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from Asia Times
LEAST BIASED, HIGH; News & Media Website based in Hong Kong
Adding to the spread of the virus is relaxation of lockdowns, mask fatigue and absence of social distancing. India has taken the lead in new Covid-19 cases as the virus spreads to smaller towns and villages. Almost half its total of 3.38 million cases came in August and the country is fast narrowing the gap with Brazil’s 3.76 million. The United States remains the worst affected with 6.05 million cases. On Thursday, India added a record 76,826 cases, the second day running with more than 75,000. It accounts for 28% of daily new cases worldwide and 13.7% of the global total of 24.6 million cases.
He sees the US-sponsored deal between the UAE and Israel as aimed at a new regional order that sidelines Turkey. Turkey has made its first move on the regional chessboard after the recent peace deal between the United Arab Emirates and Israel. On August 22, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan received in Istanbul a high-level delegation from Hamas, including its leader Ismail Haniyeh and deputy leader Saleh al-Arouri.
South Korea decided Friday to tighten coronavirus curbs further in the greater Seoul area as it seeks to contain growing clusters in the region. The country largely overcame an early coronavirus outbreak with extensive tracing and testing, but is now battling several outbreaks mostly linked to Protestant churches.
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from Bloomberg
Media/News Company
The government of Belarus shut down access to much of the internet during a crucial election this month by using equipment manufactured by a U.S. company to block people's access to thousands of websites, according to two people familiar with the matter. ... Initially, those measures were effective in restricting the flow of information on the internet. Police were filmed violently attacking protesters and snatching people from the streets, but the footage couldn’t be immediately circulated on social media websites or livestreamed on YouTube because of the restrictions. But within hours, activists began circulating instructions for how to set up the encrypted chat app Telegram using a proxy service. They created websites that bypassed the deep packet inspection filtering system, and used them to distribute Psiphon, which allows people to connect to the internet without censorship. Psiphon uses proxy servers and methods that disguise internet traffic so that it flies under the radar of deep packet inspection. That allowed protesters to communicate with one another, access the internet and document brutal police violence in the wake of the election, igniting broad-based anger and intensifying calls for Lukashenko’s ouster.
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from Conciliar Post
Just as liberty cannot be boundless, there is no such thing as a “secular,” which is to say, purely “civil” state. Whilst our state may claim to be secular, that is really a legal fiction of sorts that itself tells us something about the state’s confession, i.e. it feigns pluralism and is generally non-committal, but finds moral commitments that are historically attached to organized religion distasteful. Denial of moral value judgement is itself a value judgment that requires a positive assertion of something. Our state may be pluralist, but this, more than integralism, is aspirational rather than descriptive. Pluralism is part of the confession and, therefore, part of the public reason. But it does not entail what it claims: namely, neutral, value-free proceduralism and radical toleration across the board.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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from The Wenatchee World
BRIDGEPORT — In the middle of a quiet city park, a group of people set up green and red tents. Residents of the town passed the tents and eyed them with wary expressions. The tents were meant to give people a sense of privacy during the voluntary testing for COVID-19, said Rachel Noll, Incident Command Team spokesperson. The Chelan-Douglas Health District asked for the incident command team, because they needed the assistance, Noll said. It was all a part of an effort to test the entire town of Bridgeport, population about 2,500, for the virus, said Charlotte Headley, Incident Management Team commander. People could refuse to get tested, but the Incident Management Team along with the Chelan-Douglas Health District provided free tests Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at Firemen Park. The organizers, along with volunteers, also went door-to-door in Bridgeport offering testing. The testing was all self-administered. The reason for the mass testing is because earlier testing efforts — that included 32 people — indicated an infection rate of about 30% in the community, Noll said. Chelan-Douglas Health District staff are looking at providing this type of testing for other communities with similar infection rates in the future, she said.
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