Subpoenas to Southwest Airlines and American Airlines seek information about flight crew training and 737 Max software MCAS
Lawyers representing families of passengers killed in a Boeing 737 Max crash in Ethiopia in March are set to issue subpoenas to Southwest Airlines and American Airlines, the two biggest US operators of the jet, according to documents seen by Reuters.
The subpoenas will be issued over the next couple of days, the lawyers separately told Reuters.
Continue reading...Mahamadou Issoufou calls for ‘responsible parenthood’ as he warns population boom will undermine climate adaptation
A misreading of Islam led to Niger’s explosive birth rate, hampering the country’s fight to adapt to the climate crisis and preserve its shrinking resources, the country’s president has said.
This nexus of issues is likely to have an increasingly direct impact on European politics, said Mahamadou Issoufou, who warned warned that migration may exceed the levels it reached during the second world war.
Continue reading...An NGO has recut and overdubbed a Venezuelan telenovela to raise awareness of sexual health
Uganda has one of the highest birth rates in the world. It also has some of the most dedicated soap opera watchers anywhere in Africa.
Now a group of enterprising Ugandans is aiming to tackle the former through the medium of the latter. Soap operas are expensive to make, however, so they plan instead to “hack” a Venezuelan import, recutting the existing series and overdubbing it with Ugandan actors.
Continue reading...Unqualified missionary denies she sought to portray herself as a doctor at centre where at least 105 children died
Zuriah Namutamba still has questions about how her grandson died. About whether the actions of a young American woman, a missionary without any medical training, contributed to Twalali Kifabi’s death.
Zuriah is not the only relative in Uganda demanding answers over the work of the US missionary organisation Serving His Children (SHC) and its founder, Renee Bach, who has now left the country.
Continue reading...New video footage reveals the world's fastest ants galloping across the scorching sand of the Sahara at speeds approaching one metre per second, which is the equivalent of a house cat tearing about at 120mph.
Researchers have found that at full pelt the Saharan silver ants can travel 108 times their body length per second in gallops that brought all six legs off the ground at once
Continue reading...Under charismatic prime minister Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s capital is undergoing its most radical facelift in a generation
“Here there used to be a lot of shops, you know, women selling bread and tea,” says Woinshet Fanta, shuffling past the rusted railway track in a long floral skirt. On the other side of the road is a field littered with assorted machinery.
“There used to be an oil depot there, but now it’s closed,” she says. “They say it’s going to become a museum and a park.” The mother of four circles back towards the empty plot behind the station: “And this one is Dubai now.”
Continue reading...Parliamentarians seek to resubmit bill to introduce capital sentences for gay sex
MPs in Uganda are to push for new laws to make homosexual acts punishable by death.
James Nsaba Buturo, an MP, said parliamentarians wanted to retable a bill ruled unconstitutional by a court in 2014 that would introduce capital sentences for gay sex.
Continue reading...Thousands take to streets after exit polls give conservative academic more than 70% of the vote
A low-profile, conservative law professor has beaten a charismatic media magnate released from prison last week in Tunisia’s presidential election runoff.
In a contest that reflected Tunisia’s shifting post-revolution political landscape, Kais Saied scooped more than 70% of the vote, according to two exit polls, more than 40 points ahead of Nabil Karoui.
Continue reading...Exit poll points to victory for low-profile law professor Kais Saied over fellow outsider Nabil Karoui
Tunisians are voting on Sunday in a runoff presidential election between a low-profile law professor and a charismatic media magnate who was released from prison earlier this week.
The Maghreb country, often held up as the lone success story of the Arab spring, appears set to successfully carry out its second-ever presidential elections, with an earlier round of voting winnowing the field from 26 candidates to the two self-styled outsiders, the lawyer Kais Saied and the businessman Nabil Karoui.
Continue reading...Jihadist group al-Shabaab suspected of placing roadside device
Several Kenyan police officers were killed on Saturday when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb near the Somali border, authorities said.
“Unfortunately we lost some officers and the vehicle they were travelling in has been severely damaged,” said the Kenyan chief of police, Hilary Mutyambai, without giving an exact number of fatalities.
Continue reading...The deadly virus wreaking havoc in Asia has been detected in Timor-Leste, just 680km north of Darwin
One month ago a particularly virulent strain of African swine fever – which has been wreaking havoc in Asia since it was detected in China last year and could potentially kill up to 25% of the world’s pig population – landed on Australia’s doorstep.
The disease was detected just 680km north of Darwin, in Timor-Leste. Australian biosecurity agencies which had been screening major airports and mail distributors for illegally imported pork products redoubled their efforts.
Continue reading...The decision to honour the Ethiopian prime minister recognises the astonishing changes he has pushed through. But the country’s progress remains precarious
The list of Nobel peace prize winners encompasses the good and great, but also a few more curious nominees. Some were controversial from the first. Barack Obama was honoured before he had a chance to do anything significant with his office. Henry Kissinger was given the prize when he had already done far too much; the award, said one observer, made political satire obsolete. In other cases, history has proved unkind. Aung San Suu Kyi was recognised in 1991, as a dissident who had long campaigned for democracy and freedom. But she became head of Myanmar’s government and, though she has no power over the military, her silence as it carried out mass killings of Rohingya Muslims led many to call – unsuccessfully – for her prize to be revoked.
