Accompong News

27/02/2024

Councillor-elect of the Ipswich Division Clinton Samuels

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31/01/2024

Jan 29 (Reuters) - The first human patient has received an implant from brain-chip startup Neuralink on Sunday and is recovering well, the company’s billionaire founder Elon Musk said.
“Initial results show promising neuron spike detection,” Musk said in a post on the social media platform X on Monday.
Spikes are activity by neurons, which the National Institute of Health describes as cells that use electrical and chemical signals to send information around the brain and to the body.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had given the company clearance last year to conduct its first trial to test its implant on humans, a critical milestone in the startup’s ambitions to help patients overcome paralysis and a host of neurological conditions.
In September, Neuralink said it received approval for recruitment for the human trial.
The study uses a robot to surgically place a brain-computer interface (BCI) implant in a region of the brain that controls the intention to move, Neuralink said previously, adding that its initial goal is to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone.

The implants’ “ultra-fine” threads help transmit signals in participants’ brains, Neuralink has said.
The first product from Neuralink would be called Telepathy, Musk said in a separate post on X.
The startup’s PRIME Study is a trial for its wireless brain-computer interface to evaluate the safety of the implant and surgical robot.

Link: https://www.reuters.com/technology/neuralink-implants-brain-chip-first-human-musk-says-2024-01-29/

Neuralink logo and Elon Musk photo are seen in this illustration taken, December 19, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

12/11/2023

The Economists

Oil traders are flocking to sanctions-free Venezuela. But how long will that last, given Nicolás Maduro’s disregard for democracy?

Nov 9th 2023

The cocktail bar in one of the most expensive hotels in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, is abuzz. A huddle of businessmen, speaking English, are in animated conversation at one table. Across the lobby, another group of visitors from India has just arrived. “It’s been a good week,” says a waiter. “The oilmen are back in town.”

It was last month’s sudden lifting of American sanctions on Venezuela, the country which boasts the world’s largest proven oil reserves, that has lured the dealmakers there. On October 18th the US Treasury Department announced that it was immediately removing almost all the restrictions it had imposed on Venezuela’s oil, banking and mining sectors for years. The easing, initially for six months, was in recognition of an agreement which representatives of the regime of Nicolás Maduro had sealed the previous day, in Barbados, with the political opposition. The deal set out some conditions over how free and fair elections might be held next year.

Removing most of its sanctions in one go marks the end of the American administration’s previous strategy, which involved an incremental loosening of restrictions. “Priorities have shifted for us all,” explains a Western diplomat in Caracas. The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have sparked renewed interest in Venezuela’s potential to become an important supplier of world energy again. In September some 50,000 Venezuelans arrived at the Mexican border with the United States, a record number. Both factors pushed President Joe Biden’s government to take action.

As a result, American citizens and entities, and almost anyone else—with the exception of Russia’s government and its citizens—have been liberated to do business with Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA). Some restrictions on dealing with Venezuela’s central bank have been lifted. A ban on secondary trading in Venezuelan government bonds has also been removed, causing their price to soar. The state-owned mining company, Minerven, is no longer blacklisted. Embargoes on individuals, including Mr Maduro and more than 110 others, remain in place, though.

The regime has long blamed the disastrous state of the Venezuelan economy on American sanctions—a distortion of the truth. Although the United States began imposing sanctions on Venezuela in the 2000s, when Mr Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, was in charge, the measures were initially very limited, with around two dozen people affected. In 2017 the administration of Donald Trump, which by then had labelled the Maduro regime, along with Cuba and Nicaragua, as part of a socialist “troika of tyranny”, barred Americans from trading in new debt issued by both the state and PDVSA.

But the most effective sanctions were not imposed until 2019. They were applied shortly after Mr Maduro was inaugurated for a second six-year term, following a rigged election in which most of his serious opponents were barred from running. Hundreds of people and dozens of companies were put under embargoes. The aim of the measures, which came at the same time as the United States recognised the leader of the elected national assembly, Juan Guaidó, as Venezuela’s rightful president, was to topple Mr Maduro.

