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TITOLI: 1. 100 anni dalla Grande Guerra, le celebrazioni http://www.legnanonews.com/news/4/48564/100_anni_dalla_grande_guerra_le_celebrazioni 2. The Increasing Trend of Targeting Civilians http://www.outlookafghanistan.net/topics.php?post_id=12146 3. Isis: la strategia americana dopo la caduta di Ramadi http://www.panorama.it/news/esteri/isis-‐la-‐strategia-‐americana-‐dopo-‐la-‐caduta-‐di-‐ramadi/ 4. Kurds advance against Islamic State in northeastern Syria http://www.islamedianalysis.info/kurds-‐advance-‐against-‐islamic-‐state-‐in-‐northeastern-‐syria/ 5. The significance of killing ISIL's oil man http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/05/isil-‐oil-‐abu-‐sayyaf-‐syria-‐150519115948310.html 6. Migrant plan: Libya sends special envoy to talk with EU -‐ See more at: http://www.islamedianalysis.info/migrant-‐plan-‐libya-‐sends-‐special-‐envoy-‐to-‐talk-‐with-‐eu/ 7. Hillary’s secret Libya adviser, Sid Blumenthal, and the scandal wars of the ’90s http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/20/hillarys-‐secret-‐libya-‐adviser-‐sid-‐blumenthal-‐and-‐scandal-‐wars-‐0s/print 8. Latvian Region Has Distinct Identity, and Allure for Russia http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/world/europe/latvian-‐region-‐has-‐distinct-‐identity-‐and-‐allure-‐for-‐russia.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-‐column-‐region&region=top-‐news&WT.nav=top-‐news&_r=0 9. Ukraine must be ready, says Poroshenko http://www.ansa.it/english/news/politics/2015/05/20/ukraine-‐must-‐be-‐ready-‐says-‐poroshenko_8f270b79-‐70c4-‐4dbb-‐bc82-‐6fe83e17b194.html 10. North Korea says it has technology to make mini-‐nuclear weapons http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pyongyang-‐says-‐it-‐has-‐technology-‐to-‐make-‐small-‐submarined-‐mounted-‐nuclear-‐warheads/2015/05/20/0e96d0bc-‐fec0-‐11e4-‐833c-‐a2de05b6b2a4_story.html 11. Frontline health workers were sidelined in $3.3bn fight against Ebola http://europe.newsweek.com/frontline-‐health-‐workers-‐were-‐sidelined-‐3-‐3bn-‐fight-‐against-‐ebola-‐327485

20/5/2015 LegnanoNews - 100 anni dalla Grande Guerra, le celebrazioni

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100 anni dalla Grande Guerra, le celebrazioni

Con tutta una serie di manifestazioniche avranno inizio questa sera,martedì 19 maggio, Legnanoricorderà i 100 anni dall'inizio dellaGrande Guerra.

L'apertura è dedicata alla proiezionedel film "Uomini contro", salaRatti, martedì 19, alle 20.45, conripetizione nella mattinatadi mercoledì 20, alle 9.30, per lescuole.

Venerdì 22, alle 21, al Leone daPerego, conferenza del generaleLuca Fontana sul tema N.R.D.C. -ITA Corpo d'Armata di reazionerapida della NATO a guida italiana.

Sabato 23, alle 9, la giornata cloucon una cerimonia al cimiteroMonumentale dove alla cappella deicaduti si terranno i discorsi delsindaco di Legnano AlbertoCentinaio, del presidentedell'Associarma Antonio Cortese,del

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console di Romania a Milano George Milosan e di Marco Baratto, Delegato per il Nord Italiadell’Asociatia National Cultural Eroilor “Regina Maria".

"La celebrazione - ha spiegato ilsindaco Centinaio nel presentare laricorrenza - è un inno all'amicizia tra ipopoli e un appello per dimenticarequalsiasi motivo di odio, masoprattutto rispetto verso tutti i militarideceduti amici e nemici".

Proprio in questo contesto dasegnalare il "gemellaggio" con laRomania, in considerazione del fattoche nella cappella dei caduti al nostrocimitero trovano pace eterna 5 soldatidell'esercito romeno. Durante lacerimonia, infatti, una corona d'allora sarà portata da giovani romeni e la benedizione sarà impartitanon solo con il rito cattolico, ma anche con quello della Chiesa ortodossa romena e greco cattolica.

"Facciamo memoria comune nella prospettiva di unireil popolo italiano a quello romeno, nel più profondospirito di Fratellanza", così sempre oggi Marco Baratto,Delegato per il Nord Italia di “Regina Maria", cui hafatto eco il console Milosan (nella fotoaccanto) "ricordare tutti i caduti di tutte le guerre deveessere un impegno unitario e non solo in circostanzecome questa".

Domenica 24, le manifestazioni proseguiranno con lapartecipazione a un messa solenne in Basilica alle 11.30, promossa dall'associazione Bersaglieri diLegnano.

Infine, martedì 26, alle 20.45, in Sala Ratti, proiezione del film "Orizzonti di Gloria".

20/5/2015 The Increasing Trend of Targeting Civilians - The Daily Outlook Afghanistan

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The Increasing Trend of TargetingCiviliansMay 20, 2015 | Abdul Ahad Bahrami

With

the

sharp

rise in

Taliban activities in recent months, the militant group and other militants have

been increasingly targeting innocent civilians. This is worrisome sign for safety

and security of civilians in Afghanistan as the ongoing insurgency is far from

being resolved in the near future. According to the reports, the Taliban stopped

passenger vehicles and kidnapped dozens of passengers in Paktia province. The

Taliban have claimed responsibility saying that they are searching for

government workers. Last Wednesday, 14 civilians, including nine foreigners,

were killed in a gruesome attack by gunmen in Park Palace Hotel in Kabul.

With the increasing incidents involving abduction of passengers, kidnapping of

civilians is now becoming a trend and being used by the Taliban and other

militants as a war tactic. The kidnapping of 31 passengers, 19 of whom released

recently, was the most shocking incident of its kind perpetrated by the Afghan

militants in recent years. The kidnapping appalled the nation and sparked

widespread condemnations which culminated to release of about two third of the

hostages. Previously, in two occasions, the militants abducted some demining

workers in eastern Afghanistan and 11 laborers in Sar-e Pul province and

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released them after local elders negotiated for their release. The fate of six

passengers who were abducted on March 16 on Herat-Kandahar highway

remains unclear.

The Taliban is alleging that the group’s formal policy is to protect civilians and

show compassion towards civilians particularly for elders, women and children.

However, it seems that this is all claims and the the militants are not committed

to their own or common principles. The Taliban consider their struggle a

legitimate fight for restoring Islamic Emirate. However, the Taliban and other

new-emerging militant actors is increasing turning into a criminal group inspired

by their interpretation of Islam. The militant groups launch attacks discriminately

and inflict heavy casualties by roadside bombing and attacks on government

offices and public places.

As the militant groups are waging a deadly campaign in the country, they are

visibly adopting criminal approaches that are common for many terrorist groups

in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. In fact, the insurgency in Afghanistan

is increasingly turning into policies of not differentiating between civilians and

combatants. This, however, will have repercussions for the insurgent groups on

the long run. In past fourteen years of war, the Taliban have also been somehow

trying to capture minds and hearts of the Afghan mainstream through posing

themselves as provider of security and justice in local areas where government

has limited access. Civilian casualties and kidnappings by the militants would

further alienate the public from the Taliban.

On the other hand, the militants have recently been adopting approaches that

are largely viewed based on ethnic and sectarian lines. Most of civilians abducted

by insurgents in recent months have been Hazaras. While the Taliban have

usually been discouraging ethnic or sectarian violence in Afghanistan in last

fourteen years, the recent incidents of kidnappings targeting Hazaras suggest

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the group’s – or of their affiliated ones – of desperation in the war efforts. Even

if the Islamic State has been responsible for some abductions, the kidnappings

could not have happened without Taliban consent in areas that are mostly

controlled by the Taliban. Pursuing sectarian based approach in the war and

targeting civilians put the Taliban on a sliding slope that could gradually turn the

militants into criminal-terrorist groups.

