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L'organe du Conseil de l'Europe chargé de la prévention de la corruption met en garde contre les risques de corruption accrus générés par l'épidémie de Covid-19 dans le secteur de la santé, appelant les Etats à un maximum de transparence.

In der letzten Zeit standen Eltern vor einer grossen Herausforderung. Neben Homeoffice und der Betreuung der Kinder mussten viele auch das Homeschooling übernehmen. BLICK will von der Community wissen, was dabei die schlimmsten oder skurrilsten Erfahrungen waren.

Mit ihrem Mundart-Rock haben Megawatt die Schweizer Musik-Szene gehörig aufgemischt. Ihre Songs präsentieren sie nun bei Stars@Home.

Markus Babbel (47) hat sein Kapitel in Australien beendet. Der Ex-FCL-Trainer spricht über Corona, seine Zukunft und über die Luzerner Fans.

Tawary - Selon des sources concordantes, les autorités comptent verser les salaires des fonctionnaires et agents de l’Etat le jeudi 23 avril...

Ashley Mattingly kämpfte lange mit ihren inneren Dämonen. Nun hat dieser Kampf tragisch geendet.

Wegen der Corona-Krise wurden in Bundesbern Parlaments- und Kommissionssitzungen abgesagt. Einige Nationalräte hätten aber wegen Taggeld für die ausgefallenen Sitzungen nachgefragt. Das ärgert SVP-Nationalrat Lukas Reimann.

Heute u.a. mit dabei: Flandern drängt auf schnellere Exit-Strategie, Merkel appelliert zum Durchhalten, und Österreichs Finanzminister will europäische Regeln für staatliche Beihilfen aussetzen.

Dans le cadre de la riposte à la pandémie du Coronavirus au Bénin, le gouvernement a acquis un nombre important de matériels. L'acquisition de ces équipements et matériel ont accru les capacités de diagnostic du pays. Ainsi, à la date de ce lundi 20 avril 2020, le Bénin a la capacité de procéder au diagnostic de 16.000 cas en une journée. Le ministre de la santé, Benjamin Hounkpatin l'a fait savoir à la faveur d'un point de presse ce lundi 20 avril.

Dans le cadre de la riposte à la pandémie du Coronavirus au Bénin, le gouvernement a acquis un nombre important de matériels. L'acquisition de ces équipements et matériel ont accru les capacités de diagnostic du pays. Ainsi, à la date de ce lundi 20 avril 2020, le Bénin a la capacité de procéder au diagnostic de 16.000 cas en une journée. Le ministre de la santé, Benjamin Hounkpatin l'a fait savoir à la faveur d'un point de presse ce lundi 20 avril.
A en croire le ministre de la santé, plusieurs équipements permettant de rendre opérationnels de nombreux laboratoires de dépistage ont été réceptionnés. Il s'agit selon lui, de postes de sécurité microbiologique de classe III, de centrifugeuses réfrigérées, de chaines d'electrophorèse, surtout de 40 thermocycleurs pour la lecture finale des résultats. A cela s'ajoute divers autres matériels de laboratoire nécessaire pour les manipulations, a fait savoir Benjamin Hounkpatin soulignant qu'avec l'acquisition de ces équipements, la capacité de diagnostic du Bénin s'étend désormais jusqu'à « 16 000 tests par jour ».
Selon le ministre de la santé, « c'est la combinaison de toutes ces mesures qui permet de faire face à la pandémie et d'espérer, si chacun apporte sa contribution, de la maîtriser de façon à pouvoir continuer à exister le temps qu'elle s'éteigne ».
L'autorité ministérielle a par ailleurs rassuré les populations que le gouvernement a pris les mesures qu'il faut, remplit son devoir, et il est donc nécessaire que chaque citoyen où qu'il se trouve, respecte lesdites mesures et les fasse respecter autour de lui.
Le Bénin selon les derniers chiffres du gouvernement compte 54 cas confirmés dont 27 guéris, 26 sous traitement et un décès.

F. A. A.

Der Circus Knie wird bis 3. Juli pausieren und sagt deshalb weitere Vorstellungen ab: Zürich, Wettingen, Basel, Delsberg und Neuenburg sind betroffen, teilte der National-Circus am Dienstag mit.

Face à la cascade d'annulation des réservations en raison de la pandémie de Covid-19, le directeur d'un hôtel trois étoiles à Genève a décidé d'accueillir des sans-abri.

The need for innovation and building new skills is paramount for the media sector to respond to the coronavirus crisis. The Stars4Media Lab went virtual with its training and policy event, bridging promising media professionals and media experts to develop...

Farblich auffallende Kostüme, ein stets souveränes Auftreten und hin und wieder ein Ritt auf einem Pferd: Königin Elizabeth II. sieht man weder ihr Alter noch ihren Gemütszustand an.

Warsaw/Copenhagen, 21 April 2020 – A strong role for parliaments is crucial to the transparency and accountability of government measures as the COVID-19 pandemic puts our democracies to the test, the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA) said in a statement today.  

