Back to school after lockdowns. Campaign with preschool children. Don't miss it! Webisode 25

Due to the pandemic, the topic of innovation in education has never been so crucial. While most developed countries moved their classes online with ease, many developing countries have been found wanting, due to a lack of infrastructure and the high cost of data.

This year, Angola declared that its 2020 school year was considered lost for primary school pupils. Indeed, COVID-19 has left 250 million children in primary and secondary schools in Africa alone out of school.

Ou today's guests are from primary school, they will share with us how COVID-19 has been affecting their lives.

Interview with Joice

1. Introduction

Hello! My name is joice, I am 10 years old, I study in the fifth grade and I am Angolan.

2. Now that schools have reopened, have you gone back to school?

I didn't go back to class because of the coronavirus.

3. How has covid-19 affected your student life?

Well, the coronavirus affected my studies and I can't go out to play anymore.

However, in these free times I like to help people in need, I like to play, to read and I also like to go to the explanation with the tutor.

4. What are the measures you would like the government to create to ensure your safety at school?

Well, I want the government to distribute mask, alcohol gel and force the students to keep the social distance of 1 meter from each other.

Interview with Laurindo

1. Introduction

Hello! My name is Laurindo, I'm 13 years old, I'm a 7th grader and I'm Nigerian.

2. Now that schools have reopened, have you gone back to school?

I didn’t go back to school due to school conditions. Unfortunately my school did not create any safe conditions for students.

3. What are the conditions you would like the government to create to ensure your safety at school?
I would like to see the following preventive measures against coronavirus: social distance between students, hand washing with water and soap, disinfection of hands with alcohol gel etc.

 4. How has covid-19 affected your student life?

The Covid-19 affected me in many ways, for example I can no longer go to school. Hey, I'm getting embarrassed, sorry.

Interview with Braulio

1. Introduction

Hello! I'm Braulio Dala, I'm 14 years old, I'm a 9 grader and I'm Angolan.

2. Now that schools have reopened, have you gone back to school?

Yes I started studying again.

3. How has covid-19 affected your student life?

As a student, the coronavirus affected me in many ways, I no longer go to the library and I cannot even have close contact with my colleagues and professors.

I also don't like how my school is organized. They did not distribute any masks, visors, alcohol gel and gloves. Another point that I also disliked is that when we are at school the security guards don't organize students who do not follow the preventive measures, they use to stay very close to each other. The school guards only tell us to wash our hands and check our temperatures.

4. Are you enjoying the post covid-19 experience? 

No, I don't like it. In my point of view, the school should organize the classes better, despite breaking the class into two groups, yet the classroom is still very full. In my opinion the classrooms should be divided into 3 groups.

There is no doubt that African governments need to invest in free, high-quality online education for all Africans. So that when complicated situations like Covid-19 arise, all students have the right and access to education including pre-school children.

Link to signup form and pledge: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1hGOHt-E0TDUBT_oNswL1I34ynB1FtLZLsq_m3HjEnDY/edit

Don't miss this opportunity to bring girls back to school. Join us!

Share your experiences learning / teaching during the school closures & the projects or initiatives you've launched to get girls back to school post # COVID19 in your local communities.

Visit my new channel to see all the activities https://she-leads.blogspot.com/

ANGOLA RECORDS 125 RECOVERIES, 104 NEW INFECTIONS

 Luanda – Angola has recorded the recovery of 125 Covid-19 patients, 104 new positive cases of the pandemic and three deaths in the last 24 hours

The information was released Thursday evening in Luanda, by the secretary of State for Public Health, Franco Mufinda.

Delivering the daily Covid-19 update briefing, the official said those recovered are aged from two to 72 years, resident in Luanda (103), southern Huíla (13), central Benguela (05) and one in northern Bengo, Malange and Zaire provinces.

Mufinda said the new positive cases involve people with ages from one to 64 years. 66 are males and 38 females, detected in Luanda (34), Huila (24), 10 in Cabinda (north), 10 in Benguela, nine in Namibe (southwest), seven in Cuando Cubango (southeast) and one in Cunene (south).

According to him, the deaths involve Angolan nationals with 54, 59 and 60 years of age, two resident in Luanda and one in Benguela. Two males and one female.

Angola’s Covid-19 statistics show 13,057 positive cases, 315 deaths, 5,250 recoveries and 6,492 active patients.

US election security officials reject Trump’s fraud claims

US election officials have said the 2020 White House vote was the “most secure in American history”, rejecting President Donald Trump’s fraud claims.

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” a committee announced.

They spoke out after Mr Trump claimed without proof that 2.7 million votes for him had been “deleted”.

He has yet to concede to the president-elect, Democrat Joe Biden.

The result of the 3 November election was projected by all the major US TV networks last weekend.

Mr Biden is now projected to have won Arizona, extending his lead by 11 electoral college votes to a total of 290, with Mr Trump on 217. It is the first time the state has voted Democrat since 1996.

Mr Trump has launched a flurry of legal challenges in key states and levelled unsubstantiated allegations of widespread electoral fraud.

Meanwhile, China has finally extended its congratulations to Mr Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris after days of silence. “We respect the choice of the American people,” a foreign ministry spokesman said. Russia has said it wants to wait for an “official result”.

