, millions of moderate Muslims heard what the U.S. president had to say. And most of them probably liked it a lot more than what extremists on either side had to say.
We'veblogged about the Law of the Sea treaty before, making the rather uncontroversial argument that signing a treaty that will increase the United States' ocean territory, protect marine life, enhance research opportunities, and make international shipping lanes freer and safer -- and that is supported by Republicans and Democrats, oil executives and environmentalists, for crying out loud -- should be one of those things that fits into U.S. priorities quite obviously. Add to this the fact that nations that are a party to UNCLOS are rapidly gobbling up the remaining (and globally warming) Arctic ocean territory, and that the U.S. risks being left on the sidelines if it doesn't sign its name soon, and you have the ingredients of something that clearly should have been signed yesterday.
Unfortunately, the Law of the Sea has been held up for far too long by a handful of Senators with objections that, with any scrutiny whatsoever, turn out to amount to no more than myths. On the plus side, though, the Foreign Relations Committee's chairman, John Kerry, has stressed that UNCLOS will be a priority for the committee this year. But it is unlikely that the Senate would adopt any major treaty without strong presidential leadership.
Green energy overtook fossil fuels in attracting investment for power generation for the first time last year, according to figures released today by the United Nations.
Wind, solar and other clean technologies attracted $140bn (£85bn) compared with $110bn for gas and coal for electrical power generation, with more than a third of the green cash destined for Britain and the rest of Europe.
The biggest growth for renewable investment came from China, India and other developing countries, which are fast catching up on the West in switching out of fossil fuels to improve energy security and tackle climate change. [emphasis mine]
One problem is that the world still needs to spend $750 billion on renewable energy in the next two years. Another is that overall, investments around the world are, um, not doing so well in the current economic climate. But still, that green techology is already generating more investment than their dirty predecessors -- and that China and India, so often thrown around as the ones slowing the fight against global warming, are going green more rapidly -- is a development that few could have predicted 15, 10, even 5 years ago.
(image from flickr user thinkpanama under a Creative Commons license)
"We have no plans to go back to Somalia... [but] there are reconnaissance missions," Information Minister Bereket Simon told reporters.
"When there is a threat, you can send some scouts here and there," he added.
A few scouts here and there for Ethiopia, a few blocks here and there in control of the Somali government in Mogadishu. Meanwhile, Eritrea continues to deny the charge that it is arming Somali insurgents as "a CIA lie."
The UN Foundation's Adele Waugaman relates an inspiring story of how a doctor can deliver babies even without electricity:
When obstetrician Laura Stachel arrived in rural Nigeria to collect data about maternal care, she was shocked to discover that women were dying in childbirth because clinics had no reliable power supply.
After taking a course on solar electricity, she created what she calls the "solar suitcase" - which is now proving a life-saver in one of the hospitals she visited.
...
In the northern city of Zaria, Laura found that the lone public hospital had only 160 hospital beds for a population of 1.5 million, and that electricity was available no more than 12 hours a day. There was no running water in the delivery room, and no blood bank because intermittent access to electricity meant the blood couldn't be refrigerated reliably.
Laura's "solar suitcase", a kit of solar panels and rechargeable batteries, can light operating and delivery rooms, run a blood bank refrigerator and power two-way radios so that staff can call in off-duty doctors for emergency surgery.
To help solve the problems Laura was dealing with in Nigeria was exactly that reason that humanitarians and technical experts were meeting at the Humanitarian Technology Challenge this week. Visit Reuters AlertNet for Adele's whole piece.
(image of Nigerian mother and child, from flickr user Soumik Kar under a Creative Commons license)
Passport's Annie Lowrey is "charmed" by my reading a legality-based counter-terrorism approach into "Scooby Doo," but she doesn't quite think it's up to snuff. In her view, maybe Velma and the monster-hunting gang are more akin to Hans Blix and his team searching for WMDs.
If anything, I think of the Scooby Doo Five as a decent analog for the United Nations weapons inspectors: mobile and peripatetic, spooked by the astral, often kicked out of the amusement park, much derided but really fairly decent at digging out the truth.
I guess the lesson here is that if you are a little too eager to dole out Scooby Snacks (or "yellowcake" and aluminum tubes) to an paranoid, excitable title character (or leader), then the rest of the team can't do its job, and the whole operation goes awry like a hungry Great Dane barreling into you at full tilt. And how's Rummy or Cheney as the incorrigibly pugnacious Scrappy Doo...?
In the simmering controversy over U.S.-caused civilian deaths in Afghanistan, Washington has been sending decidedly mixed signals. It has acknowledged that civilian protection must become the top priority for U.S. forces, and, in appointing counter-insurgency acolyte Stanley McChrystal to lead the mission in Afghanistan, has sent the signal that military operations must undergo a top-down shift in strategy and focus. A U.S. military report has even agreed that troops who conducted a particularly devastating air raid in early May committed grave errors that jeopardized civilian lives.
Yet, even as it has castigated its own, the U.S. has still insisted that the Taliban was responsible for the deaths of the 30 (the U.S. number) to 140 (Afghanistan's number) civilians in the raid. (And, for that matter, the continued squabbling over mortality figures, which are consistently lower than either Afghan or UN totals, does not ultimately help the cause of reducing these fatalities.) Even if Taliban fighters did force these civilians to remain in the combat zone, the U.S. military's use of this rationale belies the purported goal of civilian protection: if the primary aim of the operation was to attack the Taliban, then it was not, by definition, to protect civilians.
A stronger critique than the United States' own has come from UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, who issued this sharp rebuke:
"The government has failed to effectively investigate and punish lower-ranking soldiers for such deaths, and has not held senior officers responsible," Alston said. "Worse, it has effectively created a zone of impunity for private contractors and civilian intelligence agents by only rarely investigating and prosecuting them."
Actual prosecution is less important than creating an atmosphere of deterrence. All 68,000 American troops that are to be deployed to Afghanistan under President Obama's plan will need to embrace the principle that civilian protection comes first. Criticism from a UN envoy is ultimately less important than negative reactions from those who matter most -- the Afghan people.
(image of a U.S. drone in Afghanistan, from flickr user jamesdale10 under a Creative Commons license)
Well said, from David Miliband, the blogging British Foreign Minister:
Today the latest round of talks on a successor to START finish in Geneva. Last week former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, argued in the New York Times that START negotiations with Russia are no more than "a fast way" for the US to "lose the arms race"
This zero-sum Cold War mentality, that sees US cooperation as a win for Russia, misses the point - cooperation brings gains for both the US and Russia, and it allows them to draw closer together on meeting the real, shared threats they face.
Today's major threats to the US and its allies come not from Russia but from states like North Korea and Iran, and from asymmetric warfare carried out by groups like AQ. Our resources and energy should go into combating these far greater threats. START is right for the new, more joined-up world.