Welcome to National Fiscal Hypocrisy Week.
Today (Monday), Congress takes up a measure delaying by one month a scheduled 23% cut in federal reimbursements to doctors. The cut will automatically go into effect unless Congress acts. But of course Congress will act. Doctors threaten to drop Medicare…
Preventing mother-to-child HIV in rural Kenya - MSF Weekly Podcast
In Kenya, more than 22,000 children were infected with HIV in 2009. The district of Homa Bay, in rural western Kenya, has the country’s highest HIV prevalence rate. MSF is working to stop the spread of the disease in Homa Bay with its prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) program.
“Despite the huge presence of international organizations in Haiti, the cholera response has to date been inadequate in meeting the needs of the population.”
(Source: af.reuters.com, via doctorswithoutborders)
Nuclear Toys
(via andrewharlow)
“MSF is calling on all groups and agencies present in Haiti to step up the size and speed of their efforts to ensure an effective response to the needs of people at risk of cholera infection. More actors are needed to treat the sick and implement preventative actions, especially as cases increase dramatically across the country. There is no time left for meetings and debate – the time for action is now.”
Why Are We Supporting Repression in Ethiopia?
William Easterly and Laura Freschi
Foreign aid observers have often worried that Western aid to Africa is propping up autocratic regimes. Yet seldom has such a direct link from aid to political repression been demonstrated as in “Development without Freedom,” an extensively documented new report on Ethiopia by Human Rights Watch.
Photo: Farmer Makaba Wasu planting a grain crop. He lost part of his one hectare field due to river erosion. Jaffa Village, Wolayita Zone, Ethiopia, August 19, 2008 (Mike Goldwater/Getty Images)
(Source: nybooks)
Book Review
Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
There’s something to be said about discovering Ernest Hemingway in your early thirties. It’s as if you need some life lessons behind you, or some sort of feeling that you’re living life, instead of life living you. There’s just no way I would have been able to appricate Hemingway in my early twenties. I was too selfish then, into my self, and my Friday and Saturday nights. Hemingways words would have had zero effect on me.
I’m now thirty four. I’ve done somethings, felt love and terror. So when you turn the last page to Farewell to Arms and you gasp, or a tear rolls down your cheek you understand the feeling. The final pages hit you like a brick to the chest. It hurts, and the first words out of your mouth are, “Fucking Hemingway” as you shake your head and smile.
In describing the books we read we use the words “on the surface” a lot and this book is no different. On the surface, this book is about a love story between Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver serving with the Italy army during World War I and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. Hemingway is not just an on the surface kind of writer, although this love story is tragic, and rips your heart from your chest, Hemingway folds in World War I, like I’ve never seen written about before.
When I finished this novel it felt like another piece of work that’s completing me as a person. What I mean by that, is, books can form little pieces of you. We each have books we’re read we’ll never forget, when they come up in conversation or we see them on bookstore shelves we smile, or poke a friend and say “Have you read this..?”
Farewell to Arms leaves a mark. That mark will never go away, for that I’m grateful.
