14 minute read
New COVID-19 screening service
NEW COVID-19 SCREENING SERVICE LAUNCHES AT
GATWICK AIRPORT
Gatwick Airport and ExpressTest (a division of Cignpost Diagnostics Limited) announce the opening of a brand-new COVID-19 screening centre. The site, located within the airport’s Long Stay Car Park at the South Terminal, will offer a fast and accurate and lab-analysed PCR swab test.
The facility is for air passengers who need a valid, negative COVID-19 test certificate for destinations requiring one. Tests are valid for up to 96 hours before travel. Passengers will still need to check with travel providers that the test meets the specific requirements those destinations may ask for. It will also help those who may simply want extra assurance that they are not currently carrying the virus. The facility could also, with any necessary amendments, satisfy requirements of the Government’s expected “test and release” post-arrival scheme allowing air passengers to reduce quarantine time required after travelling back from certain destinations. Anyone with recognisable COVID-19 symptoms will still need to use an NHS testing facility.
Air passengers and any employees based at Gatwick Airport will be charged a subsidised rate of £60 to use the screening service, while it will also be available for the general public for £99. A group discount is also offered, with up to 30% off for groups of four or more, for those who are having the full priced test.
Stewart Wingate, Chief Executive Officer, Gatwick Airport, says: “Reducing the spread of COVID-19 is a priority for us alongside giving confidence to so many people who have missed travelling during this difficult year. Our new screening facility is also a convenient service to offer people in the region looking for extra reassurance. We are pleased to be subsidising the price for our passengers and any staff based at Gatwick so they are compliant with current destination requirements that many airlines including easyJet, British Airways and TUI fly to. “Our industry has been decimated by the pandemic and, while we welcome the anticipated “test and release” scheme from the Government, we want to see an internationally agreed pre-departure testing regime, based on existing risk criteria, to replace the current uncertainty of quarantine and patchwork of testing approaches which currently exists across Europe. A truly international approach would safely open up most of the UK’s travel routes abroad, while also helping to reduce transmission of the virus.”
ExpressTest is delivered using the latest gold standard PCR equipment that is fully CE-IVD certified and manufactured to the highest possible standards, and tests are carried out by specially trained screening practitioners. The lab-analysed test results will be emailed or texted to customers typically the next day, with airline passengers advised to schedule a test 48-96 hours prior to their departure time, as a precaution. Those who screen negative will be emailed a Fit to Fly certificate that is authorised by a doctor, along with their test result, however passengers will be responsible for checking with their travel provider as to whether this document is accepted before booking the screening service.
Bookings opened on Friday, November 27th, with the first test available on Monday, November 30th. To book a test, people will need to visit www. expresstest.co.uk and select a date and time. Customers will then be sent a QR code which they must bring with them to their appointment, along with their passport or employee ID. Payment will be taken during the booking process. Opening hours are 8am to 8pm and customers are asked to arrive 15 minutes prior to appointments.
www.gatwickairport.com
THE FIRST BLACK, ASIAN FEMALE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (probably)
KAMALA HARRIS
Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States on January 20th 2021 and Kamala Harris will be the Vice-President. Should many of the pundits be correct in the assertion that Biden will not see out the first four years, whether from age, illness or choice, Kamala Harris will make history in too many ways to count.
› FAST FACTS
BIRTH DATE October 20th 1964 BIRTH PLACE Oakland, California BIRTH NAME Kamlala Devi Harris FATHER Donald Harris, Professor of Economics MOTHER Shyamala Gopalan Harris, Doctor EDUCATION Howard University, B.A. political science & economics, 1986 University of California, Hastings College of Law, 1989 RELIGION Baptist
Kamala Harris savoured the moment she became the fi rst woman, and the fi rst black and Asian American, to be vice president-elect, with a very hearty laugh.
In a video posted to her social media she shares the news with Presidentelect Joe Biden: “We did it, we did it Joe. You’re going to be the next president of the United States!” Her words are about him but the history of the moment is hers.
