News outlets havereported that children were hurt on Thursdaywhen a railing at a stadium in Sierra Leone collapsed as the president and first lady were distributing free sanitary pads.
Social media videos depict people rushing out of a stadium in the city of Bo, many of them carrying what appear to be injured people, according to the AFP news agency.
President Julius Maada Bio tweeted, “My heart goes out to all the children affected and the families of the kids who sustained injuries in the unfortunate incident at the Bo Stadium today.”
“Our medical team is working assiduously to administer medical attention to the injured.”
My heart goes out to all the children affected and the families of the kids that sustained injuries in the unfortunate incident at the Bo Stadium today. I wish all the injured a speedy recovery. 1/2
The number of casualties was not immediately clear.
The accident happened when a “short section of metal guardrail on one of the levels of the stadium came apart“, a statement from the government’s office of the press secretary is quoted as saying.
The activists and politicians were apprehended in a dawn raid two years ago, and they are accused of organising an unofficial primary ahead of a legislative election that was later postponed.
On Monday, Hong Kong’s largest national security trial began with 47 pro-democracy activists and politicians accused of “conspiring to commit subversion” by holding an unofficial public vote in 2020, just days after a new, stringent security law was put into place.
16 people are anticipated to enter not guilty pleas, though that number may change by Monday as defendants consider their options in light of possible sentences.
Those charged include prominent activists “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung and Gordon Ng Ching-hang, who faces potential life imprisonment as one of five people accused of being a “major organiser” of a poll conceived as a way for the democratic camp to choose their strongest candidates for a Legislative Council election that was later postponed.
Defendants who plead guilty will be sentenced after the trial has concluded and include internationally-known activists like Joshua Wong, who has already been convicted on other charges, and Claudia Mo, a former journalist turned legislator. Together, the 47 account for much of what remains of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy leadership after mass protests calling for political reform in 2019 came to an inconclusiveend with the arrival of COVID-19, and the national security law pushed many into exile.
Unofficially on trial is the future of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, said Eric Lai, a non-resident fellow at Georgetown Center for Asian Law, as “pro-democracy activities and participating in the legislature” could be seen as threats to national security in the future.
“The majority of public opinion in the city, the pro-democracy camp, has received more than 60 percent of the vote in the previous decade’s elections and now the government chose to arrest and criminalise all the major leaders in Hong Kong,” Lai told Al Jazeera.
“In a way, it’s a trial for these leaders but also for their supports.”
Only a few of the 47 arrested have secured bail, including former legislator Helena Wong Pik-wan. The prosecutor’s appeal against the decision was rejected [File: Lam Yik/Reuters]
Under the security law, which took effect on June 30, 2020, the defendants face up to three years in prison for conspiracy to commit subversive activities, between three and 10 years imprisonment for “active participation” in the conspiracy, and between 10 years and life imprisonment if they are deemed “principal offenders”.
The latter charge applies only to Ng and four other defendants: former university professor Benny Tai, former legislator Au Nok-hin, and former district councillors Andrew Hiu Ka-yin and Chung Kam-lun.
Tai and Au face some of the most serious charges, according to court documents, for their “clear attempt to subvert the State power, paralyse the operation of the [Hong Kong] Government”, according to prosecutors. Prosecutors also allege the defendants hoped a crackdown on their activities would garner international support and lead to the imposition of sanctions on Hong Kong and Chinese officials.
Media ban
Held in July 2020, the vote was intended as an unofficial “primary” for pro-democracy candidates running in the planned September 2020 Legislative Council election.
Candidates hoped to secure a victory for the democracy camp and use the electoral majority to bring about democratic change in Hong Kong.
Some of the platform echoed demands from the city’s mass protests in 2014 and 2019, including the resignation of then-Chief Executive Carrie Lam, an independent inquiry into allegations of police brutality during the protests and political reform with the aim of introducing universal suffrage for the territory.
Under Hong Kong’s current political system, its leader is chosen by a group of people selected by Beijing and only a portion of its legislative seats are decided by the popular vote.
The July 2020 election drew more than 600,000 voters, many of whom waited in line for hours to take part, but the results were de facto voided when the government announced the legislative election would be delayed for a year due to COVID-19.
Following the poll, as Hong Kong locked down, police swooped on the 47 defendants and six other individuals in a dawn round-up of a kind typically reserved for organised crime groups.
The vast majority of the 47 have been kept in prison since their arrest in January 2021, with bail granted to just 13 people. Due to strict COVID-19 regulations, detained activists were unable to see their families and lawyers, or receive mail, for months.
Some defendants have reportedly been unable to access Statements of Facts detailing the charges levelled against them, so their lawyers have been forced to proceed blindly through the legal system. The case was subject to a media ban that was only lifted in August last year.
William Nee, a researcher and advocacy coordinator atChinese Human Rights Defenders, likens the trial to a “pre-emptive strike” against an entire generation of democracy activists and former legislators who range in age from 24 to 66.
“The charges are absolutely absurd from an international law point of view. People have the right to run for office. Once elected, they have the right to vote how they want. Clearly, Beijing is saying the mere fact you might want to run and cast votes that go against our wishes is a conspiracy to commit subversion is absolutely against international laws and standards,” Nee said.
“That’s what’s in many ways so egregious about this case. It’s a naked assault on democracy in Hong Kong.”
Unpredictable
Under Hong Kong’s common law system, criminal defendants can typically receive a reduction in their sentence of as much as 25 percent for pleading guilty on the first day of trial, but this does not apply to national security trials. Neither does the jury system, with this trial to be heard by a panel of three judges hand-picked by the city’s chief executive.
The trial is expected to last about 90 days with some defendants facing a life term for alleged ‘subversion’ [File: Isaac Lawrence/AFP]
Maya Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch describes the national security system as a “Frankenstein” parallel system carved into Hong Kong’s once respected legal system.
The trial is expected to last about 90 days. It is possible that at the end of it, the accused will receive a reprieve of “time served” for their pre-trial detention but most face a minimum sentence of three years imprisonment.
“Everything is going to be quite unpredictable as we go along. I think what is quite clear is that Beijing is using fairly elaborate legalese to dismantle Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement,” Wang told Al Jazeera.
“Seeing them on trial and being detained is such a cognitive dissonancefor so many people in Hong Kong. It really is a visual representation of repression.”
A few months ago, I survived a lynching: This is how I remember it.
I was out on a walk with a friend in Uyo, one of Southern Nigeria’s fastest-growing cities, when four young men accosted us. They first accused us of being homosexuals – as it happens, we are not, but same-sex relations of any kind are punishable by law in Nigeria.
They then demanded that we surrender our phones. When we tried to defuse the situation by trying to talk to them, the men began to attack us with machetes. My friend escaped, but I wasn’t as lucky.
What unfolded next was a long-dreaded nightmare. The young men attacked me with a barrage of machete strikes, punches, slaps and kicks. Within minutes, my face swelled up, bloodied. As a crowd gathered and people asked questions, the young men lied, claiming that I was a paedophile. I wasn’t surprised. Now that we were out in the open, it made sense to accuse me of something in order to justify this insane attack, this robbery.
‘Funny scene’
The next morning, a local journalist who had witnessed the incident would recount it on Facebook: “Yesterday, I witnessed a very funny scene…A guy was being beaten and manhandled by several other guys in the middle of the road and it caused a traffic gridlock.”
Public brawls are fairly common in Nigeria, so it’s possible for onlookers to observe, bemused, from a distance. But there was nothing funny about the incident.
At the height of the attack, my assailants quickly sought out tyres, a cigarette lighter and diesel – the familiar tools of jungle justice. Here’s how the script usually plays out in such situations: After accused victims have been thrashed, bloodied and perhaps even stripped naked, a large tyre is placed around their body to limit movement – this act is called “necklacing”. Then the victims get a baptism of petrol or diesel and a lit match is thrown at them.
When one of the men charged towards me with a can of diesel, I broke away and tried to latch onto a moving tricycle. It was a recklessly futile effort. The men dragged me down and I fell hard on the road. I was already bleeding from the knees when one of them yanked me up and hit my face hard (my right eye would hurt for weeks after this). He had tripped and fallen after pulling me off the tricycle and was clearly infuriated.
“You’ve wounded me, right?” he said. “I will make sure you die tonight.”
I believed him.
Fire and blood
Central to Nigeria’s context of jungle justice is the role of state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings in creating this unfettered monster. When Nigeria was under military rule, executions of thieves by firing squad would be broadcast into living rooms. Meanwhile, the military increasingly acted with impunity away from the cameras, corruption was rampant and soon it was known that those who wanted justice had to bid for it.
Though democracy returned in 1999, justice didn’t.
In the early 2000s, state governors were unable to curb crime in Nigeriaʼs southeast region. So they hired a brutal vigilante group called the Bakassi Boys and gave them free rein to violently fight crimes, leading to a reign of terror marked by the public lynching of criminal suspects.
As faith in the law wilted, people channelled their hateful frustration towards low-level criminals. Scenes of flaming bodies ringed by frenzied mobs slowly became normal. In 2005, a short video of a 12-year-old boyʼs lynching circulated, shocking Nigerians.
