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editor's note
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On a summer day in 1985, I remember watching Tina Turner and Mick Jagger perform an incendiary duet on live TV: "It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (but I Like It)."
I was in awe of the music but equally impressed by the reason for the concert -- images of famine in Ethiopia had prompted music stars to sing out in the 16-hour Live Aid concert. More than a billion people watched in person and on TV; over $100 million was raised for famine relief in Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian famine also inspired the creation of a U.S. program called FEWS NET -- the Famine Early Warning System Network. Since 1985, its data nerds have analyzed climate, conflict and other conditions that could bring severe hunger. It makes sense from a humanitarian perspective to stop a famine before it starts, but the idea was also that preventing hunger is far less challenging and far cheaper.
The world has changed a lot since then. Fundraising concerts like Live Aid have fallen off -- "We're in a radically different world now," says rock performer Bob Geldof, the man behind Live Aid. As for FEWS NET, it had to halt operations earlier this year due to President Trump's stop-work orders. Now it's back online -- although some famine specialists are raising questions. Will information be gathered with the same rigor? And how will the world act upon it?
The company that makes Plumpy'Nut is 'just over the moon!'
The therapeutic food is designed to bring malnourished kids back from the brink. A new order from the U.S. after months of mixed signals is good news for the Rhode Island factory that makes it.
NPR's Fresh Air interviews novelist Thomas Mallon, who looks back on the early years of the AIDS epidemic in his new book The Very Heart of it: New York Diaries, 1983-1994.
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