To Be Taken at (country): The contest will be held in Europe, Middle East & Africa.
About the Award: HUAWEI Developer is a platform ecosystem that integrates various services and resources for developers to develop and promote their apps. After registering and being verified as a HUAWEI Developer member, developers can access complete services from development and testing to promotion and monetization. Aimed at providing quality experiences for end users, HUAWEI Developer looks forward to achieving a win-win situation with all developers.
Type: Contest
Eligibility:
Open to global developers. You only need to register a HUAWEI ID and complete identity verification.
You may not participate in the contest if you are under the age of 18.
Employees of Huawei and its affiliates and their immediate relatives should not sign up for the contest.
You can participate in the contest on your own, or as part of a team. For a team, all members must belong to the same competition region before participating in the contest in this region.
Selection Criteria: Judges will review works on the basis of the following framework:
Business value: Has substantial commercial potential, with sustainable business models that indicate clear market positioning and a target user base.
Design, technology, and user experience: Features a distinctive visual design that incorporates user-friendly characteristics, and meets universal user requirements for a stable, responsive, broadly compatible, and privacy-conducive app.
Innovativeness: Comes endowed with innovative design and/or technological attributes, which represent a clear improvement over those in existing apps.
Social value: Benefits society at large, by improving the allocation of public services, or addressing social problems. This can involve enriching the lives of individual users or facilitating industry-wide development, and span a wide range of fields, such health care, education, transportation, the economy, and the environment.
Value & Number of Awards: Up to US$100,000 will be allocated for the following award winners in each participating region:
14th August 2022 21st August 2022 (South Africa only)
Tell Me About Award:
If you are an African entrepreneur creating a solution to a health product distribution challenge in Africa, we invite you to apply for the 2022 cohort. You stand the chance of receiving a $50,000 grant as well as access to leading donors, industry and institutional players who will support introductions to customers. Up to 30 companies will be selected this round.
Which Fields are Eligible?
Services that minimize supply chain inefficiencies and provide critical linkages between manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, providers, and consumers, to reduce stockouts and ensure the availability of essential medicines, consumables and devices are needed.
HEALTH PRODUCT AVAILABILITY
ACCESSIBILITY OF HEALTH PRODUCTS
HEALTH PRODUCT QUALITY
HEALTH PRODUCT AFFORDABILITY
VISIBLITY OF HEALTH PRODUCT MOVEMENT
WASTE MANAGEMENT IN HEALTH SUPPLY CHAINS
What Type of Scholarship is this?
Entrepreneurship
Who can apply?
Representative of the business must be a founder / co-founder, and at least 18 years old with a valid ID document.
Company must be owned, led or operated by an African(s). We define this as having an African national with long-term control and management of the business, an equity stake and an active role in both strategic and day-to-day decision making. Organization does not need to be headquartered in Africa.
Business must have a legal presence on the African continent.
Business offerings must be focused on serving the needs of African customers
Business must be in the early or growth stage as defined below. Nascent/idea stage companies, or mature companies (e.g. mature incumbent distribution businesses) are not be eligible.
EARLY STAGE – You must have clearly defined your market, validated customer demand, developed a working prototype and product map, and begun to generate revenue, with a strong plan to scale and sustain growth.
GROWTH STAGE – You must have strong, well-defined revenue model, sales, and operational capabilities. Your Products and service must be primed to scale, and customer acquisition costs must be declining. You must have evidence of customer acceptance of your products (reflected in sales volumes, beyond early adopters).
Innovators must offer data-driven products or services focused on the distribution of health products, which includes over-the-counter medicines, prescription medicines, health care consumables, medical devices, assistive health technologies, and the movement of medical waste. This includes but is not limited to companies that are building data-driven approaches to health product distribution including medicines, consumables, devices, and more; cold chain technology; track-and-trace; direct-to-consumer delivery of health products; online pharmacies; digital marketplaces for product resupply; vendor-managed inventory for health products; counterfeit drug detection; waste management solutions, and more. Business lines do not need to focus solely on health product distribution to be considered. We will also consider non-health businesses with documented plans to offer data-driven products or services focused on health product distribution in the short-term (2-3 months).
Nonprofits, consultancies, intermediaries, and consortiums are not eligible.
You must show good management and governance. We are looking for efficient use of funds and a strong plan to generate further income and attract additional investments. Participants must have sustainability embedded within plans and practices.
Which Countries are Eligible?
All African countries
How Many Scholarships will be Given?
Not specified
What is the Benefit of Award?
