PolyMatter: Why Statues are North Korea’s Biggest Export

 

Today in Focus: Ebola is back – can it be contained?

The latest outbreak of Ebola, with more than 2,200 cases and more than 1,500 confirmed deaths in just over a year, is the second largest in history, despite the recent availability of an effective experimental vaccine. Political, security and cultural complications – not least a refusal to believe that Ebola exists – have thwarted efforts to overcome the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s deadly outbreak.

Senior global development reporter Peter Beaumont tells Anushka Asthana about his recent trip to North Kivu, which is at the heart of the recent outbreak. He discusses why some health officials are calling it the most complicated public health emergency in history. Guardian health editor Sarah Boseley, who reported on the 2014 outbreak, looks at how that was contained – and why the situation is potentially far more frightening this time round.

And: the Guardian’s northern editor, Helen Pidd, looks at whether the “northern powerhouse” has been a success five years after its creation.

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The Guardian: As a system, foreign aid is a fraud and does nothing for inequality

he five poorest countries in the world, measured by GDP per capita, are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Uganda, Tajikistan and Haiti.

One might imagine, then, that these countries are among the top recipients of UK aid. Wrong. The main beneficiaries are, in fact, Pakistan, Syria, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Afghanistan. Not one of the five poorest countries is among the top 10 recipients of British aid. [...]

Nor is it any different with multilateral aid (funds channelled through international organisations such as the World Bank rather than directly between donor and recipient). Again, not one of the poorest countries is among the top 10 recipients of multilateral aid. [...]

Half of all international development aid is “tied”, meaning that recipient countries must use it to buy goods and services from the donor nation. As the USAid website used to boast (until the paragraph became too embarrassing and was deleted in 2006): “The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programmes has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the US Agency for International Development’s contracts and grants go directly to American firms.” Aid has “created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans”. Long before Trump entered the White House, USAid was “putting America first”. [...]

Aid not only boosts the economies of rich countries but also promotes their foreign policy aims. As a 2014 report by the US Congressional Research Service put it, aid “can act as both carrot and stick and is a means of influencing events, solving specific problems and projecting US values”.

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statista: The ten countries where it's worst to be female

A new study from the Thomson Reuters Foundation has found that India is the most dangerous country in the world for women. The research was based on a survey of 550 experts on women's issues and criteria included healthcare, discrimination, cultural traditions, sexual/non-sexual violence and human trafficking.

Ending violence against women in India was made into a national priority after a student was raped and murdered on a bus in Delhi five years ago. Experts have now said that the country is not moving fast enough to eradicate danger to women with rape, sexual harassment/harassment and female infanticide still continuing at alarming levels.

The war-ravaged countries of Afghanistan and Syria came second and third in the study while number 10 is certainly a surprising addition. According to experts, the United States makes the top-10 list of the most dangerous countries for women due to the #MeToo and Time's Up campaigns dominating newspaper headlines and media coverage for months. 

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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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Financial Times: Shifting dynamics of a low-carbon future

As climate change forces a shift away from oil and gas, and electric vehicles become more popular, several commodities industry leaders explain how decarbonisation affects demand for resources.

Quartz: Europe’s black population has increased by at least a million over the last decade

There were nearly one million asylum applicants from sub-Saharan Africa in Europe between 2010 and 2017, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from Eurostat. While Pew Research Center isn’t able to speculate whether the inflow of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa will rise at the same pace in the coming years, a separate 2017 Pew Research Center survey conducted in six sub-Saharan countries found that many respondents said they would migrate to another country if they had the chance.

Sub-Saharan migrants in Europe arrive from a diverse set of origins. More than half of migrants who sought asylum in Europe in 2017 were born in Nigeria, South Africa, Somalia, Senegal, Ghana, Angola, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cameroon. Pew Research Center notes that the total number of Somali migrants in Europe increased by 80,000 people between 2010 and 2017. Over the same period, the total population of Eritreans living in Europe increased by about 40,000. [...]

It’s difficult to quantify the overall black population in Europe, simply because many European countries refuse to collect racial data on their citizens. Instead, some European countries collect data on the country of origin of its migrant population and the number of citizens who are children of migrants. With a pan-European black identity starting to emerge in recent years, there are calls for the EU to begin collecting racial data.

