A pioneer in France in the field of sustainable development with its training, research, innovation, economic development, scientific and industrial culture activities, the École des Mines de Saint-Etienne obtains a new international recognition by integrating young people “IMPACT” ranking of the prestigious English magazine Times Higher Education, dedicated to sustainable development, social and environmental responsibility.
Since 2019, Times Higher Education (THE) has been referencing global higher education establishments according to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) announced by the United Nations (UN) based on their scientific production, their lessons and a questionnaire very detailed regarding their practices and policies in this area.
In 2020, 770 educational, research and innovation establishments were classified out of a total of 24,000 establishments from five continents. The École des Mines de Saint-Etienne is referenced in 2020 in 4 categories: partnerships, sustainable cities and communities, responsible consumption and production, industry, innovation and infrastructure.
Its best classification is obtained in the category Consumption and responsible production, between the 100th and the 200th world rank. This result is the result of a strong proactive policy of the school in terms of sustainable development and social responsibility, carried out daily for 30 years with its students, alumni, staff and partners.
Portraits made by Samuel Little of his victims. On video, the testimonies of the murderer.ap | Reuters
At the end of life, one should remember the best moments with family and friends, the people who fell in love with him and the best trips. Samuel Little remembers killing 93 women.
Little is 79 years old. He started counting his crimes for the first time a year and a half ago. He remembers in as much detail as coldly the murders he committed more than four decades ago. He also has a photographic memory that allows him to make portraits of his victims. They were mostly young African American women, alone, living on the fringes.
In one of the videos, Little tells the story of Ruth, a light-toned black woman. Outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1992 or 1993. “Oh my friend, I loved it. I forgot her name … wait, I think it was Ruth. It was very big. His teeth were crooked. He had a gap between his teeth. If that is. And it was a light skin color … honey. And her hair was not very long. ” He picked her up from a house where he was with other women smoking crack. They spent two days together driving around the city and committing small shoplifting. They went to the Sears and Kroger’s stores, he remembers exactly. At the Kroger’s in Little Rock, he was arrested.
Samuel Little, during the trial against him in Los Angeles in 2013.AP
Little never especially fled from justice. It was simply not detected by the system. He was born in 1940 in Georgia. His first arrest is recorded in 1956. Over the years, he was detained dozens of times. He was a drunkard and a tramp. Many times the local authorities were content to kick him out of town. He killed and went to another place. He was eventually arrested for rape and murder, but was released on both counts. Finally, in 2012, he was detained at a Kentucky homeless shelter on a pending drug issue in Los Angeles.
Little’s DNA suddenly solved three crimes from the Los Angeles police files. Carol Alford, 41, whose body was found in an alley in 1987. Audrey Nelson, 35, found in a container in 1989. Guadalupe Apodaca, 46, whose body was left in a garage that same year. Little denied the allegations to the end. Two physical tests had traces of his DNA. The odds that it wasn’t him were 1 in 450 quintillion, prosecutor Beth Silverman told the court. On September 25, he was sentenced to three life terms. “I didn’t!” He yelled during the hearing.
Los Angeles police released Little’s DNA to the FBI, which put him in the violent crime database. Dozens of matches began to appear across the country. One of them, very clear, in Odessa, Texas. Denise Brothers was an African American prostitute whose body was found in a bush behind a parking lot. The case was 24 years unsolved. In 2018, a Texas Rangers agent named James Holland, a specialist in obtaining confessions from murderers, traveled to see Little at California State Prison. There he got the confession. Little remembered tiny details, like the fact that Brothers was wearing false teeth.
Montage of police photos of Litlle made by the FBI.EFE
Little wanted to change prison. In return, he would speak. He was extradited to Texas with the promise that he would not be sentenced to death. There, Holland chatted with him for 48 days straight in sessions lasting several hours. He confessed to 65 murders. A year and a half after the first confession, Little is back in California State Prison and is still talking. It goes by 93.
