COLOMBIA - Voters Reject Peace Deal

"Why did Colombian voters reject the FARC peace deal?" PBS NewsHour 10/3/2016

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SUMMARY:  In a surprise vote, the Colombian people narrowly rejected the peace deal with guerrilla group FARC that would have ended Latin America's longest running conflict.  After the vote, Colombia's president and the top FARC commander both appealed for calm and reiterated their support for peace.  William Brangham speaks with Bernard Aronson, U.S. Special Envoy for Colombian Peace Process.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Now to a major upset in South America.

Yesterday, voters in Colombia rejected a peace deal between their government and the largest rebel group, known as the FARC.  It was hoped the deal would put an end to 50-plus years of conflict that's left hundreds of thousands of people dead.

William Brangham has the latest.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour):  Sunday's stunning outcome in Colombia touched off celebrations in parts of Bogotá.  Voters narrowly rejected a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, this despite predictions it would win easily.

CLAUDIA, ‘No' Supporter (through translator):  We have all been victims of the FARC and this victory is calling to the government to renegotiate the agreements, not to hand over the country to the FARC.  It's very emotional.  This is what Colombia wants.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  But yes-voters complained opponents of the peace deal were misguided.

ANTONIO SANGUINO, ‘Yes' supporter (through translator):  Fifty percent of the people who went out to vote allowed themselves to be convinced by a message of hate, a message of revenge, a message of keeping us in the past.

COLOMBIA - The Change in World's 'Murder Capital'

"New leadership in Medellin, Colombia, transforms former ‘world murder capital’" PBS NewsHour 11/25/2014

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FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour):  For two decades, Martha Alvarez has held dance classes year-round seven days a week.  For the 350-odd students who cram into her tiny studios, it’s an alternative, she says, in a city that offers few.

MARTHA ALVAREZ, Dance Instructor (through interpreter):  I started this is 1992 out of concern for the amount of drug use and prostitution in the neighborhood.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO:  That was back when Medellin had become the world’s murder capital, the cocaine capital, home of the drug lord Pablo Escobar, who was killed by police in 1993.

MARTHA ALVAREZ (through interpreter):  It has changed a lot since then in terms of drug use, and the armed conflict has certainly diminished.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO:  Medellin has seen a dramatic drop in violence.  The murder rate is down from about 380 per 100,000 people to about 50.  Experts credit a general calming trend in the country’s long-running civil war, also the efforts of new political leadership to bring people together in the city, says Alejandro Echeverri.

ALEJANDRO ECHEVERRI, Architect (through interpreter):  When we look at the narco-trafficking years of Pablo Escobar, people didn’t trust each other.  They built barriers around themselves and they put walls up.  So public space in this city takes on a far greater significance than anywhere else, because people didn’t look each other in the eye when they walked down the street.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO:  Echeverri is an architect.  He was part of the administration a decade ago that set out to create safe public spaces.

We spoke in front of the Exploratorium he designed, a science museum that’s one of several distinctive new buildings.

MAMMALS - Update on the New Species, Olinguito

"‘Crowd-sourced’ science sheds new light on new mammal, Olinguito" PBS NewsHour 8/19/2014

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JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  ..... Newly discovered by scientists and newly documented by the crowd.

Jeff is back to explain.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  It was an exceedingly rare discovery; a new species of mammal called the Olinguito, a small, furry, tree-welling member of the raccoon family, living in the forests of Colombia and Ecuador.

In the year since the announcement, the Olinguito has gone from literal unknown to being surprisingly well-documented through photos and videos shot by amateur naturalists, bird watchers, and others, a kind of crowd-sourced science.

Kristofer Helgen, a curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, was part of the original discovery team, and joins us once again for an update.

TRADE - Finally, 5yr of No-Compromise Ends

"Congress Ends 5-Year Standoff on Trade Deals in Rare Accord" by BINYAMIN APPELBAUM and JENNIFER STEINHAUER, New York Times 10/12/2011

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Congress passed three long-awaited free trade agreements on Wednesday, ending a political standoff that has stretched across two presidencies. The move offered a rare moment of bipartisan accord at a time when Republicans and Democrats are bitterly divided over the role that government ought to play in reviving the sputtering economy.