In last fourteen years of war, the Taliban’s formal stance on civilian casualties

has been to denounce deaths of civilians and blame the government for incidents

of civilian casualties. The Taliban have been somewhat avoiding to target and

alienate civilians in non-war situations. Many times, the Taliban have been trying

to enforce social order through strict policing in areas where government

agencies have no or limited presence. But the group’s discriminatory bombing

campaign and terrorist attacks have been carried out without considering safety

of civilians. In many instances, in order to target government workers and

security personnel, the Taliban launched attacks on crowded areas such as

stadiums and queues at banks.

The militants’ recent war tactics clearly indicate that they will continue to target

civilians in different ways such as kidnaping and bombing populous areas. The

Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) needs to effectively protect the public

and minimize civilian casualties by the militants. One of the objectives of the

Taliban is to show the government unable of providing security to the public. If

the government fails to protect civilians, its credibility to the public will decline

and the Taliban will take advantage of it. The Afghan National Security Forces

(ANSF) has largely been successful in gaining public trust on its capability to

provide security for the public. The ANSF should redouble efforts for winning the

hearts and minds of the people.

With emergence of Islamic State group, there is also a high chance that the

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militant groups take ethnic-sectarian based approach in the ongoing war and

target ethnic and religious minorities. This will virtually enter the crisis into a

new phase. Development of ethnic or sectarian divisions is highly a dangerous

prospect for the future of the country. Afghanistan is highly susceptible to

ethnic-sectarian tensions as it is neighboring Pakistan, a country hard hit by

sectarian violence, as well as the current Shia-Sunni tensions in the Muslim

world. The rise of the Islamic Stage groups is coming as an alarm for

Afghanistan. The Syria-originated group is a potential threat to the harmony and

coexistence of Afghan ethnic groups.

The government needs to plan for a long-term strategy for protecting civilians.

The UN has had unsuccessful efforts in the past to persuade the Taliban for

protecting the civilians. Any such efforts are beneficial. The United Nations still

can influence the parties of the war to respect civilian safety and security. The

Afghan government should ask the UN and other parties to negotiate with the

Taliban over the issue. The anti-insurgency campaign should be combined with

direct or non-direct talks with the militant groups for providing protection to

civilians by all sides of the war.

20/5/2015 Isis: la strategia americana dopo la caduta di Ramadi - Panorama

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Isis: la strategia americana dopo la caduta di RamadiBombardamenti aerei e sostegno alle truppe irachene sul terreno: come potrebbecambiare la tattica militare dopo la battuta d'arresto

20maggio2015

Panorama News Esteri Isis: la strategia americana dopo la caduta di Ramadi

La strategia americana contro lo Stato islamico in Iraq e Siria si trova in un momentoparticolarmente delicato. La presa da parte dell'Isis della città irachena di Ramadi, ilpiù grande obiettivo militare raggiunto quest'anno dai miliziani islamisti, nonmodificherà nell'immediato la strategia militare della Casa Bianca fondata sugliattacchi aerei a guida statunitense e sulle formazione delle forze di sicurezza iracheneper combattere la guerra di terra.

Ma il livello di preparazione dei soldati iracheni - fuggiti in massa da Ramadi dopol'assalto degli uomini di Al Baghdadi - è un fattore di forte preoccupazione aWashington, che potrebbe produrre pesanti ricadute politiche nel rapporto il Congressoe la Presidenza.

I repubblicani hanno adoperato in parlamento il pretesto della caduta di Ramadi perintensificare la pressione sulla Casa Bianca affinché modifichi la sua strategia militare

Barack Obama scende dall'Air Force One – Credits: EPA/DIEGO AZUBEL

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contro l'Isis.Il senatore John McCain, già sconfitto da Obama nel 2008, ha chiestoespressamente che le truppe americane scendano direttamente sul terreno, ipotesi cheper ora Obama ha sempre escluso, anche nella consapevolezza che è stato proprio ildisimpegno dall'Iraq una delle bandiere della sua prima vittoriosa campagna elettoraleper la conquista della Casa Bianca.

Il senatore texano Ted Cruz, candidato presidenziale nelle elezioni del 2016, hainvece suggerito alla Casa Bianca di puntare, non già sul disastrato esercito iracheno,ma sui peshmerga curdi, la cui esperienza come guerriglieri è già risultata molto utileper la riconquista di Kobane, al confine tra Turchia e Siria.

Il più chiaro è stato il portavoce della Casa Bianca Eric Schultza bordo dell'Air ForceOne. «Non si può negare che questo è davvero una battuta d'arresto ma aiuteremo gliiracheni a riconquistare Ramadi». Qualche dato: gli attacchi aerei su Ramadi sonostati, solo nelle ultime due settimane, 65, di cui otto solo nelle ultime 24 ore.

L'idea, o l'illusione, è che grazie al sostegno aereo della coalizione a guida americanale forze irachene possa riprendere a breve la città irachena. Il punto è quanto riescano atenerla, tenendo conto anche del fatto che accanto all'esercito regolare potrebberoessere impiegati i miliziani delle fazioni sciite, malviste a Ramadi dalla grandemaggioranza della popolazione sunnita.

20/5/2015 Kurds advance against Islamic State in northeastern Syria

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Kurds advance against Islamic State innortheastern Syria20 MAGGIO 2015 BY ANDREA SPADA

Kurdish YPG fighters and allied militia have encircled ISIS militants in a dozen villages near the town of Tel

Tamr in Hasaka province. The region is important in the battle against ISIS because it borders land controlled

by the jihadis in Iraq.

The Kurdish YPG appear to be trying to drive ISIS from a stronghold in the mountainous Jabal Abdul

Aziz area to the southwest of Tel Tamr, said Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the Syrian Observatory for Human

Rights monitoring group.

The U.S.-led alliance bombing ISIS in Syria has been coordinating its air strikes in Hasaka with the YPG, after

successfully joining forces with the Kurds to drive the jihadis from Kobani, or Ayn al-Arab, in January.

The Kurdish official, Nasir Haj Mansour, said around 80 ISIS fighters were killed in an ambush when they tried

to flee the Tel Tamr area for Jabal Abdul Aziz earlier this week. Dozens more were killed in airstrikes.

“The confirmed number of [ISIS] dead is between 170 and 200,” said Mansour, speaking by telephone from

Syria.

Around 100 ISIS fighters were still encircled in the villages near Tel Tamr, he added.

Abdulrahman confirmed the YPG had effectively encircled ISIS fighters in the villages near Tel Tamr. “The

YPG are getting ready to launch attack on Jabal Abdul Aziz,” he said.

ISIS is still believed to be holding some 200 Assyrian Christians abducted in February from villages near Tel

Tamr.

The U.S.-led Combined Joint Task Force said Tuesday it had carried out seven airstrikes since early Monday

20/5/2015 Kurds advance against Islamic State in northeastern Syria

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in Hasaka that had destroyed vehicles, fighting positions and a shipping container.

20/5/2015

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The significance of killing ISIL's oil manWas Abu Sayyaf killed as a target of opportunity, or because hemanaged the gas and oil side of ISIL's operations?20 May 2015 08:43 GMT | War & Conflict, Middle East, Iraq, Syria, ISIL

Ibrahim AlMarashi

Ibrahim alMarashi is an assistant professor at the Department of History, CaliforniaState University, San Marcos. He is the coauthor of "Iraq’s Armed Forces: An AnalyticalHistory."

@ialmarashi

The recent US special forces raid to assassinate Abu Sayyaf, a figure within ISIL whomanaged the group's oil, gas, and financial operations, eliminated a single highlevelleader within the group, but nonetheless raises greater issues about the longterm USstrategy campaign against an organisation which has proved tenacious as it approachesits first year anniversary as a Caliphatestate.

While the circumstances of this attack are just as opaque as the figure it targeted, thereasons behind the raid itself reveals three strategies that ISIL has pursued. First, thehigh profile nature of the raid indicates that ISIL is not just a terror group that sowsviolence across its domains, but has found a revenue stream in the form of petroterrorism.

Second, antiquities were found in the ISIL leader's home, demonstrating that this grouphas also benefitted from selling another commodity that is hidden under the Syrian andIraqi soil, the rich remains of the Fertile Crescent's preIslamic past.

