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West Africa is about to receive a hefty infusion of cash. This Friday the World Bank unveiled a major aid package for the three West African countries at the center of this past year's Ebola epidemic.

Over the next 18 months, the bank plans to provide Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea $650 million in recovery assistance, mostly in the form of grants. The African Development Bank followed suit Friday with a pledge of about $300 million in similar funding.

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Sierra Leone health officials check people passing through the border with Liberia in Jendema last month. For the last two weeks, Sierra Leone has recorded only nine cases. Zoom Dosso/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Zoom Dosso/AFP/Getty Images

Sierra Leone health officials check people passing through the border with Liberia in Jendema last month. For the last two weeks, Sierra Leone has recorded only nine cases.

Zoom Dosso/AFP/Getty Images

Combined with additional new promises by other international organizations and governments, the three affected countries will be getting more than $1 billion. Those additions boost the total international commitment to Ebola recovery since the outbreak began by about a third, the advocacy group One Campaign reports.

The aid comes amid recent steady declines in the number of new cases in the region. Weekly tallies are now down to fewer than 40 cases — their lowest level since last May, when the outbreak was just beginning to gather steam.

Still, the economic and social repercussions of the epidemic continue to reverberate.

In Sierra Leone, the Ebola crisis coincided with a plunge in the price of one of the country's major exports, iron ore. The economy there could end up contracting by more than 20 percent in 2015, the World Bank estimates.

Guinea's economy is stagnating. Liberia is projected to see growth rates of about 3 percent, but that's still well below the pre-Ebola estimates of 6.8 percent.

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Back in July, the streets of Kailahun, Sierra Leone, were empty because of the Ebola crisis. Local shops and restaurants suffered from the lack of business. Tommy Trenchard for NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Tommy Trenchard for NPR

Back in July, the streets of Kailahun, Sierra Leone, were empty because of the Ebola crisis. Local shops and restaurants suffered from the lack of business.

Tommy Trenchard for NPR

At the same time, all three countries are plagued with poor infrastructure and fragile health systems — which are still reeling from the loss of dozens of health workers to Ebola.

Meanwhile, the effort to bring cases down to zero continues to grind forward. Liberia has not had a single new case since late March. Sierra Leone is in sight of that goal as well, said the World Health Organization's Bruce Aylward at a news conference Thursday. He noted that for the last two weeks there have been only nine new cases confirmed there.

"They [Sierra Leone] are down to numbers where they can drive this to zero," Aylward said.

Another hopeful sign is that a large share of new infections — nearly 70 percent — are occurring in people whom health officials had already been tracking because they were known to have been in contact with an Ebola patient. That's important because it suggests health officials are doing a good job of identifying potential transmission chains.

But Aylward also warned that the campaign to end Ebola in Guinea is proving more "bumpy" than it is in Liberia and Sierra Leone. And he's worried that the progress across West Africa has created a false impression that the battle to stop Ebola has been won. "This is not done," he said. "Success is not assured," he added.

Recently, the U.S.'s effort in Liberia has come under fire. The multi-million dollar effort to build Ebola treatment units was completed too late to be of much use, The New York Times reported Sunday. The U.S. deployed almost 3,000 military troops at a cost of hundreds of millions to erect 11 treatment facilities. But by the time they were ready, the caseload in Liberia had already fallen precipitously. Only 28 Ebola patients were treated at a unit built by U.S. forces.

Nonetheless, Aylward said, the U.S.'s promise to build these centers provided an important morale boost for Liberians at the height of the crisis. The U.S. also gave material support and air transport, which was instrumental in getting health worker teams to hard-to-reach hotspots, he said.

Finally, Aylward noted that when the U.S. committed to building the treatment units, statistical models were suggesting infections would continue to rise exponentially in the coming weeks and months.

"The key to any large scale crisis is no regrets," Aylward said. "You have to go in big and heavy if you want to deal with it."

West Africa

ebola

World Bank

Global Health

Violence against immigrants in South Africa has killed at least five people, resulted in attacks on businesses owned by foreigners and sent thousands to take refuge at temporary shelters.

