A new development bank launched by emerging economies will help all nations in distress to return to health, South African President Jacob Zuma said Monday.
The so-called Brics – Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa – announced last month that they were setting up a development bank and emergency reserve fund. This was seen as a major challenge to the Washington-based International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which some emerging powers see as biased towards Western policy positions.
Zuma, visiting Washington for a US-Africa summit, argued that the IMF has few success stories to show despite the often austere regimens it imposes on troubled economies in return for emergency loans.
For now, only the Brics nations will be able to draw from the $50-billion in the New Development Bank and $100-billion in the Contingent Reserve Arrangement. The IMF, set up with the World Bank during the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, has faced criticism for imposing onerous conditions and for not giving wider representation to developing nations on its controlling committees.
The Brics bank plan came after an agreement to give China and other emerging powers more voting power in the IMF got bogged down in the US Senate due to opposition by conservative Republicans.
Hundreds of troops were deployed in Sierra Leone and Liberia yesterday under an emergency plan to fight the worst-ever outbreak of the Ebola virus, which has killed more than 826 people in West Africa.
Panic among communities, which have attacked health workers and threatened to burn down isolation wards, prompted regional governments to impose tough measures last week, including closing schools and quarantining the remote forest region worst affected by the disease.
The haemorrhagic virus, which has no known cure, has infected more than 1400 people, straining the capacity of underfunded health systems and aid groups in one of the poorest regions in the world.
Despite pleas for help from aid groups, the number of cases is also creeping steadily higher in Guinea, where the outbreak originated in February. And Nigeria’s megacity Lagos recorded its second case yesterday, in a doctor who treated US victim Patrick Sawyer.
Convoys of military trucks ferried troops and medical workers to Sierra Leone’s far east, where the density of cases is highest. Military spokesman Colonel Michael Samoura said the operation, codenamed Octopus, involved about 750 military personnel.
Isolated communities will be quarantined but healthcare workers will have freedom of movement to keep the communities supplied with food.
In neighbouring Liberia, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and ministers held a crisis meeting on Sunday to put in place a series of anti-Ebola measures as police contained infected communities in the north of the country.
“The situation will probably get worse before it gets better,” Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown said.
“We are overstretched. We need support; we need resources; we need workers.”
The World Health Organisation plans to launch a $100-million response plan.
WHO CEO Margaret Chan warned regional leaders that Ebola was outpacing their efforts to fight it and warned of “catastrophic” consequences if the situation deteriorated.
A shrinking group of Japanese teens who want to be black are still changing how they look. B-Stylers wear hip-hop-inspired clothing like loose sweatpants and backwards caps and use words like motherf***er and man often, while braiding their hair.
It’s a very tiny subculture, one of many weird fads in Japan, like Lolitas and Dekotora. One does not really see it on the streets any longer.
According to Hina, a boutique owner who sells the look, it was bigger a couple of years ago, but is fading fast. There are only a few die-hards left in each city. It’s definitely not mainstream, and maybe still too small to even call it a subculture.
What do B-stylers like Hina mainly do?
Hina, for example, visits a tanning salon every week to darken her skin. Most would be surprised to learn that these tanning salons even exist, because in Japan it is a classic beauty ideal to let your skin be as pale as possible.
B-stylers also listen to hip-hop, and visit special African hair salons to get braids or curly hair. These salons are usually found in Tokyo’s ghettos and are run by small African communities.
Britain’s leading public health doctor today blames the failure to find a vaccine against the Ebola virus on the “moral bankruptcy” of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in a disease because it has so far only affected people in Africa – despite hundreds of deaths.
Professor John Ashton, the president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, says the West needs to treat the deadly virus as if it were taking hold in the wealthiest parts of London rather than just Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.
Writing in The Independent on Sunday, Professor Ashton compares the international response to Ebola to that of Aids, which was killing people in Africa for years before treatments were developed once it had spread to the US and UK in the 1980s.
