Presidential candidate dragged from car during online press briefing calling for investigation into rights abuses
Police in Uganda have confronted the presidential candidate Bobi Wine during an online press conference where he announced a petition to the international criminal court to investigate rights abuses in the country.
Related: Bobi Wine likens Uganda election to 'a war and a battlefield'
Continue reading...Mary Twala gives an intimate yet epic performance as an 80-year-old widow fighting plans for dam that will obliterate her village in Lesotho
This is an extraordinary and otherworldly feature film from the tiny landlocked kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa. It is the tale of a rebel spirit: an elderly woman who opposes government plans to flood her village, making way for a dam. It’s a film about resistance and resilience, but director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is coolly unsentimental and realistic about the inevitable march of capitalism and construction. Weaving in ideas around displacement, collective identity and history, this film takes on almost mythic qualities.
Related: From Beyoncé to the Oscars: Mary Twala, Africa's queen of cinema
Continue reading...Despite accusations of war crimes in the central African country, the international community seems unmoved
On New Year’s Eve, a gang of militia left its jungle base and swept across Beni, a forested north-eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, looking for Nande people to kill.
Locals alerted the Congolese army but they were ignored. In small farms in Tingwe, a few kilometres from a DRC army base, the gang found 25 people – men, women and children – out harvesting food. One by one they hacked them to death with machetes and axes.
Continue reading...French forces were in area but say they attacked ‘fully-identified armed terrorist group’
More than 20 people, including children, were killed in airstrikes during a wedding ceremony in a remote desert area of central Mali, according to local sources.
It was not immediately clear who carried out the attacks but the reports emerged as French military sources said its forces in the country had carried out an airstrike in the area on Sunday that killed “dozens of fighters” from Islamist groups.
Continue reading...Burst of optimism over approvals has been followed by delays, shortages and bureaucratic errors
The global introduction of newly approved coronavirus vaccines has been marked by delays, shortages and bureaucratic errors as it has become clear that many governments will miss their targets for mass inoculation.
The burst of optimism that arrived with approvals of new vaccines – encouraged by unrealistic expectations raised by politicians – is colliding with the reality of the challenge of vaccinating a large part of the world’s population.
Continue reading...Panic over infection rates mixed with fear of widespread hunger as 30-day shutdown is imposed after people defy ban on gatherings
Parties and new year celebrations that attracted thousands of revellers with little social distancing or mask wearing have triggered panic and a strict 30-day national lockdown in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.
On New Year’s Eve thousands of people gathered at Matapi, Mbare, one of Zimbabwe’s oldest townships for a dancehall concert, while thousands of others held parties across the city despite a police ban.
Continue reading...Up to 10 million straw-coloured fruit bats descend on Zambia’s Kasanka national park every year, dispersing millions of seeds as they go
David Mubiana will always remember the day he was shot. It happened in 2002, when his unit was ambushed by poachers with AK-47 rifles and a shotgun. He was wounded in the arm and stomach; one bullet rupturing his spleen. As a wildlife police officer in Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife, his job is inherently risky.
“Even if you fall down, you have to stand up and continue fighting. If we finish our wildlife, [our children] are not going to see what we are seeing today,” he says.
Continue reading...Roger Lumbala suspected of various acts during 1998-2002 war in Democratic Republic of Congo
French anti-terror prosecutors have announced the arrest of the former head of a rebel group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on charges of “complicity in crimes against humanity”.
Roger Lumbala, 62, is a former opposition lawmaker who led the RCD-N party, an armed group suspected by UN investigators of carrying out extrajudicial killings, rapes and cannibalism during the country’s civil war from 1998-2002.
Continue reading...South African man, now known as Justin, speaks for first time of friend Carlito Vale, who died after 430-metre fall, in Channel 4 documentary
A South African man who survived an 11-hour flight from Johannesburg to London after hiding in a plane’s undercarriage has told of the last words he exchanged with a friend whose body fell from the same British Airways flight as it came in to land at Heathrow.
“He said: ‘We made it,’ and then I passed out with the lack of oxygen,” said the man, who was then known as Themba and who has spoken publicly for the first time about the desperate journey both men undertook in 2015.
Continue reading...Tourist lodges run out of cash to feed and care for the animals on their land and thousands of villagers lose their jobs
Impala run through the thorn bush, ibis fly above the lake and lightning forks over the horizon as a storm rolls in from the Drakensberg mountains.
