Eradicating the Guinea worm in South Sudan

SOUTH SUDAN appears to be on the way to eradicating the Guinea worm, and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter played a key role.

SYRIA: As U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with allies, consensus appears to be building for a coalition response to a chemical weapons attack in Douma. U.S. authorities say it was a chlorine gas attack, and France claims it can trace it to the Bashar al-Assad regime.

Repeated chemical weapons attacks in Syria have paralyzed the world … my take.

“We are on the edge of a dangerous precipice,” U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said this week, citing a “new normal” where chemical weapons attacks would go unchallenged. “We are beyond showing pictures of dead babies, we are beyond appeals to conscience, we have reached the moment when the world must see justice done.”

This week I spoke to Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, about refugees and U.S. refugee policy on his Only in America podcast.

BRITAIN: As-yet unidentified attackers used the nerve agent Novichok, manufactured in the former Soviet Union, in the poison attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, the leading global watchdog on chemical weapons has concluded.

POLYNESIA: An Oxford botanist believes wild sweet potato plants traveled thousands of miles across the Pacific … all by themselves. And consider: The leaves of sweet potatoes collected by Captain Cook’s crew are stored in the cabinets of the Natural History Museum in London.

CANADA: The government has deployed New Zealand sharpshooters who will take aim from helicopters to eradicate deer introduced more than a century ago to the Haida Gwaii, or Queen Charlotte Islands, in British Columbia.

IRAQ: This week marked Holocaust Remembrance Day, and from a less-noted holocaust, this Christian woman with a knife to her head simply told her ISIS abuser Islam did not require her to convert.

Fifteen years later, writes noted commentator Karl Zinsmeister, Iraq is a modest success.

I’M READING The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction by Adam S. McHugh.

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