Polio
“The world is incredibly close to wiping out polio. This year
the number of polio cases has shrunk to fewer than a dozen. And those cases are
in just two countries- Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"We are definitely encouraged by the decline in number of
cases," says Dr. Rana Safdar, the national coordinator for polio
eradication in Pakistan. His country has seen the number of reported polio cases drop from more than 300 in
2014 to just 5 so far in 2017.
"We hope to completely eliminate transmission during the
current low transmission season, which starts from September and ends in
May," he says. "We are very confident we can do this. But the last
mile is always very difficult."
Pakistan has been holding national polio immunization days in
which a quarter of a million vaccinators attempt to make sure 38 million
children get all three doses of the oral polio vaccine.
"We must reach these children from the coast of Karachi to
the mountains in the highest part of Pakistan," Dr. Rana says.”
Inspiration, Film
“IN 1960 Jane Goodall
moved to Tanzania to study chimpanzees. She was only 26 years old; her
credentials consisted of a love of animals and a secretarial qualification. The
first of “Leakey’s angels” (also known as “the trimates”)—Ms Goodall was one of
three women encouraged by Louis Leakey, a renowned paleoanthropologist, to
observe apes in their natural habitats to see what insights it might yield
about early man. Scepticism abounded, but Ms Goodall was determined. She
astonished everyone when, towards the end of her six-month trial, she wrote to
Leakey having observed a chimp adapting a twig to capture termites. Leakey sent
back a telegram: “Now we must redefine tool. Redefine man. Or accept
chimpanzees as human.”
Overturning the
assumption that only humans used tools was the start of Ms Goodall’s
illustrious career in research, activism and education. She is now an iconic
figure. At 83, she rarely spends more than a few months in one place, instead
travelling the world to raise awareness for her causes. She started the Jane
Goodall Institute, an organisation which has created sanctuaries for apes, in
1977 and has worked on community development for 40 years. Roots & Shoots
was established in 1991 to encourage awareness of environmental and conservation
issues among schoolchildren. It now operates in 140 countries.
Ms Goodall felt that
her story had been sufficiently told: she is the subject of more than 40 films.
But “Jane”, released on October 20th in America and on November 24th in
Britain, finds plenty to say. At its heart is footage from the National
Geographic archives, unearthed in 2015, of Ms Goodall’s early years in
Tanzania. Totalling 140 hours, the material was untouched for 50 years and
thought lost. Brett Morgen, dubbed the “mad scientist” of documentary film for
his immersive, experiential style of film-making, was brought on to direct.
Though Ms Goodall seems a far cry from his previous subjects—Nirvana frontman
Kurt Cobain, the Rolling Stones, maverick producer Robert Evans—Mr Morgen
insists that “she is my type of subject” as, like those rock stars, “she’s
lived life by her own rules and redefined her field.” He adds: “In that sense
she’s the biggest rock star I’ve ever filmed.””
Universal
Healthcare, Medicare
“Medicare X would
allow all Americans to buy a public health insurance plan. That plan would pay
doctors the same prices that Medicare currently does, and it would allow
patients to be seen at the offices and hospitals that Medicare has in network.
But it would have a different benefit package from
the public program that covers Americans over age 65. The Medicare X plan would
cover things that Medicare does not, such as pediatrics and maternity care.
Bennett and Kaine envision the Medicare X plan
growing slowly. In 2020, it would become available only in counties with one or
zero health plans selling on the Obamacare marketplace. In 2023, it would open
to the entire country and, in 2024, allow small businesses to enroll too. Sen.
Tim Kaine (D-VA), one of the sponsors, says he could foresee a future where
large employers are also allowed to buy into the plan. (That is not included in
the current version of the plan.)”
“The guidelines offer a preliminary and highly
customizable blueprint for how New York could grapple with its daunting piles
of detritus—and call on designers and architects to be at the forefront of
research and policy to drive the city closer to the goal of sending zero waste
to landfills by 2030. That target is one tenet of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s
larger “One New York” plan, which outlines an ambitious agenda for
broad sustainability and resilience measures.
Since landfill-clogging
waste releases methane gas, it’s an obstacle to the administration’s pledge
to drastically curb emissions—a commitment that
officials cast as a defiant response to the federal move
away from the Paris agreement. “Better designed, more effective, and more
intentional waste management
is a necessary part of the City’s effort to
meet its climate goals,” said Mark Chambers, director of the Mayor’s Office of
Sustainability, in a statement about the guidelines. And that’s where designers
and architects come in: rethinking the way people interact with waste from the
chute to the street.
Architects have already
intervened in complex urban problems such as mobility and resiliency: They’ve
adapted the street for bikes and pedestrians, and to siphon stormwater, says
Clare Miflin, a partner at the architecture firm Kiss + Cathcart and the
report’s lead author. Moreover, Miflin says, architects are already concerned
about waste—both the physical castoffs generated during construction and the
more abstract problems of inefficient windows, lights, and other energy sucks.
But somewhere along the line, trash had slipped through the cracks. “Nobody’s
applying design to waste,” Miflin says.
In fact, waste is a planning issue that
has a lot to do with how a city uses its space. “It’s often considered
operational, or a hygiene issue, not a land-use issue,” says Juliette Spertus
of the infrastructure-planning firm Closed Loops, who collaborated on the
report. “But it’s something that’s stored and has a presence.””
Banking,
Credit Unions
“Congress should consider allowing credit unions to serve
communities that exist only online, the industry’s top regulator said—remarks
that could stir ire in the banking industry, which competes with credit unions
and is fighting their ability to expand their fields of membership.
National
Credit Union Administration Chairman J. Mark McWatters said such a change would
better reflect today’s society.
Under federal law, a credit
union can serve a community with a “common bond,” a concept that regulators and
Congress have expanded over the years. The number of credit-union memberships
in the U.S. has moved past 100 million in recent years, but the law still
generally limits credit unions’ field of membership to pools of people living
or working near one another.
“We need to think about how
we can create common bonds, or how we can reflect in the Federal Credit Union
Act, what people today use as common bonds,” Mr. McWatters said in an interview
this week at the regulator’s headquarters. “Chances are [such a change] would
be very broad, and chances are it would be something that the bankers might not
be totally in love with,” he said. “But again I am trying to parallel reality
today as opposed to what it was a generation—or two or three or four
generations—ago.””