Then on October 5, 2012, four students of the University of Port Harcourt, all between 18 and 20 years old, were lynched in an obscure southern village called Aluu. The young men, who tragically became known as the “Aluu 4”, constantly pleaded for mercy and stated their innocence, even as they were being tortured.
Gory videos of this attack went viral globally. The boys, it turns out, were not thieves as the mob had alleged – they had been set up by a debtor whom they had confronted to pay up. And most importantly, their names became known: Chiadika Biringa, Ugonna Obuzor, Lloyd Toku, and Tekena Elkanah. Outraged over their deaths, students of the University of Port Harcourt attacked local homes in Aluu.
Like many others, I was permanently scarred by the Aluu lynchings.
Defenders of jungle justice in Nigeria often say, “If we don’t beat and kill these criminals, they will bribe the police, go scot-free and return to deal with us. These people are dangerous!”
It is for this reason that survivors of lynching attempts are rare.
Nothing has changed
In March 2022, US President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that now makes lynching a federal hate crime within the United States. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was welcomed for its historic significance, although most Americans saw it as long overdue. Some even asked if lynchings were “still a thing”.
In Nigeria, they definitely are.
A survey in 2014 revealed that 43 percent of Nigerians had witnessed mob violence. According to a report by SB Morgen Intelligence, a Nigerian think tank, at least 391 persons were killed by mobs in the country between January 2019 and May 2022.
Often, I see headlines and social media posts arguing that Nigeria is descending into “chaos and anarchy”. While that might be true, such words serve only to mask the failure of the rule of law that is at the root of the country’s jungle justice – a problem so endemic that only a total overhaul of the present system will solve it. Nigerians are not inherently violent. They have merely lost so much faith in the law that mob action appears more effective.
After the Aluu 4 lynching, an anti-lynching bill was proposed in Nigeriaʼs legislature but fizzled out while it was being deliberated. You see, mob actions rarely ever ruffle the wealthy and powerful.
Perhaps one needs to remind Nigeriaʼs political elite that if they don’t take this seriously, the poor might soon tire of killing each other and turn their focus upon those who steal much more than mobile phones.
Rigorous sensitisation campaigns, an urgent reform of Nigeria’s correctional systems and an emphasis on restitution – not death – as the endpoint of criminal justice are some of the changes Nigeria needs.
At the centre of a mob on that cold July night, I knew better than to beg for mercy. Towards the end of my ordeal, a dark police patrol truck with tinted windows passed by, its occupants unfazed, even when it was clear that something was terribly wrong. The law did not help. The only thing I could do was to keep on asserting my innocence. I told anyone who would hear that I was simply the victim of plain armed robbery. Silently though, I prayed.
Somehow, I was able to convince a few people, until a brave stranger rescued me. Somehow, I survived, and for weeks afterwards, I slowly recovered.
I think of families whose loved ones have been murdered by this strangest and most elusive of killers: a mob that pounces, murders brutally and disappears into thin air. And for what? Because no one trusts the law any longer, because life itself has little value here.
Many people have told me that it was a miracle I made it home alive that night. I agree, even though I am aware that my survival has a dark underside – I can never fully recover.
DISCLAIMER: Independentghana.com will not be liable for any inaccuracies contained in this article. The views expressed in the article are solely those of the author’s, and do not reflect those of The Independent Ghana
Three former police officers and a civilian aredue to be sentenced by a Kenyan court for the 2016 murder of renowned human rights attorney Willie Kimani.
Last year, a jury found the four defendants—Fredrick Leliman, Stephen Cheburet, Sylvia Wanjiku, and Peter Ngugi—guilty of killing Mr. Kimani, his client Josephat Mwendwa, and taxi driver Joseph Muiruri.
The late lawyer’s wife and family have already arrived at the crowded courthouse in Nairobi, the country’s capital.
After being dumped in a river outside of Nairobi, the bodies of Mr. Kimani and the other two victims were discovered.
The lawyer was defending Mr Mwendwa, a motorbike taxi driver who had accused Mr Leliman – one of the three officers found guilty – of shooting him for no reason at a traffic stop in 2015.
Mr Kimani, Mr Mwendwa and Mr Muiruri were last seen on 23 June 2016 at a police station.
Their mutilated bodies were recovered two weeks later in a river almost 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the city.
The sentencing comes at a time when Kenya’s police service is under yet more scrutiny over extrajudicial killings and abductions.
President William Rutohas already disbanded several special units accused of civilian murder and kidnapping.
The latest development in a case that will test whether multinational corporations can be held liable for the deeds of their foreign subsidiaries is the lawsuit filed on Thursday by the UK law firm Leigh Day.
After years of oil spills had contaminated the land and groundwater, the UK Supreme Court permitted a group of 42,500 Nigerian farmers and fishermen to sue Shell in English courts in 2021.
According to the judges at the time, one of the largest energy companies in the world, Shell, could be held accountable for the incident because it had significant control over its Nigerian subsidiary, SPDC.
On Thursday, Leigh Day said it had filed claims on behalf of 11,317 people and 17 institutions including churches and schools from the Ogale community in the Niger Delta for compensation for loss of livelihoods and damage against Shell.
Leigh Day said the claim from Ogale adds to one brought by members of the Bille community in 2015. That brings the total number of villagers seeking compensation from Shell to 13,652.
The claims said oil spills resulting from Shell’s operations in the Niger Delta have destroyed farms, contaminated drinking water and harmed aquatic life. The average life expectancy in the region is 41 years, 10 years lower than the national average.
“The next stage in the case is for a case management hearing to be set in Spring 2023, ahead of the full trial which is likely to occur the following year,” Leigh Day said in a statement.
A Shell spokesperson said the majority of spills related to the Ogale and Bille claims were caused by illegal third-party interference, including pipeline sabotage but that SPDC would continue cleaning affected areas.
“We believe litigation does little to address the real problem in the Niger Delta: oil spills due to crude oil theft, illegal refining and sabotage, with which SPDC is constantly faced and which cause the most environmental damage,” the spokesperson said.
Oil spills, sometimes due to vandalism or corrosion, are common in the Niger Delta, a vast maze of creeks and mangrove swamps crisscrossed by pipelines and blighted by poverty, pollution and oil-fuelled corruption.
In 2020 and 2021, Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) recorded 822 combined oil spills, totalling 28,003 barrels of oil spewed into the environment.
SPDC was culpable for most of them, residents said, but the company has often blamed sabotage for the spills.
In response to the progressivecongresswoman Ilhan Omar’s prior criticism of Israel, American Republicans have ousted her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, provoking criticism and charges of bigotry from Democrats.
On a partisan party-line vote, the House approved a resolution on Thursday to revoke Omar’s committee assignment. Omar is one of two Muslim women serving in Congress and a former Somalian refugee.
Republican legislators claimed Omar’s “anti-Semitic” and “anti-Israel” rhetoric rendered her ineligible for the foreign policy panel.
But prior to the vote, Omar suggested that Republicans were targeting her because of her identity.
“There is this idea that you are a suspect if you are an immigrant or if you are from certain parts of the world or a certain skin tone or a Muslim,” Omar said. “It is no accident that members of the Republican Party accused the first Black president, Barack Obama, of being a secret Muslim.”
Representation matters.
We didn’t come to Congress to be silent.
We came to Congress to be a voice for families who are displaced in refugee camps and those seeking justice around the world.
Omar added that she will be undeterred by the Republican move.
“If I am not on this committee for one term, my voice will get louder and stronger and my leadership will be celebrated around the world as it has been,” the congresswoman said. “So take your votes or not. I am here to stay.”
She vowed to continue to speak up for those suffering from “unjust wars, atrocities, ethnic cleansing, occupation or displacement”.
The White House called the removal of Omar from the committee a “political stunt” and a “disservice to the American people”.
“Congresswoman Omar is a highly respected member of Congress,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday, noting that Omar had apologised for previous comments relating to Israel.
In 2019, Omar faced bipartisan outrage when for suggesting that political donations from pro-Israel lobby groups — including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — drive support for Israel in Washington. She later disavowed that remark.
In the past two years, AIPAC and other pro-Israel organisations spent millions of dollars in congressional elections to defeat progressives who support Palestinian human rights.
While the Republican resolution accused Omar of anti-Semitism, it only invoked remarks relating to Israel, not the Jewish people.
For example, the measure calls out the congresswoman for describing Israel as an “apartheid state”, although leading human rights groups — including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — have also accused Israel of imposing a system of apartheid on Palestinians.
"I had a member of the Republican caucus threaten my life and the Republican caucus rewarded him with one of the most prestigious committee assignments in this Congress."
Watch Rep. AOC respond to Republicans' removal of Rep. @Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/A22R7jQrlC
Republican Tennessee Representative David Kustoff accused Omar on Thursday of spreading “hateful beliefs”.
“As our nation’s leaders, we have the ability and the responsibility to help combat anti-Semitism and ensure that our children — tomorrow’s leaders — are taught that such rhetoric is unacceptable,” Kustoff said.
But several Jewish Democrats defended Omar. Dean Phillips — who, like Omar, represents a congressional district in Minnesota — called the Republican push against the congresswoman a “weaponisation of anti-Semitism”, which he said he finds “repulsive” as a Jewish person.
