On the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, the niece of the mastermind, Osama Bin Laden, has written a public statement.

ALSO READ:https://ghanaaview.com/jacob-blake-wisconsin-black-man-will-need-miracle-to-walk-again/
 
“For the past nineteen years, not a day has gone by since this horrible, tragic day that I haven’t thought of you, America, and grieved privately with you for all the innocent lives lost,” Noor Bin Laden (who goes by Bin Ladin) wrote on her Twitter account.

“This is in part due to this inexplicable turn of fate that links me to these atrocious attacks, but more importantly because of my love for your country.”

She added that her “values and feelings” are “diametrically opposed to the name that I bear.”

ALSO READ:https://ghanaaview.com/hunger-squalor-mar-south-sudan-post-war-unification-efforts/

In addition to honoring the lives lost, the Swiss citizen also praised first responders, those who died later from complications resulting from the attack and the survivors who lost loved ones.

Bin Ladin is the daughter of Carmen Dufour, a Swiss author, and Yeslam bin Ladin, an older half-brother of Osama. Her parents divorced in 1988. She and her two sisters were raised in Switzerland.

ALSO READ:https://ghanaaview.com/i-will-pay-15000-monthly-to-any-man-who-will-marry-me-under-these-conditions-lady-says/

She was 14 years old on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I was so devastated,” she told the New York Post. “I had been going to the States with my mom several times a year from the age of 3 onwards. I considered the U.S. my second home.”

Bin Ladin, who had kept a low profile, gained notoriety on Sept. 6 when she published a letter supporting U.S. President Donald Trump.
 source:VOA

Biden Selects California Senator Kamala Harris as Running Mate

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE – Joe Biden named California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate on Tuesday, making history by selecting the first Black woman to compete on a major party’s presidential ticket and acknowledging the vital role Black voters will play in his bid to defeat President Donald Trump.

In choosing Harris, Biden is embracing a former rival from the Democratic primary who is familiar with the unique rigor of a national campaign. Harris, a 55-year-old first-term senator, is also one of the party’s most prominent figures and quickly became a top contender for the No. 2 spot after her own White House campaign ended. 

Harris joins Biden in the 2020 race at a moment of unprecedented national crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 150,000 people in the U.S., far more than the toll experienced in other countries. Business closures and disruptions resulting from the pandemic have caused an economic collapse. Unrest, meanwhile, has emerged across the country as Americans protest racism and police brutality.

FILE – Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden speaks about his plans to combat racial inequality at a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware, July 28, 2020.

Trump’s uneven handling of the crises has given Biden an opening, and he enters the fall campaign in strong position against the president. In adding Harris to the ticket, he can point to her relatively centrist record on issues such as health care and her background in law enforcement in the nation’s largest state. 

Harris’ record as California attorney general and district attorney in San Francisco was heavily scrutinized during the Democratic primary and turned off some liberals and younger Black voters who saw her as out of step on issues of systemic racism in the legal system and police brutality. She tried to strike a balance on these issues, declaring herself a “progressive prosecutor” who backs law enforcement reforms.

Biden, who spent eight years as President Barack Obama’s vice president, has spent months weighing who would fill that same role in his White House. He pledged in March to select a woman as his vice president, easing frustration among Democrats that the presidential race would center on two white men in their 70s. 

Biden’s search was expansive, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a leading progressive, Florida Rep. Val Demings, whose impeachment prosecution of Trump won plaudits, California Rep. Karen Bass, who leads the Congressional Black Caucus, former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, whose passionate response to unrest in her city garnered national attention.

A woman has never served as president or vice president in the United States. Two women have been nominated as running mates on major party tickets: Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Republican Sarah Palin in 2008. Their party lost in the general election. 

The vice presidential pick carries increased significance this year. If elected, Biden would be 78 when he’s inaugurated in January, the oldest man to ever assume the presidency. He’s spoken of himself as a transitional figure and hasn’t fully committed to seeking a second term in 2024. If he declines to do so, his running mate would likely become a front-runner for the nomination that year.