He writes: “In both cases [Aids and Ebola], it seems that the involvement of powerless minority groups has contributed to a tardiness of response and a failure to mobilise an adequately resourced international medical response.
“In the case of Aids, it took years for proper research funding to be put in place and it was only when so-called ‘innocent’ groups were involved (women and children, haemophiliac patients and straight men) that the media, politicians, scientific community and funding bodies stood up and took notice.”
Israel declared a Gaza ceasefire over on Friday and killed more than 50 Palestinians in renewed shelling, saying militants had breached the truce shortly after it began and apparently captured an Israeli soldier.
The 72-hour break announced by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was the most ambitious attempt so far to end more than three weeks of fighting, and followed mounting international alarm over a rising Palestinian civilian death toll.
The ceasefire, which began at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT), had prompted Palestinian families to trek back to battle-devastated neighbourhoods where rows of homes have been reduced to rubble. It was to be followed by Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Cairo on a longer-term solution.
The Israeli military said that 90 minutes into the truce, militants attacked soldiers searching for tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip.
Asked if the ceasefire was over, Lerner replied: “Yes. We are continuing our activities on the ground.” He said Israeli forces were mounting an “extensive effort” to locate the soldier.
The Gaza Health Ministry said more than 50 people were killed and 220 wounded by Israeli shelling after the incident near the southern town of Rafah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a special meeting of his security cabinet for later on Friday. A statement from his office said the Israeli leader spoke by telephone with Kerry and told him “the Palestinians had blatantly breached the humanitarian ceasefire and attacked our soldiers”.
Bolivia has declared Israel to be a “terrorist state” and renounced a visa exemption agreement with the country in protest over the ongoing Israeli military offense in Gaza which already killed more than 1,300 dead and left over 7,000 wounded.
Canceling the 1972 agreement which allowed Israelis to travel freely to Bolivia “means, in other words, we are declaring (Israel) a terrorist state,” the country’s President Evo Morales announced.
Morales explained that Operation Protective edge clearly shows that “Israel is not a guarantor of the principles of respect for life and the elementary precepts of rights that govern the peaceful and harmonious coexistence of our international community.”
The announcement came after a cabinet meeting of the government of Evo Morales which decided that; “The Bolivian state and people have made a firm decision to terminate the agreement on visas to Israel, from August 17, 1972, signed under a regime of dictatorship in Bolivia and that allowed Israeli citizens to enter Bolivia freely without even entry visa.”
Bolivia broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009 over a previous military operation in Gaza.
Just on Wednesday morning shelling of a UN School in Gaza, left at least 20 dead. The incident has brought worldwide condemnation.
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has condemned a deadly attack by Israel against a UN school in the besieged Gaza Strip.
“It is outrageous. It is unjustifiable. And it demands accountability and justice,” said the UN chief in Costa Rica on Wednesday.
The IDF military campaign which began July 8, so far has left more than 1,300 dead and over 7,000 wounded.
El Salvador has joined four Latin American countries in recalling its Israel ambassador from Tel Aviv in protest at the military’s ground and air offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Peru have all recalled their diplomatic representatives to Israel.
The Chilean foreign ministry in Santiago said its ambassador was being brought back to the country because of “the escalation of Israeli military operations in Gaza”.
“Chile notes with great concern and dismay that such military operations, which at this stage of development are subject to a collective punishment against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, do not respect fundamental rules of international humanitarian law.”
Brazil had earlier denounced the “disproportionate use of force by Israel” before recalling the Ambassador of Brazil in Tel Aviv to Brasilia.
The United Nations Human Rights Council, consisting of 46 members, also voted unanimously to investigate potential Israeli ‘war crimes’ in the territory. The only member to vote against the resolution was the United States while many European Union nations abstained.
Over a million people in Gaza could be without electricity after Israeli tank shells hit the fuel depot of the enclave’s only power station, causing it to shut down. Its director, Mohammed al-Sharif, said, “The power plant is finished.”
