On Tuesday, MEPs will take a detailed look at the proposed Digital Green Certificate, the aim of which is to ensure the freedom of movement within the EU during the pandemic.
Commissioner for Justice, Mr Didier Reynders will present the proposal tabled on 17 March, which the Commission hopes to introduce for the start of Europe’s summer tourism season.
The Certificate would constitute proof that a person has been either vaccinated against COVID-19, received a negative test result, or already recovered from the disease. The document should be free, and available in digital or paper format.
Privacy of personal and medical data
In order to assess the data protection implications of the proposed Certificate, MEPs will also discuss on Tuesday with the European Data Protection Supervisor, Mr Wojciech Wiewiórowski, who will present the joint opinion by the EDPS and the European Data Protection Board on the Commission’s proposal.
During the 24 March’s plenary debate with Commission and Council representatives, a majority MEPs supported the swift creation of the Digital Green Certificate. However, in doing so many emphasised the need for strong data protection safeguards on personal and medical data. MEPs also warned that those who have not been vaccinated must not face discrimination.
When: Tuesday, 13 April, from 10.25 to 12.00.
Where: European Parliament in Brussels, Paul-Henri Spaak building (room 1A002) and per video-conference.
Plenary agreed on 25 March to deal with the legislative proposals on the Digital Green Certificate under the Parliament’s urgent procedure (Rule 163), which allows for faster parliamentary scrutiny of Commission’s proposals, while fully respecting the Parliament’s democratic prerogatives. MEPs are expected to adopt their mandate for negotiations with the Council, which may include amendments, in the next plenary session (26-29 April).
Scientology Volunteer Ministers have volunteered more than a million hours in South Africa in the past year, helping the people of the country survive the pandemic.
South Africa is in a level one lockdown with a general curfew from midnight to 4 a.m. But while the country sleeps, the volunteers dressed in bright yellow jackets over head-to-toe protective gear pull up to the next taxi stand carrying portable fogging equipment and get to work.
One by one, the men and women of the Scientology Volunteer Ministers sanitization team decontaminate every mini-bus taxi overnight so it is ready to provide transportation to the 69 percent of South African commuters who depend on them (including most of the country’s healthcare workers) when they emerge in the morning for their next day’s work.
In the year since President Ramaphosa announced the first lockdown, these volunteers have:
Clocked more than a million hours of service
Sanitized 1.1 million vehicles including taxis, ambulances, buses, fire trucks and police cars
Sanitized 63,000 buildings, including orphanages, senior residences, schools, shelters and other facilities housing essential services.
They swear by the protocols covered in the information on the Scientology How to Stay Well Prevention Resource Center. These booklets and videos are available free of charge in 21 languages including Zulo Sotha and Xhosa—the native languages of nearly half the nation. The volunteers have handed out more than a million copies of Stay Well booklets in the course of their work. And despite putting themselves on the front lines for more than a year, not a single volunteer has been taken ill.
To really appreciate the impact of their work, visit the new interactive timeline on the Scientology website and watch a series of videos, including one that documents the difference they have made to the transportation sector.
One taxi driver shares what it has meant to him to have them sanitize his cab every day and provide him with these booklets so he and his passengers can understand the protocols to keep themselves well. He credits their work with his still being alive. “Corona just passed me,” He says. “I’m still alive, man.”
Another taxi driver says, “they are trying to show us that we are very important…We need them and when they are here, we are happy. Our life is saved…I’m so healthy and good because I’ve got people who care for me.”
The Volunteer Ministers have also taken on sanitizing train stations and fleets of buses.
“In my entire career life,” says an executive in the railroad sector. “I have not actually been contacted by someone who wants to assist government.” Some 300,000 people travel through the Johannesburg station daily and although their crews disinfect and clean, they have not been able to decontaminate them. When she heard that the Scientology volunteers offered to do this, she thought “Is this for real?” And she rushed to the station to see for herself and was amazed to see them performing this service for free.
“You do things with discipline, with commitment and with precision,” says another transportation executive. “That’s what I’ve learned from each one of you. The passion. It will remain with me.”
