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Archive for the ‘Terrorism’ Category

A new study has found that aid channeled into vaccination has had a significant effect on improving childhood vaccination rates in the poorest countries.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, writing in the current edition of The Lancet (pdf), have analyzed how funding provided by aid donors through the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization has raised the percentage of children receiving the combined diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis vaccine between 1995 and 2004.

This independent assessment of the effect of GAVI on DTP3 coverage shows that GAVI has contributed to increased DTP3 coverage in countries with baseline DTP3 coverage of 65% or less at their first approval for GAVI funding. We estimate the cost to GAVI to be about $8·40–20 per additional child immunised. This estimate is close to the proposed cost to GAVI of $20 per additional immunised child.

Once again, immunization has been shown to be one of the most cost-effective interventions in development. 

Jackie Ashley is good in the Guardian today:

To be a liberal does not mean shrugging your shoulders at those who loathe you and hoping that somehow everyone will get on. A world divided between Christian bible-belt fundamentalists, powered by US military and oil interests, and Islamist Qur'an-belt fundamentalists, ruled by misogynistic mullahs, is a bad world, period.

Quite so.  But let's be clear: the battle of ideas is not between Christian and Islamic religions and cultures. The real battle of ideas is between rational, reality-based thought and religions of all kinds.

I wrote earlier this week about China’s growing role in Africa.  Here are six further insights into the implications of China’s push into Africa. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Sullivan yesterday:

I’m aware of one person who clearly stated before the war that he believed that Saddam had no WMDs. That was Scott Ritter. This is not the same as saying that we didn’t know for sure, or should have waited some more; or that containment could have worked for a few months or years longer. I mean: an anti-war commentator, writer or speaker who clearly said that Saddam had no WMDs before we invaded and that therefore the war was illegitimate.

Robin Cook, in his resignation speech as Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom on 18 March 2003:

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the
commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device
capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It isn’t just hindsight.  

The WHO and UNICEF announced today that The Measles Initiative has halved measles deaths.

Global deaths due to measles fell by 48%, from 871 000 in 1999 to an estimated 454 000 in 2004, thanks to major national immunization activities and better access to routine childhood immunization …

The largest reduction occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest burden of the disease, where estimated measles cases and deaths dropped by 60%.

Tell that to people who say that aid does not work.

Here are some Danish products you might want to add to your shopping basket this week, as a way to stand up and be counted:

• Lurpak butter
• Anything sold by Arla Foods
• Tuborg beer, or Carlsberg beer if you must (either is 8 times better than Budweiser)
• Danish movies (I don’t recommend Lars Von Trier if you want to stay happy)
• Aalborg Aquavit (that’s schnapps to you and me)
• Havarti cheese (excellent on a bagel – try the dill or cumin ones)
• Toms chocolate and Royal Dansk biscuits
• That Bang & Olufsen hifi or TV you always wanted
• Some new H2O clothes
• Ecco shoes
• Some Bodum kitchenware – give up bad design for good 
• Lego for the kids
• A poster of Helena Christensen – every house needs one.

Full disclosure: my partner comes from a family of Danish dairy farmers whose livelihoods are threatened by this boycott.

Update: See also:

• Danish.com
• Danish Food Shop
• Danish Deli
• Danelink.com

I thought Charles Kennedy’s statement yesterday was brave and dignified.  I am not going to comment on that.  Instead I want to reflect on the role of Daisy McAndrew in all this.

Mr Kennedy’s statement was triggered by the intelligence that ITV News chief political reporter, Daisy McAndrew, planned to report the story on the ITV evening news.

So who is Daisy McAndrew?  In the 1990s, as Daisy Sampson, she was a freelance journalist, scraping a living by hanging around the House of Commons doing tedious profiles for the (unreadable) House Magazine. 

Her big break came in November 1999, when she became Press Secretary to none other than  Charles Kennedy.  In a gushing piece of self-praise, her (self authored) profile on the BBC website says:

Kennedy was widely credited as having by far the best
campaign of the 2001 General Election – in no small part down to
Daisy’s handling of his press and image.

Since the 2001 Election, Ms McAndrew has risen fairly rapidly, though without distinction, first co-presenting The Daily Politics with Andrew Neil (is it possible that Mr Neil chooses his co-hosts on the basis of something other than the size of their intelligence?) and then presenting the LBC evening radio programme.

