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19.11.2019 10:56
Zanu PF MP for Chiredzi West, Farai Musikavanhu told the party’s supporters that no MDC people would be given the food which had been donated by the international community. He claimed the food was from President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
Post published in: Featured
Air Zimbabwe wants to fly to Europe next year. Photo: Bob Adams via Wikimedia
Speaking at the Aviation Stakeholders Breakfast Meeting in Harare last week, Air Zimbabwe’s acting CEO was positive about the future of the airline. Mr Joseph Makonise spoke out at the meeting about their plans for Air Zimbabwe over the coming year. Bulawayo 24 reports that Mr Makonise said,
“We went through the national audit, we lost the IASA certification in 2016. We went for re-examination. We have completed this and very soon we should be getting our results before the end of the year. Once we get that approval then we are certain to start operations in Europe. We are looking at the last quarter of 2020.
Air Zimbabwe has been banned from Europe since 2017. In May that year, the European Commission added it to the list of airlines barred from operating in the European Union, stating that this was “due to unaddressed safety deficiencies that were detected by the European Safety Agency”.
The last time Air Zimbabwe flew to Europe was in 2012, when it discontinued its flights to London. This followed the seizure of one of its Boeing planes at Gatwick over an unpaid debt.
Air Zimbabwe has a colorful history, to say the least. From allegations of corruption and mismanagement to a decade of loss-making operations, Air Zim has served up something of an African soap opera to those keeping an eye on it.
Despite reports that the airline is in the process of acquiring two Boeing 777s from Malaysia Airlines, financially the airline is still in a state. Just last month it was banned from South African airports over an unpaid debt, although that situation does seem to have resolved itself now.
Air Zimbabwe has a colorful history. Photo: Georgio via Wikimedia
More recently, there have been allegations of further issues, including some saying that the airline was supplying handwritten boarding passes. However, the airline called this out as fake news, saying a ground handling company produces boarding passes electronically at all times.
**The JNB/VFA route has not been re-introduced yet thus not on current schedule. An official announcement will be made once route is operational.
** The flight number cited does not exist on our UM flight codes for the mentioned JNB/VFA route.
**Boarding passes are produced electronically by a Ground Handling company at the respective airport and NOT by @FlyAirZimbabwe.
This fake message should thus be totally disregarded.
DM for any further inquiries.
Right now, the airline is limping along with not much to be happy for. Of the three planes it has, Nehandra Radio reports that it is flying just one. The other two are grounded over regulatory issues. The report quotes Mr Makonise as saying that,
“We have got one aircraft, you can start the engine, everything is working perfectly, but because this is a heavily-regulated industry we have to comply.
“We were supposed to do certain things to the aircraft and we have not done it and we parked it. We cannot fly it, we have to comply. We ran short of equipment. We have got equipment lying idle in South Africa. We are using one plane only, a very inappropriate aircraft.
“We could not stop our operations completely, being the only airline in the country. We believe in accordance to our six-year strategic plan if we get the right equipment, then we should be able to spruce up our operations. We took delivery of an Embraer on 30 April. It has not flown, we are also affected by sanctions, there is a know your customer approval. Those are issues beyond our control.”
Air Zimbabwe is operating only one plane right now. Photo: Bob Adams via Wikimedia
The airline is currently under ‘reconstruction’, having had its $392m of debt ring-fenced. This means the airline can begin to rebuild its reputation, routes and network without needing to service this debt, at least for the time being. However, with only one plane in action and multiple regulatory hurdles to overcome, there’s a long way to go before we’ll be seeing Air Zim at European airports.
Post published in: Business
A hospital guard directed her to a tiny apartment in the poor suburb of Mbare nearby. The midwife: a grandmother with no formal training and claiming to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
Thirteen hours later, Kanyoza gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
“It was a miracle,” she told The Associated Press with a beaming smile. “I feared for the worst. I didn’t know what to do after finding the hospital closed.”