The plan failed. Mr Maduro remains firmly in power. Mr Guaidó’s claim to the presidency petered out. He was voted out of office by many of his own former colleagues in December last year, and now lives in exile in the United States. The reasons why the effort failed are myriad. One is that the Venezuelan army, whose leadership has long been a beneficiary of the regime’s cronyism, stayed loyal to the president it knew. Another is that the sanctions regime, although seemingly fierce, was in fact relatively easily bypassed. Since 2019 middlemen from Mexico to the Middle East have helped trade Venezuelan oil, usually to independent refineries in China, via resellers in Malaysia. Ships would load oil on and off at sea and switch off their tracking transponders, or even change their names to avoid detection. The oil was sold on the black market at a discount of up to 50% of the global price.

Such an arrangement brought the regime closer to other anti-American governments, notably Iran, which in 2020 began supplying Venezuela with petrol and sent its technicians to repair decrepit refineries. That support, it is believed, was largely paid for in gold sourced from illegal mines.

The architect of much of the sanctions-busting was a former oil minister, Tareck El Aissami. Once the golden boy of the regime, he has not been heard of since March, when he said on social media that he supported a corruption inquiry which revealed that PDVSA had not been paid for more than 80% of the oil it had shipped, to the tune of $21bn. He is rumoured to be under house arrest in Caracas.

The recent return to relative normality has been welcomed by long-term traders. One Venezuelan businessman recounts the byzantine payment scheme set up to avoid sanctions, which he describes as like a hawala system, a reference to a moneyless trading system built on trust that originated in the eighth century. “You send some money to some guy abroad and some guy in Venezuela gives you cash or crypto. They usually pay, but they use your money in the meantime,” he says.

Now that PDVSA will be able to operate inside the law, a windfall for the regime beckons, says Francisco Monaldi of Rice University in Houston, Texas. One of the first deals to be hammered out was with PetroChina, China’s second-largest state oil company, which is thought to be close to agreeing to a contract to buy 265,000 barrels of Venezuelan oil per day, around two-thirds the amount that PDVSA was previously exporting to the black market. Those barrels will now be sold for an open-market price. On the American side, a licence issued last year by the Biden administration to the American oil giant Chevron, which has maintained a foothold in Venezuela, has led to 100,000 barrels a day going to the United States. Under the new sanctions-free environment that could rise by 50% by the end of the year.

Analysts, however, stress that reintroducing Venezuelan oil to the world market will not have a serious repercussion in terms of either supply or price. The productivity of PDVSA is still exceptionally low. It cannot be ramped up in the short term, especially given that sanctions have only initially been lifted for a six-month period. Currently PDVSA is producing just over a fifth of what it did before Chávez took office in 1999 (see chart). After years of underinvestment and bad management, the company has fallen far from its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was one of the world’s most productive oil firms.

This does not necessarily matter to Mr Maduro, who during a decade in power has shown his uncanny ability for survival. What he seeks now, ahead of elections which he has agreed will be held in the second half of 2024, is cash to shore up support. An economy free of sanctions, and a doubling of the value of its main export, delivers that. It was his reason for accepting the Barbados deal.

But there is a catch. The opposition primary held on October 22nd provided a very clear winner. María Corina Machado, a conservative free-marketeer, won with a landslide 92% backing. Ms Machado has been banned from political office by the regime since 2015. Turnout, at over 2.2m, was far higher than even the opposition expected. That creates a quandary. The regime might be prepared to go forward with purportedly fair elections against a weak and divided opposition. But facing a high-profile, popular candidate who has asserted that Mr Maduro and others should “face justice” is another matter.

Mr Biden’s administration has given Mr Maduro until November 30th to start “a process” of rehabilitating Ms Machado, and all other disqualified candidates, in return for lifting sanctions. Regime heavyweights, meanwhile, have declared the whole primary as fraudulent and have threatened to prosecute those who organised it. A full reimposition of American sanctions in December seems unlikely. Some fudging of the issue of Mr Maduro’s predictable non-compliance is more probable. But the businessmen flocking to Caracas should remember that, alongside the opportunity, big risks remain. ■

Correction (November 10th 2023): We originally said sanctions on Venezuela’s central bank had been lifted. To clarify, the central bank remains sanctioned, but a US Treasury department licence now permits certain transactions with the bank, in accordance with its lifting of other sanctions.

