Nature is Sending Us a Message

Editorial

A Weekly Political News Magazine

www.majalla.com/eng The coronavirus has taken a devastating toll on the human race, however one positive that has come out of this pandemic is the reduced pollution in the air we breathe. Ever since many parts of the world have been placed under lockdown, our atmosphere has seen reductions in the CO2 emissions and NO2 concentrations. This week’s first cover story

by Yasmine El-Geressi focuses on this recent improvement in air quality and why the presence of pollution in the atmosphere can make people more susceptible to diseases such as the coronavirus. The second cover story by Ali El Shamy is centred on how human activity, might have played a role in the spread of diseases and the coronavirus in particular.

The writer further explains how tampering with bats’ environment can indirectly cause virus outbreaks among human populations.

Iran’s regime has negligently put the lives of its citizens at risk by downplaying the coronavirus outbreak. As a result, Iran has become the worst hit country in the region. Up until recently, Iran’s rulers did not take the risks seriously and even blamed supernatural forces for the virus. However, now it is starting to take stringent measures such as allocating 20 per cent of its annual budget to tackle the virus. Joseph Braude writes on the other measures the regime is taking in order to salvage the country and its people.

Recently, the Israeli Foreign Ministry announced that Israeli scientists have begun working on a vaccine to tackle the coronavirus. This peaked the interest of Arabs around the region and many Arab Internet users engaged with the ministry on its social media pages to enquire about the vaccine. Furthermore, the ministry’s pages have been sending messages of goodwill to its neighbours and many Arab users have reciprocated these messages. Amal Shehade writes on this recent phenomenon and how the coronavirus might have an indirect impact of renewed bilateral relations between Israel and the Palestinians at the micro level and Arabs and Israelis at the macro level.

Sara Abdo interviews Lebanese actress and singer Dalida Khalil who spoke to Majalla about her acting career, her latest show “Ser”, why she’s taking a year long break from acting and how the quarantine in Lebanon has helped her family grow closer.

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Editor-in-Chief

Ghassan Charbel Editorial secretary Mostafa El-Dessouki HH Saudi Research and Marketing (UK) Ltd 10th Floor Building 7 Chiswick Business Park 566 Chiswick High Road London W4 5YG Tel : +44 207 831 8181 Fax: +44 207 831 2310

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A Weekly Political News Magazine

٤٠ Top 7 Reasons You Have a Headache

Issue 1794- April - 03/04/2020

Should Have Immunized the United 24 Ebola States to the Coronavirus

18 As Virus Toll in Iran Mounts, Leadership

Begins to Awaken

28 Past Pandemics Exposed China’s Weaknesses

34 Little Britain

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Dr. Adhanom Ghebreysus: The Director-General of the World Health Organization and the Man Leading the Fight Against COVID - 19 3

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Voting Schedule and Some Eligi40 Emmy bil1ity Rules Shift Due to COVID-19

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An Emirati man, wearing a protective face-mask, walks past a graffiti in Dubai on March 28, 2020. - Getty

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Police inspector wearing coronavirus-themed helmet speaks to a family on a motorbike at a checkpoint during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus in Chennai, India on March 28, 2020. - Getty

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Latest on the Spread of the Coronavirus Around the World

More than 954,000 people have been infected across the world and over 48,300 have died, according to a Reuters tally. Italy’s daily death toll on Wednesday was the lowest in six days, but the overall number of new infections grew and the government extended its national lockdown. Spain’s death toll exceeded 10,000 on Thursday after a record 950 people died overnight, but health officials noted a slowdown in proportional daily increases in infections and deaths. Mainland China logged fewer new infections on Thursday, but measures restricting movement were tightened in some areas due to a fear of more imported cases. India will pull out of a three-week lockdown in phases, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said as officials battle to contain the country’s biggest cluster of infections in New Delhi.

just below 936,000 with more than 47,000 deaths.

A Record 6.6 Million Seek US Jobless Aid as Layoffs Mount

Global Coronavirus Infections Near Million Mark After ‘Near Exponen’tial Growth

Confirmed Covid-19 infections are nearing the one million mark after “near exponential growth” saw global cases more than double in the past week. The World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned of the approaching milestone as new cases reached almost every country and territory across the world. “As we enter the fourth month since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic I’m deeply concerned about the rapid escalation and global spread of infection,” Tedros said. “Over the past five weeks, we have witnessed a near exponential growth in the number of new cases, reaching almost every country. “The number of deaths has more than doubled in the past week. In the next few days we will reach one million confirmed cases and 50,000 deaths.” The total number of cases on Thursday was

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More than 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week — doubling a record high set just one week earlier — a sign that layoffs are accelerating in the midst of the coronavirus. The stunning report Thursday from the Labor Department showed that job cuts are mounting against the backdrop of economies in the United States and abroad that have almost certainly sunk into a severe recession as businesses close across the world. The figure for last week is much higher than the previous record of 3.3 million reported for the previous week.

The surging layoffs have led many economists to envision as many as 20 million lost jobs by the end

of April. The unemployment rate could spike to as high as 15% this month, above the previous record of 10.8% set during a deep recession in 1982.

Saudi Arabia Imposes 24-hour Curfew in Mecca and Medina

Saudi Arabia imposed a 24-hour curfew in the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina on Thursday, extending measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 1,700 people in the kingdom and killed 16. The interior ministry said in a statement there were some exceptions, including for essential workers and in order for residents to buy food and access medical care.

Cars in those cities’ residential districts may only carry one passenger to limit the virus’ transmission, it said. The country of 30 million has taken drastic steps to contain the disease, halting international flights, closing most public places, and suspending the year-round umrah pilgrimage. On Tuesday, it asked Muslims to put plans for the annual haj pilgrimage on hold pending more clarity about the pandemic. Restrictions on movement have tightened,

with entry and exit to Riyadh, Mecca, Medina and Jeddah heavily restricted. Saudi Arabia has the most infections and deaths among the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, but public health officials say past experience combating the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) helped prepare the kingdom for the new coronavirus outbreak.

Hackers Linked to Iran Target WHO Staff Emails During Coronavirus

Hackers working in the interests of the Iranian government have attempted to break into the personal email accounts of staff at the World Health Organization during the coronavirus outbreak, four people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. It is not clear if any accounts were compromised, but the attacks show how the WHO and other organizations at the center of a global effort to contain the coronavirus have come under a sustained digital bombardment by hackers seeking information about the outbreak. Reuters reported in March that hacking attempts against the United Nations health agency and its partners had more than doubled since the

beginning of the coronavirus crisis, which has now killed more than 40,000 worldwide. The latest effort has been ongoing since March 2 and attempted to steal passwords from WHO staff by sending malicious messages designed to mimic Google web services to their personal email accounts, a common hacking technique known as “phishing,” according to four people briefed on the attacks. Reuters confirmed their findings by reviewing a string of malicious websites and other forensic data.

coalition’s bombing campaign in Yemen. The coalition has been fighting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels there since March 2015. Coalition officials said in a brief statement that they had started an operation to “destroy legitimate military targets” held by the rebels.

Trump Says He Brokered Deal with Saudi, Russia for Huge Oil Cuts

Houthis Launch Air Attacks on Saudi Capital

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels launched ballistic missiles towards the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, and southern areas near the Yemeni border on Saturday night. The attacks, which were intercepted

by Saudi air defences, came days after Yemen’s warring parties welcomed a UN call for an immediate truce to fight the coronavirus outbreak. Two days later, the Saudi-led military coalition launched airstrikes on Yemen’s rebel-held capital. The Saudiled strikes appeared to signal an escalation in the

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U.S President Donald Trump said on Thursday he had brokered a deal with top oil producers Russia and Saudi Arabia to cut output and arrest an oil price rout amid a global coronavirus pandemic, sending crude prices up by 45%. Trump said he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and now expected the two nations to cut output by 10 million barrels per day (bpd) - an unprecedented number representing 10% of global supply. Trump said cuts could amount to as much as 15 million bpd but didn’t say whether the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, would contribute to reductions, a move which is forbidden by U.S. antitrust legislation.

“Just spoke to my friend MBS (the crown prince) of Saudi Arabia, who spoke with President Putin of Russia and I expect and hope that they will be cutting back approximately 10 Million Barrels, and maybe substantially more which, if it happens, will be great for the oil & gas industry!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

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The World is Breathing Fresher Air Under Lockdown Poor air quality has put people at greater risk from coronavirus, but will the changes we see today have a persistent effect?

by Yasmine El-Geressi Amid travel bans, self-isolation, movement restrictions and the shut down of industrial activity taking place all over the world as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread, researchers are discovering the outbreak may be generating positive effects on the environment as satellite imagery show a sudden shift in pollution levels.

These images from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite which has been monitoring NOx levels in Europe show significant differences. As of March 25, Italian cities such as Milan and Bergamo saw nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations down by a 21 percent and 47 percent respectively. Rome’s average NO2 concentrations

This is Italy in early March

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A photograph shows a partial view of Lebanon’s capital Beirut with a clear skyline, on March 21, 2020, as most people stay home following measures taken by the government to control the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Beirut is known for its heavy air pollution caused by frequent traffic jams and other factors. - Getty

for the four weeks preceding March 25 were down between 26 and 35 percent, compared to the same weeks in 2019.

The changes over northern Italy are particularly striking because smoke from a dense cluster of factories tends to get trapped against the Alps at the end of the Po Valley, making this one of western Europe’s pollution hot spots.

Spanish figures seem to follow similar trends. Average NO2 levels in Barcelona were down 55 percent for the same mid-March period, compared with 2019.

Compared with the week prior, levels were down 40 percent.

One of the largest drops in pollution levels could be seen over the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei prov-

And this is Italy in March this year, once lockdowns began

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Sadly, even though pollution is down for now, chronic exposure can’t be repaired so quickly. For a person living with daily pollution exposure, the damage to their respiratory and immune system is done. ince which more than 50,000 coronavirus cases and was put under a strict lockdown in late January. The city is a transport hub that is home to more than 11 million people and a major engine of growth in the world’s second largest economy. According to Nasa, NO2 levels across eastern and central China have been 10-30 percent lower than normal.

In the world’s largest Lockdown that started last week in India, data shows that the main cities are recording much lower levels of harmful microscopic particulate matter known as PM 2.5, and of NO2. PM2. 5 (particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter) can penetrate deeply into the lung, irritate and corrode the alveolar wall, and consequently impair lung function, causing serious health risks.

In the capital, New Delhi, government data shows the average concentration of PM 2.5 plunged by 71 percent

The India Gate monument engulfed in smog at Rajpath, on November 2019 ,2 in New Delhi, India. (Getty)

in the space of a week -- falling from 91 microgram per cubic meter on March 20, to 26 on March 27, after the lockdown began. The World Health Organization considers anything above 25 to be unsafe. NO2 went from 52 per cubic meter to 15 in the same period -- also a 71 percent fall. Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore have also recorded a fall in these air pollutants.

The sudden fall in pollutants marks a significant shift for Indians who get look up to blue as the heavy, grey smog clears. The country has 21 of the world’s 30 most polluted cities, according to the IQAir AirVisual’s 2019 World Air Quality Report.

