Some customer support acts based on their personal opinion a...
Latest reply
Some customer support acts based on their personal opinion and they seem to come up with their own conclusion, which is frust...
Latest reply
Hot off the press overnight from Belgium
Belgium must lift all Covid 19 Measures within 30 days Brussels Court Rules Verlinden Human Rights ministerial decree Civil Safety Act Pandemic Law Coronavirus
It was incredible timing to read this because somehow I left my keys inside my home and rather than pay the expense of after hours call out charges I contact a local Belgium friend if I could stay at their home overnight!
They woke up to this news which they are delighted about.
One of them is currently in Belgium whilst the other is in New Zealand.
Let's hope we get some normality and common sense back in our lives.
@Brian @Catherine-Powell @Lizzie @Stephanie @Liv @Katie @Nick @Emilie42
@Helen350 @Ian-and-Annemarie @Dale711 @SleepinBrussels0 @Brusseleir0
and @everyone-else
BTW I had silver service hospitality and a delightful fresh fruit and yoghurt and coffee for breakfast and great company
Few hours ago, Monsieur le President MARCON announces strict new coronavirus lockdown measures.
Emmanuel Macron has announced strict new month-long measures including closing schools for three weeks, abandoning his efforts to keep France out of a third coronavirus lockdown.
The French president had ignored the pleas of his scientific advisors to close up the country in January but the spread of the contagious British variant and spiking infections forced him into a U-turn.
"We will lose control if we do not move now," he said in a televised address.
Non-essential shops will be closed and travel more than 10km from home is forbidden, unless there is a good reason. Travel between French regions is banned from April 5. People must work from home if they can and a 7pm curfew will stay in place, as Mr Macron extendedmeasures in some French regions to the whole country.
Mr Macron had hoped to pursue a “third way” of fighting coronavirus without ordering people to stay at home and keeping the economy as open as possible.
On Wednesday night, in a primetime television address, Mr Macron defended his decision to keep France out of lockdown. He insisted that every day the country was open was a day gained in the fightback for economic recovery.
He said that unlike Germany or Italy, which were in their fourth lockdowns, France had enjoyed “precious days of freedom”.
"We have opted since the beginning of 2021 for a response that aimed to curb the epidemic without locking down," Mr Macron said.
“We have won precious days of freedom, weeks of education for our children, without ever losing control of the epidemic. I think it was the right thing to do."
France’s slow vaccination campaign and his refusal to lockdown earlier have put the French president under pressure from politicians and medical experts.
“We could have done better, we have made some mistakes, all of this is true," he said.
Does this mean you will need to stop hosting @Dale7111 as your adopted country is now going into lockdown?
If so have you had to cancel your guests ?
Thank God I, my family and friends do not live on that side of the world....that's all I can say!
Belgium with a total population of 11.6 million people has in the last 24 hours had 5,611 new Covid-19 cases reported and 56 new deaths for the day. They currently have 802,327 active cases and 738 in serious to critical condition.
Compare that with Australia with its 26 million people with 2 new cases in the past 24 hours not one case anywhere in the country in serious to critical condition, and only 1 death in the past 5 months.
There is no way our court system here would override public safety and compel this country to ignore Covid-19 putting many thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of our citizens at risk.
America trusted the Trump line and look what happened, 31.1 million of them have become infected and 565,256 of them have died.
I just don't know what needs to happen to get the bulk of this planet to take this pandemic seriously.
As I said I am so thankful I live in a country where some sanity prevails.
"Belgium must lift all Covid 19 Measures within 30 days Brussels Court Rules Verlinden Human Rights ministerial decree Civil Safety Act Pandemic Law Coronavirus"!
Is there anyone out there who will hazard a guess as to why the government of Western Australia brought down a surplus budget of $2.7 Billion dollars for this financial year......the only government on earth able to achieve that during this pandemic.
They say citizens get the government they deserve, but surely the citizens of Belgium deserve better than this!
Cheers........Rob
Until one has actually read the Judgement itself, which has yet to be officially published for the public to read, it will help give a greater understanding of the reason's behind it, including Rule of Law.
