Âu

[Triển]

Over 600 people test positive at German slaughterhouse

Yet another German slaughterhouse has registered a massive outbreak of the coronavirus. Roughly two-thirds of the test results so far have come back positive.



A total of 657 people have tested positive for the coronavirus at a slaughterhouse in northwestern Germany, authorities announced on Wednesday, out of 983 completed tests. Local politician Sven-Georg Adenauer delivered the updated figures on Wednesday evening, cautioning that more tests were outstanding and further cases probable.

The Rheda-Wiedenbrück meat processing plant, in the district of Gütersloh, near Bielefeld, is run by Tönnies, the leading meat processing firm in Germany.

Just over 1,000 workers were tested, and most of the results were processed by Wednesday evening.

Around 7,000 people in the area have been put in quarantine due to possible exposure to the virus.

The results have prompted local authorities to shut down the plant, and suspend all schools and daycare centers in the region until the summer holidays on June 29.

The district said it hopes these steps will work to stop the outbreak spreading further in the population.

By no means an isolated case

Germany's meat processing sector has come under increasing scrutiny during the pandemic, with several plants reporting massive outbreaks. The sector is plagued with poor working conditions, exploitative contracts and usurious rents in mass housing for eastern European workers.

A spokesman for Tönnies said at a press conference: "We can only apologize."

Spokesman Andre Vielstädte said the business had worked "intensively" to "keep the virus out of the company."

The company said it was unclear whether there were multiple clusters, but that the outbreak was recent as tests had come back negative just three to four weeks ago.

The company speculatively blamed its workers, largely from Romania and Bulgaria, for traveling home during the long weekend and bringing it back to Germany.

According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Germany has had far more confirmed cases of coronavirus than either Romania or Bulgaria. In the past 14 days, Germany registered 4,814 new cases, compared to 2,898 in Romania and 915 in Bulgaria.

Workers' lodgings come into question

Catholic priest Peter Kossen, who provides pastoral care to many workers in the meat industry, called for meat processing companies to improve conditions for workers during an interview with DW.

"Women and men are simply worn out by these living and working conditions. They are treated as if they had no human dignity, as if they were third-class citizens," he told DW. "As long as you don't change this structure, you will always have these mass outbreaks in the meat industry."

He called for improvements to worker accommodation with one room per person so that the workers can effectively social distance and so they can achieve proper rest.

According to Germany's Robert Koch Institute, across the country the infection rate continues to remain low, despite local flare-ups.Some 156 of 412 districts have not reported any new infections in the past seven days. No district has exceeded the limit of 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants. It is unclear if Gütersloh is included in that figure.

A comparatively high number of new infections per 100,000 inhabitants have been registered in the past seven days in Aichach-Friedberg, Greiz, Gütersloh, Verden, Sonneberg and the Berlin district of Neukölln.

aw/msh (dpa, AFP, epd)

/* src.: https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-ov...use/a-53846038

[Triển]

Ở Đức có một đám khùng.

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Controversial Lenin statue unveiled in Germany's Gelsenkirchen

A statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin has been unveiled in the western German city of Gelsenkirchen. The installation comes amid global protests against monuments to controversial historical figures.



Over 30 years after the end of communism in the Eastern Bloc, the western German city of Gelsenkirchen on Saturday unveiled a new monument to the controversial Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin.

The unveiling took place amid global protest over statues immortalizing divisive historical figures.

Germany's tiny Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD), who led the initiative to install the statue, said it was the first statue of the Russian revolutionary figure to be erected in the former West Germany, decades after the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR) communist state fell.

The unveiling of the over 2-meter (6.5-foot) tall statue, originally produced in the former Czechoslovakia in 1957, was accompanied by speeches and music. Participants waved red flags from the square where the statue was erected and from the rooftops of the buildings around it.


The MLPD said it is the first such statue ever to be erected on the territory of the former West Germany

"The time for monuments to racists, anti-Semites, fascists, anti-communists and other relics of the past has clearly passed," MLPD chairwoman Gabi Fechtner said in a statement.

By contrast, "Lenin was an ahead-of-his-time thinker of world-historical importance, an early fighter for freedom and democracy," she argued.

Attendees were asked to practice physical distancing and to wear a face mask to protect against coronavirus infections.

Council attempts to block installation

Not all residents of Gelsenkirchen, a city of 260,000 and the center of Germany's former industrial and mining Ruhr region, were happy about the new monument.

"Lenin stands for violence, repression, terrorism and horrific human suffering," representatives from mainstream parties on the district council in Gelsenkirchen-West said in a resolution passed in early March, in an attempt to block its installation.

The council "will not tolerate such an anti-democratic symbol in its district," it added, urging "all legal means" be used to block its installation.

But the upper state court in Münster later rejected the council's attempt to halt the statue, which it argued would interfere with a historic building on the same site.


Some have argued that the Lenin statue will spoil the look of an historic building

Statues toppled around the globe

Statutes and monuments in Germany and around the globe have come under fire as part of the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, which began following the death of African American George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis on May 25.

