Greece, Microsoft announce 1-bn-euro cloud investment

Greece and Microsoft on Monday announced an investment deal worth up to a billion euros ($1.2 billion) to build cloud storage infrastructure in the country.

The announcement comes as Greece’s pro-business government plans to gradually shift the country’s notoriously bureaucratic civil service online.

“We are bringing data centres to Greece. We’re going to create a new region that will include Greece as well as (neighbouring countries),” Microsoft president Brad Smith told the project launch in Athens.

“This is a new opportunity for every small business in Greece… with cloud services, you pay for what you use, and you pay only when you use it,” said Smith, adding companies would no longer need to invest in buying and maintaining servers.

The project foresees three data centres in the greater Athens area. No timeframe was given Monday.

Microsoft currently has data centres in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Ireland, and is building more in Poland, Italy and Spain.

The Microsoft agreement also envisages training programmes for 100,000 Greeks, officials said.

Microsoft is also designing an augmented reality website promoting Ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games, to be released in 2021.

Through a cellphone application, visitors “will see in 3D the monuments and life in ancient Olympia exactly as it was 2.5 millennia ago,” said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

SOURCE: GUARDIAN

Malaria cases spike in Northern Mali

Malaria cases in northern Mali have spiked, according to medical workers, claiming 23 lives in the often lawless desert region last week alone.

Mali’s ministry of health said this week that 59 people have died of malaria in the north since the start of the year, almost double the number of deaths over the same period last year.

Already struggling to curb coronavirus, the poor Sahel country is also fighting a brutal jihadist insurgency active in the north and centre of the country.

Medical workers in the north registered 13,000 malaria cases between September 21 and 27, marking an 88 percent increase on the previous week.

Twenty-three people also died over that period, the health ministry said.

“At the moment, the health system is really overwhelmed,” said Cheick Ag Oufene, a health centre administrator in the northern town of Kidal, who called the situation “very alarming”.

Mahamadou Sangare, a doctor in the northern town of Aguelhok, said malaria has been wreaking havoc since the arrival of the rainy season.

Treating severe cases is difficult in the remote north, he added, raising the likelihood of fatalities.

Malaria claims hundreds of thousands of lives across the African continent each year.

But the World Health Organisation warned in April that the coronavirus pandemic could disrupt campaigns against the mosquito-borne disease, leading to a spike in cases.

Rudy Lukamba, a Red Cross doctor in Mali, told AFP that Covid-19 “has absorbed a lot of attention and redirected some of the funds, which has caused delays in prevention activities”.

“Cleaning up wetlands, clearing brushwood, drying up puddles, distributing mosquito nets and raising public awareness requires resources,” he said.

Swathes of Mali lie outside government control after a jihadist insurgency emerged in 2012 and triggered a deadly conflict which has since spread to the centre of the country.

Failure to end the long-running conflict contributed to anger towards president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, whom young military officers toppled in a coup on August 18.

SOURCE: GUARDIAN

South Africa plans to lease state land for farming

South Africa plans to lease state land for farming in a bid to redress longstanding racial imbalances, President Cyril Ramaphosa said recently, calling the campaign a “national priority”.

The programme involving some 700,000 hectares (1.7 million acres) of vacant or underutilised land will also create jobs, he said.

Plots will be available for a 30-year lease, providing they are put to agricultural use, starting later this month, according to an announcement last week by the Land Reform department.

The initiative is part of a wider land reform programme aimed at fixing disparities caused by decades of the apartheid and colonialism during which most of the land was reserved for the minority white population.

“Given our history, broadening access to agricultural land for commercial production and subsistence farming is a national priority,” Ramaphosa said in a weekly letter to the nation.

“With land ownership still concentrated in the hands of the few, and agriculture primary production and value chains mainly owned by white commercial farmers, the effects of our past remain with us today.”

Ramaphosa noted that while the state had already sold or leased 8.4 million hectares of land to “previously disadvantaged individuals” between 1994 and 2018, only 10 percent was commercial farmland.

When the ruling African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994 on the back of the victorious anti-apartheid struggle, the government pledged to redistribute 30 percent of South Africa’s 60,000 commercial farms to blacks.

A 2017 study led by former president Kgalema Motlanthe painted the picture of a “slow and ineffective pace of land reform”.

Ramaphosa also stressed the importance of boosting agriculture in a country where more than 40 percent of the rural population and almost 60 percent of city dwellers had “inadequate access to food” in 2019 — figures likely to have increased this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Women, youth and people with disabilities will be given priority access to the state farm leases, which are non-transferable and include compulsory training.

“Broadening access to land and opportunities for farming will support job creation and enterprise development,” Ramaphosa said.

More than two million South Africans lost their jobs between April and June this year as a result of lockdowns imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

In addition, unemployment is consistently higher among black South Africans, according to government statistics.

Ramaphosa hoped the farm leases — which will come with an option to buy — would “transform the agricultural landscape”.

“They must dispel the stereotype that only white farmers are commercially successful… and that black farmers are perpetually ’emerging’,” he wrote.

South Africa’s parliament is meanwhile debating constitutional amendments that would allow the expropriation of certain farmland without any compensation.

A deadline for its decision was pushed back to the end of December 2020 due to coronavirus.

SOURCE: GUARDIAN