Croatian Government Undergraduate & Graduate Scholarships 2021/2022 for young Christians from developing countries (Fully Funded)

Application Deadline:17 May 2021

The Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia (Ministry) and the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs (MFEA) are awarding the Croatian Government Scholarships for undergraduate and graduate university study to young Christians from developing countries.

Religious minorities, primarily Christians are one of the vulnerable groups in the world. The Republic of Croatia has recognized this negative trend on a global scale, and within its scope of work in the field of the international development cooperation is committed to respect and protect the rights of religious groups, as the vulnerable groups in developing countries. After completing their studies, the scholarship holders are obliged to return to their home countries. They are expected to contribute to the development of their communities and to building capacities and strengthening resilience at the local level with their knowledge acquired in Croatia upon return to their homelands.

Benefits

The awarded scholarship includes full board and lodging, a monthly allowance of 1.600 kuna, as well as basic health insurance coverage and costs of one-year preparatory Croatian language course. The student will be placed under supervision of the administrating chief at the dormitory and the Department for international cooperation at the Ministry of Science and Education. The cost of travel to and from Croatia is included.
The grant (monthly financial support) is meant to cover the living expenses for one person and there is no available financing or visa exemption for accompanying family members or any other persons

Click Here to apply . https://bit.ly/32nYmi8

ANGOLA REPORTS 373 RECOVERIES, 178 NEW CASES

Luanda – At least 373 Covid-19 patients have been recovered in the last 24 hours in Angola that reports 178 new infections and one death in the same period.

According to the health authorities’ report that reached ANGOP on Saturday evening, of those recovered, 360 are Luanda residents, three from central Cuanza Sul province, two from northern Bengo, two from central Benguela and two from southern Huíla.

The provinces of Cunene (south), Malanje (northeast), Uíge (north) and Zaire (north) have reported one recovery each.

The new Covid-19 infections have been reported in Luanda with 172, Huíla (4) and central Huambo (2), with ages ranging from four months to 92 years, 123 males and 55 females.

The sole death was reported in Huíla, involving a 54-year old Angolan man.

Angola’s current Covid-19 statistics show 24.300 positive cases, 561 deaths, 22.576 recoveries and 1.163 active patient.

Prince Philip is laid to rest as somber queen sits alone

WINDSOR, England (AP) — Prince Philip has been interred in the Royal Vault at St. George’s Chapel alongside the remains of 24 other royals, including three kings of England. But it will likely not be his permanent resting place.

The biggest of seven interment sites inside the chapel, the vault houses the remains of King George III, whose almost six-decade reign included the years of the American Revolution. His sons King George IV and King William IV are also buried there.

The vault has also been the temporary resting place for almost 30 royals, including Philip’s mother, Princess Andrew of Greece. Her remains were transferred to the convent on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where they now lie near her aunt, Grand Duchess Serge of Russia.

King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II, was interred in the Royal Vault for 17 years before his remains were moved to the King George VI Memorial Chapel at St. George’s in 1969. His wife, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and daughter Princess Margaret were interred alongside him after they died in 2002.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, she and Philip are expected to be buried in the Royal Burial Ground on the Frogmore Estate close to Windsor Castle.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

WINDSOR, England (AP) — With military bands and a royal procession, Prince Philip was laid to rest Saturday in a funeral ceremony that honored his lifetime of service to the country, the crown and his wife, Queen Elizabeth II. The widowed British monarch, setting an example amid the coronavirus pandemic, sat alone at the ceremony.

Philip, who died April 9 two months shy of his 100th birthday, was being honored at Windsor Castle in a service that was steeped in military and royal tradition — but also was pared down and infused with his own personality.

The entire procession and funeral took place out of public view within the grounds of the castle, a 950-year-old royal residence 20 miles (30 kilometers) west of London, but was shown live on television.

Coronavirus restrictions meant that instead of the 800 mourners expected in the longstanding plans for Philip’s funeral, only 30 people were allowed inside the castle’s St. George’s Chapel, including the queen, her four children and her eight grandchildren.

Following strict social distancing rules during the pandemic, the queen set an example even in grief, sitting apart from family members arrayed around the church. Other royals who are in family bubbles sat together.

People across Britain observed one minute of silence in honor of Philip just before his royal ceremonial funeral got under way.