At ITN, Ms McAndrew’s reporting has been pedestrian at best, and she has not broken any major stories. Her editors must have been beginning to wonder why they had appointed her.  Her ‘scoop’ yesterday, reporting the worst-kept secret in Westminster – may have lifted her reputation in the news industry.

I hope it does not.  This is not journalism, it is betrayal of confidence of a former employer.  In my view, there is little or no public interest in reporting the details of Mr Kennedy’s private medical condition. But even if there were, it was not the story that Ms McAndrew should have broken. Ms McAndrew owes a duty of confidentiality to Mr Kennedy, with whom she worked closely at a personal level.  Her career in journalism was given a significant boost by her two years working as his Press Secretary – indeed, if it were not for him, she would probably still be labouring over profiles in the House Magazine.  Now she has decided to give her career a further lift by spilling the beans on the man who gave her her first real break and whose trust she has now betrayed.

I am writing this by the fire inside this restaurant, having hiked here from Granada.

We went to see Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour on Saturday, live here on Berkeley in the Zellerbach Hall.

Youssou N’Dour became well-known outside Senegal after his collaboration with Peter Gabriel, formerly of Genesis, in the mid 1980s. He had popular success in Europe with "Seven Seconds", a big hit in 1994 with Neneh Cherry.

He has faced some criticism in recent years that his career has moved too far from its West African roots, and pandered too heavily to pop tastes in rich countries. The fast and furious mbalax (Wolof word for rhythm) rhythms that made him famous with his  first album, Immigrés, have been less and less in evidence in his recent work.

N’Dour recorded his latest album, Egypt, more than five years ago; but it has only just been released (delayed, in part, by the events of September 11, 2001.)  The album is a homage to the caliphs and saints of Senegal’s mystical ‘Sufi’ version of Islam.  The music draws from the largely Arab and middle Eastern tones of the streets of Cairo.  He worked with Egyptian musician Fathy Salama. On the album he does not sing a single work in English, though he did one song in English during the concert.

Egypt is an amazing combination of N’Dour’s voice with the drones of Egyptian reed instruments, the sweeping violins, cello and bass, and twittering African flutes. All the music is performed accoustically.  The power of N’Dour’s voice, with its enormous range, is much in evidence, and he demonstrates a more subtle touch than his earlier work.

You would be disappointed if you were expecting the foot-tapping, hip swaying mbalax rhythms of N’Dour’s youth. But it is music to bring the world together, combining Arab melodies, North African rhythms and West African vocals.

One admirable feature of Youssou N’Dour’s work, and part of the reason for his enduring popularity in Africa, is that he continues to make cassettes and albums specifically packaged and targeted at the African market.

Norman Geras of Normblog interviews a different blogger each week.  I find these a fascinating insight into the many bloggers whose virtual company I enjoy. These are people with whom I debate, listen, learn, laugh, bicker, celebrate and mourn. And yet I know very little about them. Normblog’s profiles fill that gap.

Norm’s profile this week is of Chris Dillow, the author of Stumbling and Mumbling. Chris manages to combine passion and righteous indignation with a sometimes deadpan delivery (today’s entry considering whether suicide bombers are rational is a case in point).

Here is a sample:

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.’ – John Stuart Mill

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Managerialism.

I am full of admiration for Chris, which is why I am blushing furiously at having been named by him as one of his favourite bloggers. The feeling is mutual.

In an amazing announcement, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced today that it will donate $258 million to research on malaria, which kills 2,000 African children each day.

See more at my Vaccines for Development blog. 

My father, Brian Barder was on Radio 4′s Broadcasting House this morning, to talk about diplomatic immunity.  The US Embassy in London has apparently decided that it should not pay the congestion charge.

I assume the aim was to bring on a crusty retired diplomat to make a fool of himself by arguing for the absolute necessity of diplomatic immunity to enable diplomats to park with impunity, drink and drive, molest small children and so on. If so, they failed. Though I am admittedly biased, I thought he did very well explaining why diplomatic immunity makes sense, how it is limited (by the ability to expel a diplomat who flouts it) and why the US Embassy in London is wrong to try to avoid the congestion charge.