“Tell me about Marianne,” Agent Holland asks in another of the videos. “She was what they would call a transgender today,” Little laughs. “A black man dressed as a woman?” Little nods. The crime was in 1972, but Little remembers it with a chilling level of detail. He says he was 19 years old and was from Liberty City, Miami. She had a boyfriend named Wes. He met her at a bar on 17th Street. She was wearing a cream and red miniskirt. He got in his Pontiac Le Mans car and drove down I-27 toward Fort Lauderdale. He entered on a side path that led into the swamps. He left the corpse face down on the mud. You don’t know the exact site. He believes that the body was never found.
Little’s confessions span 45 years and 37 cities in 14 states. Three women in Phoenix, 10 in Miami, 18 in Los Angeles, one in many places. The oldest crime he remembers was in 1970 and the last in 2005. In a report by 60 Minutes On CBS, which aired on October 6, cameras show an encounter between Holland and Little in which the inmate says, “I have had my way in numerous murders of women for 50 years.” “Where have you killed the most?” Asks Holland. “Oh, easy, in Miami and in Los Angeles.”
Little’s victims used to be marginal women. Investigators fear that some deaths were never reported, that no one missed them. Little was a boxer for a time in his life. According to the FBI, he knocked his victims out and then strangled them. There are no stabbings or shots. As prostitutes and drug addicts, investigators fear that some of these crimes were not once classified as homicides, but were mistaken for overdose deaths.
In that report, Holland says that the first thing that caught his attention is how “smart” Little is. “For starters, the photographic memory, his memories of the details,” he explains. “For example, Little remembered strange arches near the place where he killed a woman outside of Miami. Of course, when Miami detectives went to investigate, they found the bows. ” Details like that named the victim: Miriam Chapman. It was 1976.
All of Little’s confessions are credible, according to investigators. That means that in dusty folders in the local police files of the United States there are at least 43 more unsolved cases whose key could be in these stories. “Nothing he has said has turned out to be false. We have been able to verify almost everything he has said, ”said Holland on CBS. Those women existed. They had a name that wasn’t just Ruth or Marianne. They are somewhere. Her killer remembers them.
The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, insisted on Wednesday thatAfrica, “like during the climate crisis”, could also suffer“the greatest impacts” derived from the pandemicof the new coronavirus. “The crisis has far-reaching implications,” Guterres explained during a meeting with African leaders at the United Nations, where he advocated solidarity and cooperation at all levels to deal with the pandemic, since “like With the climate crisis, the African continent could end up suffering the greatest impacts. “
For its part, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has gone one step further and has predicted that“Africa will not be saved”, as an economic crisislike the one that will foreseeably come threatens to reverse the achievements that the continent has reaped with so much effort.
The latest IMF report for the sub-Saharan area of the African continent contemplates a drop in growth in the region of 1.6 percent, added to the collapse in the prices of exports of key products as a result of the “severe interruptions” in the economic activity caused by the pandemic.
“Sub-Saharan Africa will not be saved,” warned the director of the IMF Departmentfor Africa Abebe Aemro Selassie. “Everything indicates that the Covid-19 pandemic will have a high human cost.”
That is why the IMF is asking African countries and their international partners to carry out ainvestment in poor health and healthcare servicesavailable, as well as more social aid to the most vulnerable population.
However, the United Nations has highlighted the work of some of these countries, whose governments have begun to “take the lead” in promoting measures that can help to counter this situation.
In this sense, the UN has explained that, following “thepainful lessons learned from recent Ebola outbreaks“Countries like Uganda, Namibia or Cape Verde are promoting aid, subsidies and food assistance at the state level and in collaboration with private companies in some cases.
Egypt, he stressed, is one of the countries that has reduced or postponed tax collection, while the institutions for the Control and Prevention of Diseases in Africa are working to respond to the problems that may arise from the Covid-19 pandemic
Thus, in Nigeria, for example, $ 2 million has been invested in the purchase of essential medical supplies, including 50 ventilators, 30,000 test kits and personal protective equipment.
Meanwhile, theWorld Health Organization (WHO), He has highlighted, has managed to increase the detection capacity of the virus throughout the continent, managing to go from two to 47 countries capable of carrying out tests that detect new positives among its population.
