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Die Schweizer Wirtschaft leidet unter den Folgen des Coronavirus. Weitere Prognostiker erwarten nun eine Rezession.

Patrick Fischer hat wegen der Corona-Krise schwere Tage hinter sich. Die Absage der Hockey-WM löst beim Nati-Coach aber Erleichterung aus.

Un puisatier est mort ce dimanche 22 mars 2020, à Lon-Agomè, dans la commune d'Allada alors qu'il était en plein travaux.
Selon Frissons Radio, l'homme de 35 ans s'est retrouvé coincé à l'intérieur du puits de 45 mètres de profondeur. Il n'a pu être sauvé malgré les tentatives pour le sortir du puits avant l'arrivée des sapeurs-pompiers.
Son corps sans vie a été repêché et déposé à la morgue d'Allada.

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Kajetán Kičura, az Állami Tartalékalap elnökének fia (20) két lakást is vásárolhatott Pozsony - Óvárosban (Bratislava – Staré Mesto) akkor, amikor az apja újonnan alapított cégektől vásárolt védőfelszereléseket az állam számára. Ezt hétfőn adta hírül a Sme napilap.

Im Einsatz gegen das Coronavirus haben nach Militärangaben 500 Soldaten die Strassen der thailändischen Hauptstadt Bangkok desinfiziert. Die Aktion in der Nacht zum Montag war demnach der fünfte solche Einsatz.

Fotót tettek közzé arról, ahogy kipakolják a Wizz Air Sanghajból érkezett repülőgépének szállítmányát a Liszt Ferenc-repülőtéren hétfőn. A gép a koronavírus elleni védekezéshez használható védőruhából harmincezret, orvosi védőmaszkból nyolcvankétezret vitt Magyarországra. Fotó: MTI/Szigetváry Zsolt

Es ist die höchste Auszeichnung für das Filmschaffen in unserem Land. In diesem Jahr kann sich «Le milieu de l'horizon» über den Schweizer Filmpreis freuen.

Évacué vers la France, il y a quelques jours, pour des raisons de santé, Victor Fotso est décédé le 20 mars 2020 à l’âge de 94 ans. Né le 26 juin 1926, Victor Fotso, grand homme d’affaires camerounais, détenait les entreprises comme la CBC Bank, UNALOR, PILCAM, la FERMENCAM. Il a rédigé un ouvrage intitulé […]

L’article Le puissant homme d’affaire camerounais Victor Fotso est décédé est apparu en premier sur Afrik.com.

Zum siebten Mal in Folge sind in der Schweiz die von der Polizei registrierten Straftaten zurückgegangen. Allerdings fiel der Rückgang 2019 im Vergleich zum Vorjahr mit 0,2 Prozent auf 432’000 Delikte geringfügig aus.

Credit: Mohamed Fofanah/IPS

By Isabel Ortiz and Thomas Stubbs
NEW YORK and LONDON, Mar 23 2020 (IPS)

Austerity policies pushed by international financial institutions have weakened public health systems, despite current financial support packages, condemning many people to die.

As health systems of East Asia, Europe, and the Americas buckle under the strain of coronavirus, developing countries are expecting an even higher human toll. Decades of austerity promoted by international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and regional development banks have weakened public health systems, impeding the ability of governments to respond to the pandemic.

The IMF pledged $1 trillion, and the World Bank a further $12bn, in immediate funds to assist countries to cushion the impact of Covid-19. Yet, these organisations are implicated in decades of brutal austerity and privatizations that damagedpublic health systems in the first place. And it is in regions with fragile health public systems where outbreaks spread the fastest, witnessed most acutely during the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak.

Governments across the globe have implemented spending cuts and the commercialization of health services since the 1980s, advised by IFIs during regular surveillance missions or as part of their lending programmes. Austerity policies are criticised for prioritising short-term fiscal objectives over longer-term social investments such as health.

Isabel Ortiz

Under IMF guidance, for example, governments reduced health budgets, cut or capped public sector wages, and limited the number of doctors, nurses, and other public health staff. In the name of efficiency, governments – often advised by “development” banks – decreased the number of hospital beds, closed public services, and underinvested in health research and medical equipment. This undermines the ability of health systems to cope with infectious disease outbreaks, leaving billions of people highly vulnerable during pandemics.