Nitrogen dioxide is produced from car engines, power plants and other industrial processes and is thought to ex-

Clearing the air could help many people fight off the threat of deadly disease — during this pandemic as well as any future ones — and save millions of lives in the meantime.

acerbate respiratory illnesses such as asthma. The World Health Organization describes NO2 as “a toxic gas which causes significant inflammation of the airways” at concentrations above 200 micrograms per cubic meter. Pollution particles may also be a vector for pathogens, as well as exacerbating existing health problems. The WHO is now investigating whether airborne pollution particles may be a vector that spreads Covid-19 and makes it more virulent, according to an article by The Guardian.

Experts say that this involuntary experiment is a lesson that is desperately needed in India.

In November last year, hundreds of Indians took to the streets in New Delhi to protest the levels of air pollution, after the city was blanketed in a dark yellow haze for several days as air pollution hit record levels. As air quality deteriorated into the “hazardous” category, with the potential to cause respiratory illnesses, schools were ordered to close, construction was halted and flights were diverted. Other cities in northern India also suffered.

Today, the skies are now clearing up, but the impact of living in chronic air pollution polluted conditions has left a hidden problem for residents: a potential vulnerability to the coronavirus pandemic. The country already has the largest cohort of people in the world living with respiratory disease and high rates of tuberculosis. “Such conditions make this densely populated country the per-

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A deserted view of an empty historic India Gate, as nationwide lockdown continues over the highly contagious coronavirus (COVID19-) on March 2020 ,30 in New Delhi, India. (Getty)

fect fodder for a virus that attacks the lungs of its victims,” writes Vidya Krishnan in Foreign Affairs.

8 million people per year die early from air pollution exposure. This amounts to more deaths than diarrheal disease, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS combined. This means that people living in cities and other urban areas, and those exposed to toxic fumes, may be more vulnerable to respiratory infections, such as Covid-19, due to related underlying health damage.

“Increased pollution increases susceptibility to infection,” Dr. Meredith McCormack, a spokeswoman for the American Lung Association and associate professor of pulmonary and critical care at Johns Hopkins University told the New York Times. “All things being equal, a person exposed to air pollution would likely have a worse outcome if they were exposed to coronavirus.”

There is evidence from previous coronavirus outbreaks that those exposed to poor air quality are at a higher risk of dying. Scientists who studied the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003 found that infected patients from regions with higher air pollution were 84% more likely to die than those in less-polluted areas. Health scientists also point to of research showing people who smoke or breathe dirty air are at higher risk of contracting pneumonia caused by similar viruses and of developing more severe symptoms once they have it.

Breathing unclean air is also linked to high blood pres-

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sure, diabetes, conditions that doctors are associate with higher death rates for COVID-19. Physicians say that people with these chronic conditions may be less able to fight off infections and more likely to die of the disease.

Sadly, even though pollution is down for now, chronic exposure can’t be repaired so quickly. For a person living with daily pollution exposure, the damage to their respiratory and immune system is done. “The air may be clearing in Italy, but the damage has already been done to human health and people’s ability to fight off infection,” said Sascha Marschang, acting secretary general of the European Public Health Alliance, in a statement.

Moreover, the blue skies are unlikely to last forever.

As the temporary reduction in global CO2 emissions will likely be reversed when industries eventually reopen and crank up production to make up for lost time, air pollution could also bounce back with a vengeance when lockdowns measures are lifted and factories and road traffic go back to their pre-coronavirus state.

But the changes we see today could still have a more persistent effect. As more links are found between air pollution and COVID-19 symptoms, the air we breathe is likely to gain even more attention in the months and years to come. Clearing the air could help many people fight off the threat of deadly disease — during this pandemic as well as any future ones — and save millions of lives in the meantime.

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How Human Activity on the Environment Might Have Led to the Coronavirus What the Coronavirus Can Teach Us About Climate Change 14

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If the environment that bats reside in is left untouched, then no harm will come to animals (including humans) that are susceptible to these diseases. However, when deforestation happens then these bats are forced to migrate to find new homes, and many of these new homes are near human settlements. of commercial flights. According to the Air Transport Action Group, the commercial aviation industry has emitted 915 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2019. If the coronavirus continues to persuade people away from flying, then 2020 might see a sizeable reduction in CO2 emissions in the atmosphere. While this short-term reduction in air pollution is a positive outcome, the human race needs to be aware that it is these human activities, which might have led to the coronavirus pandemic in the first place. Furthermore, while the pandemic will pass sooner or later, the dangers associated with climate change will still persist even after this virus.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN PANDEMICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

A forestry machine stacks logs on land cleared of trees at the site of the new Tesla Gigafactory on February 2020 ,17 near Gruenheide, Germany. (Getty)

by Ali El Shamy Understandably, most news stories and articles covering the coronavirus have been tragic ones involving deaths, cases and job losses. While the virus has made a grim impact on health sectors and job sectors all around the world, there is one aspect that is actually benefiting from the coronavirus, the environment. Ever since many parts of the world were put under quarantine, lockdown or curfew fewer and fewer people have been using cars, or public transportation. One important side effect that has resulted from this worldwide lockdown is a reduction

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When the virus first broke out in Wuhan in late 2019, early 2020 many hoaxes regarding the origin of the virus began to circulate online, one of such hoax is that bat soup was the underlying cause of the virus.

While it is true that bats might have been the carrier of the virus, a person eating bat soup in Wuhan (which isn’t even a delicacy in the region) most certainly wasn’t the cause of the outbreak.

Recently, Vermont Senator and Democratic Presidential Nominee hopeful, Bernie Sanders, hosted a live panel discussion on his YouTube channel. The panel featured Sonia Shah, an investigative journalist who has been covering how diseases tend to spread and how corporate power impacts global health. In

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her discussion, she mentioned how deforestation might have been a factor in the spread of coronavirus and other viruses. As many people know, forests are more than just vast places teeming with trees, they are homes to many wildlife such as bats. While bats are known to carry multiple diseases and viruses, they are also immune most of the diseases they carry. If the environment that bats reside in is left untouched, then no harm will come to animals (including humans) that are susceptible to these diseases. However, when deforestation happens then these bats are forced to migrate to find new homes, and many of these new homes are near human settlements. An article published in Forbes also asserts that scientists have for years been warning that deforestation and bat migration might potentially cause a virus outbreak.

The article further indicated that since humans tend to settle near newly deforested areas, then there’s a good chance that carrier bats might come near them or livestock they might have on their property. Moreover, these migrating bats will be attracted to any area that carries the food they eat, and the problem with barns, especially lit ones, is that they tend to lure insects a popular food item for bats. As such, the carrier bats will infect livestock and the livestock will in turn infect humans. Meanwhile, fruit bats will go near fruit orchards to insatiate their appetites, this again has the potential to infect humans who work or live near these the virus which was then transmitted to humans. orchards.

Since civets (one of the livestock in Wuhan) have As the coronavirus shows similar strands to viruses previously shown to be carriers of the SARS virus, that have been carried by bats, scientists think that scientists think that the novel coronavirus might have what most likely caused the viral outbreak is that a mutated inside of them. bat came near the livestock sold in one of Wuhan’s wet markets and said livestock became carriers of WHY WE CAN’T GO BACK TO

NORMAL LIFE

While the pandemic will pass sooner or later, the dangers associated with climate change will still persist even after this virus.

What this pandemic has shown is that human complacency is a dangerous global phenomenon.

While now more than ever, humans have become aware of the negative impact we have had on our environment not enough was being done to help resolve the looming crisis. Protests have been happening all around the world, but the overwhelming majority of the human race have either subsided to nihilistic complacency that nothing can be done to

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Residents wearing face masks purchase seafood at a wet market on January 2020 ,28 in Macau, China. (Getty)

stop the looming disaster climate change will cause.

What’s even worse is that we have global leaders who either vehemently deny the existence of climate change, or actively encourage activities that add to the crisis for economic gain.

For the longest time, humans have had the comforting thought that even though climate change might have devastating irreversible impacts on our lives, it is still something that will happen “years from now�.

As a result, we go about procrastinating resolving the issue, effectively waiting for it to become worse before deciding to do something about it.

There will be no vaccine, or cure for rising sea levels, increased respiratory diseases due to air pollution or droughts.

out and once the sands of time congregate at the bottom half, then it will be too late to do anything. There will be no vaccine, or cure for rising sea levels, increased respiratory diseases due to air pollution or droughts.

This current pandemic has been a vital reality check We need now to hold corporations and governments of what a global disaster looks like, but this crisis will accountable for their impact on the environment, be over in due time. However, climate change is an otherwise the anxieties we feel now might increase hourglass hanging above all our heads waiting to run tenfold sooner rather than later.

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As Virus Toll in Iran Mounts, Leadership Begins to Awaken Tehran’s Belated Awakening Has Done Enormous Economic Damage that Will Restrain its Regional Ambitions for Years to Come

by Joseph Braude As coronavirus spreads across the globe, almost no country has been hit more severely than Iran. The government’s early reluctance to impose social dis-

tancing measures has brought harsh results as the number of infections rise by the tens of thousands.

While it appears Tehran has begun to shift course, this belated awakening to the threat has done enormous economic damage that, combined with new

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U.S. sanctions, will restrain Iranian regional ambitions for years to come.

FOOT DRAGGING ON CRISIS CONTAINMENT The Iranian government’s persistent refusal to take serious measures to halt the spread of the virus has made Iran the worst-hit country in the Middle East.

Even now, the government has refused to quarantine major cities or impose widespread closures. Mohammad Hossein Ghorbani, the deputy minister of health in Gilan, said in a radio interview, “I have had several conversations with state officials in response to repeated requests for a full quarantine in Gilan province, but the NSC... persuaded us to give up.”

This stance appears to stem from ignorance of the danger at the highest levels of Tehran’s hierarchy. As recently as Nowruz, Ayatollah Khamenei blamed the coronavirus in part on supernatural entities, saying, “We have jinn and human enemies that help each other.

The intelligence services of many countries work together against us.” And yet, the stubborn facts of the pandemic remain. As of March 30, the official tally by the Iranian Health Ministry stands at 41,495 Coronavirus infections and 2,757 dead. Unofficial estimates peg the total number of Iranians infected with COVID-19 at over 70,000, while as many as 4,762 people have died.

TEHRAN BEGINS TO PIVOT Azadi tower is illuminated with the flags of countries struggling against coronavirus (COVID19-) pandemic in Tehran, Iran on March 2020 ,31. (Getty)

Yet in recent days, after months of downplaying the threat of the virus, early signs have emerged that Tehran has awoken to the severity of the problem began to spread. In remarks on State TV, Iran’s first Vice President, Eshaq Jahangiri gave mild inkling of what lies ahead: “If necessary, we might impose tougher measures as our priority is the nation’s safety and health.”

More significantly, President Rouhani pledged on Saturday to dedicate one-fifth of the state budget to the fight against the spreading pandemic, announcing in a public address, “We are in difficult conditions, in conditions of sanctions, but we have allocated 20 percent of our budget this year to corona ... and this might be surprising for the world from a country under sanctions.”

Perhaps the first tangible expression of this newfound approach has come from the margins of state power, in the judiciary. On March 17, the Iranian Justice Ministry announced that it had temporarily released about 85,000 people from jail, out of concern that coronavi-

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This stance appears to stem from ignorance of the danger at the highest levels of Tehran’s hierarchy. As recently as Nowruz, Ayatollah Khamenei blamed the coronavirus in part on supernatural entities. rus might spread unchecked within crowded prisons.

