Angola News Wire

Jurors at a civil trial found Tuesday that Bill Cosby sexually abused a 16-year-old girl at the Playboy Mansion in 1975.

The Los Angeles County jury delivered the verdict in favor of Judy Huth, who is now 64, and awarded her $500,000.

Jurors found that Cosby intentionally caused harmful sexual contact with Huth, that he reasonably believed she was under 18, and that his conduct was driven by unnatural or abnormal sexual interest in a minor.

The jurors’ decision is a major legal defeat for the 84-year-old entertainer once hailed as “America’s Dad.” It comes nearly a year after his Pennsylvania criminal conviction for sexual assault was thrown out, and he was freed from prison. Huth’s lawsuit was one of the last remaining legal claims against him after his insurer settled many others against his will.

Cosby did not attend the trial or testify in person, but short clips from a 2015 video deposition were played for jurors in which he denied any sexual contact with Huth. He continues to deny the allegation through his attorney and publicist.

Jurors had already reached conclusions on nearly every question on their verdict form, including whether Cosby abused Huth and whether she deserved damages, after two days of deliberations on Friday. But the jury foreperson could not serve further because of a personal commitment, and the panel had to start deliberating from scratch with an alternate juror on Monday.

Cosby’s attorneys agreed that Cosby met Huth and her high school friend on a Southern California film set in April of 1975, then took them to the Playboy Mansion a few days later.

Huth’s friend Donna Samuelson, a key witness, took photos at the mansion of Huth and Cosby, which loomed large at the trial.

Huth testified that in a bedroom adjacent to a game room where the three had been hanging out, Cosby attempted to put his hand down her pants, then exposed himself and forced her to perform a sex act.

Huth filed her lawsuit in 2014, saying that her son turning 15 — the age she initially remembered being when she went to the mansion — and a wave of other women accusing Cosby of similar acts brought fresh trauma over what she had been through as a teenager.

Huth’s attorney, Nathan Goldberg, told the jury of nine women and three men during closing arguments Wednesday that “my client deserves to have Mr. Cosby held accountable for what he did.”

“Each of you knows in your heart that Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted Miss Huth,” Goldberg said.

A majority of jurors apparently agreed, giving Huth a victory in a suit that took eight years and overcame many hurdles just to get to trial.

During their testimony, Cosby attorney Jennifer Bonjean consistently challenged Huth and Samuelson over errors in detail in their stories, and a similarity in the accounts that the lawyer said represented coordination between the two women.

This included the women saying in pre-trial depositions and police interviews that Samuelson had played Donkey Kong that day, a game not released until six years later.

Bonjean made much of this, in what both sides came to call the “Donkey Kong defense.”

Goldberg asked jurors to look past the small errors in detail that he said were inevitable in stories that were 45 years old and focus on the major issues behind the allegations. He pointed out to jurors that Samuelson said “games like Donkey Kong” when she first mentioned it in her deposition.

The Cosby lawyer began her closing arguments by saying, “It’s on like Donkey Kong,” and finished by declaring, “Game over.”

Huth’s attorney reacted with outrage during his rebuttal.

Source: Voice of America

U.S. hospitals, clinics and pharmacies began vaccinating the nation’s youngest children against COVID-19 on Tuesday, a milestone that was welcomed by parents eager to protect kids from the worst impacts of the virus.

Rollout of millions of shots was underway across the country, 18 months after the elderly became the first group eligible for immunization.

Children age 6 months through 4 years aren’t at as great a risk as adults.

But the sheer level of infections has seen more than 45,000 hospitalizations and nearly 500 deaths in the newborn to 4-years-old group in America since the start of the pandemic, outcomes that vaccination could have prevented in many cases.

“We’re super thrilled,” said Amisha Vakil, mother of two 3-year-old boys who wore matching Spider-Man T-shirts as they got their Moderna shots at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

One of the twins had three open heart surgeries within his first five months.

“He’s super high risk so you know, we’ve been living in a little bubble,” Vakil said. “Now he has little armor that helps a lot.”

Monumental step

The moment was also hailed by President Joe Biden, whose administration made 10 million shots of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines available to states after they were authorized last week.

“The United States is now the first country in the world to offer safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6-months-old,” said Biden, calling it a “monumental step forward.”

