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America Is Aggravating the World's Worst Humanitarian Crisis

New York Times

19-03-2025

Politics
New York Times

America Is Aggravating the World's Worst Humanitarian Crisis

The world's worst humanitarian crisis today is probably the web of famine, civil war, mass rape and other atrocities in Sudan, a nightmare that the United States has formally described as genocide. Many tens of thousands have been killed, 11 million Sudanese have been displaced, the most lethal famine in decades may be underway, and Unicef warns that children as young as 1 year old are being raped. Yet the Trump administration is now cutting back on humanitarian assistance, aggravating the starvation. And neither the Trump administration — nor the Biden administration before it — has been willing to call out the United Arab Emirates for having armed a brutal militia called the Rapid Support Forces that — according to survivors of its rampages — are committing massacres and rapes. Do President Trump and his aides care about suffering in a distant land? I don't know, but I think when we hear individual stories it may be more difficult for us to turn away. With refugees pouring over the border into South Sudan, I visited two spots along the Sudan/South Sudan border to ask refugees about conditions in places foreign reporters cannot easily reach. Musa Ali, 32, was an interior designer in Khartoum who lived a good life until the civil war began two years ago between the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces. An army bomb a year ago destroyed his house and forced the amputation of both his legs, confining him to a wheelchair. Then food shortages grew so severe that neighbors began dying of hunger. Musa's family members in other parts of the country were able to send him money to buy food. 'We would have died of hunger' if relatives elsewhere had not sent money, he told me. Musa and his wife decided to flee to South Sudan. On the 11-day road journey, they were robbed at checkpoints by soldiers from the Rapid Support Forces, and they saw people killed along the way — mostly men whom the militia suspected were supporting the army. Musa and his wife said they saw more than 100 corpses along the road. Yassin Yakob and Sabah Mohammed, both teachers, also fled recently from the Khartoum area. They took back roads, so they largely avoided checkpoints. But they said that other vehicles also took those back roads — often trucks carrying dozens of refugees — and when the trucks broke down, people in them often starved to death because there was no food to be had. 'People's bodies were next to the trucks,' Yassin said. 'If your truck broke, you died. There was just no food.' Over the last few years, American-supported soup kitchens opened up around the country and saved many lives from famine. But the Trump administration cut funding for those kitchens, called emergency response rooms, and more than 70 percent have already closed, according to Hajooj Kuka, a Sudanese humanitarian worker. He told me that at just one emergency response room, four children had died recently of starvation. (For those asking how to help, here's a link.) Manal Adam, 30, grew up in the Darfur region in Western Sudan and belongs to an ethnic group targeted in the genocide that began there in 2003; two of her brothers were murdered at the time; she wonders if her mother was raped as well. For a time the assaults subsided, but in the last couple of years the slaughter has resumed. 'It's like history is repeating itself,' Manal said, and she haltingly recounted how men in Rapid Support Forces uniforms had stopped her on the road, thrown her to the ground and raped her. After that, she fled to South Sudan with three of her children, hoping to keep them alive. But her husband was elsewhere, and her 9-year-old daughter was with her mother, so she left them behind in her panic. Manal doesn't know if her husband, mother or daughter are still alive. Manal is safe in a refugee camp in South Sudan but suffers from pelvic infections from having been raped. And she wilts as she describes her shame as other women point to her and gossip about her. Multiply Manal by millions and you have a glimpse of the metastasizing crisis in Sudan. Famine is spreading, corpses line some roads and the sons of Darfur genocide rapists are now raping the daughters of women who had been assaulted a generation ago. Rapid Support Forces have besieged the Zamzam refugee camp in Darfur, with 500,000 desperate, hungry people inside and almost no medical assistance, U.N. officials and aid workers say. In a social media post, the attackers have warned: 'Zamzam will turn to ashes.' I suspect that many Americans regard all this is sad but inevitable, viewing Sudan as a bottomless pit of pain that we can't do anything about. Yet that's not quite right. I don't know if we can end the slaughter. But in the early 2000s the West took actions that reduced the death toll, while this time we are worse than passive. Our cutting of humanitarian aid means more children starving, and our silence about the U.A.E. probably means more atrocities. That's the wrenching contrast. A generation ago, Americans were outraged by genocide and acted — not always perfectly — to provide aid and pressure governments in ways that saved lives. Now we are pulling back aid and largely silent about the world's worst humanitarian crisis, and that comes painfully close to complicity.