Mothers hold their babies delivered in a tiny apartment in the poor suburb of Mbare in Harare, Zimbabwe, Saturday, Nov. 16, 2019, with the help of 72-year old grandmother Esther Zinyoro Gwena. Grandmother Esther Zinyoro Gwena claims to be guided by the holy spirit and has become a local hero, as the country’s economic crisis forces closure of medical facilities, and mothers-to-be seek out untrained birth attendants.(AP Photo/Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi)
Her baby was one of dozens delivered in the past week alone with the help of 72-year-old Esther Zinyoro Gwena. She has become a local hero as the southern African country’s worst economic crisis in more than a decade is forcing desperate women to seek out traditional birth attendants who often deliver babies using their bare hands with no sterilization or post-natal care.
Some worried Zimbabweans say Gwena’s work only highlights the collapse of a health sector once regarded as one of the best in Africa. Doctors have been on strike for more than two months, seeking better pay than the roughly $100 they receive a month, and nurses and midwives in Harare walked off the job two weeks ago.
Since then, Gwena said, she has delivered more than 100 babies and no mothers have died. She doesn’t charge for her services and helping stranded pregnant women is her concern.
“I never trained as a midwife. I started by befriending pregnant women at the church and then eight years ago I just started delivering babies. It is the holy spirit,” she said.
“I have had no rest since the nurses’ strike started. The work is becoming too much for one person. I am even losing weight,” Gwena said.
She said she has been delivering up to 20 babies a day in her two-room apartment.
When the AP visited on Saturday, four pregnant women writhed in pain while sitting on blankets on the floor in the tiny living room-turned-maternity ward.
The bedroom is now the “recovery room” where several women holding newborn babies huddled on Gwena’s small bed.
“They need the bed more,” she said. “I rarely get time to sleep, they are always coming in … in the middle of the night.”
Neighbors, relatives of the pregnant women and some of Gwena’s children, who help clean the blood, fetch water from a nearby well and cook, sat on a bench. Others stood in the packed room.
“Make way, another one is coming,” one woman shouted. A heavily pregnant young woman walked in carrying a small plastic bucket, blanket and bag.
Less than two hours later, the number of pregnant women had swelled to 10, their bags piled in a corner. More stood in line in the hallway outside.
“I was apprehensive,” said Grace Musariri, one of the women in line. “But I have already seen four women leaving with their babies in the few hours I was here. The fear is gone.”
The makeshift maternity ward contained little but boxes of cotton and gloves donated by President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s wife, Auxillia, who visited on Friday after Gwena’s story made headlines in Zimbabwe’s state media.
Before her visit “I used my bare hands,” Gwena said. She asks women to bring their own razor blades, cord clamps and other items.
“My biggest challenges are space, water and protective clothing. I need help, and fast,” she told a team of senior health officials who visited on Saturday.
She told them she had delivered 15 babies overnight and seven more before lunchtime.
Ricky “Rikki” Nathanson (Washington Blade photo by Michael K. Lavers)
Police in the Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo in January 2014 arrested Ricky “Rikki” Nathanson after she used a women’s restroom in a hotel.
Nathanson — who is the founder of Trans Research, Education, Advocacy and Training (TREAT), a trans advocacy group in Zimbabwe — told the Washington Blade earlier this year she was kept in jail for three days. The Southern Africa Litigation Center, a South Africa-based group that supported Nathanson during her case, in a press release said she “was forced to undergo invasive and humiliating medical/physical examination (sic) and asked to remove her clothes in front of five male police officers in order to ‘verify her gender’” while in custody.
Nathanson in August 2014 filed a lawsuit against Zimbabwe’s Home Affairs minister, the commissioner of the Zimbabwe Republic Police, the assistant commissioner of the Bulawayo Central Police Station and the leader of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party’s Youth League who instigated her arrest.
A three-day hearing in Nathanson’s lawsuit took place in the Bulawayo High Court in 2017. The judge who ruled in Nathanson’s favor awarded her $400,000 in damages for what the Southern Africa Litigation Center, described as “unlawful arrest, malicious prosecution and emotional distress.”
A Zimbabwean law firm represented Nathanson in court.