A handful of other countries and territories including Argentina, Bahrain, Chile, China, Cuba, Hong Kong and Venezuela were previously offering COVID shots for toddlers, but these did not include mRNA vaccines, regarded as the leading technology for the purpose.

The European Medicines Agency is reviewing the Moderna vaccine for use in those younger than 6 and could follow the U.S. decision.

Born in pandemic

Many children being brought in Tuesday were born after the pandemic started and had only known a life of restrictions.

Anna Farrow, who came to the same hospital with her husband, Luke, said she saw a new start for their son, George, age 3, and Hope, age 10 months.

“This is sort of the beginning of a regular childhood. And we’re very excited about that,” she said.

On the other side of the country in Needham, Massachusetts, Ellen Dietrick, an administrator at Temple Beth Shalom was preparing to welcome 300 children on the first day.

Daniel Grieneisen, the father of a 3-year-old girl who got the vaccine, said: “It means that we are now just a couple weeks from being able to take her [to] indoors places, and kind of get back to living our lives, it’s pretty exciting.”

Last week, a panel of experts called by the Food and Drug Administration reviewed data from clinical trials involving thousands of children that were conducted by Pfizer and Moderna and deemed both vaccines safe and effective.

However, a survey carried out by the Kaiser Family Foundation in May found only one in five parents of children younger than 5 were eager to get them vaccinated right away. A slightly higher proportion, 38%, said they would wait and see how well the vaccine worked for others.

New Yorker Rita Saeed, 29, said she was concerned about side effects and planned to wait a couple of years before deciding whether to vaccinate her 2-year-old son.

“Each to their own, I think it should be optional, not mandatory,” she said, pushing her son in a stroller through Central Park.

Hal Moore, a 32-year-old teacher who lives in New York City, said he was “definitely relieved” that he will be able to vaccinate his 10-month-old daughter Lucy, but “we’ll probably wait until her next normal appointment to get it.”

In a sign of the ongoing politicization surrounding vaccines in America, Florida governor and possible Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis refused to place an order with the federal government for vaccines for the youngest children, leaving private practices and parents to fend for themselves.

“These are the people who have zero risk of getting anything,” he said at a press conference last week.

Source: Voice of America

Luanda – Angola stressed Tuesday its permanent commitment to providing assistance and social inclusion of the victims of explosive devices in the country.

Angola reassured its commitment during the discussions held on the sidelines of the 20th Meeting of the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction.

It is usually referred to as the Ottawa Convention or the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty, held in Geneva, Switzerland.

During the Tuesday’s session, the Director-General of the National Mine Action Agency (ANAM), Leonardo Sapalo, highlighted the efforts and commitments undertaken by the Angola.

He mentioning the expansion of Luanda’s Viana Rehabilitation Centre and the social inclusion of the victims of explosive devices in the Paralympic football team.

Leonardo Sapalo said the programme carried out by the Angolan government, which improves and guarantees the rights of the victims of explosive devices and the welfare of their families defines the responsibilities of ANAM and the others benefiting from the some assistance.

The government’s agenda, Sapalo said, includes the drafting of a national standard for assistance to victims, the construction and expansion of health units equipped with physiotherapy and rehabilitation services.

It (agenda) also covers the implementation of public and private programmes for victims of explosive devices to combat hunger and poverty, increase economic inclusion services via entrepreneurship and improvement of social security policies.

Leonardo Sapalo announced the main priorities for the implementation of assistance to victims.

According to him, assistance includes the collection of data from victims in the country’s 18 provinces, the use of the IMSMA v3.0 tool from October 2002, an interface that uses the geographical information system, institutional capacity building, and sharing of information on a regular basis among stakeholders with data by gender, age, and disability.

The list of priorities covers the availability of funds for social inclusion, the revival of physical rehabilitation, efforts by the state, non-exclusion of access to services and participation, the creation of network of women victims of mine, the involvement of organizations of women and children with disabilities inside victims’ assistance operators and social inclusion of women victims of explosive devices.

Sapalo pointed out the existence of challenges and obstacles that need to be overcome: the elaboration of a national plan and its effective implementation, engagement of all partners, institutional capacity building of the ANAM, mobilisation of financial resources and the understanding of the real situation of victims through data collection.

