Stock Transfer Tax could fund infrastructure upgrades
Categories: Editorial, OpinionThank you to The Daily Gazette for highlighting the issue of immovable dams in the Mohawk River.The Mohawk River is perhaps the single most unifying force in the 110th Assembly District. The historic Stockade in Schenectady, the town of Niskayuna, and the town of Colonie, which comprise the 110th Assembly District, all have areas prone to flooding from the Mohawk. My staff and I attended Union College’s Spring 2017 Mohawk River Symposium, where the main focus was water quality in the Mohawk, both for recreational uses, which impacts all the new development near Rivers casino, and Colonie, which draws its water directly from the Mohawk and treats it before distributing it to residents (Schenectady County communities draw their water from the aquifer under the Mohawk).I discussed Mohawk River water quality with Colonie town officials. While Colonie has a first-rate water treatment plant, it is preferable and less costly to start from cleaner water.I met with Jim Duggan regarding the immovable dams in the Mohawk and their contribution to the flooding problem. Immovable dams create stagnant water, which may contribute to water quality problems in the Mohawk as well.In response, I obtained an additional $200,000 in the state budget for The Mohawk River Basin Program, which includes water quality and flood hazard risk reduction as two of its five points. By contrast, New Yorkers assume almost our entire tax burden.Finally, the tax would spread the financial benefit of Wall Street trading more evenly across our state instead of concentrating it among the affluent.In the 19th century, income inequality rose, but at least industry built up our physical plant. We need to assure that is done today as well.Our state became the Empire State because of a major infrastructure project that included the Mohawk River, namely the Erie Canal. Perhaps in this difficult budget year, we can see the wisdom of a using the Stock Transfer Tax to make a commitment to modernizing our infrastructure.Phillip G. Steck is a member of the state Assembly representing the 110th District.More from The Daily Gazette:EDITORIAL: Beware of voter intimidationEDITORIAL: Thruway tax unfair to working motoristsFoss: Should main downtown branch of the Schenectady County Public Library reopen?EDITORIAL: Find a way to get family members into nursing homesEDITORIAL: Urgent: Today is the last day to complete the census The program is administered by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.This additional money will make possible studies of much needed corrections to mitigate the flooding and stagnant water building up behind the immoveable dams.I should note that technology exists, such Obermeyer pneumatically operated spillway gates, that could correct the immovable dams.Water quality problems in the Mohawk emanate from aging sewer infrastructure, which periodically is overloaded, especially during heavy rains, causing untreated effluent to flow into the Mohawk, we sadly must report.Amsterdam is a hot-spot of this problem.Our colleague, Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara, has pushed to use funds from the governor’s water and sewer infrastructure initiative of last year to help Amsterdam grapple with its sewer needs.Schenectady’s new sewer pump station is likewise part of the plan to address water quality issues in the Mohawk.Last year, I met separately with Stockade citizens and Schenectady Mayor Gary McCarthy to facilitate construction of the new pump station, which is essential, while minimizing its impact on the Stockade. We then passed the necessary enabling legislation for the project.
The Mohawk is our unifying force. But unfortunately, infrastructure needs only seem to get addressed when incidents like Hoosick Falls create an emergency agenda.We need a long-term commitment to fix our state’s declining infrastructure. I continue to advocate for reinstating the Stock Transfer Tax, which New York had from 1915 to 1979, and using the funds raised solely for infrastructure improvements.This tax is but pennies per transaction, but due to volume, would raise billions of dollars.It is a tax that would be paid predominantly by non-New Yorkers.Other states, such as Alaska, North Dakota and Texas export their tax burden to purchasers of their oil.Their oil revenue subsidizes their citizens’ tax burden.
