Unprecedented efforts are being made to get medicines to people in poor countries to treat killer diseases such as Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. But too little attention is being paid to the real danger that these drugs will run out of impact. A report today from the Center for Global Development in Washington says we need to wake up – there are measures that can be taken to stop drug resistance building.

It’s always been a scourge of Europe and the USA. Penicillin long ago stopped being the miracle cure it once appeared to be. Other antibiotics took its place but resistance has developed to each one in turn and there is always a need for more.

But when drugs are precious, money is short and diseases all too often kill, as in the developing world, a failure to guard against drug resistance has especially difficult consequences. We have had MDR TB (multidrug-resistant tuberculosis) for some years. More recently came the first reports of XDR TB, extremely drug resistant tuberculosis, in South Africa. The drugs to treat it would not have been affordable even if they had been available.

Nancy Birdsall, president of CGD, put it this way:

Drug resistance […]

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Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human endeavour and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present itself to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions-fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connexions is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself more or less analogous beings on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. One’s object now is to secure the favour of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed towards […]

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International crime networks now enjoy such an extensive reach that the gangs behind them must be regarded as a significant economic power, says a United Nations report.

In one of the most comprehensive analyses undertaken of transnational criminal activity, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has calculated that the illicit trade in a range of commodities – including drugs, people, arms, fake goods and stolen natural resources – has an annual value of roughly $130bn.

The report shows how transnational crime continues to be dominated by the trade in cocaine and heroin, a business whose product is worth about $105bn a year.

But it suggests that other criminal activities – including the trafficking of natural resources, product counterfeiting and maritime piracy – are becoming of increasing concern to the international community.

One of the report’s main purposes is to persuade world powers to think harder about how they can combat the illicit trade in goods and people.

‘Transnational crime has become a threat to peace and development, even to the sovereignty of nations,’ says Antonio Maria Costa, the UNODC’s executive director. ‘Today, the criminal market spans the planet: illicit goods are sourced from one continent, trafficked across another, and marketed in a third.’

Mr Costa […]

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Warren Buffett and Bill Gates called Wednesday on their billionaire peers to give away half of their wealth.

The pronouncement by Messrs. Buffett and Gates stems from a series of dinners the two men held over the past year to discuss the effects of the recession on philanthropy with some of the nation’s richest people, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, investor Ronald O. Perelman and David Rockefeller, his family’s patriarch.

The result of the dinners is an invitation, called the Giving Pledge, which asks the nation’s billionaires to publicly commit to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropic and charitable groups within their lifetimes or after their deaths.

The effort casts a spotlight on a highly private decision, and inserts Messrs. Buffett and Gates into the process. While several attendees of the dinners have made the pledge, many of the nation’s wealthiest already had decided to disburse the bulk of their wealth to charitable causes.

The goal is to help create an expectation in society that the rich should give away their wealth and to create a peer group of wealthy people that can offer advice on philanthropy, said Melinda Gates, Mr. Gates’s wife and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda […]

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WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is focused on meeting its July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, but it has no political strategy to help stabilize the country, current and former U.S. officials and other experts are warning.

The failure to articulate what a post-American Afghanistan should look like and devise a political path for achieving it is a major obstacle to success for the U.S. military-led counter-insurgency campaign that’s underway, these officials and experts said.

The result is ‘strategic confusion,’ said Ronald E. Neumann, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005-07.

While the military’s counter-insurgency strategy is well understood, ‘there is plenty more uncertainty over the political strategy which needs to complement ISAF’s (International Security Assistance Force) work,’ wrote Simon Shercliff, a British diplomat, on his Internet blog after a two-day conference last week of U.S. officials and outside experts at the U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla. ‘Everyone agrees that we need to develop one, but there is little consensus on what it should look like.’

Congress, too, appears primarily concerned with the July 2011 timeframe, which coincides with the beginning of the 2012 presidential and congressional election campaigns.

In hours of hearings Wednesday, members of […]

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