Category: General

Luena – Ruling MPLA party’s vice president Luísa Damião Saturday in Luena (Moxico) recommended the party’s youth wing (JMPLA) more strategic and tactical-operational rigor.

Speaking at a rally, ahead of the second inter-provincial meeting (Moxico, Lunda Sul and Lunda Norte), held in Luena, Luísa Damião directed the JMPLA to continue and intensify the political work.

Political work, according to Luísa Damião, requires strategic and tactical-operational rigor.

As for the party’s women wing (OMA), the politician urged for speed up the mobilisation of women to support the leader, President João Lourenço.

The MPLA vice-president highlighted that the party has “an enormous potential of people who work day and night, talented women full of determination, resilient and competent young people, brave and victorious men, and, above all, militants committed to the values ​​and principles of the party and the leader, strongly rooted in the founding values ​​of the glorious MPLA”.

On Saturday, the MPLA vice-president paid tribute to King Mwene Mbandu III, sovereign of the Mbunda people, who died on 21 July last at the Moxico General Hospital (HGM), at 71 years of age, victim of illness.

 

 

Source: Angola Press News Agency

 

Catumbela – The leader of the main opposition UNITA party Adalberto Costa Júnior has urged for courage and national commitment to hold the country´s first municipal elections.

Angola has already approved eight laws of the Municipal Legislative Package, but the Parliament still need to schedule a diploma on the Institutionalisation of the Municipalities.

 

The leader of the main opposition in Angola was speaking during the celebration of the 87th anniversary of the party’s founding president, Jonas Savimbi,  held in coastal Benguela province on Saturday.

 

He said that local elections were crucial for the wellbeing of the Angolans, adding that it is necessary courage to meet this goal.

 

On the other hand, the politician regretted the fact of the Covid-19 pandemic to disrupt the fulfillment of strategic goals for the country, such as the municipal elections.

 

Local elections were initially scheduled for 2020, but the process did not take place due to the lack of conditions.

 

 

Source: Angola Press News Agency

 

U.S. employers added more than 940,000 jobs in July, the U.S. Labor Department reported Friday, beating analyst expectations and providing the latest sign the job market may be recovering from steep losses sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 943,000 jobs added last month topped the 850,000 from the previous month, despite a shortage of available workers.

July’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.4% from 5.9% the month before.

“While it is doubtless we will have ups and downs along the way as we continue to battle the delta surge of COVID, what is indisputable now is this: The Biden plan is working, the Biden plan is producing results and the Biden plan is moving the country forward,” said President Joe Biden at the White House Friday.

The president said his administration is the first in U.S. history to oversee an economy that added jobs “every single month in our first six months in office” and noted that “economic growth is the fastest in 40 years.”

The rollout of the coronavirus vaccine encouraged restaurants and other businesses to reopen after being forced to close for months after the pandemic began. But Biden warned there was more to be done not just on the economy, but also on fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

“Because of our success with the vaccination effort, this new delta variant wave of COVID-19 will be very different to deal with than the one that was underway when I took office,” Biden warned. “Yes, cases are going to go up before they come back down. This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

The prospects of a strong monthly jobs report were bolstered Thursday when the Labor Department reported that 385,000 jobless workers filed for compensation, down 14,000 from the revised figure of the week before.

The U.S. said a week ago that the economy expanded at a 6.5% annual rate of growth from April through June, a slightly faster pace than in the first three months of the year.

The size of the U.S. economy – nearly $23 trillion – now exceeds its pre-pandemic level as it recovers faster than many economists had predicted during the worst of the business closings more than a year ago.

But the surging delta variant of the coronavirus is threatening to impair business activity in some regions of the U.S. and, as a result, analysts say the economy could cool somewhat in coming months.

 

The second quarter growth was fueled by widespread business reopenings, vaccinations for millions of people and trillions of dollars of government pandemic aid that was sent to all but the wealthiest American families. Some economists and many Republican lawmakers have warned of inflation risks sparked by record-high government stimulus.

“Inflation is skyrocketing & Americans are paying higher prices after Dems’ wild spending spree earlier this year,” Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota tweeted earlier this week.

The number of weekly unemployment benefit claims has tracked unevenly in recent weeks, but overall has fallen by more than 40% since early April, while remaining well above the pre-pandemic levels.

