Dielli | The Sun

Albanian American Newspaper Devoted to the Intellectual and Cultural Advancement of the Albanians in America | Since 1909

CRITICISM MOUNTS, AND FACEBOOK THRIVES

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by Rafaela Prifti-

Topics of police and justice reform dominate an already intense newscycle as the heavily trafficked platforms of social media particularly Facebook enjoyed record high stocks in the market while swimming in criticism and grievances from both sides.  

THE SCALE

An estimated 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week. The social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution. Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom that reflects the biases of its employees and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. The company claims that the trending module provides lists of “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook” not acknowledging the imposition of human editorial values onto the items that an algorithm spits out.

ANTI-TRUST AND FAIRNESS

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook admitted to buying Instagram and WhatsApp to eliminate them as competitors. Yet Facebook insists both acquisitions have not harmed competition. On the question of fairness, Facebook Inc. is adamant that it does not play favorites. Longtime and former employees reportedly say that Zuckerberg isn’t easily influenced by politics. But he cares deeply about Facebook’s growth potential.  The co-founder of Accountable Tech – an organization that makes recommendations to tech companies on public-policy issues – noted that Facebook, more so than other platforms, has gone out of its way to not ruffle feathers in the current administration. ” As long as the government is in pursuit of antitrust cases against big tech companies the President does have leverage over  Zuckerberg who has been called by the regulators in Congress a few times.  The pattern has come to light in countries around the world. The Wall Street Journal reported on the FB posts of a lawmaker in India calling for violence against Rohingya Muslim immigrants. The Facebook executive was accused of granting special treatment to the lawmaker from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Party. It was only after the reporting by The Wall Street Journal that the company banned it.  On September 14 a memo from a Facebook former employee was published detailing how it had ignored or delayed taking action against foreign national governments using fake accounts to mislead their citizens.

IMMUNITY UNDER SECTION 230 OF THE COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT OF 1996

In late May President Trump signed an executive order that threatens to revoke the immunity enjoyed by social media companies, including Facebook, if they showed political bias. Facebook responded by saying the move would restrict free speech. The order was an apparent threat to social networks like Twitter that censored posts from President Trump and his allies. The pressure is mounting for Facebook’s main rivals. The U.S.Department of Justice is preparing to file a case against Google, before Election Day. Another key competitor of Facebook, Chineses-owned TikTok, is facing ejection from the country it finds a US buyer. Oracle has agreed to become TikTok’s business partner. It is unclear  whether the deal will satisfy the government officials on either side, who have indicated they intend to carefully review any new arrangement.

FREE SPEECH
Facebook executives say their only loyalty is to free speech. Nick Clegg, the head of policy and communications, claims that despite isolated cases, the systematic or deliberate political bias in Facebook decisions is not borne out by the facts. In 2016, a former journalist who was part of the project at FB reported the company workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section.  Facebook executives often point out that the company was seen as overly friendly to Democrats during the Obama administration and that it takes plenty of heat from the Right. But the Gizmodo story emboldened the claims of anticonservative bias at social media companies. In response to the backlash, Facebook started to drift rightward, according to Bloomberg Businessweek reporting. The company flew conservative commentators to its California headquarters to reassure them that there was no need for concern about how Facebook operated.
Historically, Facebook had placed most of the decision-making about its products to the executives. In 2018 the company’s policy team seemed to have veto power. In January, Zuckerberg asked to reduce the prevalence of news in users’ feeds, especially from incendiary and untrustworthy outlets. An internal report around the same time touted Trump’s superior strategy with Facebook ads, noting that candidate Trump followed advice and training from the company that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had rejected. Andrew Bosworth who ran the ads department at the time and is now head of augmented and virtual reality wrote in a memo to employees in 2018: “Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.” In the eyes of Facebook’s mostly liberal staff, the Republican relationship-building was the price of doing business. According to reports, Russia’s spread of election misinformation and failure to stop Cambridge Analytica’s data-gathering operation caused a shift among the rank and file.  After the Kavanaugh hearings, employees began to notice that Kaplan of Facebook’s policy team seemed more concerned about critiques of bias from conservatives than from liberals. The product team tweaked the news feed. Upon review of test simulations by Kaplan’s team, the product change was causing traffic to drop more severely for right-wing outlets which tend to publish more incendiary content, noted the source. The engineers were ordered to tweak the algorithm a little more until it punished liberal outlets as much as conservative ones, before releasing the update to 2.5 billion users.  As employees started to worry about Facebook’s proximity to the Right, Facebook’s Management seemed intent on pushing the company even closer to it. Faced with criticism about misinformation, the response of Facebook’s policy team as posted in a blog  has been: “There is an election coming in November and we will protect political speech, even when we strongly disagree with it.”