It’s hard for me to see the federal deduction of state and local taxes as anything other than high-tax states being subsidized by states with lower taxes. My brother in Idaho is involuntarily helping to pay New York’s high taxes when my federal tax liability is disproportionately reduced. How is that fair? Hopefully, we in New York enjoy greater benefits that come with higher taxes, but we are the ones who collectively made that choice. I find it incredible that Gov. Cuomo claims that putting a cap on how much my brother is forced to subsidize New York and other high-tax states is somehow unconstitutional. Perhaps Idaho should sue for reimbursement of past subsidies.Andrew CrapoGlenvilleMore from The Daily Gazette:EDITORIAL: Urgent: Today is the last day to complete the censusEDITORIAL: Find a way to get family members into nursing homesFoss: Should main downtown branch of the Schenectady County Public Library reopen?EDITORIAL: Thruway tax unfair to working motoristsEDITORIAL: Beware of voter intimidation Categories: Letters to the Editor, Opinion
Categories: Letters to the Editor, OpinionA new day, a new school shooting, the same old reactions. The gun lobby will inevitably tell us that this is a mental health issue, or perhaps if school personnel were armed, then casualties may have been avoided.I’m aware facts don’t seem to play a big role in such debates, but let’s look at a few anyway. The United States has a gun death rate that is approximately 25 times higher than other developed countries. Statistics on mental health are difficult to compile and compare. However, mental health disorders are present in every society. There’s no question that we should have a health care system that addresses mental health seriously.But it’s clear the gun/death problem is a gun problem. The United States leads the world in gun ownership per capita. U.S. gun proponents tend to view gun ownership as a right. Most countries view it as a privilege This privilege should be earned. Universal background checks, training classes, the end of the gun-show loophole, and the ban of assault weapons are all common sense steps to a safer society.The same old rhetoric will get us the same old result. It’s well past time to stop worrying about our precious guns and start doing something for our precious children.Frank GiordanoSchenectadyMore from The Daily Gazette:Schenectady, Saratoga casinos say reopening has gone well; revenue down 30%EDITORIAL: Beware of voter intimidationMotorcyclist injured in Thursday afternoon Schenectady crashSchenectady NAACP calls for school layoff freeze, reinstatement of positionsEDITORIAL: Urgent: Today is the last day to complete the census
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A gunman suspected of shooting nine people dead at two shisha bars in a southwestern German city has been found dead at his home, police said on Thursday.Another body was discovered at the home of the man in Hanau, a city east of the financial hub of Frankfurt where the shootings happened.”There are no indications that other suspects were involved,” police said in a statement. “One of the two dead people found is highly likely the perpetrator. The investigations into the identity of the victims and the perpetrator are ongoing.” Police raised the death toll to nine after one person succumbed to injuries. Their information suggested the gunman had committed suicide at his home after fleeing in a dark car, but the motive for the attacks is unclear.Can-Luca Frisenna, whose father and brother run one of the two bars attacked by the gunman, said he rushed to the scene after he received news of the shooting.”I heard my father was affected and my little brother, they run the kiosk, I don’t have much to do with it,” said Frisenna. “But then I saw them both – they were horrified and they were crying and everything. So everyone was shocked.”Mass-selling Bild newspaper said the man was a German citizen and that ammunition and gun magazines were found in his car. He had a firearms hunting licence, it added.Topics :
While conservative Muslims in Indonesia believe that the main responsibility of a wife is to stay at home and be an adept homemaker, two clerics maintain that Islam has never positioned women as maids.It is instead the obligation of the husband to provide food, clothes and decent housing for his wife, meaning he is the one who should cook, do the laundry and keep the house neat, according to the clerics who spoke about the teachings of Sunni Islam’s four largest mazhab (Islamic schools of thought): Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali.”When I looked closer at Islamic jurisprudence books, I was surprised that none of the major mazhab actually obligated wives to take care of household duties,” cleric Ahmad Sarwat said on Friday during a public discussion on his book titled Wife not Housemaid, which was first published last year.The event came amid a plan by a… Log in with your social account Facebook Google Topics : LOG INDon’t have an account? Register here Linkedin Forgot Password ? #family family-resilience-bill religion #religion Islam #Islam gender #gender
