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guest column:Admire Dube The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was established in 2018 with the aim to create a single market for goods and services, facilitated by movement of people to deepen the economic integration of the continent, under the Pan African Vision of “An integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa.” Consolidating Africa into one trade area provides great opportunities for entrepreneurs, businesses and consumers across the continent and ultimately countries, which boosts chances to support sustainable development in the world’s least developed region. With the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic exponentially increasing the challenges of a continent already ravaged by socio-economic ills, AfCFTA offers great potential to not only offer economic mitigations against the pandemic, but also speedily extricate African nations from regression and to a path of self-betterment. 2019 statistics show that Africa’s population stood at 1,3 billion with a combined nominal GDP of US$2,58 trillion and a healthy 3,7% growth rate. This stood firmly abreast of fellow rising economies like India with the exact same population count and a GDP of US$3,2 trillion and Brazil with its nominal GDP of US$2 trillion. However, in 2020 the pandemic took a toll on African lives and economies as economic activity declined by a projected 3,3%, confirming the region’s first recession in 25 years. The substantial downturn in economic activity cost the region at least US$115 billion this year, in part caused by depressed domestic consumption and competition as investments were divested to measures for mitigating the spread of the coronavirus. This situation could also push up to approximately 40 million people into extreme poverty erasing at least five years of progress in fighting poverty. Similarly, COVID-19 could set back progress in building human capital, as school closures continue to affect nearly 253 million students, potentially causing losses in learning which does not bode well for the continent’s future. The full implementation of the AfCFTA will certainly stem a downward trajectory by progressively eliminating tariffs on intra-African trade, making it easier for African businesses to trade within the continent and benefit from the growing African market. Africa, being a diverse continent fragmented into 54 States which are organised into trade blocs and associations under the African Union as members, will necessarily morph into a single business entity, or as close to one as anyone can hope for such a heterogeneous cocktail of diverse people. COVID-19 aside, the continent already faced a myriad of social, economic, and political challenges weakening current African trading blocs and their ability to promote integration and intra-trade among each other. The share of intra-African exports among constituent countries (trade among each other) as a percentage of total exports out of the African continent was still a miniscule 17% as at 2017, which remains low compared to levels in Europe (69%), Asia (59%), and North A
In May, Burundi held a presidential election which was won by Evariste Ndayishimiye, candidate of the ruling National Council for the Defense of Democracy - Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD-FDD) party.
Ndayishimiye was hurriedly sworn in after the untimely death of president Pierre Nkurunziza in June.
Rights violations continue
The Council encouraged donor countries which had suspended aid to Burundi to continue dialogue towards resumption of development assistance.
A report by a UN watchdog in September said human rights violations were still being committed in Burundi, including sexual violence and murder.
The country was plunged into a crisis in April 2015 when Ndayishimiye’s predecessor Pierre Nkurunziza decided to run for a controversial third term, which he ultimately won in July 2015.
His candidature, which was opposed by the opposition and civil society groups, resulted in a wave of protests, violence and even a failed coup in May 2015.
Hundreds of people were killed and over 300,000 fled to neighboring countries.
Just weeks before election day in the US, with millions of people voting already, the black vote is being attacked from every angle.
The package, though far less than the CARES Act, includes much-needed relief for businesses and individuals, as well as resources for COVID-19 vaccination.
Source
[Dalsan Radio] An Ethiopian delegation led by Finance minister Ahmed Shide has visited Hargeisa the capital of the self-declared state of Somaliland to discuss bilateral relations on Wednesday.
NEW YORK, United States - For the fir st time in nearly 50 years, older workers face higher unemployment than their mid-career worker counterparts, according to a study released yesterday by the New School university in New York City.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Courts unanimous (9–0) decision stated that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the Civil Rights Movement,[1] and a model for many future impact litigation cases.[2] However, the decisions fourteen pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Courts second decision in Brown II, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) only ordered states to desegregate with all deliberate speed.
For much of the sixty years preceding the Brown case, race relations in the United States had been dominated by racial segregation. This policy had been endorsed in 1896 by the United States Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were equal, segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment (no State shall ... deny to any person ... the equal protection of the laws).
The plaintiffs in Brown asserted that this system of racial separation, while masquerading as providing separate but equal treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans. Racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states that required racial segregation to the 16 in which it was prohibited. Brown was influenced by UNESCOs 1950 Statement, signed by a wide variety of internationally renowned scholars,
[The Conversation Africa] The results of the latest regional and local government elections in Namibia show just how much the political landscape has changed in the country since independence from South Africa in 1990.
