World

The surgeon blames pressure to meet targets and faulty medicine for the deaths

The doctor at the center of a tragedy in which at least a dozen women died following sterilization surgery in Bilaspur, India, was suspended from duties and arrested on Wednesday night.

R.K. Gupta, 59, operated on 83 women in five hours on Saturday, according to the BBC.

“It was not my fault, the administration pressured me to meet targets,” local news outlet NDTV quoted Gupta as saying. The doctor attributed the deaths to the medicines given to the women after the surgery.

In January, the Chhattisgarh state government gave him a commendation for performing a record number of sterilizations.

Meanwhile, another woman lost her life at a different sterilization camp in the same district and 20 others reported postsurgery complications, the Indian Express reports.

Authorities are still investigating the fatalities, which occurred during one of the many mass-sterilization drives organized to combat the country’s rapid population growth. The exact cause of death remains unclear, but so far the quality of medicines administered, as well as the infrastructure of the hospitals where the operations were conducted, has been identified as possible culprits.

“To me it’s not the surgeon’s fault, because if there was a problem with the surgeon’s actions there would have been bleeding and damage to the organs,” says Dr. Ashutosh Halder of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi.

Halder speculates that the complications were most likely caused by inadequate sterilization of the equipment used or an unfavorable hospital environment, although a team of four AIIMS doctors who visited the site told reporters they were “satisfied” with the arrangements there.

Sujatha Natarajan, president of the Family Planning Association of India, says that although precautions are necessary, doctors are not the sole bearers of responsibility. “Quality of service involves much larger stakeholders than that,” Natarajan tells TIME. “Putting all the responsibility on the doctor is putting a very high risk on the program itself,”

India sterilized over 4 million people last year, about 97% of whom were women. People in rural areas are offered financial incentives to undergo sterilization.

Samantha Power says Moscow has “systematically undermined” the peace process in Ukraine

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power blasted Moscow on Wednesday for “fueling war” in southeastern Ukraine’s Donbas region and brazenly subverting a two-month-old truce the Kremlin helped broker.

“Where Russia has made commitments, it has failed to meet them,” she told a U.N. Security Council session in New York City. “Russia has negotiated a peace plan, and then systematically undermined it at every step.”

Power’s strident criticism follows confirmation from NATO’s top military commander earlier on Wednesday that Russian hardware and soldiers were crossing into Ukraine.

“We have seen columns of Russian equipment, primarily Russian tanks, Russian artillery, Russian air defense systems and Russian combat troops entering into Ukraine,” General Philip Breedlove told reporters during a press conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, according to the New York Times.

The general’s assessment is consistent with myriad reports published by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe this week. Monitors reportedly spotted several unmarked but heavily armed columns transporting weapons and troops into rebel-held territory in Ukraine’s conflict-riven southeast throughout the past week.

The scene is eerily reminiscent of the “little green men” invasion of Ukraine in March, when Russian soldiers wearing unmarked uniforms fanned out across the Crimea Peninsula and later forcefully annexed the territory.

However, Moscow continues to deny allegations that Russian forces are being sent to the Donbas, and instead suggested that Kiev was attempting to cover up their own failures to properly govern.

“To justify [Kiev authorities'] misfortunes and the massive sending to the front of people and equipment we are hearing declarations about Russians sending weapons and members of the regular army [to Ukraine],” Alexander Pankin, a Russian envoy to the U.N., told the Security Council, according to RIA Novosti.

TIME Writer-Reporter focusing on Southeast Asia.

The country's future may depend on it

When U.S. President Barack Obama visited Burma, officially known as Myanmar, in November 2012, he found it abuzz with promise. Sanctions had been eased, political prisoners released and Rangoon hotels were teeming with foreign executives eager to harness the nation’s abundant natural resources, cheap workforce and enviable location between regional titans India and China.

So giddy was the postdictatorship atmosphere that Obama planted an agonizingly inappropriate kiss on Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Not that any of the traditionally conservative Burmese minded, however, because the democracy icon was finally free after 15 years of house arrest and relishing life as an elected lawmaker.

But on Wednesday, Obama returned to a very different Burma. Economic liberalization has proved woefully inadequate and human-rights abuses continue unabated. Journalists must once again muzzle their criticism or face persecution. The military continues its assaults on ethnic rebels and, as Suu Kyi said last week, the democratic transition is “stalling.”

“Progress has not come as fast as many had hoped when the transition began four years ago,” Obama told the Irrawaddy magazine before his arrival in Naypyidaw for the East Asia Summit, a meeting of the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations members plus other world powers including China, Russia, India and the U.S. “In some areas there has been a slowdown in reforms, and even some steps backward.”