The visitors driven across the 10,000 or more hectares of the Nambiti game reserve in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province see what they think is an unchanged, and unchanging natural landscape.
Continue reading...Attacks on two villages were launched just as first-round results were announced in presidential election
“Terrorists” have killed around 100 people in two villages in western Niger, the latest in a string of civilian massacres that have rocked the jihadist-plagued Tillaberi region, a local mayor has said.
The attacks on the villages of Tchoma Bangou and Zaroumadareye occurred on Saturday just as first-round presidential election results were announced.
Continue reading...Motorcycle bomber targets Turkish construction company, killed at least five people and injuring 14
A suicide bombing in Mogadishu has killed at least five people, the Turkish health minister has said.
The al-Shabaab group, which is linked to al-Qaida, claimed responsibility for the attack on Saturday in the Somali capital in a post from its Shahada news agency. The group often targets Mogadishu with suicide bombings and other attacks.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Reggae singer turned opposition leader tells of how he fears for his life
Bobi Wine, the former reggae singer turned Ugandan opposition leader, has spoken about his country’s bitter and violent presidential election campaign as it moves into its final two weeks.
“The campaign is crazy. It’s like a war and a battlefield,” Wine said in an interview conducted before he was detained for a third time in two months on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Agitu Ideo Gudeta, who was killed on Wednesday, used abandoned land to start a goat farming project employing migrants and refugees
Tributes have been paid to a 42-year-old Ethiopian refugee and farmer who became a symbol of integration in Italy, her adopted home.
Agitu Ideo Gudeta was attacked and killed, allegedly by a former employee, on her farm in Trentino on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Coronavirus, conflict and cuts to UN funding are increasing the risks of food insecurity and acute malnutrition in 2021
The government has promised £47m in extra emergency aid for 2021 as it becomes clear that the coming year will see a dramatic rise in people struggling for food.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said on Wednesday it will provide more aid for food, water, hygiene and shelter in 11 countries, including £8m to Africa’s Sahel region, where the UN has warned of catastrophic hunger.
Continue reading...Prosecutors reject Italy’s finding that Egyptian security officials were behind kidnap and torture
Egypt’s public prosecution has officially closed its investigation into the murder of Giulio Regeni, rejecting Italian prosecutors’ findings that accused four Egyptian security officials of kidnapping and torturing the Italian doctoral student in 2016.
Italy officially indicted four Egyptian security officials including two from Egypt’s national security agency in early December. The four men were accused of kidnapping Regeni, whose body was found on an outlying Cairo highway in February 2016 showing signs of torture. One of the suspects, named as Magdi Ibrahim Abdel Al Sharif, is accused of grievous bodily harm.
Continue reading...‘Extremely dangerous’ if personal information needed to process mobile payments is lost or falls into wrong hands, say staff
The rapid upscaling of digital technology use by international groups in Somalia is causing concern about the risk to the people whose data is being collected.
The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the use of programming by humanitarian organisations to deliver aid, but local staff working with several different NGOs say the organisations are not thinking enough about data protection or obtaining informed consent.
Continue reading...A lack of trial data transparency from China has raised concerns, but the country is confidently pushing ahead
When Egypt’s health ministry sent out an invitation to doctors to be vaccinated against Covid-19, they neglected to make clear it was a clinical trial.
Instead, it assured them that two Covid-19 vaccines developed by China’s National Biotec Group, part of a state-owned conglomerate known as Sinopharm, had no side-effects and that “the minister of health was vaccinated today, and orders were issued to vaccinate all doctors and workers who wish to be vaccinated”.
Continue reading...Germany says infectious variant has been present since November; Spain sets up Covid vaccine register
India has found six cases of a more infectious variant of the coronavirus in people arriving from Britain, while South Africa reimposed a ban on alcohol sales and ordered the closure of all bars as it battles a resurgence of the virus, including another new variant.
All six of the infected people in India are in isolation and their fellow travellers are being traced, the health ministry said.
Continue reading...Decades after the US took over the territory for a military base, families separated and forced to leave their homes are still waiting for compensation
When Laurenza Piron was forced from her home in the Chagos Islands in 1970, she was sent on a boat to the Seychelles. Her parents and siblings were sent to Mauritius. It was two decades before they located one another again, and even then none of them could afford a reunion. So Piron, now 76, never saw her family again.
“I wanted to go, but I didn’t have the money,” says Piron. “Compensation should have been paid. If it had, there wouldn’t be such hardship.”
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