“The most dangerous acts by elected officials in a democracy are to silence voices of dissent, even those with which we fundamentally disagree,” Phillips said on the House floor.
Republicans stressed that the resolution to remove Omar was about accountability, not payback. Democrats had previously removed Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from her assigned committees in 2021 over past conspiratorial, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading House progressive, said the targeting of Omar was an extension of the legacy of bigotry against Muslim Americans since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
“There is nothing consistent with the Republican Party’s continued attack except for the racism and incitement of violence against women of colour in this body,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
The highly partisan vote to remove @Ilhan was not about accountability.
It was about political revenge.
I will move immediately to seat Rep. Omar on the House Budget Committee.
Where she will defend Democratic values against right-wing extremism.
As Arab, Muslim and Palestinian rights groups rushed to defend Omar before the vote on Thursday, the congresswoman co-sponsored a resolution titled “recognizing Israel as America’s legitimate and democratic ally and condemning antisemitism”.
The measure condemned anti-Semitic tropes of dual loyalty and describes Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”.
Omar’s office did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on how the congresswoman squared accusing Israel of apartheid while still recognising it as a “democratic” US ally.
“My critique of our foreign policy, Israeli’s policy towards Palestinians or that of any foreign nation will not change,” Omar wrote on Twitter later on Thursday. “As a person who suffered the horrors of war and persecution, my advocacy will always be for those that suffer because of the actions of governments.”
Congressman Brad Schneider, a staunchlypro-Israel Democrat, welcomed Omar’s support for the resolution.
“I have no doubt we will continue to disagree, sometimes vehemently. I will continue to call out antisemitism from wherever it comes, whether my side of the aisle or the other,” Schneider said in a statement.
The US is keeping tabs on a possible Chinese surveillance balloon that has recently been seen flying over important locations.
Defense officials stated that they had no doubt that China was the owner of the “high-altitude surveillance balloon.” Most recently, it was spotted flying over Montana in the west.
However, military authorities decided against shooting it down due to worries about the risk of falling debris.
China is yet to respond.
Canada announced on Friday that it was keeping an eye on “a possible second incident” involving a surveillance balloon, but it did not identify the possible perpetrator. According to the statement, it closely collaborates with the US to “protect Canada’s sensitive information from threats from foreign intelligence.”
The object flew over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and through Canada before appearing over the city of Billings in Montana on Wednesday, officials said.
A senior defence official speaking on condition of anonymity said the government prepared fighter jets, including F-22s, in case the White House ordered the object to be shot down.
Top military leaders, including Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, met on Wednesday to assess the threat. Mr Austin was travelling in the Philippines at the time.
Montana, a sparsely populated state, is home to one of only three nuclear missile silo fields in the country, at Malmstrom Air Force Base, and officials said the apparent spy craft was flying over sensitive sites to collect information.
But they advised against taking “kinetic action” against the balloon because of the danger falling debris might pose to people on the ground.
The defence official, however, said there was no “significantly enhanced threat” of US intelligence being compromised because American officials “know exactly where this balloon is and exactly where it’s passing over”.
He added that there was also no threat to civilian aviation as the balloon was “significantly” above the altitude used by commercial airlines.
The official said the balloon is unlikely to give much more information than China can already collect using satellites.
The US had raised the matter with Chinese officials in their embassy in Washington DC and in Beijing, the official added.
During Thursday’s briefing at the Pentagon, officials declined to disclose the aircraft’s current location. They also refused to provide more details of the object, including its size.
“There have been reports of pilots seeing this thing even though it’s pretty high up in the sky,” the unnamed defence official said. “So you know, it’s sizable.”
They added that such surveillance balloons had been tracked in the past several years, but this one was “appearing to hang out for a longer period of time this time around”.
It confused social media users in Montana, with some posting images of a pale, round object high in the sky. Others reported seeing US military planes in the area, apparently monitoring the object.
Billings office worker Chase Doak told theAssociated Press news agency that he noticed the “big white circle in the sky” and went home to get a better camera.
“I thought maybe it was a legitimate UFO,” he said. “So I wanted to make sure I documented it and took as many photos as I could.”
Chinese state media has not reported on the incident, but it is being widely discussed on Chinese social media, with many amused at the reported use of balloons for surveillance.
“We have so many satellites, why would we need to use a balloon,” wrote one user on Weibo.
Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, slammed China’s alleged balloon.
“The level of espionage aimed at our country by Beijing has grown dramatically more intense & brazen over the last 5 years,” he tweeted.
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, a Republican, said in a statement that he had been briefed on the “deeply troubling” situation.
Speaking at an unrelated event in Washington DC on Thursday, CIA Director William Burns made no mention of the balloon, but called China the “biggest geopolitical challenge” currently facing the US.
The alleged spy craft is likely to increase tensions ahead of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China next week. It will be the first visit to the country by a Biden administration cabinet secretary.
The top US diplomat will be in Beijing to hold talks on a wide range of issues, including security, Taiwan and Covid-19.
He will also meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, as the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
Balloons are one of the oldest forms of surveillance technology. Compared to other airborne surveillance devices, they can be operated cheaply without personnel while remaining airborne for long periods of time.
The emaciated-looking jailed former Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili, has stirred calls among world leaders for his release.
The former president who appeared emaciated at a court hearing via video on Wednesday, has been in a Georgian prison since October 2021.
He was convicted of abusing his position of authority while in office, a charge he claims was politically motivated.
He was found guilty of abusing his position of authority. He claims the accusations were made for political reasons.
His health has significantly declined since his incarceration, and he alleges that authorities poisoned him.
Mr Saakashvili was arrested in 2021 after making a surprise return to Georgia by smuggling himself into the country on a ferry from Ukraine. He called for mass anti-government demonstrations but was quickly arrested by Georgian authorities.
He was convicted in absentia of abuses of power while in office.
The Georgian Justice Minister Rati Bregadze said he was self-harming and his condition was a result of his refusal to eat.
Mr Saakashvili’s medical team said his weight had dropped from 115 kg (254 pounds) to 68 kg (150 pounds) since his imprisonment.
Among the world leaders calling for his release were Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said authorities were “torturing and killing” him.
During a press conference, Mr Zelensky said he believed the current Georgian government was trying “to kill” Mr Saakashvili.
Mr Saakashvili was granted Ukrainian citizenship in 2015, and spoke only in Ukrainian at his court appearance, wearing a t-shirt with “I am Ukrainian” printed on it. He also served as the governor of the western province of Odesa between 2015 and 2016.
The Moldovan President Maia Sandu also called for Mr Saakashvili’s immediate release;
“Torturing an opposition leader to death is unacceptable for a country that wants to join the European Union,” she wrote in a tweet.
Empathy, an organisation supporting victims of torture in Georgia, alleged on 1 December that Mr Saakashvili had been diagnosed with illnesses “incompatible with imprisonment” and that Georgian and foreign medical experts had found evidence of heavy-metal poisoning.
On Thursday, the European Parliament debated Mr Saakashvili’s health, where the European Commissioner for Budget and Administration, Johannes Hahn, said the Georgian government was obliged to provide him appropriate healthcare.
Late last year, Mr Saakashvili gave French President Emmanuel Macron a hand-written note reading: “SOS. I am dying, I have very little time left.”
Georgian authorities have said Mr Saakasvhili is feigning his condition to secure his release from prison and have accused him of self-harm.
Findings showed that Israel “was responsible for this attempted act of aggression,” according to its ambassador to the UN.
Iran reserves the right, according to him, “to respond resolutely to any threats or wrongdoings” by Israel.
Iran claims the attack caused minor damage, but this has not been independently verified, and neither Israel nor Iran has admitted responsibility for the attack.
The two countries are arch-foes and in recent years have been engaged in what has been described as a “shadow war” of unclaimed attacks on each other’s assets, infrastructure and nationals.
Israel is mostly known to have carried out strikes on what it says are Iranian weapons transfers to militants in Lebanon and is also believed to have sabotaged Iran’s nuclear sites and killed Iranian nuclear scientists. Iran, which rejects Israel’s right to exist, has been accused by Israel of attacking and planning to attack Israeli and Jewish targets and people. Each side is also believed to have attacked the other’s shipping.
In a letter to the UN secretary general, Iranian ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani accused Israel of “an attempt… to launch a terrorist attack against a workshop complex” belonging to Iran’s defence ministry. He did not specify what evidence Iran had for this.
Mr Iravani said Iran reserved the right to respond “wherever and whenever deemed necessary.”
The purpose of the attacked site is unclear, though reports suggest it could be connected to missile production.
US media have quoted unnamed US officials as saying Israel carried out the attack, which Iran said involved three drones, on Saturday night at about 23:30 (20:00 GMT). Iran said one was destroyed by air defence systems and two were caught by “defence traps,” causing minor damage to a building and no casualties.
If confirmed it would mark the first such known attack on a facility in Iran under the current Israeli government which came to power under Benjamin Netanyahu at the end of December.
In an interview with CNN on Tuesday, Mr Netanyahu said Israel had been “taking action against certain weapons development” in Iran, but neither confirmed nor denied it had attacked the site in Isfahan.
“I never talk about specific operations… “And every time some explosion takes place in the Middle East, Israel is blamed or given responsibility—sometimes we are, sometimes we’re not,” he said.