Last week in Hamburg, a statue of Otto von Bismarck, Germany's first chancellor, was splattered with red paint. Bismarck, who orchestrated Germany's unification in 1871, is also known for hosting the Berlin Conference of 1884, in which Africa was divided between European colonial powers.

Berlin has experienced its own controversies over the renaming of roads honoring 19th-century colonial figures in the city's so-called "African Quarter." The activist-led initiative has met with resistance from many locals.

In recent weeks, protesters in the US, UK and Belgium have succeeded in pulling down statues of Christopher Columbus, slave trader Edward Colston, and King Leopold II, who brutally ruled over the Congo in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Germany, by contrast, only a handful of statues have been splattered with paint.

kp/mm (AFP,dpa)

/*src.: https://www.dw.com/en/controversial-...hen/a-53880002

[Triển]

Cái app của Đức tuyệt vời trong vấn đề "quyền tư ẩn" và mã nguồn mở. Sao không dẹp bỏ tự ái mà lấy của Đức phát triển tiếp cho ra cái của mình?

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Germany has its Covid-19 app, so where's the UK's?

Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent @BBCRoryCJ




Around the world, major countries are unveiling new contact-tracing apps as they emerge from lockdown.

Germany has just launched a decentralised app based on the Apple and Google platform. Switzerland, Ireland and Austria are testing theirs. And Japan is said to be unveiling something similar, with the help of Microsoft, later this week.

So the inhabitants of an island just off the south coast of England could be forgiven for asking - has everybody forgotten about us?

Six weeks ago, a trial of the NHS contact-tracing app was launched on the Isle of Wight with great fanfare. Islanders were urged to download it, almost as a patriotic duty - with the prospect that successful testing would lead to a national rollout, at least across England, a couple of weeks later.

The NHS team was quick to claim early success with over 55,000 downloads, something like 60% of the people whose mobile phones were capable of downloading it.

As the weeks went by islanders were assured that much was being learned, even if this early version of the app was quite limited - it sends rather vague messages to people who might have been in contact with someone who has reported symptoms.

Then everything went quiet.

There was no information about the data that had been gathered - how many alerts had been sent out, how people had reacted.

A new version of the app with more questions about symptoms and with test requests and results integrated into the process was due to have been launched last Tuesday, but the date came and went without any update.

Meanwhile, both ministers and Baroness Dido Harding, who is running the wider Test and Trace programme, have stonewalled questions about the app.

"App? What app? Oh that thing that we were so excited about back in April…," characterises a typical response.

The best thing they can say about it is that it will be the cherry on the cake of contact tracing, rather than the cake itself. As for a timetable, they are no longer willing to provide one.

Hand-holding

This has left the people of the Isle of Wight somewhat baffled.

Among them is a man who has spent a career building commercial apps and knows a bit about the complexities of a launch.

In late May, Steve Clark, who now runs a tech consultancy from the Isle of Wight, blogged some suggestions for making the NHS app more engaging.

He told me that a large proportion of the population had been enthusiastic about getting involved in the trial.

"We were excited and proud," he says, "to be doing our bit for the effort, and to be involved with testing what we assumed was going to be a major plank of getting on top of the virus, and keeping on top of it, as we come out of lockdown."

But he says that enthusiasm has waned because people just don't know what is going on

He puts that down, partly, to one of the key problems with a lack of "hand-holding" in the app to guide people through it, coupled with the fact that there is no incentive to look at it every day.

Steve still has the NHS app on his phone, but says it seems that others have deleted it.

"Just as you're trying to get something that would roll out nationally, you've actually got people on the trial wanting to remove it - and I think that was substantially because there was no support framework and feedback loop."



Another islander, who did not want to be named, told the BBC their concern was about what the alerts from the app meant: "Currently wishing I hadn't downloaded it. It lacks information - not knowing where this mysterious contact is, or was, and even if they have had a test."

The irony is that the team behind the NHS app believe that version two, which should have been out on the island by now, will deal with many of these issues. But they seem to be as much in the dark as anyone else as to when it will be rolled out.
Bluetooth struggles

Isle of Wight MP Bob Seely says there is some evidence from the trial that it may have helped suppress the virus.

"I look forward to the island getting an update from the Trace and Test leadership team very soon, so that we know what is happening with the app," he says.

And the fact that others are rolling out apps while the NHS project seems becalmed, might not be quite as embarrassing as it seems.

All the signs are that every country is finding it a struggle to prove that Bluetooth contact-tracing apps, whether centralised or decentralised, can really be effective.

A poll in Germany found only 42% of people saying they would download the Covid-Warn app, while 46% said they would not.

Meanwhile, Singapore appears to have decided that a wearable device is more likely to prove an effective method of contact tracing than its TraceTogether app, which has suffered from low uptake and technical glitches.

Nevertheless the UK, which a couple of months ago appeared to be a pioneer in this technology, now looks like an also-ran.

"Where the Isle of Wight goes, Britain follows," said the Health Secretary Matt Hancock when he announced the trial.

But, so far, people on the island could be excused for thinking the app is taking them on the road to nowhere.