Halt in US aid cripples global efforts to relieve hunger

Dubai Eye

07-02-2025

Politics
Dubai Eye

Halt in US aid cripples global efforts to relieve hunger

Arab News

07-02-2025

Politics
Arab News

Halt in US aid cripples global efforts to relieve hunger

The Trump administration's effort to slash and reshape American foreign aid is crippling the intricate global system that aims to prevent and respond to famine. Struggling to manage hunger crises sweeping the developing world even before US President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the international famine monitoring and relief system has suffered multiple blows from a sudden cessation of US foreign aid. The spending freeze, which Trump ordered upon taking office Jan. 20, is supposed to last 90 days while his administration reviews all foreign-aid programs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said an exception allows emergency food assistance to continue. But much of that emergency aid is at least temporarily halted as humanitarian organizations seek clarity about what relief programs are allowed to continue. Compounding the problem is Trump's move this week to shut the US government's top relief provider, the US Agency for International Development (USAID). About 500,000 metric tons of food worth $340 million is in limbo, in transit or storage, as humanitarian organizations wait for US State Department approval to distribute it, said Marcia Wong, a former senior USAID official who has been briefed on the situation. US-provided cash assistance intended to help people buy food and other necessities in Sudan and Gaza also has been halted, aid workers told Reuters. So has funding for volunteer-run community kitchens, an American-supported effort in Sudan to help feed people in areas inaccessible to traditional aid, these people said. Humanitarian organizations have hit roadblocks in getting paid for emergency food operations. Questions about what programs have permission to continue have gone unanswered, because the people who normally field such inquiries – officials at USAID – have been placed on leave, at least six sources said. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), the US entity that produced regular food security alerts meant to prevent famine, also has been shut down. Its loss leaves aid organizations without a key source of guidance on where and how to deploy humanitarian relief And the US government issued stop-work orders to two major manufacturers of nutritional supplements, diminishing the supply of life-saving food for severely malnourished children around the world. 'We are the one thing that nearly everyone agrees on – that little children who are starving and need emergency aid need help,' said Mark Moore, chief executive officer of Mana Nutrition of Georgia, one of the two suppliers ordered to stop producing supplements. 'It is not hype or conjecture or hand wringing or even contested use of stats to say that hundreds of thousands of malnourished children could die without USAID.' Shortly after this story was published, the US government notified Mana and the other manufacturer, Edesia Nutrition of Rhode Island, that the stop-work orders had been rescinded. The US State Department did not respond to requests for comment for this story. STOCKPILES ON HOLD Conflict is driving large numbers of people into desperate hunger, and the US is the largest single donor of aid. It provided $64.6 billion in humanitarian aid over the last five years. That was at least 38 percent of the total such contributions recorded by the United Nations. In 2023, almost 282 million people in 59 countries and territories experienced extreme food shortages that threatened their lives or livelihoods, according to the 2024 Global Report on Food Crises. Even before the pause in US aid, the world's famine-fighting system was under enormous strain, driven by conflict and political instability, as Reuters detailed in a series of reports last year. The halt in aid creates a two-pronged crisis for humanitarian organizations working to relieve severe hunger. It impairs the programs that aim to prevent mass starvation. More immediately, it hobbles programs meant to respond to crises and save lives. Among the food aid in limbo around the world is almost 30,000 metric tons meant to feed acutely malnourished children and adults in famine-stricken Sudan, two aid workers there said. Some is sitting in hot warehouses, where it is in danger of spoiling, they said. The food includes lentils, rice and wheat, one of the workers said – enough to feed at least 2 million people for a month. Some items have a quick expiration date and will be inedible by the end of Trump's 90-day pause, this person said. Aid groups are confused about which relief programs qualify for waivers from the spending freeze and if they'll be able to obtain them – because most USAID staff have been placed on leave. A LOST STEERING WHEEL Longer term, the shuttering of FEWS NET stands to cripple the world's ability to predict, prevent and respond to food insecurity crises. Created by the US government in 1985 after devastating famines in East and West Africa, FEWS NET is funded by USAID and managed by Washington, D.C.