11/11/2023

The U.S. Air Force's B-21 "Raider" bomber shaped like a flying wing took its first flight on Friday, the next step in rolling out a new fleet of long-range nuclear-capable stealth bombers built by Northrop Grumman , according to a Reuters witness.

07/11/2023

The attack in the Strait of Gibraltar came amid a yearslong uptick in incidents where orca pods seemingly try to capsize boats in that region.

06/11/2023

Local Taíno peoples are holding close to their chests the whereabouts of their valuable indigenous ancestral relics and possessions out of fear that the Government and other groups might seek ...

22/10/2023

Jamaica Gleaner article

In a striking broadside against the UK Privy Council, law experts from across the region questioned Jamaica’s continued clinging to the London-based appellate court, asserting that the CARICOM country continues to “loiter on the premises of the colonial masters”.

The position dominated discussions at a public reasoning symposium about the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), where lawyers dissected arguments for and against Jamaica’s accession to the region’s apex court.

Fifty-nine per cent of Jamaicans in a recent RJRGLEANER Communications Group-commissioned poll said that the country should replace the Privy Council, while 23 per cent opted for its retention.

Eighteen per cent said that they were not sure about the polarising subject.

On Thursday, King’s Counsel Larry Smith called aversion to Jamaica joining other CARICOM countries in having the CCJ as its apex court “disturbing”, amid reasons listed such as trust deficit and corruption concerns.

“It’s hogwash! It’s what my late father would call high-class nonsense. It’s foolishness!” the Barbadian asserted, while speaking at the symposium held at the Faculty of Law at The University of the West Indies, Mona.

He added: “Listen to what we are saying about ourselves. That is what is so disturbing. What are we saying about ourselves? That we cannot stand in judgment of ourselves?”

ACCESS CRITICAL

He said that the argument must go beyond this to what do governments want to deliver for citizens.

Smith said what must be ensured is that the widest cross-section of the Caribbean society has access to justice.

It is one of the reasons senior counsel Magali Marin-Young, who in June demitted office as attorney general in Belize, said that country joined the CCJ in 2010.

“I don’t think that there is any Belizean to date that has any regrets about us joining the CCJ. I can only speak of pluses because that’s been our experience,” she said.

She said the impetus for Belize to join was buoyed by access as well as national pride and dignity after then president of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court Lord Nicholas Phillips signalled that Commonwealth countries needed to establish their own apex court.

“He had, in a very patronising speech, I thought, said that the Privy Council is providing this service free of cost to the Commonwealth and that their judges were spending a lot of time clearing cases from the Commonwealth, diverting precious judicial time away from their own legal reforms and modernisation,” Marin-Young noted.

Since cutting ties with the appellate court, which was averaging one appeal per annum for Belize, she said the number has gone up with more Belizeans having access to the CCJ. She cited cost as the single prohibitive factor.

Between 2016 and 2021, the Privy Council delivered 20 judgments on appeals from Jamaica, CCJ Judge Winston Anderson disclosed.

By contrast, during the same period, the Jamaican said the CCJ delivered 43 judgments on appeals from Barbados; 28 from Belize and 52 from Guyana.

Between 2005 and 2023, the CCJ delivered 308 judgments.

“There are a number of things that have suggested to me that the law lords are spending much less time and giving much less attention to Privy Council appeals … ,” King’s Counsel Michael Hylton said.

The Privy Council is listed to hear three appeals from four countries this court term, Hylton revealed, when compared to the 22 it heard for the similar period last year.

The constitutional lawyer noted that in most jurisdictions, and especially in Jamaica, the Privy Council has not delivered judgments but instead advice.

