Sectarian violence in Nigeria’s Kaduna State has lingered for decades, claiming thousands of lives and forcing thousands more from their homes.  In late July, gunmen killed at least 43 people — making it 178 people killed so far in the southern part of Kaduna since the start of the year.  The Nigerian government has deployed more security forces but local community leaders and right groups accuse authorities of willful neglect. Timothy Obiezu reports from a village in Kaduna that was recently attacked.Camera: : Emeka Gibson    
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Технологічний гігант Apple 19 серпня став першою американською компанією, ринкова вартість якої сягнула 2 трильйонів доларів.

Раніше виробник смартфонів під маркою iPhone став першою компанією, яка в березні 2018 року досягла ринкової вартості в 1 трильйон доларів. Після цього успіх Apple наслідували інші технологічні компанії, серед яких Amazon, Microsoft та материнську структура Google, компанія Alphabet.

Успіх Apple дозволили підняти особисті статки керівника компанії Тіма Кука до 1 мільярда доларів, згідно з підрахунком індексу Bloomberg Billionaires.

На ринку відбувається загальне зростання вартості акцій технологічних компаній, оскільки за умов пандемії багато співробітників у США перейшли на роботу з з метою дотримання медичних рекомендацій та соціального дистанціювання.
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На українському міжбанківському валютному ринку відбувається знецінення гривні, яке за умов піку бюджетних платежів аналітики сайту «Мінфін» вважають сюрпризом.

«Назвати таке зростання чимось критичним для нашої економіки ми не можемо – Україна переживала і стрибки курсу до 1 гривні за день, – але тенденція останніх двох днів щодо збільшення котирувань дещо насторожує і психологічно готує учасників торгів до продовження просідання гривні, що є нестандартним в пік бюджетних платежів у клієнтів», – вказують експерти.

За даними Finance.ua, станом на 12:05 котирування зросли до рівня 27 гривень 50–52,5 копійки за долар (почалися торги на рівні 27 гривень 43–46 копійок за долар).

Національний банк України встановив опівдні 20 серпня довідкове значення курсу 27 гривень 49 копійок (це на 17 копійок більше за офіційний курс на сьогодні).

