Day: November 25, 2018

British Lawmakers Warn They Will Vote Against Brexit Deal

It took Britain’s Theresa May and 27 other European Union leaders just 40 minutes to sign the Brexit deal after two years of tortuous negotiations, but the trials and tribulations of Britain’s withdrawal agreement approved Sunday in Brussels are far from over.

As they endorsed the 585-page the agreement, and a 26-page accompanying political declaration that sets out the parameters of negotiating a possible free trade deal between Britain and the European Union, powerful political foes in London plotted strategies to undo it.

There is little evidence Britain’s embattled prime minister will have sufficient support to win legislative endorsement of the deal in a House of Commons vote next month. That was clearly on the minds of European Commission officials Sunday as EU leaders gave their backing to the terms of Britain’s split from Brussels after 44 years of membership.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker warned that Britain cannot expect to get a better deal, if its parliament rejects the agreement. “Now it is time for everybody to take their responsibilities, everybody,” he said.

“This is the deal, it’s the best deal possible and the EU will not change its fundamental position when it comes to this issue, so I do think the British parliament — because this is a wise parliament — will ratify this deal,” he added.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte warned British lawmakers that no better deal was on offer from the European Union, urging them to back the agreements.

“If I would live in the UK I would say yes to this, I would say that this is very much acceptable to the United Kingdom,” Rutte said, because the deal “limited the impact of Brexit while balancing the vote to leave”. In a bid to help the prime minister, he said May had “fought very hard” and now there was “an acceptable deal on the table”.

“You know I hate [Brexit], but it is a given,” he told reporters. “No one is a victor here today, nobody is winning, we are all losing.”

Opposition in Britain

Maybe it is a “given” in Brussels, but in Britain that is another matter altogether.

Both Remainers and Leavers in the British Parliament are warning that May doesn’t have the necessary support with the all the opposition parties lined up against the deal and as many as 100 lawmakers, Remainers and Leavers among them, from May’s ruling Conservatives pledging to vote against it as well.

Iain Duncan Smith, a former Conservative leader, said he would continue to oppose the deal because it “cedes huge amounts of power” to the European Union.

In Scotland, first minister and leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party Nicola Sturgeon said, “This is a bad deal, driven by the PM’s self defeating red lines and continual pandering to the right of her own party. Parliament should reject it and back a better alternative.”

She wants a second Britain-wide referendum, like a majority of Britons, according to recent opinion polls.

The agreement calls for Britain to stay in the bloc’s customs union and largely in the EU single market, without the power to influence the rules, regulations and laws it will be obliged to obey for a 21-month-long transition period following formal withdrawal on March 29. The deal would allow an extension of “up to one or two years” should the negotiations over “the future relationship” not be completed by the end of 2020.

May is campaigning to sell the agreement to the British public, hoping she she can build enough support in the wider country to pressure the House of Commons to endorse the deal. European Parliament approval is almost certain.

May’s warning

In an open letter to the British public published Sunday, May promised to campaign “with my heart and soul to win that vote and to deliver this Brexit deal.” If she is unable to do so, Britain would be plunged into what May herself has called, “deep and grave uncertainty.”

Her aides say she is banking on the “fear factor,” daring the House of Commons to vote down a deal which if rejected would leave Britain most likely crashing out of the bloc, its largest trading partner, without any agreements, which would be costly economically and would almost certainly push the country into recession.

Ominously, the Northern Ireland party, the Democratic Unionist Party, whose 10 lawmakers May’s minority government relies on to remain in power, says it will vote against the deal. And DUP leader Arlene Foster warned Sunday she is ready to collapse the government to block a deal that would see Northern Ireland treated differently than the rest of Britain.

And a senior Labour lawmaker Tony Lloyd said there was a “coalition of the willing” in the Parliament ready to reject May’s deal and support a softer Brexit. So, if the deal is voted down, what then? A vote against could trigger a general election, a second Brexit referendum or even more negotiations, despite Brussels’ threat there can be no other deal.

 

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Palestinian Refugee Uses Art to Enliven Refugee Camp in Lebanon

An elderly Palestinian refugee uses his brushes and a small palette to add lively colorful scenes to the walls of al-Buss, his impoverished camp in southern Lebanon. The country is home to an estimated 170,000 Palestinian refugees, spread among different camps across the country. As VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports, while most camps suffer from poor infrastructure, al-Buss is brightened by his work.

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Many in Rural US Find Fewer Maternity Care Options

For decades, Americans have migrated toward urban areas seeking opportunities, emptying out large swaths of countryside. In their wake, they have left shrinking communities that struggle to support multiple businesses, schools and hospitals.

This is a common theme in the Midwestern state of Iowa, whose population has grown by less than a million people in the past century. As family farms have consolidated into megafarms run by large corporations, rural residents have moved to cities like Des Moines, the state capital, or left the state altogether.

