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What We're Watching: Modest hopes for Venezuelan talks, Israel-Poland diplomatic spat deepens, Ebola in the Ivory Coast
Will fresh talks help Venezuela? For just the fourth time in half a decade, the Maduro regime and opposition forces have met for fresh talks to try to chart a path forward for crisis-ridden Venezuela. The negotiations, held last week in Mexico City, were attended by both President Nicolás Maduro as well as opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who in 2019 declared himself interim president after an election widely viewed as rigged was met by mass protests. What's the aim of these talks? Well, depends who you ask. For Guaido's camp, the focus is on free and fair elections, the release of political prisoners, and human rights. (Maduro has shown some goodwill in recent days by agreeing to release opposition politician Freddy Guevara.) Maduro, on the other hand, is desperate to have crippling US sanctions lifted so Caracas doesn't have to rely as heavily on China, Russia and Iran. But because Maduro has refused to give up power, analysts say, the opposition's immediate goal now is to pave the way for local and regional elections in November, as well as to boost the COVID vaccine rollout. The next round of negotiations has been set for next month.
Israel and Poland at loggerheads again: Israel's Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has recalled Poland's ambassador over a newly-passed Polish law that restricts the rights of Holocaust survivors to reclaim property stolen during World War II, and later seized by Poland's Communist regime. Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki says the law aims to stave off grifters who abuse the system to claim property that doesn't belong to them. But Lapid, backed by the United States, hit back saying that it is "an immoral, anti-Semitic law" that prevents any recourse for aging Holocaust survivors, and said Israel may downgrade ties with Poland. This development is just the latest installment in an ongoing diplomatic spat between Israel and Poland. In 2018, Warsaw proposed a law criminalizing claims that Poland, which was home to the world's largest Jewish community before World War II, collaborated with Nazi Germany. Israel criticized the law, which was eventually watered-down, saying it whitewashed Polish complicity in the Nazi genocide (about 90 percent of Poland's pre-war Jewish community was killed in the Holocaust). Unlike Germany, Poland has never passed sweeping legislation providing reparations to Holocaust survivors and their families.
Ivory Coast begins vaccinations for… Ebola: The West African country of Ivory Coast has recorded a new case of Ebola for the first time since 1994. This comes just months after the World Health Organization declared the end of an Ebola outbreak in neighboring Guinea that killed a dozen people, sending shockwaves through the region as it grapples with a dearth of COVID vaccines. Meanwhile, the WHO said it is conducting genetic sequencing tests to determine whether the virus is linked to recent cases in Guinea. Guinea, for its part, sent 5,000 Ebola vaccine doses that Ivorian authorities said are already being used on a "targeted group." The WHO and African Union are monitoring the situation closely given that an Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2018-2020, the country's tenth outbreak, resulted in over 2,200 deaths.What We're Watching: Latin America's deepening recession, DRC beats Ebola, Macron's next move
Latin America's economic pain: Back in April, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that the pandemic would push Latin America into its worst recession in half a century, plunging a third of the population into poverty. That, it turns out, was the rosy view. The IMF now says, "the human toll has gone up," projecting that the region's economy will contract by 9.4 percent in 2020, a sharp drop from April's forecast of a 5.2 percent recession. Government-mandated lockdowns and travel restrictions have hit emerging market economies in the Caribbean and Latin America particularly hard because many of them rely on jobs in the informal sector and tourism industry to keep afloat. Taken with the effects of shutdowns in China, Europe, and the US, which have cratered demand for Latin America's exports while also decimating remittances, the region's economic recovery could take many years.
Ebola eradicated in DRC: The Democratic Republic of the Congo's worst Ebola outbreak in history, which has ravaged that country for two years, is officially over, the World Health Organization said Thursday. Ebola, an infectious disease that kills around half of those who contract it, has claimed more than 2,000 lives in that country since August 2018. Treatment and containment efforts have been complicated by decades of conflict (more than 100 armed groups operate within the DRC's borders) as well as government corruption. A team of more than 16,000 front line workers, along with a new effective vaccine program, helped eradicate the outbreak, the tenth Ebola epidemic in the DRC since the 1970s.
Macron's next move: With two years remaining of his five-year term, President Emmanuel Macron is already firmly in election mode. While no French head of state has clinched a second term since Jacques Chirac won in a landslide two decades ago, Macron faces a particularly grueling battle in trying to convince the electorate that he can resuscitate the country's pandemic-battered economy. French media is abuzz with conjecture regarding what big moves the president might have up his sleeve. After Macron earlier this month hinted at a post-pandemic "government reset," some predicted that the president might ditch his all too popular Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, replacing him with a new PM who can help him gain credibility with the left. Macron's poll numbers have been sliding since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, with a majority of French people disapproving of the government's handling of the pandemic. We're watching to see what happens when Macron elaborates on his new agenda in a much-anticipated address scheduled for next month.
Worried Sick
The "Spanish flu" virus of 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people, more than all the deaths in World War I combined. While global public health efforts have greatly improved mortality rates in more modern outbreaks, experts say the next pandemic is a matter of "when," not "if." In this episode, Ian Bremmer takes a look how diseases spread and become global. His guest, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is a leading epidemiologist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH.
Dr. Fauci breaks down some of the biggest health threats facing the world today: HIV/AIDS, Ebola, malaria, tuberculosis, influenza, and the recent rise in cases of measles brought on by the misguided anti-vaccine movement.
Also on the show: Five years after his Ebola diagnosis made international news, NYC's Dr. Craig Spencer tells GZERO Media what he learned from the experience and what his life is like today.