Education And Training

GAZA (Reuters) – Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails agreed on Monday to an Egyptian-brokered deal aimed at ending a mass hunger strike that challenged Israel’s policy of detention without trial and raised fears of a bloody Palestinian backlash if any protesters died.

Most of some 1,600 prisoners, a third of the 4,800 Palestinians in Israeli jails, began refusing food on April 17 although a few had been fasting much longer – up to 77 days.

Their protest centered on demands for more family visits, an end to solitary confinement and an end to so-called “administrative detention”, a practice that has drawn international criticism on human rights grounds.

Palestinian officials said Egypt had drafted an agreement in Cairo with representatives of the Palestinian prisoners, and that inmates met during the day and had agreed to the terms.

There was no immediate word from the prisoners as to whether any had actually ended their strike.

An Egyptian official involved in the talks said that under Monday’s deal to end the strike, Israel had agreed to end solitary confinement for 19 prisoners and lifted a ban on visits to prisoners by relatives living in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Israel also agreed to improve other conditions of detention, and to free so-called administrative detainees once they complete their terms unless they are brought to court, the Egyptian official said.

Gaza’s Hamas leaders hailed the strike as a successful campaign against Israel and celebrations quickly spread to the streets where motorists honked horns, and passersby embraced and shouted “Allahu Akbar,” the Arabic for “God is great.”

“This is a first step toward liberation and victory,” said Fawzi Barhoum, a spokesman for the Islamist group.

Israel saw the deal as a goodwill gesture to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who holds sway in the West Bank, a territory separate from Islamist-ruled Gaza. The territories, where Palestinians want a state, were captured by Israel in a 1967 war.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Israel had “negotiated an end to the strike” in answer to a request from Abbas.

“It is our hope that this gesture by Israel will serve to build confidence between the parties and to further peace,” Regev said.

The hunger strikers included militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which reject peace with Israel, as well as members of Abbas’s Fatah group.

PLEDGES TO EASE CONDITIONS

Israel’s Prisons Authority, confirming the deal to end the prisoners’ action, said “an agreement has been signed to bring about the end of a 28-day hunger strike by Palestinian security prisoners.”

Prisoners who sign a commitment “not to engage in actions contravening security inside the jails” would have prison conditions eased.

In a statement, the Israeli authority said that improvements for such prisoners would include a lifting of solitary confinement and a possibility of relatives visiting from Gaza.

Relatives’ visits from Gaza were suspended after Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Palestinian militants and taken to Gaza in 2006. He was released last October in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

Israel did not say whether it would free any administrative detainees, but pledged in its statement that an inter ministerial team would look at prisoner requests and issue recommendations.

Around 320 of Palestinian prisoners are held in “administrative detention”, a security measure Israel defends as a precaution to protect undercover sources.

Many of the other prisoners have been convicted of serious crimes, including murder. Palestinian leaders say they should be treated as prisoners of war, something Israel rejects.

Israel says the detentions without trial are necessary because some cases cannot be brought to open court for fear of exposing Palestinian intelligence sources who have cooperated with Israel.

Palestinians jailed by Israel are held in high esteem by their compatriots, who see them as heroes in what they term a struggle against occupation.

Two inmates who helped to launch the strike, Bilal Diab and Thaer Halahla of Islamic Jihad, were in the 77th day of their fast on Monday.

Last week, Israel’s Supreme Court turned down their request to be freed from detention without trial but said security authorities should consider releasing them for medical reasons.

A month ago, Israel released hunger striker Khader Adnan, an Islamic Jihad member, amid concern he would die. He agreed to end his fast after 66 days in exchange for a promise not to renew his detention.

(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta and Jihan Abdallah in Ramallah and Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem; Editing by Rosalind Russell)

Editor’s note: Atul Gawande spoke at the TED2012 conference in Long Beach, California. TED is a nonprofit organization dedicated to “Ideas worth spreading” which it makes available through talks posted on its website

In those days, doctors who mastered the few techniques that could make a difference, such as setting fractures and treating certain kinds of heart conditions, were seemingly all-powerful, Gawande told the TED2012 conference in March. “A doctor could kind of know it all and do it all,” he said in an interview with CNN following his talk.

Doctors were rewarded for being cowboys, for being daring and self sufficient.

Today, the world of medicine promises and provides much more — cures and care for many of the worst health problems people have.

But doctors can no longer know everything and do everything. As medical knowledge has exploded, doctors increasingly must specialize in a field to absorb all the relevant information to treat a certain kind of illness. And a patient who goes to a hospital often winds up being treated and cared for by as many as 15 doctors, nurses and therapists, Gawande said.

The result? “Well, it’s been a disaster,” he said. “We have 40 percent of coronary artery disease patients who receive incomplete or inappropriate care, we have 2 million people pick up infections in hospitals because one of those people on that team failed to follow basic hygiene practices.”

Watch Atul Gawande’s TED Talk

“Holding on to our streak of autonomy, each of us, we end up losing the patient in between,” he said. Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, also is a researcher at Harvard University and a writer at The New Yorker.

Today doctors are still often rewarded and trained as cowboys, but Gawande says what we really need are doctors who can function as members of a team, the way those in an auto racing pit crew work together to get vehicles back in the race.

Ted.com: Trial, error and the God complex

Gawande has been a pioneer in advocating the use of checklists by medical teams working together in surgery or on other procedures.

“We’ve had checklists in medicine for people we considered the lowest on the totem pole, but the idea that the surgeon would have to follow a checklist is anathema,” Gawande said. But in fact, he added, “when checklists have been used to make sure even the best, most specialized doctors don’t miss key steps in providing care … we’re finding that carefully designed checklists cut death rates in half in surgeries, that they can eliminate certain kinds of infections and that they can slash costs.”

