Day: August 3, 2022

The World Health Organization warns a lack of humanitarian aid is driving millions of hungry people in the Horn of Africa to engage in desperate measures to survive.

Conditions in the Horn of Africa are worsening. Conflict, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic have turned the region into a hunger hotspot. That is having disastrous consequences for the health and lives of millions of people.

A recent U.N. analysis of the food situation in the region found 37 to 50 million people as being in what is classified as IPC phase 3. The World Health Organization explains that level of food insecurity forces people to sell their possessions to feed themselves and their families. At that stage of crisis, it says malnutrition is rife and special nutritional treatment is needed.

Sophie Maes is the WHO incident manager for drought and food insecurity in the greater Horn of Africa. Speaking from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, she says the WHO and other aid agencies are unable to provide the help needed to stave off hunger and ill health because of a severe funding shortage.

“Normally what you do in this kind of situation is you do blanket supplementary feeding so that people do not slide further into malnutrition,” said Maes. “This is not being well funded at the moment due to the competing crises that are going on.”

She notes the World Food Program ran out of money and had to cut rations for many beneficiaries to be able to support those most in need. She says health risks have been compounded by four years of consecutive drought. She says the hoped-for reprieve is unlikely to come as forecasts indicate the upcoming rainy season is expected to fail.

She says growing numbers of people are engaging in risky behavior just to get something to eat and support their families.

“People are desperate to get money. So, there is survival sex going on. There is more violence, fighting for the meager resources. And, also, gender-based violence going up with women having to go farther to find food and water,” said Maes. “So, as they are further away from where they live, they are more prone to be attacked.”

The WHO says it needs nearly $124 million to spend through the end of the year to protect lives in the fragile region. It says the money will provide millions of people with the aid they need to fight disease outbreaks, provide life-saving nutritional feeding for severely malnourished children, and ensure they have access to health services.

Source: Voice of America

Nigerian police have increased security around the capital of Abuja after last week’s ambush of presidential guards in a suburb and a deadly attack on a military checkpoint.

Nigerian media reported two soldiers were killed in the July 28 attack and others were injured. The attack came just weeks after a brazen jailbreak in Abuja that freed hundreds, including high profile terrorism convicts.

The reinforcement was announced Tuesday by national police spokesperson Muyiwa Adejobi, following a national security management team meeting held in Abuja.

Adejobi said the police have ordered a massive deployment of operatives and operational assets around the capital but did disclose how many more officers will be deployed.

Adejobi did not respond to VOA’s request for more details on Wednesday. But Abuja police spokesperson Josephine Adeh told VOA the decision to withhold operational details was in the interest of security.

“Crimes have taken a new trend and we too are strategizing, that’s all,” Adeh said. “We are doing more deployment, that is the strategy we’re taking. You’ll see more visibility policing.”

The massive deployment comes amid rising security threats in the Nigerian capital, even though authorities have told citizens not to worry.

Local media reported two soldiers were killed during an attack on a military checkpoint in Niger state near Abuja last Thursday.

It was the second recent attack in Abuja blamed on the militant group Islamic State West Africa Province. An attack last month on an Abuja prison freed about 440 inmates, including many alleged terrorists.

The American non-profit SITE intelligence group said Friday’s attack was an indication that the Islamic State group has drawn too close to the Nigerian capital.

Police spokesperson Adeh said residents should trust the security forces.

“We’ve always been assuring the residents that everything is under control but they choose to believe fake news and whatever they see on social media,” she said. “There’s no cause for alarm. People should go about their lawful businesses.”

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has condemned latest attacks in the country and said he had “given security forces full freedom to bring an end to this madness.”

But security analyst Senator Ireogbu said authorities have failed to deliver on its promise to make the country safe.

“Though we have a very faulty security architecture, the security apparatus can effectively deal with the problem arising from these terrorists,” Ireogbu said. “The challenge we’re having is that the political will is not there, especially from the presidency, they keep on pushing, outsourcing the blames to others, not taking responsibility.”

Nigeria faces growing insecurity, especially in its northern states.

Last week, an Abuja-based security and risk management firm, Beacon Security Consulting, said violent attacks in Nigeria increased by 47% in the first half of the year compared to 2021.

Source: Voice of America

Malawi’s nurses’ union is urging President Lazarus Chakwera to allow about 2,000 nurses to work in the United States and Saudi Arabia, after the government ordered the plan be stopped.

The National Organization of Nurses and Midwives of Malawi (NONM) announced the plan a month ago, saying the nurses were forced to take jobs abroad due to high unemployment in Malawi. The health care brain drain raised concerns, and the Ministry of Labor on August 2 ordered the plan canceled, saying the union has no legal mandate on labor migration.

Malawi’s Minister of Labor Vera Kantukule told VOA on August 2 that the decision to suspend the plans was made after considering that NONM is just a union of medical workers.

“What we told them is that if you want to be doing this thing, then you probably have to register a separate identity that will be doing the recruitment but you, the way you are, your mandate does not allow you to engage yourself in labor migration,” Kantukule said.

