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Tuesday 03rd of November 2020
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NEW: In Hunt for Virus Source, @WHO Let China Take Charge - Nine months and more than 1.1 million deaths later, there is still no transparent, independent investigation into the source of the virus @nytimes @selamgkidan @mattapuzzo @HernandezJavier Misc. |
As it praised Beijing, the World Health Organization concealed concessions to China and may have sacrificed the best chance to unravel the virus’s origins. Now it’s a favorite Trump attack line.
GENEVA — On a cold weekend in mid-February, when the world still harbored false hope that the new coronavirus could be contained, a World Health Organization team arrived in Beijing to study the outbreak and investigate a critical question: How did the virus jump from animals to humans?
At that point, there were only three confirmed deaths from Covid-19 outside China and scientists hoped that finding an animal source for the coronavirus would unlock clues about how to stop it, treat it and prevent similar outbreaks.
“If we don’t know the source then we’re equally vulnerable in the future to a similar outbreak,” Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergency director, had said that week in Geneva. “Understanding that source is a very important next step.”
What the team members did not know was that they would not be allowed to investigate the source at all.
Despite Dr. Ryan’s pronouncements, and over the advice of its emergency committee, the organization’s leadership had quietly negotiated terms that sidelined its own experts.
They would not question China’s initial response or even visit the live-animal market in the city of Wuhan where the outbreak seemed to have originated.
Nine months and more than 1.1 million deaths later, there is still no transparent, independent investigation into the source of the virus.
Notoriously allergic to outside scrutiny, China has impeded the effort, while leaders of the World Health Organization, if privately frustrated, have largely ceded control, even as the Trump administration has fumed.
From the earliest days of the outbreak, the World Health Organization — the only public health body with a global remit — has been both indispensable and impotent.
The Geneva-based agency has delivered key information about testing, treatment and vaccine science. When the Trump administration decided to develop its own test kits, rather than rely on the W.H.O. blueprint, the botched result led to delays.
At the same time, the health organization pushed misleading and contradictory information about the risk of spread from symptomless carriers.
Its experts were slow to accept that the virus could be airborne. Top health officials encouraged travel as usual, advice that was based on politics and economics, not science.
The W.H.O.’s staunchest defenders note that, by the nature of its constitution, it is beholden to the countries that finance it.
And it is hardly the only international body bending to China’s might. But even many of its supporters have been frustrated by the organization’s secrecy, its public praise for China and its quiet concessions.
Those decisions have indirectly helped Beijing to whitewash its early failures in handling the outbreak.
Now, as a new Covid-19 wave engulfs Europe and the United States, the organization is in the middle of a geopolitical standoff.
China’s authoritarian leaders want to constrain the organization; President Trump, who formally withdrew the United States from the body in July, now seems intent on destroying it; and European leaders are scrambling to reform and empower it.
The search for the virus’s origins is a study in the compromises the W.H.O. has made.
On the surface, an investigation into the virus’s origin is progressing. Beijing recently approved a list of outside investigators. But in return, the health organization has agreed that key parts of the inquiry — about the first patients in China and the market’s role in the outbreak — will be led by Chinese scientists, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
The documents, which have never been made public, show that W.H.O. experts will review and “augment, rather than duplicate,” studies undertaken by China.
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They now turn to rule over the people by means of what could be dubbed “big data totalitarianism” and “WeChat terror.” @ChinaFile #COVID19 Xu Zhangrun Law & Politics |
To put it another way, a breakthrough originating from the periphery may augur once more [as it did in the 1890s, the 1910s, the 1940s and again in the 1980s] a moment that favors a push towards meaningful constitutional and legal rule in China.
That‘s right, we, We the People, for [as I have previously said] how can we let ourselves ―survive no better than swine; fawn upon the power-holders like curs; and live in vile filth like maggots‖?!
