Doubts over Islamist extremists’ involvement in abduction of more than 300 students last week
The leader of Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group that abducted hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria six years ago, has claimed responsibility for the mass abduction of students in north-western Katsina state last week.
In an audio tape released on Tuesday, Abubakar Shekau said: “Our brothers were behind the abduction in Katsina.”
Continue reading...Mines laid by the jihadist group and and other militant organisations in the north-east are a lethal threat to internally displaced people
As food shortages worsen due to drought and the economic insecurity of lockdown, one in three children are malnourished
Baby Grace lies quietly in the clinical ward under the watchful gaze of her mother, Rose Mapeka. Her parched skin, which hangs off her tiny body, and the milkiness of her eyes, show only too clearly that the 18-month-old is undernourished.
Grace is lucky to be alive. Health workers in Kuwadzana, a high-density suburb in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, identified her as needing immediate hospital treatment for malnutrition during their home visits to the city’s nursing mothers.
Continue reading...Mines laid by Boko Haram and other groups leave millions at risk, particularly in Borno state where insurgency most acute
More than 100 people were killed or injured by landmines across north-east Nigeria in the first three months of this year, according to a new report.
Mines laid during the conflict between Boko Haram, other armed groups and the Nigerian army left 408 people dead and 644 injured between January 2016 and August this year, says the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a landmine clearance charity. Since March 2018, the country has recorded an average of five landmine casualties a week. Actual numbers are thought to be higher due to underreporting. The first 15 weeks of this year saw one casualty a day.
Continue reading...Dutch PM to speak to the nation tonight; ministers to recommend restrictions are extended in Poland
The US has reported 16,113,148 cases of new coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, with 1,476,230 cases reported in the last seven days.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Monday that 17,184 people had died from Covid-19 in the previous week, taking the total US death toll so far to 298,266.
Turkish president has said Turkey will impose a five-day full lockdown beginning on 31 December, as official data showed new daily coronavirus deaths hit a record 229.
Recep Tayip Erdoğan, speaking after a cabinet meeting, said the stay-home order would begin at 9pm on New Year’s Eve and run to 4 January.
Continue reading...The extraordinary shock of people power gave way to a bitter backlash. So where to now?
A decade ago this week, a young fruit seller called Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight outside the provincial headquarters of his home town in Tunisia, in protest against local police officials who had seized his cart and produce.
Accounts of the 26-year-old’s shocking act rippled through his homeland, where hundreds of thousands of people who had also been humiliated by an atrophied state and its officials now found the courage to raise their voices.
Continue reading...Some students ran for safety as police exchanged fire with bandits ‘armed with AK-47 rifles’
Hundreds of Nigerian students are missing after gunmen attacked a secondary school in the country’s north-western Katsina state, police have confirmed.
The Government Science secondary school in Kankara was attacked on Friday night by a large group of bandits who shot “with AK-47 rifles”, a state police spokesman said.
Continue reading...Germany introduces new restrictions to combat spread of virus; Turkey changes counting method, almost doubling cases
Here are some striking images of Dr. Luigi Cavanna visiting his patients in their homes in small towns and rural areas in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy.
He checks his patients’ oxygen levels, uses ultrasound to scan their lungs and tests them and their relatives for coronavirus.
Residents in Jersey care homes are receiving Covid vaccinations a day earlier than expected, the island’s government has announced.
Officials said the government made the call to start on Sunday rather than Monday “in view of the positive Covid cases in care homes”, which have seen a recent 400% surge, from four on Thursday to 19 by Saturday.
Continue reading...President Museveni promised much when he took power but, 34 years on, violence and poverty are rife
To survive as an opposition politician in Uganda, you have to hit the campaign trail wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet. You must be ready for war. Ugandan musician turned opposition politician Robert Kyagulanyi, also known as Bobi Wine, discovered this when he decided to challenge incumbent Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’s 34-year stranglehold on power at elections scheduled for 14 January. On the first day Kyagulanyi stepped out to campaign, he wore his vest over red overalls that made him look like a prisoner.
“I do not dress like this because I want to. I dress like this because there are people after my life. They think that by killing me, they will have it better. They do not know that if I die, it will only get worse,” he told the crowd outside his house.
Continue reading...Fleeing Ethiopia and Somalia, refugees made their way across the world’s busiest migration route, only to be left in the hands of smugglers in a lawless land
Saudi Arabia was Tigrit’s dream: a place where she could find work as a cleaner or maid, and send money back to her husband and young daughter in Ethiopia. Now, like hundreds of thousands of East Africans who have left home and travelled across the Red Sea in search of a better life, she finds herself stranded in Yemen instead.