This week, Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili went still further, declaring, “The second wave of the temporary release of prisoners had already started and their 100,000 prisoners’ furloughs have been extended until April 19.”

IRAN’S ECONOMIC WOES The economic costs of Tehran’s early stumbles will likely act as a drag on Iranian ambitions going forward. This week, the Deputy Minister of Cultural in charge of tourism, Mr. Vali Taymuri, estimated that the epidemic will cost $200 million to the country’s tourism industry in three months. The head of the airlines association told ILNA the coronavirus crisis will cost another $200 million in damages to his industry by early April.

Financially, coronavirus has struck at a particularly inopportune time for Iran, as global oil prices continue a historic plunge. In the estimate of one analyst, prices “will, in all likelihood, continue downward” as global consumption of fuel had dropped by as much as 10 million barrels per day, driven by widespread adoption of social distancing and decreased economic activity.

Atop both of these burdens, U.S. sanctions continue to impose a new albatross on Tehran. On March 26, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a statement announcing targeted sanctions on over 20 “front companies, senior officials, and business associates … [that] provide support to or act for or on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its branch for elite operations abroad, the Quds Force (QF).” This comes as retaliation for earlier provocations by Iranianbacked militias in Iraq such as Kata’ib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haqq.

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“Arab-Israeli” Reconciliation Brought to You by the “Coronavirus”

How Israeli Development of a Coronavirus Vaccine Ignited Sentiments for Peace

by Amal Shehade A few weeks on from the coronavirus outbreak in Israel, a state of rift, disagreement, and anger continues among the Isreali community and its official institutions concerning the battle against this virus. As the outbreak happened one month after the elections and the subsequent failure in forming a government, it’s now widely believed that the virus has been politically exploited for

personal interests. While this situation has added economomic anxieties and a prospective health crisis for the Israelis, a glimmer of hope is visible on Palestinian and Arab horizons. There are two important aspects in facing the coronavirus which may contribute immensely in fulfilling expectations that the virus may be a reason for better future Israeli- Arab relations. The first aspect was made clear when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel has turned to other countries in the region

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in order to purchase ventilators due to the current shortage that the country is facing. There is hope that this step will contribute to reconciliation between Arab countries in the region and Israel. The other aspect that has added to this hope was the amiable discusssions between Arab and Israeli internet users had regarding the coronavirus. These discussions happened through the Israeli Ministry of Health’s communication webpage, shortly after it announced that Israel might be on the verge of manufacturing a vaccine against the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Professor Hossam Hayek from the Technion Institute in Haifa revealed that they are close to finding a new technology for early detection of coronavirus. In an interview with Majalla, Hayek stressed that it is only a matter of time, and that there is progress in reaching results that guarantee two new technological methods of early detection of coronavirus. The technology consists of detection patches on the skin.

According to Professor Hayek, the device is currently in one of the countries that was hit by the virus, and once it is returned and proven successful, it will start being used to save as many coronavirus patients as possible.

However, Professor Hayek believes that around 50 to 70 percent of the population may become infected with coronavirus, and it is highly possible that the virus will return next year or at any time really.

NETANYAHU’S CORONA CRISIS

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Finance are facing an internal struggle with regards to how to tackle the coronavirus crisis. One of the internal conflicts has to do with the fact that Netanyahu is refusing to enforce a total lockdown, and political analysts think that this is an extension of the political deadlock in Israel which has preventted it from forming a functioning government. On the other hand, some politicians and research institutes think that this coronavirus crisis might be the start of political reconciliation between the Palestinians and Israel, and improved relations between Israel and Arab states, especially those that have peace treaties with Israel. Another significant development was when Israel bought ventilators from Arab states in order to address its shortage and save lives. This development will have the manifest result of preventing many infected Israelis from dying and it might also result in the latent benefit of improving Israeli-Arab relations.

THE IMPACT OF CORONAVIRUS ON ARAB-ISRAELI RELATIONS

At a time when most of Israel’s sociopolitical and health institutions are busy trying to find ways to confront the current health crisis and upcoming economic crisis, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has used this crisis as an oppurtunity to build bridges with the Arab nation across the region. On it’s social media pages, the Israeli foreign ministry has stated that the country’s scientists have been hard at work developing a vaccine for the coronavirus. This peaked the interest of Arab social media users in the region. The engagement pages have had with Arab users have given a glim-

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Professor Hayek: Around 50 and 70 percent of the population may be infected with coronavirus, and there is a probability that the virus will return next year. mer of hope that reconciliation can go from a fleeting dream to a concrete reality. For example one of the ministry’s pages featured a selfie showing three Arabic speaking ministry employees wishing Arab states the fortitude to come out of the crisis as soon as possible. This photo was viewed by 5 million Arab users and two days later, the ministry posted another message stating: “Israel is praying for God to protect the Arab nation from the coronavirus.

The virus is quickly spreading throughout the entire world, and it knows no borders, religious groups or nations. We’re all human, we’re all brothers and sisters.” The post received comments from Yemen, Morroco, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan and the list goes on.

One of the comments read: “Our hearts are with Israel, together we can defeat the virus.” Zakaria from Sudan wrote: “May God save and bless you.” Amin from Iraq wrote “What came from your page is a beautiful message of solidarity and peace.” Another user from Iraq wrote: “Our hearts are with Israel and the entire world with its diverse nations, religions and faiths which can unite in this fight against this virus.” There is a long list of such amiable messages on the page, and most of the users called for peace and reconciliation with Israel. However, there were also hundreds of others who wished for the coronavirus to annihilate Israel and its citizens. One user from Syria wrote: “May God save all of world’s inhabitants, except of those from Iran and Israel.”

Another wrote: “May God protect you just long enough until you manufactre that vaccine.” Another user who didn’t mention his nationality wrote: “You are not human and we are not brothers.”

A CONSENSUS ON AN ISRAELI VACCINE

A survey was recently posted on Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ webpage with the quaestion: “ Would you use the vaccine which Israel is developing against coronavirus?” The majority of the users gave an affirmative response. Moreover, millions of people from the Arab world interacted with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs through its Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts to inquire about the new possible vaccination against the coronavirus and when it may be used or obtained.

THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFEDERATION, A STRUGGLE AGAINST NATURAL DISASTERS

Coronavirus came at the peak of the crisis between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which has been broiling since the an-

nouncement of the “Deal of the Century”. This crisis subsequently ceased security coordination between the two parties.

After the rise of coronavirus cases in Israel, several of the country’s factions have considered what first steps Israel should take to ensure that the Palestinian Authority is capable of containing the virus within the territorties controlled by Israel. This is because any outbreak on Palestinian lands can quickly spread to Israel. Some have warned against the Israeli measures taken to close the crossings and prevent Palestinian workers from entering Israel for two months, as senior researchers at the National Security Research Institute think this step will worsen the economic crisis in the West Bank, and thus result in an economic collapse that will greatly affect the Palestinian Authority’s response in facing the virus. Accordingly, the researchers believed that the virus should motivate Israel to create an effective cooperative network with the Palestinian Authority and the countries with which it maintains peace agreements (Jordan and Egypt). Additionally, there is a need for a change in relations with the Gaza Strip. It is true that Israel allowed trucks to cross

Palestinian Professor Hossam Hayek from the “Technion” Institute tells Majalla: We are close to developing a device capable of early detection of the coronavirus. This device comprises detection patches on the skin.

into the Strip, but that is not enough. The researchers found that by not seeking mutual cooperation to end the coronavirus crisis, Israel would risk growing instability in the Gaza strip which would thus intensify the possibilities of escalation, and reignite the protests at the Gaza Wall.

Yossi Beilin, the former leader of the Meretz Party and one of the key Israeli figures who initiated the Oslo Peace Agreement, stated: “Today, the coronavirus has penetrated the barriers between Israel and the occupied Palestinian lands, however the lack of accord between both governments can be determental to both our efforts in tackling the virus. An event like the coronavirus will make us rethink the way we look at our regional maps, and the formation of an Israeli-Palestinian confederation will be necessary in order to ensure our cooperaton. Although, bilateral cooperation already exists between us, there is no doubt that better political relations can be formed which will in turn guarantee better coordination.”

The head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University Colonel Reserve Micheal Milstein said: “The coronavirus is an oppurtunity for us to reestablish our relations with the Palestinians. Furthermore, Israel needs to be ready to increase its civilian aid to Palestinian territories in order to maintain its own security.”

Millstein also stated that the coronavirus has highlighted the economic and civil connection between Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians rely on Israel for employment, movement and assistance while the Palestinian labor force is vital for Israel. Both sides fear a complete closure of borders, something that would be strategically counterinuitive. The authorities in the West Bank boast that they have contained the spread of the virus, but Palestinians fear that the PA will ban the 120 thousand workers who work in Israel and its settlements from travelling to these areas. That would cause an economic disruption to Palestinian civilian life.

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Millions of people from the Arab world interacted with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs through its Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts to inquire about the new possible vaccination against Coronavirus and when it may be used or obtained.

Millstein also thinks that the coronavirus will, for the short-term, put an end to violent friction, especially in Gaza. The aid that Israel is presenting to the Palestinians to tackle the coronavirus can reduce the tensions between it and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. It can also persuade Hamas to make concessions that will increase the stability and security in this part of the world. However, this can prove to be a difficult task at present times in light of the economic challenges that Israel is facing these days.

WILL CORONAVIRUS PATIENTS FROM GAZA AND THE WEST BANK BE TREATED IN ISRAEL Another aspect that needs to be considered is whether Palestinians seeking treatment in Israel is grounds to restore relations between both parties. This is a sensitive topic because Israeli citizens are living in a state of anxiety due to the rapid spread of the coronavirus and the large number of people who are dying .from it While speaking to Haaretz a senior Israeli official said: “In Israel, we’re worried that the first coronavirus case in the West Bank will cause a massive spread of the virus, that, in turn, would cause a big burden on the health sector there.” Israel is also fearful that it’s own health sector will not have enough beds to accomadate all Israeli patients in the event of a virus outbreak.

The official also said that Israel and the Palestinian Authority share coordinated protocols in the event of natural disasters. Unfortunatly, there are no coordinated procedures between both parties which could tackle virus outbreaks similar to that of the coronavirus. “In cases of natural disasters, we can rely on international aid, and Israel has the capabilties to rebuild itself and its regional neighbors, the same cannot be said in the case of the coronavirus.” The official said.

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The Haaretz article also indicated that some of the items used to treat thos with the virus are “dual-use” in nature. For instance, liquid oxygen can be used as both a disinfectant and a component for explosive devices. So far, Israel has not eased the entry policy of such products.

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR ARAB-ISRAELIS

The coronavirus came amidst the political deadlock in Israel which the latest parliamentary election has thus far failed to resolve. At the same time, the Arab-Israeli Joint List managed to increase its parliamentary presence from 13 seats to 15 seats.

Political expert Shimon Schaffer has said that the coronavirus is an opportunity for the Arab-Israeli political establishment to gain popular recognition. He also thinks that the path for Israelis to accept Arab MPs as equal partners and not enemies will be a long and difficult one. But he notes that all inhabitants share this country, and that Israelis had to accept that there are diverse ethnic groups in the country. Furthermore stripping these groups of their rights isn’t right.