“So, there is no reason not to allow the cruise ship to dock here,” he said.Following the health clearance, all passengers were allowed to disembark on Sunday morning via a tender boat. The cruise ship itself will not dock until Sunday night, as another cruise ship is still docked at the port.Agustinus said some passengers had decided to stay in Bali for a one-day tour, while 378 passengers had cut their cruise short and departed for their respective home countries via Ngurah Rai International Airport. The cruise ship is scheduled to depart from Bali for Colombo at 6 p.m. on Monday.Responding to the decision to allow Viking Sun passengers to disembark in Bali, Denpasar city administration spokesperson Dewa Gede Rai said the Transportation Ministry and Health Ministry had made the final decision. “The most important thing is that local authorities have warned that a detail examination should be done. We don’t want to try to stop tourists from coming to Bali. We just want to protect our residents from the virus. It’s for our residents’ safety,” Dewa said.Topics : After initially being denied entry by the Bali provincial administration due to COVID-19 fears, passengers of the Viking Sun cruise ship have gotten the all-clear from local health authorities and disembarked at Benoa Port in Denpasar on Sunday.Benoa Port Authority head Agustinus Maun told The Jakarta Post that the port authority had no reason to deny entry to the ship, its passengers and crew members after health authorities gave them the clearance. “All the passengers and crew have undergone detailed health examinations, and all of them have been declared healthy,” Agustinus said. Carrying 738 passengers and 442 crew members, the Viking Sun arrived in Bali waters on Saturday morning, one day earlier than scheduled, after it was barred from docking in Surabaya, East Java, when local authorities received information that two passengers aboard the ship were suffering from a cold and fever.The rejection and quarantine of cruise ships are the latest efforts by governments around the world seeking to contain the COVID-19 outbreak ever since Japan quarantined the virus-stricken Diamond Princess and its 3,700 passengers in Yokohama.Bali Governor I Wayan Koster initially said the Viking Sun and its passengers would not be allowed into Bali, but the decision was reversed after medical personnel from the Benoa Port Health Office as well as the Bali Health Agency and Bali Mandara Hospital completed health examinations on everyone on board.Agustinus said the health examination had been conducted in accordance with the World Health Organization protocols.
To ensure delivery of supplies, IATA has urged governments to cut red tape for charter operations, exempt cargo crews from quarantine rules and ensure adequate staff and facilities to process the cargo.In Indonesia, Bayu said the problem lay more in economic viability than bureaucratic red tape, such as in the transportation of medical supplies such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and pharmaceutical products.“We have received a regulatory green light to use cabin loading to ship medical supplies. However, the operation isn’t really profitable [for airline companies],” he said.Looking ahead, IATA also forecast a gloomy projection for the air transportation sector as the World Trade Organization (WTO) predicts a 13 to 32 percent slump in global trade in 2020.“The recession will likely hit air cargo at least as severely as it does the rest of the economy. To keep the supply chain moving to meet what demand might exist, airlines must be financially viable,” Alexandre said.In order to maintain airlines’ financial viability, he also underlined that the need for financial relief “by whatever means possible” would remain urgent for airlines. “As most of the cargo is being carried by passenger aircraft and not freight carriers, cargo capacity has dwindled. We grounded most of our passenger aircraft due to COVID-19,” INACA secretary-general Bayu Sutanto told The Jakarta Post in a phone interview on April 29.Indonesia’s decreasing air cargo traffic numbers are in line with global trends, with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) recording a 15.2 percent decline in global flight demand in March compared to the same period last year, while global capacity fell 22.7 percent.The severe drop in air freight capacity, which has outpaced the decline in the demand, could cause a severe cargo capacity shortfall, which would disrupt shipments, including of vital supplies needed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, IATA said.“At present, we don’t have enough capacity to meet the remaining demand for air cargo. The gap must be addressed quickly because vital supplies must get to where they are needed most,” IATA director general Alexandre de Juniac said in a statement on April 28. Topics :
Indonesia’s volume of domestic and international airfreight has dropped 39 percent from the average rate as the majority of airlines ground aircraft due to the COVID-19 outbreak, Indonesian National Air Carrier Association (INACA) data shows.The association recorded a domestic freight volume of 13,558 cargo ton kilometers (CTK) and an international freight volume of 111,464 CTK in March.Such numbers are a huge decline from the 2019 monthly average of 45,193 CTK and 159,234 CTK for domestic and international freight, respectively.