Although Africa is the continent least affected by the pandemic, which globally has exceeded two million positives and is close to almost 137,000 fatalities, the deficiencies of many African health systems, as well as the instability of many countries, makes it very It is difficult to have reliable data and face the pandemic with all the guarantees.
If there is anything that spreads faster than a virus in India, it is trickery. The crisis caused by the global pandemic of Covid-19 has not only multiplied the hoaxes in the second largest digital market in the world, but also Internet scams. Up to 86% have grown in the last four weeks, according to the Interior Ministry.
The largest of these has been the virtual sale of the tallest statue in the world, for more than 3,200 million euros. With the hook to raise funds to help the health system in Gujarat, the Indian state where the monument stands, the Statue of Indian Unity —Twice as high as the New York Statue of Liberty—, was offered on the sales platform on-line of second-hand objects OLX.
“We try to ensure that donation accounts are verified,” said Dilip Asbe, executive director of the Indian National Payments Corporation, a parent organization for retail payments. “We have closed all those that had illegitimate combinations of the Prime Minister’s Assistance Fund”, referring to the emergency reserve created to combat the Covid-19 epidemic, which in India has already caused more than 9,200 infections and 331 deaths .
And, even before the closing of the accounts, internal sources had confirmed that they had received more than 8,300 complaints from Indian citizens outside and inside the country, who had allocated thousands of dollars to false accounts that imitated and falsified that of the Prime Minister, a campaign promoted these days by celebrities from all over the country.
In addition to attempting the statue, other scams offered discounts on Netflix or local operator Reliance Jio to make subscribers distract themselves during the confinement of India’s 1.3 billion people. The Council for the Security Standards of the Digital Payment Industry has also taken good note of the alert from the US secret services, which warned of a potential increase in cybercrime during crises like the one now causing the pandemic.
All in all, the attempted sale of the 182-meter Indian statue may be nothing more than a cynical joke to mask criticism of the country’s government. The immense steel and bronze effigy is a tribute to the Prime Minister of the Interior of Indian history, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who reunited the different Indian princely states. Patel is praised by the hard core of the current Executive for his historical role in independence. And it is neither Gandhi nor Nehru, who are ascendants of the current opposition leaders.
Patel was born in the same State as the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who ordered this mole to be erected at a cost of 352.5 million euros in the face of strong criticism from those who argued that it was an ostentation in the second country in the world with more inhabitants by below the poverty line. The exorbitant sale price on-line it is closer to the average investment that India makes in the Gujarat health system (1.28% of regional GDP or around 2,262 million euros).
Hoax hidden or not, scams are a constant in India, where there is no shortage of delusions to cajole. Months ago, a businessman from New Delhi, the capital, invested 178,000 euros in a spacesuit that the scammers, a father and his son, promised to sell to NASA and the Indian space agency (ISRO) for several million euros. Clad in silver robes as astronauts, the police went viral on photos and videos of the con artists, who turned out to be an active duo since the 1990s; They convinced their victims with all sorts of weird sales, including magic mirrors and double-headed snakes.
A report by the Basque employers’ association Confebask on the number of companies and self-employed professionals in the Basque Country confirms that “March has been the worst month ever recorded in terms of the Basque business fabric” due to to the disaster that has been registered in the number of firms and self-employed for the impact on the economy of the Covid-19.
Thus, the number of Basque companies registered with Social Security in March was 57,125, with a decrease of 1,768 companies over February, what the Basque employers describe as «an unprecedented fall».
Compared to those in March of last year, the decrease in the number of signatures is 2,181. This means, according to employers, that the year-on-year decrease reaches -3.7%, “matching the year-on-year rate of decline in August 2009” which was the largest recorded to date.
“Ultimately, this is the worst record in a month ever accounted for, and represents a loss equivalent to the number of companies won in the last six years”, they recognize.
By sector, and comparing March 2020 with the same month of 2019, the number of companies in Construction -4.2%, followed by Services (-3.9%) and Industry, where the percentage drop in the number of companies has been -1.9% in the last year.
Despite everything, according to Confebask compared to Spain as a whole, behavior in the Basque Country comes out somewhat better, as the general year-on-year drop in espñola reaches -7.3%, almost double the Basque -3.7%.