-based Chemonics International. FEWS NET is charged with providing early warning to US policymakers about hunger crises that could require a humanitarian response. It uses data from federal agencies, scientists and other humanitarian organizations to produce a stream of reports on food security. USAID and humanitarian organizations used FEWS NET reports to decide where to send food aid. Researchers who collect and analyze data on food insecurity and famine say FEWS NET is essential to world efforts to fight hunger. They say it can be more nimble and prolific than its UN-backed counterpart, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC), a global partnership that reports on food insecurity in dozens of lands. In most areas where it works, the IPC requires consensus on its findings among local government authorities and representatives of other humanitarian bodies. This can result in political attempts to influence its work and can delay and impede its efforts to alert the world to a looming crisis,a recent Reuters investigation found. FEWS NET doesn't face those consensus-building requirements, and so is faster and more efficient, researchers say. In 2024, FEWS NET produced more than 1,000 food insecurity outlooks, alerts and other reports covering more than 34 countries. The IPC published 71 reports in 33 countries. The IPC declined to comment on FEWS NET's demise. The 'implications for the initiative remain unclear,' said Frank Nyakairu, a spokesman for IPC. On January 27, Chemonics, which manages FEWS NET, received a stop-work order from USAID. Two days later, FEWS NET's website went dark, eliminating public access to thousands of reports funded by American taxpayers. 'Ending FEWS NET is sort of like taking the steering wheel off the car,' said Andrew Natsios, a professor at Texas A&M University who headed USAID from 2001 to 2006. 'Even if the car is working fine, if there's no steering wheel, you don't know where the car is going.' FEWS NET has been a critical player in assessing food insecurity in most of the world's worst hunger crises. An important conduit of data to the IPC and the global humanitarian system, its reports offered strategic analysis about how conflict and other problems impact food insecurity in specific places. It also pushed the IPC to act when the UN-backed body's work became bogged down by politics. Without FEWS NET, 'the single most important component of the IPC system is knocked out,' said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tuft University's Fletcher School. In December, Reuters reported that the Sudanese government maneuvered to delay an IPC famine determination in Darfur. FEWS NET, which had already concluded that famine was happening there, pushed for the IPC's Famine Review Committee to convene, over the objections of Sudanese officials. In the end, the IPC committee agreed to announce that famine had struck Zamzam, a vast camp for internally displaced people in North Darfur. But FEWS NET's propensity to issue blunt assessments has also drawn fire in Washington. In December, FEWS NET published a report that projected famine by early 2025 in part of northern Gaza. After the report was issued, Jack Lew, US ambassador to Israel from October 2023 until January, wrote that it was 'irresponsible' to issue such a finding. FEWS NET withdrew the report, stating that its alert was 'under further review' and that it expected to update the report in January. With the dissolution of its chief funder, USAID, FEWS NET employees say they are not optimistic about the organization resuming work. Its apparent death leaves 'a gaping hole' in reporting on humanitarian crises, said Chris Newton, an analyst specializing in early warning and food security at International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. FEWS NET's loss will hurt efforts to end famine in Sudan and prevent it in other hotspots and could lead to the collapse of a wide network of data providers, all crucial to understanding humanitarian risks globally, he said. 'Famine was disappearing from the world in the 2000s, and now its return will likely accelerate as we become increasingly blind to it, even as it becomes a more common tool of politics and war,' Newton said.