“We’re stuck. I don’t have food or money for phone credit to call home. I don’t have anything,” she said, sitting on the floor in a building site with no electricity or running water on the edge of the desert.
Continue reading...The religious branch of the co-ruling PJD party described the move as ‘deplorable’
Morocco’s main Islamist groups rejected the government’s plan to normalise ties with Israel, following a deal brokered by the United States.
The religious branch of the co-ruling PJD party, the Unity and Reform Movement (MUR), said in a statement on Saturday the move was “deplorable” and denounced “all attempts at normalisation and the Zionist infiltration”.
Continue reading...About 400 pupils thought missing or kidnapped after gunmen stormed secondary school in Kankara
Bandits armed with assault rifles attacked a secondary school in Nigeria’s north-western Katsina state late on Friday, police said, and two local people told Reuters hundreds of students were missing.
The gunmen stormed the Government Science secondary school in Kankara district at about 9.40pm, and police at the scene returned fire, allowing some students to run for safety, police spokesman Gambo Isah said in a statement.
Continue reading...Concerns surface that people might avoid having jabs as result of comments by Mogoeng Mogoeng
South Africa’s chief justice has dismissed concerns that he may be endangering people’s health by linking coronavirus vaccines to a “satanic agenda”.
The comment by Mogoeng Mogoeng marked the first time since the outbreak of the pandemic that a senior judge had aired such preoccupations.
Continue reading...Police have warned against increased vigilantism after spate of sexual abuse cases
A father who was reportedly beaten by a mob after he allegedly killed the man who attacked his daughter has died in hospital, in a case that has drawn attention to Malawi’s rise in reported rape cases.
The death of the 47-year-old man in Malawi’s capital Lilongwe was reported on Thursday. He had allegedly been beaten and left for dead by a vigilante mob, said to be relatives and friends of the man he had killed.
Continue reading...Annual global terror index highlights attacks in Mozambique and DRC and says human rights abuses are driving violence
Militant violence and abuses by security forces have made sub-Saharan Africa the riskiest region in the world for business and investors, a new report says.
Seven of the world’s 10 highest-risk countries for militant violence are in the region with significant deteriorations in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to the annual Terrorism Intensity Index released on Friday by risk consultants Verisk Maplecroft.
Continue reading...Rejection of Mohamed al-Tayeb’s asylum case comes amid changes to immigration policy critics say are an attempt to placate far right
A Sudanese singer whose television appearance on The Voice brought him threats from security officers is facing deportation from the Netherlands, where he has lived for two years.
Mohamed al-Tayeb, 30, who appeared on the Arabic version of the show in 2015, has been told his request for asylum had been rejected. The Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) said it did not believe he would be harmed if he returned to Sudan, following the ousting of Omar al-Bashir last year, but critics accuse the Dutch government of playing politics over anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Continue reading...Struggle of murdered student’s parents has come to symbolise broader fight for justice
When the body of the Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni was found by the side of a Cairo highway in 2016, his mother later said she only recognised her son’s corpse by “the tip of his nose”, as he had suffered such extensive torture.
Almost five years after Regeni’s body was found, and following years of investigation by the Italian authorities, prosecutors in Rome on Thursday charged four men with Regeni’s kidnapping, including one accused of grievous bodily harm.
Continue reading...Analysis: prosecutions seen as opportunity for national security apparatus to come under scrutiny
Almost five years after the mutilated corpse of Giulio Regeni was found on the outskirts of Cairo in February 2016, Italian prosecutors have charged four members of Egypt’s national security agency over his kidnapping and murder.
For those working to uncover the truth about how Regeni died and why Egyptian security forces had entrapped the student in a web of surveillance, it was a day heavy with emotion.
Continue reading...US president’s announcement marks fourth Arab-Israel agreement in four months
Israel and Morocco have made a deal to normalise relations, Donald Trump has announced, marking the fourth agreement between an Arab government and the Jewish state this year.
“Another HISTORIC breakthrough today!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco have agreed to full diplomatic relations – a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!”
Continue reading...Cairo killing of doctoral student in 2016 long believed to be work of Egypt’s security forces
Prosecutors in Italy have charged four members of Egypt’s national security agency over the kidnapping and murder of the Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni in Cairo.
Tariq Saber, Athar Kamel Mohamed Ibrahim, Capt Uhsam Helmi and Maj Magdi Ibrahim Abdelal Sharif are accused of kidnapping the young student in 2016, and Sharif is also accused of grievous bodily harm and murder.
Continue reading...