Author Archives: TanyaSalisbury

A week after Hurricane Maria struck, the U.S. Virgin Islands are in shambles.

The recovery effort trudges along after the Category 4 storm destroyed what Irma spared, flattening buildings and tangling power lines. More than 100,000 people live in the U.S. territory, and many of them are now waiting for power, medicine, and fuel.

“It will be a while before this place returns to a semblance of normalcy,” National Guard Chief Joseph Lengyel told Fox News.

Public school buildings are too damaged for students to attend classes, the New York Times reports. The main hospitals will have to be torn down and rebuilt. The power might not be back until December. And authorities have advised residents to boil their water before consumption, fearing contamination.

Making recovery harder is the nearly $2 billion in debt the Virgin Islands is carrying. That’s more per capita than Puerto Rico.

“The economy evaporated pretty much overnight,” one restaurant owner told the Times. Tourism makes up a third of the islands’ gross domestic product. The biggest resorts will stay closed until at least next year, meaning fewer customers for restaurants and bars and fewer jobs.

While attention is focused on the humanitarian crisis affecting millions in Puerto Rico, 40 miles to the west, the Virgin Islands remain mostly out of mind.

Link: 

A week after Hurricane Maria struck, the U.S. Virgin Islands are in shambles.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Cascade, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, Ringer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A week after Hurricane Maria struck, the U.S. Virgin Islands are in shambles.

Europe Agrees to Arm the Kurds

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

What are the odds that Iraqi Kurdistan will ever be able to secede and form its own sovereign state? That depends in large part on whether the United States and other countries support Kurdish independence, which so far they haven’t. Today, however, the EU officially encouraged its members to “respond positively to the call by the Kurdish regional authorities to provide urgently military material.”

Is that a step toward accepting Kurdish independence? Maybe, but only a smidge. The EU statement also said that arms shipments should be done only “with the consent of the Iraqi national authorities.” And the Guardian reports that, “At the same time the EU reiterated its firm commitment to Iraq’s unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

If the new Iraqi government works out, this probably leads nowhere. But if the new government is no more competent or inclusive than Maliki’s, this could end up being a tacit first step toward Kurdish secession. Wait and see.

Follow this link:

Europe Agrees to Arm the Kurds

Posted in Brita, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Europe Agrees to Arm the Kurds