The Atlantic: Vaccines Alone Won’t Beat Ebola

In the Congo, if you’re sick, you’re usually surrounded. Medical services are thin, so family members shoulder the burden of nursing their loved ones back to health. At one hospital I visited (well before the current outbreak), a family had camped outside a treatment building, waiting for their relatives inside to recuperate. Their laundry was drying on a washing line. “In an outbreak, you want to separate sick and healthy people, but here, if people are sick, everyone’s there,” one survivor told me. “Here, for we who live in communities, it is solitude that kills us.”

That mindset continues after death. Families will clean and dress the bodies of their loved ones. They’ll caress, kiss, and embrace them. Spouses might even spend a night next to their deceased partners. Through these bonds of affection, Ebola, which spreads through bodily fluids, can easily jump from one host into an entire family. The worst thing about the virus is not its deeply exaggerated bloodiness, but its ability to corrupt the bonds of community. It is a pathogen well-suited to a world where sickness and death are met with touch and affection. [...]

By that she means: finding infected people and tracking their contacts; ensuring hygienic practices that keep infections from spreading; and engaging with communities. These are old-school measures. Public Health 101. But they’re also the bedrock of any outbreak response. They’re vital for diseases that have no available vaccines or treatments, like Lassa fever which is currently breaking out in Liberia, or Nipah which has risen again in India. And they’re still vital when vaccines are available. [...]

For a start, there’s a language barrier. The Congo has upward of 200 languages. In Bikoro, around 90 percent of people speak Lingala, the main local dialect; to reach the people who don’t, the ministry is also translating its messages into N’Tomba, which is spoken by 40 percent of the region.

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The Atlantic: How the U.S. Became the World’s Largest Food-Aid Donor

Every December, Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” rings out at malls and holiday parties across the United States and the United Kingdom. But that earworm of a song was actually originally written in response to the devastating famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s—and it’s far from the famine’s only legacy. Both the hunger and the relief effort were so enormous that they defined a generation, and forced a major reevaluation of how food aid works. After Ethiopia, many countries decided that handing out cash or vouchers was a cheaper, quicker, and more effective way to feed the hungry, as opposed to literally giving food. Experts began to focus on whether the food itself was the right kind—whether it contained the right mix of nutrients to help malnourished kids recover. And an increasing number of governments refocused their aid efforts exclusively on emergency relief, rather than development.

The United States, however, remained committed to giving food as aid. This episode, we talk to Barry Riley, the author of The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence, in order to understand why the United States overcame its initial reluctance to feeding the hungry overseas, and explore the impact of its more recent career as the world’s largest food-aid donor. From surplus grain stored in retired battleships to Cold War maneuvers, America’s history has set up its enduring role as the largest provider of food, rather than money. Meanwhile, we check in with the seasoned food-aid professionals Bea Rogers and Patrick Webb at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University to investigate what the latest science can tell us about the best way to feed hungry people.

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Politico: 4 biggest risks to Europe’s 2019 election

Most worrying perhaps in a new EU-funded Eurobarometer survey of 27,600 voters across Europe, released on Wednesday, is that 44 percent say that the EU is headed in the wrong direction, against 32 who say it is headed the right way. That points to a further surge for anti-establishment and Euroskeptic parties. [...]

Together, the European Parliament and European Commission are planning to spend more than €30 million on get-out-the-vote advertising and support, aimed in particular at young people and those with soft support for the EU. [...]

That’s on par with surveys conducted prior to the 2014 European Parliament elections, in which turnout dropped for the seventh time in a row to less than 43 percent. In Slovakia just 13 percent voted.  [...]

Between them the center-right European People’s Party and the Continent’s Socialists won 53 percent of the vote in 2014. This time the Socialists in particular are in trouble: Expected poor showings in nearly all the big EU countries including Germany, France, Italy and Poland mean dozens of socialist seats are at risk, and with them Parliament’s pro-EU majority.  [...]

None of the parties plans to run primaries to select their spitzenkandidat and voters cannot cast a ballot for them directly. There’s also the issue of quality. Under the current system, serving prime ministers and presidents are unlikely to run because it would require them to campaign for the Commission post for months.

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Independent: These are some very important reasons why the government’s plan for the Irish border after Brexit will never, ever work

The magnificent Independent scoop that Brussels has instantly rejected May’s new time-limited backstop as a rowing back from what the UK has already agreed should come as no shock. May called the phase one backstop option something that “no prime minister could ever agree to”, a few weeks after being the prime minister that agreed to it. [...]