Schaffer then spoke about a recent experience he had at an Israeli clinic which reflects the importance of changing the policy used in dealing with Arab-Israelis and descendents of 1948 Palestinians.

He said, “Yesterday morning, I received medical treatment at a clinic in Bnei Brak, most of the nurses and doctors were Arabs who come every day from the cities and villages in the north and the center to help all of us. They are dedicated and highly commendable. They do not mix politics with their work: they provide treatment for everyone. I suppose the only thing that matters to them is that we all understand that they are citizens that have equal rights, just like us. And he added, “Netanyahu, you have a responsibility to thank them, because they are working throughout the year to treat the same population that you belong to, the elderly.”

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Ebola Should Have Immunized the United States to the Coronavirus

What Washington Failed to Learn From the National Security Council’s Ebola Report

by Christopher Kirchhoff In international crises, policymakers and politicians rarely have a dress rehearsal before their debut on the main stage. Yet in retrospect, the Ebola outbreak of

2013–15 amounts to exactly that—a real-life test of Washington’s ability to detect and contain an infectious disease that threatens global security. Precisely because those who fought the spread of the Ebola virus knew how close we came to global catastrophe, the

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National Security Council initiated a detailed study of the successes and failures of the international and domestic responses. Starting in February 2015, 26 departments and agencies across the U.S. government participated in a “lessons learned” process headed by the White House that produced a 73-page analysis with 21 findings and recommendations. I led this effort, under the stewardship of National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Ebola Czar Ron Klain, and I authored the NSC report recently made public by The New York Times.

It was clear to those who responded to the Ebola outbreak that the response system of the United States and the international response system would risk collapse if faced with a more dire scenario. It was equally clear that a more dire scenario taking place was a question of when, not if. As the NSC report concluded, “future epidemics, especially those that are airborne and transmissible before symptoms appear, are plausibly far more dangerous.” It continued: “An appropriate minimum planning benchmark . . . might be an epidemic an order of magnitude or two more difficult . . . with much more significant domestic spread.”

A New York State trooper speaks to a patient arriving to a coronavirus testing center at Lehman College on March ,28 2020 in the Bronx, New York City. The center, opened March 23 at Lehman College, can test up to 500 people per day for COVID19-.

(Getty)

Although the costs of the current pandemic will not be fully measurable for some time, what was done and what was left undone in the nearly four years between the end of the Ebola crisis and the first appearance of COVID-19 is now in the public domain. It is all too clear how and when the United States failed to better prepare.

THE OUTBREAK LAST TIME The Ebola virus dominated headlines in the United States in the summer and fall of 2014, as it spread uncontrollably across West Africa; Thomas Duncan became the first infected person to die of the disease on U.S. soil. Ultimately, Ebola claimed the lives of over 11,000 people worldwide and two people in the United States. But those who participated in the response overwhelmingly came away with the view that it could have been exponentially worse.

With Ebola, we got lucky twice over: the deadly hemorrhagic pathogen, a filovirus, was not airborne, and the outbreak occurred in a remote region of the world with few linkages to population centers in Africa and no direct air routes to global cities. We also knew that we wouldn’t get lucky twice again. With urbanization and deforestation driving together species that don’t normally interact and “wet markets” selling wild ani-

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It was clear to those who responded to the Ebola outbreak that the response system of the United States and the international response system would risk collapse if faced with a more dire scenario. mal meat across Africa and Asia, the world is developing in ways that significantly increase the likelihood that a zoonotic virus will jump from an animal host to a human. Biotech lab accidents, terrorists, and offensive bioweapons programs are also possible sources of mass infection. When a virus makes the jump for whatever reason, intercontinental air travel ensures that it spreads with spectacular speed.

Even though the Ebola virus is far harder to catch or transmit than the new coronavirus (and easier to test for, since a test had already been developed), Ebola was its own harsh teacher. With the number of people infected doubling every three weeks at the epidemic’s peak, there was a tremendous penalty for inaction. Either Ebola was contained early, while it still was an “away game,” to use the parlance of counterterrorism, or it would quickly become a “home game,” threatening the security of the U.S. population and the global economy. U.S. President Barack Obama ordered a response for which the government had no playbook: a military mobilization of 2,800 troops, who worked in support of tens of thousands of civilian health responders in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Together, they built thousands of beds in Ebola treatment units to isolate and care for those who were infected, supported contact tracing to limit transmission, and led community education campaigns about how Ebola is spread. The last major transmission chains were stopped in late 2015, just over a year after the U.S. military deployed.

Although Americans can be justifiably proud of the role their nation played at a moment of global peril, the response to Ebola exposed gaps in preparedness and capability in every agency in the U.S. government tasked with health and security. The same was true for the international system. Shortfalls appeared in a bewildering array of places, from the U.S. Public Health Service not having enough yellow fever vaccines on hand to deploy personnel to West Africa to the U.S.

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Africa Command not having an updated pandemic plan. At home, single Ebola cases swamped the public health and hazardous waste disposal systems of New York and Texas. Washington also presumed a degree of competence in the ability of the World Health Organization (WHO) to respond to a major epidemic—a degree of competence that it turned out not to have.

Once the magnitude of the crisis came into full view and the United States and its partners rushed capacity to West Africa, the failure to initially field adequate testing capacity and personal protective equipment to frontline medical personnel presaged the crisis now playing out with COVID-19.

AFTER EBOLA Even before the Ebola epidemic ended, the U.S. government began pursuing a three-pronged strategy to contain a more dangerous outbreak. First, it doubled down on the Global Health Security Agenda, an initiative the Obama administration launched before the Ebola crisis to expand capabilities around the world to prevent, detect, and rapidly respond to infectious disease threats. Through this initiative, the United States forged partnerships with over 60 countries around the world and used $1 billion of the Ebola Response Supplemental passed by Congress in December 2014 to establish dozens of specialty labs around the world to detect novel outbreaks and to organize country-bycountry programs to deepen preparedness.

The strategy’s second prong was to further build out the network of hospitals and testing centers in the United States designated to treat Ebola and to increase the size of the national medical stockpile with more of the personal protective equipment and materials needed to fight highly lethal pathogens.

The third prong was to designate a health emergency response coordinator and create a new Directorate

Historians looking back at the period between the Ebola and COVID19- outbreaks will note a haunting sequence to events.

for Global Health Security and Biodefense within the National Security Council. It would be the job of this White House office to monitor biological threats and coordinate future responses. Crucially, this office would lead post-Ebola reforms, using its perch in the White House to ensure structural changes within agencies and departments.

Because combating a dangerous pathogen requires the close cooperation of parts of the government that don’t ordinarily work together, increasing U.S. capacity would necessitate a willingness to direct changes that might go against the culture of federal departments, agencies, and the U.S. military. It would require cajoling Congress to increase budgets, add mandates, and adjust missions. And given the magnitude of the changes, it would require the personal leadership of the president. The seriousness of the threat of an infectious disease led the outgoing Obama national security team to include an influenza pandemic scenario in a joint exercise held with the incoming Trump team. To ensure that the new Global Health Security and Biodefense Directorate’s mission would survive into the

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Dr. Craig Spencer speaks during a news conference November 2014 ,11 at Bellevue Hospital in New York.

After being treated at Bellevue for Ebola, Spencer, a -33year-old New York doctor who became America›s last known Ebola case, has been declared free of the virus and was discharged. (Getty)

When a virus makes the jump for whatever reason, intercontinental air travel ensures that it spreads with spectacular speed. “the current capacity of this system is not likely to be sufficient for many types of infectious disease outbreaks (e.g., pandemic influenza and other respiratory pathogens).” Nor was the national medical stockpile significantly bolstered. Congressional leaders passed budgets that had none of the vision or scale of the $5.4 billion Ebola Response Supplemental.

The third prong of the strategy was the last to go.

In his first month as National Security Adviser, John Bolton shuttered the new NSC Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. Its leader departed the NSC staff just one day after the WHO declared a new outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that to date has killed over 5,000 people.

new administration intact, the outgoing White House team selected a career civil servant—a respected Pentagon biodefense expert named Elizabeth Cameron— to lead it, providing continuity from one administration to the next.

LESSONS UNLEARNED As 2017 turned to 2018 and 2018 turned to 2019, each prong of this strategy fell away like wheels off a bus.

When the money provided by the Ebola Response Supplemental ran out, the new administration continued to fund the Global Health Security Agenda. But the overall budget for the Centers for Disease Control was cut, and no robust, new investments were made in greater deployable capability in the United States or other countries. At home, the envisioned expansion of the original 35-hospital Ebola Treatment Network did not take place; the $259 million appropriated for the network in 2014 was not followed by meaningful infusions of funds, setting it on track to expire in May 2020 and leading the Department of Health and Human Services to warn in November 2017 that

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Historians looking back at the period between the Ebola and COVID-19 outbreaks will note a haunting sequence to events. The two-year-old boy named Emile who became the first known victim of Ebola in West Africa died in the Guinean village of Meliandou in December 2013. Six years later to the month, doctors in Wuhan Central Hospital noticed clusters of severe pneumonia that was unresponsive to treatment, a clinical development that evoked the SARS outbreak of 2002–3. The NSC Ebola Lessons Learned report was completed almost exactly between these two events, in the summer of 2016.

The focus now must be looking forward, not back.

Still, an accounting of the current outbreak and the U.S. response to it will be necessary, as it was after the Ebola crisis, so that lessons do not go unheeded yet again. Combating epidemics in the best of circumstances is hard, and even well-tested systems never perform as planned. It will never be known how much better prepared the nation and the world might have been for a coronavirus pandemic had the infrastructure called for by policymakers who fought Ebola been fully built. But the nation will ultimately have a sense of the cost to lives and livelihoods of its absence.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Past Pandemics Exposed China’s Weaknesses The Current One Highlights Its Strengths

by Robert Peckham When the novel coronavirus first emerged in China’s Hubei Province, foreign reactions to the country’s handling of the epidemic swung between extremes. At a press conference held in Beijing in late February, Bruce Aylward, who coled the World Health Organization’s (WHO) joint mission with China on the disease now known as COVID-19,

praised what he described as “probably the most ambitious, and I would say, agile and aggressive disease-containment effort in history.” Pointing to a graph that showed a steep decline in cases, he commented, “If I had COVID-19, I’d want to be treated in China.”

Others have been far more critical. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College, sug-

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gested that China’s “less than impressive” management of the crisis would reinforce “a trend for global companies to ‘de-Sinicize’ their supply chains.” The use of the term “sick man of Asia” in the headline caused particular umbrage and provided a pretext for the expulsion of three Wall Street Journal reporters from China. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang condemned the use of “racially discriminatory language,” to which U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded with a defense of the free press.

The rapid politicization of the new coronavirus, and particularly of China’s role in containing it, has historical precedents. From the bubonic plague at the end of the nineteenth century to HIV/AIDS in the 1990s to SARS in 2002–3, Western observers have long viewed China’s responses to epidemic crises as indices of its relative political and economic openness. China’s management of disease has also been crucial to how Chinese citizens have viewed their nation and how the Chinese state has reaffirmed its authority.