A massive rally against xenophobia was held Thursday in Durban, the coastal city that has been the scene of much of the unrest. Migrants from Africa and South Asia have been the target of the violence, which was condemned by President Jacob Zuma.

The fighting in Durban killed five people – two immigrants and three South Africans, CNN reported.

The charity Gift of the Givers told CNN that about "8,500 people fled to refugee centers or police stations this week because of the violence."

In Johannesburg Thursday, foreign-owned shops were attacked and looted, the BBC reported, prompting some 200 people to take refuge at a police station.

The BBC adds: "Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the looters and arrested 12 people. ,.. Police used rubber bullets to disperse a group of migrants in Johannesburg who had armed themselves with machetes for protection."

The unemployment rate in South Africa is 24 percent, and many in the country accuse foreigners of taking jobs. The violence, which has been widely condemned in South Africa, has been attributed to comments made by Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini who was quoted as saying foreigners should "go back to their countries." He says his remarks were misrepresented.

South African officials have apologized to their African counterparts for the violence.

Anti-immigrant violence in 2008 killed more than 60 people.

South Africa

Immigration

Pope Francis, who plans to visit the United States in September, might tack onto his itinerary a side trip to Cuba, the Vatican says, but it cautions the talks with Havana are at an early stage.

The Catholic Heraldquotes Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi as saying Francis is "considering the idea of a Cuba leg."

The Herald notes:

"In what will be the Pope's first trip to the US, the Pontiff will travel to Washington DC, New York and Philadelphia in September. He will join a session in Congress and be hosted by President Obama in the White House.

"A visit to Cuba would be a historic addition to this itinerary. Pope Francis has already played a major role in the re-opening of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US, last summer writing letters to both Barack Obama and Raul Castro that eventually led to the release of US prisoner, Alan Gross."

Francis is credited with helping broker a breakthrough in relations between Washington and Havana following a decades-long Cold War freeze. Both of his predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, have also visited the predominately Catholic island-nation.

Pope Francis

Cuba

If there's one piece of hardware that can be found on nearly every trader's desk, regardless of time zone, it's the Bloomberg data terminal.

So, when the terminals experienced a global outage lasting hours, it sent chaos through markets where the "screens" are relied upon to analyze and interpret financial data — and to exchange market gossip with other traders around the world.

Zero Hedge, a financial news site, says the outage led to "widespread panic among traders mostly in Europe, who were flying blind and unable to chat with other, just as clueless colleagues (the one function used predominantly on the terminal is not charts, nor analytics, but plain old chat)."

Service now restored to most customers following disruption to parts of our network. Making progress bringing the full network back online.

— Bloomberg LP (@Bloomberg) April 17, 2015

The Wall Street Journal quoted Louis Gargour, the chief investment officer at London-based LNG Capital as saying "We're flying blind."

"It's scary how dependent we have become on our Bloomberg screens," Anthony Peters, a strategist at London-based capital markets adviser SwissInvest, was quoted by WSJ as saying.

Reuters, which is a Bloomberg competitor, quoted Ioan Smith, managing director of KCG Europe, as saying that traders had to "catch up" on important market chatter "after the Bloomberg terminals came back online, and that's when we saw the falls in Europe."

The Associated Press adds the problems "prompted the British government to postpone a planned 3 billion-pound ($4.4 billion) debt issue."

"Users say the outage started as trading was getting in full swing around 8 a.m. in London, one of the world's largest financial centers, particularly in foreign exchange and bond markets."

CNBCsays Bloomberg confirmed that the outage began about 8:20 a.m. London time and that service was restored to most users by 12:45 p.m.

AP notes: "The disruption is likely to cause concern at Bloomberg. The company has become the world's biggest financial information provider, overtaking rival Reuters. Bloomberg is privately held and is not obliged to divulge financial information, but it said in September that its revenue grew to more than $9 billion in 2014, with 320,000 subscribers globally."

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