Born in Oakland to a Jamaican father and Indian mother, Harris won her first election in 2003 when she became San Francisco’s district attorney. In the role, she created a reentry program for low-level drug offenders and cracked down on student truancy.

She was elected California’s attorney general in 2010, the first woman and Black person to hold the job, and focused on issues including the foreclosure crisis. She declined to defend the state’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage and was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

As her national profile grew, Harris built a reputation around her work as a prosecutor. After being elected to the Senate in 2016, she quickly gained attention for her assertive questioning of Trump administration officials during congressional hearings. In one memorable moment last year, Harris tripped up Attorney General William Barr when she repeatedly pressed him on whether Trump or other White House officials pressured him to investigate certain people.

Harris launched her presidential campaign in early 2019 with the slogan “Kamala Harris For the People,” a reference to her courtroom work. She was one of the highest-profile contenders in a crowded Democratic primary and attracted 20,000 people to her first campaign rally in Oakland. 

But the early promise of her campaign eventually faded. Her law enforcement background prompted skepticism from some progressives, and she struggled to land on a consistent message that resonated with voters. Facing fundraising problems, Harris abruptly withdrew from the race in December 2019, two months before the first votes of the primary were cast.

One of Harris’ standout moments of her presidential campaign came at the expense of Biden. 
During a debate, Harris said Biden made “very hurtful” comments about his past work with segregationist senators and slammed his opposition to busing as schools began to integrate in the 1970s. 

“There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” she said. “And that little girl was me.”
Shaken by the attack, Biden called her comments “a mischaracterization of my position.”

The exchange resurfaced recently one of Biden’s closest friends and a co-chair of his vice presidential vetting committee, former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, still harbors concerns about the debate and that Harris hadn’t expressed regret. The comments attributed to Dodd and first reported by Politico drew condemnation, especially from influential Democratic women who said Harris was being held to a standard that wouldn’t apply to a man running for president. 

Some Biden confidants said Harris’ campaign attack did irritate the former vice president, who had a friendly relationship with her. Harris was also close with Biden’s late son, Beau, who served as Delaware attorney general while she held the same post in California. 

But Biden and Harris have since returned to a warm relationship. 

“Joe has empathy, he has a proven track record of leadership and more than ever before we need a president of the United States who understands who the people are, sees them where they are, and has a genuine desire to help and knows how to fight to get us where we need to be,” Harris said at an event for Biden earlier this summer. 

At the same event, she bluntly attacked Trump, labeling him a “drug pusher” for his promotion of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus, which has not been proved to be an effective treatment and may even be more harmful. After Trump tweeted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in response to protests about the death of George Floyd, a Black man, in police custody, Harris said his remarks “yet again show what racism looks like.”

Harris has taken a tougher stand on policing since Floyd’s killing. She co-sponsored legislation in June that would ban police from using chokeholds and no-knock warrants, set a national use-of-force standard and create a national police misconduct registry, among other things. It would also reform the qualified immunity system that shields officers from liability.

The list included practices Harris did not vocally fight to reform while leading California’s Department of Justice. Although she required DOJ officers to wear body cameras, she did not support legislation mandating it statewide. And while she now wants independent investigations of police shootings, she didn’t support a 2015 California bill that would have required her office to take on such cases.

“We made progress, but clearly we are not at the place yet as a country where we need to be and California is no exception,” she told The Associated Press recently. But the national focus on racial injustice now shows “there’s no reason that we have to continue to wait.”

A 24-year-old Maryland college graduate is on his way to Harvard Law School, despite the fact that the odds weren’t always in his favor, due to financial issues and other struggles in his life.

But Rehan Staton’s story is one of triumph, as he is due to start classes online at Harvard Law this fall, with an entire virtual community behind of him that raised more than $70,000 on GoFundMe in a week to ensure that he could start his first semester without worrying about money, at least.

Sometimes there was no time to shower between work and class and so Staton would sit in the back of the classroom in order to avoid judgment, the Boston Globe notes.
But he revealed to CBS This Morning that his coworkers were the ones who kept him on his path.

“It was the people that were on the bottom of the hierarchy who really lifted me up,” he said. “It helps me keep my eyes on the prize. If this were just about me and just fighting for myself, I definitely would have quit.”