I3 connects innovators to leading local and international industry players as well as to financing, donors, and governments – in an attempt to help companies establish partnerships, pilot projects, contracts and investment.
I3 provides systematic grants of $50,000 to all participating startups for investments in commercialization and impact.
i3 provides participating startups with tailored investment readiness support, delivered by leading innovation experts at CCHub, Startupbootcamp AfriTech, Villgro Africa and IMPACT Lab.
Applications must be made in English or French and submitted before the 14th of August, 2022. If you have concerns or challenges applying, please let us know via mail at aida.elkohen@innovationsinafrica.com
Amref International University (AMIU) in partnership with Twitter offers full scholarships to Health journalists to do a short course on Health Journalism and Communication at AMIU.
The course fee is KES 80,000/USD 800 and the programme will be offered virtually to successful applicants. The aim of the course is to enhance knowledge, build skills and nurture competencies of journalists, Public Relations Officers and health managers on all aspects related to health reporting.
What Type of Award is this?
Short course
Who can apply?
To be considered for this scholarship, the following criteria must be met:
Completion of Application. The applicant must complete the entire application required, including providing all documentation requested in the application or otherwise requested.
Submission of documentation. The applicants are required to submit their resume and links or attachments of health related stories to mediascholarships@amref.org
Geographical restrictions. Must be a practicing African health journalist reporting on health and medical issues across Africa.
Deadline. The application must be received by 31st August 2022. Only complete applications with all required supporting materials that are received by the published deadline will be considered by the Scholarship Application Evaluation team.
Eligibility. Each Scholarship recipient shall meet all eligibility requirements described above.
Scoring. Applicants will be scored based on the quality of the content provided and their work as health journalist in their respective countries.
How to Apply for Program?
Once the scholarship evaluation team has selected and approved the list of successful candidates, the list will be submitted to Amref International University. • All applicants will receive written communication informing them of the outcome of their application, as well with information on the registration procedure. • Applicants who are awarded this scholarship will have one week from the date of notification to accept the award. If documentation is not submitted before the deadline, the scholarship offer will be withdrawn.
The German government is playing an increasingly aggressive role in NATO’s proxy war against Russia, arming the pro-Western regime in Kiev to the teeth.
On Monday, Ukraine received its first Gepard anti-aircraft tanks from Germany. “Today, the first three Gepards officially arrived,” Defence Minister Olexiy Resnikov announced on Ukrainian television. In addition, he said, tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition had also been handed over. A total of 15 Gepards were expected to arrive, Resnikov added.
Gepard anti-aircraft tank of the Bundeswehr (Image: Hans-Hermann Bühling/CC BY-SA 2.0/ wikimedia)
This is the second delivery of so-called heavy weaponry from Germany and the first delivery of Western-designed tanks to Ukraine. Like the seven self-propelled howitzer 2000s already handed over to Kiev by Berlin, the Gepard tanks aim to further escalate the war.
The range of the tanks against targets in the air is up to 5,000 metres. The rate of fire of the two tank barrels is 550 rounds per minute each, making a total cadence of 1,100 rounds per minute. The tanks are to be used primarily against the Russian Air Force but can also engage targets on the ground.
The actual number of tanks delivered could end up being even higher than Resnikov indicated. In May, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) had promised Kiev substantially more Gepards after a closed government meeting in Meseberg Castle. To repel the Russian offensive in the Donbass, he said, the country wanted to “supply up to 50 Gepard tanks suitable for this purpose.”
Since then, Germany has literally flooded Ukraine with weapons. The government’s official tally of “German lethal and non-lethal military support for Ukraine” is now so long that only a fraction can be reproduced here. Among others, the following have been delivered so far:
900 “Panzerfaust 3” bazookas with 3,000 shells
14,900 anti-tank mines
500 STINGER anti-aircraft missiles
2,700 STRELA anti-aircraft missiles
7 self-propelled howitzer 2000s including adaptations, training and spare parts (a joint project with the Netherlands)
21.8 million rounds of small arms ammunition
50 bunker busters
100 MG 3 machine guns with 500 spare barrels and breechblocks
100,000 hand grenades
5,300 explosive charges
100,000 metres of detonating cord and 100,000 explosive charges
350,000 detonators
280 motor vehicles
7,944 RGW 90 Matador anti-tank weapons.