Regarding the self-employed, the monthly balance indicates a reduction in the Basque Country of 342 people compared to February, which is the worst month of March since 2009. Thus, the number of these professionals stood at 169,902 people in March, 2,084 less than in March 2019 with a year-on-year drop of -1.2%.
The Minister of Labor and Social Economy,Yolanda Diaz, is studying the possibility of raising a measure to the Council of Ministers tolengthen and prolong the temporary employment regulation files(ERTE) due to force majeure in certain sectors.
This has been indicated by the Ministry in a statement after the telematic meetings that the minister held this Monday with the main organizations of self-employed workers,ATA, UPTA and Uatae, in which this question has been analyzed, among others.
During these meetings there has been a debate on the situation of the sectors most affected by the coronavirus crisis. In addition, the possibility ofstudy new measuresas regards productive ERTEs.
There has also been a joint reflection on changes in self-employment,at remote work, digitization as well as platforms to distribute among retail, among other issues.
Likewise, as in the meeting held by the Minister of Labor last week with union organizations, the two phases of the pandemic in the workplace have been addressed, that of attenuated exceptionality, first, and the subsequent normalization attenuated.
The various meetings have also reported on the creaction of an autonomous work table,where contacts are expected to be maintained weekly to address the next phases of the coronavirus health crisis anda common agenda is drawn upwith the aim of promoting the activity of the self-employed.
The head of the portfolio of work has transferred to organizations that are aware of the situation caused by the current pandemic in this group, “which is going through great difficulties.”
ArcelorMittal, which is applying a temporary employment regulation (ERTE) file to half of its workforce due to market circumstances,It intends to use the ERTE formula due to force majeure and has called unions to form a negotiating commission to tackle another ERTE for economic reasons.The ERTE will apply to the whole of the organization in Spain. The company will communicate the details to the labor committees this afternoon by videoconference, union sources reported.
ArcelorMittalSince March, it has been adjusting its production with some installations stops due to the closing of the automobile industry and the lower demand from other customers., along with the fall in steel prices in Europe prior to the pandemic. For these reasons, one of the company’s two blast furnaces in Gijón will stop tomorrow, with the arrest (and prior to other facilities)Arcelor will start operating with about 2,500 of its 5,000 employees.
To this restrictive measures was added last weekthe entry into force of the decree that imposed the closure of non-essential industrial facilities in Spain, which will run until midnight on Thursday and which limits the steelmaker’s activity to its tinplate line (for the canning industry) and rail and sheet metal to satisfy exports.
The unions had demanded that during this time the ERTE that they have agreed to since 2009 for the intermittent use andwhose economic conditions for employees are more advantageous than ERTE due to force majeure. This morning the company announced that, although it was already applying the ERTE itself agreed with the committees eleven years ago, it will accept the files due to force majeure.
Theunion negotiating commissionIt will be made up of 4 members from UGT, 3 from CC OO, 2 from ELA, 1 from LAB and 1 from USO.
He has just returned from French Brittany, where the founders of Famileo work. This application is used by more than 50,000 European families and allows you to transform a digital chat (for example, a conversation on WhatsApp or Telegram) into a printed magazine that is sent to older people who are not familiar with the technology. “I bet on Famileo for the social and tangible aspect of the project. It is not a ball in which the objective is to make investment rounds. We offer a sustainable service aligned with my values ”, explains Christian Marion, who is leading the launch in Spain of Famileo.
British American Tobacco (BAT), the London-based company that is the largest cigarette seller in the world, has developed the technology for a vaccine against coronavirus. One of its laboratories, Kentucky BioProcessing, in the United States, cloned part of the COVID-19 gene sequence and created what could be an antigen.
Antigens produce opposite effects to the virus, they generate antibodies. The genetic code for those proteins was injected into tobacco plants six weeks ago, and the antibodies have now been harvested to start testing, primarily with animals. He tobacco does not harbor pathogens that harm humans and allows the development of antigens more quickly than other means.
The company wants to produce 3 million doses and seeks the collaboration of governments and other entities to start clinical tests. BAT, a corporation created in 1902 and whose products have caused perhaps hundreds of millions of deaths from the damage tobacco smoking causes to the airways, has joined the race to stop COVID-19 deaths from the 2017 acquisition of the American snuffbox Reynolds, which had in its structure the Kentucky laboratory.