“The role of parliaments in formulating new legislation to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as overseeing the emergency measures introduced by governments make their work more vital than ever,” said ODIHR Director Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir. “Parliaments across the OSCE region therefore need to take decisive steps to ensure they can continue their work during this period of lockdowns and social distancing – and we see that many of them are doing just that.”

Despite the disruptions to their agendas and the difficulties in holding regular plenary and committee sessions, which slows down the regular law-making process, numerous parliaments across the OSCE region are demonstrating flexibility and commitment in adapting to the current circumstances.

Some took rapid action to amend their rules of procedure or pass legislation that allows them to continue their activities via new technology platforms and remote working. In other countries, online meetings of parliamentary committees are being broadcast live online and on television for the first time, turning an emergency situation into an opportunity to increase transparency and accountability, and bring parliamentary work closer to citizens at a time when many are feeling under-informed and isolated.

“Working closely with international organizations like the OSCE, parliaments are demonstrating that with co-ordinated decision-making, we are all better off,” said OSCE PA Secretary General Roberto Montella. “Individual parliaments are finding novel ways to continue their important work, learning from each other, and incorporating international best practices into their national coronavirus strategies. Neither social distancing nor emergency executive powers should inhibit their activity.”

In time of crisis, there is a danger that the need to react swiftly can tilt the democratic balance of power towards governments, Gísladóttir and Montella warned. But now more than ever, the key responsibilities of parliaments to represent, legislate, and oversee must be maintained and even strengthened for them to effectively guarantee the rights and freedoms of all citizens. Their role in guaranteeing the democratic representation of each individual is particularly important to ensure the voice of those communities disproportionately affected by the current crisis is heard and acted on.

In close co-operation with the OSCE PA and the OSCE field operations, ODIHR is systematically monitoring the ways in which national parliaments across the OSCE region are adapting their work to the challenging circumstances in which they find themselves. By highlighting good practices as well as the action of countries that are seeking to limit the role of parliament, ODIHR and the OSCE PA are helping countries to make parliaments stronger and more effective during this emergency period and beyond.

All countries across the OSCE region have committed to ensuring that “a state of public emergency may not be used to subvert the democratic constitutional order, nor aim at the destruction of internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms.” In addition, they will “ensure that the normal functioning of the legislative bodies will be guaranteed to the highest possible extent during a state of public emergency” (Moscow 1991). 

Le Figaro - Quelque 50 millions de personnes sont menacées par la faim en Afrique de l'Ouest en raison de l'impact de l'épidémie de Covid-19...

A Nemzeti Bűnüldözési Ügynökség (NAKA) kedd reggeltől razziát tart Közép-Szlovákiában. A Denník N információi szerint a NAKA Kajetán Kičura, az Állami Tartalékalap volt vezetője otthonában végez házkutatást.

Az Európai Labdarúgó Szövetség (UEFA) kedden ad tájékoztatást tagszövetségeinek arról, hogyan tervezi folytatni a szezont.

Le 17 avril 2020, l’artiste et influenceuse ivoirienne Emma Lohoues soufflait sa 34ème bougie. Une occasion symbolique que la jeune femme, connue pour son goût accru pour le luxe et la belle vie, n’a pas voulu laisser passer. Une gigantesque fête a alors été organisée dans sa résidence réunissant famille, amis, plusieurs grandes figures du […]

L’article L’actrice ivoirienne Emma Lohoues organise une gigantesque fête d’anniversaire en plein confinement : elle le paie cash est apparu en premier sur Afrik.com.

Credit: Human Rights Center, University of Dayton, Ohio

By Sam Ben-Meir
NEW YORK, Apr 21 2020 (IPS)

Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal is set in medieval Sweden, as the bubonic plague ravages the countryside. In one famous scene, a procession of zombie-like flagellants enters a village and interrupts a comic stage-show.

The townspeople are present to hear the procession’s leader, a bombastic preacher who proclaims that death is coming for them all: they are full of sin – lustful and gluttonous – and the plague is God’s punishment for their wicked ways.

That scene is not without historical merit: the flagellants were indeed a very real phenomenon, and with the plague, the movement grew and spread throughout Europe.

For most of us, public self-mutilation and penance is a particularly extreme and repulsive form of religious fanaticism. But in the West, we still have ways of lashing ourselves, and each other, in the face of plague, pestilence and the terror they sow; and pandemics still invariably prompt a religious explanation.

During the AIDS epidemic, we were told that God was punishing homosexuals and illicit drug users. In 1992, 36 percent of Americans admitted that AIDS might be God’s punishment for sexual immorality.

The interesting question is: What is the temptation to view a catastrophe like the plague as divine punishment as opposed to a brute fact of nature?

Surely at least one reason we are tempted to do so is because, if it is heavenly retribution, then the hardship still has some meaning; we still live in a world with an underlying moral structure.

Indeed, to many, the idea that such a great calamity is nothing more than a brute act of nature is far more painful to contemplate than an account by which God cares enough about us to punish us.

In case you think the coronavirus is any different, it is not. On March 8, 2020, the Times of Israel reported that Rabbi Meir Mazuz “claimed the spread of the deadly coronavirus in Israel and around the world is divine retribution for gay pride parades.”