Staton’s life took a turn when he was just 8 years old. That’s when his mother left his father and moved out of the country. A once-stable home life turned into one stricken with financial difficulties as his father worked, often multiple jobs, to raise his two sons and ensure they had a roof over their head and food to eat.
The insecurity at home led to issues at school.

I wasn’t eating meals every day and my dad was working all the time,” he told CNN. “Sometimes there’d be no electricity at home.”
However, when a teacher suggested that Staton be put in remedial classes, his father stepped in, finding a tutor who was an aerospace engineer who offered to help Staton for free.
At the same time, Staton turned out to be a talented athlete, training to become a professional boxer in high school, although that dream was ultimately cut short following a double shoulder injury in 12th grade.

So Staton once again began working at the trash company to help out with his father’s medical bills while still juggling school. He graduated from the University of Maryland in 2018, and gave the commencement speech.

He went on to take an analyst job at a consulting firm in D.C., before applying to law school.

Sc:Essen

(CNN)International students who are pursuing degrees in the United States will have to leave the country or risk deportation if their universities switch to online-only courses, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Monday.The move may affect thousands of foreign students who come to the United States to attend universities or participate in training programs, as well as non-academic or vocational studies.Universities nationwide are beginning to make the decision to transition to online courses as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. At Harvard, for example, all course instruction will be delivered online, including for students living on campus. For international students, that opens the door to them having to leave the US.”There’s so much uncertainty. It’s very frustrating,” said Valeria Mendiola, 26, a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “If I have to go back to Mexico, I am able to go back, but many international students just can’t.”In a news release Monday, ICE said that students who fall under certain visas “may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States,” adding, “The U.S. Department of State will not issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester nor will U.S. Customs and Border Protection permit these students to enter the United States.”The agency suggested that students currently enrolled in the US consider other measures, like transferring to schools with in-person instruction. There’s an exception for universities using a hybrid model, such as a mix of online and in-person classes.Brad Farnsworth, vice president of the American Council on Education, said the announcement caught him and many others by surprise.”We think this is going to create more confusion and more uncertainty,” said Farnsworth, whose organization represents about 1,800 colleges and universities. “What we were hoping to see was more appreciation for all the different possible nuances that campuses will be exploring.”One concern with the new guidance, Farnsworth said, is what would happen if the public health situation deteriorates in the fall and universities that had been offering in-person classes feel they have to shift all courses online to stay safe.Visa requirements for students have always been strict and coming to the US to take online-only courses has been prohibited.”These are not some fly-by-night universities, these aren’t scams, these are legit universities who would normally have in-person curricula but for coronavirus,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. ”The bigger issue is some of these countries have travel restrictions on and they can’t go home, so what do they do then?” she added. “It’s a conundrum for a lot of students.”Harvard University President Larry Bacow said in a statement Monday evening that “we are deeply concerned that the guidance issued today by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement imposes a blunt, one-size-fits-all approach to a complex problem giving international students, particularly those in online programs, few options beyond leaving the country or transferring schools.”The guidance, Bacow continued, “undermines the thoughtful approach taken on behalf of students by so many institutions, including Harvard, to plan for continuing academic programs while balancing the health and safety challenges of the global pandemic.””We will work closely with other colleges and universities around the country to chart a path forward,” he said.The Trump administration has made a litany of changes to the US immigration system, citing the coronavirus pandemic, that have resulted in barring swaths of immigrants from coming to the country.Last month, the White House issued an immigration proclamation dramatically curtailing legal immigration to the US sending hundreds of people and businesses into a scramble to understand whether their future plans are derailed.In the proclamation, the administration argued that the “extraordinary circumstances” posed by coronavirus called for the suspension of employment-based visas. But immigrant advocates, industries and experts say the administration is taking advantage of the pandemic to make sweeping immigration changes and advance its agenda to slash legal immigration.Monday’s announcement, like the changes that preceded it, could similarly result in many foreign students who often pay high tuition to have to return to their home country.According to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington, DC, about 1.2 million students who fall under the affected visas were enrolled and registered at more than 8,700 schools nationwide as of March 2018.Farnsworth said he sees the announcement as part of a larger pattern of moves by the administration that “have not set the right tone.””This is going to create I think more anxiety on the part of international students, and for those who are still thinking about where they’re going to go in the fall, I think this may push them in the direction of attending a university in another country,” he said.While students might have the option to transfer to a college or university offering in-person courses, it might be difficult to come by amid continued concerns over coronavirus. Some schools have announced plans to bring students back but shorten semesters, as well as cancel nearly all in-person classes through the semester.This story has been updated with additional quotes and information.