ELECTIONS 2020

In the 2016 election, Russian operatives created fake accounts aimed at Black voters directing people who followed these accounts not to vote or do so by text message, which isn’t possible. In all, the Russian posts reached more than 150 million Americans. In response, Facebook’s election integrity and cybersecurity is charged with the task of rooting out fake content created by foreign national governments. Last year, Facebook removed 50 networks of accounts like the Russian one from 2016. The following year, Facebook did make rules against giving incorrect information about how to vote. But when Twitter had fact-checked posts containing election voter disinformation, Zuckerberg went on Fox News to criticize it. Later an outside civil rights auditor concluded that Facebook failed to enforce its own policies. Instead Zuckerberg came up with “the largest voting information campaign in U.S. history,” a plan to register 4 million voters. Facebook designed a “Voting Information Center,” a web page with facts about the election compiled from state authorities. The social media network has been promoting the page atop every user’s Facebook and Instagram feed and attaches a link to it with every post on the service that mentions the election process. Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters that the hub “ensures that people can see the post and hear from their elected officials… But users are not warned if the information is untrue—Facebook simply advertises an information center. Facebook has said that the suggestion that the company scaled down its voter registration plans for political reasons is “pure fabrication.” Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists abound on the site. In June Zuckerberg announced that he had rehired Chris Cox, Facebook’s Chief Product Officer, who had been active in Democratic politics since a high-profile departure from the company last year. In reference to a new future administration, Nick Clegg, Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook said  “We’ll adapt to the environment in which we’re operating.”