By some ironic twist, the rabbi is basically in agreement with Rick Wiles, a Florida pastor who said the spread of coronavirus in synagogues is a punishment of the Jewish people.

The Jerusalem Post quotes Wiles as saying, “It’s spreading in Israel through the synagogues. God is spreading it in your synagogues! You are under judgment because you oppose his son, Jesus Christ. That is why you have a plague in your synagogues. Repent and believe on the name of Jesus Christ, and the plague will stop.”

The temptation to view catastrophes as divine punishment is nothing to scoff or smirk at: it is entirely legitimate to want to construct a narrative out of what has occurred – to find a pattern, to derive some meaning that redeems the suffering, hardship and death.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres appeals for a global ceasefire in a virtual press conference broadcast on UN Web TV last month. Credit: UN News/Daniel Dickinson

What is unfortunate is the tendency to point to some perceived wickedness of which others are purportedly guilty as the justification for God’s wrath.

Both the rabbi and the pastor are the same: both talk like Job’s notorious companions, those so-called friends of the unfortunate and innocent Job, who insist that he must be guilty, that he must have sinned for God to assail him with such fury.

Of course, at the end of the poem, God tells the companions that they were wrong: Job was right – his suffering was not punishment for any sin he had committed. Indeed, the Bible teaches that God often sees fit to test precisely those that are good and righteous. Sadly, the pastor and rabbi entirely disregard that biblical lesson.

If a pandemic is divine punishment, then in a sense we can be at peace – inasmuch as we have provided the scourge with a theodicy, that is, a justification of God’s ways to man.

Whenever we are faced with human tragedy, we cannot but question how an omnibenevolent and omnipotent deity would permit so much suffering to occur. A plague sharpens the concerns that lie at the heart of the theological problem of evil – the problem of reconciling a loving God with the reality and ubiquity of human and animal suffering.

Thankfully, most religious leaders are unwilling to cast the burden of guilt on any particular group of which they may disapprove. Instead, they take a page from Job and underscore the impenetrable mystery of suffering – taking their inspiration perhaps from God’s speech to Job from out of the whirlwind, where He begins with one of the famous queries of the Bible: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?”

And He continues with withering sarcasm, “Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!” In short, do not attempt to sound the depths of God’s inscrutable purpose.

For every pandemic there is a theology; by their nature, they call forth notions of guilt, sin and responsibility. It is almost as if we cannot but view them through theological categories.

Each pandemic begins with a kind of “fall,” or original sin, which we attempt to retrace with our search for “patient zero,” the individual representing the source of the calamity, the one who kicked us out of paradise as it were.

The writers of the 2011 film “Contagion” clearly had as much in mind when they decided that their story’s patient zero (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) should also be an adulteress.

A pandemic also highlights an inescapable function of all significant human action – namely, that our actions always outrun our intentions. Everything we do has consequences that we never anticipated, wanted or even imagined.

We like to think that we are not responsible for everything our actions may cause – but the reality is that we cannot dodge or entirely relinquish our responsibility even for those things we never intended.

Perhaps like nothing else, a pandemic reveals the burden of human action, our infinite liability; indeed, our indeclinable responsibility.

There is a theology accompanying every plague because there is a very human need to make sense of such colossal suffering. That theology may take the form of a conspiracy theory, but it is a theology all the same.

One example is the persistent speculation that the coronavirus originated in some kind of bio-weapons laboratory in Wuhan, China. This explanation, regardless of its lack of evidentiary merit, is a temptation because it offers us a story, which is but a secularized version of the fall.

The essential features are there: to say that human beings deliberately created the virus is to say that this pandemic is the result of human transgression; that human hubris introduced this uncontrollable element that upset the order of things.

The current pandemic has left fear and death, loneliness and stagnation in its wake. We must start asking ourselves what it has all been for.

Eventually, this great tide of suffering will ebb, life will resume, the economy will reopen and pick up steam, and the coronavirus will slowly fade from our immediate view – at that point, when we think of all those many tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands who died, alone, what will we be able to point to as their legacy? What did they die for?
Undoubtedly many will say only that their deaths were unfortunate – all we can do to honor their sacrifice is return to life as it was, prosper and grow the economy at two percent annually. If we allow that to happen, then we will have failed, completely and utterly.

If we do not seize this crisis as a moment for transformation, then we will have lost the war. If doing so requires reviving notions of collective guilt and responsibility – including the admittedly uncomfortable view that every one of us is infinitely responsible, then so be it; as long we do not morally cop out by blaming some group as the true bearers of sin, guilt, and God’s heavy judgment.

A pandemic clarifies the nature of action: that with our every act we answer to each other. In that light, we have a duty to seize this public crisis as an opportunity to reframe our mutual responsibility to one another and the world.

The post The Theology of Pandemics appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City.

The post The Theology of Pandemics appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A koronakrízis jelentős befolyással lesz a város költségvetésére. Az önkormányzat a bevételeiben több mint egymillió eurós kieséssel számol. Határozott intézkedéseket foganatosított - derült ki a sajtóközleményből, amelyet Mikuš Kovácsová Klaudia, Fülek város szóvivője juttatott el portálunkhoz.