Visitors to Burma may find this surprising. Rangoon is a cacophony of building work, and the battered death-trap taxis of yore have been replaced by Japanese and South Korean imports. Illicit money changers have been swapped for ATMs. Cellphone SIM cards are no longer restricted or prohibitively expensive, meaning the once ubiquitous phone kiosks, where ordinary Burmese queued up to pay for a few minutes’ use of a fixed-line handset, lie largely idle — an anachronism for tourist snaps.

Yet this progress is a mere facade. “Aung San Suu Kyi may say that reform has stalled, but the reality is that it has regressed,” says Khin Ohmar, coordinator of Burma Partnership, a network of civil-society organizations. Like many longtime democracy activists, she still complains of “surveillance, scrutiny, threats and intimidation.”

Burma is unusual amongst authoritarian states embarking on reform, in that the same figures who ran the previous military dictatorship remain in charge today, and so practically all changes have benefited this coterie. Foreign direct investment, for example, has been confined to the extractive industries that are the purview of tycoons with military connections.

“The changes put in place by the [President] Thein Sein administration are not, for the most part, liberal market reforms, but simply expanded permissions and concessions, often given to the crony firms that dominate parts of the economy,” says Sean Turnell, a professor and expert on Burmese economics at Australia’s Macquarie University. In fact, he adds, “protectionist and antireform sentiment is building.”

Certainly, there is no significant economic legislation pending. Foreign banks have been allowed to set up shop, but can only work with other foreigners, using foreign currency and cannot offer retail services. This means the industry remains plagued by crippling inefficiencies.

Meanwhile, some 70% of Burma’s 53 million population toil in agriculture, where there have likewise not been any meaningful reforms. Poverty, exploitation and land grabs are rife. “The economic circumstances of Myanmar’s majority rural population are now marginally worse than before the reforms were launched,” says Turnell.

The media is once again manacled. The death of noted journalist Aung Kyaw Naing in military custody last month has been the nadir of a year that has also seen 10 reporters jailed. “Obama’s got to see it as another indication of sharply deteriorating press freedoms,” says David Mathieson, senior Burma researcher for Human Rights Watch. In fact, of the 11 reformist pledges Thein Sein made to Obama back during his last visit, says Mathieson, “only about half of them have been met.”

Political reform is also backsliding. Suu Kyi will most likely romp home in next year’s national polls, provided they are as unfettered as the by-election that saw her enter the national legislature amid a landslide for her National League for Democracy party in April 2012. However, she remains constitutionally barred from the nation’s highest office. Negotiations to amend these restrictions — owing to her marriage to a Briton and sons who are foreign nationals — have broken down. Asked what the response would be should Obama try to press the issue, a Burmese government spokesman deemed constitutional reform “an internal affair.”

But it is the plight of the locally despised Rohingya Muslim population that is most pressing (not even the 69-year-old Suu Kyi has the moral fortitude to speak up for them). More than 100,000 of this wretched community fester in squalid displacement camps following attacks by radical Buddhists. They suffer restrictions on movement, marriage and education and thousands are planning to flee during the current “sailing season” on rickety boats to perceived safe havens like Malaysia, as thousands have before them. Many die every day.

However, analysts believe there is a political element to this humanitarian catastrophe. Resentment toward Muslims is a relatively recent phenomenon, with sporadic attacks on Muslim communities punctuating the past three years. Some say the unrest is being inculcated and encouraged in order to give the military continued justification for its wide-ranging powers. Government complicity in recent sectarian clashes has been alleged by the U.N. and Human Rights Watch (though furiously denied by Naypyidaw). And the tactic has been used before: anti-Muslim violence also curiously erupted amid the 1988 pro-democracy rallies.

Discontent is also brewing over myriad issues domestically: garment workers strike over pay and conditions; victims of land grabs are descending on the capital; activists protest Chinese-owned mines; farmers rally against dams that ravage the environment. But sectarian violence, or the threat of it, would be the trump card that would allow the army to suspend reforms. Military spending has already increased in absolute terms during Thein Sein’s time in office. Now there are rumors that army chief Min Aung Hlaing is maneuvering for a run at the presidency. If so, there will be precious little hope for reforming the military, which is the single greatest impediment to tackling Burma’s abysmal human-rights record.

The Rohingya crisis is a gift to Burmese generals hoping to shore up their positions and the military’s, and for that reason the Rohingya lie at the core of the Burma’s economic and political transition. Obama “is dealing with a time bomb,” says Khin Ohmar. “He may face resentment for saying something about the Rohingya, but he has to.”