Yahoo

06-02-2025

Business
Yahoo

Leaving Free Trade Orthodoxy Behind

From the Techne on The Dispatch Welcome back to Techne! Iran has revealed its first warship designed to launch and recover drones. The Shahid Bagheri is a repurposed container ship that features a 180-meter runway to accommodate its fleet of 'hundreds' of unmanned aerial vehicles. While there is a lot of bluster with the announcement, cheap drone carriers could alter the balance of naval power in the near future. I haven't written about tariffs at all, leaving it to Scott Lincicome to cover the ins and outs of tariff policy for Dispatch readers. But with the escalating trade war and a lot of open questions, I thought I would take a crack at trying to steelman President Donald Trump's tariffs. While his rhetoric often seems impulsive, Trump's push for tariffs reflects a deeper transformation in American politics and policy. The free trade orthodoxy is being transformed into something else. Just to review a bit of recent history: Former President Joe Biden maintained Trump's China tariffs with little political opposition. Marco Rubio said in his opening remarks for his confirmation hearing as secretary of state that 'the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us.' Trump is pulling out of the World Health Organization. Before the election, J.D. Vance questioned Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell about the dollar's reserve currency status, asking, 'Why should the dollar be the reserve currency? Why would we want it to be the reserve currency? Is it a problem that foreigners like using the dollar?' And Trump, for all of his waffling, has been consistent about tariffs, announcing tariffs on Canada and Mexico before those on China. I should say from the outset that I'm not a fan of escalating tariffs. All countries lose in a trade war. And while it won't be catastrophic for the United States, it will be devastating for our regional trading partners. The rhetoric around trade and finance has shifted. There is a growing sentiment that the American-supported global trading order of the last several decades was gamed by China, harming the U.S. working class while benefiting the upper class. Tariffs aren't just punitive. They are seen as a way to reset and rebalance international relationships that many believe have tilted unfairly. This approach is fundamentally reactive, driven by the conviction that a hard reset is necessary to restore what advocates see as a more equitable system. To understand why so many policymakers are calling for a reset, it helps to see how our current trade and monetary framework came into being. A closer look at the history of international finance can shed light on the roots of today's trade disputes. Last year, then-Sen. Marco Rubio wrote an op-ed that reflected the changing orthodoxy. He wrote, America became an industrial juggernaut thanks in no small part to common-sense tariffs and trade protections. This kept our country resilient and provided good-paying jobs to millions of people. After the World Wars, however, a coalition of Washington insiders and industry elites began to abandon our protections. They lowered tariffs across the board, and they created trade agreements and programs that offered duty-free treatment to imports from dozens of countries. But the historical data tells a different story. As economist Tyler Cowen highlighted in a piece late last year, recent research shows industries with higher tariffs actually had lower productivity: A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that tariffs probably did more harm than good. Using meticulously collected industry-level and state-level data, the paper traces the impact of specific tariff rates more clearly than before. The results are not pretty. One core finding is that industries with higher tariffs did not have higher productivity — in fact, they had lower productivity. Tariffs did raise the number of US firms in a given sector, but they did so in part by protecting smaller, less productive firms. That was not the path by which the US became an industrial giant, nor is it wise to use trade policy to keep lower-productivity firms in business. Not only does it slow economic growth, it also keeps workers in jobs without much of a future. These results contradict the traditional protectionist story — that tariffs allow the best firms to grow larger and capture the large domestic market. In reality, the tariffs kept firms smaller and probably lowered US manufacturing productivity. Still, there is an important context that Rubio skips over. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed in 1930 as a reaction to the Great Depression, sparked a trade war. Tariffs interacted with already wonky exchange rates to make a mess of financial systems. Countries retreated from trade, and not soon after, they began preparing for war. Japan was hit particularly hard, causing a backlash against capitalism that allowed the military to take control of the civilian government. So, as leaders were contemplating the post-World War II financial regime, they wanted to forge a system that would bind together countries to sidestep these problems in the future. The agreement signed at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, was intended to create stability, foster the reduction of barriers to trade, and ensure capital could flow to nations destroyed by the war. Participating nations pegged their currencies to the dollar, which in turn was pegged to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce. By the early 1970s, this system was breaking down, with a key force being the rise in inflation in the U.S. that began in 1965. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations were committed to full employment and used the Federal Reserve to reduce unemployment. But increasing U.S. monetary growth led to rising inflation, which spread to the rest of the world. Other countries started asking for their currency to be converted into gold, draining American reserves. All in all, the dollar was overvalued. In 1971, President Richard Nixon reset this system by devaluing the dollar, an event that is now known as the Nixon shock. While it saved the Bretton Woods system for a time, it broke down by 1973. This led to our current system of floating exchange rates based on supply and demand in foreign exchange markets. This new regime gave countries more flexibility to pursue independent monetary policies, but also cemented pressures on the American financial system. Free floating exchange rates fundamentally reshaped the global monetary order. One near-term consequence was the emergence of the petrodollar system, where oil-producing nations began pricing and trading oil exclusively in U.S. dollars. This arrangement created massive dollar surpluses for oil-exporting states, far beyond what their domestic economies could productively absorb, so they plowed this money back into the U.S. economy into safe assets, Treasury securities. As economist Josh Hendrickson noted, The oil shock of the 1970s can thus also be understood as a rational response to a dollar devaluation as oil producing countries wanted to prevent a decline in real revenues for oil prices in dollars. Furthermore, the U.S. government benefited from the oil shock in the sense that the dollar revenues of those oil-producing nations were recycled into U.S. Treasury securities, the new global reserve asset. Export powerhouses like China also channeled their trade surpluses primarily into U.S. financial markets, purchasing Treasury securities, equities, bonds, and property. This was on top of the high demand globally for dollars because foreign governments, businesses, and investors needed it for trade. The dollar as the reserve currency worked in tandem with the Treasury as a reserve asset. The dollar's reserve status made American goods costlier abroad and reduced import prices at home, which in turn widened the trade deficit. The Treasury's reserve asset status allowed the United States government to borrow funds cheaply, which helped to balloon the deficit. In Trump's orbit are thinkers who want to rebalance these relationships. The 'former investment banker turned music impresario' Michael Pettis and Trump's pick to head the Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, are two worth watching. It's Pettis' view that the industrial policies of China have been the primary driver of trade imbalances. As the Wall Street Journal reported in an October 2024 profile, Pettis thinks that '[t]he U.S. imports China's industrial policy, but the mirror image [of it]. So just as China forces consumers to subsidize producers, that means in the U.S., the balancing act is that producers subsidize consumers.' Moreover, because the U.S. dollar is the global reserve currency, preferred by foreign central banks and investors, the United States bears an especially large burden among the nations with a trade deficit. 'What the U.S. needs to do is stop playing that role,' he told the Journal. To Pettis, across-the-board tariffs are an attractive means of addressing trade imbalances and boosting the U.S. manufacturing sector. Capital controls are another way of getting there but this would mean limiting foreign capital investment, which would hurt the value of U.S. stocks, potentially putting the economy into recession. Still, I think there is a paradox inherent in the thinking of Pettis and the goals of Trump. Trump doesn't want the dollar to be knocked from its podium. In fact, he has threatened tariffs if countries try to do exactly that, in what's known as de-dollarization. On the other hand, Pettis wants de-dollarization to help solve trade imbalances. The most detailed policy blueprint comes from Stephen Miran, Trump's pick to head the Council of Economic Advisers. Late last year, Miran authored a 41-page memo on ways to restructure the global trading system: Currency policy aimed at correcting the undervaluation of other nations' currencies brings an entirely different set of tradeoffs and potential implications. Historically, the United States has pursued multilateral approaches to currency adjustments. While many analysts believe there are no tools available to unilaterally address currency misvaluation, that is not true. I describe some potential avenues for both multilateral and unilateral currency adjustment strategies, as well as means of mitigating unwanted side effects. But Miran is clear that 'many of these policies are untried at scale, or haven't been used in almost half a century, and that this essay is not policy advocacy but an attempt to catalogue the available tools and analyze how useful they may be for accomplishing various goals.' Another way to conceptualize Trump's actions is to see them in service of a larger goal, which would be a renegotiation of the financial order. Economist Oren Cass, another ardent supporter of tariffs, made the case, saying, So while the headlines are about a 'trade war,' the real question is how the reset of these relationships is going to proceed. There are many different theories regarding the best way to start down the path toward dramatic change. Do you try to turn the ship very gradually by small steps or—to mix metaphors—do you start by flipping over the gameboard and scattering the pieces? In a lot of areas, Trump has shown a very strong inclination to take that latter course. Hendrickson also thinks this logic might be animating the tariffs: If you think this system is unsustainable, then what you need is a devaluation of the dollar coupled with a reset to a more sustainable strategy. Like the 70s, this would primarily benefit the U.S. Thus, neither allies nor enemies want to bear the cost. As a result, you need a big stick to get other international players to the negotiating table to engineer that change. One way to do that is by levying across the board tariffs. Signaling you're willing to take some pain to inflict pain potentially gets people to the table. But none of this will be pretty. Rebalancing means massive shocks. Entrepreneur and geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand garnered a lot of attention on X, when he wrote last week about America's controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments: 'It's becoming clearer and clearer that we're looking at a seismic shift in the US's relationship with the world.' Three recent events suggest a new path is being charted: The U.S. Agency for International Development is being cut