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Friday 8 January 2021

Corona Voice - Angola. The tok show with Sofonie Dala. Don't Miss Out! Day 36

Our Corona Voice show is live in Angola. Day 36

As many parts of the country went into lockdown to combat the spread of the virus, unemployment numbers rose sharply. How many people are able to work and want a job, but can't find one?

Our today's guest will share with us the impact of covid-19 on his life.

 Hello, I'm Edvaldo, I'm a professional trainer. Today I'm going to talk about the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on my life

Covid-19 is a disease that has affected the entire world and caused many social problems.

This illness sadly affected my life. This affected many people psychologically and socially. I lost my job and consequently also buried my studies because I have no way to pay.

The strict restrictions and limitations to prevent the spread of this virus have conditioned all my projects.

I think that all humanity is awakened and shaken by this pandemic, but we must not lose the hope in God, he is the solution for everything.

Businesses such as shops, bars, travel and entertainment companies have had to close because of coronavirus lockdowns. Many have decided that they can't afford to keep all their workers, and have them redundant. 

Click here to watch free full webisodes: https://coronavoice-angola.blogspot.com/

This is the first and the only Coronavirus show in Angola where the most ordinary citizens show their brilliant talents.

The heroes of the program are the most ordinary citizens - they share with the audience their songs, poems and real stories of how the Coronavirus pandemic affected their lives.

We launched the “Corona Voice show” campaign to provide a space for young women and men around Angola to share their views, experiences and initiatives.

FIND SOMEONE TO SPONSOR TODAY

Your sponsorship will help the most affected people by covid-19 to take the first step out of poverty.

Africa Educates Her Campaign - Angola. Season 3. Don't Miss Out! Webisode 22

 Our girls back to school campaign is ongoing. Day 22

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused an unprecedented crisis in all areas. In the field of education, this emergency has led to the massive closure of face-to-face activities of educational institutions in more than 190 countries in order to prevent the spread of the virus and mitigate its impact.

Our today's guest is Nicha, she will share with us the impact of Covid-19 on her academic life

Hello, my name is Nicha Deolinda, I am 14 years old and I study in the fifth grade.

How did the coronavirus impact your studies?

Well, the coronavirus impacted me negatively. I can't go to school anymore, I'm studying from home solving some exercises that the school has been giving.

When did you stop studying?

Since March 2020

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

I don't. My school board has informed us that they are only going to assist students from the 6th grade upwards. Students from the 5th grade and below will receive exercises and topics to study at home.

Have you been complying with the coronavirus prevention measures?

Yes, I have been staying at home, washing my hands, using face mask and alcohol gel.

Going to school is the best public policy tool available to raise skills. While school time can be fun and can raise social skills and social awareness, from an economic point of view the primary point of being in school is that it increases a child’s ability.

Click here to watch free full webisodes: https://she-leads.blogspot.com/


We launched this campaign to ensure that every girl is able to learn while schools are closed and return to the classroom when schools safely reopen. Everyone can play a role in supporting girls ’education - whether you’re a teacher, parent, student, journalist, policymaker, or simply a concerned citizen.

Don't miss this opportunity to bring girls back to school. Tell us your story!

Do you have a personal experience with the coronavirus would you like to share? Or a tip on how your town or community is handling the poverty among women?

FIND SOMEONE TO SPONSOR TODAY

Your sponsorship will help the most vulnerable girls and women to take the first step out of poverty.



Trump finally faces reality — amid talk of early ouster

 With 13 days left in his term, President Donald Trump finally bent to reality Thursday amid growing talk of trying to force him out early, acknowledging he’ll peacefully leave after Congress affirmed his defeat.

Trump, moving to show strength, aims for Monday release

Trump led off a video from the White House by condemning the violence carried out in his name a day earlier at the Capitol. Then, for the first time on camera, he admitted his presidency of him would soon end - though he declined to mention President-elect Joe Biden by name or explicitly state he had lost.


“A new administration will be inaugurated on Jan. 20,” Trump said in the video. “My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation. ”


The address, which appeared designed to stave off talk of a forced early eviction, came at the end of a day when the cornered president stayed out of sight in the White House. Silenced on some of his favorite internet lines of communication, he watched the resignations of several top aides, including two Cabinet secretaries.


And as officials sifted through the aftermath of the pro-Trump mob’s siege of the U.S. Capitol, there was growing discussion of impeaching him a second time or invoking the 25th Amendment to oust him from the Oval Office.