About 9.5 million people remain unemployed in the U.S. and are looking for work. There also are 9.2 million job openings, the government says, although the skill sets of the jobless do not necessarily match the needs of employers.

Some employers are offering cash bonuses to new hires.

State governors and municipal officials across the U.S. have been ending coronavirus restrictions, in many cases allowing businesses for the first time in a year to completely reopen to customers. That could lead to more hiring of workers.

But the number of new coronavirus infections recorded each day has increased by tens of thousands in recent weeks and is still growing, especially in parts of the U.S. where millions of people have, for one reason or another, resisted getting vaccination shots.

The number of new vaccinations had been falling in the U.S. but now is increasing again as more people see others in their communities hospitalized from the virus and their lives endangered.

More than 60% of U.S. adults have now been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.

 

Source: Voice of America

 

 

The Vatican Museums began requiring visitors Friday to present a so-called Green Pass, a digital certificate proving they have been vaccinated, tested negative or recovered from COVID-19 using a digital or paper certificate.

The Green Pass is an extension of the European Union’s COVID-19 certificate, designed to make travel, as well as entry into certain venues, easier.

Early Friday, tourists could be seen waiting to enter the museums to have QR codes scanned. The pass can be downloaded as a smartphone app, and is available in a paper version.

The Vatican implemented its rules the same day the surrounding country of Italy implemented mandatory use of the pass to access places like bars and restaurants, gyms, theaters, museums, sporting events, and concerts.

France was the first EU nation to make proof of immunity mandatory to access a range of services and venues.

The Italian government announced Thursday it will widen the Green Pass requirement to all teachers, university students and long-distance transport beginning September 1.

 

Source: Voice of America

 

 

Apple has unveiled plans to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse, drawing applause from child protection groups but raising concern among some security researchers that the system could be misused, including by governments looking to surveil their citizens.

The tool designed to detect known images of child sexual abuse, called “neuralMatch,” will scan images before they are uploaded to iCloud. If it finds a match, a human will review the image. If child pornography is confirmed, the user’s account will be disabled and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children will be notified.

The system will not flag images not already in the center’s child pornography database. Parents snapping innocent photos of a child in the bath presumably need not worry. But researchers say the matching tool — which doesn’t “see” such images, just mathematical “fingerprints” that represent them — could be put to more nefarious purposes.

Matthew Green, a top cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, warned that the system could be used to frame innocent people by sending them seemingly innocuous images designed to trigger matches for child pornography. That could fool Apple’s algorithm and alert law enforcement. “Researchers have been able to do this pretty easily,” he said of the ability to trick such systems.

Technology ‘won’t say no’

Other abuses could include government surveillance of dissidents or protesters. “What happens when the Chinese government says, ‘Here is a list of files that we want you to scan for,’ ” Green asked. “Does Apple say no? I hope they say no, but their technology won’t say no.”

Tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and others have for years been sharing digital fingerprints of known child sexual abuse images. Apple has used those to scan user files stored in its iCloud service, which is not as securely encrypted as its on-device data, for child pornography.

Apple has been under government pressure for years to allow for increased surveillance of encrypted data. Coming up with the new security measures required Apple to perform a delicate balancing act between cracking down on the exploitation of children while keeping its high-profile commitment to protecting the privacy of its users.

The computer scientist who more than a decade ago invented PhotoDNA, the technology used by law enforcement to identify child pornography online, acknowledged the potential for abuse of Apple’s system but said it was far outweighed by the imperative of battling child sexual abuse.

 

“Is it possible? Of course. But is it something that I’m concerned about? No,” said Hany Farid, a researcher at the University of California-Berkeley, who argues that plenty of other programs designed to secure devices from various threats haven’t seen “this type of mission creep.” For example, WhatsApp provides users with end-to-end encryption to protect their privacy, but also employs a system for detecting malware and warning users not to click on harmful links.

Apple was one of the first major companies to embrace “end-to-end” encryption, in which messages are scrambled so that only their senders and recipients can read them. Law enforcement, however, has long pressured the company for access to that information in order to investigate crimes such as terrorism or child sexual exploitation.

Apple said the latest changes will roll out this year as part of updates to its operating software for iPhones, Macs and Apple Watches.

