Tag Archives: Crisis

As drug supplies run short, Egyptians turn to herbal remedies

Herbal medicine worker taking spices to make medicine

By Mohamed Zaki and Mohamed Abd El-Ghany

In the Cairo working class neighborhood of Basateen, dozens can be seen lining up outside a decades-old herbal spice shop with pyramid-shaped stacks of jars on display, filled with everything from honey and ginger to camel’s hay.

Apothecaries say there is a roughly 70-80 percent increase in sales after a series of harsh economic reforms hit medicine supply in pharmacies across the country and increased the cost of some generic and even life-saving drugs.

Store owner Samy al-Attar – whose last name is Arabic for apothecary – says a knowledgeable apothecary can find substitutes for drugs treating almost all non-terminal illnesses.

Just like pharmacies, the walls inside al-Attar’s store are lined with drawers and containers. But rather than pharmaceutical drugs, they hold herbs, each said to have its own unique healing property.

Customers impatiently crowd outside the shop window, where employees can be seen dashing around the tiny interior, choosing from a variety of textures and colors, filling clear plastic bags with orders.

Al-Attar’s role is like many pharmacists. Customers explain their symptoms and he produces a concoction of spices and herbs along with a method of administration.

Egypt’s health ministry is in the middle of negotiations with pharmaceutical companies over a 15 percent increase in prices of locally-produced drugs, and a 20 percent increase in the prices of imported ones.

Local spices and herbs, meanwhile, cost between 5 and 10 Egyptian pounds ($0.27-0.54) per kilogram.

($1 = 18.5000 Egyptian pounds)

(Writing by Seham Eloraby; Editing by Ahmed Aboulenein and Mark Potter)

Michigan governor expects no charges over Flint crisis

Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder in Lansing, Michigan, U.S.,

(Reuters) – Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said he had “no reason to be concerned” he would be charged in connection with the Flint drinking water crisis that exposed city residents to high levels of lead, the Detroit Free Press reported on Thursday.

Snyder made the comments to the newspaper on Wednesday, the day after two Flint emergency managers appointed by the governor were indicted on felony charges of conspiring to violate safety rules.

“I have no reason to be concerned,” Snyder was quoted as saying, while acknowledging he could not speak on behalf of state Attorney General Bill Schuette. Both Snyder and Schuette are Republicans.

Snyder told the paper much of the $3.5 million in taxes he is using for his criminal defense was being spent to find and prepare records requested by Schuette and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is also investigating the water scandal.

Schuette has filed 43 criminal charges against 13 current and former state and local officials, including the emergency managers this week.

Snyder’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the interview.

Flint has been at the center of a public health crisis since last year, when tests found high amounts of lead in blood samples taken from children in the poor, predominantly black city of about 100,000 residents.

Critics have called for charges to be brought against the governor, who has been in office since 2011, as well as other high-ranking state officials. Snyder has said he believes he did nothing criminally wrong.

Asked at a news conference on Tuesday whether the investigation would lead to charges against senior state officials, Schuette said no one was excluded from the probe.

Flint’s water contamination was linked to a switch of its source to the Flint River from Lake Huron in April 2014, a change made in an attempt to cut costs, while the city was under state-run emergency management.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Lisa Von Ahn)

At odds over Brexit, UK nations hold ‘frustrating’ talks on common stance

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa

By Kylie MacLellan

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Theresa May tried to persuade the leaders of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on Monday to work with her government on a common Brexit negotiating position, but the Scottish leader dismissed the meeting as “deeply frustrating”.

May says that while the devolved governments of the UK’s three smaller nations should give their views on what the terms of Brexit should be, they must not undermine the UK’s strategy by seeking separate settlements with the EU.

“I don’t know what the UK’s negotiating position is because they can’t tell us,” Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said after talks at May’s Downing Street office.

“I can’t undermine something that doesn’t exist, it doesn’t appear to me at the moment that there is a UK negotiating strategy,” she told Sky News television.

While England and Wales voted for Brexit in a June referendum, Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU, setting the devolved governments in Edinburgh and Belfast on a collision course with the UK’s central government in London.

This could lead to a constitutional crisis, and potentially to Scottish independence and renewed political tensions in Northern Ireland.

At the meeting with Sturgeon and the Welsh and Northern Irish leaders, May proposed setting up a new body to give the three devolved governments, which have varying degrees of autonomy from London, a formal avenue to express their views.

“Working together, the nations of the United Kingdom will make a success of leaving the European Union — and we will further strengthen our unique and enduring union as we do so,” May said in a statement after the talks.

But Sturgeon struck a very different tone as she emerged.