The invasion of the Capitol building, a powerful symbol of the nation’s democracy, rattled Republicans and Democrats alike. They struggled with how best to contain the impulses of a president deemed too dangerous to control his own social media accounts but who remains commander in chief of the world’s greatest military.


“I'm not worried about the next election, I'm worried about getting through the next 14 days,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of Trump’s staunchest allies. He condemned the president's role in Wednesday's riots and said, “If something else happens, all options would be on the table.”


Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that “the president of the United States incited an armed insurrection against America.” She called him “a very dangerous person who should not continue in office. This is urgent, an emergency of the highest magnitude. ”


Neither option to remove Trump seemed likely, with little time left in his term to draft the Cabinet members needed to invoke the amendment or to organize the hearings and trial mandated for an impeachment. But the fact that the dramatic options were even the subject of discussion in Washington’s corridors of power served as a warning to Trump.


Fears of what a desperate president could do in his final days spread in the nation's capital and beyond, including speculation Trump could incite more violence, make rash appointments, issue ill-conceived pardons - including for himself and his family - or even trigger a destabilizing international incident.


The president ’s video Thursday - which was released upon his return to Twitter after his account of him was restored - was a complete reversal from the one he put out just 24 hours earlier in which he said to the violent mob:“ We love you. You’re very special. ” His refusal of him to condemn the violence sparked a firestorm of criticism and, in the new video, he at last denounced the demonstrators ’“ lawlessness and mayhem. ”


As for his feelings on leaving office, he told the nation that “serving as your president has been the honor of my lifetime” while hinting at a return to the public arena. He told supporters “our incredible journey is only just beginning.”


Just a day earlier, Trump unleashed the destructive forces at the Capitol with his baseless claims of election fraud at a rally that prompted supporters to disrupt the congressional certification of Biden’s victory. After the storming of the Capitol and the eventual wee-hours certification of Biden’s win by members of Congress, Trump released a statement that acknowledged he would abide by a peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 20.


The statement was posted by an aide and did not originate from the president’s own Twitter account, which has 88 million followers and for four years has been wielded as a political weapon that dictates policy and sows division and conspiracy.


Trump could n’t tweet it himself because, for the first time, the social media platform suspended his account of him, stating that the president had violated its rules of service by inciting violence. Facebook adopted a broader ban, saying Trump’s account would be offline until after Biden’s inauguration.


Deprived of that social media lifeblood, Trump remained silent and ensconced in the executive mansion until Thursday evening. But around him, loyalists headed for the exits, their departments - which were coming in two weeks anyway - moved up to protest the president’s handling of the riot.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao became the first Cabinet member to resign. Chao, married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the lawmakers trapped at the Capitol on Wednesday, said in a message to staff that the attack “has deeply troubled me in a way that I simply cannot set aside.”


Education Secretary Betsy DeVos followed. In her resignation letter dela Thursday, DeVos blamed Trump for inflaming tensions in the violent assault on the seat of the nation ’s democracy. “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” she wrote.


Others who resigned in the wake of the riot: Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger; Ryan Tully, senior director for European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council; and first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary.


Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former chief of staff-turned-special envoy to Northern Ireland, told CNBC that he had called Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to let him know I was resigning. … I can't do it. I can’t stay. ”


Mulvaney said others who work for Trump had decided to remain in their posts in an effort to provide some sort of guardrails for the president during his final days in office.


“Those who choose to stay, and I have talked with some of them, are choosing to stay because they’re worried the president might put someone worse in,” Mulvaney said.


Mulvaney's predecessor in the chief of staff job, retired US Marine Corps general John Kelly, told CNN that “I think the Cabinet should meet and have a discussion” about Section 4 of the 25th Amendment - allowing the forceful removal of Trump by his own Cabinet .


Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined Pelosi in declaring that Trump “should not hold office one day longer” and urged Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to act. But Chao’s departure may stall nascent efforts to invoke the amendment.


Staff-level discussions on the matter took place across multiple departments and even in parts of the White House, according to two people briefed on the talks. But no member of the Cabinet has publicly expressed support for the move - which would make Pence the acting president - although several were believed to be sympathetic to the notion, believing Trump is too volatile in his waning days in office.


In the West Wing, shell-shocked aides were packing up, acting on a delayed directive to begin offboarding their posts ahead of the Biden team’s arrival. The slowdown before now was due to Trump ’s single-minded focus on his defeat since Election Day at the expense of the other responsibilities of his office.