Additional supplies are planned to include:
53,000 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition
8 mobile ground radars and thermal imagers
3 self-propelled howitzer 2000s
4,000 rounds of anti-aircraft training ammunition
10 (+10 as option) autonomous surface drones
43 reconnaissance drones
54 M113 armoured troop carriers with armament (systems from Denmark, conversion financed by Germany)
30 Gepard anti-aircraft tanks including approximately 6,000 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition
IRIS-T SLM air defence system
COBRA artillery tracking radar
3 MARS multiple rocket launchers with ammunition
3 armoured recovery vehicles
5,032 handheld anti-tank weapons
And even this is far from enough for the ruling class. Currently, leading government officials are beating the drum for the direct delivery of Leopard 2 and Marder heavy combat and infantry tanks to Ukraine. Up to now, the NATO powers have only delivered Soviet-designed battle tanks to Ukraine via a “backfilling” procedure to the East European countries providing the hardware. However, this model is not considered effective enough and has recently led to tensions between the Eastern European NATO countries and Germany. In particular, Poland has criticized Germany for not replacing Polish tank deliveries to Kiev quickly enough.
The chairwoman of the Bundestag (parliament) Defence Committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (Free Democratic Party, FDP), said on Monday that Germany had so far not been able to provide replacements for its Eastern European NATO partners’ arms deliveries to Ukraine as quickly as expected. “If this is problematic for our partners, we should stop the backfill arrangement and deliver directly to Ukraine—if necessary also the Leopard 2. Time was pressing,” Strack-Zimmermann told the dpa news agency.
Similar tones can be heard from the SPD. “The aim of the backfill arrangement was primarily to support Ukraine in the short-term with weapons that soldiers there can operate without training, but that has not really worked so far,” noted Michael Roth, chairman of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee. He added that it was now “a new phase of the war.” Deliveries of Western weapons so far had made a “real difference” in recent weeks, he said, adding this must “now be resolutely continued.”
Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht (SPD) said she had “great respect” for Poland because the country had very quickly delivered the promised Soviet-designed T-72 tanks to Kiev. The “gaps” that had arisen would have to be made up quickly under the backfill procedure, she said. However, she was currently “unable to do so from Bundeswehr [armed forces] stocks” if she wanted to “ensure national and alliance defence.” She was therefore “holding talks with industry” and was “certain that we will reach a good result.”
In other words, the German defence industry will now be even quicker to make more German battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles fit for purpose and build new ones—for NATO’s Eastern European allies, for Ukraine, but above all for Germany’s own armed forces.
The Greens, who have been clamouring incessantly for more direct tank deliveries to Ukraine for several days now, are acting particularly aggressively. “The backfill arrangement is not working as planned,” Katrin Göring-Eckardt, vice president of the Bundestag and long-time parliamentary group leader of the Greens, told the RND press agency. “Alternatives belong on the table. For example, supplying weapons directly, if we can.” She said the Polish government’s criticism was “a wake-up call” and that Germany must organize “sufficient support for Ukraine with weapons.” After all, “arms deliveries help decide the duration of the war, decide human lives.”
The argumentation of the former Green pacifists follows the murderous war logic of German militarism in the last century. The leading representatives of the Imperial Empire and the Nazis’ Third Reich also justified the mobilization of the German war machine in the First and Second World Wars with the cynical argument of wanting to achieve a quick “victorious peace” or “final victory.” In reality, they prolonged the wars and sacrificed millions of lives to the predatory interests of German imperialism.
This is what is at stake today as well. The ruling class knows perfectly well that massive support for Ukraine is not only prolonging the war and the suffering it entails, but even conjures up the danger of a nuclear third world war. Only a few weeks ago, President Joe Biden warned that the delivery of NATO fighter jets to Ukraine could “trigger World War III.” Now, his administration is planning to do just that. Over the weekend, National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby confirmed that the Pentagon was preparing to deliver fighter jets to Ukraine.
The German government is participating in the war madness because it wants to be in the forefront when it comes to dividing up the spoils and subjugating the resource-rich and geostrategically central Eurasian landmass. Moreover, it sees the NATO war as an opportunity to finally throw overboard the last post-war shackles and rise once again as the leading European military power after the defeats and unspeakable crimes of two world wars.
“After the German crimes of World War II” it was “difficult to deal with anything military,” complained Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD) in a speech to Bundeswehr recruits last Wednesday. Only to then announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, our Bundeswehr must now be superbly equipped again.” The Ukraine war, she said, makes one “aware again of what we need the Bundeswehr for—after years of austerity, the suspension of conscription and base closures.”
Bas openly declared that the ruling class was concerned with the comprehensive militarization of society and that the new recruits could soon find themselves at war. “When you swear your oath today, you know: At this moment in Ukraine, servicemen and women are defending their homeland and putting their lives on the line to do so. And you know that the case of defence can actually occur for Germany as well,” she declared without batting an eye. “With the turn of the times and the special fund [of €100 billion for the Bundeswehr],” she said, it was now possible “to turn the hardship of war more and more into a virtue of appreciation for the Bundeswehr.”
