Feed aggregator

La plus grande opération de rapatriement jamais menée par le DFAE a pris fin mercredi soir avec un vol en provenance d'Afrique.

Ende einer historischen Rückholaktion: Am Mittwochabend ist das letzte vom Aussendepartement gecharterte Flugzeug mit im Ausland gestrandeten Schweizer Passagieren in Zürich angekommen. Es hat Reisende aus Ghana, der Elfenbeinküste und aus Burkina Faso zurückgebracht.

Auch der Sport erhält wieder eine Perspektive. Aber für den Profibereich fehlt nach wie vor ein Konzept. Ein Kommentar von BLICK-Sportchef Felix Bingesser.

La fondation ABAKE a fait don ce mercredi 29 avril, de 1500 masques et gels hydroalcooliques aux radios, télévisions, journaux de la presse écrite et presse en ligne. Plusieurs couches vulnérables de la société béninoise ont reçu également des masques et gels hydroalcooliques, mais en plus, des vivres pour mieux faire face à la pandémie.

Au total 8000 masques de protection, plusieurs dizaines de litres des gels hydroalcooliques fabriqués au Bénin et des vivres ont été distribués ce mercredi par la fondation de Mme Abakè Assongba de Rosa, une habituée des actions sociales à l'endroit des couches défavorisées.
Soucieuse bien-être des populations en ces temps de pandémie de coronavirus, ABAKE Foundation a décidé de porter une aide significative aux couches les plus démunies en mettant à leur disposition des matériels de protection.
Dans ce contexte particulier de pandémie de Covid-19, les médias béninois ont été pris en compte. 1500 masques et gels hydroalcooliques ont été remis aux radios, télévisions, journaux de la presse écrite et presse en ligne.
En dehors des médias, plusieurs couches sociales de Cotonou, Dassa, Abomey, Abomey-Calavi, Porto-Novo, Parakou ont été soutenues.
« Le reste de ces masques seront distribués comme suit : 1000 à Cotonou ; 1000 à Dassa ; 1000 à Abomey-Calavi ; 1000 à Porto-Novo ; 1000 à Abomey ; 1000 à Parakou et 100 pour l'association des garagistes du Bénin », a expliqué le responsable en charge des médias de la fondation. Abd'el Khader ACHIROU a précisé que « Ceci n'est qu'une première phase pour ce qui est de la contribution de la fondation ABAKE contre la propagation du Coronavirus au Bénin. D'autres villes et d'autres associations professionnelles seront prises en compte lors de la seconde ou encore de la troisième phase de cette initiative salvatrice ».
Abake's Foundation est une fondation américaine qui s'active à porter assistance aux enfants et aux personnes en situation difficile. Cette fondation de renommée internationale avec l'installation de plusieurs ramifications de part et d'autres en Afrique, en Amérique et en Asie a essentiellement vocation sociale. Ses mérites sont reconnus par le gouvernement béninois, les différentes associations ou creuset regroupant les béninois de la diaspora.
Abake's Foundation a pour mission d'aider les couches vulnérables à bâtir leur propre avenir et s'insérer dans le processus de développement de leur pays.
Les actions réalisées par la fondation au Bénin ces dix dernières années peuvent être consultées sur le site : https://www.abakesfoundation.org/.

Personne n'est parvenu à deviner les bons numéros lors du tirage de mercredi. La cagnotte grimpe à 45 millions de francs.

L'aide fédérale pour le secteur aérien ne doit pas octroyée sans condition, estiment la gauche et les partis écologistes.

Senalioune - Ces images des dames exposant leurs marmites vides sur une rue urbaine dans un quartier populaire à Nouakchott, doivent interpeller...

By Mohammad Rakibul Hasan
DHAKA, Bangladesh, Apr 29 2020 (IPS)

The world is at risk of widespread famines caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The devastating economic impact of Covid-19 is seeing a huge rise globally in the number of hungry people.

