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Ahead of Uganda's January 14 election, President Yoweri Museveni's government continues to limit the opposition's voices by blocking campaigning, enabling an environment that cannot facilitate a fair and free vote, according to rights groups.
Critics have called it a stunt to invite sympathy. Yet Amuriat says campaigning without shoes is a protest and that those who do not get its symbolism are missing a point.
Uganda is due to hold a general election on January 14. Amuriat and another opposition candidate, Bobi Wine have had their rallies violently dispersed by security forces or been arrested.
In mid-November, scores of people were killed as security forces attempted to quell protests against the arrest and detention of Bobi Wine.
Police has accused the candidates of addressing huge gatherings in contravention of regulations on COVID-19 prevention.
Swollen feet
In an interview with one of the dailies in Uganda, Amuriat said his feet hurt a lot and has to pour cold water on them in between campaign stops for some relief.
Doctors have cautioned him on the potential danger of contracting tetanus from cuts to his feet.
Yet Amuriat remains adamant. He says by refusing to wear shoes, he’s standing in solidarity with people whose wealth and opportunities have been stolen by the country’s longtime ruler Yoweri Museveni.
JUST IN: FDC presidential candidate Patrick Amuriat has been arrested at the border of Rubirizi and Bushenyi districts. The reason for his arrest is yet to be known📹 @MukhayeD#MonitorUpdates#UGDecides2021 pic.twitter.com/xopK4FMoD0
— Daily Monitor (@DailyMonitor) December 4, 2020
Museveni, in power since 1986 is seeking a new term. In 2017, he changed the constitution to remove age limits that would have stopped him from seeking re-election.
FDC is Uganda’s largest opposition party. In 3 previous elections, the party fronted veteran activist and retired army colonel Kizza Besigye for president.
Human Rights Watch has said that the shadowy arrest of the hero of the \"Hotel Rwanda\" film amounted to an \"enforced disappearance\", demanding a full account of how he returned to the country.
[HRW] Human Rights Watch thanks the Commission of Inquiry for a much-needed update on the grave human rights violations that Burundian state agents, most notably the National Intelligence Service and administrative authorities, and members of the Imbonerakure, have committed against the population since May 2019.
Guinea's main oppositon party published Friday a list of 46 people, aged between 3 and 70 years, killed during the repression of demonstrations after the October 18 election, officially won by the incumbent Alpha Condé.
Condé was declared re-elected on October 24 by the Electoral Commission for a controversial third term with 59.5% of the vote, but three of his opponents, including opposition leader Cellou Dalein Diallo, are contesting the results before the Constitutional Court, whose decision is expected on Saturday.
Diallo's party, the Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG), denounced in a statement a \"wave of terror\" orchestrated by the government between October 19 and November 3.
\"The provisional toll of this repression is 46 dead, nearly 200 wounded by gunfire, about a hundred arrests and extensive material damage,\" according to the UFDG.
The opposition has so far reported a death toll of at least 27, while for the government, the post-election violence resulted in 21 deaths, including members of the security forces.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) Africa Officer Ida Sawyer on Twitter on October 24 accused Guinean security forces of killing \"at least 8 people, including 3 children.
Amnesty International for its part accused the same security forces of firing live ammunition at demonstrators, without giving a detailed account.
The Ministries of Security and Territorial Administration did not immediately respond to the multiple requests for a reaction from the AFP to the UFDG document.
This document includes a list of names, usually with age, profession, circumstances of death, contacts of a relative, and photos showing these people, dead or alive. In about fifteen cases, these are photos of bodies showing traces of violence.
Most of the presumed victims are young men and women between 15 and 30 years old: motorcycle cab drivers, mechanics, students...
The youngest are a boy and a girl of 3 years old, Mamadou Midiaou Diallo and Mariatou Bah, and the oldest Mamouna Camara, a housewife of 70 years old.
The UFDG also states that \"the overwhelming majority of the victims (...) belong to the same ethnic group as the opposition leader,\" in a country where community affiliations play an important role in elections.
According to the latest Global Peace Index (GPI), Rwanda rose four positions from the past year, ranking 81st out of 163 countries studied worldwide, with an overall score of 2.049.
The rise also makes Rwanda the fourteenth most peaceful country in Africa, from the 17th position in the previous report.
According to the report, the economic cost of peace in Rwanda was $1.4 billion or 5 percent of its GDP.
Regionally, Rwanda is the second most peaceful country after Tanzania which has maintained the top position since 2008.
However, the report notes that countries able to maintain peace have higher resilience to absorb, adapt and recover from shocks, such as COVID-19 and the ensuing recession.