Just over a year ago, as the senator from California hoping to win the Democratic nomination for Presidency, she launched a potent attack on Joe Biden over race during a debate. Many thought it infl icted a serious blow on his ambitions. But by the end of the year her campaign was dead and it was Mr Biden who returned the 56-year-old to the national spotlight by putting her on his ticket.
› TIMELINE
1990-1998 Serves as deputy district attorney for Alameda County, California.
1998 Named managing attorney of the Career Criminal Unit of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Offi ce.
2004-2011 District attorney of San Francisco.
2009 “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” is published.
2011-2016 Attorney general of California.
January 3, 2017 - Present Serves in the US Senate.
December 5, 2018 Accepts the resignation of Larry Wallace, a senior aide, after accusations of harassment surface from the time that he worked with her at the California Department of Justice.
January 8, 2019 Harris’ memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” and picture book, “Superheroes Are Everywhere,” are published.
January 21, 2019 Announces she is running for president in a video posted to social media at the same time she appears on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
December 3, 2019 Harris ends her 2020 presidential campaign.
March 8, 2020 Harris endorses Joe Biden for president.
August 11, 2020 Biden names Harris as his running mate, making her the first Black and South Asian American woman to run on a major political party’s presidential ticket.
November 7, 2020
Harris is elected vice president, making her America’s first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president.
Kamala dining with Al Sharpton
“It is a big reversal of fortune for Kamala Harris,” says Gil Duran, a communications director for Ms Harris in 2013 and who has critiqued her run for the presidential nomination.
“Many people didn’t think she had the discipline and focus to ascend to a position in the White House so quickly... although people knew she had ambition and star potential. It was always clear that she had the raw talent.” What she has demonstrated from the moment she took the national stage with her pitch for the presidency – is grit.
Born in Oakland, California, to two immigrant parents – an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father – her parents divorced when she was five and she was primarily raised by her Hindu single mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist.
She grew up engaged with her Indian heritage, joining her mother on visits to India, but Ms Harris has said that her mother adopted Oakland’s black culture, immersing her two daughters – Kamala and her younger sister Maya – within it.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” she wrote in her autobiography The Truths We Hold. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”
Her biracial roots and upbringing mean she embodies, and can engage with, many American identities. Those parts of the country which have seen rapid demographic change, enough change to alter a region’s politics, see an aspirational symbol in her.
But it was her time at Howard University, one of the nation’s pre-eminent historically black colleges and universities, which she has described as among the most formative experiences of her life. Lita Rosario-Richardson met Kamala Harris while at Howard in the 1980s when students would gather in the Yard area of the campus to hang out and discuss politics, fashion and gossip. “I noticed she had a keen sense of argumentation.”
They bonded over an aptitude for energetic debate with campus Republicans, their experience growing up with single mothers, even just both being the Libra star sign. It was a formative era politically too.
“Reagan was president at the time and it was the apartheid era and there was a lot of talk about divestiture with ‘trans Africa” and the Martin Luther King holiday issue,” Ms Rosario-Richardson says.
“We know that, being descendants of enslaved people and people of colour coming out of colonisation, that we have a special role and having an education gives us a special position in society to help effect change,” she explains – it was a philosophy and a call to action that was part of the university experience Ms Harris lived.
