ORAN, Algeria — A mysterious virus rips through the city of Oran, Algeria, in Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague.” Today the city on the Mediterranean coast grapples with COVID-19. Visiting the bars, beaches and boulevards that appear in the book reveals eerie parallels between 1947 fiction and 2020 reality. Known in French as “a place of radiance,” owing to its abundant sunshine and usually cloudless skies, Oran has been under curfew since mid-May after weeks of total lockdown. Camus, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote just after World War II about a silent epidemic in the…
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Small businesses forced to file for bankruptcy protection due to financial stress brought on by the coronavirus pandemic may find some relief, thanks to recent changes in federal bankruptcy law. Last summer, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed the Small Business Reorganization Act, and it went into effect in February. The law creates a Subchapter V of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which essentially makes it easier for small business owners to retain ownership of their business in the event of seeking bankruptcy protection. Under the new law, businesses with less than $2.7 million in debt may file under Subchapter…
Last year, Kenya reported a 90% decrease in wildlife poaching, but the advent of COVID-19 has stirred concerns the country’s national parks may draw new illegal hunters left jobless by the pandemic. Standing in their way despite the threat of illness is a group of eight women drawn from the Maasai community, known as Team Lioness. Team Lioness members were given the option to remain employed full-time and on patrol at Amboseli National Park, a 392-square kilometer reserve that lies at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, with the understanding that they would have little or no contact with their families…
In villages across India’s Chhattisgarh state, more women are turning to farming to sustain their families. While these female agriculturalists are helping to boost agricultural productivity in the region, their efforts are also feeding their communities during the coronavirus pandemic. Kiran Sahu is one of several women farmers who have recently cultivated once-barren land near Mokhla village in the state. Mokhla, on the banks of the Shivnath River, is one of 2,000 tribal villages where women have taken up farming for the first time. This has led to a 37% increase in cultivated land area in the state in recent…
Gibraltar is only part of the United Kingdom connected to continental Europe by land. Now, many ask, is it about to be cut off? In the wake of COVID-19 and Brexit, some fear that Spain may close the border for the thousands who go every day to work on the 2.6 square-mile English-speaking peninsula. After all, they say, Spain has long sought to revoke the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht that gave the land to Britain in perpetuity and that Gibraltar is now one of the world’s richest lands on a per-capita or per-mile basis. The tiny nation at the dangling,…
A Virginia judge has ordered a 10-day halt to Governor Ralph Northam’s plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee statue on Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue. Northam announced on June 4 that the monument would come down, after days of heated protests rocked the city. Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and is often at the epicenter of heated national debates about the war’s losing side. “That statue has been there for a long time. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. So we’re taking it down,” Northam said during a press conference. Judge…
Negotiations over the formation of a new government in Ireland have hit a snag four months after general elections, with the likely coalition government proposing a ban on all goods and services coming from Israeli settlements. While the coronavirus pandemic hindered progress on negotiations, the three coalition partners, Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party have in recent weeks moved forward on talks to establish a government. Among the items on the agenda is the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018 which bans the imports—specifically from disputed territories like East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan…
While NATO’s engages in a “reflection” process to refine its agenda for the next decade, new tensions between U.S. President Donald Trump and European allies threaten to deepen rifts forming on both sides of the Atlantic. European NATO allies have gotten used to Trump’s unpredictability in past months as he questioned the value of the military alliance and condemned NATO members that spend the least on defense. Reports Friday that the Trump administration will to reduce the number of U.S. soldiers stationed in Germany by 9,500 to 25,000 drew criticism from Berlin and took NATO allies by surprise. According to…
More than a hundred Texans held an armed rally on Saturday in support of a bar whose owner was arrested for defying a shutdown order a month ago. The arrest of Big Daddy Zane’s owner Gabrielle Ellison and six of her supporters May 6 in Odessa, Texas came after similar encouragement from an armed group. Statewide lockdown measures intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19 applied to Ellison’s watering hole. She refused and was arrested for “violation of emergency management plan.” The others were charged with carrying firearms in a prohibited location. Texas law forbids carrying firearms in places of…