Kantukule said there was also a need for a memorandum of understanding between the countries where the nurses are going to work and the Malawi government, before the nurses’ organization can proceed with its plans.

The labor minister said Malawi is among the countries where the World Health Organization has put restrictions on medical workers’ migration.

“Last time, we had an inquiry from Scotland. One of the hospitals in Scotland wanted to do this,” Kantukule said. “And the Scottish government got a response from the WHO saying ‘Malawi is on the list of those countries that you cannot take their health personnel.'”

Shouts Simeza, president of the nurses’ organization in Malawi, said he is surprised by the ministry’s position.

“The minister cannot cancel this thing. The minister has no mandate all together to tell us we don’t have the mandate, that’s being rude, in fact,” Simeza said. “And it is the government that has identified us as NONM to facilitate this. And the government has often said that it is not the only entity to recruit, that’s what the head of state Lazarus Chakwera says, ‘job creation campaign.’ And that’s exactly what we are doing.”

Simeza said the decision to seek jobs for nurses abroad came because 3,000 trained nurses in Malawi are unemployed.

Simeza said the earlier arrangement was that the first group of 1,000 nurses was expected to leave for Saudi Arabia this month. The plan is to send 1,000 each year for a five-year project.

But he said there was a delay because they were waiting for guidelines from various ministries including the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Labor on how to move forward.

“The team that we are sending out are our members, our members,” Simeza said. “They are not employed by a government ministry. So they don’t belong to any ministry, they don’t. So we went seeking guidance from the Ministry of Labor on the safety and security of the membership that are going to the U.S. [and] Saudi Arabia.”

The Malawi government said recently that it cannot recruit more nurses now, because of financial constraints.

In a statement August 2, a group of Malawi’s nurses and midwives urged Chakwera to intervene and prevent the Ministry of Labor from halting the plan to send some of them abroad to work.

There was no immediate response from Chakwera on the matter.

Source: Voice of America

Two invasive species — the brown tree snake and the American bullfrog — cost the world more than $16 billion between 1986 and 2020, according to a study.

Researchers say the already-hefty price tag should be seen as a lower limit on the true cost of invasive reptiles and amphibians, especially in under-studied regions such as Africa and South America. The study results were published in the online journal Scientific Reports.

Invasive species are animals, plants or other living things that aren’t native to the places where they live and damage their new environments. Humans spread many of the more than 340 invasive reptile and amphibian species — as stowaways in cargo or through the exotic pet trade, for instance.

Invasive reptiles and amphibians can damage crops, destroy infrastructure, spread disease and upset ecosystems. The damage is costly, but scientists still don’t fully understand the extent of the economic impact wrought by invasive species.

For the study, biologist and study author Ismael Soto of the University of South Bohemia, and Ceske Budejovice in the Czech Republic, and his colleagues, estimated the global cost of invasive reptiles and amphibians using a database called InvaCost. The database collects the results of thousands of studies, reports and other documents produced by scientists, governments and non-governmental organizations.

The data revealed that invasive reptiles and amphibians have cost at least $17 billion worldwide between 1986 and 2020.

“But this cost mostly focused on two species — the brown tree snake [and] the American bullfrog,” Soto told VOA in an interview via Zoom. “But there are almost 300 invasive species of reptiles [and] amphibians. So, this means that our cost is really underestimated.”

The two species have received a disproportionate amount of attention from researchers, said economist Shana McDermott of Trinity University, who was not involved in the study.

“When you talk about invasives, people immediately will probably say, ‘Oh, the brown tree snake,’ just because its impacts are so wide-ranging,” she said via Zoom. “It’s got ecosystem biodiversity impacts. It’s got impacts to human health — it sends people to the hospital every year with bites. It takes down energy infrastructure. … And so, of course, people are like, ‘Oh God! That’s an incredibly dangerous invasive! Let’s understand it better.'”

The research bias toward a few well-known species also skews the distribution of costs worldwide. For instance, 99.6% of the $10.4 billion in costs from reptile invasions were in Oceania and the Pacific Islands, largely reflecting damage dealt by the brown tree snake in Hawaii, Guam and Northern Mariana Islands. Likewise, most damage from amphibians was in Europe.

But that doesn’t mean invasive reptiles and amphibians aren’t problematic elsewhere. Soto said there are many invasive amphibians in Africa, but their costs probably haven’t been quantified.

“There’s not enough research in these countries [to] detect the economic costs,” he said.

Soto also noted that the current cost estimate only includes costs that are easily quantified. Destroyed crops or property are easier to count than reduced quality of life or indirect damage to human health and assigning dollar values to ecological damage is trickier still, McDermott said.

“We’re still in this very early stage of trying to understand the economic costs, and trying to understand how invasive species impact ecosystems, how they impact people’s quality of life,” she said, adding that she wants to include the price of biodiversity losses in future cost estimates.