For more information, visit the Scientology.org interactive timeline, 20/21: A Look Back & A Look Ahead, at scientology.org.za/20-21.
The first significant distinction of the newly constituted Supreme Court concerns the free exercise of religion from government control. The latest evidence is the 5-4 ruling late Friday slapping down another California pandemic diktat on the freedom of worship. The unsigned majority opinion in Tandon v. Newsom overturned an appellate-court ruling that upheld an order barring meetings of more than three families to worship in a private home.
“California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise, permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts, and indoor restaurants to bring together more than three households at a time,” says the majority opinion. Such disparate treatment between religious and secular activities is barred by the First Amendment, as the Court’s precedents have long held.
In a testy dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argues that the state rule passes muster because it bars both secular and religious meetings of more than three families in a private home. She was joined by liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer.
But the majority points out that the burden of “strict scrutiny” in such cases requires the state to prove that meetings in private homes are more dangerous for Covid transmission than those in public settings. Is there really a difference between the risks at a hair salon or theater than in a home? The state didn’t try to prove it in the case of the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit against the pandemic order.
The European Union is set to delay legal action against the United Kingdom for breaching the terms of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement in response to violent riots that have taken hold of Northern Ireland over the past two weeks.
The EU began legal proceedings against the UK last month after the Conservative Government unilaterally extended a grace period for goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain.
The temporary grace period was designed to give businesses time to adjust to the new customs border down the Irish Sea, but the EU claimed that the UK’s unilateral decision to extend the grace period violated the ” duty of good faith” set out in the Brexit Withdraw Agreement.
The EU was poised to push forward with legal action against the UK on April 15 but is now set to delay legal proceedings after violent riots erupted in Northern Ireland over an eight-day period.
Bloomberg reports that the EU is aware that a hardline approach may be inflammatory to unionists in Northern Ireland, who are reportedly rioting in protest to the Northern Ireland Protocol. Some sources claim that unionists believe that the Protocol has undermined Northern Ireland’s position in the United Kingdom.
The EU is now working on a joint plan with the United Kingdom to help restore calm in Northern Ireland after eight days of continuous rioting left at least 88 PSNI officers injured.
On Friday night, four young loyalist rioters hijacked a car before setting it alight and sending it in the direction of police officers gathered at a barricade.
Meanwhile, loyalist rioters in Belfast also hijacked and petrol-bombed a double-decker bus on Wednesday night in the most shocking night of violence in the eight-day period.
The PSNI said that the riots were Northern Ireland’s worst violence in several years and used water cannons for the first time in six years last Thursday after nationalist and unionist youths clashed in East Belfast.
The EU believes that delaying legal action against the UK buys time to resolve and defuse tensions in Northern Ireland and Bloomberg reports that the EU is determined not to deepen divisions with the UK.
Loyalist leaders called off several marches and protests planned for Saturday out of respect for Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who died at the age of 99 on Friday.
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Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey in March, 1933. That same month, Hitler attained absolute power in Germany. It was a time of dark foreboding for Jewish families like Roth’s. In his 1969 comic novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, the Jewish protagonist Alexander Portnoy attempts to free himself from his overbearing parents, mostly through sexual depravity: “My wang was all I really had that I could call my own.” He also describes leaving Jersey City for Newark to escape the anti-Semitism. “Just before the war, when the Bund was feeling its oats, the Nazis used to hold their picnics in a beer garden only blocks from our house.”
In this exhaustive – and slightly exhausting – official biography, Blake Bailey explains how Roth became a celebrity after Portnoy’s publication. “I tried going to the theater last night,” Roth wrote to his friend Jacquie Rogers, “and as I emerged from the taxi, a cry went up (yes, my dear, a real cry, as though I had tits and was Elizabeth Taylor): “Portnoy!” they screamed.” Roth was accused of writing an obscene and anti-Semitic tract. A strange argument when one considers his later novel, The Plot Against America, his friendship with Primo Levi, and his love of Kafka. These detractors, who failed to understand the nuances of fiction, had pursued Roth from the beginning, reacting furiously to his 1959 debut Goodbye, Columbus.