and brought back into line with State Department aims. Rubio told podcaster Megyn Kelly in an interview last week that 'it's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not — that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.' Trump brought 'tariffs on supposed 'allies' like Mexico, Canada or the EU,' as Bertrand framed it, although tariffs on Mexico and Canada have been put on hold pending further trade negotiations and no specific EU tariffs have been announced. In part, Bertrand is right. Hegemony was going to end at some point. However, these transition periods always bring significant risks, like disrupted trade relationships, currency volatility, and geopolitical tensions that could spiral into more serious conflicts. As we move away from American hegemony, the key question becomes not whether the old order will change, but whether its replacement will be deliberately negotiated or chaotically imposed. But it's ill-advised to take the view that America's attempt at running the world is over, that we're now just another great power, not the 'indispensable nation.' True, we are a great power, just as China is a great power. We need to embrace the transition back to a bipolar world. Not that long ago, the Soviet Union was considered the other great power. When I was in college, nearly two decades ago now, the big question was whether or not China would become part of the existing order. Some feared the size of its economy would mean it could create a new system on its own. But the real uncertainty centered on the transition away from a unipolar world. Historically, transitions between great powers have often come at the cost of enormous conflict and upheaval. In the wake of World War II, for instance, the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly morphed into opposing superpowers, dividing the globe into spheres of influence and entering a Cold War. Today, China's rise revives questions of how the global order will adjust to a new bipolar or even multipolar configuration, and whether this realignment will mirror the strain of previous power shifts. My hope is that it yields a framework built more on negotiation than confrontation. The path forward for the United States requires a delicate balance between acknowledging new realities and preserving beneficial aspects of the existing order. I don't want to sugarcoat it. The Chinese government has supported espionage and has been behind massive telecom hacks. They have violated norms. But China has also shown it's willing to work within the global economic system. In fact, when Trump announced his 10 percent tariffs China immediately challenged them at the World Trade Organization. At the same time, Beijing rolled out new export controls targeting tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, and molybdenum, metals used in defense, clean energy, and other industries. The pressure from tariffs caused Beijing to respond. We shouldn't expect China not to react. The challenge ahead lies not in choosing between complete American dominance or total withdrawal, but in negotiating a sustainable framework that acknowledges both American and Chinese economic interests while maintaining the institutional structures that have helped prevent the kinds of catastrophic trade wars that marked earlier eras. The real test will be whether this transition can be managed through deliberate diplomacy rather than destructive confrontation. We need to choose the former. Until next week, 🚀 Will The Beatles' song 'Now and Then' won a Grammy nearly 50 years after it was recorded. The song was built from a demo John Lennon recorded back in 1977 that was isolated and enhanced through AI techniques. Sen. Ted Cruz's telecom policy director, Arielle Roth, has been nominated to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). I have worked with her for some time and have always thought she would be a good choice to run NTIA. The agency oversees the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, which provides funds to expand high-speed internet access. Archivists are working to save thousands of data sets from disappearing from the government's central repository for public data: 'On January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on As of [January 30, there are 305,564 datasets,' according to 404 Media. A federal court has vacated the 2024 Council on Environmental Quality's regulations granted to the agency under the National Environmental Policy Act. The court said that the White House council had no authority to issue them in the first place. The battle for clean indoor air has profoundly influenced human civilization. Writer Larissa Schiavo explores: 'Odd as it may sound, the loudspeaker, microphone, and amplifier played a crucial role in improving indoor air. Before voice amplification systems, people relied on acoustics to make themselves heard. In huge spaces like theatres, this often involved enclosure and the nixing of windows. At best, this led to stuffy, still air shared by too many people. At worst, such as in the U.K. Houses of Parliament and the U.S. Capitol, it meant hundreds of men in full suits in the heat of summer, trying not to pass out and inadvertently infecting one another with airborne diseases.' Trump signed an executive order to create a federal sovereign wealth fund. While it's probably illegal, I just don't understand the logic. 'A jury may never see the gun that authorities say was used to kill Blake Story last year,' reports 'That's because Cleveland police used a facial recognition program — one that explicitly says its results are not admissible in court — to obtain a search warrant, according to court documents.' The always amazing Asianometry blog and YouTube channel dives into the history of Japan's Nissan Motor Corporation with some great tidbits, including how the name Datsun came about, which was what Nissan cars and trucks were called until 1986. In 1930, DAT Motors pivoted to making small cars to take advantage of a new Japanese regulation: 'Their minicar hits the market in 1932, and is called the Datson, as in 'son of DAT.' The name is later changed to Datsun with a 'u' since the 'son' in Datson, as pronounced by the Japanese meant 'loss' as in 'financial loss.''