A thick column of black smoke rose from the facility, which supplies the territory with two-thirds of its energy needs, and the fuel containers were in flames. Al-Sharif added that the local fire brigade was not equipped to extinguish the blaze.
The deputy director of the energy authority in the Palestinian territory, Fathi al-Sheikh Khalil, told AFP: “Gaza’s sole power plant has stopped working due to Israeli shelling last night, which damaged the steam generator and later hit the fuel tanks which set them on fire.”
Gaza’s power plant was forced to shut down after two tank shells hit one of three fuel tanks, said Jamal Dardasawi, a spokesman for Gaza’s electricity distribution company. The shelling sparked a large fire and a huge column of smoke was seen rising from the site. Dardasawi said 15 workers were trapped inside by the fire and that the damage would take months to repair. There was no immediate word on casualties, AP reported.
Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf says there is a genocide being perpetrated against the Christians of Iraq and the White House hasn’t said a word about it, much less acted to stop it.
The terrorist group the Islamic State, an al Qaida off shoot that has taken over large swaths of Iraq in recent months, told Christians in the Iraqi city of Mosul they had to convert to Islam by July 18 or they would be killed, according to the Economist. The only other option they were given was to leave Mosul, a city which has had a Christian presence for nearly two millennia. So thousands of Christians have now fled the city in fear for their lives.
“It is genocide. It meets the test of genocide,” Wolf said Friday on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, which this writer guest hosted. “The definition of genocide was put together by the UN by a guy named Raphael Lemkin. But it is the eradication of a group of people – race, culture, ethnicity, religion. So this meets the official test of genocide.”
The UN Security Council on Monday appealed for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza at a late-night emergency meeting called as fighting between Israel and Hamas entered its third week.
The 15-member Council released a statement calling for the truce to allow aid deliveries during the Muslim Eid festival marking the end of Ramadan, and as the death toll rose to more than 1,030 Palestinians.
The Council expressed “strong support” for an “immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire,” allowing for urgent deliveries of aid, and urged all sides to “accept and fully implement” the truce.
The statement was put forward by Jordan with the backing of Arab countries.
In its statement, the Council voiced “grave concern regarding the deterioration in the situation as a result of the crisis related to Gaza and the loss of civilian lives and casualties.”
The Council said “civilian and humanitarian facilities, including those of the UN, must be respected and protected” following outrage over the Israeli attack on a UN-run school in Gaza this week that left 15 dead.
Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor suggested the stance taken by the Council was biased.
“Miraculously it doesn’t mention Hamas. It doesn’t mention the firing of rockets. Those things are lacking in this statement, he said.
“You don’t have to have the IQ of a rocket scientist to understand that if rockets are falling on you, you are allowed to defend yourself.”
Africa’s deadliest ever Ebola epidemic in West Africa has officially claimed well over 600 lives, and unofficially many more.
Following the death of a Liberian government worker two days ago who collapsed in the international airport of Nigeria’s 20-million megacity, Lagos announced a “red alert” with Nigeria clamping down into a quasi-quarantine state, sending specialists to airports and seaports for containment.
In Sierra Leone, where many have more faith in traditional medicine, this has culminated in crowds gathered outside clinics and hospitals to protest against what they see as a conspiracy, in some cases clashing with police as they threatened to burn down the buildings and remove the patients.
One of Liberia’s most high-profile doctors has died of Ebola, officials said Sunday, and an American physician was being treated for the deadly virus, highlighting the risks facing health workers trying to combat an outbreak that has killed more than 670 people in West Africa — the largest ever recorded.
A second American, a missionary working in the Liberian capital, was also taken ill and was being treated in isolation there, said the pastor of a North Carolina church that sponsored her work.
Dr. Samuel Brisbane, a top Liberian health official, was treating Ebola patients at the country’s largest hospital, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center in Monrovia, when he fell ill. He died on Saturday. A Ugandan doctor died earlier this month.
