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West Africa is a poor region, struggling to improve its economic growth.

It had been succeeding. Last year, Sierra Leone and Liberia ranked second and sixth among countries with the highest growth in gross domestic product in the world.

But this year, growth has stopped because of the spread of the deadly Ebola virus. On Wednesday, the World Bank released a report saying the epidemic's economic cost could reach $32.6 billion by the end of 2015 if the outbreak spreads.

In such poor countries — the combined 2013 gross domestic product of the two nations and similarly hard-hit Guinea was about $15 billion — that's an astounding amount of money.

The grim scenario is based on economists' estimates of costs, and it assumes that containment efforts will move slowly, allowing the disease to spread from the hardest-hit three nations into neighboring countries, including Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Senegal. World Bank officials are hoping that "slow" scenario won't come true.

"With Ebola's potential to inflict massive economic costs on Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and on the rest of their neighbors in West Africa, the international community must find ways to get past logistical roadblocks and bring in more doctors and trained medical staff, more hospital beds and more health and development support to help stop Ebola in its tracks," World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said in a statement.

The World Bank study says that no matter what happens in coming months, Ebola already is having a huge economic impact. Right now, it is killing workers and causing "higher fiscal deficits; rising prices; lower real household incomes and greater poverty."

Over time, the disease will have indirect consequences as people change their behaviors, according to the report. When countries get hit with widespread fear of contagion, people become afraid to meet or even show up for work. That, in turn, "closes places of employment, disrupts transportation, motivates some governments to close land borders ... and motivates private decision-makers to disrupt trade, travel and commerce by canceling scheduled commercial flights and reduction in shipping and cargo service."

This week, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are trying to call attention to the huge costs of Ebola. The organizations are holding their annual fall meetings in Washington. On Thursday morning, a news conference will feature the presidents of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone as well as the heads of the CDC, the World Bank, IMF, the United Nations.

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Broad channels of short-term economic impact from the Ebola epidemic, as laid out in the World Bank report. For a larger version, click here. Courtesy of the World Bank hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of the World Bank

Broad channels of short-term economic impact from the Ebola epidemic, as laid out in the World Bank report. For a larger version, click here.

Courtesy of the World Bank

Estimates of Ebola's potential economic damage come on top of Tuesday's release of the World Bank and IMF's assessment of annual global growth. The report noted that factors such as disease, debt, war and terrorist attacks are slowing global economic expansion. The forecast for this year's average global growth slid to 3.3 percent, down 0.4 percentage point from April.

Guinea

Sierra Leone

ebola

World Bank

Liberia

The United States has been a major military player in the Middle East for decades. Whether that is in the best interests of the U.S. and the world has been a source of controversy for just as long.

The focus of this debate is the U.S. bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But that's just part of a broader discussion in a region that also includes other troubled nations where the U.S. has been involved, such as Libya, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In a recent Intelligence Squared U.S. debate, two teams of foreign policy experts faced off on the motion "Flexing American Muscles In The Middle East Will Make Things Worse." In these Oxford-style debates, the team that sways the most people to its side by the end is the winner.

Before the debate, the audience at the Kaufman Music Center in New York voted 26 percent in favor of the motion and 31 percent against, with 43 percent undecided. After the debate, those who agreed and disagreed with the motion were tied, at 45 percent each. That made the team arguing in favor of the motion the winner of the debate.

Those debating:

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Paul Pillar (right), a former national intelligence officer, with teammate Aaron David Miller, argues that the U.S. should have a smaller military footprint in the Middle East. Samuel LaHoz/Intelligence Squared U.S. hide caption

itoggle caption Samuel LaHoz/Intelligence Squared U.S.

Paul Pillar (right), a former national intelligence officer, with teammate Aaron David Miller, argues that the U.S. should have a smaller military footprint in the Middle East.

Samuel LaHoz/Intelligence Squared U.S.

FOR THE MOTION

Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Between 2006 and 2008, he was a public policy scholar when he wrote his fourth book, The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace. For the prior two decades, he served at the Department of State as an adviser to Republican and Democratic secretaries of state, helping to formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, and most recently as the senior adviser for Arab-Israeli negotiations. He also served as the deputy special Middle East coordinator for Arab-Israeli negotiations, a senior member of the State Department's policy planning staff, in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and in the Office of the Historian.

Paul Pillar is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, with senior positions that included national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, deputy chief of the DCI Counterterrorist Center and executive assistant to the director of central intelligence. He is a Vietnam War veteran and a retired officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. His books include Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process (1983), Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy (2001) and Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (2011). He blogs at nationalinterest.org.

