September 22, 2014
President Barack Obama is expected to rally international support for a coalition against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria and get backing for his plan to fight the Ebola virus in West Africa, while at the UN this week. VOA reports:
“America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat. Our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy,” Obama said. The president was using a term used to describe the Islamic State group.
His strategy against the Islamist militant group has put more than 1,000 U.S. troops in Iraq – though not in a combat role – reflecting what analysts say is the president’s continuing reluctance to get involved…
Larry Korb, who served as a foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign, noted that this time it is the governments of Iraq and Liberia calling on the U.S. to step in.
“I think we need to recognize that when we’re invited in like the president of Liberia, where Iraq has invited us back in now – then it’s much different,” Korb said.
At the United Nations, Obama will attend a climate summit and chair a Security Council meeting on foreign fighters.
The rest of the time he will work to shore up commitments by other member states to help deal with both the Islamic State militants and the Ebola outbreak.
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Global Health and Development Beat
Caribbean hospitals have been taking positive steps to withstand natural disasters, reports IPS.
A team burying Ebola victims was attacked in Sierra Leone’s capital on Saturday, a member of parliament said, as some residents defied a three-day lockdown aimed at halting the worst outbreak of the disease on record.
New initiatives from the United States, Britain, France and other countries to help fight the Ebola epidemic that has been spreading exponentially in West Africa marked a “good beginning,” former President Bill Clinton said on Saturday, but said the world will need to do more.
World leaders including UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon joined farmers, fishermen, children and others in a massive demonstration in New York on Sunday to demand action on climate change.
NPR reports on how the fair trade trend has now reached condoms, which are made thanks to rubber trees around the world.
The mosquito-borne virus known as chikungunya has sickened nearly 500,000 people in the Dominican Republic, including 109 newborn babies, an official with the Caribbean country’s health ministry said.
The provincial health department has suspended 12 polio workers in the wake of findings of a federal government-funded survey that placed the immunization coverage below 29% in Sindh, Pakistan.
The deadly Ebola virus spreading through West Africa is sparking fears in the market that supplies of cocoa, one of the region’s top exports, could be disrupted. Prices for the key chocolate ingredient have surged 6.3% this week, reports WSJ.
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Buzzing in the Blogs
The Ebola outbreak might have reached an important turning point, says Mark Goldberg in the UN Dispatch. He writes:
For the first time in the history of the organization, an emergency UN Security Council meeting was held to deal with a public health emergency. This unprecedented meeting yielded an unprecedented result: the resolution, which passed unanimously, had 131 co-sponsors — the most ever for a UN Security Council resolution.
What can the resolution do? Much of the resolution is a generalized call for greater international solidarity and international contributions to the fight against ebola. But it also contains some specific provisions that could accelerate the international community’s response to the crisis. In particular, the resolution calls on countries to lift travel restrictions to and from affected countries. This has been an ongoing problem for the United Nations and NGOs. Airlines have cancelled flights, and countries in the region have prevented the use of their airports to deliver personnel and assistance to affected countries.
These restrictions have significantly hindered the ability of international health workers, NGOs and the UN to do its job–and also made the delivery of supplies and personnel more expensive. Key countries in the region, including important travel hubs like Senegal, Cameroon, South Africa and Kenya, have banned travel to and from Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. In some cases, countries won’t even let UN planes land to refuel.
The resolution passed today explicitly calls for the lifting of these travel bans and the resumption of air travel to and from the affected region. And — this is key — Senegal, South Africa, Cameroon, Kenya, and Sierra Leone, have co-sponsored the resolution. This suggests that they have already lifted (or are preparing to lift) the travel bans.
That should be one immediate and tangible outcome of this emergency Security Council meeting. Another was the announcement by Ban Ki Moon of establishing a special United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, UNMEER. According to a letter to the Security Council obtained by UN Dispatch, the mission will “build and maintain a regional operational platform, ensuring the rapid delivery of international assistance against needs identified in affected states, lead the response at the operational level, and provide strategic direction for the United Nations system and partners on the ground.” In other words, this will be an arm of the UN General Secretariat devoted exclusively to containing ebola. Again, this is unprecedented.
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Capital Events
Monday
9:30 AM – Shifting Strategies on Drug Policy: A Comparative Approach – Brookings
Tuesday
8:00 AM – A symposium on the Ebola Crisis – Georgetown
9:00 AM – Eastern Europe’s Most Difficult Transition: Public Health and Demographic Policy, Two Decades after the Cold War – Wilson Center
Wednesday
3:00 PM – What’s Youth Got to Do With It? Investing in Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health – Wilson Center
Thursday
9:30 AM – Pakistan: Importing Americas’s Federalism? – Atlantic Council
12:00 PM – The Impact of Secondary Schooling in Kenya: A regression Discontinuity Analysis – CGD
Friday
12:30 PM – Guns, Drugs and Military Aid: Exploring Unintended Effects of US Policy in Latin America – CGD
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By Mark Leon Goldberg and Tom Murphy
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