Asthma can usually be controlled with an inhaler, or, sometimes, with medication. When neither works, it might be that the patient doesn’t have asthma at all. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports that researchers have found another disease with the same symptoms as asthma actually starts in the stomach.
From: MeNeedIt
Las Vegas, Nevada is often called ‘Sin City.’ It’s known as a place where people behave in more self-indulgent or decadent ways, famously summed up in the saying, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” But some Afghan immigrants who lead quiet religious lives have a different view of this gambling mecca. VOA’s Samir Rassoly visited a few local Afghan businesses and filed this report from Las Vegas.
From: MeNeedIt
For the first time, most of the United States’ 2.1 million federal workers will be eligible to get twelve weeks of paid family leave following the birth or adoption of a child. The new benefit – under the annual National Defense Authorization Act – goes into effect on Oct. 1. Dozens of other countries around the world already offer paid family leave to civil workers. Now advocates are pressing for the law to extend to workers across the U.S. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo has more.
From: MeNeedIt
The influential speaker of Iran’s parliament said on Sunday that, if European powers “for any reason” take an “unfair” approach to the dispute mechanism in the 4-year-old nuclear deal that has been in the balance since a U.S. pullout in 2018, Tehran will “seriously reconsider” its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
“What the three European countries did regarding Iran’s nuclear issue…is unfortunate,” the speaker, Ali Larijani, who is also a former chief nuclear negotiator for Tehran, was quoted as saying by state TV.
Germany, Britain, and France announced last week that they had triggered the dispute mechanism in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which exchanged curbs on Iran’s nuclear program for relief from international sanctions.
“We clearly announce that if Europe, for any reason, uses Article 37 of the nuclear agreement unfairly, then Iran will make a serious decision regarding cooperation with the agency,” Larijani said, according to the AFP news agency.
The European states — signatories of the JCPOA along with China, Russia, the European Union, and, formerly, the United States — said that, while the mechanism could lead to U.N. sanctions against Iran, they were not joining Washington’s yearlong “maximum pressure” campaign designed to change Tehran’s behavior.
Since the U.S. withdrawal from the deal, Iran has breached its main limitations, exceeding the stockpiles of heavy water and uranium allowed, the number and types of centrifuges it can operate to enrich uranium, and the purity of uranium.
From: MeNeedIt
Germany is bringing together the key players in Libya’s long-running civil war in a bid to curb foreign military meddling, solidify a cease-fire and help relaunch a political process to determine the North African nation’s future.
Chancellor Angela Merkel invited leaders from 12 countries as well as the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union and the Arab League to Sunday’s summit at the chancellery in Berlin. Germany’s months-long diplomatic drive seeks to bolster efforts to stop the fighting in Libya by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and his envoy for Libya, Ghassan Salame.
Among those expected are Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Other countries invited are the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Algeria, China and the Republic of Congo.
Also invited are Libya’s two main rival leaders: Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj and Gen. Khalifa Hifter. Both will attend, according to German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.
The chances of the summit producing any real progress are unclear, however. While getting the players to the table is an achievement, recent stepped-up outside support may have emboldened both sides not to compromise.
Since the 2011 ouster and killing of Libya’s longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, the country has sunk further into chaos and turmoil. Libya is divided into rival administrations, each with the backing of different nations: the U.N.-recognized government based in Tripoli, headed by Sarraj, and one based in the country’s east, supported by Hifter’s forces.
Hifter’s forces have been on the offensive since April, laying siege to Tripoli in an effort to capture the capital and battling militias aligned with the government. Hifter’s forces are backed by Egypt, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, while the Tripoli government has turned to Turkey for troops and weapons.
A truce brokered earlier this month by Russia and Turkey marked the first break in fighting in months.
Germany’s priority is to try to get the outside players that have interests in the conflict on the same page, stem the flow of weapons to Libya and ensure that the cease-fire sticks — creating space for U.N.-led efforts to re-establish a political process in Libya.
“At the Libya conference, we must see above all that the arms embargo is once again complied with — it has been agreed in principle at U.N. level but unfortunately not kept to,” Merkel said.