The occasion for her war speech was the ceremonial swearing in of new recruits on the 78th anniversary of the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler by Wehrmacht officer Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944. That the ruling class is now relying on the July 20 assassins in its war offensive is a sign of the times. Stauffenberg and several of his supporters were staunch militarists and themselves long-time Hitler partisans. Contrary to official propaganda, their assassination attempt on the “Führer” had nothing to do with the fight for “freedom” and “democracy,” but was intended to avert a complete military defeat in World War II and secure the interests of German imperialism.
The European Union has committed its member states to reduce their natural gas consumption by 15 percent from next month until March next year. The energy ministers of the 27 EU countries adopted an EU Commission proposal on Tuesday.
Smoke rises from a chimney of a Vattenfall heating power plant in Berlin, Germany [AP Photo/Michael Sohn]
The way in which the cuts are implemented is up to the individual states and the targeted savings are voluntary. However, if an acute emergency occurs, mandatory savings targets can also be adopted if at least 15 member states representing 65 percent of the population agree. Originally, the EU Commission wanted to reserve the right to declare an energy emergency, but could not enforce this position.
The austerity decision is being sold as an act of “solidarity” because all countries, regardless of how much they are affected by possible supply shortfalls, have to make the same savings. The reduction of demand across the EU is an expression of the “principle of solidarity enshrined in the EU Treaty,” the Commission’s text states.
In fact, it is a war measure that was enforced by the EU Commission and the German government with brute force. The aim is to enable Europe to continue the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine for months and years, until Russia’s military defeat.
Brussels and Berlin fear that resistance to energy scarcity, inflation and horrendous rearmament costs could lead to resistance and that social pressure on governments could jeopardize the EU’s cohesion. Therefore, the concentrated power of the EU apparatus is used to push through the austerity measures and to bring all members into line.
Like any war, the war against Russia, driven by the United States and the European powers with billions of dollars in arms, requires unity, discipline, material sacrifice and the suppression of any internal opposition. The massive energy crisis, which has caused the prices of gas and petrol to explode and threatens to lead to a massive energy outage during the coming winter, is a direct result of the war in Ukraine.
Even before the reactionary Russian attack on Ukraine, the commissioning of the completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which, with an annual capacity of 55 billion cubic metres, could meet 15 percent of the total European demand, was permanently cancelled. Other pipelines, which have been supplying Russian gas to the EU through Ukraine or Belarus for decades, stopped operating due to the war.
Nord Stream 1, which has the same capacity as Nord Stream 2, currently supplies 40 percent of its capacity and only 20 percent from Thursday. Moscow has justified the supply reduction with the necessary maintenance of turbines, some of which fell victim to Western sanctions, and has denied the intention of wanting to stop operations altogether.
The EU has rejected this as an excuse and accused Russia of deliberately trying to “use gas as a political weapon.” German Economics Minister Robert Habeck accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of playing a “perfidious game”: he tried to weaken the great support for Ukraine and drive a wedge into German society.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has always been a reliable supporter of Western propaganda, also accused Moscow of “terrorizing” the West by curbing Nord Stream 1 and inciting an “open gas war against united Europe.”
These accusations are absurd. They are reminiscent of the burglar who cries “Stop the thief!” to distract the police. In reality, it is the EU that is pursuing the stated goal of driving Russia into ruin through economic sanctions. According to the official decision, the EU no longer wants to import fossil fuels from Russia by 2027 at the latest. The militaristic tone of the accusations confirms that the EU is not concerned with energy security, but with the instrumentalization of energy policy as a weapon of war.
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen used all her authority to oblige all EU members to reduce gas consumption. The Christian Democratic Union politician already played a leading role as German Defense Minister in reviving German militarism. In 2014, the government in which von der Leyen was a member supported the right-wing coup in Kiev, which laid the seeds for today’s war.
The von der Leyen gas savings plan is based on the controversial Article 122 of the Treaty on European Union, which allows the EU to intervene deeper than usual in the national sovereignty of the member states in emergencies.
Already during the euro crisis, when the EU helped the banks out of the crisis with billions, and forced countries such as Greece, Portugal and Spain to make brutal social cuts, it invoked this article. Likewise, after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, when it again made available hundreds of billions for a “reconstruction fund” in favour of banks and corporations.