“It is a matter of policy that you don’t do dissenting judgments and you don’t do unnecessary incursions into setting precedent, save for constitutional cases. Generally speaking, they avoid doing what apex courts should do, which is develop the law.

“They are advising Her Majesty or His Majesty on matters before then. There’s a reason why the CCJ judgments go in depth in a way that the Privy Council do not,” said Hylton.

GOV’T TO STATE STANCE

Early October, Minister of Legal and Constitutional Affairs Marlene Malahoo Forte said that there “is and should be no disagreement, that it is unacceptable and untenable, to continue with an arrangement where Jamaicans need a visa to access their final court”.

She said Prime Minister Andrew Holness is to update the country on the Government’s position amid discussions of constitutional reform.

The issue has been thorny, with Holness indicating in the past that Jamaica adopting the CCJ as its final appellate court must be settled in a referendum put to Jamaicans, who decades ago decided against regional integration.

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Mark Golding has warned that his side will not support the removal of the British monarch as head of state without the simultaneous removal of the Privy Council as Jamaica’s final court.

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22/10/2023

Jamaica has so far not received any contact from Venezuela regarding crude oil supplies, despite a temporary suspension of US sanctions that lifts most restrictions on the South American count...

21/10/2023

Another school fight?

Bullying in schools.

After a lad was left unconscious recently, this video of a lass beating another in a classroom has surfaced.

19/10/2023

WASHINGTON, Oct 19 (Reuters) - A former lawyer for Donald Trump on Thursday pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy for aiding the former U.S. president’s efforts to overturn his election defeat in the state of Georgia, a live court proceeding showed.

The lawyer, Sidney Powell, pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties and agreed to testify against Trump and other co-defendants in the case if called upon.

Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has pleaded not guilty to a sweeping Fulton County, Georgia, indictment charging him with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, act in its efforts to overturn his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden.

Powell admitted to plotting to unlawfully access secure election machines in rural Coffee County in southeastern Georgia in January 2021. The plea agreement calls for her to be sentenced to six years of probation.

Powell represented Trump following the 2020 presidential election and helped spread his false claims that the election had been marred by widespread voter fraud.

Reporting by Andrew Goudsward and Kanishka Singh; Editing by Scott Malone

📸 Booking mugshot of Sidney Powell
Sidney Powell is shown in a police booking mugshot released by the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, after a Grand Jury brought back indictments against former U.S. president Donald Trump and 18 of his allies in their attempt to overturn the state’s 2020 election results in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. August 23, 2023. Fulton County Sheriff’s Office/Handout via REUTERS

18/10/2023

The Navy cook flew to Jamaica "with the sole purpose of killing" a romantic rival and her child, prosecutors say.

13/10/2023

Breaking News

Leoda Bradshaw faces four charges including murder!

Leoda Bradshaw charged with kidnapping & murder of another woman(Toshyna Patterson and her child(Sarayah Paulwell), daughter of politician and MP for East Kingston and Port Royal.

Leoda Bradshaw was charged along with three other persons. Bradshaw who is reported to be a petty officer in the US Navy claim in a social media post that she also mothered a child for the veteran politician.

Toshyna Patterson and her infant child were apparently lured into a car, murdered and their bodies burnt. Their bodies were found in the East Kingston constituency. DNA from the remains were tested in Jamaica and the USA to conclude that they were indeed the bodies of the missing mother and child.

This incident has shocked the nation that was already grappling with double, triple and quadruple murders.

The Jamaica Constabulary said Mr Paulwell is not a suspect in the matter.

04/10/2023

The Cockpit Country is a geological wonder that spans a large chunk of Jamaica’s interior. It’s a limestone hill and valley scenery with sinkholes, caverns, and lush foliage. The region is rich in biodiversity, with several plant types and fauna.

Most United States’ visitors imagine gorgeous beaches, reggae music, and dynamic towns like Montego Bay and Kingston when they think of Jamaica.

03/10/2023

BREAKING NEWS

LA TIMES story

WASHINGTON — Kevin McCarthy's leadership of House Republicans is on the verge of collapse as he faces a Tuesday vote to remove him as speaker.

