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Nigeria Confirms 298 New COVID-19 Cases, 207 More Recover
As Nigeria gradually reopens its economy amid the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic, the country has reported 298 more infections – the third-lowest since June 8.
On August 4, the country reported 288 COVID-19 infections and just one week later, it recorded 290 new cases.
The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) announced the latest figure in a late-night tweet on Sunday.
It explained that the new infections were reported from 15 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
The new figure, which is 27 lesser than the last number of infections recorded on Saturday, brings the total number of cases in Nigeria to 49,068.
Jacinda Ardern postpone election due to coronavirus fears
The prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, has postponed the country’s general election by a month amid a spike in coronavirus cases.
According to Aljazeera, the vote was due to take place on 19 September but will now be held on 17 October instead.
Ms Ardern said on Monday that the new date would allow parties “to plan around the range of circumstances we will be campaigning under”.
Earlier this week, the country’s largest city went back into lockdown.
“This decision gives all parties time over the next nine weeks to campaign and the Electoral Commission enough time to ensure an election can go ahead,” Ms Ardern said, adding that she had “absolutely no intention” of allowing any further delays to the vote.
The opposition National Party has argued the election should be delayed as restrictions on campaigning mean Ms Ardern had an unfair advantage.
The announcement that new cases had been discovered shocked the country, which had recorded no locally transmitted cases for more than three months.
Before the new cluster was identified, the government had lifted almost all of its lockdown restrictions, which were first imposed in March.
New Zealand has reported more than 1,600 infections and 22 deaths since the pandemic began, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
Source___Aljazeera
Convention set for formal nomination of Democrats Candidate Joe Biden.
Four-day event set to include formal nomination of Joe Biden as the Democratic challenger of US President Donald Trump
A presidential primary season like no other will culminate this week for the Democratic Party in the United States in an unprecedented, mostly digital convention that is set to cement Joe Biden as the official candidate tasked with taking on President Donald Trump in a November election.
Only essential staff will be on the ground at the convention centre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a pivotal swing state that had spent millions of dollars preparing to host the high-profile event, which runs from August 17 to 20, before it was scaled back in light of the pandemic.
The convention comes as Democratic officials work to energise voters behind Biden’s candidacy – and not simply against Trump.
While defeating the Republican president is a huge motivator for many within the party, there is some concern that less-engaged voters who lean Democrat and swing voters are not locked in to cast ballots for Biden, especially as the pandemic is expected to create barriers to voting.
Following a fractious and ideologically diverse 28-candidate primary season, the party has also sought to unify before the convention and avoid a repeat of 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s supporters clashed with those backing her progressive rival, Bernie Sanders.
Source__Aljazeera
The Gambia records 10 new Covid-19 deaths
The Gambia recorded 10 new Covid-19 deaths, the highest on single days-bringing the total to 43.
According to Standard, 7 of these new deaths are males, 9 are aged 45 years and above. Twice more males than females aged 70 and above were confirmed positive for Covid-19.
With the information from the of health ministry, a significant number of the new cases are residents of Western Health Region 1 (over 70%).
The 79 new cases registered took the total number of COVID-19 cases ever confirmed in the country to 1,556.
The country currently has 354 people in quarantine, 1,246 active cases, 172 probable cases and a crude case-fatality ratio of 2.8%.
Trump new executive orders against Tiktok
US President Donald Trump late Friday lashed out anew at ByteDance, issuing a fresh executive order stating the Chinese internet giant must sell its interest in the Musical.ly app it bought and merged with TikTok.
The order builds on sweeping restrictions issued last week by Trump that TikTok and WeChat end all operations in the US, his latest explosive moves aimed at countering China’s rising global power.
ByteDance bought karaoke video app Musical.y from a Chinese rival about three years ago in a deal valued at nearly a billion dollars. It was incorporated into TikTok, which became a global sensation.
Trump’s order contends there is “credible evidence” leading him to believe that ByteDance’s take-over of Musical.ly “threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”
“As we’ve said previously, TikTok is loved by 100 million Americans because it is a home for entertainment, self-expression, and connection,” ByteDance said in response to an AFP inquiry.
“We’re committed to continuing to bring joy to families and meaningful careers to those who create on our platform for many years to come.”
The order set to take effect in 90 days retroactively prohibits the acquisition and bars ByteDance from having any interest in Musical.ly.
Trump ordered that any sale of interest in Musical.ly in the US had to be signed off on by the Committee on Foreign Investment, which is to be given access to ByteDance books.
It also ordered that any saved user data be destroyed.
Source__Aljazeera
BREAKING: Tribunal Affirms Election Of Duoye Diri As Bayelsa Governor
Channels TV said the Bayelsa Governorship Election Tribunal sitting in Abuja has affirmed the election of Senator Duoye Diri as Bayelsa State Governor.
The three-man panel affirmed on the decision earlier today which is a month after the Supreme Court dismissed an appeal filed by a former aspirant of the Bayelsa governorship election under the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Timi Alaibe, challenging the candidacy of Senator Diri in the November 2019 election.