Gawande has found reason to question the assumption that the most expensive care must be the best care. “What we’re discovering is that the best care, the places getting the best results, are often among the least expensive,” he said. In those places, doctors and nurses providing care function like teams.

“We are going through a dramatic change where it’s no longer about what your doctor knows, it’s about what a team of doctors, nurses and others are able to do together.”

TED.com: Doctors make mistakes — can we talk about that?

These days Gawande brings a checklist with him into the operating room. At first, it was a bit of a shock for him.

“I did it reluctantly. I have been someone who believes, you know, do I need a checklist? No … but i didn’t want to be a hypocrite. I was bringing them to Tanzania and Seattle, so I started using a checklist myself. So that meant before the patient went to sleep we would do a series of checks — not just, ‘Do we have the right person and the right side of the body?’ But also, ‘Do we have a plan for what happens if this is a high-blood-loss case?’

“Before the incision, we’d introduce ourselves by name because it would turn out often that you would have a team of people working together for the first time who may not know each other very well.

“We discuss the plan in detail, and in doing these things I found from the very beginning that we were catching problems that we were missing otherwise. The anesthesiologist or the nurse was noticing things that I had missed.

“I have not gotten through a week of surgery in three years using this kind of checklist without it catching something that was a danger for the patient or would have made the care better.”

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Story By: by Patti Neighmond

I could use some shushing and swaddling right about now.

Pediatrician Harvey Karp with Anne Vanderpool and her son, 4-week-old Henry Wick.

Harrington wanted to find a way to ease the pain and stress of a shot. So he studied 230 infants, who were two months old and four months old. He divided them into four groups. Two groups got water before a vaccination, while the other two got a sugar solution, a sort of liquid lollipop known to distract infants from pain. After the shot, half the babies got typical comfort care from their parents. The others received the “5 S’s”.

That’s a method that Harvey Karp, a Los Angeles-based pediatrician, developed about a decade ago to calm a screeching infant. The technique involves swaddling the baby, putting the baby on her stomach, gently swinging her, shushing into her ear, and offering a pacifier to suck on.

The babies who received the “5 S’s” physical intervention stopped crying much sooner than the infants who received comfort care from their parents. And their pain scores, as measured by flailing arms and facial grimaces, were also significantly less, says Harrington. The “5 S’s” group did much better than the comfort care group, whether they got sugar water or not.

The results were published in the journal Pediatrics.

A parent demonstrates the “5 S’s” soothing technique.

Karp says the method works because it simulates the security of the womb. “In the womb, there’s a symphony of sensations, constant jiggling, constant whooshing, which is the sound of the blood flow through the arteries, and constant touching against the velvet walls of the womb.”

Story By: Weekend Edition Saturday

As the debate over the political calculations behind President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage continue, Host Scott Simon checks in with acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Armistead Maupin to talk about this as a cultural moment.

Albania is a small, mountainous country in the Balkan peninsula, with a long Adriatic and Ionian coastline.

Unemployment remains stubbornly high, and the infrastructure and corruption continue to deter much foreign investment. Agriculture, an important sector, still suffers from underfunding.

Albania made a formal application for membership of the European Union in 2009, on the basis of a 2006 Stabilisation and Association agreement.

The EU is keen to encourage further reform, particularly as regards stamping out organised crime and corruption and developing media freedom and property and minority rights.

There were violent protests in Tirana in early 2011 against alleged kickbacks in a power station deal and vote-rigging in the 2009 parliamentary election. Four demonstrators were killed in clashes with police.

Abu Dhabi The committee to follow up the implementation of the orders of President His Highness Shaikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan has approved the names of 80 citizens eligible for housing in the emirates of Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah.

The move comes as per directives from Shaikh Khalifa to ensure a decent life and suitable housing for all citizens, and the close follow-up by General Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, to construct houses for citizens with the modern global standards aimed at providing privacy for Emirati families as well as fulfilling their needs.

The committee meeting, chaired by Ahmad Juma Al Za’abi, Deputy Minister for Presidential Affairs and Chairman of the committee, also approved the new standards for building villas to satisfy the future needs of the family.

The committee discussed other related issues in this concern.

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Abu Dhabi: The Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation (FANR) will host its first public forum on May 14, 2012 at the Cultural Centre of Zayed City in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi.

The aim of the forum is to demonstrate FANR’s transparent communication with the public and introduce the role it plays in ensuring safety, security, and safeguards in the UAE’s peaceful nuclear power programme and in the use of radioactive materials. FANR invites the public to come and talk to members of its team.

FANR’s Director General, Dr William D. Travers, said: "FANR is working in accordance with international best practices to ensure the implementation of the highest levels of safety, security and safeguards in the UAE’s nuclear sector. In carrying out its responsibilities, FANR puts public communication as a priority and constantly strives to keep its communication channels open."

"Through this open forum, we will introduce FANR’s role and respond to the public’s questions on FANR’s responsibilities," he said.

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Dubai After issuing guidelines to school canteens regarding the types of food that should be made available to pupils, the Dubai Municipality has now come out with a ‘school lunch kit’ poster, which gives details on recommended food for school goers.

The school lunch kit poster that has been prepared in collaboration with the Dubai Health Authority (DHA) recommends that the school lunch should contain fruits, vegetables, milk, proteins and grains.

It advises that the food given to children be low in fat, breads be made of wholegrains and that green vegetables and fruits are included.

The civic body has instructed school canteens not to sell unhealthy food items which include soft drinks, chewing gum and high fat food.

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