This time, however, von der Leyen met with considerable resistance. Countries in the south, which now meet their gas demand from North Africa, were reluctant to agree to a programme that primarily benefits Germany, which is particularly dependent on Russian gas supplies.
The Spanish Minister for the Environment, Teresa Ribera, initially rejected the plan outright. Her country would not make any “disproportionate sacrifices.” No Spanish family would have to fear cuts in the gas supply in winter, she said, explaining this was because Spain has done its homework and not lived beyond its means.
Like the German government, the Spanish government fully supports the proxy war against Russia. But the arrogance with which the German government faced more heavily indebted countries during the euro crisis and forced them to take drastic austerity measures has not been forgotten.
On Monday, the diplomats of the 27 EU member states negotiated well into the night, until they finally reached a majority agreement thanks to numerous special arrangements. For example, a number of countries—Cyprus, Malta and Ireland—which are not connected to the gas network of other member states, are excluded from the austerity objectives.
In the end, only Hungary voted against the decision to reduce gas consumption. Viktor Orbán’s government, which maintains good relations with Russian President Putin, is now also rejecting economic sanctions against Russia.
But the centrifugal tendencies in the EU are enormous. In Italy, Mario Draghi’s government of “national unity” has also broken up over the question of war. While Draghi unreservedly supported NATO’s war course, Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing Forza Italia and Lega refused to deliver arms to Ukraine. It is unclear what the government will do after the elections at the end of September.
What welds the ruling class of Europe together is the fear of working class uprisings. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock recently declared that if no more gas came from Russia, “then we as Germany can no longer provide any support at all for Ukraine, because we are then occupied with popular uprisings.”
The Baden-Württemberg Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann, a member of the Greens like Baerbock, also warned against a split in society, commenting, “If we walk into a gas emergency, the centrifugal forces will be great, greater than in the case of the Coronavirus.”
The escalation of the war in Ukraine serves not least to direct these internal tensions outward—even if it leads to a third, nuclear world war.
According to two separate databases maintained by the Washington Post and Mapping Police Violence, US police have killed over 600 people so far this year.
As of July 16, 2022, Mapping Police Violence has confirmed that 633 people in the United States have been killed by police, 10 more people killed compared to the same time last year. According to the database, there have been only eight days in 2022 where police did not kill someone.
The Washington Post has tracked 614 police killings as of July 26, 2022. Both the Post and the Mapping Police Violence figures represent an average of just over three people killed by police every day in the United States, a number that has remained steady through Democratic and Republican administrations alike under Obama, Trump and now Biden. This is despite years of protests and demands by millions of workers and youth for an end to police violence.
Capitalist politicians routinely hail the police as heroes, “defenders of democracy,” and the epitome of impartial justice. These lies are told to the American people in order to obfuscate the class role of the police and the vital function they play in capitalist society.
The police are not given billions of dollars and lethal military-style weaponry every year by bourgeois politicians to defend the interests of everyone; the police are the front-line soldiers of capital, they exist to defend private property and enforce social inequality—nothing else. New York City, New York
Raymond Chaluisant, 18, was playing with a water pellet gun when he was murdered by off-duty New York City corrections officer Dion Middleton, 45, after midnight on Thursday, July 21. In a statement to the Washington Post, a New York Police Department spokesperson said that Chaluisant was found unconscious and unresponsive with a gunshot wound to his face around 1:35 a.m. A clearly plastic, orange and gray, “Orbeez” water pellet gun was recovered at the scene.
Raymond Chaluisant
After shooting the 18-year-old in the face, Middleton clocked into work without reporting his crime to anyone. In the exception that proves the rule, Middleton was arrested at work last Thursday and charged with murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon. While Middleton has not been fired, the NYC Corrections Department did suspend him without pay.
Speaking to the Post, the police said that there was no evidence Chaluisant ever fired his water gun at Middleton. In an interview with the New York Daily News, Chaluisant’s older sister, Jiraida Esquilin, 29, said that her little brother was trying to stay cool on a hot summer night by joining his friends in a water gun fight.
“They were just having fun,” she told the Daily News. “It’s a new Nerf gun that shoots water. The whole neighborhood was having a water gun fight. It was 90 degrees.”
“I can’t believe a corrections officer killed my brother,” Esquilin said. “Everything nowadays is a rage thing.”
Los Angeles, California
Witnesses say 39-year-old Jermaine Petit, an ex-Air Force emergency medical technician, was shot in the back multiple times as he was fleeing from Los Angeles police officers on July 18. Video footage taken by local residents shows police handcuffing Petit after shooting him and leaving him on the pavement.