Why is the statement important?

The announcement marks the most direct rebuttal from federal and state officials of President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.

Thursday’s joint statement was released by the Election Infrastructure Government Co-ordinating Council – which is made up of senior officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the US Election Assistance Commission as well as state-level officials who oversee elections and representatives of the voting machine industry.

“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result,” the group said.

“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too,” it added, without naming Mr Trump directly.

“When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”

The statement was posted to the website of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

The head of Cisa, Christopher Krebs, has reportedly incurred the White House’s displeasure over a Cisa website called Rumor Control, which debunks election misinformation.

On Thursday, Mr Krebs shared a post by an election law expert that said: “Please don’t retweet wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president.”

Cisa assistant director Bryan Ware stepped down on Thursday. The White House had asked for his resignation earlier this week, Reuters reports. Mr Krebs expects to be fired, the news agency says.

Hours before the statement was released, Mr Trump tweeted that voting software used in 28 states had deleted millions of votes for him, but presented no evidence for the stunning claim, which appeared to originate from the obscure TV network One America News and was flagged by Twitter.

The claim was linked to the miscounting of votes in one Republican-leaning Michigan county. Unofficial results initially favoured Mr Biden but were later corrected in President Trump’s favour. State election officials acknowledged what had happened, saying human error was to blame, rather than a software malfunction.

Are Republicans backing Trump?

A small but growing number of Republicans are backing calls for the president-elect to be given daily intelligence briefings.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a key Trump ally, was among those saying Mr Biden should start receiving the secret presidential memo, as is usual with incoming presidents

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley, John Cornyn and John Thune agreed, although House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Mr Biden was “not president right now” and should wait.

Between 10 and 20 Republicans in Congress have now either congratulated Mr Biden or accepted there must be moves towards a transition. But most have yet to acknowledge the president-elect’s win.

Capitol Hill reporters say Republican lawmakers are anxious not to alienate the Trump base, given that the president just won more votes than any incumbent ever, even though he is projected to lose.

Party bigwigs are also said to be hoping that Mr Trump will help campaign for two Senate run-off elections in January in Georgia that will decide whether Republicans retain control of the upper chamber.

Mr Biden is 5.3 million votes ahead of Mr Trump – about 3.4%, and is well beyond the hurdle of 270 electoral college votes required to win the presidency.

President Trump has kept a low key public profile since the election. Reports suggest he has told friends he wants to start a digital media company to take on the conservative network Fox News, whose full support he now feels to be lacking.

According to CBS News, Mr Trump is also openly discussing a possible 2024 campaign to retake the presidency.

What has Biden been up to?

On Thursday he spoke with Pope Francis, who offered his “blessings and congratulations”. Mr Biden will be only the second Roman Catholic president of the US.

He also spoke with congressional Democratic leadership about the need for a coronavirus stimulus package as the daily US caseload from the disease soared to a new record of more than 150,000.

He spent the day huddled with his transition team in Wilmington, Delaware, where he had been planning cabinet appointments.

On Wednesday he picked veteran Democratic operative Ron Klain to be his White House chief of staff.

____

Source: BBC

UK report calls out Saudi Arabia over women’s rights abuses

A report released by a member of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords has called on the world’s leading economies to shun the G20 summit hosted by Saudi Arabia this year unless jailed women’s rights activists are released.

“I want all of us to call upon those who will be participating in the G20 meeting to say we will only participate in this meeting being hosted by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia if you release these women,” Baroness Helena Kennedy, a prominent Scottish barrister, said in a video statement released on Wednesday.

These women are being detained because they are advocating for women’s rights and it is seen as an affront to the power structures of Saudi Arabia,” Kennedy added.

The United States, India and the UK are among countries that will attend this year’s G20 summit starting on November 21, hosted by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, set to take place virtually amid the coronavirus pandemic.

One of the themes of the G20 summit is women’s empowerment.

According to Kennedy’s report, the charges laid out against the jailed women include “inviting and inciting people to change the political system in the kingdom; initiating a campaign on Twitter to request a new constitution and speaking to British journalists for a documentary about imprisonment in the kingdom”.

“None of these would amount to crimes in any decent nation, and that is the problem,” Kennedy said. “This is an unacceptable abuse of human beings.”

Kennedy said among these women are academics, intellectuals, writers and journalists who were “leading voices” on women’s issues.

One of them is Loujain al-Hathloul, 31, who was arrested along with about a dozen other female activists in May 2018, just weeks before Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on female drivers.

A UN women’s rights committee called for her “immediate” release earlier this month, saying that al-Hathloul’s deteriorating health was “deeply alarming”.

In a recent interview, the Saudi ambassador to the UK was quoted as saying in an interview with The Guardian newspaper that the kingdom was considering clemency for the jailed women’s rights activists.

However, Saudi Arabia’s embassy in London later denied the report.

On Monday, New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch also called on the G20 leading economies to press Saudi Arabia to release all those imprisoned unlawfully and provide accountability for past abuses.