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Alexa, play 2 Chainz’s “Birthday Song,” because the former “Love & Hip Hop Atlanta” reality star Tommie Lee has been turning it up all month for her birthday behavior on Friday, June 19.
While bipolar disorder — once known as manic depression — is a serious condition, fans didn’t seem to mind that Lee was asserting that she has a mental illness.
“Way too 1k ta kick it 2 virgils #tommiesh–,” Lee captioned the gallery of photos of herself sashaying through the hotel exit June 9.
Fans weren’t the only ones left checking out Lee’s bold and sultry look, as the doorman in the photo could be seen ogling Lee’s figure.
From her recent posts, it looks like Lee plans to celebrate her birthday all month long.
Gribaudo recalls spotting a familiar-looking elephant in a similar Buenos Aires circus tent seven years later.
The May road trip to Elephant Sanctuary Brazil was four days long, and almost a waste of diesel: At the border crossing from Argentina, a COVID-19 health order had shut down all traffic for nearly a month.
Blais says when Rana, a 60-year-old female elephant, met Mara, she “was incredibly vocal—a lot of bellowing, rumbling, signs of excitement and enthusiasm.
Brazil appeared to tiptoe close to that standard last year, when a judge ruled that state authorities can’t levy a tax of 50,000 Reals (about $9,500) on Elephant Sanctuary Brazil after it took in an elephant named Ramba.
The post MEET AN ANIMAL: Mara the elephant found sanctuary after 50 years in circuses and zoos appeared first on Zenger News.
By AARON MORRISON and KAT STAFFORD, Associated Press
In just about any other year, Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the day in 1865 that all enslaved Black people learned they had been freed from bondage, would be marked by African American families across the nation with a cookout, a parade, a community festival, a soulful rendition of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”
But in 2020, as the coronavirus ravishes Black America disproportionately, as economic uncertainty wrought by the pandemic strains Black pocketbooks, and as police brutality continues to devastate Black families, Juneteenth is a day of protest.
And like the nationwide protests that followed the deaths of Black men and women at the hands of police in Minnesota, Kentucky and Georgia, Juneteenth celebrations are likely to be remarkably more multiracial.
“I think this year is going to be exciting to make White people celebrate with us that we’re free,” said 35-year-old Army veteran David J. Hamilton III, who has organized a Juneteenth march and protest through a predominantly Black, Hispanic and immigrant neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York.
Hamilton, a Black man, said this year is his first treating “Juneteenth with the same fanfare as the Fourth of July or Memorial Day.”
A new Trump executive order threatening the court’s operations has been condemned by prominent global institutions and individuals as it appears to give cover to human rights abuses committed in the course of U.S. foreign wars while demanding accountability from foreign countries in similar circumstances.
Param-Preet Singh of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, praised the decision of the ICC to greenlight an investigation of brutal crimes in Afghanistan, reaffirming the court’s essential role for victims when all other doors to justice are closed.
After years of collecting information on the Afghanistan war, the court’s chief prosecutor, Ms. Fatou Bensouda of The Gambia, said that enough information had been found to prove that U.S. forces “committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence” in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, and later in clandestine C.I.A. facilities in Poland, Romania and Lithuania.
She requested permission to open an investigation into claims of war crimes and crimes against humanity attributed to the U.S. military and intelligence personnel, the Taliban and Afghan forces.
Shaharzad Akbar, the head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said the court had made the right decision to proceed over U.S. objections.
East Africa is bracing for a third outbreak of desert locusts, with billions of the destructive insects about to hatch and threaten food supplies in a region already facing damaging rains and the coronavirus pandemic.
Spurred by favourable weather conditions, record numbers of locusts descended on East Africa since late 2019.
“Tens of thousands of hectares of cropland and pasture have already been damaged across the Horn and East Africa,” the International Rescue Committee said in a report this month, noting even a small swarm could devour the same amount of food in a day as approximately 35,000 people.
In Ethiopia, locusts destroyed 1.3 million hectares of grazing land and nearly 200,000 hectares of crops between January and April, resulting in the loss of 350,000 tonnes of cereals, the East Africa regional organisation, said in a June report.
So far East African neighbours Rwanda and Burundi have been spared the insects, which can migrate 150 kilometres in a day.
Since Magufuli was elected in 2015, Lissu has made it his job to fearlessly challenge the autocratic leader - and more than a dozen bullet wounds were not enough to shut him up.
Almost three years ago, Lissu, the former president of the Tanganyika Law Society (TLS), was en route to his home in Tanzania's capital Dodoma at around 11am for a lunch break during a parliamentary session.