The American physician, 33-year-old Dr. Kent Brantly, was in Liberia helping to respond to the outbreak that has killed 129 people nationwide when he fell ill, according to the North Carolina-based medical charity, Samaritan’s Purse.
He was receiving intensive medical care in a Monrovia hospital and was in stable condition, according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Melissa Strickland.
The American missionary, Nancy Writebol, was gravely ill and in isolation in Monrovia.
Samaritan’s Purse spokeswoman Melissa Strickland says Dr Brantly’s wife and children had been living with him in Africa but are currently in the US.
The epidemic has a mortality rate of between 60% and 90%.
Israeli spokesmen have their work cut out explaining how they have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, compared with just three civilians killed in Israel by Hamas rocket and mortar fire. But on television and radio and in newspapers, Israeli government spokesmen such as Mark Regev appear slicker and less aggressive than their predecessors, who were often visibly indifferent to how many Palestinians were killed.
Dr. Frank Luntz
There is a reason for this enhancement of the PR skills of Israeli spokesmen. Going by what they say, the playbook they are using is a professional, well-researched and confidential study on how to influence the media and public opinion in America and Europe. Written by the expert Republican pollster and political strategist Dr Frank Luntz, the study was commissioned five years ago by a group called The Israel Project, with offices in the US and Israel, for use by those “who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.
Every one of the 112 pages in the booklet is marked “not for distribution or publication” and it is easy to see why. The Luntz report, officially entitled “The Israel project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was leaked almost immediately to Newsweek Online, but its true importance has seldom been appreciated. It should be required reading for everybody, especially journalists, interested in any aspect of Israeli policy because of its “dos and don’ts” for Israeli spokesmen.
These are highly illuminating about the gap between what Israeli officials and politicians really believe, and what they say, the latter shaped in minute detail by polling to determine what Americans want to hear. Certainly, no journalist interviewing an Israeli spokesman should do so without reading this preview of many of the themes and phrases employed by Mr Regev and his colleagues.
The booklet is full of meaty advice about how they should shape their answers for different audiences. For example, the study says that “Americans agree that Israel ‘has a right to defensible borders’. But it does you no good to define exactly what those borders should be. Avoid talking about borders in terms of pre- or post-1967, because it only serves to remind Americans of Israel’s military history. Particularly on the left this does you harm. For instance, support for Israel’s right to defensible borders drops from a heady 89 per cent to under 60 per cent when you talk about it in terms of 1967.”
How about the right of return for Palestinian refugees who were expelled or fled in 1948 and in the following years, and who are not allowed to go back to their homes? Here Dr Luntz has subtle advice for spokesmen, saying that “the right of return is a tough issue for Israelis to communicate effectively because much of Israeli language sounds like the ‘separate but equal’ words of the 1950s segregationists and the 1980s advocates of Apartheid. The fact is, Americans don’t like, don’t believe and don’t accept the concept of ‘separate but equal’.”
So how should spokesmen deal with what the booklet admits is a tough question? They should call it a “demand”, on the grounds that Americans don’t like people who make demands. “Then say ‘Palestinians aren’t content with their own state. Now they’re demanding territory inside Israel’.” Other suggestions for an effective Israeli response include saying that the right of return might become part of a final settlement “at some point in the future”.
Dr Luntz notes that Americans as a whole are fearful of mass immigration into the US, so mention of “mass Palestinian immigration” into Israel will not go down well with them. If nothing else works, say that the return of Palestinians would “derail the effort to achieve peace”.
The Luntz report was written in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009, when 1,387 Palestinians and nine Israelis were killed.
There is a whole chapter on “isolating Iran-backed Hamas as an obstacle to peace”. Unfortunately, come the current Operation Protective Edge, which began on 6 July, there was a problem for Israeli propagandists because Hamas had quarrelled with Iran over the war in Syria and had no contact with Tehran. Friendly relations have been resumed only in the past few days – thanks to the Israeli invasion.