“What I’m not prepared to do … is stand back and watch Scotland driven off a hard Brexit cliff edge because the consequences in lost jobs, lost investment and lower living standards are too serious,” she said.

CONFLICTING PRIORITIES

The British government, which has promised to kick off formal divorce talks with the EU before the end of March, has said it will negotiate a bespoke deal on behalf of the whole United Kingdom with the bloc’s other 27 members.

Sturgeon said she would make specific proposals over the next few weeks to keep Scotland in the single market even if the rest of the UK left, and that May had said she was prepared to listen to options.

“So far those words are not matched by substance or actions and that is what has got to change,” Sturgeon said.

Sturgeon, head of the Scottish National Party, has said her government is preparing for all possibilities, including independence from the UK, after Britain leaves the EU. She wants each of the UK’s four assemblies to get a vote on the proposed negotiating package.

In Northern Ireland, there are fears that Brexit could undermine a 1998 peace deal and lead to the reintroduction of unpopular and cumbersome controls on the border with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member.

Northern Ireland’s First Minister Arlene Foster said the devolved nations had to be at “the heart of the process” so that issues relevant to them could be tackled as they arose.

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones said it was difficult for the devolved administrations to influence the process when there was so much uncertainty over what the government was seeking.

Jones said he had argued very strongly for “full and unfettered access” to the EU’s single market, which is in doubt because EU leaders say it would require Britain to continue to accept EU freedom of movement rules.

One of the central planks of the pro-Brexit campaign was that exiting the EU would give Britain greater control over immigration and help reduce the numbers arriving in the country.

(Additional reporting by Elisabeth O’Leary, William James and Kate Holton; Editing by Estelle Shirbon and Robin Pomeroy)

Hurricane Matthew hammers Haiti and Cuba, bears down on U.S.

Damage from Hurricane Matthew

By Makini Brice and Sarah Marsh

LES CAYES, Haiti/GUANTANAMO, Cuba (Reuters) – Hurricane Matthew, the fiercest Caribbean storm in almost a decade, hit Cuba and Haiti with winds of well over 100 miles-per-hour on Tuesday, pummeling towns, farmland and resorts and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to take cover.

Dubbed by the U.N. the worst humanitarian crisis to hit Haiti since a devastating 2010 earthquake, the Category Four hurricane unleashed torrential rain on the island of Hispaniola that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.

As it barreled towards the United States, the eye of the storm had moved off the northeastern coast of Cuba by Tuesday night, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

At least four people were killed in the Dominican Republic by collapsing walls and mudslides, as well as two in Haiti, where communications in the worst-hit areas were down, making it hard for authorities to assess the scale of the damage.

“Haiti is facing the largest humanitarian event witnessed since the earthquake six years ago,” said Mourad Wahba, the U.N. Secretary-General’s Deputy Special Representative for Haiti.

Over 200,000 people were killed in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, by the January 2010 earthquake.

Matthew was blowing sustained winds of 140 mph (230 kph) or more for much of Tuesday, though as night fell, the windspeed eased to about 130 mph, the NHC said.

Early reports suggested that Cuba had not been hit as hard as Haiti, where the situation was described as “catastrophic” in the port town of Les Cayes.

In the Cuban city of Guantanamo, streets emptied as people moved to shelters or inside their homes.

Matthew is likely to remain a powerful hurricane through at least Thursday night as it sweeps through the Bahamas towards Florida and the Atlantic coast of the southern United States, the NHC said. The storm is expected to be very near the east cost of Florida by Thursday evening, the center added.

The governor of South Carolina ordered the evacuation of more than 1 million people from Wednesday afternoon.

With communications out across most of Haiti and a key bridge impassable because of a swollen river, there was no immediate word on the full extent of potential casualties and damage from the storm in the poorest country in the Americas.

But Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told reporters in Washington the U.S. Navy was considering sending an aircraft carrier and other ships to the region to aid relief efforts.

The United States has already offered Haiti the use of some helicopters, said Haitian Interior Minister Francois Anick Joseph, who added that damage to housing and crops in the country was apparently extensive.

Twice destroyed by hurricanes in the 18th century, Les Cayes was hit hard by Matthew.

“The situation in Les Cayes is catastrophic, the city is flooded, you have trees lying in different places and you can barely move around. The wind has damaged many houses,” said Deputy Mayor Marie Claudette Regis Delerme, who fled a house in the town of about 70,000 when the wind ripped the roof off.

One man died as the storm crashed through his home in the nearby beach town of Port Salut, Haiti’s civil protection service said. He had been too sick to leave for a shelter, officials said. The body of a second man who went missing at sea was also recovered, the government said. Another fisherman was killed in heavy seas over the weekend as the storm approached.