Hamida Begum, a domestic worker in Bangladesh who is now out of work said, “We only have forty Taka at home (translates to approximately US 50 cents). We have to drink poison to end life if we cannot go out for work. Who will save us from hunger?” The sufferings of some 7 million slum dwellers around Dhaka, the capital city, are multiplying due to lost earnings and price hike of consumer goods.

Most slum dwellers living in different parts of the capital city no longer worry about the virus but worry more about hunger as they cannot go out to work. They do not have any food reserves. Whatever little they have cannot save them from starvation and hunger in coming days.

Hamida Begum, 37, works as a house maid. She and her husband, a daily labourer are now jobless. The little food they have won’t feed their five member family. Credit: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan

Kulsum Begum, 30, is struggling to feed her three children since her husband died last year. After the lock down she lost her job as a housemaid . She Does notbhave any relatives in the city that she can turn to for to survive. Credit: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan

Shipli Rani Shiuli, 35, is the sole breadwinner of the family. Her husband left her and she takes care of her two sons alone. After the lockdown she lost her job and does not know she will bring food to the table. Credit: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan

Textile worker Helena Begum was laid off last month. She, along her five year old daughter Shakiba and elderly mother, are living on half the amount of food they normally had before the lockdown. Helena who is 35 says that her husband left the family after she gave birth to a daughter. She does not know anyone who could help her to seek a loan. Credit: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan

Aklima, 35, is standing with her one and half year-old daughter Suborna in their one room slum house. She has sent off her three children to the village as they are unable to manage food for themselves in Dhaka city. Aklima says that she and her her rickshaw puller husband can only manage one meal a day and drink water to kill hunger pangs. Credit: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan

Kohinoor Begum and her security guard husband Abul Kashem are now staying at home due to the lockdown Kohinoor lost her job as a housemaid. The only house they had in their village has been swallowed up by the river. During their three years stay in Dhaka city, they never faced such poverty and hardship before the lockdown. With no food at home and no cash, their five family members fear starvation in coming days. Credit: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan

Khadiza Begum, 38, with her two year daughter Sumaiya. She and her husband sold pickles on Dhaka streets. After the lockdown, they paid 4000 Taka (approximately $ 50 ) as rent and now have no money to buy food. Credit: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan

The post Amid Covid-19 Hunger Fear Mounts in Bangladesh appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Le Maroc a engagé le combat contre le Coronavirus. Le roi Mohammed VI étant sur la ligne de front et dope ses troupes qu’il a dotées de moyens suffisants. Structures sanitaires biens équipées, matériels médical de qualité, personnel bien formé, combinaison, gants, masques en quantité. Rien n’a été laissé au hasard par le souverain, qui, […]

L’article La monarchie marocaine au cœur du combat contre le Covid-19 est apparu en premier sur Afrik.com.

Die Schweizer Grenze wird wieder offener – ein bisschen. Grenzgänger und ausländische Arbeitnehmer dürfen bald wieder einreisen. Sommerferien im Ausland werden aber schwierig bleiben.

Der FC Basel lässt Edon Zhegrova ziehen – und das 21-jährige Dribbelwunder wird von Premier League Clubs wie Chelsea und Wolverhampton umworben. Fehler oder vernünftige Entscheidung? Das und mehr in der neuen Folge «Pro und Konter».

Eugène Lonègnon, maire d'Avrankou dans le département de l'Ouémé est décédé ce mercredi 29 avril 2020 des suites d'une courte maladie.

Le maire d'Avrankou a rendu l'âme ce mercredi.
Pour les élections communales du 17 mai, il est tête de liste du parti Union Progressiste (UP) dans l'arrondissement d'Atchoukpa à Avrankou. Le défunt maire est marié et père de trois enfants.

Voici les horaires de rupture du jeûne (al Iftar) ainsi que celles du début du jeûne (al Imsak) de la journée du mercredi 29 Avril et jeudi 30 dans les 48 wilayas du pays. Horaires de l’Imsak et de l’Iftar en Algérie du 29 avril 2020, sixième jour de ramadan 2020 Ville Imsak الإمساك Iftar […]

AMI - Le ministre de la Santé, Dr. Nedhirou Ould Hamed a dévoilé, mercredi à Nouakchott, les grandes lignes du volet santé du programme...