Finally, the reports that Abu Sayyaf had enslaved a Yezidi woman serves as a reminderthat ISIL continues to perpetuate a nefarious form of gendered terrorism, an aspect thattends to be forgotten in the media and policy circles, which tend to obsess over the moregruesome spectacles of ISIL beheadings.

Risky operation

The first question that needs to be asked is why did the US conduct a risky operation in

20/5/2015

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the first place? The special forces troops were ferried to the attack site in Blackhawkhelicopters, the same helicopter that was downed in Somalia in 1993 during a similarraid against a high profile target.

This recent attack could have resulted in a helicopter being downed in ISIL terrain,giving the group a great propaganda boost if they downed the helicopter or evencaptured US special forces troops alive. The second question was why Abu Sayyaf wastargeted in particular.

Was he killed simply as a target of opportunity, where intelligence happened to indicatehis whereabouts on a particular day, or had he been tracked for a while, indicating thathe, opposed to ISIL military commanders on the ground, was a greater highvalue targetbecause he managed the gas and oil side of the terror group's financial operations?

Of course these are rhetorical questions, as answers to these questions can never befully ascertained, notwithstanding the statements released by the White House andDefense Department. What can be deduced nonetheless, is that Abu Sayyaf was killedin AlAmr, a town next to Syria's oil fields, and there he played a role within the groupthat managed the petroterrorism side of ISIL.

I define petroterrorism in relation to narcoterrorism. Both oil and its refined products aresimilar to drugs. Both ISIL and drug cartels depend on commodities sold on the blackmarket. Both groups manage illicit rentier economies, charging a rent on a resource thathappens to exist within domains they control.

Just as the US serves as the main market for drugs controlled by the Mexican drugcartels, Turkey serves as the equivalent to the US visavis smuggled oil controlled byISIL.

The price of oil in Turkey is exorbitantly high. The price of gasoline in Turkey is higherthan what its neighbours pay at the pump in Europe or the Middle East. Plus, petroleumis a fungible commodity.

A petroleum jerry ending up on the Turkish black market does not have a "Made in theIslamic State" label. Thus, if an end user in Turkey can get access to cheaper gasoline,and benefit from plausible deniability, a winwin situation emerges both for ISIL and theconsumer in Turkey.

The reports that ISIL sells oil back to the Syrian state demonstrates further thatpragmatism outweighs ideology in the group's strategic calculus.

Antiquities and petroterrorism

Despite their avowed aims of combatting the government of Bashar alAssad, most ofISIL's combat in Syria has been targeted against other Syrian rebels or Syrian Kurds.ISIL's ability to generate revenue from petroleum sales to the Syrian state demonstratesthat priority is given to rent seeking on commodities.

The other black market commodity, antiquities, has played a similar role to petroterrorism, thus granting ISIL another precedent in the region, the management ofarcheoterrorism, where the sale of artifacts also finances the group's violence.

This aspect of ISIL's strategy serves two purposes. It can film the high profile destructionof preIslamic sites in Iraq and Syria as a way to generate international revulsion, whilediscretely sell the archaeology that can be moved into the black market.

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Finally, an aspect of the raid that got barely a passing mention in the article was thatAbu Sayya had enslaved a Yezidi slave woman, in addition to the woman he wasmarried to. This raid serves as an inconvenient reminder of the plight of Iraq Yezidi's.

While ISIL forces were pushed back from conducting a wholesale massacre of theYezidis trapped on Mount Sinjar in September 2014 due to US air strikes, there stillremains a generation of Yezidi women held in custody by ISIL fighters.

The enslavement of Yezidi women works in tandem with the destruction of Syria's andIraq's preIslamic heritage. Both tactics attempt to forge a homogeneity within the socalled Islamic State.

In this regard, ISIL has sought the erasure of a preIslamic past through the destructionof preIslamic antiquities or what it deems as "nonIslamic peoples", thus expellingChristians from Mosul, or enslaving Yezidi women as a means to ensure they will not beable to give birth to future Yezidi children.

Sexual slavery

Unfortunately, the practice of sexual slavery mimics ISIL's petroterrorism. One tacticdeals with energy security, the other with human security. Black markets in Turkey seekillicit oil trade as a means to maintain the nation’s energy security supply, albeit byimporting petroleum from ISIL. The enslavement of Yezidi women is a violation of thisminority's human security. ISIL practices a predatory form of rule, whether it is theextraction of oil or the involuntary extraction of women.

While US foreign policy towards ISIL has been couched in in terms of traditional securitygoals, such as strengthening the Iraqi state and military and preventing ISIL terror fromexpanding to the region and the West, both the US and NATO tend to relegate humansecurity to a secondary concern.

For example, this raid was ostensibly to damage ISIL's revenuegenerating capacity, atraditional military strategy. Implementing strategies to protect vulnerable populations,such as women and minorities, children, or refugees in general require longtermcommitments such a helping develop the local infrastructure and NGOs to developmental health rehabilitation programs.

However, these are often abandoned when the immediate military goal, degrading aterrorist threat, has been achieved on the battlefield. The death of Abu Sayyaf generatedheadlines. Unfortunately what has been inflicted on his unfortunate Yezidi slave in termsof her individual trauma has not.

Ibrahim alMarashi is an assistant professor at the Department of History,California State University, San Marcos. He is the coauthor of "Iraq’s ArmedForces: An Analytical History."

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarilyreflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

20/5/2015 Migrant plan: Libya sends special envoy to talk with EU

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Migrant plan: Libya sends special envoy totalk with EU20 MAGGIO 2015 BY ANDREA SPADA

Libya said on Tuesday it has sent a special envoy to speak with the European Union about the EU’s

proposed military operation to destroy the boats of migrant smugglers who increasingly set off for Europe

from the chaotic north African country.

A statement shared by Libya’s mission to the United Nations says the country’s internationally recognised

government “confirms its total eagerness to do its effective role in controlling the mass migration which

claimed the lives of thousands of people”.

Some kind of consent from Libya is needed if the EU wants to operate in the country’s territorial waters. But

the country is split into two governments, the other backed by Islamist-allied militias.

The Western-backed government says the smuggling operations are largely based in the west, which is

under the other government’s control.

Libya’s UN ambassador this month said his government had not been consulted on the EU plan and largely

rejected it, but Ibrahim Dabbashi later indicated that his government had been brought into the conversation.

High season for migrant trafficking

Now the government’s special envoy, Nuri Bait Almal, has been sent to speak with the EU, the statement

from the Western-backed government says, adding that “we are looking forward for an early engagement

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with the European leaders”.

The statement does not say whether Libya would support an EU operation in its territorial waters or even on

its shores, but it says: “We are seeking in all seriousness to cast out this phenomenon as soon as possible

and to stop the flow of immigrants to EU countries.”

It also acknowledges Libya’s “inability in the current time to reduce these illegal migrations” and advocates

cooperating with the EU on an action plan to end the crisis. The International Organisation for Migration

estimates that more than 1 800 migrants have died or gone missing at sea on the way to Europe this year.

The 28-nation EU wants to launch its military operation next month. The operation is still in the planning stage

and also requires a UN Security Council resolution for its full implementation to be legally sound. It will involve

European navy ships, drones and satellite imagery.

The EU’s top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, said on Monday that since the summer high season for migrant

trafficking is rapidly approaching, speed is of the essence.

20/5/2015 Hillary’s secret Libya adviser, Sid Blumenthal, and the scandal wars of the ’90s | Fox News

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Print Close

Hillary’s secret Libya adviser, Sid Blumenthal, and thescandal wars of the ’90sBy Howard Kurtz

Published May 20, 2015 | FoxNews.com

Sid Blumenthal was Hillary Clinton’s goto guy as a journalist, as a White House aide and, we’ve just learned, as an informal

adviser to the secretary of State on Libya.

And that took place while he happened to be working with some businessmen who were trying to land contracts in Libya—deals

that would have required State Department approval.

What’s more, the information he provided was mostly lousy.

This remarkable story is contained in some of Hillary’s private emails, which have now been leaked to the New York Times. And

they provide a flashback for those who endured the Clinton wars of the ’90s, when Blumenthal wound up testifying before a grand

jury over his role in the Monica Lewinsky investigation.

The story is apparently based on information furnished by Trey Gowdy’s House Benghazi committee, which is prominently

mentioned as planning to subpoena Blumenthal.

