Tigran Gambaryan faces allegations of ‘serious criminality’ on behalf of world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange
A Nigerian court has ruled that Tigran Gambaryan, the Binance executive detained on charges of tax evasion and money laundering, can face trial on behalf of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
In a judgment in Abuja on Friday – Gambaryan’s 40th birthday – the presiding judge, Emeka Nwite, denied the American national bail, saying he was likely to abscond.
Continue reading...Robberies, shootings, extortion and rapes have surged since the Rwandan-backed M23 militia cut off the eastern Congolese capital
In broad daylight on 16 April, three armed and uniformed men held up a city centre mobile phone shop.
Threatening staff, they helped themselves to about £700 worth of goods, before making off on a motorbike, disappearing into the busy streets of Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Continue reading...Lawyers urge international court of justice to issue urgent measures over assault on Gaza’s southernmost city
South Africa has asked the international court of justice (ICJ) to urgently order Israel to end its assault on Rafah, halt its military campaign across Gaza, and allow international investigators and journalists into the territory.
In a court hearing, lawyers for South Africa expanded a written request for judges to issue an emergency order to stop the offensive into Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.
Continue reading...Lebohang Kganye blends oral traditions, family photos and theatre in a ‘new and fresh way’ to trace personal history of apartheid era
The South African artist Lebohang Kganye has won the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize for her work that uses large-scale cutouts and elements of set design to trace and depict her family history during the apartheid era.
The Johannesburg-based artist took home the £30,000 prize for her winning exhibition, which is on display at the Photographers’ Gallery in central London and is called Haufi nyana? I’ve come to take you home.
Continue reading...Petition launched to halt mass ceremony that organisers say is for 100 orphans whose parents were killed by gangs
Human rights activists in Nigeria have launched a petition to stop a plan to push 100 girls and young women into marriage in a mass ceremony, which has caused outrage in the west African country.
The plan, sponsored by Abdulmalik Sarkindaji, the speaker of the national assembly in the largely Muslim north-western state of Niger, were criticised by Nigeria’s women’s affairs minister, Uju Kennedy Ohanenye. She said she would seek a court injunction to stop the ceremony next week and establish if any of the girls were minors.
Continue reading...Discovery of the branch, which ran alongside 31 pyramids, could solve mystery of blocks’ transportation
Scientists have discovered a long-buried branch of the Nile River that once flowed alongside more than 30 pyramids in Egypt, potentially solving the mystery of how ancient Egyptians transported the massive stone blocks to build the monuments.
The 40-mile-long (64km) river branch, which ran by the Giza pyramid complex among other wonders, was hidden under desert and farmland for millennia, according to a study revealing the find on Thursday.
Continue reading...With a widespread telecoms blackout already in place, emergency help and humanitarian aid at risk if satellite service withdrawn, say NGOs
Nearly 100 humanitarian groups in Sudan have warned Elon Musk he risks “collectively punishing” millions of Sudanese by shutting down his vital Starlink satellite internet service in the war-ravaged country.
Sudan has been grappling with a widespread telecommunications blackout for several months, with many aid groups using Starlink to operate during the humanitarian crisis which the UN has warned is the largest in decades.
Continue reading...UK and Rwanda agree deal to extend cohort of those eligible to be forcibly removed to east African country
Tens of thousands of people who have been refused asylum in the UK have been added to the group of people at risk of being forcibly removed to Rwanda, the Home Office has announced.
The UK and Rwandan governments have agreed a deal to extend the cohort of those eligible to be forcibly removed to the east African country to refused asylum seekers. Lawyers have condemned the development and said it would drive asylum seekers underground.
Continue reading...Anger over Israel’s seizure of Palestinian side of crossing raises fears Cairo may downgrade relations
Israel and Egypt are embroiled in a growing diplomatic row over the Rafah border crossing after Israel’s takeover of the Gaza side of the crossing, amid warnings Cairo may be planning to downgrade relations.
In recent days Egypt has announced it will no longer participate in allowing the transit of aid into Gaza and said it planned to join the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel at the UN’s top court.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Last two fugitives are deemed to be dead, ending a remarkable exercise in international justice
The war crimes tribunal for Rwanda has accounted for the last remaining fugitives indicted for genocide, bringing to an end the court’s 29-year mission to deliver justice for the 1994 slaughter that killed more than 800,000 Rwandans.
The historic moment passed without drama, not with an arrest or the exhumation of a body, but in a video conference on 30 April between the tribunal’s prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, and the two leaders of its fugitive tracking team, dedicated to resolving the cold cases left in the wake of the genocide.
Continue reading...Family law has not kept up with social shifts, with marital rape, child marriage and lack of property and custody rights persistent problems, research finds
Discriminatory family laws across parts of Africa are stalling progress on women’s rights in some countries, according to new research.
The human rights organisation Equality Now studied family law and practices in 20 African countries and found progress in recent decades, but said inequalities persisted in marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance and property laws.
Continue reading...Human-caused climate crisis brought soaring temperatures across Asia, from Gaza to Delhi to Manila
The record-breaking heatwave that scorched the Philippines in April would have been impossible without the climate crisis, scientists have found. Searing heat above 40C (104F) struck across Asia in April, causing deaths, water shortages, crop losses and widespread school closures.