Employment Report AwaitedThe claims report will have no impact on the Labor Department’s comprehensive employment report for April, which is scheduled to be released on Friday, as it falls outside the period during which the government surveyed establishments and households for its monthly report.Still, jobless claims totaled 26.5 million through the week of April 12. Economists, however, cautioned that this would not necessarily translate into a similar number of job losses in the government’s closely watched employment report.”We have to remember that there is evidence to suggest there were delays for people registering, with discussion of jammed phone lines and websites crashing under the traffic,” said James Knightly, chief international economist at ING in New York.”Offsetting this there may have been people who filed more than one claim in confusion while other people may have found work in the grocery and parcel delivery sectors.”Some companies like Walmart and Amazon are hiring workers to meet huge demand in online shopping. There is also demand for truck drivers as well as workers at pharmacies, supermarkets and courier companies.According to a Reuters survey of economists, nonfarm payrolls are forecast to have plunged by a historic 22 million in April, which would blow away the record 800,000 dive seen during the 2007-2009 recession. Employment dropped by 701,000 jobs in March, ending a record streak of gains dating to September 2010.The unemployment rate is seen jumping to 16% in April, which would shatter the post-World War Two record of 10.8 percent touched in November 1982. In March the jobless rate shot up 0.9 percentage point, the largest monthly change since January 1975, to 4.4 percent.April could, however, mark the trough in job losses as more small businesses access their portion of an almost $3 trillion fiscal package, which made provisions for them to get loans that could be partially forgiven if they were used for employee salaries. At least 30 states are partially reopening, which could see some of the unemployed going back to work.Thursday’s claims report is also expected to show the number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid raced to a record 19.905 million in the week ended April 25 from 17.992 million in the week. The so-called continuing claims data is reported with a one-week lag.”Continuing claims should remain elevated for longer, only peaking once hiring starts to resume more substantially,” said Veronica Clark, an economist at Citigroup in New York. “This will likely occur sometime in June as reopenings slowly start through May. More substantial increases in employment in monthly job figures could occur into July and August, but some more-permanent job losses are likely to remain.”Topics : Millions more Americans likely sought unemployment benefits last week, suggesting a broadening of layoffs from consumer facing industries to other segments of the economy and could remain elevated even as many parts of the country start to reopen.The Labor Department’s weekly jobless claims report on Thursday will probably reinforce economists’ views of a protracted recovery of the economy, which is reeling from nationwide lockdowns to slow the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus.The economy shrank in the first quarter at the steepest pace since the Great Recession from 2007-2009. The weekly claims report would follow news on Wednesday that private payrolls fell by a record 20.2 million in April, which set up the overall labor market for historic job losses last month. “Even with the economy slowly starting to reopen, the number of unemployed should continue to rise sharply as governments, as well as businesses that have tried but not succeeded at holding the line, are now laying off workers,” said Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economics in Holland, Pennsylvania.”The pace of new claims for unemployment is slowing, but remains at levels unimaginable just a few months ago.”Initial claims for state unemployment benefits likely totaled a seasonally adjusted 3.0 million for the week ended May 2, according to a Reuters survey of economists. That would be down from 3.839 million in the prior week and mark the fifth straight weekly decrease in applications since hitting a record 6.867 million in the week ended March 28.Last week’s filings would lift the number of people who filed claims for unemployment benefits to about 33.3 million since March 21, roughly 22 percent of the working age population.