‘Game changer’

“Apple’s expanded protection for children is a game changer,” John Clark, the president and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said in a statement. “With so many people using Apple products, these new safety measures have lifesaving potential for children.”

Julia Cordua, the CEO of Thorn, said that Apple’s technology balances “the need for privacy with digital safety for children.” Thorn, a nonprofit founded by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, uses technology to help protect children from sexual abuse by identifying victims and working with tech platforms.

But in a blistering critique, the Washington-based nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology called on Apple to abandon the changes, which it said effectively destroy the company’s guarantee of “end-to-end encryption.” Scanning of messages for sexually explicit content on phones or computers effectively breaks the security, it said.

The organization also questioned Apple’s technology for differentiating between dangerous content and something as tame as art or a meme. Such technologies are notoriously error-prone, CDT said in an emailed statement. Apple denies that the changes amount to a backdoor that degrades its encryption. It says they are carefully considered innovations that do not disturb user privacy but rather strongly protect it.

Separately, Apple said its messaging app will use on-device machine learning to identify and blur sexually explicit photos on children’s phones and can also warn the parents of younger children via text message. It also said that its software would “intervene” when users try to search for topics related to child sexual abuse.

In order to receive the warnings about sexually explicit images on their children’s devices, parents will have to enroll their child’s phone. Kids over 13 can unenroll, meaning parents of teenagers won’t get notifications.

Apple said neither feature would compromise the security of private communications or notify police.

 

 

Source: Voice of America

 

The ticket window is open again for space flights at Virgin Galactic, with prices starting at $450,000 a seat.

The space-tourism company said Thursday it is making progress toward beginning revenue flights next year. It will sell single seats, package deals and entire flights.

Virgin Galactic announced the offerings as it reported Thursday that it lost $94 million in the second quarter on soaring costs for overhead and sales. The company posted revenue of $571,000, barely enough to cover one seat on a future flight.

The company’s most noteworthy recent achievement came last month, after the quarter ended, when founder Richard Branson and five crewmates soared to 86 kilometers (53.5 miles) above the New Mexico desert.

CEO Michael Colglazier said the company resumed sales on Thursday to take advantage of a surge in consumer interest after the flight by Branson, who beat rival billionaire Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin ship into space by nine days.

The company based in Las Cruces, New Mexico, won regulatory approval in June to fly people into space.

Virgin Galactic said “early hand-raisers” will get first priority to book seats, and another list will be created for new customers.

The company’s next spaceflight is scheduled for late September in New Mexico with the Italian air force.

Virgin Galactic said it ended the quarter with cash and equivalents totaling $552 million.

The results were released after the stock market closed. The company’s shares were up nearly 5% in after-hours trading.

 

 

Source: Voice of America

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA – South Africa’s Cape Town is struggling to cope with more than 38,000 active cases of COVID-19, making it the epicenter of the pandemic in Africa’s worst-hit country.

The provincial chairman of the Democratic Nursing Organization of South AfrIca, Elenor Roberts, said medical staff members were under immense pressure.

“As of now, the situation in our rural areas, it is dire,” because there are so many COVID patients who need attention and “so few staff to look after these patients,” Roberts said.

She said there were about 13,000 nurses in Western Cape province, far too few to handle the workload.

“Our members complained that they cannot take it,” Roberts said. “It is too much for them. There is not enough staff and there’s also not enough beds.” The result, she said, is that “they have to struggle to put the COVID patients away from the other patients.”

She said she thought the vaccination drive underway in the country was helping to some extent.

“I think the vaccinations in this case did help,” she said, but progress remained slow in Western Cape. As of last Thursday, she said, it was her understanding that less than 70 percent of nurses had been vaccinated, so “we are still are at a great risk.”

The province’s premier, Alan Winde, is due to give an update on the situation at a digital news briefing Thursday.

 

 

Source: Voice of America

 

 

MOSCOW – Space engineers will analyze whether a glitch that caused the International Space Station to spin out of its normal orientation could have impacted any of its systems, a Russian space official said Wednesday.

Sergei Krikalev, the director of crewed space programs at the Russian space corporation Roscosmos, emphasized that last week’s incident did not inflict any observable damage to the space station, but he said that experts would need to study its potential implications.