Before the publication of Portnoy, Roth took his parents out to dinner. He warned them they might get their share of the spotlight; he also reassured them they were his parents, not Portnoy’s. However, Roth’s working method was nearly always to recycle his life into fiction. He once told the Paris Review that “concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life”. Such was his acuity, every so often someone would read one of his novels, then berate him down the phone for stealing their lives.
Roth held the view that “literature is not a moral beauty contest”. This didn’t sit well with the more censorious types in society. He exercised tremendous perseverance to keep writing through the near-constant criticism (one reason he moved to rural Connecticut). Luckily, his ego was huge, a distinct advantage for a writer. Roth still had numerous mental breakdowns, although mostly as a result of his two marriages.
He spent years trying to fictionalise his first wife, Maggie Martinson, who died in a car crash in the late 1960s. The marriage caused Roth great emotional pain. But as a character, he knew Maggie was gold-dust. Their marriage was based on blackmail. Maggie paid a pregnant woman for some of her urine so she could present Roth with a positive pregnancy test. It worked. And the scene made its way into Roth’s 1974 novel My Life as a Man.
Roth’s second marriage, to the actress Claire Bloom, was just as disastrous. The two were fundamentally incompatible and Roth had one long, and numerous short, affairs. Bloom wrote a memoir about their marriage wherein Roth was depicted as a sexual predator; he was a misogynist. (Yet perhaps only a misogynist could invent someone like Mickey Sabbath, libidinous anti-hero of his 1995 novel, Sabbath’s Theatre?) In the 1950s, he dedicated himself to “bibliography by day, women by night”. He never gave that up. After a while, Bailey’s detailed analysis of Roth’s relationships becomes almost unnecessary. But it does highlight Roth’s final years, when he is almost overcome by the kind of loneliness that is the preserve of the promiscuous.
Bailey’s chronicling of Roth’s intellectual life is fascinating. It’s where the biographer of John Cheever and Richard Yates comes into his own. Roth’s work rate was astonishing: 10 or 12-hour days, six or seven days a week. He liked nothing more than spending days with the best copy-editor in town improving his sentences. He once spent nine hours reading The Counterlife to his editor, David Rieff. The pair were listening out for a sentence that was “slightly off” or “ambiguous”. Bailey gives us a sense of how Roth’s writing developed over the years; often this comes down to small details. When Roth was an undergraduate, one of his set texts was Albert Baugh’s Literary History of England, “an underlined copy of which Roth would forever keep on the library table of his Connecticut living room”.
In the 1970s, Roth championed dissident East European writers who were stuck behind the Iron Curtain, such as Milan Kundera. He helped covertly channel money to them and persuaded Penguin to publish a series of paperbacks – Writers from the Other Europe – so their work could be read in America. Roth’s generosity and open-heartedness extended beyond literature. He once gave his cleaner $75,000 so she could buy a flat in New York. In person, he was playful, independent-minded, secretive, rebarbative and witty – everything you might expect from the style and tone of his novels.
Despite claims otherwise, the subject matter of Roth’s novels is impressively diverse. Here are just a few: a novel about a deadly epidemic? Nemesis, about Polio in 1950s America. A novel about a right-wing demagogue who becomes president? The Plot Against America. A novel about public shaming? I Married a Communist. A novel about Death? Exit Ghost. A (good) novel about a novelist? The Ghost Writer. A novel about a man who is all vice and no virtue? Sabbath’s Theatre. A novel about the tumult of the 1960s? American Pastoral. And every one of them rewards rereading.
Throughout his work, Roth gave his home city a place in the literary imagination. As Saul Bellow is to Chicago, and Joyce is to Dublin, so Roth is to Newark. When he died in 2018, “the lion’s share of his estate went to the Newark Public Library”. This essentially saved the library from closure. Soon, Roth’s collection of 4,000 books, along with his writing desks and reading chairs, will be kept in a special reading room designated the Philip Roth Personal Library Collection. What better way to commemorate one of the great writers of the last century?