The service began with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby entering the chapel ahead of the coffin, followed by Philip’s children and three of his eight grandchildren, as a four-member choir sang “I am the resurrection and the life.”

The service followed a funeral procession, in which Philip’s coffin traveled to the chapel on a specially adapted Land Rover designed by Philip himself for the eight-minute journey to St. George’s Chapel. Philip’s coffin was draped in his personal standard, and topped with his Royal Navy cap and sword and a wreath of flowers.

Senior military commanders lined up in front of the vehicle. The children of Philip and the queen — heir to the throne Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward — walked behind the hearse, while the 94-year-old queen traveled to the chapel in a Bentley car.

Grandsons Prince William and Prince Harry also walked behind the coffin, although not side by side. The brothers, whose relationship has been strained amid Harry’s decision to quit royal duties and move to California, flanked their cousin Peter Phillips, the son of Princess Anne.

For many viewers, the moment stirred memories of the image of William and Harry at 15 and 12, walking behind their mother Princess Diana’s coffin in 1997, accompanied by their grandfather Philip, in a London ceremony televised around the world.

Earlier, under soft spring sunshine, some locals stopped outside the castle to leave flowers on Saturday, but people largely heeded requests by police and the palace not to gather because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The funeral reflected Philip’s military ties, both as a ceremonial commander of many units and as a veteran of war. More than 700 military personnel took part, including army bands, Royal Marine buglers and an honor guard drawn from across the armed forces.

Inside the Gothic chapel, the setting for centuries of royal weddings and funerals, the service was simple and somber. There was no sermon, at Philip’s request, and no family eulogies or readings, in keeping with royal tradition. But Dean of Windsor David Conner said the country has been enriched by Philip’s “unwavering loyalty to our queen, by his service to the nation and the Commonwealth, by his courage, fortitude and faith.”

Philip spent almost 14 years in the Royal Navy and saw action in the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific during World War II. Several elements of his funeral had a maritime theme, including the hymn “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” which is associated with seafarers and asks God: “O hear us when we cry to thee/For those in peril on the sea.”

As Philip’s coffin is lowered into the Royal Vault, Royal Marine buglers sounded “Action Stations,” an alarm that alerts sailors to prepare for battle — a personal request from Philip.

Former Bishop of London Richard Chartres, who knew Philip well, said the prince was a man of faith, but liked things kept succinct.

“He was at home with broad church, high church and low church, but what he really liked was short church,” Chartres told the BBC. “I always remember preaching on occasions which he was principal actor that the instruction would always come down: ‘No more than four minutes.’”

Along with Philip’s children and grandchildren, the 30 funeral guests include other senior royals and several of his German relatives. Philip was born a prince of Greece and Denmark and, like the queen, is related to a thicket of European royal families.

Mourners wore masks and observed social distancing inside the chapel and did not join in when a four-person choir sang hymns.

Ahead of the funeral, Buckingham Palace released a photo of the queen and Philip, smiling and relaxing on blankets in the grass in the Scottish Highlands in 2003. The palace said the casual photo was a favorite of the queen.

For decades, Philip was a fixture of British life, renowned for his founding of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards youth program and for a blunt-spoken manner that at times included downright offensive remarks. He lived in his wife’s shadow, but his death has sparked a reflection about his role, and new appreciation from many in Britain.

“He was a character, an absolute character,” said Jenny Jeeves as she looked at the floral tributes in Windsor. “He was fun, he was funny. Yes, he made quite a few gaffes, but it depends which way you took it really. Just a wonderful husband, father, and grandfather, and a good example to all of us.”

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US, China agree to cooperate on climate crisis with urgency

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The United States and China, the world’s two biggest carbon polluters, agreed to cooperate to curb climate change with urgency, just days before President Joe Biden hosts a virtual summit of world leaders to discuss the issue.

The agreement was reached by U.S. special envoy for climate John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua during two days of talks in Shanghai last week, according to a joint statement.

The two countries “are committed to cooperating with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands,” the statement said.

China is the world’s biggest carbon emitter, followed by the United States. The two countries pump out nearly half of the fossil fuel fumes that are warming the planet’s atmosphere. Their cooperation is key to the success of global efforts to curb climate change, but frayed ties over human rights, trade, and China’s territorial claims to Taiwan and the South China Sea have been threatening to undermine such efforts.