Erste Ergebnisse einer klinischen Studie zum Wirkstoff Remdesivir bei der Behandlung von Covid-19-Patienten sind einem ranghohen US-Experten zufolge sehr positiv zu bewerten. Die Resultate müssten zwar noch unabhängig geprüft und veröffentlicht werden.

Employees work on the solar panels of the El Romero plant, with a capacity of 196 megawatts, in the desert region of Atacama in northern Chile, a country that has set out to develop its solar power potential. CREDIT: Acciona

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Apr 29 2020 (IPS)

The oil slump, global recession and uncertainty about the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic will fuel the appetite for cheaper fossil fuel energy and delay investments in renewables, affecting the targets of the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The countries of the developing South, and in particular oil exporters, will be affected as suppliers to shrinking economies and as seekers of investment in clean energy, in a world that will compete fiercely for low-cost recovery, warned experts consulted by IPS.

The crises, “in view of the abundance and low prices of oil, far from accelerating a change of era that would leave behind fossil fuels and embrace renewable energies, will postpone for a long time that aim, outlined in the SDGs,” said Venezuelan oil expert Elie Habalián.

One of the targets of SDG 7, which calls for affordable clean energy, is to “increase substantially the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix” by 2030.

This is in line with the Paris Agreement on climate change, signed in 2015, which enters into force at the end of this year. The accord includes energy transition measures: national contributions to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and curb the increase in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

These commitments are undermined by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which will cause a severe recession, with the global economy projected to shrink three percent this year and six percent in large countries in the North like the United States and in the South like Brazil.

With that forecast, “it seems that the efforts of governments will tend to sustain and deepen the extractivist model, including hydrocarbons,” said researcher María Marta di Paola, of Argentina’s Environment and Natural Resources Foundation.

In 2018, according to British oil giant BP, global consumption of primary energy (the energy embodied in natural resources before undergoing any human-made conversions or transformations) was 13,865 million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe), with a predominance of fossil fuels: oil 33.6 percent, coal 27.2 percent and gas 23.8 percent.

Hydroelectricity represented 6.8 percent and sources strictly considered renewable (solar, wind, geothermal, marine, biomass) contributed just 561 Mtoe, or 4.04 percent.

The Paris Agreement, aimed at adapting to and mitigating the climate emergency, establishes that developing countries will take longer to comply with the agreement and that the reductions to which they commit will be made on the basis of equity and in the context of their fight against poverty and for sustainable development.

But in the face of the crises caused by the pandemic, many of the 196 signatory countries, “seeking to take advantage of their installed capacity and regulate impacts on employment and consumption, will relax environmental standards and miss the opportunity to begin a clean, fair and inclusive energy transition,” said Di Paola.

Lisa Viscidi of the Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue said that “although rates of return are currently higher for renewables than for fossil fuels, there are indications that it will be difficult to attract investment in solar or wind energy before demand recovers.”

View of a gas plant in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, a major oil exporter. The outlook of abundant oil and lower prices in the midst of the crisis points to intense demand for and use of fossil fuels in the short and even medium term. CREDIT: ADNOC

She cited “the plunge in demand for electricity due to the self-isolation (to curb the spread of COVID-19), which strongly impacts the auctions of renewables, leading to their cancellation” – a reference to the mechanism for buying and selling electricity between suppliers and distributors.

With the collapse of oil prices, governments like those of Latin America “will not be inclined towards renewable energy for now, calculating that it could have higher costs,” said Viscidi, head of the energy area in her organisation.

But also when the current world health crisis ends, “the post-pandemic economy will pose insurmountable obstacles for many countries in the global South to achieve a transformation of their energy mix,” said Alejandro López-González, an expert in sustainability from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain.

This, he argued, is because “the transformation of the energy mix in countries of the South depends on trade in commodities with industrialised countries,” that is, on securing good markets and prices for their products, which provide revenue with which to adopt cleaner energy sources.