Yahoo

06-02-2025

Politics
Yahoo

Halt in U.S. aid cripples global efforts to relieve hunger

(Reuters) - The Trump administration's effort to slash and reshape American foreign aid is crippling the intricate global system that aims to prevent and respond to famine. Struggling to manage hunger crises sweeping the developing world even before U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the international famine monitoring and relief system has suffered multiple blows from a sudden cessation of U.S. foreign aid. The spending freeze, which Trump ordered upon taking office Jan. 20, is supposed to last 90 days while his administration reviews all foreign-aid programs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said an exception allows emergency food assistance to continue. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. But much of that emergency aid is at least temporarily halted as humanitarian organizations seek clarity about what relief programs are allowed to continue. Compounding the problem is Trump's move this week to shut the U.S. government's top relief provider, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). About 500,000 metric tons of food worth $340 million is in limbo, in transit or storage, as humanitarian organizations wait for U.S. State Department approval to distribute it, said Marcia Wong, a former senior USAID official who has been briefed on the situation. U.S.-provided cash assistance intended to help people buy food and other necessities in Sudan and Gaza also has been halted, aid workers told Reuters. So has funding for volunteer-run community kitchens, an American-supported effort in Sudan to help feed people in areas inaccessible to traditional aid, these people said. Humanitarian organizations have hit roadblocks in getting paid for emergency food operations. Questions about what programs have permission to continue have gone unanswered, because the people who normally field such inquiries – officials at USAID – have been placed on leave, at least six sources said. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), the U.S. entity that produced regular food security alerts meant to prevent famine, also has been shut down. Its loss leaves aid organizations without a key source of guidance on where and how to deploy humanitarian relief. And the U.S. government has issued stop-work orders to two major manufacturers of nutritional supplements, diminishing the supply of life-saving food for severely malnourished children around the world. 'We are the one thing that nearly everyone agrees on – that little children who are starving and need emergency aid need help,' said Mark Moore, chief executive officer of Mana Nutrition of Georgia, one of the two suppliers ordered to stop producing supplements. 'It is not hype or conjecture or hand wringing or even contested use of stats to say that hundreds of thousands of malnourished children could die without USAID." The U.S. State Department did not respond to requests for comment for this story. STOCKPILES ON HOLD Conflict is driving large numbers of people into desperate hunger, and the U.S. is the largest single donor of aid. It provided $64.6 billion in humanitarian aid over the last five years. That was at least 38% of the total such contributions recorded by the United Nations. In 2023, almost 282 million people in 59 countries and territories experienced extreme food shortages that threatened their lives or livelihoods, according to the 2024 Global Report on Food Crises. Even before the pause in U.S. aid, the world's famine-fighting system was under enormous strain, driven by conflict and political instability, as Reuters detailed in a series of reports last year. The halt in aid creates a two-pronged crisis for humanitarian organizations working to relieve severe hunger. It impairs the programs that aim to prevent mass starvation. More immediately, it hobbles programs meant to respond to crises and save lives. Among the food aid in limbo around the world is almost 30,000 metric tons meant to feed acutely malnourished children and adults in famine-stricken Sudan, two aid workers there said. Some is sitting in hot warehouses, where it is in danger of spoiling, they said. The food includes lentils, rice and wheat, one of the workers said – enough to feed at least 2 million people for a month. Some items have a quick expiration date and will be inedible by the end of Trump's 90-day pause, this person said. Also stuck in warehouses are millions of nutrient-rich food packets produced by Mana Nutrition and Edesia Nutrition of Rhode Island for U.N. emergency relief efforts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere. 