It's understood Norway and Finland and Austria have all also had Judicial Review Decisions in their Courts of Law that have also raised important matters of Laws and Human Rights.
@Fred13 🙂
@Robin4 I know you have this common depiction that Trump is the source of all evil, but America did go into total shutdown, just as Fauci/Birx recommended (after contending this was nothing to worry about as late as February, 2020 or no need for travel bans or some of the insane politicians celebrating in Chinatown.).
All schools, all states (except SD) and every governor was given total autonomy. Guess what, those with or without lockdown or schools open (since September) got the same exact results, except for insane decisions in some states to send elderlies en masse to nursing homes.
The jury is still out, what would have been the best way to go about this. Could it be that never should have closed anything and not sink an economy also would have had the same results? Would have herd immunity would have been the ultimate answer? We will never know for that is not the direction the world took.
Oh, and then there was the bold decision to incorporate (and pay billions of dollars to) the best & brightest pharmaceutical companies to create a vaccine in record speed and get the usual pompous government showstoppers to get the hell out of the way to get a vaccine by year's end. And it happened, and now others are trying to take the credit! Imagine that.
I don 't think anyone thinks he is a source of all evil but his handling of the pandemic was appalling leading to many more becoming ill and dying than should have done in the US.
His refusal to provide ventilators to states in need and get adequate protection out to healthworkers at the height of the first outbreak because of political bickering last year was criminal. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/27/trump-ventilators-coronavirus-cuomo-new-york
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-misleading-ventilator-counter-punch-at-cuomo/
Yes states do operate independently but there was no reason he couldn't have introduced country wide legislation to control the outbreak. @Fred13
@Helen3 Vox, The Guardian, etc? I am sure they painted the worse picture, in fact I know they did, I read them. Funny you should mention ventilators.
Take NY, Cuomo asked for 60,000 ventilators, then 40,000, yet the number 16,000 was the one most agreed on. It is 1 of 50 states. April 1st:
The Javitz Center done in 4 days (Army Corps of Engineering), 2,500 beds, a fraction used; the navy ship 2,000 beds, a fraction used.
Where the elderlies ended up? - nursing homes; how many died, now guesstimated 15,000 but during the entire election year the claim was only 6,000. Where was the media to inform the public honestly all along the way? Cuomo was even called 'The Model of Governors', even got an Emmy. He is now not so beloved, what happened?
He took his natural place, time tends to do that because it tends to expose the facts ultimately, if there was really a free press - from ideology.
@Fred13 "All schools, all states (except SD) and every governor was given total autonomy. Guess what, those with or without lockdown or schools open (since September) got the same exact results"
Comparing the outcomes from one US state to another is extremely unscientific and gives an inaccurate picture. Here's why- because in the US, even the states with lockdowns and mask mandates had a high number of non-compliant residents and there were no serious consequences for non-compliance.
To come up with an accurate picture of whether lockdown measures work, you have to compare countries where the population largely comply with regulations and there are heavy consequences for not doing so, with places that never locked down.
And those comparisons make it evident that strictly enforced lockdowns work to contain the virus spread.
Florida schools have been opened since September, which is the 3rd most populated state in the U.S. The same with Texas, 2nd most populated. Both took a totally different approach, both have been no worse than the rest. So what is the difference?
Mentality, that led to a different approach. Remember what is at stake, the economic livelihood of millions of humans. The capitalist world has ~never~ shut down like this, why did it take such an approach this time? What are the political consequences, what were the political intents?
Those are the multi-trillion dollar questions. We can't learn anything if we do not examine what happened, what really happened. There is no longer a vested political reason to continue the same political lies and continue to hide the facts.
Is up to the world now to learn from it. But nothing is ever learned if all the card are not on the table.
We are on the same page Fred, but you don't keep an economy running in the midst of a pandemic by trying to keep it running. All you are doing is dragging out the solution, which in the long term will hurt the economy even more!
The only sensible option is to alleviate the problem as quickly as possible...... and then get the economy running again.
Each state here has had Covid escape into the community at times. Last week it was Brisbane's turn in Queensland. A Cluster of 17 cases was uncovered in Brisbane and the entire greater Brisbane area (2.4 million people) was put into immediate total lock-down for three days.
