Angola declares end of State of Public Calamity

Luanda - The Angolan Government declared Saturday the end of the state of public calamity in the whole country, giving way to the administrative management of the pandemic, which will enter into force at midnight on the 16th of this month.

The announcement was made by Francisco Furtado, Minister of State and Head of the Military House of the President of the Republic, during the updating of the prevention and combat measures against Covid-19.

The new measures maintain the state of alert of the health authorities, which must keep control and sanitary surveillance.

At the borders, the Government states that the entries are dependent on the realisation of a test with negative result 72 before the trip.

Passengers coming from other countries will be subject to rapid tests post-disembarkation, free of charge.

MPLA leader calls for party’s high voter turnout in 2022 elections

Huambo – MPLA president João Lourenço appealed to his party for a massive vote in the August elections, to ensure the continuity of solving the population's problems.

The leader of the ruling party in Angola launched the appeal at the mass  rally held in central Huambo province, as part of his two-day visit started Friday to the region.

João Lourenço stressed the need to carry on the construction of ongoing projects so that, in the next term, "his government can do much more than what is being done now".

He promised more work in the near future on building more schools, hospitals, housing, provide more energy and clean water for populations, for industries, as well as offering more jobs.

Also, President of the Republic, João Lourenço added that the Executive is working to give more space to the private sector, making it the main responsible not only for the production of goods and services, but also responsible for the supply of jobs.

He informed that since 2018, the Angolan Executive has generated 430,000 jobs in different sectors of the economy.

According to the MPLA leader, through the Informal Economy Reconversion Programme (PREI), about 155,000 Angolans left the informal economy, moving to the formal economy, thus managing to earn a living and their daily bread in a more decent way.

He also highlighted the gains of the Programme for Supporting Production, Diversification of Exports and Substitution of Imports (PRODESI) and the Action Plan for the Promotion of Employability (PAPE).

He mentioned that during the last four years the Executive has guaranteed technical-professional training to just over 260,000 citizens, mostly young people, and launched them into the job market.

Public service salary increase

To reduce the cost of living and increase the purchasing power of citizens, João Lourenço recalled that the State reduced the Value Added Tax (VAT) from 14 to 7 percent, as well as increased the value of the minimum wage and the salary of Public function.

Fighting price speculators

During his speech, the leader of the MPLA said that the Executive stormed the price speculators in an intelligent way, guaranteeing a Strategic Food Reserve, that is, guaranteeing a greater supply of essential goods with prices controlled by the Executive, which forced speculators to lower prices.

refineries

He announced that, starting this year, the country will start producing 30,000 barrels a day of oil transformed into diesel, gasoline and other refined products.

He also announced the start-up, in 2025, of the Soyo Refinery, which will refine at least 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day, and the increase in the production capacity of the Luanda Refinery.

In 2025, the country will be producing at least 160,000 barrels of crude oil,  being 60,000 in Cabinda and 100,000 in Soyo, revealed the President of the Republic.

Huambo Stadium

The MPLA leader ended his speech with the announcement of the construction of a football stadium in Huambo province.

"Huambo has a football tradition, we all know the great glories of football in this province", he concluded.

Tucker Carlson’s “Replacement” conspiracy motivates mass minority murder in Buffalo

The suspected shooter expressed repeated fears online that whites are being replaced by people of color, The New York Times reported.

The suspect in the fatal shooting of 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket Saturday was reportedly haunted in his writing by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory — a viciously racist view of the world that has been touted by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and several other far-right personalities.

Payton S. Gendron, who is white, repeatedly returned to the conspiracy in his 180-page online manifesto that white Americans are at risk of being replaced by people of color by immigration, interracial marriage and eventually violence, The New York Times reported Saturday. Almost all of the victims in the mass shooting were Black.

Gendron, 18, referred to “racial replacement” and “white genocide” in his writings, according to the Times. The first page included a symbol known as the sonnenrad, or black sun, which was once used by German Nazis but has been adopted by white supremacist neo-Nazis, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

In an interview on CNN Saturday night, Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.), who represents Buffalo, called the mass shooting part of a planned, “organized” effort to attack the minority community within an “element in our society that is blatantly racist, and they’re violent.”

The horrific crime “points to an effort to exact domestic terrorism that is racially motivated,” he added. “That threat to our community in Buffalo and western New York is a threat to the nation.”

This is a “problem that’s pervasive and growing,” he warned.

“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said of Gendron, who traveled some 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York, to carry out the attack. “A straight-up racially motivated hate crime.”

The “great replacement” rhetoric was once considered an extreme-right belief, but has edged toward the mainstream with winks from politicians and outright support on right-wing programs, including Carlson’s.

Just a week ago, Carlson was dubbed in an MSNBC column the “No. 1 champion” of the racist ideology ― someone who repeatedly warns of invasions of “illegals” and has insisted that President Joe Biden wants to “change the racial mix” of the nation.

In September, Media Matters reported that Carlson launched a “dedicated campaign to insert the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory … into mainstream Republican discourse.”

The conspiracy motivated white nationalists who marched in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia (who were described as “very fine people” by then-President Donald Trump). “Jews will not replace us,” marchers chanted.

The conspiracy has been cited as motivation in several racist mass shootings, including the killing of 20 people in an El Paso store in 2019 and the killing of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.

“It is the most mass-violence-inspiring idea in white supremacist circles right now,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Times.

About 60% of extremist murders in the U.S. between 2009 and 2019 were committed by people espousing white supremacist ideologies like the replacement theory, according to the ADL.

“A racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation,” Biden said in a statement Saturday after the shooting.

“Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America,” he added. “Hate must have no safe harbor. We must do everything in our power to end hate-fueled domestic terrorism.”

Source: New York Times

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