The company that handles online payments claims that it was forced to make the choice due to “the challenging macro-economic environment.”
Following tens of thousands of layoffs by major technology companies in the past month alone, PayPal made its announcement.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, have all announced significant job cuts this year.
“We must continue to change as our world, our customers, and our competitive landscape evolve,” PayPal’s chief executive Dan Schulman said in a statement.
Also on Tuesday, Snap – the parent company of social media platform Snapchat – warned that revenue for the three months to the end of March could fall by as much as 10%.
“We anticipate that the operating environment will remain challenging, as we expect the headwinds we have faced over the past year to persist throughout Q1,” the company told investors.
After the announcement, Snap’s shares fell by almost 15% in extended trade in New York.
At the start of this year, Amazon announced it planned to cut more than 18,000 jobs because of “the uncertain economy” and rapid hiring during the pandemic.
Also this month, Alphabet said it would shed 12,000 jobs, while Microsoft said up to 10,000 employees would lose their jobs.
Last week, Swedish music-streaming giant Spotify said it would cut 6% of its about 10,000 employees, citing a need to improve efficiency.
In another sign of the technology industry slowdown, US computer chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Tuesday reported a 98% fall in net income for the last three months of 2022.
The company also said it expects revenue to drop by as much 10% in the current quarter.
However, the figures were better than many investors had expected and AMD’s shares rose after the announcement.
In Asia on Wednesday, the world’s second-biggest memory chip maker, SK Hynix, posted its largest quarterly loss on record.
The South Korean company reported a worse-than-expected 1.7 trillion won ($1.4 billion; £1.1 billion) loss for the last three months of 2022, as sales fell by 38%.
The firm pointed to falling computer chip prices and joined rival technology giants in warning that it expects an industry-wide downturn to worsen in the coming months, before recovering later in the year.
It came after rival Samsung Electronics on Tuesday reported its lowest quarterly profit in eight years.
A long-running legal battle between Qatar Airways and Airbus over the safety of the A350 aircraft has been resolved.
The settlement was “amicable and mutually agreeable,” according to a statement released jointly by the companies on Wednesday.
The companies said in a statement, “A repair project is now underway and both parties look forward to getting these aircraft safely back in the air,’’
The “amicable settlement” ends a $2bn row over the safety of Europe’s premier long-haul jet – an unprecedented public rift that led Airbus to revoke dozens of other jet orders from Qatar ahead of a scheduled June court trial.
Qatar Airways grounded Airbus A350s over what it described as fuselages “degrading at an accelerated rate” in the long-range aircraft.
The airline had raised questions about the A350s’ carbon composite fuselage, designed to make the twin-aisle aircraft lighter and cheaper to operate by burning less jet fuel.
In December 2021, Qatar’s national carrier announced it was suing Airbus in London over what it described as the “accelerated surface degradation” of the wide-body A350.
Cracks in the painted surface exposed gaps in a sublayer of A350 lightning protection, prompting its regulator to ground 29 of the jets. Airbus, based in Toulouse, France, has acknowledged quality flaws but insisted the jets are safe.
The next month, Airbus terminated a multibillion-dollar order by Qatar Airways for 50 of its smaller single-aisle in-demand A321neo jets.
The termination of the Airbus contract for its A321neos followedQatar Airways’ refusal to take any more A350s until the problem was fixed.
The details of the settlement are confidential. The companies said the deal was not an admission of liability by either party, both of which would drop their legal claims and “move forward and work together as partners”.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire welcomed the settlement.
The planemaker also said it would reinstate all orders it revoked as part of the dispute, but the first of 50 A321neos would now be delivered in 2026, three years later than the airline said this was scheduled.
The first of 23 undelivered A350s will be delivered this year, a spokesperson added.
This comes after the tiny nation signed a security agreement with Beijing last year, a move that took Washington and its allies by surprise.
It happened after the US announced it would open its Honiara post, which had been closed since 1993 due to worries about China’s expanding military aspirations.
The opening of the embassy on Wednesday was missed by the Solomons’ PM.
However a foreign ministry spokesman said the re-established US embassy was welcomed by the government.
The region is strategically crucial for the US as a gateway to Asia for Pacific allies like Australia. Washington’s diplomatic presence has until now largely been centred in its Papua New Guinea post.
But US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday said the Honiara embassy would help advance the US-Pacific partnership goals – signed last year – of keeping the region a place where “democracy can flourish”.
The embassy opening comes at “an important moment for the region we share”, he said in a video statement.
“Because more than any other part of the world – the Indo-Pacific region including the Pacific islands – will shape the world’s trajectory in the 21st Century.”
The United States of America is pleased to announce the opening of its Embassy in Honiara. We are committed to strengthening the enduring relationship between the U.S. and Solomon Islands! pic.twitter.com/tLGR37TkCb
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Concerns about Beijing’s increasing influence and military expansion in the Pacific has prompted the US and Australia to step up their focus there in recent years.
Last September, US President Joe Biden invited 14 Pacific island nations to theWhite House for the first-ever in-person summit. Washington signed a sweeping partnership and development agreement with the island nations.
Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare also signed up to the deal despite reports in the lead-up that he might abstain.
Beijing last year had also accelerated efforts to gain influence in the region – to mixed effect.
While it inked a security deal with the Solomons in March, it failed to secure a trade and security deal with 10 regional countries a few months later despite a lobbying tour from China’s then Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
“China has no intention of competing with anyone, let alone engaging in geopolitical competition, and has never established a so-called sphere of influence,” said Mr Wang during the tour.
In recent times, Fiji, one of the biggest and most influential Pacific islands, has also announced it will cancel a police training exchange with China – formerly a close partner.
Fiji’s new government – elected in December – has indicated it prefers stronger ties with its traditional Pacific partners Australia and New Zealand over China.
Australia and NZ are also both members of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – the region’s main bloc.
Several Pacific countries have advocated for regional unity in the face of superpower tensions and on Monday, many welcomed the announcement that Kiribati would return as a member.
Kiribati had withdrawn from the PIF last year in a move the country’s opposition said had been influenced by Beijing. The country’s leader had then said the forum wasn’t adequately addressing the concerns of Micronesian countries.
Dr Meg Keen from the Australia-based Lowy Institute said the US re-engagement was welcomed but it would remain to be seen “if the announcements are backed up by actions”.
She said the region could see a “diverse range of partnerships” as Pacific islands pursue development goals and funding.
The new US embassy also comes as Washington has been re-negotiating agreements with three island nations in the North Pacific – Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands – who give exclusive military use rights to the US.
On July 7, 2021, President Moise was assassinated at his home in the capital of Haiti by what the police described as a hit squad made up primarily of foreign mercenaries.
One of the suspects is Colombian, and three of the suspects are dual US-Haitian citizens.
Later on Wednesday, they are scheduled to appear in a Miami federal court.
The investigation being conducted into President Moise’s assassination in Haiti has stalled, with investigators and judges receiving death threats. But as the plan to kill Mr Moise was allegedly hatched by Haitian-Americans in Florida, investigations are proceeding in the US.
The transfer of the four men from Haiti to Florida has brought the total number of suspects in US custody to seven.
Three of those who moved to the US have been charged with conspiracy to murder President Moise. The fourth, Christian Sanon, was charged with smuggling bullet-proof vests to Haiti for use in the plot.
Those charged with conspiracy to commit murder are:
Prosecutors allege that James Solages and Christian Sanon met in Florida in April 2021 to discuss “regime change” in Haiti.
According to police in Haiti, Mr Sanon, a Haitian-American doctor and pastor, had “political objectives” to replace Mr Moise as president.
Haiti’s police chief at the time of President Moise’s killing also said that Mr Sanon was the first person one of the assailants called as police surrounded them after the murder.
In a statement, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said that while Mr Sanon had not been charged with conspiracy to murder, he “participated in crimes that culminated in the assassination of the Haitian president”.
According to the DoJ, James Solages, Joseph Vincent and Germán Rivera had originally planned to kidnap President Moise and take him to an unknown location while a new president was installed in his stead.
But when they failed to get a plane to take the Mr Moise away, they allegedly changed their plan.
“It is alleged that on July 6, 2021, Solages, Vincent, Rivera and others met at a house near President Moise’s residence, where firearms and equipment was distributed and Solages announced that the mission was to kill President Moise,” the DoJ statement said.
The other man, German Alejandro Rivera, is suspected of having recruited the Colombian mercenaries who made up the hit squad hired for the purpose.
All four men were arrested in Haiti shortly after President Moise’s assassination and been held in the Caribbean nation until their transfer on Tuesday.
If found guilty, Mr Sanon could face up to 20 years in jail while the three other suspect could be sentenced to life in prison.
The political void left by the killings has led to a surge in violence and lawlessness across Haiti.
Cardinal George Pell’s funeral on Thursday in Australia, mourners murmured prayers and sang hymns; however, hecklers kept shouting his damnation.
The Catholic priest, who passed away last month at the age of 81 due to complications from surgery, leaves behind a difficult legacy.
He was once the top assistant to the Pope and the top Catholic in Australia.
But unsubstantiated claims that he committed child sexual abuse and covered it up damaged his reputation.