In a unanimous judgment delivered by Justice Owodunni, the tribunal held that the petition filed by mister Owei Woniwei of the Alliance for Democracy is incompetent and lacks merit.
The Tribunal further held that the petitioner failed to prove the allegations of the forged declaration of age and the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) discharged certificate levelled against the Deputy Governor, Senator Lawrence.
Credit___Channels TV
Who is Kamala Harris?
The California Democrat was born in Oakland, California, to two immigrant parents: an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father.
After her parents’ divorce, Ms Harris was raised primarily by her Hindu single mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist.
She grew up engaged with her Indian heritage, joining her mother on visits to India, but Ms Harris has said that her mother adopted Oakland’s black culture, immersing her two daughters – Kamala and her younger sister Maya – within it.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” she wrote in her autobiography The Truths We Hold. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”
She attended college in the US, spending four years at Howard University, one of the nation’s preeminent historically black colleges and universities, which she has described as among the most formative experiences of her life.
Ms Harris says she’s always been comfortable with her identity and simply describes herself as “an American”.
She told the Washington Post in 2019, that politicians should not have to fit into compartments because of their colour or background. “My point was: I am who I am. I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it,” she said.
After four years at Howard, Ms Harris went on to earn her law degree at the University of California, Hastings, and began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.
She became the district attorney – the top prosecutor – for San Francisco in 2003, before being elected the first woman and the first black person to serve as California’s attorney general, the top lawyer and law enforcement official in America’s most populous state.
In her nearly two terms in office as attorney general, Ms Harris gained a reputation as one of the Democratic party’s rising stars, using this momentum to propel her election as California’s junior US senator in 2017.
Credit_BBC
Trump’s conspiracy theory against Ms Harris failed.
According to BBC, the campaign team for Democratic White House candidate Joe Biden has issued a scathing response after US President Donald Trump amplified a conspiracy theory about his running mate.
Mr Trump said he had “heard” that Kamala Harris – a US-born citizen whose parents were immigrants – “doesn’t qualify” to serve as US vice-president.
The fringe theory put forward by Trump has been dismissed by constitutional experts.
The Biden campaign called the comments “abhorrent” and “pathetic”.
They noted that Mr Trump spent years promoting a false “birther” theory that ex-President Barack Obama was not born in the US.
Ms Harris, a senator from California, on Tuesday became the first black woman and the first Asian-American to be named as a running mate on a main-party US presidential ticket.
“Donald Trump was the national leader of the grotesque, racist birther movement with respect to President Obama and has sought to fuel racism and tear our nation apart on every single day of his presidency,” a Biden campaign spokesman said in an email.
“So it’s unsurprising, but no less abhorrent, that as Trump makes a fool of himself straining to distract the American people from the horrific toll of his failed coronavirus response that his campaign and their allies would resort to wretched, demonstrably false lies in their pathetic desperation.”
Ms Harris was born to a Jamaican father and Indian mother in Oakland, California, on 20 October 1964. As such, she is eligible to serve as president or vice-president.
Constitutional scholars have dismissed the fringe legal theory that Mr Trump was referring to.
India coronavirus cases cross 2.5 million
The average daily reported cases jumped from around 15,000 in the first week of July to more than 50,000 in August.
India is ready to mass produce COVID-19 vaccines when scientists give the go-ahead, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in his Independence Day speech on August 15, also launching a national project to roll out health identities for each citizen.
In annual celebrations held at the 17th-century Red Fort and scaled down due to the pandemic, Modi identified health and economic self-reliance as the key priorities for his government.
At the event, soldiers who ceremonially welcomed Modi had been under quarantine days before the event.
Only around 4,000 guests were allowed and made to sit six feet apart, while medical booths with ambulances were set up for any attendee showing COVID-19 symptoms during entry.
Source___Aljazeera
The heaviest defeat Barcelona have suffered in years of the league.
Five-time Barcelona left without answers after German side’s ruthless display dumps them out of the Champions League.
Barcelona has “hit rock bottom” after the humiliating defeat to Bayern Munich in the Champion League quarter finals, the Spanish side’s defender Gerard Pique said.
The Catalan club were thrashed 8-2 in a one-sided match and had no answers to the German team’s energetic high-press tactics.
Not even captain Lionel Messi, one of the best footballers in the world, could save Barcelona at the end of a season in which he has seemed increasingly agitated by the disarray.
“It’s a disastrous result,” Pique said after Friday’s loss dumped the five-time winners out of the tournament.
“An embarrassment, that’s the word. We have hit rock bottom.”
This was a night of utter misery in Lisbon in the pandemic-enforced single-game reformatting of a knockout stage that has never a seen a team lose so heavily in the Champions League era.
If it wasn’t embarrassing enough, Barcelona had to watch Philippe Coutinho, on loan to Bayern Munich from Barcelona, inflict the final blows and make the collapse all the more painful.
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