The approval of the deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama is a victory for President Obama and proponents of the view that foreign trade can drive America’s economic growth in the face of rising protectionist sentiment in both political parties. They are the first trade agreements to pass Congress since Democrats broke a decade of Republican control in 2007.

All three agreements cleared both chambers with overwhelming Republican support just one day after Senate Republicans prevented action on Mr. Obama’s jobs bill.

The passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying relationships with strategic allies. The economic benefits are projected to be small. A federal agency estimated in 2007 that the impact on employment would be “negligible” and that the deals would increase gross domestic product by about $14.4 billion, or roughly 0.1 percent.

Hay folks, something is better than nothing. Small steps......

HEALTH - Premies and Kangaroo Care

"The Human Incubator" by TINA ROSENBERG, New York Times 12/13/2010

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Sometimes, the best way to progress isn’t to advance — to step up with more money, more technology, more modernity. It’s to retreat.

Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble. The institute was the city’s obstetrical reference hospital, where most of the city’s poor women went to give birth. Nurses and doctors were in short supply. In the newly created neonatal intensive care unit, there were so few incubators that premature babies had to share them — sometimes three to an incubator. The crowded conditions spread infections, which are particularly dangerous for preemies. The death rate was high.

Dr. Edgar Rey, the chief of the pediatrics department, could have attempted to do what many other hospital officials would have done: wage a political fight for more money, more incubators and more staff.

He would likely have lost. What was happening at the Mother and Child Institute was not unusual. Conditions were much better, in fact, than at most public hospitals in the third world. Hospitals that mainly serve the poor have very little political clout, which means that conditions in their wards sometimes seem to have been staged by Hieronymous Bosch. They have too much disease, too few nurses and sometimes no doctors at all. They can be so crowded that patients sleep on the floor and so broke that people must bring their own surgical gloves and thread. I recently visited a hospital in Ethiopia that didn’t even have water — the nurses washed their hands after they got home at night.

Rey thought about the basics. What is the purpose of an incubator? It is to keep a baby warm, oxygenated and nourished — to simulate as closely as possible the conditions of the womb. There is another mechanism for accomplishing these goals, Rey reasoned, the same one that cared for the baby during its months of gestation. Rey also felt, something that probably all mothers feel intuitively: that one reason babies in incubators did so poorly was that they were separated from their mothers. Was there a way to avoid the incubator by employing the baby’s mother instead?

What he came up with is an idea now known as kangaroo care. Aspects of kangaroo care are now in use even in wealthy countries — most hospitals in the United States, for example, have adopted some kangaroo care practices. But its real impact has been felt in poor countries, where it has saved countless preemies’ lives and helped others to survive with fewer problems.

In Rey’s system, a mother of a preemie puts the baby on her exposed chest, dressed only in a diaper and sometimes a cap, in an upright or semi-upright position. The baby is strapped in by a scarf or other cloth sling supporting its bottom, and all but its head is covered by mom’s shirt. The mother keeps the baby like that, skin-to-skin, as much as possible, even sleeping in a reclining chair. Fathers and other relatives or friends can wear the baby as well to give the mother a break. Even very premature infants can go home with their families (with regular follow-up visits) once they are stable and their mothers are given training.

The babies stay warm, their own temperature regulated by the sympathetic biological responses that occur when mother and infant are in close physical contact. The mother’s breasts, in fact, heat up or cool down depending on what the baby needs. The upright position helps prevent reflux and apnea. Feeling the mother’s breathing and heartbeat helps the babies to stabilize their own heart and respiratory rates. They sleep more. They can breastfeed at will, and the constant contact encourages the mother to produce more milk. Babies breastfeed earlier and gain more weight.

The physical closeness encourages emotional closeness, which leads to lower rates of abandonment of premature infants. This was a serious problem among the patients of Rey’s hospital; without being able to hold and bond with their babies, some mothers had little attachment to counter their feelings of being overwhelmed with the burdens of having a preemie. But kangaroo care also had enormous benefits for parents. Every parent, I think, can understand the importance of holding a baby instead of gazing at him in an incubator. With kangaroo care, parents and baby go through less stress. Nurses who practice kangaroo care also report that mothers also feel more confident and effective because they are the heroes in their babies’ care, instead of passive bystanders watching a mysterious process from a distance.