Germany is also keen to prevent Libyan fighting from further destabilizing the region, potentially setting off new waves of migrants seeking safety in Europe across the Mediterranean Sea.
Maas traveled to Libya to meet Hifter on Thursday. He said the general pledged to respect the cease-fire, even though he had left Moscow days before without signing a draft document setting out details of the truce. Sarraj did sign the document.
On Friday, however, powerful tribal groups loyal to Hifter seized several large oil export terminals along Libya’s eastern coast as well as southern oil fields in another challenge to the Tripoli government, which collects revenue from oil production. The National Oil Corporation said the move threatens to throttle much of the country’s oil production.
U.N. envoy Salame earlier this month demanded an end to all foreign interference in Libya, saying that a military solution is impossible and governments and mercenaries helping rival forces are hindering a political solution.
Despite the arms embargo against Libya, he said, weapons are being sold and given to Libyans, and “probably thousands” of mercenaries have been sent into the country, creating a “bleak” situation for millions of civilians.
German officials have been careful to keep expectations of Sunday’s summit in check.
“The conference is important, but it is a beginning, the start of a process,” spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer said.
From: MeNeedIt
Amid a spike in violent extremism around the world, a communications researcher is experimenting with a novel idea: whether people can be “inoculated” against hate with a little exposure to extremist propaganda, in the same manner vaccines enable human bodies to fight disease.
The idea is based on something called attitudinal inoculation, a technique that aims to build people’s resistance to negative influences by exposing them to weaker forms of those influences. Developed in the 1960s, the method has been used to help teenagers resist peer pressure to start smoking.
In 2018, Kurt Braddock, a communications professor at Penn State University, conducted a study to see whether attitudinal inoculation could be used against extremism. The results, published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence in November, look promising.
Data showed a ‘very cool story’
The data came back showing a very, very cool story about how inoculation works in this context,” Braddock said in an interview.“
I found that if you inoculate people against extreme right-wing propaganda or extreme left-wing propaganda, they tend to argue against that propaganda more than if you don’t inoculate them,” Braddock said. “They tend to feel more anger towards the source of the propaganda than those you don’t inoculate. And they tend to think that the extremist groups that produce the propaganda are less credible than if you didn’t inoculate them.”
Two-step method
As with other attitudinal inoculation studies, Braddock’s experiment on 357 participants — randomly selected from a survey website — entailed two steps.
The first involved warning them that the propaganda material they were about to encounter had been very effective in changing the views of people such as the participants. “
That makes them think that maybe their beliefs and attitudes aren’t as secure as they think they are and if they encounter this propaganda it might change their minds,” Braddock said.
Counter arguments
Then they were given counter arguments. For example, they were told that exhortations to violence could be refuted by arguing that “protest is fine but violence doesn’t solve the issue,” Braddock said.
Once “inoculated,” the participants (except for a small control group) were invited to read propaganda material produced by two extremist groups — the now-defunct left-wing Weather Underground and the neo-Nazi group National Alliance — and asked to register their reaction.
The response exceeded Braddock’s expectations: those who had been inoculated were more likely than the control group to reject both groups. “
The differences were significant,” Braddock said.
Caveats to findings
As significant as they were, the findings came with caveats. One reviewer noted that the study used propaganda from a group that is no longer around. Another questioned the reliability of such experiments, noting that exposure to propaganda is just one risk factor for radicalization. A more important question is whether the lab-tested method has real-world application.
Braddock acknowledges the limitations. To test out his idea in the real world, he said he plans to conduct follow-up studies on young people who are actively targeted by extremist propaganda.
‘Real-world testing’
That’s the next step,” he said. “I’m really curious to see what shakes out in real world samples.”
Jesse Morton, an-ex jihadi who runs a support organization for former extremists, said the study has some potential use. Social media companies and educational institutions could potentially use it to develop preventive tools, Morton said.”
There’s a lot of push on [social media companies] to do something about the right-wing extremist threat in general, but I think schools and universities are those that are most set up for benefiting from it,” Morton said.
Google pilot program
Under pressure to clamp down on violent content, social media companies have rolled out a variety of anti-extremism tools in recent years. In 2017, Google launched the “ReDirect Method,” a pilot program that prompted viewers searching for extremist videos on YouTube to watch more positive content.