Topics : Most of the cases are in or around Moscow, and some regions have already begun to lift lockdown restrictions.The Moscow mayor announced last week that industries and construction sites will begin work on May 12, but that masks and gloves will now be mandatory in public areas and shops.The Russian capital has made special passes required for moving around outside, but many people can be seen in the streets, especially in good weather. The number of people confirmed to have the coronavirus in Russia has exceeded 200,000, data posted on an official website set up by health authorities showed on Sunday.The total number of cases increased to 209,688 after another 11,012 tests came back positive in the last 24 hours, it showed.The official number of people dying of coronavirus-related complications has been comparatively low in Russia at 1,915, though an opposition-allied doctors union has accused authorities of underreporting deaths of medics.
Russia’s national figure does not include everyone who died after testing positive, but only those patients whose deaths were confirmed to be caused by viral pneumonia.Officials have said the daily rate — which has been over 10,000 for the past seven days — has much to do with aggressively testing even those showing no symptoms.The trend will likely make the number of Russia’s confirmed cases the biggest in Europe in a matter of days.Russia has performed 5.4 million tests, compared to Britain’s fewer than two million.
This year’s British and Australian MotoGP races have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers said on Friday.The British Grand Prix was scheduled for Silverstone on Aug. 30 while the Australian round had been due at Phillip Island on Oct. 25.The season is yet to get underway after the season-opening Qatar Grand Prix was cancelled in March as the novel coronavirus outbreak shut down world sport. Races in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands which were to be held in June-July were also removed from the revised calendar.”We’re saddened to have to announce the cancellation of these iconic events after finding no way through the logistical and operational issues resulting from the pandemic and rearranged calendar,” Carmelo Ezpeleta, chief executive of the commercial rights holder Dorna, said in a statement.Silverstone managing director Stuart Pringle said they had no choice but to cancel the event despite putting in “months of work behind the scenes” to ensure it went ahead.”Logistical restrictions under the current situation, combined with a shortened and rearranged MotoGP calendar has caused the cancellation of the event,” Pringle said in a statement. Topics :
Australia is yet to open its international borders while people travelling to the United Kingdom must quarantine for two weeks.Grand Prix races in Spain, France, Italy and Catalunya were postponed until later this year.Earlier this month, MotoGP had proposed starting its season with two races on consecutive weekends in July at the Jerez circuit in southern Spain, with the government yet to approve the proposal. 
Comedian Bintang Emon, who recently gained popularity for his satirical video that questions the light sentence sought for Novel Baswedan’s alleged assailants, has become the subject of controversy on social media after several Twitter accounts purportedly belonging to so-called buzzers accused him of being a drug addict.In a tweet posted by one such account, @Tiara61636212, Emon was said to have been a methamphetamine addict. The account further claimed Emon had turned to illegal drugs to maintain his performance as a stand-up comedian.Photos of the comedian have also been posted on the social media platform along with the caption “addicted to meth”. Actor and fellow stand-up comedian Pandji Pragiwaksono wrote in a tweet that Emon had been attacked by the questionable accounts because he had done “the right thing”.Sekarang Indonesia tau Bintang Emon melakukan hal yg benar karena fitnah oleh organisator akun2 ini mengungkap bhw mereka ada di posisi yg salah. pic.twitter.com/JGb11JRseG— Pandji Pragiwaksono (@pandji) June 15, 2020“Now Indonesia knows that Bintang Emon did the right thing because the allegations raised by the owners of these accounts reveal they are on the wrong