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If breakfast is the meal of champions, Jada Pinkett Smith may not be winning — depending on who you ask. The glowing 49-year-old recently shared that
Abiy's government and the regional one run by the Tigray People's Liberation Front each consider the other illegitimate.
\t There was no immediate word from the three AU envoys, former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano and former South African President Kgalema Motlanthe. AU spokeswoman Ebba Kalondo did not say whether they can meet with TPLF leaders, something Abiy's office has rejected.
\"``Not possible,'' senior Ethiopian official Redwan Hussein said in a message to the AP. ``\"Above all, TPLF leadership is still at large.'' He called reports that the TPLF had appointed an envoy to discuss an immediate cease-fire with the international community ``masquerading.''
\t Fighting reportedly remained well outside the Tigray capital of Mekele, a densely populated city of a half-million people who have been warned by the Ethiopian government that they will be shown ``no mercy'' if they don't distance themselves from the region's leaders.
\t Tigray has been almost entirely cut off from the outside world since Nov. 4, when Abiy announced a military offensive in response to a TPLF attack on a federal army base.
That makes it difficult to verify claims about the fighting, but humanitarians have said at least hundreds of people have been killed.
\t The fighting threatens to destabilize Ethiopia, which has been described as the linchpin of the strategic Horn of Africa.
\t With transport links cut, food and other supplies are running out in Tigray, home to 6 million people, and the United Nations has asked for immediate and unimpeded access for aid.
AP
By Stephen Chadenga GWERU City Council has resolved to introduce a dual pricing system for the convenience of residents offering to settle their bills in foreign currency, a senior council official said yesterday. Council spokesperson Vimbai Chingwaramusee said the local authority would soon adopt the resolution at an ordinary council meeting. “We are considering dual pricing according to Statutory Instrument (SI) 185 of 2020,” Chingwaramusee said. “We will go through full council for adoption as the SI says all the water and rates bills will be sent to ratepayers who will choose whether to pay in United States dollars or local currency.” She said once the resolution is adopted, council would start sending water and rate bills in local and foreign currencies, respectively. Currently, there is no facility at the local authority for ratepayers to pay bills in foreign currency. Other municipalities have since adopted dual pricing as most businesses now prefer using US dollars ahead of the unstable local currency. But Gweru Residents and Ratepayers Association director Cornelia Selipiwe said the move was “ridiculous” as few people would want to part with hard currency given the huge disparity between the official and black market exchange rates. “All they want is to collect US dollars, but who would want to part with such currency given that the official rate is far below the black market rate,” Selipiwe said. “Council should have advocated for a liberal exchange rate which would attract people to pay in foreign currency.” He said the move to introduce dual pricing was being done without the input of relevant stakeholders.
Karen Gross, a former college president who once served as a senior policy advisor to the U.S. Department of Education, told BlackPressUSA that the election's impact on education would be profound across the early childhood – adult education pipeline.
Kenya has recorded 155 positive coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, bringing the total tally of confirmed cases to 4,952.
The cases were confirmed from 4,171 samples tested, bringing total samples tested in the country to 146,537, Health Chief Administrative Secretary Mercy Mwangangi announced.
All the new cases are Kenyans, Dr Mwangangi added.
Of the new cases, 120 are male while 35 are female.
Nairobi County has the highest number of new confirmed cases at 104 while Busia has 19, Migori 10, Mombasa nine, Uasin Gishu four, Kiambu three, Machakos two and Nakuru two.
Ede, Nigeria — Researchers at the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases (ACEGID), Redeemer's University, Ede, Nigeria, have begun a partnership with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and other research and public health partners, to implement a Sentinel project for an early warning system in Africa.
Led by Christian Happi and Pardis Sabeti, both researchers who have been studying infectious diseases together for two decades, the project aims to combine genomics with new information technologies in the detection and response to emerging viral threats in real-time.
But while it's clear that we are all very much behind the curve, this pandemic will hopefully prompt government leaders to take up new tools and technologies to combat COVID-19, and to prepare for future outbreaks,\" said Pardis Sabeti, Member, Broad Institute; Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University; and Professor, Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at Harvard Chan School of Public Health.
And in the third pillar, the project will empower public health experts by training thousands of healthcare professionals to use the sentinel tools and deploy the diagnostic technologies for population-level testing, building on previous experiences of ACEGID and the Broad Institute in training over 900 individuals from around the world.
The project partners will leverage their existing partnerships and cutting-edge genomics capacity and experience in containing diseases such as monkeypox, yellow fever, Ebola, Zika, and Lassa fever to pilot the project in West and Central Africa, and eventually scale up to other African countries and regions.
So, as the calendar turns to 2021, and many wish friends, family and associates, “Happy New Year!” we’ll place an overwhelming emphasis on the “New Year” portion of the sentiment.
The migrants, many of whom have been living and working in Kenya for years, have lost jobs and income due to movement restrictions and curfews and the general economic slowdown, all brought by the pandemic.
\"Migrants are some of the most vulnerable people in the region and their livelihoods have been and continue to be severely impacted by COVID-19,\" said Mohammed Abdiker, IOM Regional Director for East and Horn of Africa.
\"It is important that all partners including humanitarian agencies and governments work in tandem to alleviate the impact on these vulnerable people.\"
Many work in the informal sector, whose nature leaves migrants vulnerable to COVID-19's worst impacts.
We value the relationship that exists between our government and IOM,\" said Meles Alem, Ethiopian Ambassador to Kenya.