In some ways, Morton said, the Redirect Method is similar to the anti-hate vaccine Braddock is testing. “
We can’t just think about prevention and isolation,” Morton said. “We have to think about the realm of prevention in countering violent extremism, as if it is directly connected to every facet of the radicalization process.”
From: MeNeedIt
Cameroon teachers are protesting what they say is growing violence against them by both students and their parents, and the teachers are urging the government to protect them and reinstate corporal punishment. The teachers say the absence of corporal punishment is encouraging abuse of teachers. This week, several attacks on teaching staffs were reported, including one in which a teenage student fatally stabbed his teacher, in the capital.
Students shout Saturday at a government-run school in Obala, a town on the outskirts of Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, protesting the principal’s decision to destroy all mobile phones and knives seized from children Friday at the school. One of their senior discipline masters, Narcisse Ateba, says the students use mobile phones to access social media platforms that promote violence, and they also use sharp objects such as knives to attack their peers and teachers.
As students in Cameroon began their annual exams Monday, hundreds of their teachers in English-speaking regions were on the streets protesting. The teachers are demanding better security after three teachers and a student were abducted, adding to scores captured, killed, or whose property was torched during a two-year separatist conflict.Teachers dressed in dark clothes and holding signs demanding better security walk down a street in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s northwest region.
…
He says that some parents and students will want to harass or beat him up, but he has nonetheless decided to publicly destroy the 15 mobile phones found and seized by teachers from students Friday because it is illegal to use them in classrooms. He says he will not allow students to come to school with razor blades, box-cutters and knives.
The destruction of the mobile phones and the peaceful marches to administrative offices and palaces are part of protests by teachers at Obala against what they say are increasing acts of violence against them.
This week, a 16-year-old student at the public school Nkolbisson in a neighborhood in Yaounde is accused of using a knife to stab his mathematics teacher who died of excessive bleeding as he was being rushed to a hospital. The school said the student insisted on using his mobile phone in class against the teacher’s instruction. The student was arrested and detained by police, and will be answering to charges, including premeditated killing.
Another teacher this week was battered by students in Douala for questioning why they were late to school, and yet another teacher in Douala was beaten by a parent and fell into a coma. The parent was said to be angry with the teacher’s decision to use corporal punishment on his son as punishment for making noise in class. In another incident, a student used a machete to chop off another student’s finger in Obala after a fight during a soccer match.
Elvis Yisinyuy, an official with the Cameroon Teachers Trade Union in Yaounde, says attacks by students on teachers intensified in 2015 when Cameroon prohibited teachers from beating or severely punishing students.
“When a minister says that teachers are not supposed to administer corporal punishment to students, the student will now see that he [the minister] has the right to bring disorder because there is nothing the teacher can do in class,” said Yisinyuy. “The minister should revisit the text and permit teachers to administer corporal punishment with caution.”
October 5 is World Teachers Day, set aside to mobilize support and to ensure that the needs of future generations will be met by teachers. Some teachers, who work with Central African refugees in camps in eastern Cameroon or on the border with Central African Republic (C.A.R.), face especially difficult challenges.
Emmanuel Mbiydzenyuy asks students to be quiet and follow English language classes here at the government school in Dhahong in eastern Cameroon. Eighty of the 110 students in one class are…
Yusinyuy said the high wave of drug consumption by students and the inability of teachers to use corporal punishment because they have been prohibited from doing so is also responsible for the wave of attacks.
Nalova Lyonga, Cameroon minister of secondary education, says corporal punishment can not be tolerated because it is an abuse on the rights of students who are mostly children.
“What I have told the teachers is that they themselves have to make a distinction between a disciplinary case and a case which becomes a criminal case, and they should be able to report to the special police at the disposal of the schools,” said Lyonga.
Lyonga said Cameroon students are exposed to other cultures of the world because of the increasing use of mobile phones, and they gain access to social media platforms that promote violence, while neglecting the peace and unity that Cameroon traditionally preaches.