What is worse, governments were discouraged from raising alarm to the debilitating impact of scarce funding for public health. With the publication of “From Billions to Trillions: Transforming Development Finance Post-2015” and related documents, IFIs reassured governments of a simple solution to declining budgets: private sector delivery of public goods and services. This advice came despite multiple failures in public-private partnerships and privatizations over the last decades – for example, the US private health model is the world’s most expensive health system, but it has low effectiveness, leaving millions of Americans without health coverage.

From Lesotho to Sweden, public-private partnerships on health were costlier to citizens and resulted in poorer service delivery than public health systems.

So who benefits from these policies? IFIs have not prioritized public health issues, but fiscal or private sector objectives instead. Macroeconomic or business interests were often considered over the public good, and people’s welfare was an afterthought. This has already resulted in higher morbidityand millions of avoidable deaths, with many more yet to come.

A recent report shows how IMF-induced austerity cuts are negatively impacting about 75 percent of the world population– a total of 113 countries in 2020 – despite urgent health and developmental needs. Spending cuts apply to 72 developing countries and 41 high-income countries, many of which have already been suffering decades of adjustments. Another study shows how 46 countries prioritised debt service over public health services at the beginning of 2020, when coronaviruswas spreading.

Despite contributing to the crisis, IFIs now aim to become part of the solution by making new funds available. While laudable, the World Bank’s $12bn financial package represents a smokescreen to the public relations disaster related to its flagship Pandemic Emergency Financing (PEF) bonds. PEF bonds were designed with markedly stringent pay-out criteria to reduce the risk of losses for private investors – who have so far made annual yields of up to 14 percent, funded by the aid budgets of Germany, Japan, and Australia. Ultimately the bonds have diverted aid from crucial investments in public health systems of developing countries.

At its core, the reckless actions of IFIs represent the absence of effective global governance for health. Decades of IFIsundermining public health systems highlight how desperately the world needs global leadership and a coordinated response.To that end, the G20 has scheduled a virtual Summit over Covid-19. But will G20 leaders have the foresight to permanently abandon outdated austerity policies and urgently invest in universal public health systems?

Thomas Stubbs

Given the coronavirus emergency, even the IMF is advising governments to ramp up public health expenditures. This needs to be more than just a short-term measure, to then later return to a situation where millions are excluded from healthcare. The building blocks of global health security should be based on prevention and universal public health systems, especially in countries with underdeveloped healthcare.

The United Nations, in particular the World Health Organization (WHO), is more capable than IFIs to coordinate universal public healthcare systems, but the WHO currently lacks resources to move beyond monitoring and surveillance. The US Trump Administration recently cut contributions to the organisation, instead funnelling trillions of US dollars on restoring short-term confidence in the markets. European countries could have given meaningful aid in solidarity to East Asia and developing countries, where thousands are infected of Covid-19. But, from the outset of the crisis, they instead adopted inward-looking responses that often entrenched or intensified authoritarian and populist nationalism.

How many more people need to die? While we are now reaping the consequences of austerity policies imposed around the world, the coronavirus pandemic also offers an opportunity to redress public health gaps and do things differently. State intervention is necessary to address the magnitude of the Covid-19 pandemic, develop long-term public health, and realize the right to health of populations everywhere. It is time for world leaders to abandon myopic austerity policies and instead focus on building robust public health systems for all.

Dr. Isabel Ortiz is Director of the Global Social Justice Program at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University, and former director of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF.

Dr. Thomas Stubbs is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Research Associate in Political Economy at the Centre for Business Research, University of Cambridge.