Iñigo Gurruchaga reports. London correspondent
France
The French country overcomes the barrier of 4,000 dead
France has passed the barrier of 4,000 dead in hospitals and, little by little, the numbers of the deceased in nursing homes are beginning to be known. Only in the Grand Est region there are 570 elderly people and the authorities assure that from today the data of the entire country will be known.
The Government expects that the release from confinement will be gradual And although the scenarios are still being examined, it could “be done by region, depending on the results of the tests or by age,” Prime Minister Édouard Philippe has predicted. But there are still many uncertainties and the peak of the epidemic has not been reached either, although there are signs of hope: the number of admissions in resuscitation (ICU) stabilizes.
The French Government is counting on increasing the national production of sanitary protection material in the face of difficulties in obtaining it abroad. From different French regions it has been denounced that the mask orders they had made in China were “repurchased” at the same airport from which they had to leave by Americans who paid three or four times more and in liquid.
Economically, the coronavirus crisis already affects one in five French employees. Some 3.6 million workers have been affected by an ERTE, in total about 3.6 million, which could cost the state about 11,000 million euros in 3 months.
Paula Rosas reports. Correspondent in Paris
A man walks through the Red Square in Moscow / EFE
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, who according to some Russian media outlets has not been allowed to approach President Vladimir Putin for days, said yesterday morning, quoted by Moscow radio Echo, that the head of state would continue his agenda. usual and would hold a meeting with direct presence of members of the Government. This despite the fact that it was learned on Tuesday that Denís Protsenko, director of the main Russian health center for the fight against coronavirus, the hospital on the Moscow periphery of Kommunarka, had tested positive for COVID-19. Protsenko met Putin in Kommunarka on March 24.
Yesterday, however, a few hours after reporting on the president’s plans, Peskov rectified saying the opposite, announcing that the planned meeting with the ministers would not be done physically but by videoconference. And so Putin carried it out from his residence on the outskirts of Moscow in Novo-Ogariovo. “The president prefers these days to telework everything … we take all precautionary measures,” said the Kremlin spokesman.
However, yesterday, before Putin did, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin did meet with his Cabinet and physically. Some ministers came with a mask, although most, including Mishustin himself, were not wearing it. Today, Thursday, Mishustin did meet with the Executive by videoconference.
Peskov also clarified that “all those who were with the president in Kommunarka are being subjected to coronavirus tests daily”, that is, the spokesman himself, the mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobianin, the deputy prime minister, Tatiana Golikova, the minister of Health , Mikhail Murashko, and the head of the Rospotrebnadzor supervisory body, Anna Popova. Peskov already reported Tuesday that the COVID-19 tests carried out on Putin are “normal.”
But it is a fact that the top Russian leader has confined himself to his residence and that, in addition to making his remote working contacts, he has suspended his public meetings. And the threat to the health of Putin, who is 67 years old, stems not only from the consequences of his visit to Kommunarka and his meeting with the director of the center, but also from Peskov, who spent a month last month in a birthday party with several infected and hospitalized, including the singer Léshenko, and Kristina Bitáyeva, an official of the Presidential Administration who tested positive for the coronavirus after returning from the United States and Canada via Paris.
In his virtual meeting yesterday with the ministers, the Russian prime minister acknowledged that the situation in Russia with the coronavirus “is getting worse”, despite the fact that the numbers of infected and dead are still very far from those of countries like Italy, United States, Spain or France. Putin signed the decrees approved by the Russian Parliament to contain the pandemic, including one that empowers the government to declare a state of emergency, a prerogative that until now was exclusively held by the president. Peskov has assured that the Russian president plans to address the Nation again today.
Currently, almost two thirds of the regions of Russia have decreed the total confinement of the population, more than 100 million people. In the last 24 hours, 771 new cases of COVID-19 have been registered throughout the country, representing a rebound. Yesterday, when the increase in cases was 440, a small decrease was observed compared to Tuesday, which registered 500 new infected. The total number of people with coronavirus in Russia now rises to 3,548 and the death toll to 30. The number recovered from the disease stands at 235. In Moscow there have been 595 more cases and there are currently 2,475 infected and 19 dead. .