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France’s Europe Minister Clement Beaune said Sunday that Turkey had set a “trap” for European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen by forcing her to sit off to the side on a visit to Ankara, in a photo-op faux pas quickly dubbed ‘sofagate’.
The Turkish presidency’s failure to place a chair for von der Leyen alongside President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and EU Council chief Charles Michel was “an insult from Turkey,” Beaune said on RTL television.
“Turkey behaved badly,” he added, calling it “a Turkish problem done deliberately towards us… we shouldn’t be stirring up guilt among Europeans”.
Von der Leyen‘s being shunted aside prompted recriminations from European capitals to Turkey, but also within Brussels.
For its part, Ankara insists the incident was down to tangled wires between the Council and Commission, separate EU institutions.
Michel’s staff claimed they had no access to the meeting room before the Tuesday event, but also highlighted that the Council chief comes before the Commission president under strict international protocol.
“It was a kind of trap… between the one who laid it and the one who walked into it, I’d rather place the blame on the one who laid it,” France’s Beaune said.
Echoing Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who called Erdogan a “dictator” in response to the sofa incident, Beaune charged that there was “a real problem with lack of respect for democracy and an autocratic drift in Turkey” that should prompt Europeans to be “very firm with the Turks”.
Nevertheless, “in future, it would be good if there was one single presidency of the European executive,” Beaune acknowledged.
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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We’re going to take a few minutes now to note the departure of a very much loved colleague. Correspondent Tom Gjelten is retiring after 38 years with NPR. Over that time, he has been a foreign correspondent. He’s had the national security beat. He’s covered any number of domestic issues. And most recently, for the past six years, Tom has been NPR’s religion correspondent, and we asked him if he wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes with us to talk about that assignment. And he is with us now.
Tom Gjelten, welcome. Thank you so much for being with us.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: Well, thank you, Michel. And thank you for those kind words.
MARTIN: So very sad to see you go. I don’t really want to accept it. But I am excited to talk with you about your current beat because over these past six years, a lot has changed in America. And I just wondered what you’ve seen emerge in the area of religion.
GJELTEN: You know, Michel, a big story, maybe even the biggest story, has been all this controversy around sexuality and marriage. I mean, those were hot-button issues before, but they’ve really been elevated in recent years. I think one reason for that is that LGBTQ people have become more open about their sexual orientation, their gender identity. I think one result of that has been that LGBTQ people have faced increased hostility, especially from religious people.
MARTIN: And I understand that you have an example of that from your early reporting that you can play.
GJELTEN: Yeah. This was from five years ago, back in the spring of 2016. I did a story on the struggle in evangelical Christian circles to accept LGBTQ people. This was – this story was in Louisville, Ky. A main character in that story was a man named Nick Wilson. He’s a gay man in a Southern Baptist environment. Here’s a bit from that story.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
NICK WILSON: Two great-grandfathers were Southern Baptist preachers, and one grandfather was a pastor. Father’s a retired pastor. Brother’s a pastor. We were always in church.
GJELTEN: With lots of gospel music, Appalachian.
WILSON: (Singing) Tempted and tried, we’re oft made to wonder…
GJELTEN: Nick learned to play the piano by ear as a young boy. He accompanied the choir at his father’s churches. But Nick Wilson was called to preach in his own church. After college, he enrolled at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, but no congregation would ordain him. They all wanted a model family man, and Nick Wilson didn’t fit the bill.
WILSON: First off, I’m single. That’s a problem. They really want you to be married. But then if you throw in gay, then it’s over with.
GJELTEN: And I can tell you, Michel, that Nick did ultimately find a Baptist congregation that was welcoming of him. He’s now the organist there. But it was a real struggle.
MARTIN: Why do you think that this – the LGBTQ story took on such a prominence in the religion beat?
GJELTEN: I think because it brought out a fundamental conflict between civil rights and religious freedom. Conservative religious people feel they should be free to exercise their religious beliefs pertaining to sexuality and marriage. LGBTQ people and their advocates say that that religious freedom argument shouldn’t be used to justify discrimination. I can truthfully say, Michel, very few stories took as much of my attention over these years as that one.