“It appears there is no damage,” Krikalev said in an interview broadcast by Russian state television. “But it’s up to specialists to assess how we have stressed the station and what the consequences are.”

NASA emphasized Wednesday that the station was operating normally and noted that the spin was within safety limits for its systems.

Thrusters on Russia’s Nauka laboratory module fired shortly after the module arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday, making the orbiting outpost slowly spin about one-and-a-half revolutions. Russia’s mission controllers fired thrusters on another Russian module and a Russian cargo ship attached to the space station to stop rotation and then push the station back to its normal position.

Both U.S. and Russian space officials said the station’s seven-person crew wasn’t in danger during the incident.

The station needs to be properly aligned to get the maximum power from solar panels and to maintain communications with space support teams back on Earth. The space station’s communications with ground controllers blipped out twice for a few minutes on Thursday.

NASA said in a tweet Tuesday that the station was 45 degrees out of alignment when Nauka‘s thrusters were still firing and the loss of control was discussed with the crew.

“Further analysis showed total attitude change before regaining normal attitude control was (about) 540 degrees,” NASA said.

On Wednesday, NASA noted that “continued analysis following last week’s event with unplanned thruster firings on Nauka has shown the space station remains in good shape with systems performing normally.”

“Most importantly, the maximum rate and acceleration of the attitude change did not approach safety limits for station systems and normal operations resumed once attitude control was regained,” it said.

Roscosmos’ Krikalev, a veteran of six space missions who spent a total of 803 days in orbit, noted Wednesday that firing orientation engines created a dynamic load on the station’s components, making a thorough analysis of whether some of them could be overstressed necessary.

“The station is a rather delicate structure, and both the Russian and the U.S. segments are built as light as possible,” he said. “An additional load stresses the drivers of solar batteries and the frames they are mounted on. Specialists will analyze the consequences. It is too early to talk about how serious it was, but it was an unforeseen situation that requires a detailed study.”

Krikalev said Nauka‘s engines fired because a glitch in the control system mistakenly assumed that the lab module hadn’t yet docked at the station and activated the thrusters to pull it away.

The launch of the 20-metric-ton module has been repeatedly delayed by technical problems. It was initially scheduled to go up in 2007, but funding problems pushed the launch back, and in 2013 experts found contamination in its fuel system, resulting in a long and costly replacement. Other Nauka systems also underwent modernization or repairs.

Nauka is the first new compartment for the Russian segment of the International Space Station since 2010, offering more space for scientific experiments and room for the crew. Russian crew members will have to conduct up to 11 spacewalks beginning in early September to prepare it for operation.

The space station is currently operated by NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur; Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov of Roscosmos; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

In 1998, Russia launched the station’s first compartment, Zarya, which was followed in 2000 by another big piece, Zvezda, and three smaller modules in the following years. The last of them, Rassvet, arrived at the station in 2010.

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America

 

NOAA-supported scientists on Tuesday reported that this year’s “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is larger than originally predicted, at more than 16,000-square kilometers, or about the surface area of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined.

NOAA forecasted in June that the hypoxic zone — an area with little to no oxygen to support marine life — would be 12,600 square kilometers, which would have been smaller than the five-year average. The actual size proved far larger.

The annual hypoxic zone survey was conducted aboard the R/V Pelican research vessel from July 25 to August 1 by scientists from Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

The researchers gathered data on the dead zone’s location, as well as oxygen and salinity levels. This evidence is vital for NOAA to refine its models and study how to decrease the size of the hypoxic area.

 

The dead zone’s expansion is believed to be driven by pollutant runoff from farms and cities contaminating the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico and stimulates oxygen-consuming algae growth. NOAA aims to minimize the loss of habitat caused by the phenomenon for living resources like commercially harvested fish and diminish the hypoxic zone’s influence on local economies.

The Interagency Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force utilizes the survey’s data to evaluate nutrient runoff and create solutions to lessen contaminants in the watershed. The Hypoxia Task Force collaborates with local farmers and corporations to execute water quality projects.

“Our nation’s farmers provide the food, the fuel, the fiber, that sustains our families, that sustain our nation, and they are true leaders in environmental stewardship and water management,” said Radhika Fox, co-chair of the Hypoxia Task Force.