Soto and McDermott agreed that future studies should not only quantify the costs of more species in more regions but also project how the costs will evolve with time, especially as climate change continues to facilitate the spread of more invasive species.

“There is a lot still left to be determined. … I do think that quantifying it is the first step, though,” said McDermott. “Unless you can put a dollar value on it, unfortunately, you don’t get [policymakers’] attention for policy. So, this is an incredibly important topic. … We really shouldn’t be waiting on more studies to act.”

Source: Voice of America

In 1998, I joined a group of journalists traveling to Afghanistan’s Khost province to meet the leaders of a militant group who’d already logged a string of attacks and were announcing a new terrorism conglomerate. As we arrived, Arab fighters fired into the air to welcome their leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and his patron-in-chief, Osama bin Laden, at their makeshift headquarters in the eastern Afghan province, not far from the Pakistan border.

The sky lit up with tracer rounds and the tall mountains echoed gunfire and jihadist chants of camouflaged bodyguards as the two white-robed men disembarked from their Toyota trucks. At the time, bin Laden was already a known figure in the region; al-Zawahiri’s name was then confined mostly to Egyptian media, but the cleric brought with him an air of seriousness and international focus for the cluster of Arab, Afghan, Punjabi, Kashmiri and Bengali fighters congregating in Afghanistan.

Despite his years in an Egyptian prison, al-Zawahiri, who had studied medicine as a younger man, left his mark on militant Islamist movements in his home country, including an alleged role in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, a leadership role in the Islamic Jihad, and the 1995 attack on the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. He also popularized the writings of Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb, making him well-known among his extremist contemporaries.

Both in their 40s, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden had contrasting physiques. The former was significantly shorter (hardly 5 feet or 152 centimeters tall) and rounder than the tall and slim bin Laden, who was five years his junior — an age gap the slender Saudi appeared to respect.

It was May 26, 1998, and the two men, along with another Saudi radical, Sheikh Taseer, sat in a hall before 13 journalists to announce the merger of a new terror conglomerate, the International Islamic Front. None of them then used the title al-Qaida for the joint venture.

Al-Zawahiri was then leader of the Egypt-based Jama’at-ul-Jehad (Islamic Jihad) and bin Laden told the reporters that the newly formed front had won the support of al-Zawahiri’s organization. The two had a common goal: taking out infidels from the Arabian Peninsula.

That much was announced by bin Laden during the presser, but al-Zawahiri explained the purpose of their new group in a more informal discussion during a break for tea, during which he spun stories promoting their cause. Bin Laden opted to watch, letting the articulate al-Zawahiri indulge reporters’ curiosity about the group’s plans, life in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, and his doctrine of revenge.

Throughout the discussion, al-Zawahiri’s embrace of Islamist fundamentalism at age 15 and his deep dive into radicalism was evident.

He introduced us to loyalists, including Muhammad Showqi al-Islambuli, brother of Khalid Islambuli, the main assailant in Sadat’s murder. He appeared to take special pride announcing that he was also hosting the three sons of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the radical Egyptian cleric with ties to the 1993 bombing at New York’s World Trade Center.

Foreshadowing of larger war

Calling himself a staunch enemy of the U.S. and its allies in the Arab world, he recited a litany of complaints against the West while referencing attacks on U.S. bases and personnel in Saudi Arabia and Somalia, foreshadowing the war that his followers would soon expand. In August that year, terrorists backed by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri attacked U.S. embassies in Tanzania, and Kenya. Around 200 people, including 12 Americans, were killed in the August 7 attacks. The U.S. retaliated weeks later, firing cruise missiles at a training camp in Khost, near where journalists had interviewed the men about two months before.

While al-Zawahiri at the time was already an ideological leader in his movement with bin Laden, the August attacks expanded his public profile.

It was al-Zawahiri who was talking on a satellite phone with a journalist in Peshawar about the terrorist attack in eastern Africa that was traced by the U.S. and used to train Tomahawk missiles on the compound. The two men survived the attack, but the compound crumbled as about 20 Pakistani radicals were killed in an instant.

But that was not the last time that the U.S. missed al-Zawahiri. Intel communities later said he also survived the U.S.-led bombing of the cave complex at Tora Bora, a mountainous range on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in December 2001.

When they were both alive, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri were believed to be living together in Afghanistan under the Taliban’s first reign, from 1996 to 2001. Some videotapes showed them walking together along rocky mountain slopes after the 9/11 attacks. Al-Zawahiri was lucky again in May 2011 when U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, a garrison city in Pakistan. Analysts believed al-Zawahiri was probably hiding somewhere else along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, or perhaps somewhere closer to bin Laden inside Pakistan.

Afghanistan was then not a desirable location for al-Qaida leaders, in part because U.S.-led forces had the ability to strike anywhere within the country. Following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan last August, media reports said the al-Qaida leader felt comfortable moving to a house in central Kabul, where on Sunday a U.S. drone strike killed him while he stood on a balcony.

Source: Voice of America