By Dialogo October 25, 2010 Diálogo – What is Chile’s effective participation with the other countries of the region, chiefly in the fight against drug trafficking? Vice Admiral Niemann – From an overall perspective, I dare say that the relationship on the regional level is chiefly on the level of the exchange of information. There are agreements in place with certain countries, some of them in bilateral terms, to exchange information ahead of time and on the national level in order to be able to react with the resources and the regulatory and legal authorizations that each country has in this regard. Diálogo – What is the chief problem affecting Chile in relation to national security? Vice Admiral Niemann – I would say that at this time, from the perspective of national security, it’s probably drug trafficking that is beginning to be the most important problem in Chile, especially in the more northern regions. This is undoubtedly the result of the success that the fight against drug trafficking has had in the Caribbean region, chiefly in the area of Colombia, in the area of Ecuador, and also in Peru. So now all the traffic heading from South America to the leading markets, the most important markets, such as, for example, Europe and North America, is gradually edging to the south. This has been demonstrated by the growing percentage of drugs that we’re seizing in different areas and through different means in northern Chile. The second area that is affecting the country’s security at this time, in one way or another, has more to do with natural disasters. In Chile we just went through a really major disaster on 27 February, affecting the country in a really significant way. We have the loss of a significant number of human lives to mourn, on top of the material losses that resulted, and this has undoubtedly also affected the institutions of the armed forces, generating significant demand on those institutions in terms of their capacity to react to natural onslaughts of this kind. Diálogo – Do you believe that this movement of drugs toward the Southern Cone is due to the pressure being exerted in Mexico, Colombia, and other countries, or not? Could you comment on this issue? Vice Admiral Niemann – The truth is that I can’t specify the reason why it’s happening, but the fact that there is an increase in the drugs seized in that sector is possibly due to the success that’s being had further north. To the degree that the flow is restricted, or there are actions to prevent this flow from easily passing through this channel, seeking the shortest distance between the center of production and the market, then there’s a search for a path that is further from a straight line between two points. This undoubtedly indicates to us, by deduction, that in one way or another, it’s easier or should be easier to follow the route that’s more distant, in this case. This poses an enormous challenge to us in preventing this from happening. Diálogo – What is the importance of this event, and do you think that anything concrete has come out of it, for fighting drug trafficking specifically? Vice Admiral Niemann – Effectively, this is an extremely important event. This occasion marks fifty years of the CNI. The CNI was born as an institution with the purpose of bringing together the navies of the Western Hemisphere, North, Central, and South America alike, to address those issues that are important and of global concern in the sphere of our responsibilities. I would say that the topic chosen for this occasion, which is MDA, Maritime Domain Awareness, and the threats that can affect our countries’ maritime security from different perspectives, effectively addresses an issue that is of extraordinary importance today. I would say that in the Americas, the fight against drug trafficking occupies a place of real importance, as might in other regions of the globe be the case, for example, of piracy, which we don’t normally have in our area of operation, thank God. It happens to be the case that the sphere of the fight against drug trafficking is important. There are countries – as was true of our country in the past – in which the armed forces, generally speaking, are not extremely involved with this issue, but there’s been a change in Chile in particular, in the sense that little by little, the involvement of defense institutions, chiefly in regard to detecting illicit activity, has gradually become more ongoing and more routine, and this is a result of the fact that the plague is increasing and not decreasing.