But don’t take my word for it: here is an MP3 file (2.9Mb) which you can download and play on your computer (or iPod) with the interview.  Alternatively, for the rest of the week (only) you can hear the whole programme here.

Update: See Brian Barder’s blog entry for details of why diplomats, even American ones, should pay the congestion charge.

Lionel Shriver had an interesting piece in the Guardian on September 17th. I’ve only just caught up with it, by way of Natalie at Philobiblion (with whom I completely agree).

Shriver says that as we have become richer, we have become less interested in having children, choosing instead to do other things with our lives.  I certainly recognize some of myself in some of these thoughts:

We are less concerned with leading a good life than the good life. We are less likely than our predecessors to ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask if we are happy. We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty as the pitfalls of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don’t especially care what happens once we’re dead. As we age – oh, so reluctantly! – we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not ‘Did I serve family, God and country?’ but ‘Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat?’ We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun. … In deciding what in times past was never a choice, we don’t consider the importance of raising another generation of our own people, however we might choose to define them. The question is whether kids will make us happy.

But Shriver is completely off beam with her suggestion that there is something virtuous about having children.   She talks of her decision, and that of her thinly disguised pseudonymous friends not to have children as an "economic, cultural and moral disaster".  She describes a decision to be childless as "the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all" which "ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy", and concludes:

When Islamic fundamentalists accuse the west of being decadent, degenerate and debauched, you have to wonder if maybe they’ve got a point.

So Shriver apparently believes that people who have children are selflessly perpetuating the human race, while those of us who choose not to have children are selfishly living for today, putting our own enjoyment before the well-being of the planet and the spieces.

This is complete balderdash.  I have nothing against people choosing to have children: for many people it is a very fulfilling and important part of their lives.  Furthermore, I would generally support people’s right to have children. But it is not a selfless sacrifice on their behalf for which I should be expected to express gratitude.  Parents choose to follow the strong instinct to propagate their own genes, and they enter into parenthood anticipating an enormous pleasure resulting from bringing up children.  In some countries, parents also see children as an investment in their own future.  Few people have children out of a sense of the social good of doing so; and if that were their motive, they would have made a miscalcuation about where the greater social good lies.  Increasing the number of people with whom we have to share the earth’s finite resources does not make us, or future generations, better off.  So while I am happy to tolerate the decision of people to have children, I do not accept that those who have children are selflessly acting in the interests of humanity.

Conversely, it is true that some people have chosen to remain childless because they think that children are would interfere with their trekking holidays or marathon training.  But there are also many people who feel that the contribution they can make to the world is much greater if they do not spend their time and money raising children.  Many such people are are sacrificing the chance to have their own children in order to create a better world, including for the children of others.

All of which makes it particularly galling that those of us who choose to remain childless should be required to subsidise so heavily those who choose to propagate their DNA. 

None of this is meant to argue for, or against, having children.  Make up your own mind, and do what you prefer.  But don’t give me any moralistic lectures about the sacrifices that parents make, or the selfishness of choosing to remain childless.  And don’t expect me to pay for the expensive choice that you have made.

Splendid contribution from Chris at Stumbling and Mumbling, who asks what a coherent set of left-wing economic policies would look like.

He offers:

1. Macro markets to enable workers to insure against falling demand.
2. A citizens basic income.
3. Asset redistribution, including through inheritance taxes
4. Dismantling the corporate welfare state – the DTI and CAP.

An excellent start. I would propose the following policies as part of a left wing economic policy agenda:

5. Overhaul competition policy – strengthen the Office of Fair Trading by increasing its powers and resources, crack down on cartels, price fixing, monopoly and oligopolies; break up market dominant companies.
6. Broaden the base of income tax to remove allowances and tax breaks, including equality of taxes for earned and un-earned income, no separate allowance for capital gains, taxation of capital gains on primary residence, taxation of trust incomes and non-domiciles; and lower income tax rates accordingly
7. Abolish all tariffs, quotas and other trade barriers
8. Introduce a carbon energy tax
9. Relax immigration controls for both skilled and unskilled labour (I would favour completely open borders) – which would benefit both UK citizens and the poor internationally

Jim at Our Word is Our Weapon splendidly refutes the graph published by Fredrik Erixon that purports to show a negative relationship between aid and growth. (See also Jeff Sachs’s response to Erixon).