Government investments assist in the task force’s goal of reducing the dead zone, like the USDA’s $38 million contribution to small watersheds, and Section 319 of the Clean Water Act that provides grants to professionals who seek to mitigate waterway pollutants.

According to Nancy Rabalais of Louisiana State University and principal investigator of the survey, the effects of climate change could alter the dead zone. Rabalais stated that rising temperatures and greater precipitation will increase the Gulf’s “stratification, or the layering of the surface layer over the bottom layer, making that difference much stronger and preventing oxygen from the surface getting back down to the bottom.”

Forecasting methods used by NOAA to measure the hypoxic zone may be impacted by climate change because of their reliance on average coastal weather conditions. Current practices may require adaptation as ocean temperatures rise and extreme weather events increase.

 

 

Source: Voice of America

 

 

WHITE HOUSE – Calling it a major milestone, U.S. President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday that the country has shipped more than 110 million doses of coronavirus vaccine to 65 nations that are among the hardest hit in the world.

“This is more than the donations of all 24 countries that donate any vaccine to other countries, including China and Russia,” Biden said during remarks in the White House East Room.

The president emphasized that Washington is making no demands for its donations of doses.

“And there’s no favoritism and no strings attached. We’re doing this to save lives to end this pandemic,” Biden said.

 

In response to a question from VOA on whether other high-income countries should follow the lead of the United States, the president replied: “I think those countries that have been able to cover their population and have the ability to provide either dollars and/or vaccines for the 100 or so net-poor nations that need help should do so.”

Biden added that some Group of 7 countries, which made such pledges at their recent summit in England, have followed through.

“We’ve kept the commitment that we would do what we said, which is more than all the rest of the countries combined this far,” the president noted.

Tom Hart, acting chief executive officer of the ONE campaign, a global organization fighting extreme poverty and preventable disease, agreed with Biden’s call for other prosperous countries to do more.

 

“The U.S. is leading the global COVID-19 fight, but the rest of the world must step up to the plate and match the Biden administration’s ambition and action. With COVID-19 raging globally and new variants emerging constantly, wealthy countries face a clear choice: Share more doses and shorten the pandemic or continue to hoard doses and prolong COVID-19 indefinitely,” Hart said in a statement.

A September summit that the U.S. president plans to host “must be a turning point, with new, additional commitments to get vaccines to everyone and address the devastating economic impact of COVID-19. Everyone is on the hook to deliver,” Hart added.

“The Biden administration’s efforts to share excess vaccine doses with other countries will save lives and help end the pandemic faster in the U.S. and around the world,” Sean Simons, press secretary for the ONE Campaign, told VOA. “We won’t end this pandemic anywhere unless we beat it everywhere.”

 

Most of the U.S. vaccine doses have been shipped through the World Health Organization-managed COVAX cooperative, as well as through regional partnerships such as the African Union and Caribbean Community.

Biden said that his administration has fulfilled its pledge to give at least 80 million vaccine doses to other nations around the globe and that they are a down payment on hundreds of millions of more doses that the United States will deliver in the coming weeks.

“Starting at the end of this month, the administration will begin shipping a half a billion Pfizer doses that the United States has pledged to purchase and donate to 100 low-income countries in need,” according to a White House statement.

The president’s announcement comes amid an increase in infections in the United States and around the world, fueled by the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus.

During the past month, average daily new cases of COVID-19 in the United States have surged above 85,000. That is higher than the peak seen last summer and is at a level not seen since mid-February of this year.

Biden, in his Tuesday remarks, criticized moves by some U.S. states to forbid mask mandates.

“As of now, seven states not only ban mask mandates but also ban them in their school districts, even for young children who cannot get vaccinated,” the president noted. “Some states have even banned businesses and universities from requiring workers and students to be masked or vaccinated.”

Biden called such edicts disappointing and said if governors “aren’t willing to do the right thing to beat this pandemic, then they should allow businesses and universities who want to do the right thing to be able to do it.”

The president repeated his appeal for governors to help, “but if you aren’t going to help, at least get out of the way. The people are trying to do the right thing. Use your power to save lives.”

Governors opposing mask mandates say it should be a matter of individual choice. They also claim such mandates are not enforceable nor do they encourage more people to be vaccinated.

 

 

 

Source: Voice of America