Category: Industry

Malanje – An overall 3 million US dollars is to be channeled for the operationalization of the Southern African Development Community(SADC )’s Regional Cassava Leadership Centre, set to be launched within three months in the northern Malanje Province, with the aim to strengthen research on the crop and boost the value chain.

The information was disclosed Tuesday by the coordinator of the Agricultural Productivity Programme for Southern Africa (APPSA), Joaquim César, on the occasion of the 27th Scientific Council of the Agronomic Research Institute (IIA) being held since Monday in Malanje.

Cesar said the preparations are under way for the launching of the referred centre, which will have a research complex with laboratories, greenhouses and other facilities to be supported by 50 technicians from the Agronomic Research Institute (IIA).

Mr Antunes said the SADC Regional Cassava Leadership Centre is part of the Agricultural Productivity Programme for Southern Africa that started in 2020, and that, despite having cassava as main crop, includes research on other products such as maize, peanuts and beans.

He said the APPSA is budgeted at 25 million US dollars and has as its main axis the generation and dissemination of technology for the aforementioned crops with eight sub-projects already underway to improve the cultivation system and consequent transformation.

Besides Angola, APPSA also includes Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Lesotho, where regional centres of leadership for rice, corn, legumes and vegetables will be created.

The programme is funded by the World Bank.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

Seychelles has revised its advisory that restricted travel from seven southern African countries, introduced on November 27, to curb the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 as it is now widespread around the world and has also been detected in the small island nation.

From January 6, travellers from South Africa, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe are able to travel to Seychelles again.

The Public Health Commissioner, Jude Gedeon, told a press conference on Thursday that the travel restriction to those countries was imposed to curtail the entry of Omicron “but now that laboratory tests have shown that we already have the variant, there is no point in keeping the countries on the restricted list.”

Air Seychelles will restart its flights to Johannesburg on January 7 and continue flying once a week, an Air Seychelles spokesperson confirmed to SNA.

Meanwhile, Gedeon has expressed concern over the rapid increase in positive cases of COVID-19 in just over a week but no new restriction measures have been put in place.

He said that the total number of active cases in Seychelles is 2,481, with an increase of 2,180 cases since December 30, when the country had 621 active cases. However, the number of deaths as a result of the virus has not increased, which remains at 134 since the start of the pandemic.

“We have seen during the festive period, parties were taking place, people were mixing households and this is what has caused this surge that we are facing now,” he said.

Gedeon said that with the current spike in active cases, the record of active cases in a day, which was 629 in May last year, has been broken and is now 692.

“The current trend is more acute than the previous surge that we had early last year around May when the highest registered number of active cases was 3,046. It appears that we can have a higher number of active cases based on the current trend that we are seeing,” he warned.

No new health measures were announced but Gedeon said that group sports will not be allowed to take place because of the close contact between players. He also added that Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education officials will meet to decide on school calendars. Public schools are scheduled to open in around 10 days.

Meanwhile, Seychelles, an archipelago in the western Indian Ocean, is continuing its vaccination efforts and people who have taken two doses of a COVID vaccine are being encouraged by the health authorities to have a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine being offered at the moment.

Source: Seychelles News Agency

Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are suing Meta Platforms Inc, formerly known as Facebook, for $150 billion over allegations that the social media company did not take action against anti-Rohingya hate speech that contributed to violence.

A U.S. class-action complaint, filed in California on Monday by law firms Edelson PC and Fields PLLC, argues that the company’s failures to police content and its platform’s design contributed to real-world violence faced by the Rohingya community. In a coordinated action, British lawyers also submitted a letter of notice to Facebook’s London office.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment about the lawsuit. The company has said it was “too slow to prevent misinformation and hate” in Myanmar and has said it has since taken steps to crack down on platform abuses in the region, including banning the military from Facebook and Instagram after the February 1 coup.

Facebook has said it is protected from liability over content posted by users by a U.S. internet law known as Section 230, which holds that online platforms are not liable for content posted by third parties. The complaint says it seeks to apply Burmese law to the claims if Section 230 is raised as a defense.

Although U.S. courts can apply foreign law to cases where the alleged harms and activity by companies took place in other countries, two legal experts interviewed by Reuters said they did not know of a successful precedent for foreign law being invoked in lawsuits against social media companies where Section 230 protections could apply.

Anupam Chander, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said that invoking Burmese law wasn’t “inappropriate.” But he predicted that “It’s unlikely to be successful,” saying that “It would be odd for Congress to have foreclosed actions under U.S. law but permitted them to proceed under foreign law.”

More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state in August 2017 after a military crackdown that refugees said included mass killings and rape. Rights groups documented killings of civilians and burning of villages.

Myanmar authorities say they were battling an insurgency and deny carrying out systematic atrocities.

In 2018, U.N. human rights investigators said the use of Facebook had played a key role in spreading hate speech that fueled the violence. A Reuters investigation hat year, cited in the U.S. complaint, found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims on Facebook.

The International Criminal Court has opened a case into the accusations of crimes in the region. In September, a U.S. federal judge ordered Facebook to release records of accounts connected to anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar that the social media giant had shut down.

The new class-action lawsuit references claims by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked a cache of internal documents this year, that the company does not police abusive content in countries where such speech is likely to cause the most harm.

The complaint also cites recent media reports, including a Reuters report last month, that Myanmar’s military was using fake social media accounts to engage in what is widely referred to in the military as “information combat.”

Source: Voice of America