side,” @pandji tweeted on Monday, garnering nearly 30,000 retweets and 60,000 likes at the time of writing.Twitter user @tapifanboyy called on fellow social media users to speak up in support of Emon amid the furor.Bintang Emon adalah bentuk kebebasan, pemuda yang berani bersuara dengan nyata tentang hal hal yang dianggap suram di negeri ini.Bintang Emon adalah kita, kita yang geram akan keadilan yang seolah timpang.Kalian jangan cuek, beri dukungan untuk ikut menyuarakan keadilan. pic.twitter.com/oBMe6jIdiI— Bukan fakboy (@tapifanboyy) June 15, 2020“Bintang Emon represents freedom, a young man who dares to speak up about the [injustices] in this country. Bintang Emon is us — we who are sick of injustice,” they tweeted.Another user, @nichkuss, similarly conveyed his support for Emon.My fav’s comedian is attacked by buzzers for speaking up the truth. Seriously, the way how this government work is suck. And why can’t just the government accept all of the criticize instead of making shitty tweets and hashtags 🙄🙄I’ll always stand for you, Bintang Emon pic.twitter.com/VrWoizYwuw— Nicolas Kusuma (@nichkuss) June 14, 2020“I’ll always stand [with] you, Bintang Emon,”Meanwhile, other netizens have also attempted to clear unfavorable search results for Emon on the platform by tweeting his name multiple times alongside a string of positive adjectives such as “talented”, “beautiful” and “precious”.Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) researcher Rivanlee Alexander told tempo.co that the controversy only went on to prove that there had been an active effort to silence dissenters in the country.“Although the perpetrators remain unknown, what they have done is an example of intimidation against freedom of expression,” Rivanlee said.In a short video that went viral over the weekend on Instagram, Emon poked fun at the prosecutors’ insistence that the defendants in Novel’s case — Chief Brig. Ronny Bugis and Brig. Rahmat Kadir — had “accidentally” thrown sulfuric acid at the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) investigator’s face in April 2017.The skit was met with praise among fellow netizens and celebrities, with some lauding Emon’s decision to use his penchant for humor to speak up about the notoriously difficult case.Novel himself also went on the record to say that he found Emon’s video amusing.“That boy is ingenious,” he said on Saturday. The account has been suspended at the time of writing.Read also: Baffled by light sentences sought for Novel Baswedan’s attackers, netizens turn to humorEmon himself wrote on his official Twitter page, which has since been set to private, that he and his management team had been receiving anonymous emails.The apparent attempts to discredit Emon seemed to have failed, however, as many other netizens have since tweeted in support of the young comedian. As of Monday afternoon, “Bintang Emon” has topped the national trending topics on Twitter.
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Topics : People living in the world’s tropical forest regions, from Brazil to Indonesia, face heightened risk to their health this year from a potentially deadly combination of forest fires and the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists warned on Wednesday.Air pollution caused by smoke from annual human-caused fires that rage in tropical regions is expected to make cases of the novel coronavirus more severe, they said.Eminent U.S. physician Harvey Fineberg, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, warned that the 2020 fire seasons in tropical forest countries “are very likely to exacerbate the presence and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic”. “It’s a year when it is incumbent especially on the leadership, and those who have influence, to do everything in their power to curtail the intentionally set fires,” he said in a briefing organized by The Earth Institute at Columbia University.He called the fires an annual “blight” but predicted this year they would be “especially damaging not only to the ecology but to human health”.In the Brazilian Amazon, the main fire season runs from August to October. Its intensity last year hit global headlines and sparked calls for better prevention.In Indonesia, the dry season runs from April to October.