Clinton “took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at

times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that

Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable,” the Times says.

Hillary had wanted to hire Blumenthal when she took over the State Department, but that idea was blocked by President Obama’s

aides.

The Blumenthal saga is yet another product of the tangled web of public, private, political and philanthropic networks created by the

Clintons. At times it’s hard to separate the overlapping threads.

While working with the businessmen who saw Libya as a lucrative market, Blumenthal “was also employed by her family’s

philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, ‘message guidance’ and the planning of commemorative events,

according to foundation officials. During the same period, he also worked on and off as a paid consultant to Media Matters and

American Bridge, organizations that helped lay the groundwork for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.”

Clinton, taking a few questions from reporters in Iowa yesterday for the first time in nearly a month, framed her response as a

matter of reaching out.

"He’s been a friend of mine for a long time, he sent me unsolicited emails, which I passed on in some instances," she said. "And I

see that that’s just part of the giveandtake. When you’re in the public eye, when you’re in an official position, I think you do have to

work to make sure you’re not caught in a bubble and you only hear from a certain small group of people, and I’m going to keep

talking to my old friends, whoever they are."

Since the reporter's question didn't include key details, Hillary avoided addressing the gist of the story, that he was giving her advice

about Libya while pursuing business ventures there, and that the information he was relaying was deemed suspect or flat wrong.

A little background: Blumenthal toiled for years for the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New Yorker. The late editor of

the New Republic, Michael Kelly, was so suspicious of his backchannel ties to the Clintons that he barred Blumenthal from the

office. During the 1992 campaign, magazine writer Julia Reed later told me, Blumenthal urged her not to write a piece questioning

Bill Clinton’s character. But what if it were true? “It doesn’t matter…This is too important,” she says Blumenthal told her. At the New

Yorker, he refused to write about the Whitewater scandal.

When Hillary brought him into Bill’s secondterm White House, cynics cracked that he would receive “back pay” for services

rendered.

20/5/2015 Hillary’s secret Libya adviser, Sid Blumenthal, and the scandal wars of the ’90s | Fox News

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This is what I wrote soon after he made the move in 1997: “What is it about Sid Blumenthal that brings out the venom in the

Washington media establishment?...Blumenthal, 48, whose wife also works for the White House, has somehow been branded as

the capital's chief suckup, a craven sellout who defended Bill and Hillary Clinton against the world even as he carefully cultivated

them in private conversations.”

Bigger trouble lay ahead. In a sworn Senate deposition, Blumenthal said that while President Clinton had told him on the day the

story broke in 1998 that Monica Lewinsky was a “stalker,” he himself had never repeated that to friends or his former colleagues in

the press corps.

But that account was challenged by his longtime friend, the late Vanity Fair writer Christopher Hitchens, in a House affidavit: “Mr.

Blumenthal stated that, Monica Lewinsky had been a 'stalker' and that the president was 'the victim' of a predatory and unstable

sexually demanding young woman.”

Special prosecutor Ken Starr brought Blumenthal before a grand jury, where he refused to answer certain questions on grounds of

executive privilege. No charges were ever brought.

Blumenthal sent Hillary at least 25 memos on Libya in 2011 and 2012, according to the Times piece. One was sent in 2012, as the

new Libyan prime minister was trying to stabilize his government, talked up the influence of a man named Najib Obeida—without

mentioning that Blumenthal’s business allies hoped that Obeida would finance their humanitarian projects in that country. Clinton

forwarded the memo to her senior staff.

In the end, Blumenthal’s business pals failed to secure any business in Libya.

Any top government official is free to consult outside friends as a way of getting fresh thinking from outside the bureaucracy. What’s

striking here is the overlapping of public service and private profit—exactly what the Clintons have been accused of with a

foundation that, as it turns out, also employed Sidney Blumenthal.

Click for more Media Buzz.

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20/5/2015 Latvian Region Has Distinct Identity, and Allure for Russia - NYTimes.com

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REZEKNE, Latvia — On acontinent of fractured loyalties,a kaleidoscope of separatistpassions extending fromScotland to eastern Ukraine,Piters Locs, the 70-year-oldchampion of an obscure and, atleast officially, nonexistentlanguage, has a particularlyesoteric cause.

“We are a separate people,” he

By ANDREW HIGGINS MAY 20, 2015

Latvian Region Has Distinct Identity,and Allure for Russia

A monument dedicated to the liberation of Rezekne, Latvia, after World War II. Latvian soldiers, border troops andthe local police held a joint exercise last month in the city. Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York Times

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said, showing visitors aroundthe private museum he has built to celebrate the language and literature ofLatgale, a sparsely populated and impoverished region of lakes, forests andabandoned Soviet-era factories along Latvia’s eastern border with Russia.

While Mr. Locs insists that he has no desire to see the area break awayfrom already tiny Latvia, such passion for Latgale’s language and itsdistinct identity helps explain why Russian nationalists see this region —about a quarter of the country — as fertile ground for their machinations todivide and weaken NATO’s easternmost fringe.

Only about 100,000 people actually speak Latgalian. The authorities inRiga, Latvia’s capital, consider it a dialect of Latvian, not a separatelanguage, and nobody is punished for speaking it.

But complaints that the region’s culture,heavily influenced by Russia, is under threathave been taken up with gusto by pro-Russiagroups, fueling suspicion that they work as afront for Moscow.

In a recent article urging Russia to undertakea “preventive occupation” of this and twoother Baltic nations — all of them NATOmembers — Rostislav Ishchenko, a politicalanalyst close to influential nationalist figuresin Moscow, asserted that Latgale’s separateidentity could help open the way for a“revision” of Baltic borders. A mapaccompanying the article showed Latgale as aseparate entity taking up the entire length ofwhat is now Latvia’s border with Russia.

Such a scenario would mean a Baltic replayof events last year in Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists and so-called little greenmen — Russian soldiers in uniforms strippedof insignia — seized Crimea and then

territory along Ukraine’s border with Russia.

Much the same strategy has also been promoted in a recent series ofmysterious online appeals calling for the establishment of a “Latgalian

By The New York Times

FINLAND

BalticSea

ESTONIA

RUSSIA

LATVIA

RezekneLATGALE

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People’s Republic,” a Latvian version of the Donetsk People’s Republicsupported by Russia in Ukraine.

Latvia’s Security Police, the domestic intelligence agency, have struggled totrace the source of the appeals but believe they originated in Russia.

“They seem to be some kind of provocation to test how we would react,”said a security agency official, who asked not to be named because of thedelicacy of the issue. He said there were no signs of separatist fervor inLatgale itself and described the “Latgalian People’s Republic” as an“artificial creation by outsiders.”

Eastern Ukraine also displayed no separatist fervor until Russian-backedgunmen in March 2014 seized government buildings in Donetsk,silenced local supporters of Ukraine’s central government and, aided byRussian state television, mobilized a previously passive population to theseparatist cause.

“The crux of the matter is thatyou have to be in charge, incontrol. Once you give theinitiative to the other side youare lost,” said Janis Sarts, thestate secretary for Latvia’sDefense Ministry. He notedthat regular rotations throughLatvia of NATO troops andaircraft had sent a firmmessage to Moscow that “therisks would be tremendous” if ittried to copy its Ukrainianplaybook in the Baltics.

In a blunt, if theatrical, warning to any would-be troublemakers, Latviansoldiers, border troops and the local police held a joint exercise last monthhere in Rezekne, the Latgale region’s historic and cultural capital.

With shouts of “hands in the air” as a military helicopter clatteredoverhead, a special forces unit of Latvia’s border troops stormed thedistrict council building to confront mock “terrorists” who had seized thepremises.

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The raid lasted just a few minutes and ended with the rabble being draggedfrom the building and then dumped into a military truck.

If the whole operation had echoes of the conflict in Ukraine, down to thegrimy tracksuits of the make-believe insurgents, it was no mistake. Rather,it was meant to send a clear signal that “we are ready and it is not so easy todo illegal things,” said Brig. Gen. Leonids Kalpins, the commander ofLatvia’s National Guard.