The latest update from the World Health Organization presents a mixed picture of the fight to contain the worst outbreak of Ebola on record

More than 5,000 people have died from the Ebola virus, marking a macabre waypost that coincides with the disease’s return to Mali and a pickup in its spread in Sierra Leone, according to a status update released Wednesday by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Ebola has killed 5,160 out of 14,098 people infected across eight countries, according to the group’s most recent update, which presents an uncertain stage — dented with disappointments but also peaked with some bright points — in its effort to bring the Ebola outbreak under control.

In one hopeful sign, the rate of Ebola transmission is no longer increasing at a national level in Guinea and Liberia, though some areas of both countries are still seeing an escalation.

Yet Sierra Leone, where 1,169 people have died, continues to weather “steep increases” in the number of cases, says the WHO. Some 421 new cases were reported in the nation in just one week in November alone.

And in Mali, which was thought to be Ebola-free after an infected toddler died there in October, at least one person has recently died from the virus, while two deaths are suspected to have also been from Ebola, according to the update. One of the suspected cases, a grand imam, was buried after a “ritual washing” and a funeral assembly attended by “many mourners,” the WHO says.

Meanwhile, the WHO has received just 49% of the $260 million it deems necessary to handle the Ebola outbreak, according to the group’s latest figures. Though an additional 15% of the total amount has been pledged to the organization, it is still wanting for 36% of the required sum.

Out of 4,611 hospital beds planned for Ebola treatment centers in the three hardest-hit West African nations, just 24% are operational, and only 4% of the some 2,636 beds planned for community care centers have been set up. Just 38% of the 370 or so burial teams the WHO plans to train are good to go.

Still, all districts in the affected countries are within 24-hour access of a laboratory clinic, and some 95% of people the WHO is monitoring for possible exposure are receiving daily communications, the organization says.

Read next: Ebola Treatment Clinical Trials to Start in West Africa

China lives up to its responsibilities on global warming

The U.S. diplomats wandering around the Copenhagen airport in the aftermath of the 2009 U.N. climate summit looked like the walking dead. With reason—those talks, billed as the most important climate negotiations ever, were pure torture for almost everyone involved, just barely saved from total collapse by the last-minute creation of the relatively weak Copenhagen Protocol. And while there was plenty of blame to go around, including for the U.S., much of it was directed at China, which consistently blocked negotiations throughout the summit and almost managed to torpedo the protocol. No wonder the American negotiators looked so exhausted—they’d just spent a fortnight grappling with a country that seemed firmly opposed to doing anything about global warming.

But China, it seems, has changed. The climate deal worked out between Washington and Beijing on Wednesday—you can see the details in this post by Emily Rauhala— won’t come close to saving the planet on its own. No, the deal isn’t binding, but few international agreements really are.

While together China and the U.S. account for 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, this marks the first time that the world’s two biggest carbon emitters sat down and agreed together to limits on future greenhouse gas emissions, however voluntary. And more importantly, it marks what seems to be a very different approach by Beijing on international climate diplomacy—and perhaps on diplomacy more generally.

As Michael Levi at the Council on Foreign Relations notes, the fact that Beijing chose to work together with the U.S.—usually an antagonist on climate and other issues—may be more meaningful than the emission targets themselves:

China has typically gone out of its way to assert its independence in anything climate-related. That approach would usually have led it to announce major goals like these in a clearly unilateral context – even if they were developed in tandem with the United States. Rolling them out together with the United States says that China is increasingly comfortable being seen to act as part of an international effort.

Environmentalists hope that the announcement from Beijing will inject a little momentum into flagging global climate negotiations, which begin shortly in Lima and are meant to culminate with a real global deal in Paris at the end of 2015. Perhaps. But while it might seem as if a problem like global warming can only be solved with a global deal that covers every country, the reality is that just a handful of countries account for nearly all greenhouse gas emissions—China and the U.S. first among them. What they do—alone or in concert—is what will ultimately matter.

There is no shortage of skeptics picking apart the U.S.-China deal—David Stout has a good roundup of them here. Any time governments make promises about action they won’t carry out for more than 15 years—long after today’s leaders are out of office—there’s reason to be skeptical. Climate diplomacy is like dieting: tomorrow is always a lot easier than today.

However, the very fact that China is publicly willing, in concert with the U.S., to dedicate itself to emissions targets that will be challenging is a sign that there is political will in Beijing to move on climate change, as well as political confidence that technological means will be there to do so without cramping the country’s all-important economic growth. It’s a sign, as Fred Kaplan writes in Slate, that China understands that “with great power comes at least some responsibility.”

That fact, more than the specifics of emissions cuts or timeframes, is what really made the China-U.S. climate deal historic.