OVERSPREADING – KEY FACTOR TO THE PANDEMIC AND PREVENTIVE PRACTICES

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By Rafaela Prifti- Today’s confirmation by the CDC that the pathogen is airborne brings together the science of overdispersion with the recognition of airborne aerosol transmission. Overdispersion is a key factor that should inform the approach to the pandemic and the preventive practices. Although much is still unknown about the super-spreading of SARS-CoV-2, nine months of epidemiological data shows that it is an overdispersed pathogen. It tends to spread in clusters, whereby one person tends to infect many or all that once, making them super-emitters of the virus. After months of extensive research by the global scientific community, many questions remain open about the substantial death toll suffered by a few cities compared to many others with similar density, household composition, weather, age distribution, and travel patterns in the spring of 2020. As the rest of Europe experiences a second wave, there are many explanations of variables such as weather, elderly populations, prior immunity, herd immunity—but there is a potentially overlooked way of understanding one factor: the measure of the dispersion of the pathogen. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found across the globe. A study found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. In some cases of COVID-19 a single person did infect in excess of 80 percent of the people in the room in just a few hours, yet in other incidents COVID-19 is surprisingly much less contagious, even zero transmission. Multiple studies show that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.
SARS-CoV that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak was overdispersed in the same pattern. The majority of infected people did not transmit it, but a few super-spreading events caused most of the outbreaks. MERS appears overdispersed, but does not transmit well among humans.
The alternating between being super infectious and fairly noninfectious presents a huge challenge for health officials especially if we take into consideration that the pandemic playbook is based on the flu. Although a genuine threat, influenza does not have the same level of clustering behavior. Using a flu-pandemic playbook, won’t necessarily work well for an overdispersed pandemic.  To fight a super-spreading disease effectively, policymakers need to understand why super-spreading happens, its effects on testing regime and how to conduct effective contact-tracing methods.Experts divide the disease patterns into deterministic or stochastic: In the former, an outbreak’s distribution is more linear and predictable; in the latter, randomness plays a much larger role and predictions are hard, if not impossible. That means that the same inputs don’t always produce the same outputs.
Super-spreading clusters of COVID-19 almost overwhelmingly occur in poorly ventilated, indoor environments with over time congregations such as—weddings, churches, choirs, gyms, funerals, restaurants, loud talking, no masks. Studies show that the risk varies in every setting and activity. Infectious disease experts identify four key elements of super–spreader events: “prolonged contact, poor ventilation, highly infectious person, and crowding” as the key elements for a super-spreader event. Super-spreading can occur indoors beyond the six-feet guideline, because SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing COVID-19, can travel through the air particularly if ventilation is poor.
Given that some people infect others before they show symptoms, or when they have very mild or even no symptoms, it’s not always possible to know if we are highly infectious ourselves. There may be more factors but understanding the known elements of the pathogen’s behavior means that targeting clusters would be a very effective way in bringing down the transmission numbers. The health experts maintain that overdispersion should also inform our contact-tracing efforts. Right now, many states and nations engage in what is called forward or prospective contact tracing. Once an infected person is identified, we try to find out with whom they interacted afterward in order to warn, test, isolate, and quarantine these potential exposures. Backward tracing or retrospective contact tracking means identifying who was the first infected person. This approach is based in the nature of overdispersion since only a small percentage of people infect many at a time, whereas most others infect zero or maybe one.  Doing backward tracing to find the person who infected our patient, and then trace the forward contacts of the infecting person, rather than identify potential exposures, many of which will not happen anyway, because of the declining pattern of most transmissions    .
TEST AND TRACE METHODS
Public Health authorities consider that it doesn’t make sense to do forward tracing while not devoting enough resources to backward tracing and finding clusters, which cause so much damage. This point underlines the importance of rapid testing. The current dominant model of test and trace is not the best way when clusters are so important in spreading the disease, in terms of identifying people who are not infected and those who are infected. Although slow and expensive, PCR tests are highly accurate for both dimensions. However, PCR tests are slow, expensive and require a long uncomfortable swab, they are very accurate. Meanwhile, some rapid tests that are very accurate for ruling out individuals who are not infected with the disease but not as good at identifying infected individuals, are particularly valuable for cluster identification during an overdispersed pandemic. According to the specialists, this is helpful because some of these tests can be administered via saliva and be distributed outside medical facilities. Also increase the utility of wastewater testing which is effective for population-screening purposes, researchers say.
Because of the cluster behavior, identifying transmission events (someone infected someone else) is more important than identifying infected individuals using PCR testing. The most recent example of such a cluster was the Rose Garden event at the White House. Such cheap tests that could have been useful for the overdispersed pathogen. Yet these have been held up by regulatory agencies in the United States, due to the concern with their relative lack of accuracy in identifying positive cases compared with PCR tests.
ASSESSING DIFFERENT STRATEGIES
Many countries are now experiencing widespread rises in cases despite Europe’s relative level of success with containment rules this summer. The polarized debates about the pandemic bring up Sweden as an example to make a point about the efficacy of lockdowns. Studies show that Sweden like many other countries failed to protect elderly populations in nursing facilities, yet it has enforced stricter measures directed at super-spreading compared to other European countries – 50-person limit on indoor gatherings in March. Sweden encouraged social distancing and moved to online classes for higher-risk high-school and university students, while bringing the young children with a low transmission rate to schools—the opposite of the approach in the United States. Specialists say that “the most informative case studies may well be those who had terrible luck initially, like South Korea, and yet managed to bring about significant suppression.” In an overdispersion regime, the transmission level may be misleading. Just a few events can reignite massive numbers.
Japan did not impose a full lockdown, or interrupt mass transit. Like the US, Japan did not initially have the PCR capacity to do widespread testing. Recognizing the overdispersion characteristic of the pathogen, Japan strategy focused on cluster-busting including undertaking aggressive backward tracing to uncover clusters and counseling its population on ventilation. Japanese health experts say that restrictive rules are much more effective when they target the right key factor of the pandemic and work in combination with cheap testing and backward tracing to identify and limit the super-spreading events.

MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR SULEJMAN GASHI IN KOSOVA

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“An inspiration and an example particularly for the younger generation of journalists.”-
by Rafaela Prifti-
On September 18, a memorial ceremony was held in Kosova’s capital to honor the life and work of Sulejman Gashi, one of the best known and respected Albanian-American professional journalists whose career stretched over two decades, who passed away at 61. A week earlier from the service, Drilon Gashi, surviving son, announced the passing of his father, stating that the burial will take place in his home country, Kosova. Four years ago, while on a contracting assignment in Salt Lake City, Utah, Sulejman suffered a cardiac arrest and slipped into a coma. His departure saddened relatives, colleagues, friends, community members around the world.

On behalf of the Pan-Albanian Federation of America Vatra, Executive Council, Board of Directors, branches and all members, President Elmi Berisha expressed condolences to the Gashi family. He said that Sulejman Gashi was an exemplary reporter, intelligent mind and patriot who loved his country dearly.  

As per Drilon’s announcement, the burial of Sulejman Gashi took place in his native Kosova, and the memorial service was held a few days later. Government officials, public figures, colleagues, relatives, representatives of religious communities gathered to remember his lifework. In his remarks, Kosova’s Prime Minister Hoti  praised his efforts aiming towards an independent state of Kosova: “Sulejman Gashi was a well-known name in journalism in Prishtina, especially in Radio Television of Prishtina, and later as a RTK correspondent from the United States of America. I and all of us, especially remember his reporting from New York, covering the news from Washington, and round the world. Thus, he belonged to the generation of journalists, publicists and intellectuals of a specific time for Kosovo who took on the burden of the journey of creating an independent state of Kosovo, initially facing the Yugoslav regime violations of rights and freedoms of Albanians in the former Yugoslavia. Those were extraordinary circumstances and Syla, together with the colleagues of that time, knew how to best  articulate the interests of the Albanians in Kosovo and to defend them before the democratic centres all over the world.” In the end, Prime Minister Hoti made a pledge of fulfill” as soon as possible, the goals of Sulejman and his generation, for a fully integrated Kosovo in the large family of advanced countries of Euro-Atlantic civilization.”  
Drilon’s touching eulogy described how his father’s voice and image came on the TV screen as a war reporter and how people in coffee shops and public places would freeze to watch him. The quality of his reporting and its delivery were Sulejman’s gift to us. Drawing on his decades long substantive work, the Speaker of the Assembly Vjosa Osmani called Mr. Gashi “the voice of hope from the place of hope”. Other speakers remarked that Sulejman will be an inspiration and an example for the younger generations, especially for those who inspire to be journalists.

Albin Kurti, leader of LVV, noted that “he was known by three names: Sulejman Gashi, Syla, Sal Gashi, one for each of his functions: a professional, a dear friend and colleague, and devoted Albanian-American patriot. Just as learning does not happen without a teacher, and any trade requires a master, so did our first US tour need a mentor, Syla was our guide.” For years, Sulejman alternated journalism work with State Department linguistic contracting. In his tribute, Albin Kurti called Sulejman “a de facto ambassador of our country and our people. He will always “be the Albanian in America overseas and also be America inside his Albanian heart. “
 The Association of Kosova Journalists honoured the colleague’s work and contribution to the profession. Through the end of 1990s , Mr. Gashi was a correspondent for Bujk, Kosova Information Center and other outlets His reporting career at TV Prishtina was interrupted, as well as many of his Albanian colleagues there, when the Serbian authorities shut down the medium and Rilindja newspaper in July 1990.  He and his family migrated to the United States.  A year later, Sulejman Gashi was a founding journalist and editor of “Illyria” newspaper launched with two main commitments: independence for Kosova and democracy for Albania. His legacy will be the love for his family, his homeland and humanity in general. 

CRITICISM MOUNTS AND FACEBOOK THRIVES

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by Rafaela Prifti-

Topics of police and justice reform dominate an already intense newscycle as the heavily trafficked platforms of social media particularly Facebook enjoy record high stocks in August while swimming in criticism and grievances from both sides.  

THE SCALE

An estimated 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week. The social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution. Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom that reflects the biases of its employees and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. The company claims that the trending module provides lists of “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook” not acknowledging the imposition of human editorial values onto the items that an algorithm spits out.