The revolt against McCarthy is led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and a handful of conservative Republicans who have long complained that the speaker works with Democrats too often. If McCarthy is removed, the House, which has been in disarray for much of the year, could descend further into chaos, with a small group of GOP hardliners demanding further concessions for electing a new Republican speaker. And without the Bakersfield Republican in the speaker’s chair, California, which lost its senior senator just last week, could see its power in Congress diminished even further.

Gaetz, after months of threats, filed a motion to oust McCarthy late Monday night, taking advantage of chamber rules that allow any lawmaker to force a quick vote to boot the speaker. The House is scheduled to vote on Gaetz's motion Tuesday afternoon.

If all Democrats vote against McCarthy, Gaetz only needs four Republicans to side with him to oust the speaker. Ahead of the vote, McCarthy said he would not make a deal with Democrats to save his job. Democrats signaled they would not rescue McCarthy from his right-wing enemies.

“We are ready to find bipartisan common ground,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, late Tuesday morning. “Our extreme colleagues have shown no willingness to do the same. They must find a way to end the House Republican Civil War.”

As of noon Tuesday, it appeared Gaetz had enough votes to oust McCarthy. At least four GOP lawmakers—Andy Biggs and Eli Crane of Arizona, Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Bob Good of Virginia — had signaled they would not save the speaker.

It would be the first time in U.S. history that this mechanism has been used to successfully oust a sitting House speaker. Gaetz has yet to suggest a name to replace McCarthy. McCarthy has likely already chosen an acting speaker to serve in his place temporarily if he is removed, but the person's identity has not yet been revealed.

McCarthy has been pressured by conservatives in his party who are peeved at his willingness to break bread with Democrats. On Saturday, the speaker relied on Democratic votes to avert a government shutdown; earlier this year, he worked with Democrats to suspend the nation's debt ceiling so the United States could pay its bills.

Gaetz has sought to label those actions as a betrayal of the GOP and proof that McCarthy is not fit to lead the party. Gaetz also alleged McCarthy made a "secret deal" to help Biden deliver funding to help Ukraine in its war against Russia. (McCarthy said this is untrue.)
The showdown is cementing McCarthy as one of the weakest speakers in recent memory.

McCarthy's leadership has repeatedly been questioned by far-right members in his caucus, who harness the GOP's slim majority and withhold their votes to force the speaker to bend to their will. In exchange for their votes in January, McCarthy restored rules that made it easy for any member of the House to move to overthrow him — the same rules that are causing him so much trouble now.

McCarthy’s possible ejection from the speakership would be the latest blow to the power and reach of California’s congressional delegation, following former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s exit from House leadership and the recent death of longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein. If McCarthy is defeated, Democratic Reps. Pete Aguilar of Redlands and Ted Lieu of Torrance will be the only Californians left in leadership in either chamber of Congress.

But McCarthy’s politics are so far removed from the average California voter that Democrats aren’t worried.

“He hasn't really fought for California to begin with. And in fact, in many cases in the past, he's done things that are very inimical to the interests of California,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), whom McCarthy kicked off the House Intelligence Committee earlier this year, told The Times. “At the end of the day, the country needs a speaker that can be relied upon. We don't trust him, their members don’t trust him, and you need a certain degree of trust to be the speaker.”

Rep. Mark Takano (D-Riverside) told The Times that “there is a high degree of trust in our leadership” among Democrats.

A handful of Democrats might defect, but it doesn’t appear that they will be able to save McCarthy. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) told reporters that he was “considering everything” and might vote present rather than voting with Democrats. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told The Times.

26/09/2023

A huge happy birthday! 😍

23/09/2023

Member of Parliament for North West St. Elizabeth, J.C. Hutchinson, says he has not been neglecting his constituents in Holland Mountain. At least one resident of the area who called in to Cliff Hughes Online made complaints that the area has been without street lights, proper roads, and piped water...