Meeting with reporters in Seoul on Sunday, Kerry said the language in the statement is “strong” and that the two countries agreed on “critical elements on where we have to go.” But the former secretary of state said, “I learned in diplomacy that you don’t put your back on the words, you put on actions. We all need to see what happens.”

Noting that China is the world’s biggest coal user, Kerry said he and Chinese officials had a lot of discussions on how to accelerate a global energy transition. “I have never shied away from expressing our views shared by many, many people that it is imperative to reduce coal, everywhere,” he said.

Biden has invited 40 world leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, to the April 22-23 summit. The U.S. and other countries are expected to announce more ambitious national targets for cutting carbon emissions ahead of or at the meeting, along with pledging financial help for climate efforts by less wealthy nations.

It’s unclear how much Kerry’s China visit would promote U.S.-China cooperation on climate issues.

While Kerry was still in Shanghai, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng signaled Friday that China is unlikely to make any new pledges at next week’s summit.

“For a big country with 1.4 billion people, these goals are not easily delivered,” Le said during an interview with The Associated Press in Beijing. “Some countries are asking China to achieve the goals earlier. I am afraid this is not very realistic.”

During a video meeting with German and French leaders Friday, Xi said that climate change “should not become a geopolitical chip, a target for attacking other countries or an excuse for trade barriers,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

On whether Xi would join the summit, Le said “the Chinese side is actively studying the matter.”

The joint statement said the two countries “look forward to” next week’s summit. Kerry said Sunday that “we very much hope that (Xi) will take part” in the summit but it’s up to China to make that decision.

Biden, who has said that fighting global warming is among his highest priorities, had the United States rejoin the historic 2015 Paris climate accord in the first hours of his presidency, undoing the U.S. withdrawal ordered by predecessor Donald Trump.

Major emitters of greenhouse gases are preparing for the next U.N. climate summit taking place in Glasgow, U.K., in November. The summit aims to relaunch global efforts to keep rising global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) as agreed in the Paris accord.

According to the U.S.-China statement, the two countries would enhance “their respective actions and cooperating in multilateral processes, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement.”

It said both countries also intend to develop their respective long-term strategies before the Glasgow conference and take “appropriate actions to maximize international investment and finance in support of” the energy transition in developing countries.

Xi announced last year that China would be carbon-neutral by 2060 and aims to reach a peak in its emissions by 2030. In March, China’s Communist Party pledged to reduce carbon emissions per unit of economic output by 18% over the next five years, in line with its goal for the previous five-year period. But environmentalists say China needs to do more.

Biden has pledged the U.S. will switch to an emissions-free power sector within 14 years, and have an entirely emissions-free economy by 2050. Kerry is also pushing other nations to commit to carbon neutrality by then.

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South Africa regulator recommends lifting pause on J&J vaccine

South Africa’s health regulator has recommended that the government lift the pause on administering drugmaker Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, given that certain conditions are met.

“These conditions include, but are not limited to, strengthened screening and monitoring of participants who are at high risk of a blood clotting disorder,” the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (SAHPRA) said on Saturday.

“In addition, measures are to be implemented to ensure the safe management of any participants who develop vaccine-induced thrombosis and thrombocytopenia (VITT),” the statement added.

SAHPRA said on Wednesday that it had recently reviewed data from Johnson & Johnson’s local research study immunising healthcare workers and found no significant safety concerns.

South Africa suspended the rollout of the J&J vaccine in the “implementation study” on Tuesday, after health agencies in the United States recommended pausing its use because of rare cases of blood clots in six people inoculated with it, out of some seven million people who have received the shot in the country.

A US panel will meet again next week to discuss whether the pause on the use of the vaccine should continue after delaying a vote on the matter earlier this week.

SOURCE: REUTERS

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The Road to Extraordinary

 

In his new book Peak: Secrets of the New Science of Expertise, K. Anders Ericsson proposes that almost all of us have the seeds of excellence within us—it’s just a question of nurturing them via deliberate practice.

What is deliberate practice?