OutRight Action International, a global LGBTQ advocacy group, in a press release notes Nathanson’s case is the first time Zimbabwe’s “judiciary has recognized that gender does not have to be either male or female.”
“I was really, really, really, really excited and really happy,” Nathanson on Saturday told the Blade during an interview at the LGBTQ Victory Fund’s annual International LGBTQ Leaders Conference that took place at the JW Marriott Hotel in downtown D.C. “I was elated.”
The judge ruled in Nathanson’s favor less than a year after the U.S. granted her asylum because of persecution she suffered in Zimbabwe.
Nathanson, who now lives in Rockville, Md., is the assistant to the chief of staff at Casa Ruby. OutRight Action International in September announced Nathanson had been named to its board of directors.
“There is hope,” said Nathanson when the Blade asked her about the impact of her case. “If you’re resilient and you stand up for what is right and you don’t give up and you are like a pit bull with your teeth stuck in something and you don’t ever let go, something gives and at the end you win.”
Nathanson added her case is “about the judgment and the principle” and not the financial settlement.
“I now know that I’ve changed the lives of millions and millions of other people by taking this one step,” she said.
Post published in: Featured
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According to the Princeton Review’s 2020 law school rankings, which law school has the best law school professors?
Hint: The ranking is based upon student ratings of their professors’ teaching abilities and their accessibility outside the classroom.
See the answer on the next page.
“What do in-house lawyers want?” It is the question that repeatedly comes up when I speak to law firms, legal providers, and vendor representatives.
One of the common answer to this seemingly existential question often boils down to this: “I would like my providers to know my business.” This often comes with an explanation: “I need solutions to business problems, not just legal problems because in a company every problem is a business problem.”
This discussion makes sense logically. In fact, many providers politely nod their heads in agreement when this advice is dispensed. But, practically speaking, what does “I would like my providers to know my business” mean? I went to the hosts of the Legal Ops Rising podcast to see what they’re hearing in the industry.
Kate White and Andy Peterson of Design Build Legal help law firms design and build client-centered solutions (often involving people/process/technology). They also work with in-house counsel to get more value from their outside firms.
In many ways, Andy and Kate are like relationship therapists. They teach law firms how to have new kinds of conversations with clients to develop empathy. They also help in-house lawyers develop the language needed to articulate their needs to law firms. Here’s what they suggest you do to truly understand your clients’ businesses.
Engage with Legal Operations
“Many legal departments now have a legal operations team, focused on managing the department’s finances, bringing on new technology, creating efficiencies, and managing vendor relationships,” Kate observes. “An established legal operations professional is looking at how the legal department is structured, how the legal team can streamline processes, and how they can use data to measure their own performance and that of their providers.”
“And when your client puts someone in a legal operations role for the first time,” Andy adds, “it’s a big neon sign saying that they’re starting to think differently about their departments. It opens up a tremendous opportunity for your firm to play both offense and defense. Reach out to your contacts and set up a meeting. If you’ve got operations folks on your side, bring them. On defense, you can show that you appreciate the role of legal operations people inside of legal departments and that you want to work proactively with them.”
“But on offense, you may be able to partner with and support the legal ops person in achieving early successes,” he continues. “You may even be able to help them shape their role somewhat. That could be huge for your firm down the line when the client decides to do a convergence. Hopefully, your firm has become a trusted advisor to the legal ops function and not just another one of the hundred firms submitting RFP responses.”
Ask Different Questions
“So many of the in-house counsel and legal ops professionals we speak with are eager to work directly with business professionals on the law firm side, but they say that many of the law firms serving them are still not bringing those folks to the table,” says Kate.
As opposed to the classic “Client Service” or “Client Feedback” interviews — which tend to be about the firm, the work it’s doing, and the matters it is handling, Kate and Andy facilitate what they call “Client Insights Interviews.”