 
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Asian markets sank into negative territory Thursday, dragged down by the U.S. Federal Reserve’s sobering outlook on a post-pandemic recovery the day before.Japan’s benchmark Nikkei index finished a full 1% lower. The S&P/ASX index was down 0.7%. South Korea’s KOSPI index plunged 3.6%, and the TSEC index in Taiwan dropped 3.2%.Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was trading 1.8% lower in late afternoon trading, while Shanghai’s Composite index was down 1.3% and Mumbai’s Sensex was down just over 1%.In minutes of last month’s meeting of the U.S. central bank, released Wednesday, several members of the Reserve said the COVID-19 pandemic “would continue to weigh heavily on economic activity, employment, and inflation in the near term and was posing considerable risks to the economic outlook over the medium term.”The Fed’s remarks caused a shockwave on Wall Street, sending the Dow Jones, S&P 500 and Nasdaq downward.In commodities trading Thursday, gold was selling at $1,951.70, down 0.9.% U.S. crude oil was selling at $42.57 per barrel, down 0.8%, and Brent crude oil was selling at $45.02 per barrel, down 0.8%.All three U.S. indices were trending negatively in futures trading.  
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Google is warning that Australians’ personal information could be “at risk” if the digital giant has to pay for news content. A proposed law would require firms like Google and Facebook to pay Australian news organizations for the content that appears on their websites. The law was drafted last month after months of negotiations between the Australian government and the two tech giants broke down. In an open letter posted online Monday, Melanie Silva, Google’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand, said Australians’ personal data could be turned over to big media firms if the law is enacted, which would help them automatically inflate their search ranking.  Silva also said the law would make such free services such as Google Search and YouTube “dramatically worse” and could lead to Australians paying for such services. Rod Sims, the chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, dismissed Google’s claims as “misinformation.”  He said the proposed law does not require Google to turn over user’s personal information, or charge for its search services.The open letter was published as Australian regulators begin the last week of gathering public consultations and comments on the proposed law.   Australian media companies have seen their advertising revenue increasingly siphoned off by firms like Google and Facebook in recent years. 
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India on Monday reported its coronavirus death toll has surpassed 50,000 after it confirmed more than 900 new dead in one day. The country is fourth in the world in COVID-19 deaths, trailing only the United States, Brazil and Mexico. New Zealand, a country that celebrated going more than 100 days without a known community transmission of the virus, has pushed back its election scheduled for next month as it deals with a new outbreak. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the national elections will now take place October 17, and that there will be no further delay. New Zealand health officials reported nine new cases Monday, bringing the number of confirmed active cases there to 78 while the main site of the outbreak, Auckland, remains under lockdown for another week. In South Korea, which saw its own success in driving down new infections, health officials are working to slow an outbreak around Seoul that includes several churches as major sources of infections. After going several months with new daily cases rarely topping 50, health officials said Monday there were 197 new confirmed cases, after nearly 300 on Sunday.A health official wearing protective gear takes a rest during the COVID-19 testing at a public health center in Goyang, South Korea, May 28, 2020.Japan, home to the world’s third largest economy, is the latest to show the economic impact of the pandemic that has caused governments across the world to institute restrictions that have severely hampered economic activity. The government released data Monday showing the country’s economy shrank at an annual rate of 27.8% between April and June. The decline is the biggest since comparable data began being recorded in 1980. In the United States, a disease expert says those who contract the virus and recover may expect to be immune from another infection for as long as one year. Former Food and Drug Administration official Dr. Scott Gottlieb appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday to talk about new findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that say a three-month immunity is a certainty.   “But it’s probably the case that you’re going to have a period of immunity that lasts anywhere from six to 12 months. It’s going to be highly variable. Some people will have less immunity, some people will have slightly more,” Gottlieb said.  “But it’s good news that they’re able to document that people have really sterile immunity. They’re not going to get reinfected for at least three months and probably longer than that after infection.”    But Gottlieb cautioned that COVID-19 is called the novel coronavirus for a reason – there is still much that doctors don’t know about it.  The United States has recorded more than 170,000 coronavirus deaths, the most in the world.  Experts at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics predict that number will hit 186,000 by September 1 and more than 390,000 by December 1. 
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A U.S. disease expert says COVID-19 survivors may expect to be immune from another case for as long as one year. Former Food and Drug Administration official Dr. Scott Gottleib appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday to talk about new findings by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that say a three-month immunity is a certainty.  “But it’s probably the case that you’re going to have a period of immunity that lasts anywhere from six to 12 months. It’s going to be highly variable. Some people will have less immunity, some people will have slightly more. But it’s good news that they’re able to document that people have really sterile immunity. They’re not going to get reinfected for at least three months and probably longer than that after infection.” But Gottlieb cautioned that the COVID-19 is called the novel (new) coronavirus for a reason – there is still much that doctors don’t know about it. With the U.S. closing in on 170,00 coronavirus deaths, experts at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics predict that number will hit 186,000 by September 1 and more than 390,000 by December 1.  Health officials have not been able to convince enough people to wear masks and practice social distancing to slow the spread of the disease.A man wearing a face mask walks across the street in Los Angeles, Friday, Aug. 7, 2020.U.S. scientists say they have isolated infectious particles of the coronavirus as far as 4.8 meters away from hospitalized patients. The scientists said the widely accepted 2-meter social distancing advice provides a “false sense of security” and could result in large groups of people being exposed to the disease. The study, conducted at the university of Florida Health Shands Hospital, has not been peer reviewed.   The Italian cruise ship MSC Grandiosa will began a voyage to the Mediterranean on Sunday, after it and four sister cruise ships were idled by the coronavirus pandemic in Civitavecchia, one of the world’s busiest ports.  The five ships can hold a total of 26,000 people. The four other ships will also resume operations soon, positioning Italy as the epicenter of the effort to resume cruises worldwide.   