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AGAINST THE MOTION

Michael Doran is a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in Middle East security issues. He served as senior adviser to the undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the State Department and, prior to that, held an appointment at the Pentagon as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for support to public diplomacy and at the National Security Council as the senior director for the Near East and North Africa. At the White House, Doran helped devise and coordinate national strategies on a variety of Middle East issues, including Arab-Israeli relations and the containment of Iran. He has held several academic positions, teaching in the history department at the University of Central Florida, the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service.

Bret Stephens is deputy editor of the editorial page at the Wall Street Journal, responsible for the opinion sections of the Journal's sister editions in Europe and Asia. He also writes the Journal's foreign affairs column, Global View, for which he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Previously, Stephens was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, a position he assumed in 2002 at age 28. His first book, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, will be published in November.

Updated at 11:50 a.m. ET

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen who was attacked by Taliban militants for promoting education for girls, will share the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian campaigner against exploitation of children.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee says on Nobelprize.org:

"Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi's tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain. He has also contributed to the development of important international conventions on children's rights.

"Despite her youth, Malala Yousafzai has already fought for several years for the right of girls to education, and has shown by example that children and young people, too, can contribute to improving their own situations. This she has done under the most dangerous circumstances. Through her heroic struggle she has become a leading spokesperson for girls' rights to education."

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Kailash Satyarthi (in white) greets U.N. officials at a meeting in Geneva in 1998. Donald Stampfli/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Donald Stampfli/AP

Kailash Satyarthi (in white) greets U.N. officials at a meeting in Geneva in 1998.

Donald Stampfli/AP

Yousafzai, 17, defied the Taliban in her town of Mingora in Swat Valley, near the volatile western frontier dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan. In October 2012, Taliban militiamen boarded a school bus she was on, singled her out and shot her in the left side of the head. Two other girls were also wounded in the attack.

Left in critical condition, Yousafzai received an outpouring of international support and was moved to the U.K. for treatment.

"Malala battled for her life, and came back to become an international ambassador for the rights of girls to be educated," NPR's Julie McCarthy says.

In July 2013, Yousafzai addressed the United Nations, telling delegates that the Taliban "thought that bullets would silence us, but they failed.

"The terrorists thought that they would change my aims and stop my ambitions," she said defiantly, "but nothing changed in my life, except this: Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born."

She is a previous recipient of the Sakharov Prize and was first nominated for the Peace Prize last year. She now lives in Birmingham, England, but the Taliban have threatened to target her again.

Yousafzai is the youngest-ever Nobel laureate.

Speaking in Birmingham hours after the award was announced, Yousafzai said she was in chemistry class when her teacher informed her she'd won.

"I decided not to leave school," the education campaigner said. "I treated it like a normal day."

She called the Peace Prize a "precious award" and "a great honor" and said her co-recipient, Satyarthi, "totally deserved" the prize.

"This is not the end. This is really the beginning. I want to see every child going to school," she said.

Satyarthi, 60, is a longtime activist against child labor and for better education of children in South Asia. In his 20s, he gave up a career as an electrical engineer and "dedicated his life to helping the millions of children in India who are forced into slavery by powerful and corrupt business- and landowners," PBS writes.

"His original idea was daring and dangerous. He decided to mount raids on factories — factories frequently manned by armed guards — where children and often entire families were held captive as bonded workers.

"After successfully freeing and rehabilitating thousands of children, he went on to build up a global movement against child labor. Today Kailash heads up the Global March Against Child Labor, a conglomeration of 2000 social-purpose organizations and trade unions in 140 countries."

The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights calls Satyarthi "India's lodestar for the abolition of child labor."

"Since 1980, he has led the rescue of over 75,000 bonded and child slaves in India and developed a successful model for their education and rehabilitation. Kailash has emancipated thousands of children from bonded labor, a form of slavery where a desperate family typically borrows needed funds from a lender (sums as little as $35) and is forced to hand over a child as surety until the funds can be repaid," the RFK Center says.

Speaking to NPR in 2011, Satyarthi decried the rise of female feticide — or so-called selective abortions — in India, explaining: "The parents feel that the boy is a help for the future, where the girl is a liability.

"If we spend money on her, then we have to spend money on her marriage, dowry probably, and then if something goes wrong, then we are always sufferers. So better that that girl is not born," he said, explaining the reasoning of some parents in India.

Pakistan

Nobel Peace Prize

India

Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictionary once dismissed porridge as "a food usually reserved for horses in England, in Scotland supports the people."

That was in the 1700s. These days, porridge is seen as more cool than gruel. Today is World Porridge Day — and to celebrate, London hosted its own porridge-making competition.