Petit was taken to a hospital and is expected to survive after undergoing major surgery.
In statements given by police following the shooting, they claimed that Petit had a weapon, implying that it was a pistol of some kind, and thereby justifying the shooting. However, the cops have been forced to admit that Petit was only “armed” with a “black metal latch actuator” which was recovered by police at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and South Bronson Avenue at the time of the shooting.
Deshonay Howard told the Los Angeles Times that she was parked in front of her house when she saw police trailing Petit as he was walking near a bus stop. “We all heard him say, ‘I don’t have anything,’ and he started to run.” She told the Times that she saw police shoot him in the back three times.
A GoFundMe has been started by Ashlyn Petit, the daughter of Jermaine. She wrote that “LAPD shot him even though he was UNARMED. He’s currently in the hospital in critical condition.”
Chicago, Illinois Security camera footage has confirmed that an unarmed 13-year-old African American boy had his hands up when Chicago police officer Noah Ball shot him on May 18 this year. The boy survived the gunshot wound but is now paralyzed from the waist down.
Police have claimed they were pursuing the teen because he was a passenger in a suspected stolen vehicle. The boy has not been charged with any crimes.
A witness told CNN-affiliate WLS that police clearly shot him while his hands were up. “His (the boy’s) hands were up and I seen the cop run up to that boy and just start shooting that boy did not have no gun or nothing.”
Ball, who has yet to be arrested, claimed through his attorney that he thought a cell phone the boy had was a gun. While the security footage shows the boys hands were up when he was shot, Ball did not activate his body camera until 40 seconds after shooting the young person.
Lawyers for the family of the young paralyzed child said he can no longer walk, “... he can’t get up, he can’t go to the bathroom, he can’t get his own food ... his life is changed forever.” Cincinnati, Ohio
Rose Valentino, a Cincinnati police officer for the last 14 years, has been relegated to desk duty after admitting to using a racial slur while on duty following an internal investigation. The investigation uncovered body camera footage of Valentino expressing her hatred for “niggers” while she was driving in a police car outside a local high school.
On a rainy April 5 afternoon, body camera footage shows Valentino driving her vehicle towards the police station which is located next to Western Hills University High School. As Valentino is pulling into the police parking compound, several cars are seen on the side of the road waiting to pick up students.
While the footage does not appear to show any vehicles blocking her path into the compound, she nevertheless turns on her lights and sirens, activating the body camera in the process.
“You’ve got to move. Fucking ridiculous. Fucking assholes,” Valentino says as she is driving. As Valentino continues to get more agitated, local ABC station 9 WCPO reported that a “black teen” gestured at the cop, allegedly giving her the middle finger, which sent Valentino into a rage.
“I fucking hate them. Oh, I fucking hate them so much. Fucking God. I hate this fucking world. Fucking hate it.” As the cop waits for the police security fence to open up to the cop parking lot, she continues her tirade. “Fucking niggers. I fucking hate them.”
WCPO reported that Valentino has received positive employee evaluations from her superiors who have noted her “positive attitude” and “great work.” The report noted that Valentino “trains officers who recently graduated the academy.”
While Valentino has received high marks from her bosses, and was granted a pivotal role training new graduates, WCPO found that she has been “reprimanded multiple times for not turning on her bodycam,” and that April’s incident was not the first time Valentino expressed racism.
In November 2018 Valentino was one of three cops involved in an incident that resulted in the city paying out a $151,000 settlement after Valentino pulled out her gun and aimed it at two unarmed black men. Neither of the men were committing a crime; one of the men, a real estate agent, was showing a property to the other man, a prospective renter.
The crisis engulfing Australia’s construction sector has deepened over the past six weeks. A plethora of building companies have been placed into administration and liquidation, owing millions of dollars to owners of unfinished homes, subcontractors, suppliers and workers in entitlements.
This month, Victorian-based building firm Snowdon Developments was ordered by the Supreme Court to go into liquidation on the grounds of insolvency, owing just under $18 million to 250 creditors.
The Snowdon collapse follows similar failures throughout June, including prominent home builders such as Victorian-based Waterford Homes, which went into liquidation with debts so far amounting to $600,000.
House under construction in Manly, Queensland [Photo by Orderinchaos via Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Specialist small home builder Affordable Modular Homes collapsed under a mountain of debt, owing $121,000 to creditors, while Statement Builders failed, owing $200,000 in taxes. Other home builders that went to the wall last month included Langford Jones Homes, Pivotal Homes, Solido Builders, Wulfrun Construction and Westernport Constructions.