Throughout the developing South, the global recession will result in fewer exports, business closures, job losses, lower tax revenues and reduced investment, according to projections by multilateral bodies, leaving capital- and technology-intensive initiatives, such as solar or wind farms, without resources.

Currently, in the developing South, only India, with solar and wind energy plants, and Brazil (wind and biomass) are attempting to keep up with the giants that possess large non-conventional clean energy installations: China, the United States, Germany and Japan.

In 2018, renewable energies represented only 9.3 percent, or 2,480 of the 26,615 terawatts (1 Tw = 1 billion kilowatts) of electricity generation in the world, versus 10,100 Tw contributed by coal, 6,189 by gas and 4,193 by water sources.

Peter Fox-Penner, head of Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy, said in an article distributed by The Conversation that “Economy-driven demand reductions, which are likely worldwide, will hurt new renewable installations.

“Utilities will tighten their budgets and defer building new plants. Companies that make solar cells, wind turbines, and other green energy technologies will shelve their growth plans and adopt austerity measures,” in the context of the global recession, he wrote.

But “Countervailing factors will partly offset this decline, at least in wealthy countries,” Fox-Penner said. “Many renewable plants are being installed for reasons other than demand growth, such as clean power targets in state laws and regulations,” and public pressure that forces utilities to close down coal-fired power plants, he added.

The outlook for oil

Along these lines, Venezuelan economist José Manuel Puente predicted that “the energy transition will happen, there are more and more regulations, electric and hybrid cars, and the problem for Venezuela, Nigeria or Mexico is that we will remain poor countries with deposits of black sludge underground.”

López-González is also in favour of countries like Venezuela – with an enormous potential for wind energy due to the strong, constant trade winds that blow in the northwest – fully exploiting their hydrocarbon resources in order to finance changes in their energy mix.

But these strategies were suspended for members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and for other crude oil producers, when oil prices collapsed to the point that on Apr. 20 they reached negative values, for the first time in history.

U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate was quoted that day on the New York futures market at -37 dollars per barrel, 50 dollars below its opening price that day of 13 dollars.

The prices plunged because, as stockpiles overwhelmed storage facilities, buyers did not want to be forced to receive agreed shipments for delivery on that “Black Monday”, and preferred to assume the cost of getting out of the commitment.

That day illustrated the decline in demand that had already started before the arrival of coronavirus in Europe and the Americas, and which gave rise in March to a supply reduction agreement between the 11 OPEC partners and 10 other exporters.

The recession triggered by COVID-19 will mean that the world will consume 30 percent less this year: 70 million barrels a day of oil, down from 100 million in 2019.

This oil crisis “brings very bad news for producers in the Gulf, Russia, Mexico, Venezuela and others: it is the end of absolute income, and the extreme minimisation of the differential income of oil,” said Habalián, a former Venezuelan ambassador to OPEC.

For years, oil exporting nations benefited from setting reference prices for oil before it reached the markets. And in addition, due to the wide gap between costs and prices, they piled up profits that are being pulverised by the current crisis.

Also affected are dozens of companies facing bankruptcy since the growing demand and strong oil prices had allowed them to extract, mainly in the United States, shale oil and gas by means of fracking (hydraulic fracturing), an environmentally questionable technique.

Finally, the energy landscape will be impacted by the behaviors that consumers adopt in the wake of the pandemic – such as their use of energy or demand for travel – or by changes in labour relations after the extensive experiment in off-site work as a result of the COVID-19 self-isolation.

The post The Crises of 2020 Will Delay the Transition to Clean Energy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

The discovery that the badger-like animal lived alongside dinosaurs challenges ideas about mammals.

Die verzweifelte Video-Botschaft einer Türkin (43) aus Winterthur ZH geht aktuell viral. Die Frau erzählt, sie sei an Covid-19 erkrankt, das Spital in der Schweiz habe sie dennoch einfach abgewiesen. Nun fordert sie, ausgeflogen und in der Türkei behandelt zu werden.