The official also recognized the need to expand the intervention regarding assistance to victims in an isolated manner, mitigate the divergence in the definition of sectoral priorities coupled with the availability of funds, improve financial capacity and working means of the governing body, which must receive particular attention from the State and international partners.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Luanda – The governor of the Central Bank of Angola (BNA), José de Lima Massano, considers that the country has made remarkable progress in its financial system, after leaving the black and grey lists of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

“We evolved in the year 2016, we definitively left this list. We came out of the black list, we went through the grey list and we are out,” said José de Lima Massano, during the 105th session of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), held in Huila on 31 May this year.

Answering local journalists, at the time, about the coming to Angola of the team from the Group for the Prevention of Money Laundering in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESSAMLG), he said that it was a path that the country had been following since 2010, a period in which the country was blocked for being part of a list of countries that were considered to be non-cooperating.

“We want to remain outside those lists. The work is permanent and the rules are changed and some are determined by the FATF itself, which regulates these matters and others are from initiatives from our own authorities, including the National Bank of Angola itself,” said the governor of the Central Bank.

Speaking about the financial system, he said it was noticeable that nowadays the banks were asking more questions and wanted to know where the money came from, to ensure that what was determined from a normative point of view, in terms of effectiveness, was also a reality.

In this field, he said that progress has been made, looking at the work that must continue to be done since “there is still room for improvement and to always do a little more, in the scope of these matters”.

In this regard, he said he wanted to rely a little more on the entities that are not supervised by the BNA, for whom the assessment being made is really about the country and not just the financial system.

“With regard only to the financial system, the work we have done gives us the comfort that we are on the right track,” he reiterated.

He added there is, likewise, work to raise awareness of the people who connect with the transactions that take place either within or outside the financial system.

“The concern is not only that there is an act of laundering of the financial system, but also the origin of those transactions,” he stressed.

The mutual assessment of the financial system by the team from the ESAAMLG – the FATF branch, will take place in Angola from 27 June to 15 July, this year, with the delegation’s visit scheduled for Thursday, 23 July.

The assessment will be of compliance and effectiveness, following the provision of laws and regulations that drive the Angolan financial system.

The results of the assessments will be known in the first quarter of 2023, in a plenary to be held in Arusha, Tanzania.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Luanda – Angola’s main opposition party, UNITA, submitted Tuesday afternoon to the Constitutional Court (TC) its candidacy for participation in the general elections scheduled for 24 August, this year.

The party submitted a list containing 355 candidates for members of parliament.

This figure corresponds to 130 permanent candidates and 45 substitutes, for the national constituency, plus 90 permanent candidates and 45 substitutes for the 18 provinces of the country.

The list is led by Adalberto Costa Júnior as candidate for the Presidency of the Republic and Abel Chivukuvuku for the vice-Presidency.

According to the secretary-general of the party, Álvaro Daniel, the candidacy is backed by over 20,000 supporters who provided their signatures and necessary documentation.

This is the fourth political party to present its candidacy to the TC, less than four days before the end of the process that started on 6th June.

However, with 51 seats in the outgoing parliament, UNITA joins MPLA, the majority party with 150 deputies, and CASA-CE electoral coalition, the second largest political party in the opposition with 16 seats.

The National Patriotic Alliance (APN), a party with no seats in parliament, is also part of the group of political parties that have already submitted their candidacy to the TC for the August ballot.

There are roughly 14.39 million voters to cast their ballots, 22,560 of which will be abroad, where voting will take place for the first time in the country’s history.

The overseas vote will take place in 12 countries and 26 cities, whereby in the African continent the countries are South Africa (Pretoria, Cape Town and Johannesburg), Namibia (Windhoek, Oshakati and Rundu), the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and Matadi), Republic of Congo (Brazzaville, Dolisie and Ponta Negra) and Zambia (Lusaka, Mongu, Kolwezi).

Voting will also be open to the Angolan diaspora in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, Brasília and São Paulo), Germany (Berlin), Belgium (Brussels), France (Paris), United Kingdom (London), Portugal (Lisbon, Porto) and the Netherlands (Rotterdam).

UNITA was founded in 1966 by Jonas Savimbi and António da Costa Fernandes as a liberation movement, before becoming an armed rebellion after national independence in 1975.