So handing this year’s prize to a leader who has been in power for just 18 months, and was little known before that, is a bold move. Yet the Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, has an astonishing amount to show for his time in office. The award is primarily to recognise his work to secure peace and international cooperation, and in particular the deal he signed with Eritrea last summer, which ended a nearly 20-year military stalemate following a long border war. The domestic changes he has effected in a highly repressive country are equally impressive. Half his cabinet is female, as is his chief justice – and the head of the election board, a former exiled dissident. Bans on opposition parties have been lifted, thousands of political prisoners have been freed, and senior officials have been arrested for corruption and human rights abuses. It is all the more astonishing given that he was appointed by the instinctively autocratic Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. His remarkable record, however brief, has turned scepticism about his promises into “Abiymania”.
Continue reading...Wildfires and an encroaching population are threatening grasslands that host some of the world’s rarest species
Conservationist Getachew Assefa points across the valley. “It started close to the mist over there, by the most spectacular viewpoint,” he says. “Almost all the grassland was burnt. All of that plateau and the steep cliff over there.”
Six months after wildfires torched this part of Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains, the scars are healing: heather and grass have returned to carpet the hilltop, brightened by the yellow daisies which bloom after the long rains. On the near side of the valley lie barley fields, rippling in the wind.
Continue reading...Prosecutors criticised over jailing of Eritrean man wrongly identified as human trafficker
Italian investigators who pursued a case against an Eritrean man accused of being one of the world’s most-wanted human traffickers in a case of mistaken identity were guilty of “serious neglect”, judges in Sicily have said.
In a 400-page judicial report, the court of assizes traced the three-year ordeal of Medhanie Tesfamariam Berhe, a 30-year-old refugee released from an Italian jail in July.
Continue reading...Vessel carrying people from sub-Saharan Africa hit rough seas near island of Lampedusa
At least 13 women have died and eight children are missing after a boat capsized in rough seas off the Italian island of Lampedusa on Sunday night as a patrol vessel attempted to save it.
Italian authorities have rescued 22 survivors from the boat, which was carrying about 50 people. Only four of the 13 recovered bodies have been identified by surviving family members, including that of a 12-year-old girl.
Continue reading...Security forces stop minors at checkpoints and check phones for ‘political’ material
More than 100 children are among thousands of people detained in Egypt in an effort to prevent further protests against the rule of Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi.
At least 3,120 people have been arrested since hundreds of people took to the streets on 20 September, according to the Cairo-based NGO the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms. Amnesty International said at least 111 children were arrested in the crackdown, “some as young as 11, with several detained on their way home from school”.
Continue reading...Photos taken by official photographers show how Ugandan dictator exploited media ‘to amplify ego and political will’
For decades he has been reviled as a simple-minded and sadistic dictator, or lampooned as a clownish thug.
Now tens of thousands of newly discovered images have shown how Idi Amin exploited cutting-edge media technology, populism and radical ideologies to maintain his bloody grip on power in the 1970s.
Continue reading...Deadly assault on gold mine follows spate of violence in region south of Sahara blamed on Islamist insurgency
Around 20 people have been killed in an attack on a gold mining site in northern Burkina Faso, security sources said, the latest in a spate of violence blamed on a jihadist insurgency across the region.
The attack on Friday took place in Soum province not far from where alleged jihadists blew up a bridge linking two northern towns in mid-September
Continue reading...Young people in the global south have been tackling the climate crisis for years. They should be celebrated too
Ridhima Pandey was just nine years old in 2017 when she filed a lawsuit against the Indian government for failing to take action against climate change. Pandey’s fierce, astounding passion for the environment is not accidental. Her mother is a forestry guard and her father an environmental activist; and the whole family was displaced by the Uttarakhand floods of 2013, which claimed hundreds of lives.
In Kenya Kaluki Paul Mutuku has been actively involved in conservation since college, where he was a member of an environmental awareness club, and has been a member of the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change since 2015. Raised in rural Kenya by a single mother, Mutuku’s vigorous activism, like Pandey’s, was inspired by the direct challenges his family (and wider community) faced from the effects of climate change: “Growing up, I witnessed mothers cover kilometres to fetch water,” he says.
Continue reading...Abd al-Rahman Milad attended 2017 talks between intelligence officials and Libyan coastguard
One of the world’s most notorious human traffickers attended a meeting in Sicily with Italian intelligence officials to discuss controls on migrant flows from Libya.
Abd al-Rahman Milad, known as Bija, took part in a meeting with Italian officials and a delegation from the Libyan coastguard at Cara di Mineo, in Catania, one of the biggest migrant reception centres in Europe, on 11 May 2017.
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