As I write these words I reflect on my own situation which also dramatically changed in 2018 [when the author published his famous anti-Xi Jeremiad]. For having raised my voice then, I was punished for ―speech crimes.‖
Thereafter, I was suspended from my job as a university lecturer and cashiered as a professor, reduced to a minor academic rank. I was placed under investigation by my employer, Tsinghua University; my freedoms have been curtailed ever since.
Writing as I do herein, I can now all too easily predict that I will be subjected to new punishments; indeed, this may well even be the last piece I write. But that is not for me to say.
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However, after sequencing the full genome for RaTG13 the lab’s sample of the virus disintegrated, he said. “I think they tried to culture it but they were unable to, so that sample, I think, has gone.” Misc. |
According to Daszak, the mine sample had been stored in Wuhan for six years. Its scientists “went back to that sample in 2020,
in early January or maybe even at the end of last year, I don’t know. They tried to get full genome sequencing, which is important to find out the whole diversity of the viral genome.”
However, after sequencing the full genome for RaTG13 the lab’s sample of the virus disintegrated, he said. “I think they tried to culture it but they were unable to, so that sample, I think, has gone.”
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Election observers cite low turnout in Ivory Coast poll @AP Law & Politics |
Election observers in Ivory Coast said Monday that voter turnout was “extremely low” in parts of the country after leading opposition candidates called for a boycott to protest President Alassane Ouattara’s bid for a controversial third term.
Tensions surrounding the vote have raised fears of post-election violence in the West African country, where more than 3,000 people died in 2010-2011 when then-President Laurent Gbagbo refused to concede defeat to Ouattara.
The opposition says more than 30 people died over the weekend.
The Independent Election Commission so far has only released results from Saturday’s presidential election in 26 of the country’s 108 departments, all Ouattara strongholds that were won by the president as expected.
The opposition coalition, however, has asserted that only 10% of Ivorians cast ballots, without citing its source.
Election officials have yet to release a nationwide voter turnout rate though more provisional results were expected later Monday.
“A significant portion of the population did not vote,” an observer mission from The Carter Center and Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa said Monday.
“These problems threaten public acceptance of the results and the country’s cohesion,” the Carter Center’s mission said in a statement.
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Mohammed Melehi Casa 1970 @Tate Africa |
The title of the painting Casa is a common shortening for the city of Casablanca in the artist’s native Morocco. It can be read as an abstracted cityscape, informed by Melehi’s nomadic lifestyle which saw him travelling from Marrakech to Rome, Paris and New York. In the 1960s, during his stay in New York, he had already worked on a series of paintings with titles like New York, Above Manhattan and Sleeping Manhattan that set up a dialogue with the work of American painters such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Nolan and Jules Olitski (whom Melehi met in the early 1960s when the American artist exhibited in Rome at Topazia Alliata Gallery, run by the mother of Melehi’s then wife, Toni Maraini).
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East African Portland Cement Company N.S.E Equities - Industrial & Allied |
Par Value: 5/-
Closing Price: 16.00
Total Shares Issued: 90000000.00
Market Capitalization: 1,440,000,000
EPS: -30.77
PE:
A key provider of Cement and Cement products in Kenya for over 70 years.
Full Year Results through 30th June 2020
Full Year Revenue 2.474902b versus 2.847273b
Full Year Cost of Sales [3.300350b] versus [4.052555b]
Full Year Gross Profit [Loss] [825.448m] versus [1.205282b]
Full Year Other Operating Income 198.864m versus 1.691487b
Full Year Administration and Selling Expenses [2.501957b] versus [2.548586b]
Full Year Loss from Operating Activities [3.128541b] versus [2.062381b]
Fair Value Gain/[Loss] on Investment Property 1.114779b versus [233.204m]
FY Finance Costs [786.304m] versus [691.588m]
FY Loss Before Tax [2.798610b] versus [2.961898b]
FY Loss After tax [2.769610b] versus [3.361868b]
FY EPS [30.77] versus [37.35]
Conclusions
The Balance Sheet needs to be restructured
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