Deliberate practice is the breakdown of expertise into a  series of smaller, attainable practices. A deliberate practitioner engages in structured activities that improve performance in a specific area. The goal of deliberate practice is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. It takes a long time, and it’s hard. But to quote one of today’s great philosophers, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard…is what makes it great.” Thank you, A League of Their Own’s Jimmy Dugan.

Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce a powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill. And it also clears up the whole “ten-thousand-hours to expertise rule” controversy (spoiler: it isn’t really a rule).

Excerpted from Peak: Secrets of the New Science of Expertise

How do you keep going? That is perhaps the biggest question that anyone engaged in purposeful or deliberate practice will eventually face. Getting started is easy, as anyone who has visited a gym after New Year’s knows. You decide that you want to get in shape or learn to play the guitar or pick up a new language, and so you jump right in. It’s exciting. It’s energizing. Then after a while, reality hits. It’s hard to find the time to work out or practice as much as you should, so you start missing sessions. You’re not improving as fast as you thought you would. It stops being fun, and your resolve to reach your goal weakens. Eventually you stop altogether, and you don’t start up again.

So that’s the problem in a nutshell: purposeful practice is hard work.

The question is, What can you do about it?

What can we learn from expert performers about what it takes to keep going? Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. It may seem natural to assume that these people who maintain intense practice schedules for years have some rare gift of willpower or “grit” or “stick-toitiveness” that the rest of us just lack, but that would be a mistake for two very compelling reasons. First, there is little scientific evidence for the existence of a general “willpower” that can be applied in any situation.

But there is a bigger, second problem with the concept of willpower, one related to the myth of natural talent…once you assume that something is innate, it automatically becomes something you can’t do anything about. This sort of circular thinking—“The fact that I couldn’t keep practicing indicates that I don’t have enough willpower, which explains why I couldn’t keep practicing”—is worse than useless; it is damaging in that it can convince people that they might as well not even try.

Motivation is quite different from willpower. There are some interesting parallels between improving performance and losing weight. The ones who are successful in losing weight over the long run are those who have successfully redesigned their lives, building new habits that allow them to maintain the behaviors that keep them losing weight in spite of all of the temptations that threaten their success.

A similar thing is true for those who maintain purposeful or deliberate practice over the long run. They have generally developed various habits that help them keep going. As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration.

For purposeful or deliberate practice to be effective, you need to push yourself outside your comfort zone and maintain your focus, but those are mentally draining activities. Expert performers do two things—both seemingly unrelated to motivation—that can help. The first is general physical maintenance: getting enough sleep and keeping healthy. If you’re tired or sick, it’s that much harder to maintain focus and that much easier to slack off.

The second thing is to limit the length of your practice sessions to about an hour. You can’t maintain intense concentration for much longer than that—and when you’re first starting out, it’s likely to be less. If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break. Fortunately, you will find that as you maintain your practice over time it will seem easier. Both your body and your mind will habituate to the practice. The practice never becomes outright fun, but eventually it gets closer to neutral, so it’s not as hard to keep going.

We’ve just seen several ways to decrease the inclination to stop; now let’s look at some ways to increase the inclination to continue. It may be completely intrinsic. Or maybe it’s for totally practical, extrinsic purposes. You hate public speaking, but you recognize that your lack of speaking skills is holding you back in your career, so you decide you want to learn how to address an audience.

All of these are possible roots of motivation, but they aren’t—or at least they shouldn’t be—your only motivators. Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.

Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is a belief that you can succeed. In order to push yourself when you really don’t feel like it, you must believe that you can improve and—particularly for people shooting to become expert performers—that you can rank among the best. If you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t.

One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors. Surrounding yourself with supportive people is easiest in activities that are done in groups or teams.

Deliberate practice can be a lonely pursuit, but if you have a group of friends who are in the same positions, you have a built-in support system. These people understand the effort you’re putting into your practice, they can share training tips with you, and they can appreciate your victories and commiserate with you over your difficulties. They count on you, and you can count on them.

While you may collect a group of like-minded individuals for support and encouragement, still much of your improvement will depend on practice you do on your own. How do you maintain motivation for hour after hour of such focused practice? One of the best bits of advice is to set things up so that you are constantly seeing concrete signs of improvement, even if it is not always major improvement. Break your long journey into a manageable series of goals and focus on them one at a time—perhaps even giving yourself a small reward each time you reach a goal. There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.