PLAGUED BY DEFEAT

A couple wear masks as they sort out their passports at Hong Kong›s Chek Lap Kok airport to protect against a killer outbreak of pneumonia which shows no sign of abating in the territory 28 March 2003. (Getty)

Between 1894 and 1950, an estimated 15 million people died of bubonic plague in a pandemic that began in China.

The disease spread from Yunnan, on China’s southwest border, to the Pearl River Delta, with Hong Kong serving as its global launch pad. Many Western commentators were convinced that the “plague germ” had incubated in China’s crowded cities. These critics took the absence of modern sanitation as an indication that the Qing dynasty was incapable of governing. Disease, they concluded, had revealed the political system for what it was: moribund and in need of fundamental reform.

The plague hit China at a time when rival imperial powers were competing to enlarge their spheres of influence. In 1894, Japan went to war with the Qing over control of the Korean Peninsula. China’s defeat and its loss of Korea as a vassal state exposed the country’s inability to modernize; the Qing army and navy were simply no match for Japan’s remodeled forces. Then, in 1899, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay published his “Open Door Note,” which attempted to create a framework for competing foreign interests in China and protect China’s recently weakened territorial integrity. But the proliferation of imperial networks and the push to open up China’s markets had an unintended consequence: they provided the conditions for infections to globalize and a rationale for further foreign intervention in Chinese affairs.

The term “sick man of Asia” was coined in this postwar context. There was much soul-searching in China as to what had caused the country’s ignominious defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. Many reformers pointed to a pervasive cultural and political malaise, drawing on social evolutionary ideas to emphasize China’s moral and physical

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The rapid politicization of the new coronavirus, and particularly of China’s role in containing it, has historical precedents. atrophy. Foremost among these critics was the Chinese scholar Yan Fu, an esteemed translator who was educated in the United Kingdom. In “On Strength,” an article published in a Tianjin newspaper in 1895, he likened China to a sick man in need of radical therapy. The Chinese needed to jettison debilitating habits, including opium smoking and foot-binding. The nation was a living organism locked in a competitive struggle for survival; citizens were the cells that formed this vital whole, so their physical and moral well-being was paramount.

Calls for reform grew louder in the late 1890s. The intellectual Liang Qichao reiterated Yan’s claim that as a country inhabited by “sick people,” China was a “sick nation.”

Ground down by an autocratic and incompetent state, the Chinese had become sick not only morally but also physically: rampant diseases—among them plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, and smallpox—were sapping the people. Reformers called for restoring the health of China’s citizenry and rejuvenating the decrepit body politic.

Sickness and health thus provided the basis for justifying reforms that extended from the susceptible Chinese body to the enervated state. In 1923, Sun Yat-sen—the first president of the Republic of China—visited Hong Kong to give a lecture. Describing his graduation from medical school some 20 years before, Sun told his audience, “I saw that it was necessary to give up my profession of healing men and take up my part to cure the country.”

Efforts to reform China’s political and public health would outlast the Qing dynasty and the bubonic plague. In 1910, as Qing rule crumbled, the British-educated, Penang-born physician Wu Lien-teh was sent by the Chinese government to curtail the spread of pneumonic plague across Northeast China. He enacted stringent containment strategies based on modern scientific teachings: postmortems, bacteriological investigations, and mass cremations, to name a few. Wu’s program was markedly different from the response to the bubonic plague just two decades prior, when endeavors to halt the contagion were left to local charitable organizations or to the foreign officials who staffed the Imperial Maritime Customs Service with minimal oversight from the viceroy at Canton.

Just as before, however, China’s handling of the outbreak within its borders would have geopolitical implications.

During the pneumonic plague outbreak, China, Japan, and

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Russia vied for political and economic dominance over Manchuria. With Japan rapidly modernizing and Russia bullishly expanding eastward, China’s management of the disease was an opportunity to showcase its newfound efficiency and reinforce its territorial claims. But reform came too late. In 1911, the Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty. Coincidentally, the springboard for the rebellion was Wuhan, the city that would become the epicenter of the COVID-19 epidemic.

THE WAR ON DISEASE The relative openness of China’s republican period, from 1911 to 1949—characterized by freer markets, a flourishing press, newfound liberties, and lively engagement with the world—was also reflected in the country’s health sector. Chinese scientists took part in international meetings, new opportunities opened for women in health care, medical schools expanded, and a Ministry of Health was established in 1928, in part to address the rural-urban disparity in health.

That age came to an end with the communist seizure of power, led by Mao Zedong in 1949. Although the People’s Republic, like previous governments, focused on disease prevention, health, and national strength, it acted upon these concerns altogether differently. The communist government viewed health through a statist lens and as an important rationale for one-party rule. Mao’s war on disease was a case in point. Ostensibly a health campaign, the war was actually part of an ambitious social program that sought to extract undesirables, promote unity, and fight against capitalist imperialism.

During the Korean War, for example, North Korea and the Soviet Union alleged that the United States was using biological weapons to spread infectious diseases.

China supported the charges, claiming that U.S. planes were dropping insects and other disease vectors to spread plague, cholera, encephalitis, and anthrax. Mao responded with a “Patriotic Hygiene Campaign” in 1952, admonishing citizens to root out and destroy invading pests: flies, mosquitoes, rats, fleas, and even dogs. Anti-bacteriological warfare measures were put in place, including quarantine stations. Although the veracity of the biological warfare allegations continues to be debated, compelling evidence suggests that the charges were fabricated as part of a concerted propaganda campaign. The accusations provided the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party with a pretext for pushing a domestic political agenda under the guise of biosecurity.

Mao continued to leverage health as a political tool during the Cultural Revolution, which was initiated in 1966 as a war against bourgeois institutions, including modern medi-

cine. In 1964, Mao had attacked the Ministry of Health as an elite establishment; during the Cultural Revolution, he proceeded to persecute doctors and starve hospitals of support. The Cultural Revolution also created ideal conditions for infectious diseases to flourish. An outbreak of meningitis in Beijing in the late summer and fall of 1966 was soon spread across the country by the student paramilitary—the Red Guards—traveling on the railways. Chinese authorities made no attempt to contain the epidemic, since doing so would have put the brakes on the Cultural Revolution, which depended on the mass mobilization of the Red Guards to purge society of recalcitrant bourgeois elements. The United States offered assistance, which China flatly declined. By the spring of 1967, more than 160,000 people had died.

And yet, even as his government cracked down on bourgeois medicine, Mao pursued an antidisease program directed at schistosomiasis, or snail fever, an infectious disease caused by a species of parasitic flatworm. The antischistosomiasis campaign involved rallying large numbers of rural workers to laboriously collect and destroy snails in central and southern China. In his poem “Farewell to the God of Plague,” Mao celebrated the campaign’s success with a vision of restoring to life ghostly villages “choked

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Chinese red guards during the cultural revolution in China 1966. (Getty)

with weeds.” Ultimately, however, the campaign failed to live up to Mao’s expectations: schistosomiasis remains endemic in China.

The communist state offloaded its responsibility for health onto the collective. In 1968, the “barefoot doctor” program became national policy. Villagers were recruited as parttime paramedics and underwent basic health-care training.

They were given access to vaccines but otherwise received minimal state support. This putative from-the-ground-up vision of health helped inspire a global shift: in 1978, the countries that gathered at the WHO International Conference on Primary Health Care adopted the Declaration of Alma-Ata, which upheld health as a basic human right and emphasized community-based health care for all. Ironically, this affirmation of Mao’s legacy took place precisely as his successor, Deng Xiaoping, was introducing economic reforms. China’s health-care system would be one of the first areas earmarked for change.

WHISTLEBLOWERS AND ECONOMIC REFORM China’s reform era coincided with the rise of new infec-

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tious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS. The first indigenous cases of HIV/AIDS in China appeared in Yunnan among heroin users, but by the early years of this century, infection was increasingly sexually transmitted. A booming plasma economy in the 1990s further fueled the epidemic.

Third parties paid donors in impoverished rural areas for blood, from which they extracted plasma to sell to biotech companies. The residual blood was then returned to donors. As a cost-saving practice, blood from different donors was often mixed in the same centrifuges. The result was a sharp increase in infectious diseases contracted through cross-contaminated blood. More than one million people in China are estimated to have contracted HIV/ AIDS. The blood contamination scandal set the pattern for future infectious disease crises: rumors of an epidemic, attempts at a cover-up, an exposé by a medical whistleblower, followed by an official admission of the problem and draconian containment measures to mitigate the damage. In the case of the plasma scandal, the whistleblower, medical researcher Shuping Wang, brought contamination to the attention of officials in Henan, the worst-affected province.

The officials attempted to deny and cover up the crisis, but news soon leaked to the international media. The plasma collection centers were finally closed for “rectification” in 1996.

The Western media, however, had already portrayed the contamination scandal as illustrative of China’s poor regulation and endemic corruption. Moreover, the episode exposed the awkward cohabitation of rampant capitalism and authoritarianism in post-Mao China: a toxic mixture of unregulated markets, patchy provincial oversight, and overregulated governance.

Similar concerns about the state greeted a different health crisis in November 2002, when the deadly SARS virus was detected in Guangdong Province. The SARS outbreak also played out on the public stage through leaked information, cover-ups, and crackdowns. Jiang Yanyong, a physician in Beijing, revealed the state’s efforts to conceal the true number of SARS cases in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. That same day, the reporter Susan Jakes published a searing exposé in Time magazine, based on a signed statement by Jiang, under the headline, “Beijing’s SARS Attack.” These reports catalyzed a policy U-turn in China. The mayor of Beijing and the minister of public health resigned, and the government embarked on a concerted and much-publicized campaign to contain the epidemic.

SARS was a major test for China’s leadership. The outbreak threatened to derail China’s export economy. And at least initially, Beijing’s bungled response set off a panic that undermined the government’s international aspirations. China had joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, and that same year, Beijing was chosen to host

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the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Membership in the WTO and hosting the Olympics were both viewed by the Chinese leadership as important platforms for promoting China’s role as a global player and for ensuring foreign investment. SARS jeopardized that. As Premier Wen Jiabao declared, “the health and security of the people, overall state of reform, development, and stability, and China’s national interest and international image are at stake.”

BACK TO THE FUTURE Not surprisingly, many commentators have drawn parallels between SARS and the current epidemic. As with SARS, officials in the province where COVID-19 broke out first downplayed the problem, and the public accused them of a cover-up. The government cracked down on whistleblowers, such as Li Wenliang, a doctor who had tried to share information about the virus. Li was hounded by the police and died of the disease.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has set out to contain the epidemic through a campaign strikingly reminiscent of the one against SARS. The Chinese government has marshaled tens of thousands of health-care workers and military personnel in what Xi has described as a “total war.”

Ding Xiangyang, the deputy secretary-general of the State Council, has called the epidemic a “battle for China” and a risk to the nation unprecedented since the founding of the People’s Republic.

This “war” has challenged Xi’s authority in some respects, but it has also provided an occasion for Xi to reaffirm his credentials as Mao’s heir. By emphasizing the scale of the crisis, Xi can affirm his reputation for resourceful

The blood contamination scandal set the pattern for future infectious disease crises: rumors of an epidemic, attempts at a cover-up, an exposé by a medical whistleblower, followed by an official admission of the problem and draconian containment measures to mitigate the damage.

and clearheaded leadership when he overcomes it. For the moment, at least, Xi’s strategy appears to be working, bolstering his support in many parts of China, if not in Hubei Province, where the disease first emerged. As China’s citizens watch the chaotic scenes of COVID-19 panic across Europe and the United States, Xi’s response to the virus suddenly looks proportionate.