The exercise was held in the center of town, a few yards from a bronzestatue called “United for Latvia,” a monument to national unity that, overthe decades, has been more an emblem of the tenuousness of power inthese parts. Erected in 1939 during a short-lived Latvian republic, it wastaken down when the Soviet Union annexed the Baltics in 1940, put backup in 1943 during the Nazi occupation, removed again in 1950 afterMoscow regained control, then put back again in 1992 after Latvia regainedits independence.

Edgars Rinkevics, Latvia’s minister of foreign affairs, dismissed the onlinecampaign for Latgalian independence as the work of “Internet hooligans”but said it was unclear whether they were “lone wolves” or part of a broaderstrategy to “create an atmosphere of uncertainty.”

Moscow, he added, finds it “very difficult psychologically” to accept thatBaltic lands it ruled until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union are nowfirmly entrenched in NATO and the European Union.

Russia, Mr. Rinkevics said, poses “no imminent military threat” to Latviabut “will push as far as it can” as part of a “revisionist project” to reshapethe post-Cold War order.

The Security Police have been tracking what they view as Russian-inspiredmischief-making in Latgale for years, especially since the publication in2012 of “Latgale: In Search of Another Life,” a lengthy book written inRussian by co-authors who include Aleksandr Gaponenko, the Russian-speaking head of the Institute of European Studies, a Riga-based outfit thatsecurity officials consider a front organization for Moscow.

Mr. Gaponenko denied advocating Latgalian independence and accusedthe authorities of fabricating the issue to whip up hostility toward Russiaand excuse the presence of American troops in Latvia.

Others, such as Vladimir Linderman, the leader of the Latvian branch of

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Russia’s National BolshevikParty, a belligerent fringegroup, claim that they do notwant Russia to grab Latgaleand that they instead champion“autonomy.”

Getting power for Latgale to setits own course will be difficult,he said, as “the people who areready to struggle have all left,”including many who went toseek jobs in Western Europeand Riga, but also about a halfdozen he knew who had gone tojoin separatist fighters ineastern Ukraine.

Though there are no reliableopinion polls to gauge Latgale’sdiscontent, the region hasmany reasons to feel separate,set apart by its religion —Catholicism instead of theLutheranism favored elsewherein Latvia — its dying languageand its distinct, oftennightmarish history.

The biggest religion in Rezekne was Judaism until last century, when it wasobliterated by the Nazis, with help from Latvian police officers. The Jewishcommunity — 70 percent of the local population in 1885 — now has just 52members in a town of more than 30,000 people.

“We are the smallest community but have the biggest graveyard,” said LevSukhobokov, a local Jewish leader, showing a reporter the spot whereGermans and their Latvian helpers staged a mass killing of Rezekne’s Jewsin 1941.

Today, in Daugavpils, Latgale’s biggest city, almost half the population isRussian. Russians are not quite so numerous in Rezekne, but in a 2003referendum, 55 percent of its voters opposed joining the European Union.

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In the country over all, 67.5 percent voted in favor.

Rezekne also bucked the national trend in a 2012 referendum on whetherto make Russian an official state language, voting in favor of a move thatwas overwhelmingly rejected by the country as whole.

The European Union has financed a huge new concert hall and otherprojects, but the Russian-speaking mayor, Aleksandrs Bartasevics,denounces European sanctions against Russia, trusts Russian televisionmore than Latvia’s mostly pro-European news media outlets and worriesthat NATO will bring trouble, not security.

“What frightens me most is that American soldiers and tanks will appear,”the mayor said. “That is a signal of where the next conflict is happening.”

AnsaPolitics

20 May 2015 13:35 - NEWS

Ukraine must be ready, says PoroshenkoReports Kiev considering missile defense system

- Redazione ANSA - MOSCOW

(ANSA) - Moscow, May 20 – Russia "is preparing for an offensive" and Ukraine "must be ready"to defend itself, Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko said Wednesday. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s security council secretary talked of installing a missile defense system incomments reported by a Ukraine news agency. "I believe they are preparing an offensive and Ithink we should be ready and I think that we do not give them any tiny chance for provocation",Poroshenko said to the BBC.

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20/5/2015 North Korea says it has technology to make mini-nuclear weapons - The Washington Post

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North Korea says it hastechnology to make mini-nuclearweapons

12

By Daniela Deane May 20 at 4:03 AM

North Korea said Wednesday it has the technology to make nuclear

warheads small enough to be mounted on missiles, a day after a top U.S.

military officer said the country was many years away from such an ability.

A spokesman for Pyongyang’s powerful National Defense Commission said

in a statement Wednesday that it will defend the country with such

This undated picture released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agencyon May 19 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un inspecting the Taedonggangterrapin farm in Pyongyang. (Kns/AFP/Getty Images)

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technology, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The North Korean report was carried by the South Korean news agency

Yonhap, the country’s largest news agency.

The statement said North Korea already had the technology required, but it

did not make clear whether it had yet succeeded in making any such

nuclear warheads, according to Yonhap.

Wednesday’s statement came just weeks after North Korean state media

showed photos of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un allegedly observing

the testing of such a missile. The photos released earlier this month showed

a projectile coming out of the sea from what appeared to be a floating

submarine while the North Korean leader looked on from a distance. He

declared it to be a “world-level strategic weapon,” news reports said at the

time.

The new statement threatens to further escalate tensions sparked by those

earlier reports and reveals a more aggressive stance being taken by

Pyongyang.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says his plan to visit a North Korean industrial

Ban Ki-moon: North Korea called offvisit (0:56)

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In Washington Tuesday, Adm. James Winnefeld, vice chairman of the

Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies

that the North Koreans “have not gotten as far as their clever video editors

and spinmeisters would have us believe,” the Associated Press reported.

“They are many years away from developing this capability,” Winnefeld

said, according to the news agency. “But if they are eventually able to do so

it will present a hard-to-detect danger for Japan and South Korea as well as

our service members stationed in the region.”

Winnefeld said that such a capability by Pyongyang “only reinforces the

importance of regional ballistic missile defense,” the AP reported.

Experts questioned the authenticity of the test photos with some

speculating that the missile could have been launched from a submerged

barge rather than a submarine. Some experts do warn, however, that the

missile is in an early stage of development.

North Korea already has hundreds of land-based ballistic missiles and is

widely believed to be advancing its efforts to make smaller nuclear

warheads. U.S. officials have warned that Pyongyang could be capable of

complex has been scrapped after Pyongyang retracted its earlier approval. (Reuters)

20/5/2015 North Korea says it has technology to make mini-nuclear weapons - The Washington Post

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launching a nuclear missile that could reach the United States, but they say

it has not been tested yet.

During a recent visit to Seoul, Secretary of State John F. Kerry accused

North Korea of “flagrant disregard for international law” by continuing to

work on its nuclear bomb and missile programs. He reassured Seoul of

Washington’s “ironclad” security commitments to its ally.

Deane reported from London.

20/5/2015 Frontline health workers were sidelined in $3.3bn fight against Ebola

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HEALTH

Frontline health workers were sidelined in $3.3bn fightagainst EbolaBy Amy Maxmen 5/19/15 at 5:12 PM

Under cover of darkness, a few burial workers pried open the steel doors of a hospitalmorgue and stole the corpses of two adults and one child. They carried the bodiesconfidently, with hands that carted cadavers daily. They took the bodies to the hospital'sfront gates, and tossed them beside a paved road that bisects downtown Kenema, thethird largest city in Sierra Leone.

It was 25 November, 2014 and hospitals were collapsing under the weight of thedeadliest Ebola outbreak in history. The men and women on the frontlines of the crisis,who risked their lives to save the dying and protect the healthy from infection, had begunto feel duped. While millions of dollars had been donated to Sierra Leone from all overthe world to help them tackle the crisis, their pleas for pay had been overlooked. But theburial workers knew that the corpses wouldn't be.

As the sun rose, a crowd gathered around the bodies. No one admitted to dumping them,but members of the hospital's burial team, the 23 men tasked with carrying and cleaningEbola-infected corpses, told local journalists that the cadavers had been displayed as aform of protest. The team had not received the €100 ($115) weekly in "hazard pay" theyhad been promised for nearly two months. And they were not alone. All over thecountry, doctors, nurses, hospital cleaners, lab technicians and burial workers weremissing paychecks.

