Category: News Feeds

HARARE, Zimbabwe 

As the World TB Day commemorated on March 24 every year kicks in, many children like Tinago and Thembi Gwenzi, have the disease to contend with.

In one room of their house in the capital Harare, Tinago Gwenzi coughs uncontrollably. His sister, Thembi Gwenzi in the next room is in even worse condition, coughing and spitting blood – her eyes welling up with tears.

Their parents died of TB four years ago and they are under the care of their aunt who moved in to stay with them.

Both parents had toiled for years as panners at a gold mine in the outskirts of Harare where they made the little money they needed to support their family.

Later on, the couple contracted TB, a common disease across the mining areas in Zimbabwe.

In this Southern African country, TB continues to be the leading cause of death among people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

With no choice and no means to survive even as they lived with their aunt at home, the siblings went down to the neighboring mines where they panned for gold, and like their parents, contracted the disease.

“They both have TB; I can tell you they are better now; they were worse two months ago. People think they have AIDS. That’s not the case at all,” Miriam Chaota, the aunt, told Anadolu Agency.

– Difficult diagnosis

Four years ago, Zimbabwe’s Health Ministry launched a project Catalyzing Pediatric TB, to scale up the diagnosis and treatment of the disease among children.

However, to many health workers like Bhekimpilo Sibanda, a laboratory technician at a top private hospital in Harare, children remain the country’s underreported victims of TB.

“Children even as they may show signs of having TB, here in Zimbabwe, it’s difficult to diagnose them of the disease,” Sibanda told Anadolu Agency.

Of Zimbabwe’s approximately 16 million people, 48% are children, according to official figures.

The Health Ministry says some 20% of those infected with TB are children.

Their aunt, now their ultimate guardian, has pinned the blame for the marauding TB on Zimbabwe’s defunct public healthcare system.

“If one gets admitted in hospital with TB, that person is sure to die even earlier because there is no medicine nor proper care given to people with the disease, worse still for children,” said the aunt.

TB remains the world’s deadliest infectious killer, with over 4,000 people losing their lives daily to the pandemic while 30,000 people fall ill with the disease, according to World Health Organization (WHO).

Compounding Zimbabwe’s war against TB in children, is inflation hovering above 300%, according to the International Monetary Fund last year.

Doctors and nurses in the country have since last year been downing tools every now and then, demanding improved wages to match with the country’s spiralling inflation.

In 2016, according to WHO, an estimated one million children below 15 years were infected with TB globally, but only 434,044 cases were reported, with over 253,000 children dying annually from the disease.

Zimbabwe has so far confirmed two cases of Covid-19, with one having already succumbed to the virus.

Stanbic Bank, a unit of South Africa’s Standard Bank, was one of the first to announce preventive measures, telling customers on Monday that paper-based transactions would no longer be accepted.

“In the interest of public health, and with immediate effect, please be advised that we will only be accepting payments via Business Online.

“All other bank instructions and letters must be sent on email and accompanied by the attached email indemnity form, which must be completed and signed by the authorised signatories,” read a notice send to customers by the Bank.

Cabs, a subsidiary of Old Mutual Zimbabwe, announced similar measures, telling its customers that hard copy instructions would not be accepted until further notice.

“Due to the Covid-19 outbreak we shall not be accepting hard copy instructions, all communications and instructions are to be sent as soft copies going forward. We will advise once it becomes safe for us to accept hard copies,” read a note from Cabs.

Other banks are taking precautions further, with First Capital Bank (FCB), formerly Barclays Bank, temporarily closing at least four branches.

“To protect Clients & Staff from spread of Covid-19, we are reducing our Branch Network by temporarily closing Belmont,B/ Dale, Harare St, First St from 24/03/20,” read a note from FCB.

Stanbic also temporarily shut down its Victoria Falls and Hwange Branches, while Nedbank has announced the closure of six of its branches.

Zimbabwe’s first case of Covid-19 was recorded in the resort town of Victoria Falls, in the north-west of the country.

Head Corporate Affairs at Stanbic Bank, Palmer Mugavha, said the decision was testament to the fact that the bank would put human life “ahead of any potential to earn profit”.

President Mnangagwa has also announced measures to combat the pandemic, including the closure of bars and other entertainment establishments.

Post published in: Business

Zimbabwe’s second coronavirus patient, a 30-year-old man, has died in the capital Harare, the government said on Monday, as borders were closed to curb the spread of infection.

Health Minister Obadiah Moyo “has confirmed the death of Zororo Makamba, who was the second person to test positive for COVID-19 in Zimbabwe,” his office said.