That was Monday last week, contact tracers and QR codes isolated that cluster and all those who came into contact with it from the community, and this week the whole country is back to business again. Here is yesterdays figures.
Last night (Good Friday) 40,000 fans attended a football match here at the Adelaide oval, they all paid to attend, they all ate or drank something, staff got employed, the wheels of business went around. Adelaide dining is running at full capacity, there is no compulsion to wear masks in public.
The Adelaide 'Fringe' festival which runs from 19th Feb to 21st March sold $16.4 million worth of tickets with more than 500,000 people going though the gates for the month.
Today more than 30,000 people are attending a horse racing event at Oakbank in the Adelaide Hills not far from where I live.....no masks, no restrictions. All over Australia life is virtually normal. Sydney's 'Lyrics' stage theatre last week opened the live stage production of the American stage show 'Hamilton' to packed houses.
At times things do get cancelled or postponed due to Covid but these are isolated events and are not having a major effect on the economy
Business is back to usual here Fred because the authorities will take what ever steps are required to stop COVID-19 getting into the community, our economy is firm and Australia still has its AAA credit rating with S&P and 'Moody's'
The country is still taking our cap of 4,000 returning nationals per week but they go into immediate quarantine and have no effect on the community. It is these returning expats who are bringing the virus with them at a rate of about 100 per week....but they are being suitably controlled and isolated.
We just need the rest of the world to catch up Fred and that can't happen fast enough for us.
Cheers........Rob
You just described the situation with many states here who have done it the same way and have opened little by little cautiously. They are incessantly attacked by the entire press, except by one. Others have gone to a draconian shut down, and after 1.3 years insist on still clamping down to hide past terrible decisions (NY, CA, MI, IL, 8 in all).
That is why I am now pointing to the present challenge - no more incessant lying, no more a pure political press that is a death knell to a democracy and continuing to indulge in political games. The U.S. may now very well take a royal beating if it doesn't come out of Covid 19 in control of itself. The world in turn may suffer if the U.S. is meantime too dysfunctional to address the common world enemy intelligently and directly. That enemy is right next to your country @Robin4 and is not playing any games.
/Good luck world, I think you going to need it this time
Yes Fred we are suffering, The Chinese have just put a 220% tariff on Australian wine for 5 years, they stopped the importation of Australian Barley and have put severe limitations on the import of Australian iron ore. The Chinese are attempting to strangle Australia economically.
But Fred it won't work! Last year Australia had it's best rural sector balance sheet ever!
The Chinese government put a massive tariff on Australian Barley back in Feb 2020 but the Australian Barley Board got off their butts and opened up a heap of new and existing markets and sold the entire predicted barley crop. Late last year Chinese buyers came back into the market but the answer from Australia was 'Sorry we don't have product to sell to you'! We were actually selling our entire crop to markets that were prepared to pay more than the Chinese were willing to pay.
We are a sovereign nation Fred, and we won't be bullied by anyone. There is over $300 Billion of Chinese investment in Australia and the Chinese would be well advised to consider that investment at risk if they push Australia too far!
Your point is taken though!
Cheers........Rob
Love it. My best childhood friend moved to Australia when I went to Vietnam (1969), and with U.S. military R&R in Australia, we got to see each other a lot. Ever since I became a fan of the country.
How aggressive can China be. When I went there in 2019, I came away with the impression it was a machine. The world can't afford a distracted U.S. doing stupid things. The recent meeting with the new administration where they outright insulted the U.S. (on American soil mind you) was embarrassing. The recent 'noise' testing the waters how the world would respond about annexing Taiwan is serious.
A lot happened during our lifetime @Robin4 , but this modern world comes across even more complicated. 😉
There is not a more patriotic country on earth than Australia Fred. Australians are great travelers but as Peter Allen summed it up with his song....'I still call Australia home' ....that is the essence of Australia! We would never want to live anywhere else!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHP9NuZNjbI&ab_channel=felixunger1971
We will go to extraordinary lengths to protect what we have and I can tell you now Fred, China, despite their population and their might, is no match for Australia on any level!
Cheers........Rob