The post Fighting Coronavirus: It’s Time to Invest in Universal Public Health appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Face au risque de contagion dans les écoles et au refus du gouvernement de congédier les apprenants, le directeur national des écoles catholiques, l'Abbé Épiphane Ahouansè dans une correspondance adressée aux responsables des écoles de cette confession religieuse, a recommandé l'adoption d'un certains nombre de mesures.
Selon cette correspondance, les évaluations, interrogations écrites, devoirs et autres, sont suspendus dès ce lundi 23 mars jusqu'au départ en congés de Pâques.
Cette mesure a été prise pour ne pas pénaliser les apprenants qui seraient retenus à la maison par leurs parents.
De même, les enseignants sont appelés éviter des sanctions à l'encontre de ces apprenants pour leur absence à l'école.
Le directeur national des écoles catholiques dit être conscient de tous les désagréments que pourrait causer cette situation. Il invite les responsables d'établissements au calme et à la prière face au drame de la pandémie du Covid-19.

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Das Unihertz Atom XL ist nicht das erste Smartphone, das einen Sturz aushält und wasserdicht ist. Aber es hat spannende Features: kompakte Bauweise, ein integriertes Funkgerät und einen tiefen Preis.

Der Schweizer Filmpreis, der am 27. März in Zürich hätte stattfinden sollen, wäre ein Fest der Frauen geworden. Diese gehen in acht von elf Kategorien als Gewinnerinnen hervor, teilte das Bundesamt für Kultur (BAK) am Montag nicht ganz so feierlich via Communiqué mit.

Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, on Sunday urged in a direct TV speech his countrymen to react with responsibility and stay home if feeling sick. Stronger measures might be needed, he warned, but Sweden's political approach to the coronavirus remains more relaxed than the harsher measures taken in neighbouring Denmark. Gatherings of 500 people are still allowed in Sweden and only university and higher education has been moved online.

A külügyminisztériumnak nincsenek információi arról, hogy Szlovákia hány külföldön tartózkodó állampolgára kapta el a koronavírus-fertőzést – közölte a TASR-rel Juraj Tomaga, a tárca szóvivője.

Credit: UN Photo/Lamphay Inthakoun

By Rita Ann Wallace and Cynthia S Reyes
NEW YORK and TORONTO, Mar 23 2020 (IPS)

In January of this year, Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, shocked much of the world when they announced they would be stepping down from their roles as senior royals.

Much of the world, that is, except members of their loosely knit online supporter group the “Sussex Squad”, who had been following their doings closely. In the prior two months, one part of the “Squad” had planted over 30,000 out of a targeted 100,000 trees in their honor. And therein lies a tale.

On World Children’s Day, 20 November 2019, a group of 11 women, mostly women of color, and connected only by a wish to counter the tabloid and social media negativity around Harry and Meghan, launched “Sussex Great Forest”, a Twitter- and Instagram-based campaign to plant trees around the world.

The goal was modest: plant 10,000 trees by 6 May 2020, the first birthday of Harry and Meghan’s son Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor. The target was met and surpassed in one week.

The initiative started with a Twitter Direct Message conversation in July 2019 among four women on how to counter the tsunami of online and tabloid vitriol aimed especially at the former Meghan Markle, a bi-racial American.

This negativity was due in part to the racism and xenophobia which have become a well-documented feature of post-Brexit Britain, and in part to the tendency of Britain’s notorious tabloid media to scandalize even the couple’s most mundane doings.

The group of four soon grew to 11 women, from various countries – USA, UK, Canada, Jamaica, Guyana, Ghana, South Africa – unknown to one another except by their twitter handles. They included an author; an anesthesiologist; a restaurateur; an insurance broker; an IT professional; an accountant; a UN retiree; and others.

As women of color, all of us were disturbed by the misogynoir confronting Meghan, and wanted something positive to trend on social media to replace the hateful hashtags.

Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

We decided planting trees in the couple’s names was a fit with Prince Harry’s known passion for conservation; Duchess Meghan’s work to empower women; and in keeping with all the latest recommendations on climate action.

An online campaign in support of a couple whom others are determined to drag publicly had to be done in stealth. We brainstormed and communicated only through Twitter direct message chats. We created the @sussexgtforest handle on both Twitter and Instagram, invited known Harry and Meghan supporters to follow, and closed the accounts to all others.

We set a launch date of World Children’s Day, which also coincided with UK National Tree Week. We set up campaigns on tree planting organizations which had good reputations and good scores with Charity Navigator and its equivalents.

We chose UK-based International Tree Foundation and Tree Sisters; US-based One Tree Planted; and Kenya-based the Green Belt Movement.