ANTI-TRUST AND FAIRNESS
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook admitted to buying Instagram and WhatsApp to eliminate them as competitors. Yet Facebook insists both acquisitions have not harmed competition. On the question of fairness, Facebook Inc. is adamant that it does not play favorites. Longtime and former employees reportedly say that Zuckerberg isn’t easily influenced by politics. But he cares deeply about Facebook’s growth potential.  The co-founder of Accountable Tech – an organization that makes recommendations to tech companies on public-policy issues – noted that Facebook, more so than other platforms, has gone out of its way to not ruffle feathers in the current administration. ” As long as the government is in pursuit of antitrust cases against big tech companies the President does have leverage over  Zuckerberg who has been called by the regulators in Congress a few times.  The pattern has come to light in countries around the world. The Wall Street Journal reported on the FB posts of a lawmaker in India calling for violence against Rohingya Muslim immigrants. The Facebook executive was accused of granting special treatment to the lawmaker from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Party. It was only after the reporting by The Wall Street Journal that the company banned it.  On September 14 a memo from a Facebook former employee was published detailing how it had ignored or delayed taking action against foreign national governments using fake accounts to mislead their citizens.

IMMUNITY UNDER SECTION 230 OF THE COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY ACT OF 1996
In late May President Trump signed an executive order that threatens to revoke the immunity enjoyed by social media companies, including Facebook, if they showed political bias. Facebook responded by saying the move would restrict free speech. The order was an apparent threat to social networks like Twitter that censored posts from President Trump and his allies. The pressure is mounting for Facebook’s main rivals. The U.S.Department of Justice is preparing to file a case against Google, before Election Day. Another key competitor of Facebook, Chineses-owned TikTok, is facing ejection from the country it finds a US buyer. Oracle has agreed to become TikTok’s business partner. It is unclear  whether the deal will satisfy the government officials on either side, who have indicated they intend to carefully review any new arrangement.

FREE SPEECH
Facebook executives say their only loyalty is to free speech. Nick Clegg, the head of policy and communications, claims that despite isolated cases, the systematic or deliberate political bias in Facebook decisions is not borne out by the facts. In 2016, a former journalist who was part of the project at FB reported the company workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section.  Facebook executives often point out that the company was seen as overly friendly to Democrats during the Obama administration and that it takes plenty of heat from the Right. But the Gizmodo story emboldened the claims of anticonservative bias at social media companies. In response to the backlash, Facebook started to drift rightward, according to Bloomberg Businessweek reporting. The company flew conservative commentators to its California headquarters to reassure them that there was no need for concern about how Facebook operated.
Historically, Facebook had placed most of the decision-making about its products to the executives. In 2018 the company’s policy team seemed to have veto power. In January, Zuckerberg asked to reduce the prevalence of news in users’ feeds, especially from incendiary and untrustworthy outlets. An internal report around the same time touted Trump’s superior strategy with Facebook ads, noting that candidate Trump followed advice and training from the company that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had rejected. Andrew Bosworth who ran the ads department at the time and is now head of augmented and virtual reality wrote in a memo to employees in 2018: “Trump “got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.” In the eyes of Facebook’s mostly liberal staff, the Republican relationship-building was the price of doing business. According to reports, Russia’s spread of election misinformation and failure to stop Cambridge Analytica’s data-gathering operation caused a shift among the rank and file.  After the Kavanaugh hearings, employees began to notice that Kaplan of Facebook’s policy team seemed more concerned about critiques of bias from conservatives than from liberals. The product team tweaked the news feed. Upon review of test simulations by Kaplan’s team, the product change was causing traffic to drop more severely for right-wing outlets which tend to publish more incendiary content, noted the source. The engineers were ordered to tweak the algorithm a little more until it punished liberal outlets as much as conservative ones, before releasing the update to 2.5 billion users.  As employees started to worry about Facebook’s proximity to the Right, Facebook’s Management seemed intent on pushing the company even closer to it. Faced with criticism about misinformation, the response of Facebook’s policy team as posted in a blog  has been: “There is an election coming in November and we will protect political speech, even when we strongly disagree with it.”