But the audience for Xi’s performance is as much global as domestic. Just as in the past, whether in the time of SARS or of plague, outside observers are assessing China’s governance by its capacity to manage its health.

COVID-19 has become an important test for the virtues of authoritarian governance versus those of citizen empowerment. Aware of this high-stakes diplomacy, China is reframing the narrative to emphasize the success of its mass-containment measures and downplay concerns

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The passengers sit apart on a train of Metro on March 28,2020 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. (Getty)

about its initial failures. China has shared its expertise with the European Union, pledged $20 million to the WHO in its fight against the virus, dispatched medical teams and supplies to Iran, Iraq, Italy, and Serbia, and promised to help African countries meet the crisis. All at once, Xi has begun to look more like a global leader committed to health for all.

By contrast, Western states appear to be improvising.

Europe faces logistical obstacles as it attempts regional lockdowns and quarantines. Free access to social media in the West is fueling what the WHO has described as a “mass infodemic,” in which overwhelming amounts of information make truth hard to discern from fiction. And in the United States, President Donald Trump, who initially talked down the threat, has ignored warnings from his own health officials and now finds himself playing catch-up to

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local authorities frantically seeking to mitigate the spread of infection. Although the COVID-19 epidemic is far from over, China’s brand of authoritarian statecraft gains credibility by the day, objections to the state’s lack of transparency and accountability notwithstanding.

The new coronavirus has revealed a fractured geopolitical landscape and reactivated old arguments about openness and efficiency. The virus has laid bare China’s strongman leadership, but it has also highlighted incompetencies within Western democracies. As governments of democratic states impose sweeping quarantine measures, China is hoping that its draconian style of epidemic management will prevail as the new global norm.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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Will Brexit Break Up the United Kingdom?

by Jeremy Shapiro Even before the United Kingdom officially left the European Union in late January, Brexit had pushed the country into political convulsions for over three years. But as the dust settles, another long-feared ramification is coming into clearer view: Brexit could ultimately break up the United Kingdom itself.

The most attention has focused on Scotland, which voted

against independence in 2014. The region has long been home to a vibrant independence movement, and a large majority of Scots opposed Brexit. In December, the ruling Scottish National Party formally requested authorization to hold another independence referendum. In reality, however, a breakup remains unlikely. Brexit may have alienated the Scots politically, but economically, it will bind them even closer to the United Kingdom—so much so that financial common sense will likely prevail over nationalist sentiments. If there is a real threat to British territorial integrity,

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But as the dust settles, another longfeared ramification is coming into clearer view: Brexit could ultimately break up the United Kingdom itself. points. The defeat was supposed to have settled the question for at least a generation—until Brexit intervened. In 2016, the Scots voted by a large margin to stay in the EU, but they were overruled by their more numerous and Euroskeptical compatriots in England. Scotland’s pro-independence regional government has pointed to that fact to argue that Scotland was taken out of the EU against its expressed democratic will and has called for a rerun of the 2014 vote. Last year, tens of thousands marched in the streets of Glasgow in support of another independence referendum.

Despite appearances, however, it is not clear that Brexit has changed Scottish public opinion on independence all that much. Polls show some fluctuation—over the last year, for example, 15 polls have shown more support for staying in the United Kingdom, and three have shown more support for independence. It is a confusing picture, but overall, it resembles the situation in the run-up to the 2014 referendum. Moreover, although it is hard to say precisely why the 2014 referendum failed, it appears that many of those who opposed independence back then did so out of economic concern. These skeptics are unlikely to have come around since. Scotland remains deeply dependent on the wider British economy, and many Scots understand that independence would come at a steep economic cost.

The British treasury effectively subsidizes Scotland to the tune of about $17.1 billion a year, or a staggering $3,167 per person. About 60 percent of Scottish exports now go to the rest of the United Kingdom—four times as much as go to the EU. Far from an economic powerhouse in its own right, Scotland is, in the words of one commentator, turning into “a satellite regional economy” of the United Kingdom.

Activists attend an anti-Conservative government, proScottish independence, and anti-Brexit demonstration outside Holyrood, the seat of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh on February 2020 ,1. (Getty)

it stems not from Scotland but from Northern Ireland, where the centrifugal forces of Brexit may prove too powerful to contain in the years ahead.

THE PRACTICAL SCOTS

Brexit is likely to cement that peripheral status. A new trade deal between London and Brussels has yet to be struck, but it will undoubtedly introduce new barriers to trade, especially for services. Such barriers will make it even harder for Scotland’s service-oriented economy to get by on its own.

The cause of Scottish independence has enjoyed an unlikely resurgence in the years since the region first held a referendum on the issue in 2014. Back then, the opponents of independence carried the day by more than ten percentage

In 2014, such dependence on England would have mattered less: an independent Scotland could have become a member of the EU alongside the United Kingdom and continued to enjoy borderless access to its largest trading partner. Today,

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there is no such option. On the contrary, exiting the United Kingdom and joining the EU now would require Scotland to introduce border checks on the roads leading to England— not quite Hadrian’s Wall, perhaps, but still an enormous economic shock for two regions joined together by over 300 years of union. When states have disintegrated in the past—the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, for example—the breakups have usually been economically disastrous. The EU, for its part, might not want to welcome into its ranks a weakened Scotland in need of massive subsidies.

An independent Scotland could, of course, choose to stay outside the EU and possibly even retain the British pound as its currency. But in that case, political independence would belie greater economic dependence on England. And the loss of political representation in Westminster would leave Scotland with even less control over its fate, ironically akin to the United Kingdom’s current dilemma in Brussels. Perhaps voting against one’s economic interests to achieve independence from distant bureaucrats captures the spirit of this age of nationalism. But Scotland has already proven once that it worships more practical gods. Most likely, that peculiarly Scottish faith will grow only stronger after Brexit.

THE COSMOPOLITAN IRISH The real threat to the Union will arise farther west, from across the Irish Sea. Economically, Northern Ireland is starting from a position similar to Scotland’s. It is a heavily subsidized region with a service-oriented economy. Its most important export market—by leaps and bounds—is the rest of the United Kingdom, with the EU (including the Republic of Ireland) only a distant second. But if Brexit will pull Scotland’s economy closer into England’s orbit, it will push Northern Ireland’s in the opposite direction.

For years, negotiations over the terms of the United Kingdom’s exit from the EU were stuck on the question of the Irish border—how to avoid passport controls and customs

Legally, Northern Ireland has now left the EU, but unlike the rest of the United Kingdom, it must still maintain a high degree of regulatory alignment with the EU.

checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland if the former left the EU while the latter remained inside. The deal struck last year between London and Brussels solves this problem by essentially creating a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom instead.

Legally, Northern Ireland has now left the EU, but unlike the rest of the United Kingdom, it must still maintain a high degree of regulatory alignment with the EU. Given that arrangement, Northern Ireland is, over time, likely to expand its economic ties with the Republic of Ireland and with the EU at large and reduce its dependence on the United Kingdom. The magnitude of the realignment will depend on exactly how the Brexit deal works in practice, which is still a very open question. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has insisted that the deal does not require customs checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, but the EU reads the same deal quite differently.

And Johnson is nervous enough about Northern Ireland drifting away that he has suggested building a $25 billion bridge across the Irish Sea to better connect the region to the rest of the country.

Northern Irish unionists are anxious, too, and for good reason. Northern Ireland’s strange new status comes at a time

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Sinn Fein activists protest at the Parliament Buildings on the Stormont Estate in Belfast on January ,31 2020 against Brexit and call for a border poll on Irish Unity. - Britain on January 31 ends almost half a century of integration with its closest neighbours and leaves the European Union, starting a new -- but still uncertain -- chapter in its long history. (Getty)

A new trade deal between London and Brussels has yet to be struck, but it will undoubtedly introduce new barriers to trade, especially for services. Such barriers will make it even harder for Scotland’s service-oriented economy to get by on its own.

when several trends are already reshaping the region’s traditional political and social fault lines. Northern Ireland has long been majority Protestant, but experts predict that the region could become majority Catholic as soon as next year.

More than 20 years after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended the so-called Troubles and erased the border between the two parts of Ireland, younger generations on both sides are far less interested in the religious and nationalist divides that so inflamed their parents. Instead, they have mobilized in favor of “cosmopolitan” values, such as ending abortion restrictions and gay marriage. The shift has made its way into popular culture, too. Derry Girls, a new TV series set in 1990s Northern Ireland, chronicles the adventures of Catholic school girls who care less about religious divides than about finding cute Protestant boys to snog. In the eyes of the Irish writer Susan McKay, that carefree attitude has made the show’s heroines “the new emblems of Northern Ireland.”

For now, most polling of Northern Irish voters reveals little enthusiasm for leaving the United Kingdom. Still, support for independence is rising, albeit slowly. And unlike Scotland, Northern Ireland would not need to worry about being stranded outside the EU if it left the United Kingdom. That is because it has the option of unification with the Republic

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of Ireland, provided voters on both sides of the border agree in a referendum. In the republic, a majority already favor reunification, and in last month’s Irish general election, Sinn Fein—a party with a deep commitment to Irish unification— received the largest share of the vote. Unification would mean automatic EU membership for the north, with all the financial benefits that entails. Together, Ireland and the EU could easily subsidize the small province without major sacrifices. For now, that task falls to the United Kingdom, but the Good Friday Agreement requires the British government to grant Northern Ireland an independence referendum if there is a reason to believe a majority might vote in its favor.

That day looks like it may come sooner than expected.

ENGLAND, ENGLAND Neither Scotland’s nor Northern Ireland’s path is preordained. What is nearly certain, however, is that the independence movements in both regions will roil British politics for some time to come. The political reverberations of these movements, compounded by other post-Brexit domestic challenges, will keep the country self-absorbed and absent from the world stage for several more years. The ultimate impact of Brexit for the United Kingdom will come not from some sort of economic catastrophe that empties store shelves; it will come through national solipsism and the gradual relegation of a former hegemon to a decidedly provincial middle power.

This decline has already been the story of the last four years, and it will likely be the leitmotif of the United Kingdom’s coming trade deals with the EU and the United States. A smaller United Kingdom, finally confined to a single island, could represent the unfortunate but logical culmination of Brexit.

This article was originally published on ForeignAffairs.com.

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pinion

China, Iran and the Coronavirus Let’s start with China, or specifically the Chinese authorities that accused Doctor Li Wenliang of spreading false information after he warned of a possible outbreak of coronavirus.

The doctor later died after contracting the virus, and the authorities subsequently apologised to his family. This showed that, without a shadow of a doubt, China hid from the world the severity of the virus; such negligent action has led to:

by: Elie Fawaz

We are dealing with regimes that are not only posing a threat to their own citizens; rather they are posing a threat to the citizens of the entire globe The Chinese government has caused a global humanitarian and economic disaster.

Meanwhile, Iran has for years been sponsoring and training terror groups and militias that have threatened the lives of civilians all around the world

First, the coronavirus turned into a global pandemic, which, up to this hour, has claimed more than 35 thousand victims.