These failures are part of what media commentary terms “a construction sector bloodbath.” More than 16 building companies had already collapsed since the closing months of 2021. They include well-known names in home building, such as Hotondo Homes, Dyldam Developments, BA Murphy, Home Innovation, ABG Group, New Sensation Homes, Pindan and ABD Group.
This year also saw the collapse of major companies, such as Probuild and Condev, that had projects underway or on the books worth billions of dollars. The fate of Australia’s largest home builder Metricon, which had around 4,000 homes under construction last month, remains uncertain despite a $30 million cash injection into the company by its shareholders and promises of government support.
It is widely acknowledged across the industry that these failures are only the tip of the iceberg. Industry market researcher IBISWorld recently projected that the number of firms operating in the home building industry would fall by 9 percent in 2022-23, contracting for the first time in a decade “by thousands.”
Last month, co-founder of the Association of Professional Builders (APB), Russ Stephens, told news.com.au that around 50 percent of building companies in Australia “are currently experiencing negative equity.” A company is considered to have negative equity if it owes more than it has in assets, with more than one creditor. “Once a company experiences negative equity, it’s a slippery slope to becoming insolvent,” Stephens said.
Last October, based on extensive research, APB had warned that “it was clear that the increasing price of construction materials, supply chain delays and COVID-related labour shortages were impacting the profitability of every single building company in Australia.”
Referencing the spiraling costs of building materials, CoreLogic, a provider of property data and analytics, has said home builders are unlikely to experience a reprieve anytime soon. “The short- and medium-term outlook for the construction industry still looked bleak,” it stated.
Banks could become embroiled in the meltdown. In May, National Australia Bank chief executive Ross McEwan said construction was the “most worrying” industry in its portfolio.
This crisis has been exacerbated by the necessary two-month lockdown of Shanghai to bring the recent outbreak of COVID-19 under control. More than a quarter of goods imported into Australia come from China, including around 60 percent of its building industry materials.
ANU supply chain management expert David Leaney told the media in May that construction “has certainly got some of the biggest delays,” saying “the lead time to get timber frames if you’re building a house is 46 weeks.”
The “let it rip” COVID policies adopted since late last year by all Australian governments, Liberal-National and Labor alike, continue to cause repeated waves of mass infection, illness and death. This has resulted in labour shortages in vital areas of the supply chain, such as the docks, trucking and freight haulage.
It is difficult to put a precise number on jobs lost in the construction industry because most companies directly employ only small numbers of workers. The bulk of their work is carried out by labour hire companies, employing casuals, subcontractors and independent trades-persons. Many of these are owed thousands of dollars and will find it difficult, if not impossible, to survive.
From the outset of the pandemic, the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU) and other industry trade unions collaborated with the employers to demand that the sector be exempted from lockdowns and other public health measures, thereby forcing workers to stay on the job, resulting in widespread COVID infections.
Now with building companies collapsing in quick succession, destroying the livelihoods of countless workers, the CFMMEU is maintaining a virtual silence, seeking to prevent the eruption of struggles by construction workers to defend jobs and livelihoods.
This is a logical extension of the role played by the unions for decades, enforcing the decimation of working conditions and the huge increase in casual, labour-hire and sham contracting arrangements throughout the construction industry, claiming this was necessary to ensure competitiveness and to preserve jobs into the future.
Construction workers need to draw a balance sheet of these bitter experiences. They cannot leave matters in the hands of the unions, which are tied by a thousand threads to the corporations and governments.
The crisis in China’s property market, exemplified by the default of Evergrande, the country’s most indebted real estate developer last November, is spreading. It is threatening a significant fall in economic growth under conditions where the government is battling to deal with the effects of the COVID pandemic.
Residential buildings developed by Evergrande in Yuanyang. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Over the past few weeks, a home-buyer boycott movement has developed in which purchasers are refusing to continue payments for apartments they have purchased but which are still under construction.
In the past, the pre-delivery sales agreements have been a mainstay for property development as real estate companies have received money for projects not yet completed, enabling them to finance the next one.
The movement is extending with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reporting that hundreds of smaller companies involved in property development are threatening to halt loan payments because they are not receiving payments from the major developers.
The ABC cited a joint statement signed by a group of suppliers to Evergrande in Hubei province saying they are “broke” and will stop paying loans. Addressed to banks and provincial authorities, the statement said: “Evergrande should be held responsible for any consequence that follows because of the chain reaction of the supply-chain crisis.”
While the home-buyer boycott movement is so far relatively small in relation to the total market—the Financial Times reported earlier this month that some 300 projects were involved—its growth has sparked concern at top levels of the government.