She returned to address students at Howard in 2017 and took them on a journey from the Ferguson race protests of 2014 to the halls of Capitol Hill in just one sentence:
Kamala with husband, Doug Emhoff
› FAST FACTS
“You students have joined the fight for justice - you protested. From the streets of Ferguson to the halls of the United States Congress, you have lived the words of James Baldwin, ‘There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.’ But Ms Harris also operates with ease in predominantly white communities. Her early years included a brief period in Canada. When her mother took a job teaching at McGill University, Ms Harris and her younger sister Maya went with her, attending school in Montreal for five years. Ms Harris says she’s always been comfortable with her identity and simply describes herself as an “American”. She told the Washington Post in 2019, that politicians should not have to fit into compartments because of their colour or background. “My point was: I am who I am. I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it,” she said. In 2014, Senator Harris married lawyer Doug Emhoff – now a fixture at her campaign stops – and became stepmother to his two children. Last year she wrote an article for Elle magazine about the experience of becoming a stepmother and unveiled > She is the daughter of
Jamaican and Indian immigrants
> She grew up attending a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple
> Her name comes from the Sanskrit word meaning
Lotus Flower the name that would then come to dominate many headlines that followed. “When Doug and I got married, Cole, Ella, and I agreed that we didn’t like the term ‘stepmom’. Instead they came up with the name ‘Momala’.”
They were portrayed as the epitome of modern American “blended” family, an image the media took to and one that occupied many column inches about how we talk about female politicians.
On becoming vice president-elect, she is unlikely to lose this nickname but many argue she should also be seen and recognised as the descendant of another kind of family and that is the inheritor of generations of black female activists.
Momala with stepchildren, Ella and Cole
But from the very earliest, as her friend Ms Rosario-Richardson attests, she showed the skills that allowed her to be one of few women to break through barriers.
“That is what attracted me to get her to join the debate team at Howard University, a fearlessness.”
Wit and humour are part of that armoury. The laugh she greeted the president-elect with, when making that first momentous phone call, was one her friend recognised immediately and intimately.
“It clearly shows her personality, even in the short time she has been on the campaign trail.”
“She has always had that laugh, she has always had a sense of humour too, she had a sense of wit - even in the context of a university debate - to get those points across.”
The ability to deliver zingers to her opponents in live debate was very much part of the momentum behind the start of her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. She wasn’t afraid of confrontation as in this Twitter exchange with Donald Trump Jr last October.
› FAST FACTS
> First African-American, first woman and first Asian-
American to become Attorney
General of California
> First Asian-American
Attorney General in history
> First Indian-American to serve as a Senator “Why is @KamalaHarris the only person that laughs at her jokes... always way too long and way too hard?” Mr Trump’s son asked.
“You wouldn’t know a joke if one raised you,” she wrote back.
A simple burn on social media, but a popular shorthand for the kind of skills that meant a career in law and politics was a natural fit.
Although her career as a prosecutor is what made her a politician, it brought with it political benefits and risks.
She began work in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and became the district attorney - the top prosecutor – for San Francisco in 2003, before being elected the first woman and the first black person to serve as California’s attorney general, the top lawyer and law enforcement official in America’s most populous state.
She gained a reputation as one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars, using this momentum to propel her election as California’s junior US senator in 2017.
But straddling the line between pleasing left-leaning California Democrats and being a politician for a nation where the left does not decide who gets to be president has been hard.
She gained favour among progressives for her acerbic questioning of the then Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, but as a presidential candidate for the Democratic Party her adept debate performances were not enough to compensate for poorly articulated policies. Walking the fine line between the progressive and moderate wings of her party, she ended up appealing to neither.
Despite leftward leanings on issues like gay marriage and the death penalty, she faced repeated attacks for not really being progressive enough.
“Kamala is a cop” became a common refrain on the campaign trail. But those same law enforcement credentials proved beneficial on the national stage when Democrats needed to win over more moderate voters and independents.
She was “someone with a law enforcement background, and perceived in her own state as being insufficiently progressive... and trying to project an inauthentic self”, it was stated “that looks very different in a vice presidential slot”. As the US grapples with an ongoing racial reckoning and there is scrutiny over police brutality, Ms Harris has taken a front row seat, using her sizeable microphone.
On talk shows she calls for changes to police practices across the US, on Twitter she calls for the arrests of the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African-American woman from Kentucky, and she speaks frequently about the need to dismantle systemic racism.
She has the law enforcement background but she has often said that her identity makes her uniquely suited to represent those on the margins.
Now she has the chance to do just that and from inside the White House.