20/09/2023

The Mirror US

Scientist reveals X-ray results on 2 'alien' bodies - and says they're NOT fake

Scientists have tested the 'alien' bodies presented to Mexico's Congress last week, and the results are in. It remains unclear whether they're actually aliens, but certain peculiarities exist

Two “aliens” shown before Mexico’s congress by a self-proclaimed ufologist have been tested by doctors.

Last week, the country’s lawmakers heard testimony suggesting the possibility that extraterrestrials might exist. Now two small skeletons, some two feet high, have been X-rayed by doctors.

Jaime Maussan, who last week presented them to politicians in large wooden coffins, claims that the bodies were found in Peru and are “non-human beings that are not part of our terrestrial evolution”.

Doctors at a laboratory in Mexico City carried out X-rays and CT scans of the bodies yesterday (Tues). José de Jesús Zalce Benitez, the director of the Health Sciences Research Institute of the Secretary of the Navy, which carried out the tests, said that they showed the bodies had not been assembled or manipulated.

The bodies of the aliens were found to be intact and untampered with by Mexican authorities.

His findings contradicted earlier suggestions that the bodies had been assembled with animal or human bones. “[They] belong to a single skeleton that has not been joined to other pieces,” he said.

Footage of the team carrying out the tests shows one of the bodies bearing an elongated head, a small upturned nose and two slanted eyes.

While they bear a resemblance to fictional depictions of aliens, scientists have yet to suggest that they are from another planet. One hypothesis put forward by academics and archaeologists is that the remains are mummified human bodies.

The Peruvian government has said they are pre-Hispanic objects, with officials there saying that they have begun a criminal probe into how the bodies left the country. Maussan, 70, has said he is innocent and has done "absolutely nothing illegal."

📷 Image: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

https://www.themirror.com/news/world-news/scientist-reveals-x-ray-results-105652

18/09/2023

A debris field has been found in South Carolina during the search for a F-35 fighter jet that had gone missing after a "mishap" on Sunday, officials confirmed

18/09/2023

The U.S. military issued an appeal to the public on Sunday for "any information that may help our recovery teams locate the F-35."

17/09/2023

Watch PNP conference

PNP 85th Annual National Conference

17/09/2023

PNP business

PNP conference, public session ongoing, National Arena

In Photo, Andrae Blair knocks fist with Mark Myrie

14/09/2023

The Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade of Jamaica 🇯🇲 , Kamina Johnson Smith, arrived in 🇨🇺 on the occasion of the G77 and China Summit on September 15 and 16.

📷

14/09/2023

Killings have increased sharply in Costa Rica, the long-peaceful nation known for its laid-back vibe. The drug violence has put the country's identity at stake.

11/09/2023

America remembers 9/11

September morning 2001 America was attacked from inside. The Twin Towers at World Trade Center were hit by a passenger plane hijacked by extremist aligned to Osama Bin Laden.

Since then America🇺🇸 has regained confidence in its security, but it will never forget that day.

Activities are well on the way to commemorate the victims and heroes of that day.

Photos: World Trade Center by Thrudilensphotography

#9/11

10/09/2023

Breaking News

What seem to be a personal WhatsApp communication is being circulated near and far.

It is being said that a popular vlogger and social media influencer has been reaching out for help from people he considers very close friends and family. However, based on the WhatsApp messages, the vlogger is being refused the help he requires.

People are speculating that the vlogger is having a mental breakdown, but it appears there’s more to it.

06/09/2023

A former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency says that Israel is enforcing an apartheid system in the West Bank.

01/09/2023

Chief Richard Currie honoured guest at annual Back to School ceremony and outreach program hosted by Andre Stephens.

30/08/2023

Regional News

CUBA🇨🇺 invited to summit

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel returned to his homeland on Monday after visiting several African countries and participating in the 15th BRICS Summit in South Africa.

Upon his arrival at Havana's José Martí International Airport, the president was received by Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz and Vice President Salvador Valdés Mesa, reported national television.

Since August 19, Díaz-Canel made official visits to , and , and participated in the XV BRICS Summit (Brazil, Russia, China and ), to which Cuba was invited as President Pro Tempore of the Group of 77 + China. (RHC)

Source//Granma