With the signing of the Bicesse Peace Accords on May 31, 1991, which put an end to the one-party system then in effect in the country, UNITA was transformed into a political party.

The party is currently led by Adalberto Costa Júnior, former leader of the Parliamentary Bench (whip), who is running for the Presidency of Angola.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Viana – The opposition FNLA is to present this Wednesday its candidacy to run for the general elections to take place on August 24 this year, announced today in the municipality of Viana, in Luanda, the president of the party, Nimi A Simbi.

The statement was made during a meeting of the party’s Central Committee that approved the list of candidates.

The politician stressed that to formalize this process, the organisation will submit to the Constitutional Court (TC) more than 20,000 signatures of supporters and 221 aspiring MPs.

The president of the party recognised that it was difficult to select the aspiring members of parliament, due to the prolongued crisis that FNLA fhas aced.

However, in the fourth general elections of 2017, the party founded by Holden Roberto only won one seat in the National Assembly (parliament).

So far, MPLA (majority party), which holds 150 seats in parliament, the electoral coalition CASA-CE, second largest political force in the opposition with 16 deputies, the National Patriotic Alliance (APN), a party with no parliamentary seats and the main opposition party, UNITA, submitted their candidacies.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Luanda – At least 54 projects from the total of 329 credits approved count on an effective disbursement estimated at 950 billion kwanzas made available under the Programme for Production Support, Export Diversification and Import Substitution (PRODESI), the secretary of State for Economy, Dalva Ringote, said Tuesday.

According to the data disclosed by the state Secretary for Economy, at least 2.2 billion kwanzas were made available by the Development Bank of Angola (BDA), which implements the Credit Support Project (PAC).

Speaking at the usual briefing of the Ministry of Economy and Planning (MEP), the official said, since the implementation of the PAC financing instrument began at least 329 projects were approved in the past few weeks, representing 107 more in relation to those approved earlier.

The beneficiaries of the projects approved and financial disbursement were the provinces of Luanda (22), Bengo (5), Huíla (5), Huambo (3), Cunene (3), Uíge (2).

The provinces of Bié, Cunene, Namibe,Malanje, Kwanza Sul and Uige had three projects approved each, while Moxico, Kwanza Norte, Benguela and Cabinda had one each.

The funding was channelled to projects linked to the sectors of manufacturing (5), agriculture (26), fisheries (6), solid urban waste (5), livestock (2) and tourism (2), among others.

Overall, the financing instruments supporting PRODESI paid out a total of 1,397 projects.

The Production Support Programme, Export Diversification and Import Substitution – PRODESI is a government initiative aimed to accelerate national production and generate wealth.

First stage of PREI concluded

In relation to the Programme for the Reconversion of the Informal Economy (PREI), Dalva Ringote said the first cycle of registration and formalization of informal operators (among market vendors and liberal professionals) in the country has ended.

The first cycle of PREI covered municipalities of the country’s 18 provinces and allowed the global formalization of 205,000 entrepreneurs, mostly women (75%) between 15 and 45 years old.

Dalva Ringote did not disclose the data for the beginning of the second cycle, which may include other municipalities, in a total of 164 nationwide.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Luanda – Angolan handball player Isabel Guialo signed, this Tuesday, a contract valid for one season, with the Rapid Bucharest team, champions of Romania.

Coming from 1° de Agosto, the central midfielder, Isabel Guialo, was born on April 8, 1990 (32 years old).

She started at Sport Aviação (ASA), played for Petro Atlético de Luanda and then moved to the “military” club.

She was playing for the Kisvárdai Kézilabda Club in Hungary in 2018. A few years earlier, in 2007, she was part of the Rest of the World national team.

For Petro, she won two Champion Club Cups (2012-2013), while for D`Agosto she has five National Championships (2013, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2019), three Champion Club Cups, three Babacar Fall Cups, a Cup of Cups and a World Club Championship in 2019.

She was voted the most valuable player (MVP) of the National Senior Championship in 2017 and, in the same year, repeated the feat at the World Championship held in Germany.

This is the third Angolan athlete to evolve in that European club, which already has the competition of the midfielder Azenaide Carlos, at the end of her contract, and it is thought that she will play for a club in Turkey.

Source: Angola Press News Agency