Visuals are important for an online campaign, so we encouraged supporters who were going to plant trees themselves to do so early and take photos so we would have content on our pages on launch day.

Students and parents at a primary school in Malawi, with funding from two donors, planted 50 trees and sent us pictures. People in dozens of other countries planted trees in their yards or in pots and sent photos. Those who were donating online to the tree-planting charities also sent screenshots of their receipts.

Ahead of our launch, we pitched our story to one journalist on the royal beat. He was interested, and promised to do a piece on launch day. On the day, we opened up the Twitter and Instagram accounts, and pushed out our content with an ask to join the movement and plant trees for Harry, Meghan, Archie, and the planet.

The response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive. People donated to the charities and spread the word. Our campaign was picked up by traditional media and dozens of stories ran. The campaign got a boost when Harry and Meghan heard about our effort and acknowledged us from their Instagram account.

At the end of only a week, we had exceeded our 10,000-tree goal – five months ahead of schedule.

Jubilant, we set a new goal of 100,000 trees; and to date over 60,000 have already been planted or donated. We have recently added two more tree planting charities – US-based Trees for the Future and National Forests Foundation.

We think there are several lessons to be drawn from this about how individuals and small groups can use social media for good:

• 1. Don’t be deterred by the size of your Twitter or Instagram following, or the lack of financial resources to create and upkeep a website. The tools of activism are mostly free. Get involved in the conversations online about the things which interest you, and in a short time you will be part of a network of like-minded people. Social media is about engagement, not numbers of followers.

 

• 2. Don’t be deterred by national and geographic boundaries, which are meaningless online. A global campaign can start from a computer in Maputo as much as from one in Montreal. Use the opportunity to bring diverse perspectives and skills to your undertaking.

 

• 3. Assess your potential, and if necessary, start small, with a manageable goal, and use your success at a smaller target to propel you forward.

 

• 4. Publicize your efforts. Speak up about your campaign in your chosen forums.

 

• 5. Use sub-groups to help expand your network and get feedback on tactics. We received helpful suggestions from outside the core group that helped us improve the initiative.

 

6. Your cause must be trustworthy. We collect no money ourselves, and deliberately chose charities that donors could verify for themselves – all funds go directly to them. We also aim for transparency, providing regular updates and responding promptly to questions.

Our 6 May deadline is now only weeks away. We are trying to close the gap between 60,000 and 100,000 trees – and doing so at a time of global crisis.

But our love for the Earth, and our wish to show support for Harry and Meghan, continue to propel us forward. We do believe we will be able to meet our target in time for a great birthday present for Archie, as representative of his generation: better hope for the planet.

But whether we get to 100,000 trees or not, we will still have accomplished multiple times our initial goal – without a website or any of the normal tools many people think are necessary for a climate activism campaign.

The power of social media had been used to fan hate against Harry and Meghan. “Sussex Great Forest” recognized social media’s power for good, harnessing its capacity to connect strangers and galvanize them to take positive action on something they feel passionately about.

The post Women & Climate: Planting a Global Forest in a Connected World appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Rita Ann Wallace, a Media Consultant in the UN, and Cynthia S. Reyes, an author and former senior journalist with Canada’s national broadcaster, are two of the 11 co-founders of the “Sussex Great Forest” Global Tree Planting Campaign.

The post Women & Climate: Planting a Global Forest in a Connected World appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Die Banken reduzieren auch hierzulande ihr physisches Angebot. In der Waadt können Kunden der Kantonalbank nicht mehr zum Schliessfach. Kundenschalter an zentralen Lagen bleiben jedoch weiterhin offen, betonen die Banken.

In der Schweiz herrscht Ausnahmezustand. Auch der Sport leidet. BLICK interviewt unsere Athleten deshalb per Skype. Heute: Sprint-Star Mujinga Kambundji.

Ex-UBS-Spitzenmann Jürg Zeltner ist tot. Der 52-jährige Bankenmanager starb am Wochenende an den Folgen einer Krankheit.

La Main tendue fait face à une avalanche de téléphones, preuve s'il en est que les Helvètes, semi-confinés, sont angoissés.