'We are not making foods that are a 'nice to have.' We make foods that are the equivalent of penicillin" for malnourished children," said Navyn Salem, Edesia's CEO. Millions of packets of life-saving food 'will go to waste while we see children starve to death on our watch." Though the packets are vital to saving children from starvation, there is widespread uncertainty among aid groups about whether they have permission to continue distributing them. The groups are confused about which relief programs qualify for waivers from the spending freeze and if they'll be able to obtain them – because most USAID staff have been placed on leave. A LOST STEERING WHEEL Longer term, the shuttering of FEWS NET stands to cripple the world's ability to predict, prevent and respond to food insecurity crises. Created by the U.S. government in 1985 after devastating famines in East and West Africa, FEWS NET is funded by USAID and managed by Washington, D.C.-based Chemonics International. FEWS NET is charged with providing early warning to U.S. policymakers about hunger crises that could require a humanitarian response. It uses data from federal agencies, scientists and other humanitarian organizations to produce a stream of reports on food security. USAID and humanitarian organizations used FEWS NET reports to decide where to send food aid. Researchers who collect and analyze data on food insecurity and famine say FEWS NET is essential to world efforts to fight hunger. They say it can be more nimble and prolific than its U.N.-backed counterpart, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC), a global partnership that reports on food insecurity in dozens of lands. In most areas where it works, the IPC requires consensus on its findings among local government authorities and representatives of other humanitarian bodies. This can result in political attempts to influence its work and can delay and impede its efforts to alert the world to a looming crisis, a recent Reuters investigation found. FEWS NET doesn't face those consensus-building requirements, and so is faster and more efficient, researchers say. In 2024, FEWS NET produced more than 1,000 food insecurity outlooks, alerts and other reports covering more than 34 countries. The IPC published 71 reports in 33 countries. The IPC declined to comment on FEWS NET's demise. The 'implications for the initiative remain unclear,' said Frank Nyakairu, a spokesman for IPC. On January 27, Chemonics, which manages FEWS NET, received a stop-work order from USAID. Two days later, FEWS NET's website went dark, eliminating public access to thousands of reports funded by American taxpayers. 'Ending FEWS NET is sort of like taking the steering wheel off the car,' said Andrew Natsios, a professor at Texas A&M University who headed USAID from 2001 to 2006. 'Even if the car is working fine, if there's no steering wheel, you don't know where the car is going." FEWS NET has been a critical player in assessing food insecurity in most of the world's worst hunger crises. An important conduit of data to the IPC and the global humanitarian system, its reports offered strategic analysis about how conflict and other problems impact food insecurity in specific places. It also pushed the IPC to act when the U.N.-backed body's work became bogged down by politics. Without FEWS NET, 'the single most important component of the IPC system is knocked out,' said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tuft University's Fletcher School. In December, Reuters reported that the Sudanese government maneuvered to delay an IPC famine determination in Darfur. FEWS NET, which had already concluded that famine was happening there, pushed for the IPC's Famine Review Committee to convene, over the objections of Sudanese officials. In the end, the IPC committee agreed to announce that famine had struck Zamzam, a vast camp for internally displaced people in North Darfur. But FEWS NET's propensity to issue blunt assessments has also drawn fire in Washington. In December, FEWS NET published a report that projected famine by early 2025 in part of northern Gaza. After the report was issued, Jack Lew, U.S. ambassador to Israel from October 2023 until January, wrote that it was 'irresponsible' to issue such a finding. FEWS NET withdrew the report, stating that its alert was 'under further review' and that it expected to update the report in January. With the dissolution of its chief funder, USAID, FEWS NET employees say they are not optimistic about the organization resuming work. Its apparent death leaves 'a gaping hole' in reporting on humanitarian crises, said Chris Newton, an analyst specializing in early warning and food security at International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. FEWS NET's loss will hurt efforts to end famine in Sudan and prevent it in other hotspots and could lead to the collapse of a wide network of data providers, all crucial to understanding humanitarian risks globally, he said. 'Famine was disappearing from the world in the 2000s, and now its return will likely accelerate as we become increasingly blind to it, even as it becomes a more common tool of politics and war,' Newton said.

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