The extreme heat was made 45 times more likely in India and five times more likely in Israel and Palestine, the study found. The scientists said the high temperatures compounded the already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where displaced people are living in overcrowded shelters with little access to water.
Continue reading...Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine says in interview that US troops ‘stayed on our soil, doing nothing while terrorists killed people’
Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, Niger’s prime minister, has blamed the US for a rupture in an important military pact between the two countries that allows US forces to station in the west African nation.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Zeine said US officials had attempted to dictate which countries Niger could align with, had failed to justify the presence of US troops in the country while “doing nothing” to counter an Islamist insurgency in the region.
Continue reading...Conflicts in Gaza, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have led to a total of 68m IDPs across the world
Conflict has forced more than 68 million people to leave their homes as of the end of 2023 – the highest figure since data became available 15 years ago.
Natural disasters made a further 7.7 million people homeless, pushing the total number of internally displaced people (IDPs) to a record 75.9 million, according to figures published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Darfur is on the brink of another disaster as fighting intensifies around El Fasher, the last city in the region not controlled by the Rapid Support Forces
At the Abu Shouk camp for displaced people on the northern fringe of El Fasher in North Darfur, about seven people a day arrive with injuries sustained from nearby clashes between fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and groups allied to the Sudanese army.
For months now the RSF have been besieging El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, trapping a million people in the last major population centre in Sudan’s vast Darfur region not under paramilitary control.
Continue reading...The Labour leader confirmed he would scrap the Rwanda scheme in his Dover speech, then confusingly blurred his own argument
Could Keir Starmer “Make Asylum Boring Again”? That would be the ultimate test of success for his claim that he can grip the issue that has caused Rishi Sunak more trouble than any other. Starmer’s message is that he is no less committed to securing the borders and stopping the small boats crossing the Channel, but that achieving this requires a serious plan to tackle smuggling gangs and fix the asylum system in Britain too. So how different is Labour’s plan – and would it work?
Labour’s analysis should be that making asylum work depends on blending control and compassion. The Dover speech was a political exercise in asymmetric triangulation. Robust messages about control were loudly proclaimed. More liberal ideas about a rules-based system could be found, but mostly by reading between the lines.
Starmer did confirm that Labour would scrap the Rwanda scheme. Labour had seemed to wobble in the face of premature Conservative confidence that Rwanda is already working to deter. Ironically, the biggest risk for Sunak’s deterrent argument would come if he finally gets to test it practically. Send the first flights to Rwanda this summer and further arrivals across the Channel will surely outpace any removals 10 times over.
There is a clash of principle over asylum. Labour would process the asylum claims of those who arrived without permission. The Conservatives have now passed several laws vowing they will not. Yet ministers are in denial. Whether or not up to 500 people go to Rwanda does not give the government any plan for the next 50,000 people it still claims it intends to remove. So flagship new duties on the home secretary to refuse these claims for ever have not been given legal force – as the courts would strike that out in all those cases where the government has no realistic alternative. Yet the government has ceased to process asylum cases, reversing last year’s success in clearing the historic backlog.
Starmer is right to deny the charge that Labour’s policy is an “amnesty”, since processing the backlog would see some asylum claims granted and others refused. But he confusingly blurs his own argument with a tit-for-tat labelling of government policy as a “Travelodge amnesty”.
Continue reading...Charities and campaign groups are calling on bodies to say they may stop funding country if legislation comes into effect
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are coming under pressure to use their financial might to persuade Ghana to reconsider a proposed law that could lead to anyone who identifies as LGBTQ+ being jailed for three years.
Charities and campaign groups are calling on the global development bodies to tell Ghana they may stop funding the country if the proposed legislation – which will be challenged in the country’s supreme court next week – comes into effect.
Continue reading...Prime minister, Masra, accuses officials of manipulating results that show he won 18.5% of vote to Itno’s 61%
Chad’s military leader, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, has been declared the winner of this week’s presidential election, according to provisional results that have been contested by his main rival, the prime minister, Succès Masra.
The national agency that manages Chad’s election released results of Monday’s vote weeks earlier than planned. The figures showed Itno won with 61% of the vote, and Masra fell far behind in second, on 18.5%. Gunfire erupted in the capital, N’Djamena, after the announcement, though it was unclear if it was celebratory.
Continue reading...Hunters reportedly find five Rwandan men in mangroves on Saibai Island, a known crocodile habitat
As the UK government continues its push to forcibly remove asylum seekers to Rwanda, a group of Rwandan nationals has claimed asylum in Australia after arriving by boat on a remote island.
The five men arrived in Australia by an unconventional route, reportedly flying into the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, to be granted visas on arrival, before travelling thousands of kilometres east to Indonesia’s Papua province, where they crossed the land border it shares with Papua New Guinea (PNG).
Continue reading...As El Fasher stands on the ‘precipice of a massacre’, rights groups call for sanctions after new testimony describes atrocities carried out by RSF paramilitaries in Sudan
Gruesome new testimony details one of the worst atrocities of the year-long Sudanese civil war – the large-scale massacre of civilians as they desperately tried to flee an ethnic rampage in Darfur last summer.
Witnesses describe children, still alive, being “piled up and shot” by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as they attempted to escape the regional capital of El Geneina in June last year during a bout of ethnic violence in which thousands of civilians were killed.
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