Carol Kayum, president of Reference Citizens, a non-governmental organization that promotes citizenship education, has been visiting schools in Yaounde to educate both teachers and students against violence. She says Cameroon should uphold it’s culture of non-violence to prevent the growing number of assaults on other students and teachers.
“Our cultures are rich. Parents should transmit them to children, and also there should be communication between schools and parents so that we know what our children are doing in school, and we also tell the school authorities what the children do at home,” said Kayum. “School authorities and parents should control the use of drugs.
Kayum said many people now join the teaching profession because they lack jobs, and not for the love of teaching, and as such, they are not loved by students.
The students also have complained they are harassed by some teachers whom they accuse of behaving poorly or not teaching well.
The Cameroon Ministry of Secondary Education has recorded 40 violent attacks by students on their peers, 22 attacks on teachers and 15 attacks by parents on teachers within the past month.
From: MeNeedIt
The United Nations envoy to Libya said on Saturday he hoped but “could not predict” whether eastern oil ports shut ahead of a pending Berlin summit aimed at reaching a truce in Libya would be reopened soon.
Ghassan Salame said the Berlin summit scheduled for Sunday would likely discuss the closures to avoid them dragging on for weeks or months like previous seizures of facilities.
“If the thing is not solved between today and tomorrow I expect the issue to be raised, yes,” Salame told Reuters in Berlin, where Germany and the UN are expected to push for an
extended truce.
Oil export terminals across eastern and central Libya were shut on Friday by tribesmen allied to commander Khalifa Haftar, whose Libya National Army (LNA) based in the east has been locked in a nine-month war with government forces over control of the capital, Tripoli.
Diplomats see the closures as a power play by the LNA aimed at choking off oil revenue to the internationally recognized Tripoli government.
The National Oil Corp (NOC) on Saturday declared force majeure on oil exports from the eastern ports of Brega, Ras Lanuf, Hariga, Zueitina and Es Sider, saying the closures would result in the loss of 800,000 barrels (bpd) day in oil output.
Production in Libya, which was plunged into chaos with the toppling of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, was estimated at 1.3 million bpd last week.
Salame said he hoped Haftar would be willing to consider extending a truce which has largely held for a week despite the two sides failing to sign a deal at talks in Moscow mediated by Russia and Turkey on Monday.
Haftar is expected to attend the summit opposite Tripoli-based Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj.
The war over Tripoli is backed by foreign powers with the LNA supported by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and most recently Russian mercenaries, and Turkey sending troops and fighters from Syria’s civil war to help al-Serraj.
“I can confirm the arrival of fighters from Syria,” Salame said, putting estimates at 1,000 to 2,000.
There have been a series of failed conferences and negotiations to stabilize Libya.
Salame said he had started the process of a new intra-Libyan dialog between the rival parliaments in Tripoli and the east, an approach that has failed since 2017.
“What is different now is that we have war…in 2017 there was no pressure, but now you have thousands of people who have been killed,” he said.
From: MeNeedIt
A major gun rights rally is scheduled for Monday in the capital of the U.S. southeastern state of Virginia.
Thousands of pro-gun activists, included armed militia members, are expected to gather in Richmond at a time when Democrats have full control of the state legislature for the first time in a generation.
Democratic lawmakers have made passing tougher gun control laws a central campaign theme.
The Virginia Senate approved legislation late Thursday requiring background checks on all firearm sales and limiting handgun purchases to one a month. The senate also passed a bill to restore local government right to ban weapons from public buildings and other venues.
Neo-Nazi, militia and other gun-rights groups have promised to gather enmasse on the capital for Monday’s rally, which is organized annually by the Virginia Citizens Defense League.
The planned demonstration harkens back to a violent white supremacist rally in nearby Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, when one woman was killed and more than 30 other people injured as a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
Amid threats of violence and a possible heavy turnout, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, declared a temporary state of emergency Wednesday that bans all weapons from Richmond’s Capitol Square during Monday’s rally to prevent “armed militia groups (from) storming our capitol.”
Gun-rights groups, which contend the constitution guarantees their right to own any firearm, asked the Virginia Supreme Court rule the temporary ban unconstitutional, but the court upheld the ban on Friday.
