This report presents the rationale for and design of a city government disaster insurance pool in the Philippines. Insurance pools help governments enhance their financial preparedness for disasters, focusing on the provision of rapid post-disaster financing for early recovery. The Philippine City Disaster Insurance Pool was developed under the guidance of the Department of Finance as part of the 2015 Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Strategy. It utilizes a parametric insurance structure, basing payouts on the occurrence of earthquakes and typhoons according to their physical features, rather than actual losses.

For the last twenty years, Dr Hawa Abdi and her daughters have run a refugee camp on their family farm not far from Mogadishu which has grown to shelter 90,000 displaced Somalis: men, women, and children in urgent need of medical attention. As Islamist militia groups have been battling for control of the country creating one of the most dire human rights crises in the world, Dr. Abdi's camp is a beacon of hope for the Somalis, most of whom have no proper access to health care. She was recently held hostage by a militant groups who threatened her life and told her that because she's a woman she has no right to run the camp. She refused to leave. This is not just the story of a woman doctor in a war torn Islamic country risking her life daily to minister to thousands of desperate people, it's also an inspiring story of a divorced woman and her two daughters, bound together on a mission to rehabilitate a country.

Disasters happen! These are the stories of love and loss, death, and destruction. Many victims died in disasters. These are the stories of how survivors live to strike back. Survivors were trapped, but then set free when they were rescued! Some are man-made disasters, while others are natural disasters. The survivors of disasters include child abuse victims, domestic violence survivors, battered wives, war veterans, orphans, riots survivors, and victims of the terrorist attacks. These survivors live to tell the tale after seeing a natural disaster such as deadly storms.

From award-winning ABC News Chief National Correspondent Matt Gutman, and written using exclusive interviews and information comes the definitive account of the dramatic story that gripped the world: the miracle rescue of twelve boys and their soccer coach trapped in a flooded cave miles underground for nearly three weeks--a pulse-pounding page-turner by a reporter who was there every step of their journey out. After a practice in June 2018, a Thai soccer coach took a dozen of his young players to explore a famous but flood-prone cave. It was one of the boys' birthday, but neither he nor the dozen resurfaced. Worried parents and rescuers flocked to the mouth of a cave that seemed to have swallowed the boys without a trace. Ranging in age from eleven to sixteen, the boys were all members of the Wild Boars soccer team. When water unexpectedly inundated the cave, blocking their escape, they retreated deeper inside, taking shelter in a side cavern. While the world feared them dead, the thirteen young souls survived by licking the condensation off the cave's walls, meditating, and huddling together for warmth. In this thrilling account, ABC News Chief National Correspondent Matt Gutman recounts this amazing story in depth and from every angle, exploring their time in the cave, the failed plans and human mistakes that nearly doomed them, and the daring mission that ultimately saved them. Gutman introduces the elite team of volunteer divers who risked death to execute a plan so risky that its American planners admitted, "for us, success would have meant getting just one boy out alive." He takes you inside the meetings where life and death decisions were grimly made and describes how these heroes pulled off an improbable rescue under immense pressure, with the boys' desperate parents and the entire world watching. One of the largest rescues in history was in doubt until the very last moment. Matt Gutman covered the story intensively, went deep inside the caves himself, and interviewed dozens of rescuers, experts and eye-witnessed around the world. The result is this pulse-pounding page-turner that vividly recreates this extraordinary event in all its intensity--and documents the ingenuity and sacrifice it took to succeed.

At no time during the Great Depression was the contradiction between agriculture surplus and widespread hunger more wrenchingly graphic than in the government's attempt to raise pork prices through the mass slaughter of miliions of "unripe" little pigs. This contradiction was widely perceived as a "paradox." In fact, as Janet Poppendieck makes clear in this newly expanded and updated volume, it was a normal, predictable working of an economic system rendered extreme by the Depression. The notion of paradox, however, captured the imagination of the public and policy makers, and it was to this definition of the problem that surplus commodities distribution programs in the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations were addressed. This book explains in readable narrative how the New Deal food assistance effort, originally conceived as a relief measure for poor people, became a program designed to raise the incomes of commercial farmers. In a broader sense, the book explains how the New Deal years were formative for food assistance in subsequent administrations; it also examines the performance--or lack of performance--of subsequent in-kind relief programs. Beginning with a brief survey of the history of the American farmer before the depression and the impact of the Depression on farmers, the author describes the development of Hoover assistance programs and the events at the end of that administration that shaped the "historical moment" seized by the early New Deal. Poppendieck goes on to analyze the food assistance policies and programs of the Roosevelt years, the particular series of events that culminated in the decision to purchase surplus agriculture products and distribute them to the poor, the institutionalization of this approach, the resutls achieved, and the interest groups formed. The book also looks at the takeover of food assistance by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its gradual adaptation for use as a tool in the maintenance of farm income. Utliizing a wide variety of official and unofficial sources, the author reveals with unusual clarity the evolution from a policy directly responsive to the poor to a policy serving mainly democratic needs.