Second, the whole world is now under some sort of quarantine that governments have enforced on their citizens. This has resulted in astronomical economic losses, a dramatic rise in mass unemployment, international corporations either going bankrupt or temporarily going out of business. Examples of industries that have suffered as a result of this quarantine include aviation, restaurants and cafes.

The pandemic has also showed the massive gaps that exist within Western healthcare systems, many of which lack the ventilators needed in this crisis. The lack of ventilators in Italian hospitals has forced doctors to make the difficult decisions of which patients get ventilators and which ones are left to die.

According to a study conducted by Southampton University, if China had acted more responsibly towards the pandemic, then 95 per cent of those infected would have avoided transmission of the virus.

China’s decision may have been an economics-based one, however what’s even scarier to think about is the fact that China was able to hide information of this magnitude and importance from the world. It is for this reason that China is directly responsible for the horror and tragedy that the global population is currently living through. Without a doubt, the coronavirus crisis has raised some important questions for the West and the free world to answer, particularly whether or not China should remain

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the international hub of industry, and whether or not the world should remain dependent on it. The West must also rethink the dangerous consumer trends that its societies, seeking low prices, are pushing since such cheap goods are only made possible when periphery states force their working classes into a form of modern day slavery. Such phenomena can only happen in dictatorships that devalue the human rights of its citizens.

Onto Iran, which has made many mistakes throughout this pandemic. First and foremost, Iran failed to contain the spread of the virus prior to the legislative elections. Second, it has rejected American medical aid, even though it was coming through Swiss mediation. The reasons cited for this rejection were weak and based on silly conspiracy theories. As of the writing of this piece more than 2,700 people in Iran died because of the coronavirus, and is the sixth most effected country after the US, Italy, Spain, China and Germany. Iran has failed to prevent the spread of the virus throughout its cities. It has, nonetheless, used its dead citizens as negotiation fodder to persuade the US of removing all sanctions placed on it. If that’s the case, then why did Iran reject the aid in the first place, then?

We are dealing with regimes that are not only posing a threat to their own citizens; rather they are posing a threat to the citizens of the entire globe. The Chinese government’s efforts to hide the severity of the virus have caused a global humanitarian and economic disaster. Meanwhile, Iran has for years been sponsoring and training terror groups and militias that have threatened the lives of civilians all around the world.

The coronavirus might be a global pandemic, but it has also shed a spotlight on dictatorships that are attempting to extend their control and influence beyond their own borders. These regimes stop at nothing to implement their strategic plans, even if said plans come at the cost of human life. The West must harden its stances on those two regimes, even amidst this coronavirus crisis.

A Weekly Political News Magazine

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Issue 1794- April - 03/04/2020

Dalida Khalil to Majalla: “I will think about settling down once the current coronavirus crisis ends “ www.majalla.com

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Top 7 Reasons You Have a Headache Food, Alcohol, Bright Light, or Stress Could Play a Part in Your Headaches. Identifying Triggers May Help You Avoid Them

by Harvard Health Letter When a bad headache strikes, you just want it to end. The aching, throbbing pain can be debilitating and result in missed appointments, work, or time with family and friends.

Regardless of whether you are prone to migraines, tension

headaches, or cluster headaches (see «Is this your headache?»), you may be able to reduce their frequency by identifying what brings them on. Here›s a look at the most common triggers for each of these kinds of headaches.

1. Stress. Stress can cause tight muscles in the shoulders and neck, which often leads to tension headaches. «It›s believed

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to start in the muscles. When tension headaches become frequent, the pain in shoulder and neck muscles is felt by the brain as pain in the head,» says Dr. Sait Ashina, a neurologist who specializes in headache treatment at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Stress is also a common trigger for migraines.

2. Diet. Hunger itself can trigger a migraine or tension headache. But eating certain foods may trigger migraines. It could be just one type of food - like beans or nuts - or many foods, such as avocados, bananas, cheese, chocolate, citrus, herring, dairy products, and onions. «Processed foods with nitrites, nitrates, yellow food dyes, or monosodium glutamate can be especially problematic,» Dr. Ashina notes.

3. Alcohol intake. Alcohol is a common cause of migraine and cluster headaches. For some people, a few ounces of red wine are all it takes to provoke a headache, although any kind of alcohol can be a trigger. It›s not clear if the alcohol itself is to blame or if another component in the drink causes the problem.

4. Environment. «Cluster headaches seem to be seasonal and often happen in the spring or fall,» Dr. Ashina says. «It›s something in the environment, but we can›t tell exactly what it is yet.» Environmental factors such as bright light, smoke,

Stress can cause tight muscles in the shoulders and neck, which often leads to tension headaches.

This may be because caffeine causes blood vessels to constrict; without caffeine, the blood vessels widen and bulge out with each heartbeat - a chief reason for the pounding pain of migraines.

7. Lack of sleep. A lack of sleep is associated with migraines and tension headaches. «We don›t know why, but we do know there›s a correlation and that sleep can lead to pain relief.

Sometimes people feel better after taking a nap,» Dr. Ashina says.

IS THIS YOUR HEADACHE? Here are three common types of headaches and their symptoms.

• Tension headache. Pain often starts in the neck and back and works its way up to feel like a tight band around your head. It often goes away with rest.

• Migraine headache. Pain typically begins on one side of the head, throbs or pounds, and makes you sensitive to light and sound. It may cause nausea. A migraine can last for hours or days.

• Cluster headache. A cluster headache feels like a stabbing pain in the eye. It may cause eye tearing or redness, runny nose, or nasal congestion. It may last for a few minutes or hours, go away, and come back several times per day. These headache clusters can occur for months, disappear, and reappear a long time later.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

humidity, intense scents, or cold weather are associated with migraine headaches.

5. Hormones. Changes in estrogen levels are associated with migraines in women, and women suffer from migraines more often than men. Menstrual cycles may be tied to migraine in younger women. Varying estrogen levels during perimenopause can sometimes start migraines in women who never experienced them before. Estrogen therapy may also be a migraine trigger. Menopause does seem to end migraines in most women.

6. Caffeine withdrawal. If you normally consume caffeine in coffee or tea, stopping intake abruptly may trigger a migraine.

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Understanding your headache triggers can help you avoid getting headaches in the future. But identifying triggers can be tricky, especially if you have more than one (like several kinds of food). Dr. Ashina recommends keeping a diary to note the day, time, symptoms, and circumstances surrounding a headache (what had you eaten? where did it happen?).

If avoiding triggers isn›t enough to keep headaches at bay, talk to your doctor. There are many prescription medications as well as pill-free treatments (acupuncture, meditation, biofeedback, relaxation therapy) that can help reduce headache frequency.

And you›ll need to go a step further: «Make sure you get enough sleep, exercise, eat a healthy diet, limit alcohol intake, and reduce stress,» Dr. Ashina says. «Headaches are a condition of hypersensitivity, so you need balance in your system to fight triggers.»

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Dr. Adhanom Ghebreysus: The Director-General of the World Health Organization and the Man Leading the Fight Against COVID - 19

by Moncef al-Mazghany

Once he returned to Ethiopia, he was appointed as the Minister of Health between 2005 and 2012. During his -1 Early Tragedy Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus was tenure, he built thousands of clinics born on Wednesday March 1965 ,3 and led a campaign that successfully in Asmara, Eritrea. The moment he reduced the child mortality rate by remembers most from his childhood 30 per cent from 1990 and 2015. is when he saw his brother dying due Moreover, the number of those who to having a weak immune system. died of malaria was reduced by 75 per Tedros decided that no child should cent. He was then appointed as the ever suffer the same way again, and Ethiopian Foreign Minister from 2012 it is for that reason that he decided to to 2016. dedicate his life to eradicating diseases from susceptible countries. After -3 Rise on the Global Stage his bachelor’s degree in biology, he His time as Foreign Minister made pursued masters in Immunology of him a big name on the global stage.

Infectious Diseases from the London In 2016, he decided to announce School of Hygiene and Tropical his candidacy for Director-General Medicine at the University of London. of the World Health Organization He subsequently received a PhD in (WHO), and both the African Union community health from the University and the ministers of health of the continent endorsed him. On 23 May of Nottingham in 2000.

2017, Tedros was officially elected -2 The Minister at War Against as the next Director-General for the Malaria WHO.

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-4 The Biggest Opponent of His Career: the Coronavirus Although Tedros has been on the frontline of the fight against rising child mortality rates and malaria his biggest fight would come in the form of a diabolical opponent: the coronavirus. The coronavirus was born in late 2019 in Wuhan, China but it has since travelled all over the world and forced people to stop travelling, going on outings and even going to work. As this is a unique virus, scientists have been hard at work trying to find a cure for the disease. Meanwhile, Tedros has asked governments and policy makers around the world to put their citizens on lockdown or quarantine. The fight against the virus is not over yet, but if Tedros is successful in leading the fight then he will surely be remembered as on of history’s greatest heroes.

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Dalida Khalil to Majalla: “I will think about settling down once the current coronavirus crisis ends”

by Sara Abdo

hasn’t happened in a long time since modern life forced us as individuals to only focus on our own Dalida Khalil is a self-made entertainer who’s personal troubles and responsibilities. Moreover, always ready to seize any opportunity that comes one positive that has come out of everyone staying to her. Despite coming from humble beginnings, at home is the decrease in global pollution. I Khalil’s hard work and perseverance transformed personally think that this is an important first step her into one of Lebanon’s and the Arab world’s in improving the negative aspects of life on the biggest stars. Her latest show “Ser” (Secret) is a outside, whether it’s the negative energy, pollution display of her acting talents, however Khalil is not or hatred. only dedicated to her artistry. Recently, she voiced her support for Lebanon’s revolution and called Q: Your role in “Ser” is vastly different from the for the ouster of the corrupt regime. However, ones you previously played, what has this show now, like most people in Lebanon, she’s living in added to your career? quarantine at home due to coronavirus pandemic. A: This show helped me reach my potential as a Majalla recently sat down with Khalil who she well-rounded actress. “Ser” reminds me of the spoke to us about the opportunities and troubles success I achieved when I first started my acting that life threw at her. So also discussed her love life journey with the show “Helwa W Kazaba” (She’s a Beautiful Liar). I was really young then, but and her patriotism for Lebanon. the show helped me garner popularity with mass Q: How would you describe your daily life in audiences. Now for the first time since that show, I have gained the same success and fame with “Ser”. quarantine?

A: I spend my days at home with my mother, sisters Now many people are recommending the show to and friends. We formed a “girls’ club” where we their friends, I get letters from fans all around the find ways to have fun, we also cook together and world praising me for my performances and the try to look at the positives that this quarantine has fanfare this show has been attracting on social media to offer. Our family is just like any other; we’ve has been incredible. “Ser” has been the number one united and started looking out for each other. This trending show on twitter throughout the region and

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it has also become one of the most viewed shows on the online streaming service “Shahed”.

Q: Do you consider “Ser” to be the big break of your acting career?

A: “Ser” wasn’t the first big show I acted in, I consider “Amir El Liel” (The Prince of Night) to be my first opportunity to jump start my career, especially since it starred major actors such as Rami Aiash. However, I was only 25 when I starred in that show, and I did have the maturity I have today.

A lot of my views have changed since then, and many life events helped me grow as a person and even as an actress. Acting is more than just talent it is experience and perseverance and performing diverse roles is what helps an actress mature. After “Ser” I plan on taking a break for a year or two until I find another role that will again showcase my acting skills.