Northam said authorities have received credible threats of violence, including the deployment of weaponized drones over Capitol Square.
Extremist groups have also inundated social media and the internet with threatening messages and hints of violence.
The FBI arrested three alleged members of a white supremacist group on gun charges Thursday, partly due to concern that they planned to incite violence at the rally.
Both houses of the Virginia legislature are expected to approve even more restrictive gun control laws, including a ban on assault rifles and “red flag” laws aimed at taking guns from people who are considered risk to communities.
U.S. President Donald Trump had words of support late Friday for gun rights supporters in Virginia, tweeting, “That’s what happens when you vote for Democrats, they will take your guns away.”
Supporters of tighter gun control laws say they would help reduce the number of people killed by guns each year.
From: MeNeedIt
Two of the first three states to vote in the Democratic presidential race will use new mobile apps to gather results from thousands of caucus sites — technology intended to make counting easier but that raises concerns of hacking or glitches.
Democratic Party activists in Iowa and Nevada will use programs downloaded to their personal phones to report the results of caucus gatherings to the state headquarters. That data will then be used to announce the unofficial winners. Paper records will later be used to certify the results.
The party is moving ahead with the technology amid warnings that foreign hackers could target the 2020 presidential campaign to try to sow chaos and undermine American democracy. Party officials say they are cognizant of the threat and taking numerous security precautions. Any errors, they say, will be easily correctable because of backups.
“We continue to work closely with security experts to test our systems and identify incidents, including disinformation monitoring, and we are confident in the security systems we have in place,” said Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price.
The technology aims to produce a more efficient and reliable way of calculating and releasing results to the public than the complicated math and thousands of phone calls that the caucus system has long relied upon.
But the use of a new app by an unidentified developer, coupled with the high stakes of the contests, has concerned some observers. They worry that unofficial results could be inaccurate if hackers or other problems taint the data. That’s a problem even if the paper backups eventually provide an accurate tally.
“Scary would be a darn good word,” said Brandon Potter, chief technology officer of ProCircular, an Iowa company that has done vulnerability assessments for local elections officials. “If it’s secure, awesome. But it opens up all kinds of questions.”
Party officials in both states declined to identify the vendor that developed their apps, saying they did not want to create a potential target for hackers.
Microsoft developed an app that was used by both political parties in the 2016 Iowa caucuses and credited with helping obtain results from 95% of precincts within four hours. During that cycle, Microsoft’s role was announced months beforehand, and the company discussed security measures.
Some critics say the party should again identify the developers, along with the certification and security testing they have gone through, to boost public confidence.
“It would be really nice to know who developed it, how competent they are and what oversight they were subjected to,” said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer science professor and election security expert. “The caucus night reporting, which is so important in determining which candidates drop out, which continue, who gets a boost from the caucus — all of that is definitely vulnerable to an attack on the app.”
Jones said hacking could take several forms. Hackers could try to corrupt the app before it’s downloaded, activate malware that might be lurking on phones or target the server that houses the app. Another concern: The app could crash amid heavy use as precincts report results.
He and others agreed that the official results of the Feb. 3 Iowa and Feb. 22 Nevada caucuses will eventually be accurate. Each precinct keeps paper copies of the results and numerous participants at each site will know the precise outcome.
Because of hacking concerns, the Democratic National Committee scrapped the Iowa party’s plan to hold a virtual caucus in which those unable to attend in person could use smartphones to record their preferences. Party officials said the risks posed by the reporting apps were much lower than with electronic voting.
The state parties worked with the technical team at the DNC to vet developers and design security protocols around the use of the app.
The Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government conducted simulation and training exercises with Iowa officials that included scenarios in which there were problems with a mobile reporting app. The training emphasized the importance of using authentication, secure networks to transmit data and encryption to guard against attacks.
“I do think that we need to give the Iowa team a lot of credit for how seriously they looked at all these issues,” said Eric Rosenbach, co-director of the Belfer Center.
DNC spokesman David Bergstein said national officials were coordinating with the Iowa party and the Department of Homeland Security “to run efficient and secure caucuses.” He said he is confident that state Democrats are “taking the security of their caucuses extremely seriously from all perspectives.”