MARTIN: And what about outside of religious circles? Did you feel a kind of impact there, ripple effects there?
GJELTEN: Yeah, because it really spoke to that connection between religion and politics, which has emerged in these years as a really important thing to explore – you know, a so-called faith vote. And there has been no better example of that than all the attention that’s been given to white evangelicals and their support for Donald Trump in recent years. I say there’s been more attention to this religion and politics connection in these last few years than there ever was previously.
MARTIN: Now, you know, this is the worst question. But I have to ask.
GJELTEN: (Laughter).
MARTIN: Do you have a favorite story?
GJELTEN: I have several favorite stories. You know, I chose this beat, Michel, because, you know, after doing all those other things that you mentioned, I saw it as a way to connect with people personally and see my country in a different light. These stories have been, for me, ways to humanize people. One of my favorites was a few years ago, when I profiled a group of young Muslims talking about what it was like to grow up Muslim in America. Here’s a bit of that story, focusing on one young woman.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GJELTEN: And then there’s Aqsa Mahmud, born in Pakistan, raised in Georgia. Some of her closest friends there were born-again, Jesus-believing Baptists for whom religious faith is to be respected.
AQSA MAHMOUD: I am so grateful to have been a Muslim growing up in the South. Only in the South could you say to your friend and be like, hey, you know what? I’ve got to pray. And they’d be, like, of course. Like, they talked about God in a very personal way. Like, their relationship with Jesus made me want to have a closer relationship with God. I’ll be honest.
GJELTEN: We have this stereotype of Southerners, evangelicals being intolerant. Here was a Muslim girl who actually felt more comfortable in the South because her friends there were more open talking about faith. It really challenged those stereotyped ideas.
MARTIN: Now a personal question, Tom. Do you think that this beat changed you in any way, either as a reporter or perhaps as a person?
GJELTEN: You know, Michel, I was actually raised in a devout Christian family. I’m familiar with that world. I feel comfortable talking to people about their faith. But for most of my time here at NPR, as you said, I’ve been focused on national security, international issues. And the truth is that I did fall away from my own faith tradition. I think during these last six years, I have become more attentive to people of faith, more respectful of all those people who take their faith and believe seriously more than I was before. I think that has been, for me, an important change.
MARTIN: Well, your work certainly lives on. The legacy that you leave as a journalist, as a colleague, as a friend certainly lives on.
That was NPR’s Tom Gjelten, who has just retired as our religion correspondent after 38 years with the network. Tom, thank you so much for everything.
GJELTEN: And thank you, Michel, for being such a great colleague.
(SOUNDBITE OF SWITCH BLADE SONG, “NO PROBLEMZ”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
Foreign Minister Dinesh Gunawardena has met the Colombo-based senior diplomatic representation of the European Union (EU) on Friday, at the Foreign Ministry, and apprised them on political and economic developments in Sri Lanka.
The Minister had updated the envoys of ongoing processes, including the constitutional reform process, the strengthening of democratic institutions, and on progress related to the implementation of reconciliation mechanisms, among other issues.
The meeting was interactive and also entailed a discussion on EU-Sri Lanka cooperation, including trade, investment and development cooperation, and plans underway to convene the scheduled Sri Lanka-EU Joint Commission Sub-committees following the convening of the 23rd Meeting of the Sri Lanka-EU Joint Commission in January 2021, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated.
Measures in place for the revival of tourism in Sri Lanka in the COVID-19/post-COVID -19 context, and the Government of Sri Lanka health protocols related to quarantine had also been discussed.
The Ambassador of France Eric Lavertu; the Ambassador Italy Rita Mannella, the Chargé d’Affaires of Romania Ambassador Victor Chiujdea; as well as the Deputy Heads of Mission of Germany, the Netherlands and the EU had participated in the meeting.
9(MDA3OTgyNDI4MDEzMTM0MjQzMTZlNDI0Mg004)&w=696&resize=696,0&ssl=1 "Retiring NPR Correspondent Looks At How Religion Beat Has Changed")