These accusations dominated Thursday’s events in Sydney. Police outside St. Mary’s Cathedral took action at one point to separate irate mourners from chanting protesters. One protester was earlier detained.
Inside the church, where Cardinal Pell served as the city’s archbishop for over a decade, dignitaries including former Prime Ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott filled pews. Hundreds more gathered in a forecourt to watch the requiem Mass on big screens.
Noticeably absent were Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet – himself a devout Catholic. Both sent delegates.
In a message read to the congregation, Pope Francis praised Cardinal Pell’s “dedication to the gospel and to the Church”, while Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher lauded him as “giant of the Catholic Church in Australia” who had been wrongly demonised.
Over six decades, Cardinal Pell rose to prominence in the Church as a strong supporter of traditional Catholic values.
He took on the role of Vatican treasurer in 2014 but left in 2017, returning to Australia to face trial on child sexual abuse charges. He was convicted, then later acquitted on appeal.
Many of Cardinal Pell’s supporters believe he was unfairly persecuted, and that his record on the issue of child sexual abuse is part of what made him great.
Mr Abbott, who spoke at the funeral, claimed Cardinal Pell had been the first Australian Catholic to sack child abusers and report them to police. Others pointed to the landmark – but controversial – compensation scheme he set up.
“He was greatest man I’ve ever known,” Mr Abbott said.
Image caption,Cardinal George Pell was Australia’s highest-ranking Catholic
Others who gathered to pay their respects said he was a kind man, quick to offer support and encouragement to those going through challenging times.
One mourner told the BBC he hopes the cardinal will be remembered “for the things he did and not for the things that he was accused of”.
“He was a good man,” Nathan, 33, added. “He fought for the rights of many people, contrary to popular belief.”
But outside the cathedral square, child abuse survivors remembered him as someone who had failed to protect them.
Some travelled from other states to tie ribbons to the church fence – a gesture seen in Australia as a tribute to victims of the Church abuse crisis. Most were cut down overnight on Wednesday by supporters of Cardinal Pell.
A landmark inquiry into Australian child sexual abuse found Cardinal Pell had personally known of abuse by priests as early as the 1970s and had failed to act. Cardinal Pell disputed the findings, saying they were “not supported by evidence”.
“I can’t let today pass without standing for him. He is not well enough to stand for himself,” she told the BBC.
Image caption,Maureen was among those who left hundreds of ribbon tributes for child sexual abuse survivors
Protesters gathering in parkland opposite the cathedral remembered Cardinal Pell as a “monstrous bigot”.
“Pell stood for blatant homophobia, misogyny… covering up abuse within the Catholic Church,” organiser Kim Stern told the BBC.
“We think it’s pretty disgusting he’s getting a send-off like this.”
Also out in force were police, trying to temper simmering tensions.
Thursday’s funeral follows weeks of tense debate in Australia about Cardinal Pell’s legacy.
Mourner Louisa Pastoois personally admired the cardinal, but she told the BBC she has accepted his legacy will be mixed.
“The legacy he leaves behind in the Church, and the world… is something different,” Louisa said.
“I think there needed to be someone to take the blame for all that’s happened in the church… there needs to be a face to the sins and unfortunately, it was his.”
Anthony Lowe, a 36-year-old black man with two amputees, was shot and killed on January 26 in the Los Angeles region.
He allegedly threatened officers after stabbing someone. The mother of Mr. Lowe stated, “They killed my son.”
It happens as police killings are being looked at more closely following the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tennessee.
Mr. Lowe’s incident took place in Huntington Park, and onlookers recorded it on camera.
The grainy video shows part of the confrontation, with Mr Lowe holding a long, shiny object and moving on the stumps of his legs away from officers. That clip does not show the shooting.
The Huntington Park Police Department said in a statement on January 30 that officers responded to a stabbing and that the victim provided a description of the suspect.
The suspect had allegedly left his wheelchair, approached the victim and stabbed him in the chest with a 12in butcher knife, before returning to the wheelchair and fleeing the scene.
The victim was left with “a life-threatening stab wound resulting in a collapsed lung and internal bleeding”, the police statement said.
When officers caught up with Mr Lowe, according to the police statement, he “ignored the officer’s verbal commands and threatened to advance or throw the knife at officers”.
Police say that after two unsuccessful attempts to use Tasers to subdue Mr Lowe, they shot him.
Huntington Park Police Lt. Hugo Reynaga told the Los Angeles Times that investigators had obtained video of the shooting from a nearby business but did not plan to release the footage.
He added that Huntington Park officers do not wear body cameras.
“He tried to run away, and every time he turned around and did the motion like he was gonna throw the knife at him, they tased him,” he told the newspaper.
“They were trying to give this guy the less-lethal Taser shock. And because it was ineffective, they had to go to something that was more effective.”
The two officers involved have been placed on paid leave amid an investigation. They have not been named.
On Tuesday, members of Mr Lowe’s family and activists demanded that the officers be held accountable for the shooting.
“They murdered my son, who was in a wheelchair with no legs,” Mr Lowe’s mother, Dorothy, said at a news conference. “They do need to do something about it.”
A spokesperson for the family told the BBC’s US partner, CBS, that Mr Lowe was suffering from a mental health crisis at the time of the shooting.
His sister told the LA Times that he had his legs amputated last year following an incident with police in Texas.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide unit is investigating the Huntington Park shooting, as it does for other smaller police departments in the area.
According to the Mapping Police Violence database, nearly 1,200 people were killed by police in 2022. Officers were charged with a crime in nine of these cases.
According to a joint statement from the defence departments of the two nations, the Philippines and the United States have agreed to broaden their defence agreement, giving US troops access to four more military bases in the Southeast Asian country.
The deal was announced by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin while he was in Manila for talks with newly elected Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
“The Philippines and the United States are proud to announce their plans to accelerate the full implementation of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the agreement to designate four new Agreed Locations in strategic areas of the country and the substantial completion of the projects in the existing five Agreed Locations,” the joint statement said. It was published on the websites of the US Department of Defense and on the Philippines’ Department of National Defense.
EDCA forms part of a decades-long security alliance between the US and the Philippines, and allows US troops to rotate through five Philippine bases, including those near disputed waters.
It also allows for the US military to store defence equipment and supplies on those bases.
The statement said the expansion would make the two countries’ alliance “stronger and more resilient” and “accelerate modernization of our combined military capabilities”.
The statement did not elaborate on the new locations, but said they would “allow more rapid support for humanitarian and climate-related disasters in the Philippines”. The US had allocated more than $82 million towards infrastructure investments at EDCA’s existing five sites, it added.
Ties between the Philippines and the United States have warmed since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr took office last year [Jam Sta Rosa/Pool via Reuters]
The expansion comes as China becomes increasingly assertive in pressing its claim to the self-ruled island of Taiwan, as well as in the South China Sea where it claims almost the entire waterway under its controversial nine-dash line. The Philippines, other Southeast Asian nations and Taiwan also have overlapping claims to the sea, which is a major global trade route.
The relationship between the Philippines and the US – longtime allies – was strained under Marcos Jr’s predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, who favoured China and threatened to sever ties with Washington and expel US troops.
But ties have warmed under the new administration, with US Vice President Kamala Harris visiting last November.
“This is really the dawn of a new era after a rocky few years,” said Al Jazeera correspondent Barnaby Lo, who is in Manila.
Tension in disputed seas
While most of the new bases are expected to be in Luzon, the western island of Palawan, facing the contested Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, is expected to get an additional base as well.
A senior US defence official told reporters on Wednesday that the Philippines was under “day-to-day pressure from (China) in ways that contravene international law”.
The US aims to ensure “they have the capability to defend their own sovereignty”, the official said.
The Philippines has often found itself on the front line of Beijing’s aggressive tactics in the South China Sea, where China’s maritime militia has established an almost constant presence in Manila’s exclusive economic zone.
In 2012, China took control of Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines after a months-long standoff that began when Manila discovered Chinese fishing boats around the rocky outcrops.
Tensions rose again in 2021 when the Philippines protested against China’s “continuing illegal presence and activities” near its islands in the South China Sea.
Beijing has ignored a 2016 international court ruling – in a case brought by the Philippines – that its claim to the South China Sea was without merit.
China also claims democratic Taiwan as part of its territory and has not ruled out the use of force to achieve its objective. Last year, after then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island, Beijing conducted major war games around and across the island.
The Korean Peninsula’s situation has reached an “extreme red line” as a result of South Korea and the United States’ joint military exercises, according to North Korea, which has denounced them and warned that they could turn the area into a “huge war arsenal and a more critical war zone.”
In addition to threatening the “toughest” response, North Korea said in a statement released on Thursday that it was not interested in dialogue as long as Washington continued its so-called “hostile” policies.
Days after US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Seoul and promised to increase Washington’s deployment of cutting-edge military assets, such as fighter jets, to the Korean Peninsula, Pyongyang issued the warning.
The North Korean statement, attributed to an unidentified spokesperson of its Foreign Ministry, said the expansion of the allies’ drills is threatening to turn the Korean Peninsula into a “huge war arsenal and a more critical war zone”. The statement said Pyongyang is prepared to counter any short-term or long-term military challenge by the allies with the “most overwhelming nuclear force”.