Meanwhile, donations flooded into Sierra Leone, and the two other countries affected byEbola, Guinea and Liberia. Local staff watched land cruisers rumble through towns,transporting international aid workers, many of whom did not work directly with Ebolapatients. Overhead a United Nations helicopter flew Western humanitarians and officialsacross the country at an estimated €4,390 ($5,000) per trip. Time magazine declaredEbola workers the persons of the year, but here they were, haunted and hungry.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of nurses and other frontline staff fighting Ebola have been

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underpaid throughout the outbreak – and many remain so today. The lack of pay is notsimply a matter of corrupt officials stealing donor money, because so-called "hazardpay" was issued through direct payments to frontline workers starting in November, thenelectronic payments to bank accounts and mobile phones beginning in December. Theproblems appear to be twofold: first, Sierra Leone's national health system has been sounderfunded for so long, that it was a monumental challenge to document all of thecountry's care workers and set up payment distribution channels to them. Second, it turnsout that relatively little money was set aside for local frontline staff within Sierra Leone'shealth system in the first place. In fact, less than 2% of €2.9bn ($3.3bn) in donations tofight Ebola in West Africa were earmarked for them. Instead, the vast majority ofmoney, donated from the taxpayers of the UK, the US and two-dozen other countries,went directly to Western agencies, more than 100 non-governmental organisations(NGOs), and to the UN.

Strikes drew attention to staff frustrations throughout the outbreak, but many healthworkers suppressed their anger and pressed on with their jobs. They did not want to risktheir prospects of eventual pay. Indeed, at Kenema Government Hospital, the entireburial team was fired after the demonstration last November.

On the day of the demonstration, Elizabeth Kabba, a nurse in her late thirties, ignored thecrowd gathered at the hospital gates. She slid into her protective uniform, and entered amakeshift structure constructed out of plywood and tarp, with the words "High RiskArea" scrawled across the doorway in permanent marker. Kabba had volunteered towork in the Ebola ward when the outbreak began in May 2014. West Africa's leadingvirologist, Dr Sheik Umar Khan, had recruited her and a dozen other nurses to the wardfrom the general hospital – one of the largest in the country. Back then, no one couldhave predicted how horrific the outbreak would be. They did not know that Ebola wouldkill Dr Khan and 36 other health workers at Kenema Hospital. Across the three affectedcountries in West Africa, 507 health workers have died of the disease, as of 6 May,according to the World Health Organization.

When I visited Kenema Hospital in February, graffiti on one wall of the Ebola isolationarea read: "Please pay us." By then, nurse Kabba had cared for more than 420 Ebolapatients, and had lost several friends. She had not received most of the €80 ($92) weeklyallowance she'd been promised since September. Nurses around the country were insimilar positions. "We hear about money pouring in, but it is not getting to us," Kabbasaid. "People are eating the money, people who do not come here. We are pleadingnationwide, we have sacrificed our lives."

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When I spoke with Kabba's boss, District Medical Officer Mohamed Vandi, heacknowledged that his health force had been sorely neglected. "I am not hopeful for thefuture," he said. As Ebola ebbed, world leaders had begun to make promises aboutimproving fragile African health systems. Vandi looked on sceptically. "If we could notget support when the virus was here, I wonder how we could get it when the virus isgone?"

The walking dead

When Ebola crept through Guinea's porous border, and into eastern Sierra Leone by May2014, it was the national health workers who responded. By July, the Ebola ward atKenema Hospital had swelled with more than 100 patients.

With a 70% chance of a swift, painful death, people perished in their beds and on thefloor; nurses climbed over corpses to reach other patients crying out for help. Invalidsdied while the nurses rehydrated them, and while cleaners wiped every variety ofinfectious fluid from their bodies. Nurses described how patients stricken with fearwould fight them, or flee to the latrines. "When I'd find them in the toilet, I'd wash themand return them to bed," one nurse told me. "I'd stay by the bed and pray for their lives tohelp them to cope. I'd lie and tell them I was once an Ebola patient, and that I survived."

On 29 July, Dr Khan, the head of the ward, died of Ebola. His death sent chillsthroughout West Africa, but most of all Kenema's hospital. "He was the captain of theship, and when he died, everything changed," said James Massally, the laboratorydirector at Kenema hospital. "The attitude of workers, nurses, technicians, everyone wasterrified."

To keep the hospitals staffed, the government promised hazard pay to health workerswho continued to work. Prior to the outbreak, nurses who were lucky enough to findpaying jobs in the national health system earned about €115 ($130) per month – less thanguys who drove motorcycle taxis. Those who weren't yet on the payroll worked for freeuntil a job opened. To get by, nurses confessed they sold goods on the side or chargedpatients for care under the table. So when the bonuses for frontline workers wereannounced, thousands of nurses and other staff across the country volunteered. Thosetreating Ebola patients directly were to get about €100 ($115) per week on top of theirmeagre (and often non-existent) salaries; those in Ebola triage units, €80 ($92); andnurses in general wards, €40 ($46).

Yet with a budget less than Mississippi's – the poorest state in the United States – the

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government of Sierra Leone could not afford to pay the increasing number of staff itneeded to tackle Ebola. In Kenema, the WHO contributed to hazard pay funds for acouple of weeks. In addition, it recruited a handful of international health workers tohelp. William Pooley, the 29-year old British nurse who later caught the disease, wasamong them. So was Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious disease physician from BostonUniversity. Bhadelia arrived in August to find fliers commemorating dead nurses and labtechnicians hung on hospital walls – and a facility lacking rubber gloves, plastic Tyveksuits and other safeguards. "So you're not getting paid, your friends are dying, and youhave nothing to protect yourself. We couldn't get anything into the country becausecommercial shippers stopped flying," she says. "At one point, we created aprons out oftarps."

By August, Ebola had spread to the capital. Marta Lado, a Spanish infectious diseasedoctor, was there when it hit. She had been working on HIV in Connaught Hospital inFreetown, as part of a team from King's College London, which has partnered withConnaught since 2011. She and the director of that partnership, Oliver Johnson,converted one of the hospital wards into an isolation unit, and recruited a couple of localnurses and cleaners. "We'd finish at 9pm, go home to sleep, and then a soldier or asecurity guard would call and say someone is banging on the door of the unit, or there isa dead body," Lado says. "It was completely crazy."

Ghost workers

In August, after nearly 1,000 people had died of Ebola, the WHO declared a worldhealth emergency and the process of organising and funding an international campaignto fight the contagion began. The world's largest donors searched for organisations todeliver their help – and that took time. Few NGOs specialised in emergency clinicalcare, and a rare one that did, Médecins sans Frontières, was stretched to capacity. In themeantime, the death toll in the three hard-hit countries tripled. By 1 October, it included3,330 people. Dedicated local nurses and support staff struggled to care for patients.Desperation drove them too – in the form of the hazard pay they had been promised.

In November, the hazard pay process was altered after the World Bank (along with theAfrican Development Bank) offered funds to cover it. Almost immediately, the WorldBank noticed signs of corruption in Sierra Leone's health system. When they looked atthe lists of frontline staff created by officials in the Ministry of Health, they discovered"ghostworkers" – aliases, family members, and mistakes in enumeration – that meantcertain people might collect more money than they deserved. "The lists were bloated and

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it pointed to some maleficence," said Sheriff Mahmud Ismail, a communications officerwith the World Bank in Sierra Leone.

In response, the World Bank assessed the situation and suggested a radical idea: frontlinestaff could be paid using an e-pay system, in which a health worker would receivemoney directly to their bank accounts or via a text message instructing them to go to apay station to pick up cash. With e-payments, money could not be stolen by governmentofficials on the way.

According to the World Bank, the UN Development Program (UNDP) were brought into manage the hazard pay database and co-ordinate the payment system: hospitalsupervisors passed new lists of frontline staff to co-ordinators in each district, whoexamined, signed and sent them off to Freetown. There, a small team in Freetown,staffed from both the UN and the National Ebola Response Centre (Sierra Leoneangovernment officials), corresponded with a US-based accounting firm, BDO, to be surethe appropriate signatures were in place. If everything looked correct, the World Bankasked BDO release the funds.

Ultimately, this small team in Freetown was responsible for overseeing $23.7m (€20.8m)worth of hazard payments to a fluctuating workforce of about 23,000 nurses, labtechnicians, and support staff throughout Sierra Leone's health system.