Predictions are for a milder dry season this year compared to 2019, when an El Nino weather pattern fuelled higher temperatures and more intense fires, spreading health-damaging haze across swathes of Southeast Asia, said Ruth DeFries, an ecology and sustainable development professor at Columbia University.But the coronavirus pandemic is likely to distract political attention from the problem, and could eat into resources to train firefighters and get them into peatland forests where some of the most serious fires smolder for a long time, she added.Fineberg said it was too early to point to examples where forest fires have worsened the severity of COVID-19, as the main fire season is only beginning.But evidence on general air pollution and lung infections caused by the virus so far show a “chain of connection”, he noted.He also warned of a heightened risk of the COVID-19 infection spreading if fires force communities to evacuate and seek shelter in shared accommodation.Hospitals under strainMarcia Castro, chair of global health and population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an expert on the Brazilian Amazon, said forest fires in the region commonly led to a rise in hospitalizations because of respiratory, heart and other problems.If that were to happen this year, on top of the strain from the COVID-19 pandemic – Brazil currently has the world’s second-highest number of cases and deaths – the health system would not have enough beds to cope, she said.She and Fineberg highlighted the particular threat to indigenous peoples living in or near forests, noting COVID-19 was being brought into their areas by outsiders exploiting their land through mining and other activities that damage the environment.Seasonal surges in dengue and malaria patients were also likely to complicate the situation, Castro said, with 90% of hospital beds already occupied in several cities in the Amazon region, mainly due to COVID-19.As Brazilian cities relax lockdown measures with inadequate precautions to prevent the disease’s spread, “an intense fire season could have devastating public health consequences with the unnecessary loss of many lives and the widening of local inequalities”, she said.”There is really no option [other] than preventing these fires from happening,” she added.The scientists emphasized that forest fires in the world’s humid tropics have rarely occurred naturally, unlike in other drier areas such as the United States and Australia.Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), said fires in the Amazon were usually used to clear land, particularly for farming, meaning they could be controlled using policy.In 2019, deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rose by 34% and is likely to increase by a similar amount this year, she added.In May, deforestation was up for a 13th consecutive month, government data showed last week, despite President Jair Bolsonaro’s recent deployment of the military to fight soaring environmental destruction in the region.Alencar said that about 45% of the land that had been deforested last year had yet to be cleared by burning, pointing to the potential for another year of intense fires.”We need to have the government really on board to fight illegal activities… and while we don’t have that, you have a major disaster in the Amazon – an environmental crisis on top of a sanitary crisis,” she said.Alencar and Castro called for businesses and consumers around the world who buy commodities from Brazilian industries that contribute to deforestation – such as beef, leather and soy – to use their purchasing power to persuade Brazil to clamp down.”With the current administration, I think we [would] need a lot of pressure that would harm in some way the economy for them to take action,” Castro said.
Central Lombok regency in West Nusa Tenggara is set to require female Muslim civil servants to wear the niqab, as some of them have been seen not wearing masks — one of the health protocols imposed amid the COVID-19 pandemic.Regent Moh Suhaili Fadhil Thohir announced the plan during a regular Friday gymnastics event in the regent’s office yard on June 19, which was recorded in a video that has since become the subject of public discussion.“I said it spontaneously because during the Friday event, some refused to wear a mask for fear of running out of oxygen. But considering the current situation, we need protection,” he said on Wednesday. Suhaili said the requirement for Muslims to wear the niqab had nothing to do with radicalism as it was simply an effort to prevent virus transmission among civil servants, who he said should set an example to the wider community in Central Lombok.“It’s also fashion. They could match their hijab to the color of the veil. It has nothing to do with radicalism, or over-fanaticism,” Suhaili said as quoted by kompas.com, adding that the requirement would start as soon as next Friday.The civil servants, however, are not required to wear a head-to-toe veil that also cloaks the body, but a niqab covering only the nose and mouth.Suhaili also said the requirement was not forceful and that there would be no regulation needed to enforce it. “There are no sanctions, only a pleasant and healthy movement.”Lombok Tengah civil servant Yayuh had mixed feelings about the niqab requirement. Although it can be a learning process to wear proper Muslim clothing, Yayuh feared it might create a contrast with the gymnastic clothes they wore.“We usually wear tight pants for the Friday event. If outsiders see it, it might be a bit inappropriate,” Yayuh said, adding that it might be expensive to have that kind of niqab.As of Thursday, West Nusa Tenggara had recorded 1,260 COVID-19 cases, 63 of which have turned fatal. Lombok Tengah has recorded at least 114 cases, with four deaths. (syk)Topics :