/* src.: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53069690

[ốc]

Heart of Darkness: 10 triệu người Congo chết vì một tội đồ diệt chủng lớn nhất.

Belgium forced to reckon with Léopold's legacy and its colonial past
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-colonial-past

The target was King Léopold II, whose brutal rule of Congo from 1885 to 1908 caused an estimated 10 million Congolese deaths through murder, starvation and disease. Brussels city authorities are facing a petition to remove all statutes of the king by 30 June, the 60th anniversary of Congo’s independence. By Friday, more than 75,000 people had signed it.

The protesters are trying to dismantle racism in Belgium in 2020, and feel they have no choice but to confront the past. “I couldn’t have missed this moment,” said Dalilla Hermans, a writer and activist who overcame her initial health fears about attending a mass gathering. “Now you can really feel that this was everyday black people who had had enough.”

There are many other celebrations of the era, and the daily newspaper Le Soir has counted no fewer than 70 tributes to colonialism on the streets of Brussels. Jules Jacques, who oversaw rubber collection and threatened resisting Congolese workers with “complete extermination”, is remembered in rue Général Jacques. Arthur Pétillon, an artillery major charged with quashing rebellions, is lauded with a metro station.

The death toll and savage punishments meted out to Congolese workers, such as chopping off hands and whipping people to death, were well documented by the time Michel spoke. Even a century earlier, during the imperial twilight, Léopold’s brutal rule was an international scandal, as recounted by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold’s Ghost.

[Triển]

Germany puts two western districts on lockdown

German officials reimposed lockdown measures on hundreds of thousands of people following a large coronavirus outbreak in a meat processing plant. Police were deployed to help maintain quarantine among the plant workers.



While coronavirus restrictions are easing across the most of Germany, authorities in the northwestern state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) brought back the lockdown for districts of Gütersloh and Warendorf on Tuesday.

The move is aimed at fighting the outbreak at the nearby meat processing plant, where over 1,550 workers have now tested positive.

The outbreak is the "biggest infection event" in Germany so far, said NRW Premier Armind Laschet.

"We will now, for the first time in Germany, return a whole region to the lockdown measures that were in place a few weeks back" Laschet said while announcing the restrictions on Gütersloh, where the slaughterhouse is located. A few hours later, the authorities expanded the lockdown to the nearby Warendorf, where some of the workers live.

Still contained?

Together, the two districts are home to around 628,000 people. The authorities have now once again closed schools, kindergartens, theaters, gyms swimming pools, bars, clubs, and other public venues. Only two people can meet in public in they are not members of a single household. Officials said the measures will stay in place for at least one week.

However, Premier Laschet emphasized the measures were "preventative" ad the wast majority of the infected cases are slaughterhouse workers.

State authorities are now boosting testing to see if the virus is spreading among the general population. The medical officials are planning to test patients and nurses in hospitals and nursing homes, as well as workers in supermarkets. The would also try to determine how many workers from other companies came into contact with the people working for the meat producer Tönnies.

Tönnies' 'scandal'

Hundreds of police officers were also deployed to help maintain quarantine among over 6,000 Tönnies employees, most of them migrant workers hired by subcontractors and housed in poor and unsanitary conditions. The Gütersloh outbreak is only the biggest of a series of outbreaks in similar facilities across the country, drawing the attention to German companies' abysmal treatment of workers in the meat industry.

Talking to DW on Tuesday, a Gütersloh resident endorsed the government's move but also slammed Tönnies co-owner Clemens Tönnies for failing to tackle the infection.

"Of course [the lockdown] is the right course of action, but it's a scandal that Mr. Tönnies would allow this rubbish to happen," he told DW's Amien Essif. "It could have been stopped sooner."

On Tuesday, another outbreak was reported in a different meat processing plant located in the German state of Lower Saxony, with officials testing 50 workers and finding 23 are positive for the coronavirus.

dj/rc (Reuters, dpa, AFP)

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[ốc]

Mỹ cũng phá kỷ lục về số người bị lây corona gia tăng trong một ngày.

Nhất cúm khuynh thành, tái cúm khuynh quốc.

[Triển]

Mỹ cũng phá kỷ lục về số người bị lây corona gia tăng trong một ngày.

Nhất cúm khuynh thành, tái cúm khuynh quốc.

Nghe đồn New York rút lại vụ nới lỏng.

[Triển]

Ngồi đáy giếng ở phút 3:00

Bovid:
- Mr. Speaker, i wonder whether the right honorable
can name a single country in the world that has a functional
contact tracing app, because there isn't one.

Đối lập:
- Germany! Twelve million downloads.

(hết trích)

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[ốc]

He should ask the Right Honorable about where to buy a comb.

Hay là giả bộ như tóc bù xù để cho đầu hói?

[Triển]

He should ask the Right Honorable about where to buy a comb.

Hay là giả bộ như tóc bù xù để cho đầu hói?

Mưu kế này hay à, còn hơn anh Fúc Xuân Nguyễn, chuyên gia kéo tóc 9:1.