Globe Trot: Kenya doctors’ strike is bloody business

KENYA: If your Monday holds trouble, consider Week 7 of the Kenya doctors’ strike at a government hospital in Naivasha, where Dr. Scott Myhre is operating without electricity, no blood in the bank, and the blood of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy pouring onto the floor.

WORLD’s 2010 Daniel of the Year, neurosurgeon Dick Bransford, has returned from retirement to Kenya to alleviate the shortages brought on by the strike. A typical morning at the mission hospital in Kijabe includes rounds for 22 patients and surgeries often without benefit of lab work, according to the 76-year-old physician.

GAMBIA: President Yahya Jammeh, voted out in December, vacated an office he had vowed to hold on to, taking exile in Equatorial Guinea but reportedly making off with $11.4 million.

RUSSIA: In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin’s team is saying, “Donald Trump is not our man,” and is already trashing the new U.S. president’s proposals for nuclear disarmament.

Cozying up to Russia will quickly prove problematic, as these WikiLeaks tweets suggest.

A working group of Russia’s Duma, the legislature, met last week to review the controversial anti-terror law, which Putin signed last summer but said could be revised. As is the measure eviscerates religious expression:

“Missionary activity—defined so broadly as to mean essentially the sharing of beliefs—would be limited to inside registered religious facilities by persons certified by a registered religious organisation. Missionary activity (sharing of beliefs) would be explicitly banned from residential areas and from the phone and internet.”

ISRAEL: President Trump began fleshing out his “America first” foreign policy with a phone call to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, inviting him to Washington next month.

UNITED STATES: The file on Linda Sarsour, the Muslim organizer behind Saturday’s March on Washington, is long and problematic (read bottom up), for women especially, including links to Hamas extremists and jabs at Saudi women fighting for the right to drive.

Notice in this 2012 story profiling Sarsour and other Muslim women leaders, their agitprop suggests some Arab governments “may have more tolerance than the United States or European countries for members of religious minorities.”

IRAQ: U.S.-led forces struck 90 boats and three barges on the Tigris River over three days, all believed to be ISIS fighters fleeing Mosul.

JORDAN: Hundreds of lives were saved when an engineer noticed cracks in an Amman building, and authorities evacuated residents before three buildings collapsed.