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

As much as 3 feet (1 meter) of rain was forecast to fall over hills in Haiti that are largely deforested and prone to flash floods and mudslides, threatening villages as well as shantytowns in the capital Port-au-Prince.

The hurricane has hit Haiti at a time when tens of thousands of people are still living in flimsy tents and makeshift dwellings because of the 2010 earthquake.

“Farms have been hit really hard. Things like plantains, beans, rice – they’re all gone,” said Hervil Cherubin, country director in Haiti for Heifer International, a nonprofit organization that is working with 30,000 farming families across Haiti. “Most of the people are going to have to start all over again. Whatever they accumulated the last few years has been all washed out.”

Matthew was churning around 20 miles (32 km) northwest of the eastern tip of Cuba at 11 p.m. EDT (0300 GMT). It was moving north at about 8 miles per hour (13 kph), the NHC said.

Cuba’s Communist government traditionally puts extensive efforts into saving lives and property in the face of storms, and authorities have spent days organizing teams of volunteers to move residents to safety and secure property.

The storm thrashed the tourist town of Baracoa in the province of Guantanamo, passing close to the disputed U.S. Naval base and military prison.

The U.S. Navy ordered the evacuation of 700 spouses and children along with 65 pets of service personnel as the storm approached. U.S. President Barack Obama had earlier canceled a trip to Florida scheduled for Wednesday because of the potential impact of the storm, the White House said.

A hurricane watch was in effect for Florida from an area just north of Miami Beach to the Volusia-Brevard county line, near Cape Canaveral, which the storm could reach on Thursday, the hurricane center said.

Tropical storm or hurricane conditions could affect parts of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina later this week, even if the center of Matthew remained offshore, the NHC said.

Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency for Florida on Monday, designating resources for evacuations and shelters and putting the National Guard on standby.

(Reporting by Joseph Guyler Delva in Port-au-Prince and Makini Brice in Les Cayes; Additional reporting by Marc Frank in Cuba and Jorge Pineda in Dominican Republic; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel and Dave Graham; Editing by Simon Gardner, Sandra Maler and Nick Macfie)

Out of sight, out of mind? Europe’s migrant crisis still simmers

A woman sits and looks on outside a building covered up with sheets to protect the dwellers from the strong summer sun outside of the disused Hellenikon airport, where stranded refugees and migrants are temporarily accommodated in Athens, Greece,

By Michele Kambas and Antonio Bronic

ATHENS/ZAGREB (Reuters) – A year after hundreds of thousands of refugees snaked their way across southeastern Europe and onto global television screens, the roads through the Balkans are now clear, depriving an arguably worsening tragedy of poignant visibility.

Europe’s migrant crisis is at the very least numerically worse than it was last year. More people are arriving and more are dying. But the twist is that, compared with last year, a lot of it is out of sight.

Take the border between Greece and Macedonia. Summer crops have replaced the city of tents at the border outpost of Idomeni, even if some locals are convinced there is an unseen population hiding in the surrounding forests, waiting for smugglers to assist them on their onward journey.

The tiny Greek village was a focal point of the migrant flow north toward Germany and other wealthy countries, with thousands of refugees squatting for months waiting for sealed borders with Macedonia to open

Elsewhere in the Balkans, a Reuters photographer, revisiting the people-packed locations where he and his colleagues captured last year’s diaspora, found empty roads, unencumbered railway tracks and bucolic countryside.

The comparison is stark.

More than one million people fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan made their way to Europe last year, with the majority of them crossing the precarious sea corridor separating Greece and Turkey, the temporary home for more than 2 million refugees displaced from Syria.

They came carrying their worldly belongings in plastic bags and hauling babies on weary shoulders, a visual exodus of the kind not seen in Europe since the end of World War Two.

Many have since reached their destination in northern Europe, but with the borders closed and the European Union now attempting to contain the numbers, thousands are stuck at holding centers in Greece and Italy.

They are not so nearly visible there – nor are the ones still coming.

VISIBILITY DOWN, ARRIVALS UP

According to data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), arrivals are up 17 percent on last year, stoked mainly by a spike at the start of the year through Greece.

Deaths among those trying to get to Europe, mainly due to drowning, are up more than 15 percent.

“This is not a blip,” said David Miliband, a former British foreign minister who now heads the International Rescue Committee, an aid group set up by Albert Einstein – himself a refugee – to rescue Europeans before the outbreak of World War Two.

“The forces that are driving more and more people from their homes – weak states, big tumults within the Islamic world, a divided international system .. None of these things are likely to abate soon.”