As Jim points out, these very simple purported relationships tell us almost nothing.  Proper statistical analysis of the relationship between aid and growth finds a robust positive relationship.

Regular readers will recall that I occasionally take Tim Worstall to task for some of his opinions about development, especially his articles at TechCentralStation. For example, I disagreed with him on the role of the supply side in development).  I don’t mean it personally: Tim is the man for whom the term "irrepressible" was invented.

It is with a mixture of pleasure and surprise that I can report that his article today on trade is, in my humble opinion, not bad at all.  Tim rightly draws attention to the connection between the consumption of physical and natural capital and the level of poverty (ie poor countries tend to have to run down their natural endowments more rapidly than do the rich). However,  the relationship between poverty and trade is more complex than he suggests: free trade is certainly an important component in development, but it is not the only determinant of how quickly countries will lift themselves from poverty.  Nonetheless, I share his hope that rich countries will accelerate progress to free trade at the WTO Ministerial Meeting in December, in the interests both of rich and poor countries.

As an aside, I cannot resist drawing attention to his choice of TechCentralStation as a platform for his writings. TechCentralStation is a right-wing, corporate lobbying front. I personally wouldn’t want my articles sandwiched between articles advocating Intelligent Design. I know Tim has got to earn a living somehow, but this isn’t an organization whose money I would be happy to take.

Tim has edited an anthology of the best of British bloggers in 2005, 2005 Blogged, which will be coming out later this year.  You can order it here from Amazon (buying it after clicking that link will give me a small commission).

Kudos to Gordon Brown for getting the new International Finance Facility for Immunization off the ground.  Vaccines are one of the most cost-effective (and least corruptible) ways to save lives in developing countries.

Read about it here in my "day job" blog over at the Center for Global Development. 

Update: 12 September – see this intelligent post at Stumbling and Mumbling on this topic. 

A study in The Lancet (free registration required) measures the success of a partnership to reduce measles in Africa, the Measles Initiative, started in 2001. Initial partners were the American Red Cross, the WHO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United Nations Foundation, and UNICEF. Subsequently, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Church of Latterday Saints, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Children (GAVI) have joined the partnership. Partnership funds permitted the financing of measles campaigns.

Between 2000 and June, 2003, 82·1 million children were targeted for vaccination during initial SIA [supplemental immunisation activities - ie campaigns] in 12 countries and follow-up SIA in seven countries. The average decline in the number of reported measles cases was 91%. In 17 of the 19 countries, measles case-based surveillance confirmed that transmission of measles virus, and therefore measles deaths, had been reduced to low or very low rates. The total estimated number of deaths averted in the year 2003 was 90 043. Between 2000 and 2003 in the African Region as a whole, we estimated that the percentage decline in annual measles deaths was around 20% (90 043 of 454 000).

Source: M Otten, R Kezaala, , A Fall, B Masresha, , R Martin, L Cairns, R Eggers, R Biellik, M Grabowsky, P Strebel, J-M Okwo-Bele and D Nshimirimana, "Public-health impact of accelerated measles control in the WHO African Region 2000–03". The Lancet Volume 366, Number 9488, 3 September 2005

Overall, the Measles Initiative has mobilized more than US $144 million and has helped 33 African countries to vaccinate more than 150 million children, saving more than 500,000 lives. It costs less than a dollar to vaccinate a child against measles.

The Guardian has an online photograph exhibition about the eight Millennium Development Goals.

Jeff Sachs’s introduction says: 

This remarkable exhibition of photographs on behalf of the Millennium Development Goals brilliantly highlights our common humanity. We look at photos of people living in extreme poverty but see first and foremost their humanity and spirit and dedication, even in the midst of extreme deprivation. Their eyes don’t call for our pity but for our camaraderie and partnership and empathy.

Around 1 billion people on the planet struggle for their very survival each day, and thousands lose that struggle, succumbing to hunger, illness, and natural hazards simply because they are too poor to stay alive.

There is no reason for this kind of suffering in the 21st century. The people we see are fully capable of becoming highly productive and secure members of the world community, if they are just given a helping hand.

I commend to you this very funny article in the satirical magazine, The Onion: 

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, ‘I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.’ Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

Hat tip: Brad De Long