ELECTIONS
In the 2016 election, Russian operatives created fake accounts aimed at Black voters directing people who followed these accounts not to vote or do so by text message, which isn’t possible. In all, the Russian posts reached more than 150 million Americans. In response, Facebook’s election integrity and cybersecurity is charged with the task of rooting out fake content created by foreign national governments. Last year, Facebook removed 50 networks of accounts like the Russian one from 2016. The following year, Facebook did make rules against giving incorrect information about how to vote. But when Twitter had fact-checked posts containing election voter disinformation, Zuckerberg went on Fox News to criticize it. Later an outside civil rights auditor concluded that Facebook failed to enforce its own policies. Instead Zuckerberg came up with “the largest voting information campaign in U.S. history,” a plan to register 4 million voters. Facebook designed a “Voting Information Center,” a web page with facts about the election compiled from state authorities. The social media network has been promoting the page atop every user’s Facebook and Instagram feed and attaches a link to it with every post on the service that mentions the election process. Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters that the hub “ensures that people can see the post and hear from their elected officials… But users are not warned if the information is untrue—Facebook simply advertises an information center. Facebook has said that the suggestion that the company scaled down its voter registration plans for political reasons is “pure fabrication.” Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists abound on the site. In June Zuckerberg announced that he had rehired Chris Cox, Facebook’s Chief Product Officer, who had been active in Democratic politics since a high-profile departure from the company last year. In reference to a new future administration, Nick Clegg, Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook said  “We’ll adapt to the environment in which we’re operating.”

SULEJMAN GASHI, BELOVED COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND, PASSED AWAY AT 61

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by Rafaela Prifti-

A career journalist, a professional translator and a highly respected colleague, Sulejman Gashi passed away at 61. For those of us, who had the incredible fortune of knowing and working with him, there is a profound sense of loss. Vatra President Elmi Berisha expressed condolences to the Gashi family on behalf of the Executive Council, Board of Directors, branches and all members, describing Sulejman as an exemplary reporter, intelligent mind and a true patriot. His reporting career at TV Prishtina was interrupted, along with his Albanian colleagues, when the Serbian authorities shut down the medium in July 1990.  He and his family migrated to the United States. A year later, Sulejman Gashi was a founding journalist and editor of “Illyria”, the newspaper launched with two main commitments: independence for Kosova and democracy for Albania.
Through the end of 1990s, Mr. Gashi was a correspondent for Bujk, Kosova Information Center and other outlets. Throughout the war, his reporting stood out for its high standards of journalism. In 2001, when OSCE Mission established Radio Television Kosovo as an independent public service broadcaster, they reached out to media professionals with excellent credentials like Sulejman Gashi. He conducted live interviews with the highest government officials and international representatives earning the respect of all of them. Years later, he became US correspondent for Kosova national broadcaster, RTK.
Aside from his career in journalism, Sulejman Gashi was a US State Department Independent Contractor. His extraordinary command of English language won the respect and admiration of his colleagues. I was fortunate to meet him in a DOS language training workshop, which marked the beginning of a friendship that has shaped my life.

In 2016, while on assignment in Salt Lake City, Utah, he suffered a cardiac arrest and slipped into comma. Today, Drilon Gashi, surviving son, announced the passing of his father, stating that the burial will take place in his home country, Kosova:
“It is with great sorrow that we announce that our dearest loved one, Mr. Sulejman Gashi, passed away today on September 11, 2020. He fought very hard to recover from the difficult condition he sustained four years ago. Our loved one’s burial will take place in his country of origin, Kosova, which he loved very dearly. Sulejman Gashi lived a life and left a legacy of great significance for his family, his profession, his country and nation.  In the coming days we will provide more information on the arrangements. We are very grateful for the respect and love that all have for our dearest loved one, Sulejman, but kindly request that we all collectively respect the public health measures in place due to the pandemic.  We greatly appreciate your consideration of the our privacy in this very difficult time for our family and relatives.”

Today, messages of condolences are posted on social media by politicians, media executives, co-workers, friends and community leaders in Kosova and United States. After a few comforting words addressed to his family members earlier, I briefly communicated with former RTK colleagues, DOS interpreters and representatives of the Albanian-American community who join Dielli staff in being saddened by Sulejman Gashi’s departure. Vatra announcement about memorial service details to follow in the coming days.