Q: How has acting with Bassam Kousa in “Ser” impacted your career?

A: Bassam Kousa is like a school of acting, and even though the scenes we shared together was few and far between working with him helped bring out my best acting skills.

roles I wasn’t happy with. I can be hasty with my choices sometimes, and that hastiness has impacted my career. There was many times where I hastily agreed to roles just so I could prove my acting capabilities. I think “Ser” came to me at the perfect Q: Will you be starring in any Ramadan series this time, as I had nothing to prove at that point. year?

Q: Do your roles reflect on your daily life and A: No, I’m taking a break. behaviour?

Q: Do you feel that you underperformed in any of A: I distinguish between my real life personality and that of my characters that I perform. I do your previous roles?

A: There were roles in which I didn’t put all my admit, though, that I have learned from my heart into, and that is because I didn’t like them. performances because the characters I played went I blame myself for that since my work is my through situations that I never experienced in my responsibility and I should never have picked life. This was especially true when my characters I played were subjugated to violence, these past four months of playing “Talin” taught me that I need to be stronger smarter person who pays attention to the finer details of life.

Feuds never originate from actors and actresses, rather it’s the fans that create fake drama

Q: Does competition in the entertainment industry foster rivalry in your opinion?

A: I admit that feelings of jealousy have plagued me through my professional career. Although these feelings have subsided, I still feel jealous when

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a role I wanted goes to another person, or when producers and audiences pay attention to untalented actors.

Q: What TV or movie role did you want for yourself?

A: I would have loved Miriam Fares’s role in “Etaham” (Accusation), I adore these kinds of roles.

Q: Would you have loved to co-star with “Eteham’s” leading man Hassan El Radad?

A: Without a doubt!

There were roles in which I didn’t put all my heart into, and that is because I didn’t like them, but my new series, “Ser” (Secret), helped me reach my potential as a well-rounded actress.

and have nothing but love and respect for both of Q: You were present when Nadine Nasseeb Najem them. Never in my life do I wish for any feuds to and Serene Abd El Nour put aside their differences arise between us. and ended their feud. Have the feuds between Lebanese actresses really subsided, or will they Q: Do you consider yourself a traditional or return once the next Ramadan TV season comes modern woman?

A: I’m a mixed bag, although I consider myself a about?

A: In my opinion, feuds never originate from actors traditional woman, I highly respect independent and actresses, rather it’s the fans that create fake women who rely on themselves rather than on their drama and the artists are then forced to live with husbands. I have a strong personality but I have my said drama. I, myself, am friends with both women limits. I make sure that my voice is heard at home, and I’m happy with the decisions I made for my

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life. I also do not allow anyone to force his or her views on me.

Q: Most people have many worries in their lives, what worries you most?

A: I became responsible for my household after my father died, as such became the head of my household. This is why I am determined to remain a workingwoman.

Q: The people of Lebanon have recently flooded the streets calling for revolution, what are your opinions on this?

A: I share all the concerns and dreams that every Lebanese citizen has. Many people in this country lack the basic necessities of life such as running water, electricity, and infrastructure and job opportunities. Ever since the civil war, many Lebanese citizens have dreamt of migrating to another country, which would provide them with these needs. I was seriously considering migrating myself before the coronavirus crisis.

Q: Do you feel that you have the responsibility of providing charitable aid to Lebanese citizens in need?

A: Charity is one of the secrets to happiness, as it provides people with peace of mind. I love giving to charity, even if I don’t make a public display of it.

Q: Have you ever thought about settling down?

A: I will think about settling down once both the current coronavirus crisis and economic crisis end.

I have given it serious thought since I want to have kids and a family of my own.

Many Lebanese citizens have dreamt of migrating to another country…I was seriously considering migrating myself before the coronavirus crisis.

Q: Do you want a relationship with a prudent man or a romantic man?

A: I like a man who’s fun, kind, cultured and I also like men who loves and respects his family because family is something I couldn’t live without. I don’t mind if he’s not romantic because I feel that I am romantic enough to make the relationship spark.

Q: Do you have any upcoming musical projects?

A: I was supposed to star in a new music video, but the project had to be delayed once the coronavirus hit Lebanon. I hope that the crisis ends as soon as possible so that we can go back to work and live life normally again. I only ask that we hold on to faith and patience and that the authorities are transparent with the number of cases we have.

Q: What about your future acting roles?

A: I still haven’t found a serious role that suits me, and many production companies have temporarily stopped their projects due to the coronavirus.

Moreover, it’s too late now to participate in the annual Ramadan season in light of the severe situation the country is going through.

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Emmy Voting Schedule and Some Eligibility Rules Shift Due to COVID - 19

Coronavirus Brings Unprecedented Changes to Awards Season

by Michael Ordona The latest entertainment dominoes to fall before the COVID19- pandemic affects the run-up to the 2020 Emmy Awards and screening rules for the next Golden Globes. The ceremony date for the 72nd Emmys remains unchanged at Sunday, Sept. 20.

Friday morning, the Television Academy announced some procedural and qualifying changes to accommodate for production delays caused by the outbreak, including eligibility rules and the voting timetable. “Hanging� episodes, or episodes of a series that fall outside the established eligibility window (ending May 31) though

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the series premiered within the window, will now be eligible for consideration through June 30. This applies to both limited and regular series, though limited series must make all episodes available before June 30 and regular series must make a minimum of six episodes available before that date. If the complete limited series isn’t available by then, it and its “individual achievements … will be eligible in the subsequent eligibility year,” said the academy’s announcement.

The announcement reiterated the suspension of all For Your Consideration events, which took effect earlier this month.

The FYC events, “whether with a live audience, streaming or recorded for posting on a viewing platform, have been suspended for this Emmy season,” the announcement said.

A spokesman for the Television Academy told The Times that even virtual Q&As, for instance, that don’t put viewers at risk were part of the ban to maintain a level playing field: “We appreciate the sensitivity of the moment but didn’t think it was the right thing. Some talent might want to participate, others don’t. We understand the issue. We’re trying to be fair to the entire industry.

“We did receive some feedback from actors and showrunners in agreement with our position,” he said, but “the Television Academy made this decision because we thought it was the right thing to do.”

The Emmy voting schedule has compressed somewhat to accommodate the longer eligibility window without moving the ceremony back. applies directly to films now seeing their theatrical releases canceled and that “may instead be released first on a television format (e.g. subscription streaming service, subscription cable channel, broadcast television, etc.).” The rule change is temporary, though the HFPA says that the changing situation may allow or force further modifications.

The date of the 2021 Golden Globe ceremony has yet to be announced, though Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are to return as co-hosts.

Of course, screeners are mostly online these days, as is voting, so academy members should still have access to what they need to see and be able to vote on it. The spokesman noted that items such as “booklet mailers related to online screeners may continue.”

(L-R) Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler speak onstage during the 91st Annual Academy Awards at Dolby Theatre on February 2019 ,24 in Hollywood, California.

(Getty)

The Emmy voting schedule has compressed somewhat to accommodate the longer eligibility window without moving the ceremony back. The new schedule: June 5: Entry deadline July 13-2: Nominations voting July 28: Nominations announced Aug. 31-21: Final awards voting Details on the revised Emmy Awards calendar are available at Emmys.com.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association also announced changes to its Golden Globe eligibility requirements this week: Since the pandemic has forced the closure of theaters and screening rooms, the rule that films must be screened specifically for voters has been dropped. Physical discs or screening links sent to members will now suffice.

To qualify, films must have only “had a bona fide theatrical release planned to begin in Los Angeles” during the period of March -15April 2020 ,30, the HFPA announcement said. This

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James Corden on stage at the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles on Sunday, Sept. ,22 2019. (TNS)

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pinion

Coronavirus in Syria: Another Means of International Blackmail

by Alia Mansour

The regime will also surely use the coronavirus as another means of blackmail against the international community. Although, opposition and revolutionary forces will have to alert in the coming days, the ones who will pay the biggest price for the regime’s negligence will be the Syrian people

In a press conference about coronavirus a few days ago, Nazar Yazji, the health minister of the ruling Syrian regime stated: “The Arab Syrian army has sterilized many of the bacteria on Syria’s lands.”

This launched a wave of jokes and satire, since he referred to the war against Syrian people rather than the war against the pandemic, there’s also the fact that the army has nothing to do with containing the virus. The minister also used the general term “bacteria” rather than coronavirus so are we to understand that the current man in charge of the Syrian health ministry does not know the difference between the virus plaguing the world today and other “bacteria”? Or was his choice of the word “bacteria” a reference to Syrians opposing the regime, rather than the virus itself?

A few days following this statement, the minister announced the first reported case of coronavirus: a man who had just returned to Syria from abroad.

However, before this announcement was made schools and universities were shut, the borders were closed which meant that even Syrians wishing to return to their home country couldn’t do so anymore. National television broadcasts suddenly showed video footage of the streets being sterilized. As soon as the announcement of the first case was made, the Interior Ministry stated that it had enforced a 6 PM curfew, banned gatherings, and closed all stores except supermarkets and pharmacies, while restaurants were now only allowed to do take out deliveries. Furthermore, people were also forbidden to travel between cities and counties. Despite all these measures, the regime insisted that there was only one case of coronavirus in the country and that the infected person was on the road to recovery. However, media and human rights organizations have stated that there were in fact hundreds of coronavirus cases in Syria, and most of these cases originated from armed fighters and Iranian “pilgrims”. If state media is to be believed, the Assad regime has equipped Syria to fight off any pandemic diseases and safeguard the Syrian peoples’ health. Nevertheless, any one who knows regime media agencies knows that they lie about everything, even the weather forecasts. How could

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anyone believe that a regime that has killed half a million of its people, displaced half of its population would be prepared to protect the remaining inhabitants from disease? No one wishes for the virus to spread in Syria, as that would be another disaster for the Syrian people. According to statistics provided by international organizations, 83 per cent of the Syrian population is living below the poverty line; moreover many inhabitants are internally displaced.

If the virus becomes widespread, the Syrian regime will surely exploit the catastrophe to ask to sanctions to be lifted, just as the Iranian regime is doing now. Even if sanctions are lifted from both Tehran and Damascus, it is doubtful that these regimes will provide care for their people, rather they will most likely continue using violence and corruption to abuse the Iranian and Syrian people, respectively.

If the Assad regime was serious about stopping the spread of coronavirus, then it would have forced Iranian (and pro-Tehran) militias to leave. However, earlier Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, said that his fighters were being tested for coronavirus before being sent to Syria, effectively stating that his fighters were allowed to kill Syrian with weapons but not contagious diseases.

The WHO’s representative to Syria recently announced that the organization sent the regime 1,200 testing kits, even before it declared its first positive case for coronavirus. This shows that international organizations can provide help to Syria, even without its regime asking for sanctions to be lifted. If the regime was left in charge of fighting the virus, then it would have done what its health minister said and sent soldiers to kill its own civilians and not eradicate the disease. The regime will also surely use the coronavirus as another means of blackmail against the international community, just as it uses terrorism and the threat of attacking Israel to get what it wants on the international stage. Although, opposition and revolutionary forces will have to alert in the coming days, the ones who will pay the biggest price for the regime’s negligence will be the Syrian people.