United States

Image:  It is the sad legacy of our response to 9/11 that bin Ladenism has spread far beyond Osama bin Laden’s wildest dreams. Illustration: Steve Haske for Guardian US Opinion

theguardian.com - September 11th, 2014 - Ali Soufan

In the years leading up to the attacks of 11 September 2001, the west saw al-Qaida rising but didn’t address the threat in time. My colleagues and I in the FBI and over at the CIA had been focused on al-Qaida since the mid-1990s. The true threat, however, came from the ideology, not the group.

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Image: A woman in Monrovia, Liberia, passed a man believed to be infected with Ebola. Researchers say it could take 12 to 18 months to bring the epidemic under control. Credit Abbas Dulleh/Associated Press

nytimes.com - September 12th, 2014 - Denise Grady

The deadly Ebola outbreak sweeping across three countries in West Africa is likely to last 12 to 18 months more, much longer than anticipated, and could infect hundreds of thousands of people before it is brought under control, say scientists mapping its spread for the federal government.

“We hope we’re wrong,” said Bryan Lewis, an epidemiologist at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech.

Sep 13 2014 - 6:10am by Charles Omedo - thewestsidestory.net

Come next week, the United States president, Barack Obama will get personal briefing on the Ebola virus situation in West Africa from medical experts working on the epidemic, and he will also use the opportunity to lay out his government’s response plan for combating the deadly epidemic.

Four American doctors and nurses have contracted the fatal disease but were lucky to have survived after being flown back to the US for treatments with experimental drugs and blood serums. The disease has however killed over 2,550 victims according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and over 4,300 currently infected with the epidemic in West Africa.

http://thewestsidestory.net/2014/09/13/16496/president-barack-obama-discuss-us-response-ebola-epidemic/

In writing about the importance of promoting private enterprise, as well as in many other sections of my work, I suggested an almost near certainty that the risk management industry eventually will facilitate resilience and structural adaptivity in our built environment.  In my larger draft, I included a short section about this, which I am posting below (somewhat revised).  I believe it is beneficial to share this section now in order to explain my optimism for resilience. (I also wrote short sections on Time, Rapid Change, Optimism, A Futurist Perspective, and The Human Factor but do not necessarily intend to post them here.)

The future will be all about risk and trying to find protection from the rapidly increasing threats to our world as we advance in population size, social/cultural/economic complexity, and cutting-edge science and technology.  Risk underwriting will play a big role in how well or how poorly we adapt to accelerating change.