Martin Luther King, Jr. , original name Michael King, Jr. (born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee), Baptist minister and social activist who led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. His leadership was fundamental to that movement’s success in ending the legal segregation of African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States. King rose to national prominence as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which promoted nonviolent tactics, such as the massive March on Washington (1963), to achieve civil rights. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
King came from a comfortable middle-class family steeped in the tradition of the Southern black ministry: both his father and maternal grandfather were Baptist preachers. His parents were college-educated, and King’s father had succeeded his father-in-law as pastor of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The family lived on Auburn Avenue, otherwise known as “Sweet Auburn,” the bustling “black Wall Street,” home to some of the country’s largest and most prosperous black businesses and black churches in the years before the civil rights movement. Young Martin received a solid education and grew up in a loving extended family.
This secure upbringing, however, did not prevent King from experiencing the prejudices then common in the South. He never forgot the time when, at about age six, one of his white playmates announced that his parents would no longer allow him to play with King, because the children were now attending segregated schools. Dearest to King in these early years was his maternal grandmother, whose death in 1941 left him shaken and unstable. Upset because he had learned of her fatal heart attack while attending a parade without his parents’ permission, the 12-year-old King attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.
In 1944, at age 15, King entered Morehouse College in
Social media giant Facebook is ramping up its campaign to end misinformation on its platforms. The company will remove any... View Article
The post Facebook to remove all 'Stop the Steal' content from platform appeared first on TheGrio.
[DW] Text books used in Africa often present the continent's history from a colonial point of view. Many Africans say it's time to tell Africa's history from an African perspective.
This nationalistic patent monopoly route was the one Trump choose to pursue.
… highest disparities at younger ages: Black Americans from ages 30 to 49 … certainly the highest-profile ones.
“African-Americans have suffered quite the repercussions …
High-level talks and coordinating SADC guidelines on the coronavirus pandemic should have been used to prevent the border crises, the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS) said.
[CIO] Apple have released their latest gizmo. The Apple Watch Series 6, the latest in its line of popular smartwatches. The Series 6 model retains the same overall design introduced with the Apple Watch Series 4 and continued with the Series 5, but it adds a variety of new sensors to allow for things like blood oxygen monitoring and better sleep tracking. The new addition of features allow the watch to remain fresh and ready to adapt to the constantly changing technological landscape.
Not only has he derided “looters and lowlifes,” but he has also threatened the full force of federal law enforcement to threaten people’s legal right to protest.
There are documented cases of economically envious looting Black communities (Wilmington, Tulsa, Rosewood) because of economic envy, plundering our homes, and then using the power of the majority media to turn a Massacre into a “riot.”
Why don’t you think about the fire that ran people out of Greenwood, the broken windows that destroyed Black presses, the looting that has stolen Black wealth?
Many of the so-called “looters and lowlifes” are descended of enslaved people who have had enough.
I stand with the looters and lowlifes, the people who, in the shadow of the poet Langston Hughes, ask, “What happened to a dream deferred.”
(CNN) — Two decades ago, Rosa María Ruiz purchased 4,000 hectares (9,885 acres) of land along the Beni River, near the small village of Rurrenabaque, with the goal of transforming it from a heavily logged patch of the Bolivian Amazon into a thriving private wildlife reserve.
The Bolivian eco-warrior had just had success creating what the Wildlife Conservation Society believes is the most biodiverse protected area on the planet, the nearby Madidi National Park, but her vocal criticism of Madidi's protections under government control got her kicked out. Undeterred, she set up her own private park upriver and named it Serere after a gangly bird with a blue face and punk rock hair.
Fast-forward to early 2020, and Serere Eco-Reserve was home to more than 300 species of birds and some of South America's most elusive mammals, including dwarf leopards, night monkeys, jaguars, tapirs and giant anteaters. The revival of this small swath of the Amazon was made possible thanks to the support of foreign eco-tourists who paid around $100 a day for all-inclusive overnight stays filled with hiking, conservation lessons and family-style meals sourced from the onsite garden.
Rosa María Ruiz has spent decades fighting to protect the Bolivian Amazon.
Courtesy Madidi Travel
Then, of course, the pandemic hit, and Serere hasn't welcomed a single visitor since March 23. With no incoming funds, and little in the way of savings, Ruiz had to cut staff from 40 to just seven rangers who've already chased off poachers and seen around 7 acres of forest pillaged for lumber (a trend echoed across the Amazon Basin).