Makamba, a broadcaster and son of a business tycoon and politician, was confirmed positive with the virus on Saturday.

He had travelled to New York late last month and returned home on March 9, transiting through Johannesburg in neighbouring South Africa.

The government said he began showing mild flu-like symptoms on March 12 that progressively worsened. He consulted a doctor and was instructed to self-quarantine.

On Friday the country reported its first coronavirus case, a 38-year-old man who returned from Britain to his home in the tourist resort town of Victoria Falls.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa announced the closure of borders to human traffic on Monday as part of a new raft of measures to step up the country’s response to a pandemic that has hit more than 190 countries worldwide.

“We have decided to ban all non-essential traffic and travel, both inbound and outbound, except for the movement of cargo,” Mnangagwa said in a televised address to the nation.

He added that public gatherings of more than 50 people would be prohibited and encouraged residents to avoid in-country travel.

“Government has put a blanket ban on gatherings around nightclubs, bars, beer halls, swimming pools, gymnasiums and sporting activities until further notice,” Mnangagwa said.

Zimbabwe’s government previously ordered schools closed and cancelled public and sporting events.

It has also prohibited government officials from travelling outside the country, although Mnangagwa flew to Windhoek at the weekend to attend the inauguration of his Namibian counterpart Hage Geingob.

Zimbabwe’s public health system has been suffering for years from a lack of equipment and drugs and there are fears it will struggle to cope with the outbreak.

“The system… is overstretched and inadequate to deal with a coronavirus epidemic,” Norman Matara, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights, said at the weekend.

* A federal judge has denied Michael Cohen’s request to be released from prison early, even though his lawyers argued that Cohen risks exposure to COVID-19 if he continues to be confined. Well, it was worth a try. [Yahoo News]

* A Department of Justice lawyer has lost a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, which reported that the attorney made unwelcome advances against an intern. [New York Daily News]

* Attorneys for the Houston Astros are fighting fans who are suing the franchise over a sign-stealing controversy. Shouldn’t the fans be happy the team is doing everything it can to succeed? [Yahoo News]

* A Pennsylvania attorney is accused of running a $2.7 Million Ponzi scheme. [ABC News]

* The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that North Carolina cannot be sued because it copied videos of the salvage operation of a ship once sailed by Blackbeard. Guess the Supreme Court ruled that one kind of “piracy” is okay… [NPR]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

Despite a major Biglaw merger in 2018, what firm saw a dip of 3.4 percent in revenue to $869.1 million for 2019?

Hint: Firm leadership said the decline was not unexpected and that firm was focused on more positive matrices, including that in the 21 months since the merger became official, there was a 5 percent increase in combined profits over 2018, and the firm finished 2019 with a positive cash balance of $86 million.

See the answer on the next page.

I’m always looking at new technology because, well, that’s part of what I do. Whether it’s for myself, someone else, or for the benefit of the legal community, when I see new technology that catches my attention, I like to share it because I think it’s part of the responsibility that comes with having a platform to communicate to the legal operations community.

So, last week I spent some time talking with Ian Campbell, president and CEO of iCONECT. I’ve mentioned the iCONECT platform here before in a different context. But now, fresh off a cash infusion, Campbell’s team has ramped up development. They recently released version 10 and at a time when software and service providers are moving to the cloud, iCONECT has chosen to let the customer decide where to implement their platform. iCONECT v10 is available both in the cloud through a network of vendors or behind the firewall for in-house deployment.

I’ve used the iCONECT platform in the past. I even tried to get certified in it. Campbell showed me the platform himself, touting that beyond the faster HTML5 interface are new optimizations and enhancements below the waterline too. I thought it may be useful to review some of the new features.

First is iCONECT’s new drag-and-drop ingestion/processing, called Self Serve. It enables users to import native files by simply dropping the files or pasting a link into the platform, and the embedded processing engine goes to work converting them, extracting the metadata and text. Self Serve also works really well with incoming productions from LAW, Ipro, and Relativity.

Next, and really useful for those with documents sets containing lots of personally identifiable information (PII), is a module iCONECT is calling COVER. This is a game changer, in my view. COVER allows for the mass-redaction of PII on a scale I haven’t seen yet. What’s cool is that users can set up templates for different jurisdictions of PII, allowing license, social security, or phone numbers from multiple countries to be “covered.” The module is powered by Ayfie’s entity identification engine, and it’s possible to identify PII on ingestion. You can tag and folder the documents to keep them organized, and prior to production users can redact all that PII in one fell swoop. It also works with word lists, allowing, for example, a pharma company to mass-redact proprietary chemical combinations in documents. Very cool!