Some of the mantle of accepting huge migrant flows that was carried by Greece last year and the beginning of this one has been taken up by Italy.

This follows a resurgence of migrant flows from northern Africa. More than 140,000 asylum seekers are now housed in Italian shelters, a seven-fold increase on 2013, with the migrant crisis in its third year.

In Greece, where arrivals plunged in the wake of an accord between Turkey and the EU to stem the flow in March, an estimated 57,000 migrants were still stuck in the country by Aug.8.

Campaigners say the accord has lulled policymakers into a false sense of accomplishment by allowing them to believe that Europe’s migration problem has been solved.

“By outsourcing the responsibility to Turkey and to Greece, European governments are basically saying ‘we have solved the crisis because we don’t see it, and we can’t smell it and we can’t hear it,” said Gauri van Gulik, deputy Europe director at Amnesty International.

“The crisis is as big as ever, and as yet unsolved by governments,” she told Reuters.

IOM data says that 258,186 people arrived in Europe by the end of July, compared with 219,854 over the same period in 2015. There were 3,176 fatalities by Aug. 7, outpacing the 2,754 who died in the first eight months of last year, a slightly longer period.

“Its absolutely incredible because if you think about the panic this caused last year and the incentive there was to really get some policy changes in place, nothing has happened,” Van Gulik said.

(Additional reporting by Steve Scherer in Rome, Lefteris Papadimas in Athens Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

Israel Steps Up Strikes On Terrorist Rocket Launcher Positions

The Israeli Defense Forces struck over 320 Hamas terror sites in the Gaza Strip overnight bringing the total to 750 in the last three days.  The sites struck were mainly rocket launcher sites and areas connected to the terrorist organization’s tunnel system.

The strikes come as Israeli intelligence stopped an attempt by Hamas terrorists to sneak a bomb into Israel.  Authorities stopped a car with Palestinian plates at a checkpoint and discovered the bomb inside.  The suspects were arrested and admitted they were planning to carry out an attack on civilians.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters the situation is at a crisis level.

“This is one of the most critical tests the region has faced in recent years,” he said. “Gaza is on a knife-edge. The deteriorating situation is leading to a downward spiral which could quickly get beyond anyone’s control.”

Palestinians have been trying to claim that Israel is targeting civilians but the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. told reporters that Hamas has taken to hiding in civilian homes and businesses to try and avoid retribution for their activities.  One Hamas headquarters is located within a working hospital.

Spain Receives Bailout; World Markets Not Gaining

Struggling banks led Spain to be the fourth and largest European Union nation to ask for a bailout. The country will receive up to 100 billion euro, however, some of the member nations, like the UK, are not contributing to the loan.

The news of the bailout initially sent worldwide stock markets soaring but the enthusiasm quickly wore off and many markets were trading lower than opening by mid-morning. Ratings agency Fitch downgraded the rating for two Spanish banks two ranks from A to BBB+. Fitch attributed the move to last week’s downgrade of Spain’s sovereign credit rating. Continue reading →

Crisis or Opportunity

Rick Joyner recently said that the Chinese word for “crisis” is the same word for “opportunity”.  How very appropriate for the times we live in.

If you take Katrina as an example, the crisis certainly initiated emergencies of all types.  People needed to be rescued, relocated and restored extensively with everything from material things to healing of the traumas caused by the crisis.  Families were separated, loved ones were lost or missing – some injured and in hospitals, some injured and unable to get help, and some fatally wounded by the ferocious storm.

During this crisis, the government could not meet the needs of the people – not in the short term or the long term.   There was mass-confusion in trying to organize and deploy food, water and medical help.  The news media reported the deplorable and inadequate attempts of government to provide relief for the suffering.

I remember the pleas of those taken to the Superdome for water, diapers, baby formula, and food.  It was heartbreaking.

As the hours and days wore on, the churches stepped in and attempted to help with food, water, clothing and other basic necessities.  But it was clear from the beginning; neither the government nor the churches were prepared to deal with a disaster of this magnitude.

If we were to have a complete economic collapse, conditions in this country could become every bit as devastating as those we previewed in Katrina.  Experts have said that the inner cities would be out of food and water within ONE day.  This would not be a regional crisis, but a national and probably international crisis.

Are we, as the church, going to be prepared to help ourselves and others?  An economic collapse will provide unprecedented opportunity for ministry.  Those who understand it and are prepared for it, will have the opportunity to be Jesus to others.  Biblical prophecy indicates that those prepared will be God’s people.  We must address this with clarity to be prepared and to offer help, hope and healing for the hurting.

It’s time we all get ready.

Love,

Lori Signature