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Japan was hit by its biggest economic contraction on record in the second quarter as the coronavirus pandemic crushed business and consumer spending, keeping policymakers under pressure for bolder action to prevent the recession from deepening.While the economy is emerging from the doldrums after lockdowns were lifted in late May, many analysts expect any rebound in July-September growth to be modest as a renewed rise in infections keep consumers’ purse-strings tight.Gross domestic product (GDP) shrank an annualized 27.8% in April-June, government data showed Monday, marking the biggest decline since comparable data became available in 1980.It was the third straight quarter of contraction and slightly bigger than the median market forecast for a 27.2% drop.”The big decline can be explained by the decrease in consumption and exports,” said Takeshi Minami, chief economist at Norinchukin Research Institute.”I expect growth to turn positive in the July-September quarter. But globally, the rebound is sluggish everywhere except for China.”Private consumption, which accounts for more than half of Japan’s economy, plunged 8.2% for the quarter, as lock-down measures to prevent the spread of the virus kept consumers at home.The drop, which exceeded analysts’ forecast of a 7.1% fall, was the biggest quarterly decline on record.Capital expenditure declined 1.5% in the second quarter, less than a median market forecast for a 4.2% fall.External demand, or exports minus imports, shaved a record 3.0 percentage point off GDP, as the pandemic dampened global demand, the data showed.Japan has deployed massive fiscal and monetary stimulus to cushion the blow from the pandemic, which hit an economy already reeling from last year’s sales tax hike and the U.S.-China trade war.While the economy has re-opened after the government lifted state of emergency measures in late May, a worrying resurgence in infections cloud the outlook for business and household spending. 
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An eyewitness has captured images of a smoke funnel near a raging California wildfire, as weather agencies issued a rare “fire tornado” alert, Saturday, August 15. Eyewitness Dylyn Walker recorded footage of the whirl of smoke and blazing fire across the grassland while he was on his way to check on his relatives, as an evacuation alert went out for Plumas and Lassen counties in northern California. Local media reported that the Loyalton Fire, which originated east of the town of the same name, has burned around 20,000 acres, with 5% containment as of Saturday evening. (Reuters)  
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Somali security forces battled militants for more than four hours Sunday before ending an attack and siege of a beachfront hotel.Ismail Mukhtar, spokesperson for the Ministry of Information, said 11 people were killed, one of them a security agent. Ambulance services earlier reported evacuating nearly 30 more injured victims.Officials and witnesses told VOA Somali that just before 6 p.m. local time, a suicide car bomb exploded outside the Elite hotel at Mogadishu’s popular Lido Beach. Moments later four armed gunmen stormed the hotel.Security forces arrived at the scene immediately after the attack began and took over responsibility of ousting the attackers from hotel guards. Militants Attack Beachfront Hotel in Somali Capital A firelight is reported inside the hotel between the militants and hotel guards All four of the attackers who stormed the hotel were shot dead, Mukhtar said.  Troops rescued more than 200 people from the hotel, including the owner, Abdullahi Mohamed Nur, a lawmaker and former minister.The al-Shabab militant group claimed responsibility for the attack. The head of the Somali journalists’ union, Mohamed Ibrahim Moalimuu, was among the witnesses sitting outside the Elite hotel when the explosion occurred.  He told VOA Somali that he arrived the hotel 15 minutes before the explosion along with his friend Abdirazak Abdi Abdullahi, who works for the state-controlled radio station. Abdullahi was killed by the militants after the first gunshots were fired, Moalimuu told VOA Somali.  Abdirazak Aden Osman, a security guard at a nearby hotel, said he heard a huge explosion that rocked the area.  “It was a massive explosion,” he said. “Glass from broken windows fell on us.”  Al-Shabab is an al-Qaida-affiliated group that has been carrying out attacks in Somalia, targeting civilian and government installations. The group has lost control of almost all of the major towns to the Somali government and African Union forces but still controls large parts in the countryside and is capable of carrying out deadly attacks.
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Out on her first day of knocking on doors in the Bay Area, the census taker had limited success getting people to answer the questions on the 2020 census.Residents at only two homes answered all the questions about how many people lived there, what their relationships were and their sex, age, race and whether they’re Hispanic. No one was home at three households, residents at two homes wouldn’t give her the time of day, and the rest only answered some questions.Workers on the front-lines of the massive effort trying to count everyone in the U.S. have faced unprecedented obstacles in the last phase of the 2020 census: people wary of talking to strangers in a pandemic and distrustful of government; a shortened schedule; administrative snafus, and nagging concerns about the quality of the protective equipment they’ve received.The California census taker and others interviewed by The Associated Press asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs — they are prohibited by the bureau from talking to reporters. Up to a half million census takers started hitting the streets last week to knock on the doors of around 56 million homes that haven’t yet responded to the 2020 census. The AP talked to two census takers in California, two in Alaska and one each in Florida and Massachusetts, and the concerns they raised were similar.A 2020 census letter and a multilingual guide mailed to a U.S. resident in Fairfax, Virginia, March 12, 2020. (Photo: Diaa Bekheet)Following her training, the California census taker tried to establish a rapport by smiling frequently, but that chemistry was hampered by her mask. She also told them she was just trying to do her job in an effort to win them over. She was taken aback by how reluctant people were last Tuesday, either for privacy reasons or distrust of the government.At a couple of houses, she knew the family, but even then they didn’t want to be interviewed by her, though they were happy to share neighborhood gossip.Several census workers said they wished the personal protective equipment the Census Bureau gave them was of higher quality. The census takers, also called enumerators, were given white cloth masks, some made by underwear manufacturer