Also new to the iCONECT platform is Oversight, a Sentio-powered automated quality-control feature used during manual document review. In much the same way that banks and credit card companies are able to identify unusual purchase activity that might trigger a fraud alert, iCONECT’s Oversight tracks how document reviewers code documents, and it quickly and automatically identifies anomalies in coding that appear to be inconsistent based on previous coding activity and sets them aside for further review. It’s a great way to have “oversight” into review quality.

Version 10 also introduces continuous active learning (CAL) in the iCONECT platform. Here, users index the text of documents, run some keywords or feed some example documents, and the platform starts feeding the most relevant documents to review with subsecond response time.

Beyond iCONECT’s unique ability to manage video and audio files without third-party tools or plug-ins is their cool new table and thumbnail feature in the document list which enables users to click on a thumbnail rendering of a file to enlarge it. A great way to quickly find that document “with the blue diagram on it.” A huge timesaver.

Their ‘SelfServe’ ingestion/processing component is just one of the template-driven optimizations for project managers. Tag panels, field structures, security profiles, and productions can all be created, then saved as a template allowing for granular and complex workflows to be saved as nothing more than a one-click template for non-PM users.

iCONECT has always been a company that not only meets market need, they have a way of looking over the horizon helping law firms, vendors, and corporations make pragmatic decisions on both their technology direction and on what software review platform they should partner with for the longer term.

Hats off to Ian and the iCONECT development team for again introducing an iCONECT version that sets a new bar.

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Mike Quartararo is the President of the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists (ACEDS), a professional member association providing training and certification in e-discovery. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery and a consultant providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@aceds.org. Follow him on Twitter @mikequartararo.

Sorry to Granny and the other 28 million Americans age 65 and older, but if it’s you or the economy, lots of Republicans are going with the GDP. Last night, Texas’s Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick captured the gestalt, telling Fox’s Tucker Carlson that he’s “all in” only grandparents sacrificing themselves to preserve the American economy for the “grandchildren, that [] we all care about and [] we love more than anything.”

“No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’” Patrick explained, as he urged Americans to throw in the towel and cut out that sissy social distancing. “If that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

Indeed, it’s entirely credible that “no one reached out” to ask Patrick if he’d like to throw himself on the pyre, because that is f*cking crazy.

Patrick can invoke “lots of grandparents out there in this country like me” who “want to live smart and see through this, but I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed.” But here on Planet Earth, those grandparents have consistently refused to raise the minimum wage, woefully underfunded public education, enjoyed the benefits of Medicare while fighting tooth and nail against single-payer healthcare, and consistently derided their own millennial and Gen-Z grandchildren as lazy and entitled. So the idea that those same seniors would now line up to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect them frankly beggars belief.

“My message is that let’s get back to work. Let’s get back to living.” Patrick continued. “Let’s be smart about it. And those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country. Don’t do that. Don’t ruin this great America.”

REALLY? Exactly how will “those of us who are 70 plus … take care of ourselves?” Because a fatality rate of 2 percent in the 330 million person population means 6.6 million American dead. And while we’re all bloody sick of being trapped in the house homeschooling our kids, the non-sociopathic portion of the country isn’t ready to watch our parents drown in their own lung secretions in exchange for getting back to “normal.”

And of course, it wouldn’t be just a geriatric holocaust. ATL’s own David Lat is 44 years old, fighting for his life on a ventilator. Yesterday in New York City, 36-year-old high school principal Dezann Romain died of coronavirus. It’s not just those retirees, who aren’t even contributing to our all-important economy, who would die from Patrick’s Let ‘Er Rip scheme.

Under Patrick’s plan to buck up and save the economy, parents of medically fragile children would blithely go back to work, knowing that sacrificing their own kids is just the cost of protecting American businesses. You can’t buy a bottle of Purell for love or money, but, sure, we’re all just going to risk it with our kids’ health.

NFW, not even if Donald Trump tweets it out.

Tough luck, Meemaw! The president says we have to “protectively & lovingly” expose you to a highly contagious virus that will require an agonizing hospital stay at the cost of upwards of a million dollars and may well be fatal. And that’s not including the devastating impact of allowing the American medical system to become overwhelmed by simply allowing us all to become infected at once. Anyway, thanks for helping out with the grandkids, Bubbe!

Yeah, what he said.

Transcript: Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick Suggests Seniors Would Die to Save the Economy [Rev]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.