\"We can't keep going at the rate we are now without further support,\" she says, noting a GoFundMe campaign created to tackle the emergency. \"It's evident that if we don't have a presence and protection in Serere, especially because of the economic crisis everyone's living now, then those who are hard-up will continue cutting down the trees and selling lumber for easy money.\"
It's a predicament faced by highly respected conservation projects across the developing world, who have spent much of 2020 navigating the new reality of trying to protect wild animals while dealing with the fiscal fallout of Covid-19.
Serere Eco-Reserve in Bolivia hasn't welcomed visitors since March 23.
Wildlife tourism: An industry in peril
In the early days of the pandemic, the internet was abuzz with stories of wild boars in Barcelona, pumas in the Chilean capital of Santiago and dolphins in Venice canals (the latter was viral fake news). Animals, it seemed, were thriving in the era of coronavirus lockdowns.
These \"good news\" stories of animals roaming freely were what we all craved at the time, but they overshadowed a more unfortunate reality.
Tourism has been the fragile pillar on which thousands of conservation projects stood for decades, helping to protect wild, trafficked and refugee animals, restore vital habitats and educate the public about sustainability. When that pillar crumbled overnight amid global travel bans, the
WITH the country set to head to the polls in three weeks amid a second wave of novel coronavirus infections, public health expert Dr Peter Figueroa is urging the Government to reintroduce earlier curfew times and reduce the numbers allowed for public gatherings.
Aldon Thomas Stiles | California Black Media Two bills calling for the study of reparations owed to African Americans are making their way through both the California legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives. As state and federal lawmakers grapple with whether or not the State of California - and the United States as a […]
The post LA Activists Drill Down on Who Deserves Reparations for Slavery and Why appeared first on L.A. Focus Newspaper.
Title: Victor Trammell for Your Black World | Photo courtesy of Consulting and Development International
By KEN MORITSUGU Associated Press BEIJING (AP) — China's state media lashed out at the latest move on Taiwan by the departing Trump administration, accusing U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of 'seeking to maliciously inflict a long-lasting scar on China-U.S. ties.' A writer for the official Xinhua News Agency also said in a commentary Sunday that the lifting of longstanding restrictions on U.S. government contacts with Taiwanese counterparts proves that Pompeo 'is only interested in stoking unwarranted confrontations, and has no interest in world peace.' Another commentary posted online by CGTN, the English-language channel of state broadcaster CCTV, called […]
The post Chinese state media blast latest Pompeo move on Taiwan appeared first on Black News Channel.
The Weeknd took home two awards during the the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday, but in the wake of the repeated racial injustices which have been brought to a global spotlight, the artist revealed he wasn't in a mood to bask in his accomplishments. "It's really hard for me to celebrate at this moment, so I'm just going to say justice for Jacob Blake and justice for Breonna Taylor ,” he said after winning best R&B for "Blinding Lights." The artist repeated the sentiment when he accepted the award for video of the year for “Blinding Lights.” . @theweeknd is taking home the #VMA for Video of the Year, and sending a powerful message pic.twitter.com/aUNPo8gXAJ — MTV (@MTV) August 31, 2020 As Blavity previously reported , Blake was shot seven times in the back when officer Rusten Sheskey opened fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin last week. Witnesses said the 29-year-old father of three was going back to his car after breaking up a fight when the officer shot him in front of his children....
It seems the Cleveland Browns wideout has had a change of heart after visiting the Browns facility.
In some of these countries we're seeing an increase in cases and in others, new cases remain stable from week to week, indicating we need to remain vigilant to stop the spread of COVID-19,\" Moeti said.
So with COVID-19 threatening to overwhelm health systems, the extensive polio response network is once again lending crucial support as countries build up systems to contain COVID-19,\" said Moeti.
Mali's response to COVID-19
Safia Boly, Minister of Investment Promotion, Small and Medium Enterprises and National Entrepreneurship in Mali, shared how COVID-19 has impacted the economic prospects of the informal sector in her country.
The slowing rate of cases in many countries, which we have seen, has given the opportunity to scale up public health capacities so that even as lockdowns are being eased, which is what is happening in countries now, the capacity is there and even if there is an initial uptick of cases, as we are seeing in countries like South Africa, be more capable of stopping a very out of control spread of the virus.
The impact on economies, as Minister Boly explained, will be severe but we know an out of control spread of the pandemic could also overwhelm countries in other ways.\"
(Reuters) - England all-rounder Moeen Ali has tested positive for COVID-19 upon arriving in Sri Lanka and will self-isolate for 10 days, as will fast bowler Chris Woakes who was deemed a possible close contact, England’s cricket board said yesterday.
The article England’s Moeen Ali tests positive for COVID-19 ahead of Sri Lanka tests appeared first on Stabroek News.