Rafael Mañueco reports. Correspondent in Moscow
Belgium
Belgium surpasses 1,000 deaths with coronavirus
Belgium has crossed the barrier of a thousand deaths with coronavirus. The crisis team confirmed on Thursday the death of 183 more people in the last twenty-four hours, which brings the death toll to 1,011 people, of which 93% were over 65 years old (40% were over 80) . Fatal figures in a context in which the number of infected continues to skyrocket. Today there is talk of 15,348 with a rise of 1,382 compared to Wednesday (912 positives have been detected in Flanders, 317 in Wallonia and 137 in the Brussels region). The result of the around 65,000 diagnostic tests that have been carried out since the outbreak of the crisis.
The most immediate objective of health officials is to avoid saturation of the Belgian system. “We must maintain current measures to make room in hospitals,” said the virologist Emmanuel André, who in the daily appearance has referred to the use of medications such as chloroquine (used for the treatment or prevention of malaria) that is ” integrated into our clinical study protocols ”but it is still unknown“ if it is completely effective or its possible side effects ”.
André, when asked by journalists, has also spoken about the use of masks in a generalized way. “They are useful, but not 100% effective” and “in no case” can they replace the current measures of confinement and social withdrawal, he remarked.
In the last 24 hours, 584 patients with COVID-19 have been hospitalized and 363 have been discharged, bringing the number of recoveries to 2,459 since March 15. Today the system would have occupied 52% of the intensive care beds.
The month of March has ended as largest audience in television history since they are measured (1992), according to the latest reports by Barlovento Comunicación and Geca, based on data from Kantar Media. At a time when television audiences tend to decline progressively, the alarm state and confinement to stop the expansion of the coronavirus by Spain they have motivated television consumption to skyrocket to almost 40%. In this way, the average audience has increased by more than 1.7 million viewers, and has exceeded by twelve minutes the previous record of minutes per viewer, set in February 2013 (272 minutes). Or what is the same, the 4 hours and 45 minutes on average Per person have swept March 2019 records for up to 51 minutes. What has not changed is that Telecinco has been leader for the nineteenth consecutive month (14.3%), followed by Antena 3 (11.6%), but the two channels that have experienced the most increase have been La Sexta, with a rise of 1.6 points (8.3%), and La 1 , which with 1 point has managed to overcome the double-digit barrier (10.1%).
In addition, the news programs of the four most viewed channels have broken their records of the season, being the ‘Noticias 20H’ (La Sexta) from March 14 the most watched broadcast, with 3,982,000 viewers and a large 19.1% share of the screen, ahead of the best day ‘Survivors’, which brought together in Telecinco 3,834,000 viewers (18.9%). For the third consecutive month, the Antena 3 news programs have led the average of the two editions from Monday to Sunday. This occurs mainly because the informative that Sandra Golpe leads on the desktop from Monday to Friday, the best in percentage of audience of the editions of all the networks, with a 17.8% share of the screen, and 2,974,000 viewers, is more than two points ahead of its immediate pursuer.
However, they have been TVE newscasts that have grown the most in number of viewers. The ‘Newscasts’ averaged 2,689,000 viewers in March and a 15.4% share, which is their best figure since February 2012. And also, they have established themselves as the leaders of the two bands of the weekend. In this journey, only ‘Survivors’ (Telecinco and Cuatro), ‘El Hormiguero 3.0: Stay at home’ and ‘Your face sounds to me’ (both from Antena 3) are the only non-informative broadcasts that have crept in among the 25 schedules more views. A list in which, curiously, no fiction has entered. To find the first of the ‘ranking’, one would have to go back to March 15, when Antena 3 aired the movie ‘Somewhere in the valley’, which was followed by 2,533,000 viewers and had a 14.4% share of the screen .
For its part, in the DTT has highlighted the irruption of channel Thirteen, which with its cinema and religious programming monopolizes the top 25 of the month with up to 20 broadcasts.