Much of Dr Luntz’s advice is about the tone and presentation of the Israeli case. He says it is absolutely crucial to exude empathy for Palestinians: “Persuadables [sic] won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Show Empathy for BOTH sides!” This may explain why a number of Israeli spokesman are almost lachrymose about the plight of Palestinians being pounded by Israeli bombs and shells.
In a sentence in bold type, underlined and with capitalisation, Dr Luntz says that Israeli spokesmen or political leaders must never, ever justify “the deliberate slaughter of innocent women and children” and they must aggressively challenge those who accuse Israel of such a crime. Israeli spokesmen struggled to be true to this prescription when 16 Palestinians were killed in a UN shelter in Gaza last Thursday.
There is a list of words and phrases to be used and a list of those to be avoided. Schmaltz is at a premium: “The best way, the only way, to achieve lasting peace is to achieve mutual respect.” Above all, Israel’s desire for peace with the Palestinians should be emphasised at all times because this what Americans overwhelmingly want to happen. But any pressure on Israel to actually make peace can be reduced by saying “one step at a time, one day at a time”, which will be accepted as “a commonsense approach to the land-for-peace equation”.
Dr Luntz cites as an example of an “effective Israeli sound bite” one which reads: “I particularly want to reach out to Palestinian mothers who have lost their children. No parent should have to bury their child.”
The study admits that the Israeli government does not really want a two-state solution, but says this should be masked because 78 per cent of Americans do. Hopes for the economic betterment of Palestinians should be emphasised.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is quoted with approval for saying that it is “time for someone to ask Hamas: what exactly are YOU doing to bring prosperity to your people”. The hypocrisy of this beggars belief: it is the seven-year-old Israeli economic siege that has reduced the Gaza to poverty and misery.
On every occasion, the presentation of events by Israeli spokesmen is geared to giving Americans and Europeans the impression that Israel wants peace with the Palestinians and is prepared to compromise to achieve this, when all the evidence is that it does not. Though it was not intended as such, few more revealing studies have been written about modern Israel in times of war and peace. – UK Independent
Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra said on Friday that an armed group was present near the site where Air Algerie flight AH5017 crushed in northern Mali on Thursday.
Lamamra said the first information about the crash site was received from an armed group.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, meanwhile, said the most likely cause of Thursday’s crash was bad weather conditions.
“We think that this plane crashed for reasons pertaining to meteorological conditions,” he said on RTL radio.
French transportation minister Frederic Cuvillier said the possibility of a strike from the ground had been ruled out “from the start,” rejecting speculation that rebels in Mali’s restive north could have shot the plane down.
In televised address, President Francois Hollande said no one survived the crash, adding that the plane’s black box flight recorder had been found.
“Sadly, there were no survivors” of flight AH5017 that had 116 people on board, including 51 French nationals, Hollande said.
Ten people from the same family with roots in France’s east died in the Air Algerie crash, local officials and relatives said Friday as the full extent of the tragedy came to light.
The members of the Reynaud family were on board the plane that crashed Thursday in Mali, the local authorities of the towns some of them lived in and their families confirmed.
Nobody survived the crash of an Air Algerie flight over Mali, French President Francois Hollande said on Thursday, adding that the plane’s black box flight recorder had been found, AFP reports.
“Sadly, there were no survivors” of Flight AH5017 that had 116 people on board, including 51 French nationals, when it went down over northern Mali, Hollande said in televised comments.
The French military has recovered the flight recorder and was taking it to the city of Gao, he added.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, meanwhile, said the most likely cause of Thursday’s crash was bad weather conditions, although authorities were not excluding other hypotheses.
“We think that this plane crashed for reasons pertaining to meteorological conditions,” he said on RTL radio.
The jet’s Spanish crew had signalled they were altering course due to difficult weather conditions, and company sources and officials said there had been reports of heavy storms at the time.
Cuvillier said the possibility of a strike from the ground had been ruled out “from the start”, rejecting speculation that rebels in Mali’s restive north could have shot the plane down.
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