“The military and political situation on the Korean Peninsula and in the region has reached an extreme red line due to the reckless military confrontational manoeuvres and hostile acts of the US and its vassal forces,” the spokesperson said.
The “DPRK will take the toughest reaction to any military attempt of the US on the principle of ‘nuke for nuke and an all-out confrontation for an all-out confrontation!’” the spokesperson said, referring to the country by its formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“If the US continues to introduce strategic assets into the Korean Peninsula and its surrounding area, the DPRK will make clearer its deterring activities without fail according to their nature,” the spokesperson added.
North Korea for decades has described the US’s combined military exercises with South Korea as rehearsals for a potential invasion, although the allies have described those drills as defensive. North Korea last year ramped up its own weapons demonstrations as the allies resumed their large-scale training that had been downsized for years.
North Korea’s actions included a slew of missile and artillery launches that it described as simulated nuclear attacks on South Korean and US targets.
Jeon Ha Gyu, a spokesperson for South Korea’s defence ministry, said the ministry had no immediate comment in response to the North Korean statement.
He said the allies’ latest aerial drills – which took place on Wednesday and involved the US’s B-1B bombers and F-22 and F-35 fighter jets – were aimed at demonstrating the credibility of the US “extended deterrence”, referring to a commitment to use the full range of its military capabilities, including nuclear ones, to defend South Korea.
South Korea in recent months has sought stronger assurances that the US will swiftly and decisively use its nuclear capabilities to protect its ally in the face of a North Korean nuclear attack. More than 28,500 US troops are based in South Korea as a legacy of the 1950-1953 Korean War, which ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
During a political conference in December, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called for an “exponential increase” in nuclear warheads, mass production of battlefield tactical nuclear weapons targeting South Korea, and the development of more powerful long-range missiles designed to reach the US mainland.
Experts say Kim’s nuclear push is aimed at forcing the US to accept the idea of North Korea as a nuclear power and then negotiating badly needed economic concessions from a position of strength.
Nuclear negotiations between North Korea and the US have been derailed since 2019 because of disagreements over a relaxation of Washington-led economic sanctions against North Korea in exchange for steps by Pyongyang to wind down its nuclear weapons and missile programmes.
The North Korean spokesperson said Pyongyang was not interested in any contact or dialogue with the US as long as it maintains its “hostile policy and confrontational line”, accusing Washington of maintaining sanctions and military pressure to force North Korea to “disarm itself unilaterally”.
In its 115-year history, the company’s 2022 adjusted earnings of $39.9 billion (£32.2 billion) were the highest ever.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, oil and gas prices increased, which resulted in energy companies making record profits.
Given that households are struggling with inflation, the profits have increased pressure on businesses to pay windfall taxes.
Last year, the UK government introduced a windfall tax – called the Energy Profits Levy – on the profits of firms to help fund its scheme to lower gas and electricity bills.
Oil and gas prices had begun to rise after the end of Covid lockdowns but rose sharply after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, resulting in bumper profits for energy companies.
The price of Brent crude oil climbed above $120 a barrel in March 2022, but has fallen back since. Oil prices are now below the level seen before the invasion of Ukraine.
Gas prices remain elevated but have been capped for consumers by the government.
Shell chief executive Wael Sawan said the firm’s results “demonstrate the strength of Shell’s differentiated portfolio, as well as our capacity to deliver vital energy to our customers in a volatile world”.
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) states that the new design will honour “the culture and history of the First Australians.”
The current five dollar note features a portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
After the Queen passed away in 2017, discussions about Australia’s future as a constitutional monarchy resurfaced.
“This decision by the Reserve Bank Board follows consultation with the Australian government, which supports this change,” the bank said in a statement.
“The Bank will consult with First Australians in designing the $5 banknote. The new banknote will take a number of years to be designed and printed. In the meantime, the current $5 banknote will continue to be issued. It will be able to be used even after the new banknote is issued,” it added.
The RBA currently has no plans to change the design of any other denomination of Australian banknotes, a spokesperson told the BBC.
It has not yet set a date for when it will reveal the new five dollar note design, they added.
The decision was welcomed by Aboriginal politicians and community leaders.
“This is a massive win for the grassroots, First Nations people who have been fighting to decolonise this country,” Lidia Thorpe, a Greens senator and DjabWurrung Gunnai Gunditjmara woman.
First Nations people lived in Australia for at least 65,000 years before British colonisation, according to recent estimates.
This is a massive win for the grassroots, First Nations people who have been fighting to decolonise this country. First Nations people never ceded our Sovereignty to any King or Queen, ever. Time for a Treaty Republic! pic.twitter.com/J4LjyFXwUe
The King became the British monarch after his mother’s death in September.
As the British monarch, he is also the head of state of Australia, New Zealand and 12 other Commonwealth realms outside the United Kingdom. The role is largely ceremonial.
The British monarch’s portrait has appeared on at least one design in every series of Australian banknotes.
However, in September Australia said the image of the new monarch would not automatically replace the Queen on its five dollar notes, and that she might be replaced by Australian figure.
Much of Australia’s currency already features Indigenous Australian figures and artworks.
In a 1999 referendum Australian voters chose to keep the British monarch as the country’s head of state.
In 2021, Australia officially changed its national anthem to remove reference to the country being “young and free”.
Following a trip to Jerusalem by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-President Idriss Deby, diplomatic relations betweenIsrael and Chad were restored in 2018.
Building on bilateral ties that were established five years ago, Chad will open an embassy in Israel on Thursday, according to the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The announcement was made on Wednesday as Chadian President Mahamat Deby’s office announced that he was visiting Israel for a 48-hour state visit but gave no other information.
The Chadian president would preside over the opening of the embassy, according to Netanyahu’s office.
Chad cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 1972 after the Organization of African Unity, the forerunner of the present-day African Union, ordered its member states to do so in support of the Palestinians.
But in November 2018, former Chadian President Idriss Deby, the late father of the current leader, paid a historic visit to Israel during which he spoke of the two countries committing to a new era of cooperation.
Netanyahu then visited Chad in January 2019, while the following year Israel signed normalisation agreements with Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates as part of a broader diplomatic push by the United States under President Donald Trump.
The agreements enraged Palestinians who condemned them as a “stab in the back” amid fears that they will weaken a long-standing pan-Arab position calling for Israeli withdrawal from territories it occupies illegally and acceptance of Palestinian statehood in return for normal ties with Arab countries.
It was not immediately clear where the Chadian embassy would be located. Most countries keep embassies in Tel Aviv.
Trump in 2017 provoked controversy by announcing he would relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and officially did so a year later. The move infuriated Palestinians and spurred international condemnation.
Previous US presidents and the leaders of nearly every other country have refrained from opening embassies in Jerusalem until the city’s final status is resolved through Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Palestinian leaders see occupied East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.
Netanyahu, who returned to office last month, has cast the upgrade of relations with Chad as part of his outreach to Arab and Muslim countries, which he wants to expand.
The German Consulate in Istanbul warned citizens to avoid central areas of Turkey’s largest city and avoid crowds. Several European countries have warned of an increased risk of attacks in the wake of Quran burnings.
Germany temporarily closed its consulate in Istanbul on Wednesday, citing a heightened risk of attack in the Turkish city.
The move comes amid rising tensions after right-wing extremist and anti-Islam activists burned or destroyed Qurans in several European cities in recent weeks.
What did German officials say?
In posts on the consulate’s social media channels, German officials announced the consulate would be closed on Wednesday and that all visa appointments had been canceled.
“Following recent cases in several European capitals where the Quran was publicly burned or destroyed, security agencies believe the risk of terrorist attacks in Istanbul has increased,” officials said in a statement.
The statement advised German citizens to avoid Istanbul’s central district of Beyoglu and the popular Taksim Square. German officials also advised citizens to avoid areas with “international crowds” and steer clear of busy public places in general.
The German Embassy in Ankara remained open on Wednesday. It was unclear whether the consulate in Istanbul would remain closed later this week.
Both the Swedish Embassy in Ankara and the country’s consulate in Istanbul were also closed to visitors, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Stockholm told news agency dpa.
The British Consulate in Istanbul is also “currently not open to the public as a precaution,” according to a UK government travel advisory.
Tensions between Turkey and Europe
The warnings of potential attacks come after right-wing extremists repeatedly destroyed the Quran, the holy book of the Muslim faith, in several European cities.
The actions have sparked outrage in Turkey, particularly after the right-wing extremist Rasmus Paludan set fire to a Quran in front of a mosque in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. The Danish-Swedish politician later repeated the act in Copenhagen.
He threatened to continue until Turkey accepted Sweden’s bid to join the NATO military alliance.
Similar protests where a Quran was desecrated and torn up in the Netherlands prompted Turkey to summon the Dutch ambassador.
Several countries — including Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the United States — issued warnings last week of an increased risk of attacks in Turkey.
Turkey, in turn, also issued a travel alert for its nationals in Europe — saying that the recentanti-Muslim and anti-Turkish acts show the “dangerous level of religious intolerance and hatred” on the continent.
Both Sweden and Finland announced their intention to join NATO in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All current members of the trans-Atlantic military alliance must approve their membership bids, but Turkey and Hungary have not yet approved.
