by Mark Weston | Jun 22, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security
In a talk I gave at Demos early last year, I wondered whether Islamic extremists in different parts of West Africa, who had hitherto acted in isolation, might one day join up to become a cohesive pan-regional force.
Now it seems that Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, whose activities have centered on Mauritania, Algeria and Mali, is making efforts to link up with Nigeria’s Boko Haram movement, now imaginatively renamed the Taliban, to create a broad-based West African terror group.
AFP reports that AQIM’s leader has told his Nigerian brothers that, “We are ready to train your sons on how to handle weapons, and will give them all the help they need – men, weapons, ammunition and equipment – to enable them to defend our people and push back the Crusaders.” So far, negotiations remain at a fledgling stage, but the intent is there and, given the region’s notoriously porous borders, so too are the means.
by David Steven | Jun 19, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence
Atul Gawande:
Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combated our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.
It should be no wonder that you have not mastered the understanding of them all. No one ever will. That’s why we as doctors and scientists have become ever more finely specialized. If I can’t handle 13,600 diagnoses, well, maybe there are fifty that I can handle—or just one that I might focus on in my research. The result, however, is that we find ourselves to be specialists, worried almost exclusively about our particular niche, and not the larger question of whether we as a group are making the whole system of care better for people.
Via Ezra Klein.
by Alex Evans | Jun 18, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global Dashboard, Influence and networks
Halfway between Copenhagen and Cancun, international climate policy seems to have reached an inflection point – on both policy approach, and narrative framing. Alas, as discussions I’ve taken part in over the last week at both Ditchley and IPPR seem to confirm, the political momentum is all the wrong way, on both counts.
Copenhagen produced a pledge-and-review deal based on a tacit low-ambition consensus between the US and the BASIC countries. Looking ahead to Cancun, all the talk is of sectoral packages for renewables, energy efficiency, avoided deforestation and adaptation – but not binding targets. At Ditchley, I even heard one of the main architects of the Kyoto Protocol saying that voluntary targets and national policies and measures were the way to go, for everyone other than the EU.
There was more of this line of thinking at the IPPR seminar I spoke at yesterday, where one of the other presenters was Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute – one of the main cheerleaders for the technology-led bottom-up approach and, conversely, a key critic of cap-and-trade or indeed the whole idea of carbon pricing.
When, he asked, has that kind of approach ever been a spur for innovation in the past? On the contrary, the key, he says, is to “drive down the price of clean energy technologies with large-scale public investments in research, development, demonstration and deployment”. Kind of like the Apollo program.
But he doesn’t stop there. More fundamentally, Shellenberger says, we’ve had the whole framing wrong. As he argues in his (excellent) book with Ted Nordhaus, he wants “a new politics for a new century – focus on aspirations, not complaints, human possibility, not limits”. So enough with all the doom and gloom. Focus on the possibilities! The new jobs! The gadgets! Green new deal! All must win prizes!
Well, I hate to be the party-pooper, but – seriously? Are we all really drinking this Kool-aid?
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by Alex Evans | Jun 18, 2010 | UK
Over at Guido Fawkes…
Word reaches Guido that a certain new MP is ruffling a few old guard feathers with his arrogance and brutal determination to climb the ladder. Despite barely having an office and working phone Penrith’s Rory Stewart, the Conservative’s self-proclaimed bright star and Afghan rambler, is lobbying his colleagues hard for a spot on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
Though he failed to mention the time he spent as a Labour Party member, he has bullet pointed his “career highlights” in a letter that has been snorted at by some old timers. “It’s highly unusual for a freshman MP to be seeking a spot on such a powerful committee. But then again, Rory Stewart is a highly unusual little man” one told Guido after lunch…
Right, perish the thought that an FAC member should be selected on the basis of actually knowing something about foreign policy. Of course it should be time spent on the backbenches, rather than in Iraq or Afghanistan, that qualifies you.