The National Bureau of Economic Research has released a study concluding the protests that followed the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery did not cause an increase in coronavirus infection rates.
Also, at around that time, the Ministry of Health was urging young people to do their part in fighting Covid-19, and that is how the idea of developing a no-contact hand washing station came to mind.
Coincidentally, the Smart Bin project was running a 10,000 bottle collection challenge so I encouraged my fellow club members to participate in the initiative.
Being the project's engineer, my role has been to design, implement and test the electronic system employed in the zero contact hand washing station.
I think the government should make such zero contact hand washing station available in all public areas, and provide refill services for soap, sanitiser and water to the systems.
My role in the hand washing project was to design the station builds, posters, flyers and other graphics related work.
Tanzania is still missing from the updated list despite Kenya insisting it has settled the diplomatic dispute arising from the earlier one.
A former Food and Drug Administration chief says there's little chance a coronavirus vaccine will be available this year.
The latest Consumer Price index (CPI) report shows some significant price hikes that will worry households as the festive season approaches.
www.blackdoctor.org Can I tell you a secret? I’m afraid to take the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available. There, I said it. I’m sure this revelation wasn’t news to you. Hell, it wasn’t even news to me because I don’t even take the flu vaccine. Yes, the CDC estimated the deaths related to the flu for 2019-20 […]
Opposition Spokesman on Finance Mark Golding has asserted that the banking sector has fallen short in facilitating COVID-19 relief payments from the Government, as it was reported yesterday that some beneficiaries faced significant hurdles in...
By FREIDA FRISARO and KELLI KENNEDY Associated Press FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Tropical Storm Eta was squatting off western Cuba on Tuesday after drifting away from South Florida, where it unleashed a deluge that flooded entire neighborhoods and filled some homes with rising water. The 28th named storm of a record hurricane season was the first this year to make landfall in Florida. And now a 29th named storm has formed over the northern Atlantic: Theta took shape Monday night, eclipsing the record set in 2005, when Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma struck the Gulf Coast. After striking Nicaragua […]
The post Florida cities mop up after deluge from Tropical Storm Eta appeared first on Black News Channel.
Despite a rapid rise in cases, Ramaphosa pushed to continue to ease lockdown restrictions this week.
\"Because South Africa acted very early, we imposed restrictions and the lockdown when we had only 402 cases,\" Karim told DW.
But despite seeing a resumption of normal economic activity, the spike in cases this month has accounted for a third of total cases in the country, Ramaphosa said.
South Africa has a total of 83,890 confirmed cases of coronavirus, with a total death toll of 1,737.
The country of 58 million people has significantly more cases than its neighbors, and the highest number of cases on the continent.
RIHANNA HAS donated 4,000 tablets to help children in Barbados continue their education outside the...
The post Rihanna donates 4,000 tablets to children in Barbados appeared first on Voice Online.
By STEVE MEGARGEE AP Sports Writer MILWAUKEE (AP) — A pair of Major League Baseball games were postponed Wednesday as players across the sports landscape reacted in the wake of the weekend shooting by police of Jacob Blake, a Black man, in Wisconsin. Games between the Cincinnati Reds and Brewers in Milwaukee and the Seattle Mariners and Padres in San Diego were called off hours before they were set to begin. Other MLB games had finished, were in progress or just about to start when the announcements were made. The baseball postponements came after the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks didn't come […]
The post Reds-Brews, M's-Padres games off in wake of Kenosha shooting appeared first on Black News Channel.
A report reveals African Americans and Latinos under-report scams to the Federal Trade Commission even though they experience fraud at higher rates.
[This Day] Abuja -- The federal government released the total sum of N63.8 billion for COVID-19 response for the period that covered between March and June 2020.
As a domestic worker, Amsale Hailemariam had an inside view of a richer lifestyle in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. But the coronavirus has cost the single mother even that meagre living, putting that world even further out of her reach.
Her income, she says, has evaporated:
\"Since the beginning of the coronavirus, there is no work.
\"We are staying at home and we've stopped going out so that we don't get infected.
\"We are living in a state where we are above the dead and below the living. This is not life.\"
Until the outbreak, her daughter, Bethlehem Jafar, was studying for a career in public health. She has been forced to put that aside for now.
Amsale says her hopes and dreams are tied up in her daughter:
\"So that she doesn't follow in my footsteps and go through what I went through, I worked hard singlehandedly to see her go to school and succeed.\"
For some, the name Ethiopia still conjures up decades-old images of famine and destitution.
But the last quarter of a century has seen a transformation in the East African nation that stands as one of the world's economic success stories.
Gayle Smith , Chief Executive Officer of the anti-poverty organisation ONE , says that Ethiopia, like many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, is heavily dependent on foreign investment. With the current COVID-related travel restrictions, that has all but come to a standstill.
She feels the country will inevitably lose ground:
\"A lot of the gains of the last 25 years are going to be wiped out.
\"They don't have the money they need to both respond to the pandemic, but also stop the bleeding from this sudden freeze in income in capital and revenue.\"
\"Bilateral debt service has been suspended through the end of this year, but it's not nearly enough.
\"We need to go through to 2021. We need the multilateral organisations and the private creditors to come on board.\"
More than 736 million people worldwide are already in extreme poverty, half of them in just five countries – Bangladesh, India and three African nations Congo, Nigeria and Ethiopia.
But because of the effects of COVID 19, the World Bank says up to 100 million more people could soon fall into extreme poverty defined as living on the equivalent of just 1 us dollar and 90 cents a day.