For some reason, as yet unexplained, Brexiteers are vividly certain that the UK's market of 60 million will be able to get better trade deals than the 500 million of the EU. But let's indulge the dream, and say the UK gets better trade deals than the EU could muster. This would mean, for instance, Northern Irish dairy is privy to a better trade deal with Malaysia than the Republic’s dairy is. This would create a huge financial incentive for dairy made on the island to be considered of “Northern Irish” (and therefore UK) origin – but how can this be policed without a hard border or technology yet to exist?  [...]

At the minute, we're trying to precariously and painstakingly piece together all of the best parts of the EEA/single market and customs union instead of simply entering them as the only realistic way to obtain those advantages. It's like needing to get to the town over and electing to turn your attention to a collection of car parts to build your transport from scratch rather than boarding the bus across the street. Yes, you would need to pay and you don't have control over the exact route taken to your destination, but at least the bus will land you there. All the while instead, you’re fiddling with some nuts and bolts, trying to work out how to make a road-worthy car unlike any ever made, in a stupidly unrealistic timeframe, oh, and without wing mirrors – you've an irrational thing against them. It's all that needlessly and stubbornly painful.

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Politico: Europeans love the EU (and populists too)

The survey, carried out for the European Parliament by Kantar Public, a consultancy, found that 48 percent of EU citizens surveyed agree their voice counts in the EU, while 46 percent disagree — and Brexit appears to have improved the pro-EU mood. Before the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU in 2016, just 37 percent of Europeans agreed their voice counted in the EU.

However, citizens feel more connected to national politics than pan-European: 63 percent of Europeans agree their voice counts at the national level, with that figure topping 90 percent in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.  [...]

Just 38 percent consider these new parties a threat to democracy — not a view shared by many of the old guard — and 63 percent of those aged 24 and under agreed “new political parties and movements can find solutions better” than existing parties. [...]

Better news for the EU is that 67 percent believe their country has benefited from EU membership, according to the survey, and 60 percent say being part of the bloc remains a good thing. (12 percent say it’s bad for their country.) In 2011, at the height of the EU’s financial and economic crises, just 47 percent said EU membership was a good thing. [...]

The results varied widely between countries. There is a great deal of concern about immigration in Italy (where 66 percent said it is a priority issue), Malta (65 percent), and Hungary (62 percent).

Fighting youth unemployment and support for economic growth are the top concerns in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Cyprus and Croatia. Dutch, Swedish and Danish citizens describe “social protection of citizens” as their top concern.

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Quartz: Italy’s new “political government” will be a technical government, minus the expertise

Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, leaders of the two groups, have agreed on a government plan (a “government contract,” as they called it) which will try and deliver their many electoral promises. From anti-immigration policies, to tax cuts for the wealthy, overall it looks like the most right-wing program Italy’s had in decades. Civil law professor Giuseppe Conte—known to Italians for defending the creators of a sham stem cell treatment administered on a terminally ill child—has been named to be prime minister. [...]

But only a few weeks later, while still technically mayor, Renzi turned on Letta and was named prime minister of a coalition government. One can see why Italians may be disappointed, and why the opposition, and especially the Five Star Movement, would harshly attack Renzi. It was not only because his coalition government was with the center right and one of Silvio Berlusconi’s minions, but Renzi himself had not even been voted in parliament (something that is perfectly acceptable within Italy’s constitution).

These became leitmotifs of the Five Star opposition, and informed the 2018 platform: They would reject any coalition or technical governments, and only govern with a full majority, and voters would know that the prime minister was “elected” (though the prime minister remains named by the majority parties, not voted). [...]

To mark a change, the actual leaders assured Italians that this will be a “political government”—but looking at it closely, it doesn’t look too different from their despised technical governments, albeit with no expertise. Conte is a the perfect exemplification of this: A professor, he has the shell of a technocrat, without any substance—only a day after his name was circulated, allegations that he lied on his résumé about a New York University degree emerged.

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The Guardian: Donald Trump cannot block anyone on Twitter, court rules

In ruling against Trump, the court pointed to past White House assurances that the president’s Twitter account is an official political channel. In her 75-page opinion, the United States district judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote: “The president presents the @realDonaldTrump account as being a presidential account as opposed to a personal account and, more importantly, uses the account to take actions that can be taken only by the president as president.” [...]

“Because no government official is above the law and because all government officials are presumed to follow the law once the judiciary has said what the law is, we must assume that the president and [digital director Dan] Scavino will remedy the blocking we have held to be unconstitutional,” the judge wrote. [...]

“When the account serves as the official mouthpiece of a democratically elected national leader, then I as a citizen have a right to read whatever diarrhea is pouring out of said mouthpiece,” he told the Guardian.

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