"Most people think of porridge as a winter dish, and a richer, heavier dish. But I do think it's coming back in vogue. In the last 10 years, it's risen in profile," says Toral Shah, a competitor at Friday morning's event.

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Judges taste test an entry in Friday's London Porridge Championships. Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship hide caption

itoggle caption Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

Judges taste test an entry in Friday's London Porridge Championships.

Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

Porridge is traditionally Scottish, with its heritage in the oaty diets of crofters, or tenant farmers, of the remote Highlands. I'm a Scotsman, and porridge formed an integral part of my childhood. Winter would mean one thing for certain: a steaming hot bowl of the stuff every morning, before trudging through the snow to school.

Porridge is such a subjective thing. Mine was made with milk, occasionally dried fruit, and either brown sugar or golden syrup drizzled in the shape of a smiley face. Just as long as you remember to stir clockwise — stirring counter-clockwise risks summoning the devil, according to Scottish superstition.

Nick Barnard is a porridge traditionalist, and a judge in Friday's London Porridge Championships. "I have a bowl of oatmeal, flavored with salt and cooked just right — piping hot," Barnard says, explaining his technique. "I dip my spoon into the porridge, then into cold, raw Guernsey cream. ... And there I am, absolutely loving this wonderful simplicity."

Barnard runs London-based Rude Health foods, which sponsored Friday's competition. He was crowned last year's champion in the "speciality" category — he made a fruity date dish — at the World Porridge Making Championships, held annually in Carrbridge in the Highlands of Scotland.

The 21st world championship was held last weekend. Entrants competed in two categories: traditional and speciality. The winner in the former category takes home the "Golden Spurtle," a Scottish kitchen tool for stirring porridge, thought to have originated six centuries ago. Made of wood, it looks like a tiny baseball bat. This year's traditional winner, Dr. Izhar Khan, a kidney specialist from Aberdeen, Scotland, told NPR he credited his victory to the spurtle he used, made by one of his patients.

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Personal fitness trainer Adam Stansbury won Friday's London competition with this chocolate and honey porridge. Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship hide caption

itoggle caption Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

Personal fitness trainer Adam Stansbury won Friday's London competition with this chocolate and honey porridge.

Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

As for the prize for the speciality dish, it was awarded jointly to Chris Young and Christine Conte. Chris had turned savoury, putting together a wild mushroom porridge risotto, while Christina — a Scottish-Italian food blogger based in Los Angeles — made a sticky toffee porridge.

The winner of today's London event — personal fitness trainer Adam Stansbury — wowed the judges with his chocolate and honey porridge.

Fellow competitor Toral Shah is another health-food fanatic; she runs London's Urban Kitchen. The porridge competition, she says, "is a fun thing to do, it's slightly competitive, and I really want to show people that you can make things taste brilliant, but they can be really healthy, too."

Indeed, porridge's widely acclaimed nutritional benefits — slow-releasing carbohydrates, energy-rich and easy to digest — are credited in part for its resurgent popularity in recent years.

Some even credit porridge with changing the course of Scottish history. In his book The Scottish: A Genetic Journey, author Alistair Moffat argues that soon after the Scots began farming cereals thousands of years ago, they learned how to turn that harvest into porridge — a discovery that fueled the nation's population growth. His argument? Feeding children porridge — a meal soft enough not to tax fragile baby teeth — meant that women could stop breastfeeding sooner, freeing them up to have more children.

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A simple take on Scotland's beloved dish. Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship hide caption

itoggle caption Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

A simple take on Scotland's beloved dish.

Dai Williams/Courtesy of the National Porridge Championship

Modern Britons clearly haven't forgotten their roots. According to research firm Mintel, almost half of 16- to 24-year-olds in the U.K. surveyed last year said they start the day with porridge. And fast-casual food chain Pret A Manger's sales of hot cereals doubled in the U.K. in 2013.

But the porridge love has spread well beyond the U.K. Kahn's competitors in last week's championships included the owner of a porridge bar in Copenhagen, as well as Sweden's Nordic porridge-making champion.

So what does Barnard look for in a great serving of porridge? The first word he uses is "moreish" — how nourishingly delicious is it? He wants imagination, and something that's pleasing. The quality of the ingredients is also important for him. "Could I eat a whole bowl of it, and will it sustain me?"

For Toral, it's the experimental possibilities that make porridge so exciting. Take her beetroot and apple version, with hints of ginger, cinnamon, vanilla yogurt and spiced granola. "And it's apple season," she adds. "Why would you not go seasonal?"

So, tell us, how do you eat yours?

Scottish food

porridge