Most glaringly, that included the fight against the raging coronavirus that is killing record numbers of Americans each day.


Few aides had any sense of the president’s plans, with some wondering if Trump would largely remain out of sight until he left the White House. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany read a brief statement in which she declared that the Capitol siege was “appalling, reprehensible and antithetical to the American way.”


But her words she carried little weight. Trump has long made clear that only he speaks for his presidency.

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Source: AP


Capitol Police rejected offers of federal help to quell mob

 Three days before supporters of President Donald Trump rioted at the Capitol, the Pentagon asked the U.S Capitol Police if it needed National Guard manpower. And as the mob descended on the building Wednesday, Justice Department leaders reached out to offer up FBI agents. The police turned them down both times, according to senior defense officials and two people familiar with the matter.

After Capitol riots, Russia slams US’s ‘archaic’ electoral system

Despite plenty of warnings of a possible insurrection and ample resources and time to prepare, the Capitol Police planned only for a free speech demonstration.

Still stinging from the uproar over the violent response by law enforcement to protests last June near the White House, officials also were intent on avoiding any appearance that the federal government was deploying active duty or National Guard troops against Americans.

The result is the U.S. Capitol was overrun Wednesday and officers in a law enforcement agency with a large operating budget and experience in high-security events protecting lawmakers were overwhelmed for the world to see. Four protesters died, including one shot inside the building. A Capitol Police officer died Thursday after being injured in the Wednesday melee.

The rioting and loss of control has raised serious questions over security at the Capitol for future events. The actions of the day also raise troubling concerns about the treatment of mainly white Trump supporters, who were allowed to roam through the building for hours, while Black and brown protesters who demonstrated last year over police brutality faced more robust and aggressive policing.

People shelter in the House gallery as protesters try to break into the Chamber of the US House of Representatives. [Andrew Harnik/AP Photo]

“This was a failure of imagination, a failure of leadership,” said Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, whose department responded to several large protests last year following the death of George Floyd. “The Capitol Police must do better and I don’t see how we can get around that.”

Acevedo said he has attended events on the Capitol grounds to honor slain police officers that had higher fences and a stronger security presence than what he saw on video Wednesday.

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said that as the rioting was underway, it became clear that the Capitol Police were overrun. But he said there was no contingency planning done in advance for what forces could do in case of a problem at the Capitol because Defense Department help was turned down. “They’ve got to ask us, the request has to come to us,” said McCarthy.

U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, under pressure from Schumer, Pelosi and other congressional leaders, was forced to resign. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asked for and received the resignation of the Sergeant at Arms of the Senate, Michael Stenger, effective immediately. Paul Irving, the longtime Sergeant at Arms of the House, also resigned.

“There was a failure of leadership at the top,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.

The U.S. Capitol had been closed to the public since March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now killed more than 360,000 people in the U.S. But normally, the building is open to the public and lawmakers pride themselves on their availability to their constituents.

Police clear the US Capitol Building with tear gas. [Stephanie Keith/Reuters]

It is not clear how many officers were on-duty Wednesday, but the complex is policed by a total of 2,300 officers for 16 acres of ground who protect the 435 House representatives, 100 U.S. senators and their staff. By comparison, the city of Minneapolis has about 840 uniformed officers policing a population of 425,000 in a 6,000-acre area.

There were signs for weeks that violence could strike on Jan. 6, when Congress convened for a joint session to finish counting the Electoral College votes that would confirm Democrat Joe Biden had won the presidential election.

On far-right message boards and in pro-Trump circles, plans were being made.

The leader of the far-right extremist group Proud Boys was arrested coming into the nation’s capital this week on a weapons charge for carrying empty high-capacity magazines emblazoned with their logo. He admitted to police that he had made statements about rioting in Washington, local officials said.

Both Acevedo and Ed Davis, a former Boston police commissioner who led the department during the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, said they did not fault the responses of clearly overmatched front-line officers, but the planning and leadership before the riot.

“Was there a structural feeling that well, these are a bunch of conservatives, they’re not going to do anything like this? Quite possibly,” Davis said. “That’s where the racial component to this comes into play in my mind. Was there a lack of urgency or a sense that this could never happen with this crowd? Is that possible? Absolutely.”

Trump and his allies were perhaps the biggest megaphones, encouraging protesters to turn out in force and support his false claim that the election had been stolen from him. He egged them on during a rally shortly before they marched to the Capitol and rioted. His personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, a former New York mayor known for his tough-on-crime stance, called for “trial by combat.”