“A Client Insights Interview isn’t about the law firm at all,” Andy explains. “It’s about understanding the business challenges and operational pain points of the legal department. When do they feel like they are truly being supported by outside counsel? What are the changing priorities, new products and services on the business side that the department is supporting? Is the team understaffed? Is the department constantly recreating the wheel? These conversations, on their own, will give the law firm insight into the client’s business.”
Find Something to Partner On
The other thing a Client Insights Interview will often do is help the firm to support the client in new and different ways. “We have had firms surface opportunities to partner with clients on everything from redesigning how contracts are developed and managed to share best practices across outside providers in service of the client, to unlocking and leveraging data to identify and mitigate risk,” Kate explains. “These solutions make your firm ‘stickier,’ sure, but they also have opened up new revenue streams for firms.”
Sometimes, opportunities are unexpected. “We facilitated one of these a while back where in-house counsel said his biggest pain point was a move to Office 365 — the company was really struggling to get through it,” Andy recalls. “Coincidentally, the law firm had recently made the same transition, and because we had asked these different questions, the firm took the opportunity to send a couple of its IT people over to the client for a day, to discuss the technical and change management approach that had worked at the firm. Needless to say, the client never expected its law firm to help in that manner.”
So what do in-house lawyers want? Law firms that empathize with them, that ask the right questions, and that can see past discrete legal work and into broader ways of partnering with and supporting them. You can find out more about this and numerous other legal operations topics by listening to Legal Ops Rising, hosted by Kate and Andy.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. Olga founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. Olga also co-founded SunLaw, an organization dedicated to preparing women in-house attorneys to become general counsels and legal leaders, and WISE to help female law firm partners become rainmakers. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can email Olga at olga@olgamack.com or follow her on Twitter @olgavmack.
Have you heard the blessed news? There is peace in our time, between the activist hedge funds and their targets. Appeasement works, even on Paul Singer.
A new playbook is emerging in the world of shareholder activism, one that calls for quick peace treaties enabling investors and the companies they target to sidestep costly, protracted battles…. The new setups are more like nonbinding handshake agreements….
Elliott Management Corp…., one of the most prolific and aggressive activists, plans to use them as a template in future campaigns, according to a person familiar with the matter.
This is because activist campaigns are expensive and bruising and, oh yea, decreasingly remunerative.
Activists, for their part, are grappling with subpar returns and eager for the increased flexibility and opportunity to tout a quick victory that the new arrangements afford.
Now, however, this new Era of Good Feelings faces its sternest test. It’s one thing to get poor, downtrodden John Paulson to wave the white flag. It’s quite another to tell a tanned and rested Carl Icahn he can’t have what he wants. And Carl Icahn wants HP and Xerox to get together in some way, shape or form. HP—which has a market cap roughly four times that of Xerox—is ruling the most improbable of those forms, namely the smaller and shrinking company swallowing the larger. But, in a nod to these more collaborative times, says it remains “open to exploring” some way of these two becoming one. But it sure doesn’t sound as enthusiastic about it as Icahn.
There are “fundamental questions that need to be addressed,” Chief Executive Officer Enrique Lores and Chairman Chip Bergh wrote in a letter to Xerox CEO John Visentin. They cited Xerox’s revenue decline since June 2018, “which raises significant questions for us regarding the trajectory of your business and future prospects.”
HP Rejects Xerox Offer as Too Low While Staying Open to Deal [Bloomberg]
Peace Breaks Out Among Activists and Their Prey [WSJ]
Paulson gives up opposition to reduced Callon-Carrizo deal [Reuters]
(Image via Getty)
Predictive coding is a technology that is frequently suggested as a way to empower attorneys to focus their time on electronically stored information (“ESI”) that is relevant to the claims and defenses of their case, from the investigation stage of a lawsuit to responding to discovery requests. What is sometimes mysterious to those receiving these suggestions, however, is how predictive coding actually works or how it can be used effectively in a case.
What if there were something out there to help empower lawyers to meet their discovery obligations while saving time and money? Everlaw is proud to present an overview of predictive coding along with strategies on how you can use it during litigation.
Click here to download the white paper to learn more about how you can use predictive coding to your advantage.
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