The changes to Tanzanian society were \"immediate\" following Magufuli's election win almost five years ago, Lissu says.
According to Lissu, Magufuli, quite simply, needs the money to implement dozens of national megaprojects he has spearheaded, while Magufuli's fledgling attempts at revamping Air Tanzania, the country's flag carrier, have alone cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
What's unique under Magufuli, according to Lissu, is that the arrests are being made solely for criticising the president.
Following the announcement last Saturday of presidential election results in Malawi by the country’s electoral commission, the African Union Commission has published this statement, congratulating the winner – Dr Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera:
“The Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, wishes to congratulate His Excellency Dr Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera upon his election as President of the Republic of Malawi following the successful conduct of fresh presidential election in the Republic of Malawi on 23 June 2020, and the subsequent official election results published on Saturday 27 June 2020 by the Malawi Electoral Commission.
“The Chairperson commends the outgoing President His Excellency Peter Mutharika for his stewardship of the Republic of Malawi over the years.
“The Chairperson reaffirms the African Union’s commitment to supporting Malawians in their quest to strengthen democratic and participatory governance and ensure sustainable socio-economic development in the country.”
Dr Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera defeated incumbent Peter Mutharika with 58.57% of the vote in last Tuesday’s poll, the electoral commission announced late on Saturday.
In February, Malawi’s constitutional court annulled Mr Mutharika’s victory in the May 2019 election, citing vote tampering.
They are prompting “very real conversations I didn’t think the country has ever really had because none of them are comfortable,” said Sydney Kamlager, a member of the Legislative Black Caucus in the California state Assembly.
While advocates in California have celebrated a string of recent legislative victories, lawmakers in New Hampshire refused to make an exception to their rules for a Democratic lawmaker who sought to introduce a bill examining racial bias and discrimination in the state’s corrections, judicial and police systems.
In Massachusetts, a Democratic lawmaker wants to overhaul state education spending to funnel more money to schools with high numbers of minority students.
On Thursday, the state Senate passed a bill to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement in the California State University system, the country’s largest four-year public university with 23 campuses and more than 481,000 students.
Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, a Republican, told reporters he agrees racism is a public health crisis and that his chamber is taking the proposed resolution seriously.
Over 40 stadiums and arenas have been transformed into polling sites in an effort to combat Black voter suppression.
[VOA] Residents of Nairobi's Mathare slum marched Monday to protest police brutality in the enforcement of a curfew that is part of the effort to contain the spread of COVID-19.
Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara met with a main opposition rival on Wednesday and promised to pursue talks aimed at calming a standoff over the October 31 election, which has ignited clashes killing scores of people.
Ouattara met with opposition candidate and former president Henri Konan Bedie in Abidjan.
The election handed Ouaterra a third term, which some say violates a two-term constitutional limit.
\"It was a first meeting... to break the ice and restore trust,\" said Ouattara.
\" And we agreed to meet again very soon to continue this dialogue, which has got off to a good start and mutual trust is restored.\"
Both Ouattara, 78, a nd Bedie said the meeting was an important first step but did not indicate that they had made any concessions.
Bedie, 86, said: “In the days and weeks ahead, we will call each other and meet so that the country becomes what it was before.”
Ouattara was declared victor of the election with more than 94 percent of the vote, which was boycotted by the main opposition.
Up to 85 people have been killed in the clashes that ensued after Ouattara decided to run for a third term.
More than 8,000 people have fled the country to seek refuge in neighbouring states, fearing the violence last seen after the 2010 election, which killed more than 3,000 people, could reignite.
Fighters from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) group, which was driven out of Uganda in the late 1990s, attacked Samboko village, about 100km (60 miles) southwest of the city of Bunia, Omar Kavota from rights group CEPADHO said on Wednesday.
A day after killing at least 17 in the nearby village of Makutano, ADF members killed at least 40 people with machetes and looted food and valuables early on Tuesday, Kavota added
On the ground, some people have fled and others have given themselves the courage to stay for the moment.
More than 400 people have been killed in attacks attributed to the ADF since the army began an offensive to oust the group from its bases last year, according to the Kivu Security Tracker (KST), a research initiative that maps unrest in the region.
About 200,000 people have fled their homes in Ituri province, where the two villages are located, in the past two months because of the widespread violence by a variety of armed groups.
Last month, 22 people from the Hema community were killed in attacks in the village of Koli in Ituri province, which were blamed on the Cooperative for the Development of Congo – an armed political-religious sect drawn from the Lendu ethnic group.