It was a monumental challenge in a country with a cash economy, no digital humanresources database, a dearth of accountants, and a history of corruption.

When e-payments launched in November, Rupert Simons felt concerned that the effortwas drastically underpowered. He was then a senior adviser to Tony Blair's AfricaGovernance Initiative in Sierra Leone, and asked officials at the National EbolaResponse Centre in Freetown, whether they wanted assistance with hazard pay. "Theysaid, 'We have a plan'," Simons says. "And when people say, 'We have a plan,' you haveto let them get on with it."

Each month, from November until today, complaints of missing hazard pay persisted.Doctors at the renowned 34th Military Hospital in Freetown, who had treated hundredsof Ebola patients, showed me copies of signed letters describing missing hazardpayments, which they had handed to the pay team to no avail. And the internationaldoctors from King's College London said they had advocated on behalf of their localpartners for months.

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"Since the beginning [of the Ebola response], the most consistent problem has been thefailure to pay risk allowances," said Johnson, when we spoke in February. "We havegiven the pay team records of who needs to be paid, which have been verified by theDistrict Medical Officer, us at King's, stamped, signed and the lot, and yet still a lot ofpeople have not been paid and we have been fighting this since August," he said. "It'sinexcusable with all of this money lying around that nobody has invested in a big teamthat can sort it out."

'I am deleted'

By the time I met Faith Sisay in February, she spoke bitterly of promises to support the"angels" of the response. She had worked at the Ebola ward at Kenema hospital sinceJune, and continued to do so after she realised she was pregnant in August. Sisay, in hertwenties, having just completed her nursing degree, had looked forward to the weeklystipends, as well as a pledge of post-Ebola employment, guaranteed by Sierra Leone'sPresident Ernest Bai Koroma.

Once her womb swelled, the head nurses asked her to remain outside the ward, toprepare medications and fetch supplies. Initially she received her hazard allowance, butthen paydays in October, November, December, January, and February came and went,and Sisay didn't receive a cent.

Beads of sweat collected on her nose as we spoke on her back porch; Sisay's huge bellyseemed to burst out of her tiny frame. When she complained to her supervisors aboutmissing hazard pay, they told her to be patient. But nothing changed. "They don't evenknow about Faith. I am deleted."

Back at Kenema Hospital, I watched young men from the former burial team don theirprotective gear. Ebola was no longer prevalent, but people continued to die of variouscauses and their corpses needed to be handled safely, just in case they were infected.Although the workers had been fired after the corpse-dumping demonstration inNovember, they continued to work for occasional tips. The men emerged from themorgue carrying a casket, and slid it into a truck. Then in the dry grass nearby, theyshook off the gear, tossed it in a pit of burning trash, and, wet with sweat, one of them –Abdul Sam – invited me to see where he'd lived during the peak of the outbreak inKenema.

Sam motioned to the morgue, and I stepped inside. A thin white sheet covered a corpsein a corner, near a rusted steel cabinet. At the opposite end was a narrow sectioned-off

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corridor, where Sam said he'd rested. By sleeping beside a pile of bodies, he was able toprepare Ebola's victims around the clock. Then he was discarded. "No pay!" he gasped ina voice that climbed towards a falsetto, palms raised to the sky.

At Kenema Hospital, Massally supported Sam and a few others with his own pocketmoney after they were laid off without pay in November. He worked with the UN inEast Timor in 1999, he said, and had a sense of how much money flows through peoplewho tackle a crisis via laptop. "I feel pathetic for the local staff. They do everything butthe returns go to the internationals who do not go into the red zone," he said. "Some do,but it's a relative few."

On the outskirts of Kenema is an Ebola treatment centre operated by the InternationalFederation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. It opened gradually duringSeptember, after the worst of the outbreak had passed through the district. By November,patients diagnosed with Ebola at Kenema Hospital were transferred there for care. WhenI visited in February, there were no patients at the unit. A silent swathe of granite andpristine, white tents beneath a blue sky, the compound looked like a mirage. Two dozenlocal nurses sat in the shade of a tent. They felt their salaries were fair and their hazardpayments were reliably being processed by the NGO.

An unpaid ambulance driver picked me up from the centre. On the drive, we came acrossa throng of kids standing around a UN helicopter. With a requested budget of $96.3m(€84.5m) for UN air services, humanitarians flew around the country constantly. Idecided to figure out why, when so much money had been hurled at Ebola, so many atthe frontline were not being paid.

While we were sweating

I found nurse Miriam Conteh outside Kenema Hospital's Ebola unit the followingmorning. Her faded maroon scrubs darkened with sweat. She had been at the hospitaluntil 3am the night before with a patient she now suspected of Lassa fever, a highly-infectious viral disease that, like Ebola, is characterised by high fevers and bleeding.Conteh said she could help create an employee list, but it had to be kept secret becausethe nurses had been warned not to complain to outsiders. Already, a nurse who had told alocal journalist about his pay problems had been transferred without warning to anotherdistrict. Nurses around the country echoed the concern. For these reasons, the names andsome distinguishing features of the nurses and burial workers have been changed in thisstory.

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Conteh arrived at my guesthouse a few days later, carrying a backpack heavy withdocuments. The loose papers formed a rough diary. A page from 23 July read: "29confirmed Ebola patients, 3 in critical condition, 1 lactating mother, 6 orphans, 8 in needof psychosocial support, 2 dead, 41 nurses on duty for all shifts."

A set of papers from the lab showed that technicians in Kenema had tested 3,083 patientsfor Ebola, in addition to 742 corpses between May through November. Log books listedstaff in the Ebola ward over time. For every name, Conteh described the person: he wasa diligent cleaner, she was a fat nurse, and so on. Conteh said several had not receivedhazard pay for months, and many of the others – including her – had been paid only half.

I converted the staff lists to an excel file, and emailed it to the UNDP in Sierra Leone,the agency involved with hazard pay. Sudipto Mukerjee, the UNDP country director,met me in his office in Freetown. Just before we spoke, someone on his team searched intheir system for some of the nurses on my list and replied with a subset of names theyfound. Mukerjee said everyone on that list received the 400,000 leones (€80 ) weeklypay, (though later, he told me to verify that with the pay team member from the NationalEbola Response Centre). I told him about nurses not on the UN's list who had not beenpaid, and I said that those who were named insisted they had received half the promisedamount. To this, he suggested their complaints referred only to October, the periodpreceding the World Bank's involvement. "November payments have been paid, as far asI am concerned," he told me. "And if they say they aren't [paid], they should lodge thiscomplaint through a proper system and not through you." I replied that they arethreatened if they complain. "If you have a situation where people are being threatenedthey should report it to Anti-Corruption [agencies]," Mukerjee countered. "They shouldreport it to the police, to the traditional chief, there are so many means of getting yourvoice heard."

When I left his office, I called a senior nurse in Kenema to be sure I hadn'tmisunderstood. She sounded shocked. "They should see what we went through on thefrontline while these people sat in the A/C, in their own vehicles, while we weresweating," she said. I decided not to tell her that the UN's international staff earn $1,600(€1,400) in danger pay every month on top of their significant annual salaries; countrydirectors in Sierra Leone, for example, take home $153,825 to $187,904 (about €135,000to €165,000) per year. The gross national income per capita in the country, meanwhile, isjust $660 (€580).

You, the taxpayers

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At Connaught Hospital in Freetown, a nurse in the Ebola unit recognised me from a fewweeks earlier. He asked if I'd heard anything about the hazard pay he was owed fromDecember, January and February, and pointed to a "useless" list of phone numbers forthe hazard pay help desk. All three lines led to a recording that said the phones were shutoff.

I visited Awul Wurie, the manager from the National Ebola Response Centre on the payteam. He greeted me outside of the Situation Room at the UN Special Court, where theleaders of every major organisation involved in the response met daily. I asked him forthe specifics about who had received what and when. "You have the nerve to ask me forprivate information," he said. "I'm done with this. We're done." In a follow-up email,Mukerjee clarified that UNDP is assisting the government in ensuring that the rightpeople are paid appropriately and on time, but that they are not responsible if nurses getless than they deserve because their names are missing from lists, or if they've beenmisclassified.

