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The Economist: International
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International
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Political violence and trauma: Beaten but unbowed
PRISON guards beat Mohammed’s head so badly that his eyelids were puffy and purple, and his feet so hard that he could not walk. They hurled abuse and taunts at the 21-year-old Syrian protester. But his sunny resolve was unbroken. “As soon as I can walk, I’m back on the street,” he vowed from his bed in a suburb of Damascus.Violent unrest wreaks havoc on mental health, provoking nightmares, altering behaviour and causing lasting illness. But the link between suffering and trauma is less straightforward than many assume. In research published in 2008 Brian Barber, a psychologist at the University of Tennessee, found that violence had left young Palestinians in Gaza less traumatised than their Bosnian peers, even when stripping out factors such as the levels of bloodshed they had witnessed and whether their homes had been destroyed.The key, he found, lay in how injured people understood the violence. The young Palestinians saw the intifada as a way to end the Israeli occupation. This political framework left them less upset by what they saw. In contrast, many Bosnian youths were mystified by the onset of the war that engulfed...
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Islam and homosexuality: Straight but narrow
ONE leaflet showed a wooden doll hanging from a noose and suggested burning or stoning homosexuals. “God Abhors You” read another. A third warned gays: “Turn or Burn”. Three Muslim men who handed out the leaflets in the English city of Derby were convicted of hate crimes on January 20th. One of them, Kabir Ahmed, said his Muslim duty was “to give the message”.That message—at least in the eyes of religious purists— is uncompromising condemnation. Of the seven countries that impose the death penalty for homosexuality, all are Muslim. Even when gays do not face execution, persecution is endemic. In 2010 a Saudi man was sentenced to 500 lashes and five years in jail for having sex with another man. In February last year, police in Bahrain arrested scores of men, mostly other Gulf nationals, at a “gay party”. Iranian gay men are typically tried on other trumped-up charges. But in September last year three were executed specifically for homosexuality. (Lesbians in Muslim countries tend to have an easier time: in Iran they are sentenced to death only on the fourth conviction.)Gay life in the open in Muslim-majority...
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Neglected tropical diseases: Hot tropic
Lovely swimming for children and parasites
GLOBAL health campaigns like grand goals. On January 30th Bill Gates joined the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), 13 drug-company executives and others in pledging to eradicate or control by 2020 ten of the world’s nastiest diseases, which afflict more than a billion people. Guinea worm, sleeping sickness, bilharzia (which doctors call schistosomiasis) and the others rot tissue and cripple the organs. Even if they do not kill, they stunt children and sap adults’ energies.The new push comes as a bolder set of ambitions hits trouble. As part of the Millennium Development Goals, world leaders promised in 2000 to curb the toll of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis by 2015. That brought a spending splurge—donations for health projects in poor countries more than doubled between 2001 and 2008 (see chart). The death rate for malaria dropped by more than a quarter. But the economic crisis has tightened fists. Christopher Murray of the University of Washington reckons annual spending-growth from 2009 to 2011 was only 4%. Excluding the World Bank’...
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Saving lives: Scattered saviours
Eli Beer: smart bike, phone and idea
ISRAELIS know all too well the need for first aid—and the difficulties of providing it. When Eli Beer was four, in 1978, he saw the carnage after a hijacked bus exploded. In 2001 he was knocked to the ground by a secondary bomb intended to kill first-aiders rushing to the scene of a suicide blast.Conventional ambulances called to such scenes have plenty of fancy equipment, but they start from a central location and often struggle to squeeze through traffic jams. So they often arrive too late: the most gravely injured often die in minutes.Mr Beer has designed something better. His charity, United Hatzalah, co-ordinates a group of 1,700 volunteers scattered around Israel. All are trained in basic first aid. And each has a GPS-enabled smartphone revealing exactly where he or she is.Anyone who sees an emergency can call a central number (1221 in Israel). A smartphone app (a small programme installed on a modern mobile phone) instantly alerts the nearest first aider, who may be only a block away, standing behind a deli counter or dozing in a...
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Privacy laws: Private data, public rules
FIRST came the yodelling, then the pain. The online entrepreneurs and venture capitalists at DLD, a geeks’ shindig this month in Munich, barely had time to recover from their traditional Bavarian entertainment before Viviane Reding, the European Union’s justice commissioner, introduced a new privacy regulation. Ms Reding termed personal data the “currency” of the digital economy. “And like any currency it needs stability and trust,” Ms Reding told the assembled digerati.The EU’s effort (formally published on January 25th) is part of a global government crackdown on the commercial use of personal information. A White House report, out soon, is expected to advocate a consumer-privacy law. China has issued several draft guidelines on the issue and India has a privacy bill in the works. But their approaches differ dramatically. As data whizz across borders, creating workable rules for business out of varying national standards will be hard.Europe’s new privacy regulation is one of the most sweeping. Its first goal is to build a “digital single market”. That will be a welcome change from the patchwork of rules that...
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