Her school was closed on Feb. 22 and by the following Thursday, the virtual system was operational.Schools have been closed in the northern regions of Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia Romagna until at least the end of the week, but with the number of cases in Italy rising to more than 2,000, there is no certainty about when they will reopen.Many schools have websites and email or electronic messaging groups that have allowed teachers and pupils to stay in touch.”The school has an electronic registry and I am sending work to my pupils using email and WhatsApp. I gave them a canto of Dante today to study,” said Flavia Santonico, a high school teacher in Bologna. In the red zone in which 10 towns in the Lombardy region around Milan and one town in neighboring Veneto have been locked down, telecoms operator TIM has temporarily provided unlimited data coverage.Marco De Rossi, head of WeSchool, an Italian company that develops educational platforms, said the company had seen a three-fold jump in traffic on its platforms last week, with 590,000 active users. He said extra shifts had been added to deal with demand.”Stir Crazy”The Education Ministry has appealed to schools to share their experiences to help adapt to the shutdown and opened a page on its website to help with long-distance learning.Schools and children have different levels of experience with long-distance learning and, for now, there is no national system.”There were a few problems at first but it’s working great now,” said Federico Vita, 11, a pupil at the Ungaretti school in Melzo which started focusing on digital teaching techniques about three years ago.The state school, near Milan, has “adopted” a school in the red zone in Veneto to share its experience.The shut down has created a headache for parents forced to find child minders, work from home or take time off.”My 12-year-old is going stir crazy,” said Susan, a mother in Bologna. “And you have to make sure they don’t get hooked all day on their mobiles.”Homework has been coming through, but there have been no virtual classes or lessons or stuff like that organized yet.”Even teachers who say the system has worked well worry about whether pupils will be able to keep learning effectively outside the normal rhythm of the classroom.Monica Boccoli, a maths teacher in Cremona, who is part of a network of teachers trying to encourage digital educational techniques, works in a school experienced in digital learning for younger pupils. “But managing an emergency is different,” she said. “In primary schools, teacher contact remains fundamental”. For schoolchildren in northern Italy, the beginning of their second week blocked at home because of coronavirus saw a scramble to adapt digital alternatives to the classroom, ranging from online maths games to homework on Dante sent by WhatsApp.Schools in several areas have been closed since the coronavirus outbreak just over a week ago and authorities have had to improvise to keep classes going, using school digital platforms and services like Skype, Microsoft Teams or Google Classroom.”The system has been functioning very well and it’s holding up for the moment,” said Lucia Balzarini, a religion teacher at the A. Tosi agricultural technical college in Codogno, a town in the quarantined “red zone” where five children have tested positive. “The problem will be in the longer term.” Topics :

E-wallet ShopeePay, a relative newcomer to the market, has outperformed its rivals in the last three months as consumers splurge on online shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic, a survey shows.According to a MarkPlus survey of 502 smartphone users, ShopeePay, an arm of e-commerce platform Shopee, captured 26 percent of the digital wallet market, outperforming e-wallets OVO (24 percent), GoPay (23 percent), DANA (19 percent) and LinkAja (8 percent).“Respondents said ShopeePay offered more attractive discounts than other e-wallets. It was also considered the easiest to use,” MarkPlus high tech, property and consumer goods industry head Rhesa Dwi Prabowo said during an online press conference on Wednesday. He added that most people used ShopeePay to shop online.ShopeePay was established in 2018, later than its competitors GoPay and OVO, which have been in the market since 2014 and 2017, respectively.The digital wallet is built within Shopee’s platform as a payment solution alongside bank transfer, credit card and virtual bank account. At the same time, Shopee saw a 130 percent increase in transactions in the second quarter from the same period last year to 260 million transactions.Rhesa went on to say that ShopeePay’s popularity was also backed by intense marketing and the rise of e-commerce usage during the pandemic. Read also: Shopee books 130 percent transaction growth in Q2 as consumers go onlineThe survey showed that people on average spend Rp 149,000 (US$10.12) per transaction with ShopeePay, while they spend Rp 134,000 on OVO, DANA and LinkAja and Rp 109,000 on GoPay.The respondents used ShopeePay seven times per months on average compared to only five to six times monthly on other e-wallet platforms.“We also found that ShopeePay is the most loved and recommended e-wallet in the country,” Rhesa said. “However, the survey found that people still trust OVO and GoPay more than ShopeePay.”Topics :