CANBERRA, Australia — The recent spate of labor market indicators suggests fears that the end of the JobKeeper program would cause a major hiccup in Australia’s impressive employment recovery are overblown. And Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s big-spending, jobs-focused budget this week aims to keep it that way. The successful JobKeeper wage subsidy that was introduced during the height of the pandemic ended in March. The JobKeeper scheme helps employers who got significantly affected by coronavirus to help them keep paying their employees. The businesses can use temporary provisions to make certain agreements with employees or guide them in a certain direction (JobKeeper…
Author: zenger.news
Conservationists have discovered 35 pounds of plastic waste, including shopping bags and potato chip packets, lodged in the stomach of a beached whale. The whale’s corpse washed up on a beach in the French Atlantic coastal commune of Messanges on May 8. Volunteers from nonprofit Itsas Arima performed an autopsy on the 16-foot marine mammal. It died after ingesting the pounds of plastic, which included cigarette filter packets. Some of the 35 pounds of plastic waste found in the whale’s stomach. (Itsas Arima/Newsflash)“The animal was sick from a serious parasitic infection and was therefore unable to dive deep enough to…
NAIROBI, Kenya — The months of February and March were difficult for Carol Maina, 38, a mother of three from Langata, an estate within Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. First, she lost her job and then fell into an online scam where she lost savings meant to cushion her in hard economic times. “I had saved Sh4.2 million ($39,485),” she told Zenger News. “A friend who knew I had lost a job connected me to people who said they were cryptocurrency traders. They convinced me to invest Sh3 million ($28,212) to buy something they called Bitcoin.” She said the “Bitcoin gurus” convinced her…
KAMPALA, Uganda — Residents of northern Uganda have termed “unfair,” a 25-year jail term handed down to the former Lord’s Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen by the International Criminal Court on May 6. In February this year, the International Criminal Court, based at The Hague, Netherlands, found the former child soldier guilty of 61 out of 70 counts, including murders, rape, child abduction, assaults, and sexual enslavement. However, some residents of northern Uganda, which bore the brunt of the activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army, feel that Ongwen’s 25-year jail term is excessive and will not add to the victims’ healing.…
LIMBE, Cameroon — In what reads like a modern reenactment of Ernest Miller Hemingway’s 1951 short novel masterpiece, “The Old Man and the Sea”, a fisheries graduate in Cameroon has recounted how he recently caught a giant whale shark and dragged it ashore—where it was quickly butchered for meat by locals. “I was not expecting it,” Ashu Charles Okuk, 34, told Zenger News. “I was so much afraid when I pulled my net and instead saw a mighty fish. The shark was still alive in my net, breathing normally. I tried to let it go, but the fish was completely entangled…
KOLKATA, India — “Even in such calamity, people are out there to loot,” Debanjali Bhattacharya, a research fellow from the University of Calcutta, told Zenger News. She has been helping friends and strangers find oxygen and Covid-19 drugs like Remdesivir. “We got a source of Remdesivir injections for one of our friend’s mother. We were demanded INR 1,20,000 ($1,635) for six vials.” She immediately understood the source was a quack as the price was more than the regular amount of INR 3,500-4,000 ($47.5-54.5). Remdesivir was the first antiviral drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat Covid-19 patients requiring hospitalization. “I have been receiving…
KOLKATA, India — India was the third-largest military spender globally in 2020, a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute states. The top spender was the United States followed by China. The institute, which tracks global arms trade and army expenditure, noted that the U.S. accounted for 39 percent of the money spent on military globally, followed by China and India accounting for 13 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively. “The five largest spenders in 2020, which together accounted for 62 percent of global military expenditure, were the U.S., China, India, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Military spending by China grew for the…
In most cases in Israel, the water that flows from the tap is completely safe and can be drunk without a second thought. Elsewhere around the world, however, this is not the case. According to the 2020 UN Global Water Development Report, around two-thirds of the global population experience severe water shortages for at least one month out of the year. And even when water does reach the tap, it is not always safe to drink due to contamination — a widespread issue affecting roughly 500 million people worldwide. In 2012 alone, an estimated 842,000 deaths from middle- and low-income…
CHENNAI, India — Despite opposition from the Indian government and users, Facebook-owned WhatsApp is set to go ahead with its controversial privacy update. The instant messaging app said it would not delete any account or limit user functionality on May 15 — the deadline for users to accept its new terms. The new update targets WhatsApp’s business accounts, choosing to use Facebook services and personalize ads on the social networking site. WhatsApp, acquired by Facebook in 2014, already shares some limited information such as phone numbers with its parent. The new update will see WhatsApp sharing data like device and location information as…
NEW DELHI — A rescued mother cow, described as “drop-dead gorgeous” with “striking eyes” and “long, dark eyelashes”, has been named Kim Kowdashian, after reality TV star Kim Kardashian. The ode to the “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” star is to do with her turning vegan, animal rights organization People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India told Zenger News. The organization rescued the cow, originally named Rani, back in 2019. Rani was being beaten, dragged, and pulled by her owner on a busy street in India’s financial capital Mumbai when onlookers complained to PETA officials. The onlookers said the owner was…