WASHINGTON – A college degree will no longer give Americans a leg up when seeking some jobs with the federal government.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday that will overhaul the government’s hiring practices so that a job applicant’s skills will be given priority over a college degree.

Administration officials say the shift will allow the government to hire a more inclusive workforce based on skill instead of a person’s education level.

“This will ensure that we’re able to hire based on talent and expand our universe to qualified candidates and ensure a more equitable hiring process,” Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior advisor, told reporters on Friday.

Ivanka Trump is co-chair of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, which was created in 2018 and tasked with recommending ways to improve job training. The president signed the order during the board’s meeting on Friday.

“The federal government will no longer be narrowly focused on where you went to school, but the skills and talents that you bring to the job,” Trump said.

The federal government is the nation’s largest employer with 2.1 million civilian workers.

Jobless benefits: Think that extra $600 in unemployment benefits will last until the end of July? Think again.

President Donald Trump and his daughter and advisor Ivanka Trump (R) attend an American Workforce Policy Advisory Board Meeting in the East Room of the …Show more  MANDEL NGAN, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Ivanka Trump said the new hiring practice will show that the government is leading by example as it tries to recruit and retain the best and brightest workers. She and other administration officials have pushed to increase opportunities for apprenticeships and have promoted such training and vocational education as alternatives to traditional two-year or four-year college degree programs.

The shift in hiring protocols will recognize the value of learning regardless of whether it occurs on the job or in the classroom, said Brooke Rollins, acting director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, which oversees the president’s domestic agenda.

The government is not eliminating the college requirement entirely but instead will stress skills in jobs where having a degree is less important. Two-thirds of Americans do not have a college degree.

A college or graduate degree is necessary to work in many occupations, but the need for educational credentials is less certain for many other fields, said Michael Rigas, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management.

Trump’s executive order directs federal agencies to shift from vetting job candidates based largely on their educational credentials and written questionnaires and move toward using assessment methods that will more directly determine whether they possess the knowledge and skills to do the job, Rigas said.

Facebook says it has removed adverts for US President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign that featured a symbol used in Nazi Germany.

The company said the offending ad contained an inverted red triangle similar to that used by the Nazis to label opponents such as communists.

Mr Trump’s campaign team said they were aimed at the far-left activist group antifa, which it said uses the symbol.

Facebook said the ads violated its policy against organised hate.

“We don’t allow symbols that represent hateful organisations or hateful ideologies unless they are put up with context or condemnation,” the social network’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said on Thursday.

He added: “That’s what we saw in this case with this ad, and anywhere that that symbol is used we would take the same actions.”

Image captionA screenshot showing the symbol used in a Trump campaign ad and removed from Facebook

The ads, which were posted on the site on pages belonging to President Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence, were online for about 24 hours and had received hundreds of thousands of views before they were taken down.

“The inverted red triangle is a symbol used by antifa, so it was included in an ad about antifa,” Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement.

“We would note that Facebook still has an inverted red triangle emoji in use, which looks exactly the same,” he added.

Mr Trump has recently accused antifa of starting riots at street protests across the US over the death in police custody of African American George Floyd.

The president said last month that he would designate the anti-fascist group a “domestic terrorist organisation”, although legal experts have questioned his authority to do so.

Antifa is a far left protest movement that opposes neo-Nazis, fascism, white supremacists and racism. It is considered to be a loosely organised group of activists with no leaders.

Most members decry what they see as the nationalistic, anti-immigration and anti-Muslim policies of Mr Trump.

This is the latest salvo in an increasingly fraught relationship between the technology giants and the White House.