At Min Aung Hlaing’s request, Myanmar’s already two-year-old state of emergency was extended by another six months on Wednesday, according to state media.
It happened at the same time as the US and its allies announced new sanctions against the military regime.
On the second anniversary of the coup that overthrew the nation’s civilian government and resulted in Aung San Suu Kyi’s arrest, the National Defense and Security Council approved the extension.
The “state of emergency will be extended for another six months starting from February 1,” acting President Myint Swe was quoted as saying. “Sovereign power of the state has been transferred to commander in chief again,” he added.
State media also reported Min Aung Hlaing as saying on Wednesday that “Our government will work to hold elections in every part of the country so as the people will not lose their democratic right.”
The UN has warned that the promised elections will likely not be free and fair.
Junta slammed with new round of sanctions
Washington, along with Canada and the United Kingdom and Australia on Tuesday imposed sanctions on the Union Election Commission, mining enterprises, energy officials and others, as per a statement by the US Treasury Department.
The statement said this was the first time the US had targeted Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) officials, the managing director and deputy managing director. It is the country’s single largest revenue-generating state-owned enterprise.
Mining Enterprise No 1 and Mining Enterprise No 2, both state-owned companies, as well as the Union Election Commission, were also hit with sanctions by Washington.
Canada targeted six individuals and prohibited the export, sale, supply or shipment of aviation fuel. Australia targeted members of the junta and a military-run company.
The UK designated two companies and two people for helping supply Myanmar’s air force with aviation fuel used to carry out bombing campaigns.
The sanctions come as Myanmar’s military has conducted aerial bombings and other attacks against pro-democracy forces.
UN warns planned elections likely a ‘sham’
On the same day, the independent UN special investigator on Myanmar warned that the military junta plans to seek legitimacy by orchestrating a “sham” election this year.
“You cannot have a free and fair election when the opposition is arrested, detained, tortured, and executed, journalists are prohibited from doing their job, and it is a crime to criticize the military,” Tom Andrews said at the UN.
Myanmar’s junta last month outlined plans to hold an election later in the year.
To do that, it is supposed to lift the nationwide state of emergency six months beforehand. Observers had widely expected the military to announce it was preparing for the polls this week, with the state of emergency set to expire on Wednesday’s anniversary.
But on Tuesday, the junta-stacked National Security and Defense Council said the state of the country “has not returned to normalcy yet.”
The statement accused opposition political groups of trying to seize “state power by means of unrest and violence.”
Membership rules set high bar to qualify
The junta had recently introduced new rules for parties contesting elections, which include a huge increase in their membership, a move that could sideline the military’s opponents.
The rules favor the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which was defeated by now-jailed leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party in the 2015 and 2020 elections. The party includes several former military generals.
The NLD and western nations have denounced the election and said they would not acknowledge the results.
John Sifton, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, told Reuters that the US has still not matched stronger sanctions imposed by the European Union.
“As a result, the measures taken so far have not imposed enough economic pain on the junta to compel it to change its conduct,” he said.
Myanmar’s top generals led a coup in February 2021. The country has since seen instability, with a crackdown on dissent.
According to the independent Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a watchdog group that tracks killings and arrests in Myanmar, 2,940 civilians have been killed and 17,572 have been arrested by authorities since the army takeover.
NGO reports junta targeted religious sites
The London-based Myanmar Witness released a report on Wednesday saying troops of Myanmar’s military junta occupied a Catholic Church in Moe Bye and fired shells at civilians seeking refuge at the Mwe Daw Pagoda.
“Single events such as this help us to understand the bigger picture of daily life in Myanmar,” Dan Anlezark, Deputy Head of Investigations at Myanmar Witness, told DW.
Myanmar Witness reviewed videos and images captured during a flare-up of fighting in September last year, showing the Mary Mother of God Catholic Church seem to “have been the epicenter of the fighting.”
The destruction in the town reached a climax on September 16, when the Mwedaw Pagoda, which was providing shelter to people fleeing the fighting, was hit by artillery.
Footage collected by Myanmar Witness showed the impact sights and large blood puddles, footwear, and clothing in the pagoda courtyard.
“Two years after the military coup that overthrew democracy in villages and towns around the country, Myanmar Witness is regularly observing and investigating evidence of incidents and abuses of the type documented in this report,” he added.
Rachid Nekkaz, an activist and businessman from Algeria who had been imprisoned for calling for a boycott of hiscountry’s 2019 presidential election, was released on Wednesday, according to a rights organisation, following his announcement earlier this month that he would leave politics.
Nekkaz was released on “humanitarian grounds,” according to a Facebook post from the National Committee for the Liberation of Detainees.
The Algerian newspaper Le Soir d’Algerie claims that the 51-year-old has been granted a presidential pardon. In the 2019 election, Nekkaz made an unsuccessful attempt to run for office.
Nekkaz stated that he had written to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune the month prior to “officially” inform him of his decision in a letter from prison that was posted on his Facebook page on January 2.
Nekkaz said in the letter he would dedicate himself “exclusively” to writing, his family and addressing health issues.
He had previously been jailed between December 2019 and February 2021 for “incitement to violence on social media,” where he has a large following.
The French-born Nekkaz was detained once more in May 2021 and received a five-year prison term last year.
Despite having abandoned his French citizenship, a regulation prohibiting candidates who had ever held a nationality other than Algerian had determined that he was unable to run in 2019. Instead, he proposed his cousin, who shares the same name and works as a mechanic.
After widespread protests forced his predecessor to quit, Tebboune, a former premier under longtime dictator Abdelaziz Bouteflika, won the 2019 elections.
His government has outlawed the Hirak pro-democracy movement’s protests and intensified legal action against critics, activists, journalists, and intellectuals.
The US effort came after the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000 between Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The talks followed the escalation of violence in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
According to the BBC documents, Bush expected early on that Ariel Sharon, who succeeded Barak, would use the Gaza Strip to sow divisions among the Palestinians.
The documents deal with discussions that took place between the United Kingdom and the US a few months after Bush and his administration, which was dominated by neoconservatives, entered the White House.
When Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, the second Palestinian uprising was at its height. It had erupted in late September 2000 when Sharon entered the courtyards of Al Aqsa Mosque, an act widely seen by Palestinians as a provocation.
The Bush administration called on Arafat to stop the uprising to lay the groundwork for the start of security negotiations with Israel. It also vetoed a draft resolution in the United Nations Security Council, which proposed sending a UN observer force to protect Palestinian civilians from Israeli forces in the occupied territories.
After the negotiations were aborted, telephone talks were held between Bush and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair in which they discussed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at length.
According to the minutes of the talks, the prime minister said Arafat was a liability.
He said the Palestinian leader “had reached the limits of what he can do constructively and he is only working to maintain his position”. He added that Arafat “no longer has anything to offer”, indicating that the leader had made all the possible concessions he could.
Bush endorsed what Blair had said, then described Arafat as “weak and useless”. He revealed that he had asked the CIA to search for possible successors to the Palestinian leader but said that the agency “researched the Palestinian scene thoroughly and concluded that there is no successor available”.
The British documents revealed that the US secretary of state at the time, Colin Powell, did not agree with Bush’s search for a replacement for Arafat.
Arafat died a few years later, on November 11, 2004, at a Paris hospital after a cerebral haemorrhage caused by a toxic substance – polonium – that was found on his clothes and body.
Palestinians and Arabs accused Israel of killing him. It denied any responsibility for his death.
When Bolivia struck an agreement with Canadian manufacturer Biolyse Pharma to provide it with COVID-19 vaccines for its people, the Canadian government did not take the necessary measures needed to greenlight the export.
When Uganda was trying to purchase doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, it was charged triple per dose that richer European countries paid.
When India and South Africa led an alliance of most countries on Earth at the World Trade Organization to change its rules and allow COVID-19 vaccines to be produced wherever they could be, a small band of rich countries, led by the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, blocked them.
When the COVAX initiative was set up by rich countries and international organisations, it promised to purchase and distribute COVID-19 vaccines equitably across the globe, but it didn’t. Some wealthy countries, like the UK, received significant vaccine supplies from COVAX, while poorer countries were left waiting or had to rely on vaccine donations, which, too often, were of doses nearing expiry.
Today, the coronavirus pandemic may have subsided, but the real enemy of health has survived: a patent system that keeps medicine recipes secret, a trade system that allows corporations to price medicines out of reach, and a global governance system that keeps the power to change any of this from poor countries.
If we want a better international health system, we are going to have to build it ourselves. With Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory in Brazil and the rise of new progressive governments across the region, Latin America is well-poised to begin this urgent work.
In my previous roles as Ecuador’s health minister and director of the Health Institute at the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), I have seen possibilities take shape when countries work together under the principles of equity and social justice, bound by a common vision, and with the power to bring that vision to life.
To break the current system’s power and forge a new one, we need to challenge it at four levels: transparency, knowledge, industry and governance.
First, we need collective pricing and purchasing. The primary reason companies get away with arbitrary pricing of drugs is secrecy in trade deals.
We can turn the tables by creating a Medicine Price Bank and begin to collectively purchase medicines. We launched such a bank in 2016 when I was director of health for UNASUR. It was a simple database of drug prices, made up of an initial list of 34 medicines. The 12 participating countries shared the prices they were offered by pharmaceutical companies – to, in turn, see the prices offered to others.