McCarthy said law enforcement’s intelligence estimates of the potential crowd size in the run-up to the protests “were all over the board,” from a low of 2,000 to as many as 80,000.

So the Capitol Police had set up no hard perimeter around the Capitol. Officers were focused on one side where lawmakers were entering to vote to certify Biden’s win.

Barricades were set up on the plaza in front of the building, but police retreated from the line and a mob of people broke through. Lawmakers, at first unaware of the security breach, continued their debate. Soon they were cowering under chairs. Eventually they were escorted from the House and Senate. Journalists were left alone in rooms for hours as the mob attempted to break into barricaded rooms.

Sund, the Capitol Police chief, said he had expected a display of “First Amendment activities” that instead turned into a “violent attack.” But Gus Papathanasiou, head of the Capitol Police union, said planning failures left officers exposed without backup or equipment against surging crowds of rioters.

“We were lucky that more of those who breached the Capitol did not have firearms or explosives and did not have a more malign intent,” Papathanasiou said in a statement. “Tragic as the deaths are that resulted from the attack, we are fortunate the casualty toll was not higher.”

The Justice Department, FBI and other agencies began to monitor hotels, flights and social media for weeks and were expecting large crowds. Mayor Muriel Bowser had warned of impending violence for weeks, and businesses had closed in anticipation. She requested National Guard help from the Pentagon on Dec. 31, but the Capitol Police turned down the Jan. 3 offer from the Defense Department, according to Kenneth Rapuano, assistant defense secretary for homeland security.

“We asked more than once and the final return that we got on Sunday the 3rd was that they would not be asking DOD for assistance,” he said.

The Justice Department’s offer for FBI support as the protesters grew violent was rejected by the Capitol Police, according to the two people familiar with the matter. They were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.

By then, it was too late.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police Department descended. Agents from nearly every Justice Department agency, including the FBI, were called in. So was the Secret Service and the Federal Protective Service. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sent two tactical teams. Police from as far away as New Jersey arrived to help.

It took four hours to evict the protesters from the Capitol complex. By then, they had roamed the halls of Congress, posed for photos inside hallowed chambers, broken through doors, destroyed property and taken photos of themselves doing it. Only 13 were arrested at the time; scores were arrested later.

In the aftermath, a 7-foot fence will go up around the Capitol grounds for at least 30 days. The Capitol Police will conduct a review of the carnage, as well as their planning and policies. Lawmakers plan to investigate how authorities handled the rioting.

The acting U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, Michael Sherwin, said the failure to arrest more people is making their jobs harder.

“Look, we have to now go through cell site orders, collect video footage to try to identify people and then charge them, and then try to execute their arrest. So that has made things challenging, but I can’t answer why those people weren’t zip-tied as they were leaving the building by the Capitol Police.”

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Source: AP

 

COVID-19: ANGOLA RECORDED 478 RECOVERIES

 The Angolan Health Authorities registered the recovery of 478 patients from Covid-19, 110 new infections and zero deaths in the last 24 hours.

Coronavirus symbol

The recovered patients are distributed in five different provinces, namely, Luanda (367), Zaire (90), Cunene (16), Huambo (3) and Bié (2).

According to the newsletter of the daily update of the Multi-Sector Commission for the Prevention and Combat of Covid-19, which reached ANGOP last Thursday, in the last 24 hours, the analysis laboratories registered 110 new cases by SARS Cov-2, with ages varying from one to 68 years and no deaths.

Of the 110 new cases, the note explains, were registered in Luanda (46), Cuanza Sul (24), Bié (21), Huambo (5), Zaire, (2), the provinces of Uíge, Benguela and Moxico with ( 3) cases each. Huíla, Namibe and Cabinda, with a positive case, respectively, with ages between 1 to 81 years.

The document shows that, in this period, the labs processed 2,111 samples of RT-PCR, the accumulative indicates for 319 096 with 5.6% of a positive rate.

So far, Angola presents the following epidemiological picture:

17, 974 infections, 11 955 recovered, 413 deaths and 5,422 active people.

Of the diseased patients, 2 are in critical condition, 9 serious, 76 moderate, 97 mild and 5 422 asymptomatic.

The health authorities are still strictly following 410 people in institutional quarantine and 3 911 citizens under surveillance.


International Day of Clean Energy 2024 | 26 January 2024

 Every dollar of investment in renewables creates three times more jobs than in the fossil fuel industry.  Greetings friends. I am Sofonie D...