For someone who was lucky enough to grow up and live in a country where guns aren’t household objects, it is difficult to understand America’s addiction to guns and the political resistance to gun control measures despite support for some controls within the general public. The recent failure of the US government to pass the Manchin-Toomey bill, a relatively limited move to strengthen background checks when purchasing guns in the US, demonstrates how difficult it will be for the substantial gun control laws to be passed in America. The bill itself is not straight forward to understand if, like me, you’re not used to reading government legalese but you can read the full text on Senator Toomey’s website and simpler explanations can be found in the accompanying press release and on the Politifact website. Ultimately, the measures were voted down much to the frustration of President Barack Obama who noted, “there were no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this.” Bizarrely, the Southern region director for Organizing for Action (Obama’s grass roots campaign organization) whose job was to build up community support for gun violence prevention legislation was shot by a stray bullet only days after the amendment failed. Image Credit: Mista Stagga Lee, flickr In addition to strengthened background checks, one of the proposals in the failed measure was to establish a 12-member National Commission on Mass Violence to conduct a comprehensive factual study of incidents of mass violence.
When the sun rises over the Rio Grande Valley, the cries of the urracas — blackbirds — perched on the tops of palm trees swell to a noisy, unavoidable cacophony. That is also the strategy, it could be said, that local officials, health care providers and frustrated valley residents are trying to use to persuade [...]
Historian David Oshinsky writes: Since 1988, the number of new polio cases worldwide has plummeted from 350,000 cases to 223 last year. With only 26 so far in 2013, we have the smallest number of cases in the fewest countries ever, creating a dramatic opportunity for eradication. India, for example, was recently declared polio-free following … Continue reading →
“On this 10th anniversary of China’s April 2003 admission that the SARS virus had spread across that country … Beijing finds itself once again in a terrible position via-a-vis the microbial and geopolitical worlds,” Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in a Foreign Policy opinion piece, noting the emergence of a new strain of bird flu, H7N9, in the country. “In both the SARS and current H7N9 influenza cases, China watched the microbe’s historic path unfold during a period of enormous political change. And the politics got in the way of appropriate threat assessment,” she states. She recounts the events leading to the SARS outbreak, noting the country’s delay in reporting the outbreak to the international community, and writes, “Today, with the future path of the new influenza still uncertain, Beijing faces conundrums similar to those it confronted after publicly admitting to SARS.”
Flights were delayed by up to two hours across the country on Monday…Airline executives were furious over how the {Federal} aviation agency handled the government-inflicted chaos, and privately said the agency was seeking to impose the maximum possible pain for passengers to make a political point. The airline executives in this NYT story are using a venerable and plausible theory of how government agencies behave in response to budget cuts. An agency would strategically cut areas that make the public howl in pain so as to increase the probability that the cuts will be reversed. If the agency cut areas that did not directly affect the public, it risks the public and politicians saying “good riddance” and making the cuts permanent.
April 22, 2013 An earthquake struck China’s Sichuan province over the weekend. Relief efforts are under way as reports show 182 people died and over 8,000 were injured. From CNN: The Sichuan Red Cross estimated that drinking water in Ya’an City will run out within three days despite rescue workers’ efforts to deliver supplies to quake-hit area. In more remote areas, where the shifting earth muddied river waters, people anxiously awaited evacuation, Xinhua said. Thousands of emergency workers, including soldiers, rushed to reach the affected zones in the hilly region, but their progress was impeded. Huge mountain chunks near the quake’s epicenter in Lushan County have sheared off and fallen into valleys
We all knew it. We saw this coming in Haiti and talked about it in Egypt, when 5 Ushahidi maps popped out the day before the elections. But the Kenyan elections are somehow different, and the reason why they are, is that the possible outcome is indeed a civil unrest that could bring the country years back to 2007. [...]
“UNICEF’s latest report [.pdf] on child nutrition, launched at the Dublin Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, Climate Justice hosted by the Mary Robinson Foundation and Irish Government, revealed that every year 2.3 million children under the age of five still die of malnutrition and 165 million children are stunted as a result of not receiving enough nutritious food within the first 1,000 days of life,” British Member of Parliament Ivan Lewis, the shadow secretary of state for international development, writes in a Huffington Post U.K. “Politics” opinion piece. He adds the report “demonstrates the vital link between development and the importance of the first 1,000 days of a child’s life,” and continues, “Addressing stunting can break the cycle of poverty and have significant social and economic impacts on the development of nations. However, at the moment the scale of stunting means that more than one quarter of the world’s children cannot reach their full potential.”
15 April 2013 — Statement on the humanitarian crisis and the insufficient sense of urgency among the governments and parties that could put a stop to the cruelty and carnage in the Syrian Arab Republic.
For a wonk parent it’s hard to beat the heart-warming experience of seeing your book referenced in your son’s university essay. In this case, junior had the task of trying to understand the link between neoliberalism and the rise of a new left in Latin America, so he cited Silent Revolution, a book I first
Most Americans are perhaps not aware that our approach to food aid overseas is widely regarded as incredibly inefficient, self-serving and, as The Atlantic recently noted, sort of wacky. At the risk of over-simplifying, the problem with the way we do food assistance to poor countries is that the system has been designed to serve … Continue reading →
Howard G. Buffett is pushing the international community to fully restore aid to Rwanda. When a UN Group of Experts (GoE) report found that Rwanda was supporting rebels fighting a deadly conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), a number of countries including the U.S. and Britain cut or suspended foreign aid in … Continue reading →
This week is acquiring an oddly retro flavour. Wednesday had me reminiscing about the Access to Medicines campaign of the last decade. Now it turns out that the issues it raised have recently erupted again. In short, the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are trying to get another extension to be free from implementing the WTO’s
At a panel session during the 4th Conference of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) held in Washington, DC, a group of distinguished speakers and leaders on health in China – from the China Medical Board, top universities and the Ministry of Health – were tasked with discussing and elaborating on China's role in global health. The speakers briefly discussed China's history in international health activities (their first deployment of medical teams to Africa dates back to 1963!), different kinds of partnerships in global health – particularly among universities, and examples of current and upcoming initiatives. In sum, the panel suggested a promising future for China’s role in global health. But when a question was raised (by me) about the size of financial/development assistance for global health from China, either to Africa or globally, none of the distinguished panel members had an answer.
