Aug 10, 2013 4 min read

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad as compiled by the Associated Press:

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has murdered United Nations health workers attempting to administer the polio vaccine in rural villagers and has convinced villagers that the vaccine is a Western plot to infect Afghan children. While U.S. health workers aren’t being gunned down, misguided, backward thinking also has prevented American families from taking full advantage of a vaccine that could prevent thousands of cases of cervical cancer each year.

Researchers believe that the Gardasil vaccine to block infection by the human papillomavirus could prevent up to 70 percent of all cervical cancers and 90 percent of genital warts. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that immunization rates across the nation have stalled over the last year.

HPVs are the most common cause of sexually transmitted infections. More than half of people who are sexually active become infected with one of the more than 40 types of HPV that are known to spread during vaginal, oral or anal sex, according to the National Cancer Institute.

But the vaccine can practically eliminate that risk, especially if it is administered to teens before they become sexually active so their bodies can develop immunity.

We shouldn’t let superstition or ignorance deter us from ensuring that as many as possible receive this lifesaving vaccine.

A new round of Middle East peace talks begin this week with hope for success in short supply. And no wonder. The modern state of Israel is nearing age 70, and in all that time there has been no settlement of the vexing question of how Israel and a Palestinian neighbor state can coexist in peace.

Nor has there even been an agreement on how to create that Palestinian state and what the capitals of it and Israel should be. Both want Jerusalem.

Yet Secretary of State John F. Kerry deserves praise for ending a five-year freeze in talks even if almost no one imagines a final settlement can be reached in the nine months he has set as the goal. Israeli and Palestinian leaders also deserve praise for finding the courage to renew peace talks when so few hold out hope for success.

Israelis and Palestinians need to work hard now to create a two-state solution so all people in the region can live out their dreams in peace and in a relationship built on mutual respect. Continued tension in the Middle East because of the stateless Palestinians gives extremists around the world a rallying cry. A successful resolution to the conflict would be a gift to the world.

As if there were already not enough going on around the Mediterranean, Gibraltar has raised its head again. The latest round of cross-border tension appears to have started in a row last year over fishing rights, when Spanish fishermen were expelled from Gibraltar’s waters for using large nets.

The issue of fishing rights reverts, as everything seems to in this dispute, to the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. Spain does not recognize the existence of waters under Gibraltarian control, as it says those rights were not handed over when the colony was. There have been attempts to mediate the issue. Much of this pragmatism now appears to be in jeopardy.

Drivers have been forced to wait seven hours in the heat as Spain ramped up border checks. Claiming “the party is over”, Jose García-Margallo, Spain’s minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, suggested in a newspaper interview that Spain was mulling imposing a fee on every vehicle entering or leaving the territory, closing its airspace to flights to Gibraltar and changing the laws so that online gambling companies operating from the colony would have to use Spanish servers. Gibraltar’s first minister, Fabian Picardo, accused Spain of acting like North Korea.

If other sovereignty disputes are anything to go by, little is to be gained by the reversion to the old politics of the dispute that the hawkish Spanish minister is suggesting.