Last month, Twitter put a warning on one of the president’s tweets about rioting in Minneapolis – saying it had “glorified violence”.

Mr Trump hit back by talking about the “unchecked power” of big tech. He said that Section 230 – a law that protects social media companies from being legally responsible for the online content of users – should be revoked.

But forget Twitter for now, Facebook is the platform that Mr Trump really cares about. The social network is where a majority of his online political advertising budget goes. The move will likely infuriate the president. It also acts as a warning that Facebook does – and will – moderate some political content.

As the 2020 election draws nearer, it’s likely more and more focus will be placed on what it does – and does not – take down.

Earlier this month, Facebook employees spoke out against the tech giant’s decision not to remove or flag a controversial post by Mr Trump relating to the protests over Mr Floyd’s death.

The president posted a comment on the social network saying that he would “send in the National Guard” and warned that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. But Facebook said it did not violate its company policy.

Mr Trump had tweeted the same comments, but Twitter placed a warning over the content, which it said “glorified violence”.

SOURCE:BBC

The US may need to bear social removing measures —, for example, stay-at-home requests and school terminations — until 2022, specialists anticipated on Tuesday. That is, except if, an antibody turns out to be rapidly accessible.

That is as indicated by specialists from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who distributed their discoveries in the diary Science on Tuesday. Those discoveries straightforwardly repudiate explore being touted by the White House that recommends the pandemic may stop this mid year.

The group at the Harvard School of Public Health utilized what’s thought about Covid-19 and different coronaviruses to make potential situations of the present pandemic.

“Discontinuous removing might be required into 2022 except if basic consideration limit is expanded generously or a treatment or antibody opens up,” they wrote in their report. “Indeed, even in case of obvious end, SARS-CoV-2 observation ought to be kept up since a resurgence in disease could be conceivable as late as 2024.”

The Harvard group’s projections additionally demonstrate that the infection would return thundering decently fast once limitations were lifted.

“In the event that discontinuous removing is the methodology that is picked, it might be important to do it for quite a while, which is clearly an extremely prolonged stretch of time,” Dr. Marc Lipsitch, a creator on the investigation and a the study of disease transmission educator at the Harvard School of Public Health, told columnists.

Another significant factor: Whether individuals become safe to the new coronavirus after they have been tainted. That is not yet known.

Potential difficulties incorporate finding a solid test to figure out who has antibodies for the coronavirus, building up the degree of insusceptibility presented by past contamination and to what extent it endures, and the limit of overstretched wellbeing frameworks to do dependable, boundless counter acting agent tests in everybody.

There’s additionally the troublesome social inquiries around invulnerability endorsements, which have been skimmed as a chance in the UK. Would they make a sort of two-level society, where the individuals who have them can come back to an increasingly ordinary life, while others remain secured?

The investigation analysts state they know that such delayed separating, regardless of whether irregular, would almost certainly have “significantly negative monetary, social, and instructive outcomes.”

They trust their exploration will help recognize likely directions of the plague under elective methodologies, distinguish corresponding approaches to battle it, and to prod further pondering approaches to get the pandemic leveled out.

In spite of the fact that coronavirus cases in the US have been taking off, social separating has all the earmarks of being powerful.

Social removing is “one of the most remarkable weapons” against COVID-19, said Robert Redfield, chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“On the off chance that we can simply amplify that social removing, we can restrain this present infection’s capacity,” he said recently.

States the nation over have given stay-at-home requests, permitting just for fundamental tasks or assignments.

Punishments for breaking the request change by state. In Maine, the punishment for separating the request can be to a half year in prison and up to a $1,000 fine.

In Florida, a minister was captured a month ago for proceeding to hold huge administrations and is accused of unlawful gathering and infringement of general wellbeing crisis rules, both second-degree crimes.

This week, states on the East and West drifts declared they are framing their own provincial agreements to cooperate on the best way to revive after the stay-at-home requests.

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts each arrangement to name a general wellbeing and monetary authority to a local working gathering.

West Coast conditions of California, Washington and Oregon likewise declared they are uniting in an arrangement to start steady arrival of stay-at-home requests.