HanesBrands, and a small bottle of bourbon-scented hand sanitizer made by a distillery in Oklahoma. Census takers also were told to conduct interviews outside as much as possible and maintain 6 feet (2 meters) of distance from people they interview.The Florida enumerator said her mask was flimsy and too big for her face. One of the California census takers described the masks as “stretchy” and lacking a filter. A spokeswoman for the Census Bureau said the masks conformed to CDC guidelines, were washable and could be reused up to 10 times.Johnny Zuagar, who is president of a union that represents permanent census workers but not the temporary census takers, said he thought the Census Bureau did the best it could on masks, given the competition from other companies in ordering 2.4 million masks.”They are trying to do something unprecedented,” said Zuagar, president of Census Council 241.The census helps determine how $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed and how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets.Some of the census takers said the training they received was fraught with administrative confusion. The Florida census taker received a phone call two weeks ago, asking her to show up for an in-person training session across town 10 minutes before it was supposed to start. A week later, after she met her supervisor, she still had not been able to start her online training sessions because she was switched into another group of enumerators and her new supervisor had not yet contacted her.One of the California census-takers said he was sent an email notice about a virtual training session hours after it was supposed to have taken place. No one told the Massachusetts census taker he needed to bring his Social Security card or passport for in-person training.The Massachusetts census taker said he had been disappointed in the way his supervisor was communicating with him.The 2020 census has been whip-lashed by a constantly changing schedule. The door-knocking phase was supposed to start in May and wrap up at the end of July, but the pandemic pushed the start for most census takers back to August with a deadline for wrapping up the head count at the end of October.But the Census Bureau recently announced it would end the count a month early, at the end of September, after requests for deadline extensions stalled in Congress. The inaction in the Republican-controlled Senate coincides with a memorandum President Donald Trump issued last month to try to exclude people living in the U.S. illegally from being part of the process for redrawing congressional districts.Census takers this year have to reach 8 million more homes than they did in 2010, and they have only six weeks instead of the 10 weeks they did a decade ago, according to an analysis by the Center for Urban Research at CUNY. Forty-eight senators, including Alaska’s two Republican senators, last week sent a letter to Senate and House leaders urging them to extend the deadlines.The Alaska census taker worried that lopping off a month from the schedule would sabotage the count.In Idaho, Wendy Jaquet, who is co-chairing that state’s census efforts, says she’s already seeing the impact of the door-knockers as the state’s response rate has edged up this week.”That has made me more encouraged,” Jaquet said.Census advocates and some U.S. Census Bureau officials have said the extensions were needed, not only to get the work done, but also to avoid confusing people about when the census was ending.”We are fearful that a lot of undercounted communities will not complete it because they think it ends Oct. 31,” said Sabeen Perwaiz, who is leading an alliance of nonprofits in effort to increase census participation in Florida. “We absolutely think there will be some confusion in communities.
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At least 18 people were shot, including four killed, as gunfire erupted in several places around the Ohio city overnight, authorities said Sunday.Officers responded just after 12:30 a.m. Sunday to the Avondale neighborhood and found 21-year-old Antonio Blair with gunshot wounds, police said in a statement. He was taken to University Hospital and died there, they said. Three other gunshot victims were also taken to the hospital.At about 2:15 a.m., officers responded to a report of gunfire in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood where 10 people were shot, police said. One died at the scene and another at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center; they were identified in a statement as 34-year-old Robert Rogers and 30-year-old Jaquiez Grant.  Three people were shot at about midnight Saturday in the Walnut Hills neighborhood, about a block away from the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, police said.  News outlets reported the shootings took place within 60 to 90 minutes of each other, but Assistant Police Chief Paul Neudigate told reporters that they “seem to be separate independent incidents but horrific and tragic.”Police didn’t immediately provide details about the fourth fatal shooting but confirmed that it occurred on the city’s West End, where television news reports indicated that one person was shot later Sunday morning and was pronounced dead at the scene.No suspect information was immediately available in any of the cases.”One extremely violent night in the city of Cincinnati. Looking at possibly 17 victims, up to four that could be fatal at this time. Why? That’s going to be the question,” Neudigate had said before the fourth shooting was announced.Cincinnati’s police chief later Sunday called the level of violence “unacceptable.””I am calling on all citizens of this great city to say enough is enough! We must not sit by silently and say we can’t do anything to end gun violence,” Chief Eliot Isaac said in a statement. “We all have a moral obligation to stop the violence and stop the killing in our communities.”  Police said the department would shift officers from other assignments to beef up the number of uniformed officers in the affected communities and would call on federal prosecutors and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives “to focus on repeat shooters and aggressively bring illegal gun charges.”Mayor John Cranley called it “senseless gun violence that ruined lives and will cause immeasurable suffering” at a time the city was facing “unprecedented circumstances and challenges” in fighting crime during the COVID-19 pandemic. He said the city has seen an uptick as people gather in private homes and public places when the bars close.”Guns are far too prevalent at these gatherings. Please do not attend gatherings because you could end up as an innocent victim,” he said in a statement.He stressed, however, that those firing were responsible for the shootings — which he called “attempted or actual murder” — and vowed to bring them to justice.”I am also calling on everyone to help put an end this culture of resolving personal disputes with guns as well as to reduce the far too prevalent availability of illegal guns on our streets,” he said. “The very sad reality is people are getting in trouble when they have nowhere to go and nothing to do.”In July, the Enquirer reported  that the city had experienced a rise in shootings and homicides from gun violence during the first half of the year as compared to the same time period in 2019.
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