The FT reported on Monday that China’s State Council last week passed a plan to establish a real estate fund worth up to 300 billion renminbi ($44.4 billion) to support at least a dozen property development companies.
Initially the China Construction Bank and China’s central bank will inject 80 billion renminbi into the fund, and then possibly to 300 billion renminbi, to revive stalled construction projects.
The amounts of money involved are not small. According to a report published by Bloomberg on Monday: “Construction halts may affect 4.7 trillion yuan worth of homes in China, and up to 1.4 trillion yuan, or about 1.3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, may be needed to complete them.” [The yuan is another name for the renminbi.]
The Bloomberg report noted that while halted real estate projects were not unheard of “the depth of the current turmoil is unprecedented.”
The move by the State Council came a week after the city of Zhengzhou set up a property developer development fund, backed by the financial arms of the local government authority, in response to the growing home-buyer boycott movement.
The extent of the crisis was revealed in a report earlier this month in the FT that developers in some parts of China had agreed to accept garlic, as well as watermelons, barley, and wheat as down payments from farmers on new apartments.
One real estate agent in Zhengzhou, the capital of the Henan province, said that, despite home prices falling to record lows, market activity was depressed.
The Henan province was also the scene of protests on July 10 when hundreds of people protested after deposits totalling 40 billion renminbi had been frozen by four rural banks. The protests were defused when Chinese banking regulator, Liu Rong, promised that protestors who had lost money due to fraud would be reimbursed.
The issue attracted the attention of the representatives of global capital and finance. According to analysts at the US bank Citi, whose remarks were reported in the FT: “We are not worried about the rural banks in Henan per se. However, the situation could worsen if the public were to start worrying about other banks, especially some of the larger financial institutions.”
The real estate crisis is having major financial effects, especially in the higher yield or junk bond market. A report by Bloomberg earlier this month said that the housing woes were hitting every corner of the real estate industry “with distress signs once again flashing in debt markets.”
Pessimism, it said, had become so entrenched that a property firm that had been the subject of a state rescue in May suffered major losses in the dollar bond market.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Daniel Fan said: “Investors are concerned that it’s just a matter of time for liquidity stress to spread to larger, healthier developers. If the offshore refinancing channel remains shut, the continued repaying of debt with their own cash is not a sustainable strategy and will eventually hurt cash flow.”
Meanwhile the situation at Evergrande goes from bad to worse. The company announced last Friday that its CEO Xia Haijun had been forced to resign as the result of an investigation into how 13.4 billion renminbi of deposits ($2 billion) were used as security for third parties to obtain bank loans, some of which the borrowers failed to repay.
Evergrande is due to announce a restructuring plan by the end of the month. It has around $300 billion worth of liabilities, of which around $20 billion are in dollar-denominated bonds. At this stage creditors have no idea as to how, or even if, they will be repaid. The nature of the restructuring agreement will be critical for the maintenance of confidence in financial markets more broadly.
It has been estimated that real estate firms that have issued high-yield debt need to repay a total of $3.7 billion in offshore bonds and $6.1 billion worth of domestic debt between July and September.
The turmoil in the real estate sector and associated financial markets is exacerbating the mounting problems in the economy as a whole. Annualised growth in the June quarter was only 0.4 percent, meaning that China barely escaped an outright contraction.
Growth estimates for the full year have been revised down. A number of economists expect that the economy will contract in the current quarter and growth for the year will be well below the government’s target of 5.5 percent, which was itself the lowest for 30 years.
Analysts at the Japanese financial firm Nomura have repeated the widely held view that “some fundamentals” may be worse than official data claim. It noted that the road freight index, a key gauge of economic activity, is down 20 percent over the past year and new home sales have dropped by a third.
There has been a significant rise in the number of unemployed young people, with the jobless rate for those aged between 18 and 24 rising to a record high of 18.4 percent. At least 10 million university students are coming on to the jobs market in the next few weeks.
The growing economic crisis will have political ramifications. The Xi Jinping regime, which represents the Chinese financial oligarchy, has sought to base itself on sections of the middle class that have been able to make gains from the full-scale restoration and development of capitalism initiated at the end of the 1980s.
But growing numbers of this social layer, which collectively has an estimated 70 percent of its wealth tied up in housing, are being hit, under conditions of a marked slowdown in economic growth and the contraction of job opportunities.
In the past, the response of the regime would have been to initiate economic and financial stimulus packages. But this road is being increasingly closed off under conditions of rising and increasingly unstable debt and the tightening of interest rates globally by the major central banks.