A 2015 report on the Ebola Response from the UN claims that 100% of Ebola responseworkers registered in the system have been paid. It does not mention those not in thesystem. The head of the District Ebola Response Centre in Kenema, Abdul Wahab,reiterated this success, just after I spoke with several unpaid staff. In an email response, aWorld Bank spokesperson wrote: "The majority of workers who have earned hazard payare receiving it." Perhaps, she suggested later on the phone, the nurses misspoke.

This lack of accountability is a common characteristic of UN agencies, says Simons,who is now CEO of Publish What You Fund, a London-based organisation. "UNagencies will say the local government is in charge, but they have responsibilities — inthis case for making sure that the World Bank's funds for hazard pay get out there. Sothey need to be held accountable to the World Bank, and the World Bank is accountableto its board of governance, who are governments, i.e., you the taxpayers." That's true forthe World Bank, which is essentially owned by the governments of 188 membercountries, the UN by 193 member countries, and for each bilateral donor – such as theUS and the UK – who act on behalf of their citizens and with their citizens' money.

However, to their credit, the World Bank and the African Development Bank, with theUN's support, offered money to frontline workers in Sierra Leone's health system in thefirst place, and to do it they launched a radical means of payment through mobile phonenetworks. Vastly greater donations avoided staff in the national health system altogether,precisely because the system is chaotic.

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Instead of aiding the process, the world's largest donors to the Ebola response gave theirfunds to NGOs, Western and UN agencies. After each organisation absorbed a piece, theremains trickled down to the local and international staff working with patients(generally outside of the national health system) and with communities affected byEbola. Some of the expenditures were undoubtedly effective, and some were wasteful,but it's difficult to discern between the two because budgets are opaque.

For example, the US gave $423m (€373m) of its taxpayers' Ebola response money to theUS Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency has run more than 12,000diagnostic tests for Ebola, monitored more than 150,000 travellers exiting West Africa,kept a large team of press officers rotating through Sierra Leone, and more. But when Iasked these officers how much money went to each of these services, I didn't getnumbers. Several NGOs directed my budgetary queries to the donors that gave themmoney. Donors linked to websites with incomplete information. The totals don't matchup. Grants for many thousands of dollars are described vaguely as "health," "Ebolasupport," and "Ebola response". Other common phrases, "social mobilisation" and"sensitisation" apply to any activity involving communication, such as Twitter posts,posters of smiling nurses, and billboards painted with slogans like "Kick Ebola out!" and"Getting Ebola to zero!" In a solitary account with detail, the Dutch government lists onesensitisation item: a Stop Ebola Memory card game that cost them €18,421.

After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, an economist at the Centre for Global Development inWashington, DC, Vijaya Ramachandran, attempted to track $6bn (€5bn) in taxpayerdonations to the crisis, and concluded it could not be done. "A question worth asking iswhy we rely on this model of going through expensive NGOs rather than relying ondomestic systems," Ramachandran says. "Corruption is often used as an excuse to notbuild up the local system."

Business suites and 4x4s

What is obvious to anyone in Sierra Leone – before or during the Ebola crisis – is thatmuch of the aid money returns to people from donating countries. Dozens ofinternational NGOs have settled in Sierra Leone since the "blood diamond" civil warended in 2002. Their overhead is relatively high because international staff expect livingwages, internet, health insurance, and flushing toilets. During the outbreak, it was evenhigher because they required expensive security measures, such as private 4x4s, andhotels with ATMs and surveillance cameras. Every standard room in the Radisson Blu,which typically cost $270 (€230) per night, was booked by the US Agency for

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International Development for six months. Business suites went for ($350) €310 a night,while less pricey hotels remained nearly vacant.

The most diplomatic explanation for the flow of aid to Western organisations is thatextremely poor countries like Sierra Leone do not possess the infrastructure toimplement programmes and handle grants with accountability. Yet at a Decemberhearing on funds for the Ebola response, the chair of the British public accountscommittee, Margaret Hodge, noted that skirting the government's system costs quite alot. She cited one Ebola intervention in Liberia in which "only €3.4m out of a €53m EUprogramme reached the frontline. That is less than 7%, and it is shocking".

Emergency responses aren't about finding the cheapest option, I was told, they're aboutspeed. Still, expensive doesn't equal effective. The situation with stand-alone Ebolatreatment centres illustrates that point: just 28 Ebola patients have been treated at 11Ebola centres in Liberia that cost the US hundreds of millions, according to a New YorkTimes investigation.

What's more, stand-alone treatment centres have already begun to pull up the stakes asthe outbreak ends, while the public hospitals stay busted. This model of providingassistance outside of the government's system has been the norm for aid to Sierra Leonefor more than a decade. Even when the aid saves lives, the infrastructure required todeliver services in-house is not built. As a result, the country remains reliant on moreaid. Sierra Leone's health system is one of the world's worst. According to the WHO, theminimum threshold of doctors, nurses and midwives required for access to basic care is22.8 professionals per 10,000 people. The UK's ratio is 123.1. Sierra Leone's is 5.

Salaries are not sexy

In February, mobs of patients lingered at the entrance of Connaught hospital – thebiggest referral hospital in Sierra Leone. Many had tested negative for Ebola at stand-alone Ebola treatment centres run by NGOs, and were sent here for care. I spoke with thehead nurse of the overrun emergency ward in his office, which was in a supply closet.He was missing hazard payments, frustrated with his low salary and depressed with thelack of services for patients. If someone arrived in the throes of an epileptic seizure, hewould have to ask them to go to a pharmacy and buy a needle and catheter, because thehospital didn't have its own.

Health professionals in Sierra Leone often seek out better paying jobs with NGOs, or inother countries if they're able. During the public accounts hearing in the UK, Stephen

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Phillips, a Conservative MP, asked why Sierra Leone's national health system wasanaemic after 15 years of British aid from DFID. "When this outbreak comes along, theBritish taxpayer finds that there are only 120 doctors in the entirety of Sierra Leone," hesaid. "Isn't the magic bullet for DFID and the international community to supplementterms and conditions in a way that encourages medically trained staff to remain in theirhome countries?" Mark Lowcock, DFID's permanent secretary, replied that it had beentried, and failed.

A common dismissal of the idea that donations might go directly to local nurses andother health workers is that underwriting salaries is unsustainable. Another explanationis that it discourages African governments from paying civil society workers themselves.Then there are more jaded hypotheses, such as salaries are not sexy. Do-gooders prefertangible displays of generosity – iPads for data entry, air-conditioned biohazard suits –gifts that look good on camera. Another possibility is that those in charge have littleincentive to change a system of aid attractive to those on the giving end. A SierraLeonean economist told me, on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardisingrelationships with donors: "It's in their interest to make us look bad so they can hold thebudget, the NGO industry is an industry."

Whatever the reason, the fragile health system that initially let Ebola become aninternational disaster is now in even worse shape. While Ebola raged, people sick frompregnancy complications, diabetes, measles, and myriad other maladies stayed awayfrom hospitals for fear of the bloody disease. Now they're returning to find a staffdepleted from health worker deaths, and deflated from the horrors they witnessed.

Infectious disease scientists guarantee this will not be the last outbreak in our lifetimes.To prepare for the next one, Bill Gates, the UN, and the WHO have releasedrecommendations. Their advice includes equipment, isolation units, affordablehealthcare, workshops for nurses, surveillance systems, technological solutions, andpharmaceutical products. But none that I've found mention pay for nurses in fragilehealth systems.

Perhaps with more time, manpower, and pressure to do the job well, the UN, the WorldBank, and Sierra Leone's government might have sorted out e-payments. There werehints of improvement after I left the country. In March and April, the pay team returnedto Kenema to investigate. On 9 April, nurse Elizabeth Kabba called me to say she hadbeen paid in full for February, although she still lacked half of her hazard pay from themonths prior. She suggested I call Faith Sisay, who had just given birth to a "bouncing

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by TaboolaSponsored Links

baby boy". Sisay thanked God for her healthy child, but added that she had received nopayments, and had lost hope in the system. I imagined her sitting in the dark on the backporch, babe to her breast, and a few neighbours around her. "When the next diseasecomes, it will be difficult to get nurses," she said, "How will you do it?"

Support for this story was provided by a travel grant from the Pulitzer Centre on CrisisReporting and investigative funds from Tiny Spark.

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