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Jacobin Magazine: Assessing Che

First, he shared with them a revolutionary politics from above that allowed him to retain, along with the Castros, the political control and initiative on the island, based on a monolithic conception of a type of socialism immune to any democratic control and initiative from below.

Like the Castro brothers, Guevara had a deep commitment to the one-party state and to an extreme version of vanguardism, which he sometimes took to the level of absurdity.

For example, his response to the social and political conditions he found in the eastern Congo, which he himself acknowledged lacked any of the necessary conditions for socialist revolution — such as the demand for land on the part of the vast rural population, a working class (which did exist in the Katanga region), and a significant imperialist presence that could provoke a sentiment of national resistance — was to create a vanguard Communist Party that would singlehandedly lead the revolution in that part of the country. [...]

Guevara’s personal and political characteristics — his political honesty and his radical egalitarianism — might have made him better suited to being a Communist oppositionist than a long-term Communist ruler who would have needed to live with the growth of inequality and corruption that has accompanied the Cuban Revolution.

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Business Insider: Mesmerizing maps show the global flow of refugees over the last 15 years

Earth TimeLapse, an interactive platform created by Carnegie Mellon University and Robert Muggah, global security expert and research director at the Igarapé Institute, details over a 16-year span from 2000 to 2015 where migrants are leaving and arriving.

Data comes from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Each red dot represents 17 refugees arriving in a country, while yellow dots represent refugees leaving their home country behind.

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Quartz: More people fled conflict in DR Congo than in Syria and Iraq last year

In 2016, around 922,000 people—the highest number of displaced people due to conflict recorded globally—fled their homes in DRC, according to data from the latest Global Report on Internal Displacement by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

Much of the displacement in DRC is linked to the country’s political instability with president Joseph Kabila refusing to leave office after the end of his tenure last December. Political tensions were heightened much earlier as the elections, initially slated for November 2016, have now been postponed with the country’s budget minister saying the DRC cannot afford the $1.8 billion cost of the elections. [...]

While DRC saw the most displacement caused by conflict, globally, there were 6.9 million new internal displacements caused by conflict and violence in 2016. Significantly, Sub-Saharan Africa surpassed the Middle East to become the most affected region, despite Syria, Iraq and Yemen accounting for almost two million new displacements in 2016. Asides from the DRC, incidents across the continent have seen Africa become the most affected region. Nigeria, where a fight against Boko Haram continues across the northeast, and South Sudan, where a fragile peace pact has been broken are among worrying flash-points on the continent.

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Al Jazeera: Tattoos in Kinshasa: Overcoming conflict and taboos

Since he got his first tattoo in 2012, the 35-year-old has covered his body in ink designs. Modern tattoo art is still not fully accepted in Congolese society; the markings are still seen as an imitation of Western influences, rather than remnants of the traditional African practice of body art dating back millennia.

Still, for their bearers, the designs are a way to share their past experiences visually.

According to anthropologist Lars Krutak, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution who has spent more than two decades studying tattoos and indigenous tattooing practices, unlike the instability of the turbulent Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)  with its continuously shifting political, economic and social climates - tattoos provide a sense of permanency and stability, forever imprinted on the skin. [...]

"There are no official tattoo schools in DR Congo. It's the school of the streets," he tells Al Jazeera. Despite his lack of formal training, he claims to have tattooed thousands of people since joining the profession in 2006. The price for a design ranges from $5 to $50, depending on the size and colours.

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Business Insider: You may be surprised by the 10 countries that hold over half the world's refugees

Ten countries, accounting for just 2.5 per cent of global GDP, are sheltering 56 per cent of the world’s 21 million refugees, according to a report published on Tuesday.

The rights group criticised the wealthiest countries for showing “a near absence of leadership and responsibility” while the refugee crisis escalates. [...]

The report highlights the contrast in the number of refugees from Syria taken by its neighbours and by other countries with similar populations.

The UK has taken fewer than 8,000 Syrian refugees since the country’s civil war began in 2011, while Jordan, which has a population almost 10 times smaller than the UK and just 1.2 per cent of its GDP, hosts more than 655,000 Syrian refugees. [...]

“It’s disgraceful that the UK hosts less than one per cent of the world’s refugees when our size and prosperity mean we should do so much more. Desperate families are forced into the hands of traffickers precisely because countries like ours have pulled up the drawbridge. Smaller, poorer neighbouring countries are left to try and cope, and when they can’t, more people are forced to try to move on, seeking a basic level of safety

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