The group said the G20 awarded Riyadh this year’s presidency “despite the Saudi government’s unrelenting assault on fundamental freedoms, including jailing and harassing public dissidents and human rights activists, unlawful attacks on civilians in Yemen, and flouting international calls for accountability for the murder by state agents of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi”.

Since Saudi agents murdered Khashoggi at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, there has been no accountability for senior officials involved in his murder.

Instead, Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars hosting entertainment, cultural and sporting events as a deliberate strategy known as “image laundering” to conceal its human rights abuses, HRW said.

SOURCE : AL JAZEERA

Fur industry faces scrutiny over fears mink could spread COVID-19

While people around the world cheer late-stage trial results from a potential game-changing COVID-19 vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech, a troubling development has surfaced on the pandemic front – a mutated strain of coronavirus found on mink farms in Denmark.

Mink are raised and killed for their fur around the world, including in the United States, Denmark, Argentina, China, Spain and Poland.

Denmark has already slaughtered 10 million mink over fears they could trigger new COVID-19 outbreaks, and the United Kingdom’s health minister urged countries to rethink mink farming in the face of the threat (the UK has already banned the practice).

Now, calls to cull healthy minks are drawing criticism from farmers – and renewing animal rights groups’ demands that the global fur industry be shut down once and for all.

Here’s what you need to know.

Yes. So far, COVID-19, the disease associated with the coronavirus, has been discovered in small numbers of household pets like cats and dogs as well as lions and tigers at New York City’s Bronx Zoo. It has also been discovered in mink, which seem to be particularly vulnerable to catching the virus.

Mink are solitary mammals about the size of a house cat. If you want to get super sciency- they are carnivorous mustelids – meat-eating members of the weasel family, which also includes ferrets, skunks, otters, fishers, martens and wolverines.

Mink live in North America and Europe. Wild European mink are considered critically endangered on the Red List of Endangered Species maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

In the wild, mink swim and can travel long distances, and male mink can carve out territories over thousands of acres of wetlands. Female mink give birth to litters of between one and eight babies called kits.

When mink are farmed for their fur, they’re kept in close quarters, making them vulnerable to the spread of disease.

“COVID-19 first infected humans through close contact with captive animals at live-animal markets, which are similar to the unhygienic conditions at fur farms where mink are confined inside wire cages and often stacked on top of each other, which allows diseases to easily spread through their urine, excrement, pus and blood,” Emily Raap, a campaign generalist with the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), told Al Jazeera.

According to PETA, mink are solitary, territorial animals that would become aggressive if kept in a group in an enclosed space where they were allowed “free-range” movement.

Some female mink are kept for years as breeding stock, but most mink are killed when they’re six to eight months old.

Poisoning, electrocution, bludgeoning and neck-breaking are all ways fur farmers kill mink without damaging their pelts, investigations by PETA have found.

Global production of mink pelts stands at about 45 million pelts per year. The US produced 2.7 million pelts in 2019 valued at $59.2m, down 30 percent from $84.3m the previous year.

Mink fur is used in clothing, accessories and some false eyelashes, and mink oil is used in cosmetic and medical products and as a treatment on leather goods.

The US Department of Agriculture believes that mink on farms in Utah and Wisconsin caught the coronavirus from human farm workers who had been exposed. In Michigan, it’s still not known how mink got sick.

Once infected, mink have similar symptoms to those of humans when it comes to their respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts. Among mink, the coronavirus is also just as contagious. While Denmark had only three infected mink farms in June, by November, the virus had spread to more than 200, prompting calls for all farmed mink to be killed.

Some 15,000 mink have died from COVID-19 in the US so far.

Denmark reported 214 cases of mink-related COVID-19 earlier this month, including 12 people on five mink farms who had been infected with a mutated strain of the virus.

But on the nine farms with infected minks in Utah, “everything is still suggesting a one-way travel from people to the minks,” Dean Taylor, Utah’s state veterinarian, told Reuters.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that while “currently, there is no evidence that animals play a significant role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 [the coronavirus] to people,” reports from mink farms in the Netherlands suggest “there is the possibility for spread of SARS-CoV-2 from mink to humans.”

So far, the US is making farms with infected animals quarantine, while other countries are requiring that mink be culled.

The COVID-19 crisis could be hastening the end of mink farming in some countries.

In Denmark, farmers have said the cull amounts to the end of the mink industry.

In the Netherlands, the industry is scheduled to be phased out by 2024, but that timeline was accelerated for some producers this year after more than 100 of them were ordered to close their mink farms by March 2021.

France has moved to outlaw mink farming beginning in 2025.  And in the US, the state of California has banned the sale of fur starting in 2023.

Wasn’t fur already falling out of fashion anyway?

Yes. Major fashion brands like Prada, Coach, Michael Kors, Calvin Klein and Macy’s – among others – have pledged not to use fur in their products.

Will COVID make fur even more unfashionable?

Animal rights activists like Raap hope concerns over COVID-19 help hasten the end of fur farming.

“PETA will keep pushing everyone forever until fur is banned,” Raap said. “The goal is always that we don’t need to be raising and killing animals. There’s just absolutely no reason for it. And again, everyone can make a difference today by not supporting these cruel industries that exploit animals.”