Party officials said they would not be sending the app to precinct chairs for downloading until just before the caucus — to narrow the window for any interference. And while using the app is encouraged, precinct chairs still have the option of phoning in results.
Democrat Ruth Thompson, who will chair a Des Moines precinct, said she was not concerned about security risks related to the app.
“The Russians don’t care what’s on my phone,” she said. “I know we’ve got the app, but we have a paper backup. If there is a hack or something, there is the opportunity to correct it.”
Hacking fears aren’t new. In 2012, a video purporting to be from the hacking collective Anonymous called on supporters to “peacefully shut down” the Republican caucuses. In response, party leaders increased their security measures for the website where the results were posted.
Ultimately, it was old-fashioned data errors that tainted the results that year: The party chairman on caucus night declared Mitt Romney the winner by eight votes over Rick Santorum. Two weeks later, Santorum was declared the winner by 34 votes when results were certified.
From: MeNeedIt
Russian President Vladimir Putin played it differently this time.
Instead of openly declaring plans to extend his rule like he did in 2011, Putin proposed constitutional amendments to appear to give more power to Russia’s parliament.
Instead of announcing the move as a fait accompli, he said the people should vote and decide.
And then he executed a swift, unexpected reshuffle of Russia’s leadership, putting a low-profile official with no political aims in charge of the government.
Putin announced what many see as a strategy for staying in power well past the end of his term in 2024. And the proposed constitutional reforms that might allow him to remain in charge as prime minister or as head of the State Council didn’t elicit much public outrage.
Neither did the resignation of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s prime minister, whom Putin quickly replaced with the little-known tax chief, Mikhail Mishustin.
There was a smattering of calls for protest: One opposition supporter urged people to join his one-man picket in front of the Presidential Administration on Saturday, while another called for protesters to turn out against the “constitutional coup” at a Sunday rally in honor of two slain activists.
It was very different from what happened in 2011-2012, when efforts to engineer Putin’s return to the presidency crushed Russian hopes for liberalization and sparked massive protests in Moscow.
In his speech Wednesday, Putin presented his plan to amend the constitution as a way to improve democracy. By suggesting that lawmakers could name prime ministers and Cabinet members, he also curtailed the authority of the president, who currently holds that power.
Putin also said the constitution could specify a greater role for the State Council, an obscure consultative body of regional governors and federal officials, indicating that he might take a leading position there.
He also sought to prioritize the primacy of Russian laws, so that the European Court of Human Rights would no longer have the authority to issue rulings that Moscow opposed.
All this would “strengthen the role of civil society, political parties and regions in making key decisions about the development of our state,” Putin said Thursday in discussing the amendments with lawmakers.
New Prime Minister Mishustin was praised by government officials and commentators as an “effective manager” with expertise in finance who would be able to drive Russia’s stagnating economy out of a slump.
Many Russians might see that as a positive change rather than a sophisticated political plot. According to a survey released Friday by Russia’s state-funded pollster VTsIOM, 45% of the respondents saw the shakeup as Putin’s genuine desire to change the existing power structure.
But opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny said the changes are not the kind that people are looking for. Putin is looking to “remain a lifelong, ultimate leader” and run Russia as “property” divided between himself and his backers, Navalny tweeted.
And the announced changes do nothing to address what Russians really want, said Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol.
“People demand to end corruption, people demand to improve their living conditions. They demand a reform of the health care system, they’re worried about pension reform. All these demands, they are not going anywhere,” Sobol told The Associated Press.
Vladimir Milov, an opposition politician, echoed that sentiment. Russians are willing to put up with worsened living conditions if they see potential for growth in the future — but Putin’s address shows he’s not interested in that, he said.
“This is the main conflict between Putin and society right now,” Milov said. “Society can’t wait for economic growth to start again, and Putin doesn’t care, he’s occupied with other things. At some point, this will backfire.”
Still, the announced constitutional reforms are unlikely to trigger a new wave of protests.
“All recent protests happened when discontent that has been building up for a while spilled out, triggered by something. Amending the constitution is unlikely to be a trigger,” Milov said.
Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the independent Levada polling center, said the government shakeup is so vague it is unlikely to spur public anger.
“What is happening is not clear. Is this about a presidency? About some other governing body? It is unclear what people should express their unhappiness about,” Volkov said. “It is hard to protest against something that’s unclear.”
In addition, Volkov noted, back in 2011-2012 Putin’s approval ratings were much lower — more than half of the country wanted him out. “Right now there is no urge to replace the country’s leader,” he said.
And the question remains whether the opposition will be able to galvanize people to protest. The Kremlin last year turned up the pressure on activists and politicians, sandbagging them with high-figure fines and exhausting them with arrests and trials.
There are several criminal cases open against Sobol and other Navalny allies. Sobol said she owes the government more than $400,000 in fines, and expects more fines to be imposed on opposition figures.
“There is a high probability that political pressure on us will continue this year,” she said.
Still, Sobol vowed the opposition will continue the fight — by protesting, contesting the government’s actions in court and exposing corrupt officials.
On Thursday, Navalny said in a post online that Mishustin’s wife earned some $12 million over the past nine years, according to her tax returns, even though she never owned nor ran a business. He demanded answers from Mishustin, who headed Russia’s tax service until he was named prime minister this week, and alleged there was corruption involved.
Dmitry Gudkov, a former lawmaker turned opposition politician, believes an early parliamentary election is likely, since he says the Kremlin would want the vote to be this year instead of next.
“They’re in a rush and want to (pass the proposed constitutional amendments) with the sitting parliament, which they fully control,” Gudkov. “Clearly that changes our strategy.”
From: MeNeedIt
U.S. health officials announced Friday that the United States will begin screening airline passengers arriving from central China for signs of a new virus outbreak that has killed two people and sickened dozens of others.
Officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the screenings will take place at airports in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, and will focus on direct or connecting flights from Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the heart of the outbreak.
A CDC spokesman, Scott Pauley, told VOA that only people traveling from Wuhan would be screened at this time.
Chinese health officials say many of those who became sick from the virus worked at or visited a food market in the suburbs of Wuhan. Three cases have been detected outside China — two in Thailand and one in Japan – with health officials saying those patients had visited Wuhan prior to becoming sick.
Health authorities have identified the virus as a new type of coronavirus, part of a large family of viruses that includes the common cold as well as the more serious illness SARS. Scientists say the new virus strain appears most similar to SARS, but say it seems to be weaker than that disease.
Two people in China have died from the mysterious virus and 45 others have been infected in Wuhan and nearly 50 have been infected worldwide. Chinese officials say five people remain in serious condition.
The CDC says upon arrival in the United States, travelers from Wuhan will answer a health questionnaire and have their temperatures taken for signs of illness. Those who are determined to be at risk of the virus will be taken to a nearby hospital and isolated for further assessment.
CDC officials told reporters during a conference call Friday that they expect more cases will be reported outside of China. They said the risk of the virus to the American public is low, but said they want to take proper precautions.
Health officials believe the virus spread in China from animals to humans. It is not clear if the virus is now capable of human-to-human transmission, but CDC officials say there are some indications that people may be able to spread the virus in a limited way. Scientists say that it is also possible that the virus could mutate to become more dangerous.
At least a half-dozen countries in Asia have also started health screenings for incoming airline passengers from central China.
This time of year is one of the busiest travel seasons in China, with people flying both to and from the country to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
Pauley said the CDC anticipates a higher number of Chinese travelers to the United States for the New Year and has factored this into its planning.
China said it has increased disinfection efforts in major transportation hubs to help ensure the virus does not spread. Wuhan is a main hub in China’s railway network.
A State Department spokesman said the United States is closely monitoring the outbreak in China as well as actively working with governments across the region to combat spread of the virus.
The World Health Organization is warning that a wider outbreak of the virus is possible and has given guidance to hospitals worldwide. However, in a statement Thursday, the WHO said that it does not recommend instituting any trade or travel restrictions on China at this time.
The most common symptoms of the newly identified virus are fever, cough and difficulty breathing.
VOA State Department correspondent Nike Ching contributed to this report.
From: MeNeedIt