​Shrinking rural America

The northwest region of Iowa has been hit especially hard, forcing those who remain to drive farther and farther for things like groceries, education and health care.

At its peak, the town of Mallard hosted several grocery stores and restaurants, four churches, a cinema and two schools, one of them private. Today, its population of about 265 supports little more than a gas station and a couple of bars. The 100-year-old Catholic Church closed last summer, and the public school will close next year, forcing students to ride on buses to a neighboring town.

Kayla Lanning, a former horse training assistant, takes it all in her stride.

“We’re used to it. It’s not any big deal to us to have to travel a little ways,” she said. In her case, “a little ways” can mean a two-hour drive.

When Lanning learned she would be giving birth to twins, she was told that she could either schedule a cesarean section at her nearest hospital, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) away, or travel to a better-equipped hospital 135 kilometers (85 miles) away. She and her husband, John, chose to make the long drive and avoid the C-section.

Luckily for the Lannings, the drive to the hospital was uneventful, aside from a police officer pulling them over for speeding. The babies were delivered in the hospital, but prematurely; that meant being transferred to yet another hospital, even farther away.

Lanning admits to being a little “irritated” by the distances involved, but accepts it as the part of the trade-off for staying in Mallard.

​Fewer options

But not everyone is able to make it to a hospital with a proper obstetrics unit.

“It’s not uncommon for me to get a call from an ER (emergency room), where they say, ‘We have a patient. She started bleeding, she’s 28 weeks along, and she came in here’” to a hospital with no such unit, said Dr. Neil Mandsager, who specializes in high-risk pregnancies.

Many hospitals don’t even have an ultrasound machine to check the status of a baby, said Mandsager, the medical director of obstetrics at Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines. As a result, he travels about 865 kilometers (540 miles) each month to pay weekly visits to patients in rural health care centers.

The problem isn’t isolated to Iowa, which ranks 36th among the 50 states in terms of population density. According to a University of Minnesota study published earlier this year, “18 million reproductive-age women live in America’s rural counties, but over half of these counties have no hospital” where a woman can give birth.

Bigger gaps

Mandsager said Iowa “does a pretty good job of creating a system that works as best as it can for the pregnant woman, but there’s still definitely some gaps, and these gaps are getting bigger as these small hospitals close.”

Typically, obstetrics services in one to three maternity hospitals or obstetrics units close in Iowa each year, but this year, the number has spiked.

“I can’t remember a year when eight [obstetrics units] closed. That’s a pretty high number,” he said.

Mandsager, along with Stephanie Trusty, a nurse clinician at the Iowa Department of Public Health, attributes the closings to concerns over quality of care, malpractice insurance, profitability and low patient volume. They say it’s also difficult to attract and retain physicians.

“In rural Iowa, delivering babies is not scheduled. If they’re a single practitioner in a rural area, then they’re on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know, that’s hard,” Trusty said.

In addition, there is the worry that so few deliveries can impact a physician’s and nurse’s ability to keep up their skills. Trusty said she looked at the maternity records of the eight hospitals that closed their obstetrics units or shut down altogether this year and found that three of them averaged less than one birth per week.

New mothers surveyed

The Iowa Department of Public Health for years has used a survey given to new mothers as a way to assess concerns. The patient survey collects data on issues such as distance traveled and quality of care received. Trusty said the survey has had an extremely high response rate. Of the 40,000 yearly births in the state, the department receives about 20,000 survey responses.

Surprisingly, she said, those responses haven’t reinforced their fears.

“We asked ‘did they have trouble getting prenatal care,’ and very few were refused care, and most people said it was still easy to get access,” Trusty said. “On how many miles they drove? The data didn’t change for years and years, so we took it off our survey.”

That was five years ago. Because of the large number of maternity ward closings this year, Trusty said they will reintroduce the question about “distance traveled” in next year’s survey.

As for whether couples may be dissuaded from settling in smaller towns because of these longer commutes, Lanning said it didn’t factor into her decision.

“We are so grounded here. John grew up here, and everything we know and do is here. So yeah, that doesn’t affect that,” she said.

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Italian Pasta Company Works to Improve Global Staple

Countries around the world have their own versions of pasta. In Germany there is spaetzle, in Greece there is orzo, throughout Asia there are dishes with noodles, and in Latin America you can find countless variations of spaghetti and other pastas. Voice of America reporter Iacopo Luzi visited the famed company Pasta Mancini in Monte San Pietrangeli, Italy, to see how they make this global staple.

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Washington’s Women’s Museum Opens Exhibit of Award Winning Fashion Brand

Washington’s National Museum of Women in the Arts is the only museum in the world that showcases creations made exclusively by women. But in the three decades since it first opened, the museum has never had exhibitions dedicated to fashion until now. In November, it opened an exhibit dedicated to the famous American fashion house, Rodarte. Karina Bafradzhian has the story.

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