Armed with comparative stats, governments successfully drove down prices at the negotiating table, enhancing access to medicines for everyone in the region while challenging the secrecy built into big pharma contracts. At the time, UNASUR estimated that if all 12 countries bought necessary quantities of the 34 medicines listed at the lowest price in the region, total savings would amount to about $1bn per year.
We could relaunch this price bank and take it further. Once we have the price information in place, we could negotiate for collective purchasing, further driving down prices with our bulk ordering. Through collective purchasing, we can squeeze the inflated profit margins of big pharma and instead turn that into healthier lives for our peoples.
Second, we need shared capacities. Regulating new drugs and vaccines is not easy. Regulatory infrastructure takes years to establish, from training skilled technicians to building laboratories and setting up information sharing with regulatory agencies around the world. Where one country has a greater capacity to regulate vaccines and treatments, they can lend these capacities to countries that do not – a simple system of solidarity that speeds up access.
This is already happening in the region. During the pandemic, Mexico’s drug regulatory authority (COFEPRIS) supported the Paraguayan health agency to evaluate India’s Covaxin for emergency use approval, even though Mexico had no plans to use it. We can build on this and set up a region-wide mechanism.
Third, we need to establish and expand national production. Within months of scientists developing vaccines for COVID-19, rich countries bought up almost all available and future doses, leaving little for the rest of us.
Cuba was insulated from this failed system. It benefitted from decades of investment in public healthcare and domestic pharmaceutical production, which meant that it was able to develop two homegrown vaccines — with efficacy rates of over 90 percent – and swiftly start immunising its population. It sent its vaccines to other embargoed nations like Iran, Venezuela and Nicaragua, and signed agreements to collaborate on vaccine production with countries like Vietnam and Argentina.
Domestic pharmaceutical production in Latin America is expanding. Argentina has a significant manufacturing capacity with 190 factories and 40 public laboratories. Mexico plans to produce the country’s own COVID-19 vaccine candidate, Patria in its national pharmaceutical company Birmex. Brazil has a notable production capacity and Colombia, too, is looking to expand.
By nationalising production and developing our own industries, countries of the Global South can coordinate production and distribution, making sure health emergencies are tackled with the interests of our people in mind, not Global North corporations.
Finally, we also need coordinated action on the international stage. From pushing for international trade reform to co-sponsoring resolutions, and filing complaints together – we can be more effective by coordinating our actions.
When I was leading the Health Institute at UNASUR, we carved out a space for new forms of collective action within the region, renegotiating the terms of existing health policies at the World Health Assembly of the WHO. Between 2010 and 2016, 35 joint interventions were carried out at the WHA on behalf of UNASUR countries, on issues such as access to medicines, health as a fundamental human right, WHO reform, sustainable development goals, and others.
Similarly, when tobacco company Philip Morris attempted to sue Uruguay for initiating anti-smoking legislation, the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) managed to act as a bloc before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) to show their regional support. ICSID eventually ruled in Uruguay’s favour.
Acting as a bloc could support other efforts to secure compulsory licences to produce COVID-19 vaccines and medicines in Chile, Colombia, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic. Such licences, permitted within WTO rules, allow governments to start alternative production or importation of a generic version of a patented medical product without the prior consent of the permit holder. This is what Bolivia needs from the Canadian government so it can import 15 million doses of vaccine produced by Biolyse.
A progressive health bloc with collective purchasing, regulatory capacities, drug production and distribution capacities, could exert pressure to jointly achieve the right to produce life-saving medicines.
These ideas for building a new global health system from below could be put in place quickly and start improving the lives of our people.
Now is the time to bring together progressive governments, in Latin America and further afield, to end big pharma monopolies, democratise pharmaceutical production, reduce drug prices, build robust health systems that expand the public provision of health services, strengthen regulatory capacity and uphold the right to health for all.
We know what needs to be done, now we need to bring together the collective power to make it happen.
DISCLAIMER: Independentghana.com will not be liable for any inaccuracies contained in this article. The views expressed in the article are solely those of the author’s, and do not reflect those of The Independent Ghana
In its campaign againstBoko Haram in northeast Nigeria, the military reportedly used a covert abortion programme, according to a December report from Reuters.
A special panel appointed by Nigeria’s human rights commission has been tasked with looking into a Reuters report alleging that the military used a covert abortion programme to fight armed groups in the northeast.
The government-appointed National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) announced on its website on Tuesday that it would introduce the special panel in Abuja the following week.
“The National Human Rights Commission will on Tuesday (7th February 2023) inaugurate a Special Independent Investigative Panel on human rights violations in the implementation of counterinsurgency operations in the northeast,” NHRC said.
“The panel will, among other things, focus on investigating Reuters report which alleged that Nigerian Military was involved in abortion of many pregnancies in the North East in the last 10 years,” NHRC said.
The seven-member panel will be chaired by retired Supreme Court Judge Abdu Aboki and includes a retired major general, a representative from the Nigerian Bar Association and an expert in obstetrics and gynaecology, NHRC said.
It was not immediately clear how long the investigation would last and what the panel would do with its findings. NHCR has no powers to prosecute human rights violators but can recommend prosecution for offenders.
An NHRC spokesperson did not respond to calls and messages sent to their mobile phone seeking further details.
Reuters reported in December, based on dozens of witness accounts and documentation, that the military abortion programme involved terminating at least 10,000 pregnancies among women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by rebel fighters.
He was the only player, according to Cricket Australia, who was unable to travel to India for the Test series.
Usman Khawaja, the Australian opener, missed the team’s flight to India for their four-Test tour due to a visa holdup, according to Cricket Australia (CA).
According to a CA spokesperson, the batsman, who was born in Pakistan, was the only member of Australia’s team who did not board the flight on Wednesday because his visa was late.
Khawaja posted online a meme from the popular Netflix series Narcos where infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar sits on a garden chair staring into space, with the caption “Me waiting for my Indian Visa like… #stranded #dontleaveme #standard #anytimenow”.
CA was expecting the visa to arrive later on Wednesday and said Khawaja had been booked on a flight out on Thursday.
Some team support staff are also flying out on Thursday.
In 2011, Khawaja had said he was denied entry into India “because he was not born in Australia”. However, since then Khawaja has visited India several times.
Pakistan and India have had fraught relations since partition in 1947 and those tensions have routinely seeped into sports.
Australia will try to win their first Test series in India in almost a decade. Tests will be played in Nagpur, New Delhi, Dharamsala and the last one at the world’s largest cricket stadium in Ahmedabad.
After being left out of the Test side for about two years, Khawaja made a stunning return against England in the 2021-22 Ashes.
He notched up his 4,000th Test run in a recent match against South Africa in Sydney, where he was 195 not out.
The alleged rape and human trafficking charges against the former kickboxer turned influencer, which he denies, have him in custody. Defense attorneys will attempt to counter that there is not enough evidence to keep him and his brother Tristan in custody today.
Additionally, two female suspects from Romania have been detained.
According to allegations, the Tate brothers lured their victims into relationships or marriages by seducing them.
Prosecutors say the women were then forced to produce pornographic content under duress.
Kickboxer turned influencer, Andrew Tate, is also accused of raping one of the victims last March. All four deny the allegations.
Image:Police officers escort Andrew Tate handcuffed to his brother Tristan Tate. Pic: AP
Earlier this month, a court extended their preventative custody period to 27 February.
Today, defence teams will try to argue that there is not enough evidence to continue to hold them.
The brothers’ legal team is also fighting for these items to be returned.
Image:Luxury cars were seized from the influencer’s villa earlier this month
Last week, Andrew Tate made his first comments since his detention.
“They know we have done nothing wrong,” he told reporters as he was brought in for further questioning by anti-organised crime prosecutors. “This file is completely empty. Of course it’s unjust, there is no justice in Romania unfortunately.”
Famous for misogynistic content, Tate has a huge following despite being banned from most mainstream social media platforms.
His Twitter account was reinstated in November after Elon Musk took charge of the company.
While regional leaders are gathered in the city to discuss their coordinated offensive against the al-Shabab militant group, mortar shells have exploded in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.
The presidential palace is closely guarded, and the four shells struck nearby areas.
There have been no reported casualties.
Following recent military successes by the Somali government against the Islamist militants, the leaders of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti will meet there on Wednesday.
Al-Shabab still controls large areas of Somalia and is continuing to carry out regular attacks.
But they have lost territory since the government, backed byUS and African troops,launched a new offensive last August.
Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera has reduced the size of his cabinet in a reshuffle that also saw the appointment of seven new faces, including an opposition lawmaker.
The list of ministers and deputy ministers has been reduced from 33 to 27, but critics say it is still too large.
The reshuffle was expected following reports that a number of ministers were implicated in a corruption investigation being carried out by Malawi’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) and the UK’s National Crime Agency.
In his New Year message, President Chakwera had promised to name a new and leaner cabinet.
The list of the new cabinet minister was released on Tuesday at around midnight local time.
Mr Chakwera has not allocated himself a ministerial portfolio as was the case previously. He also did not allocate ministerial responsibilities to his Vice-President Saulos Chilima – who is facing corruption charges that he denies.
The vice-president remains in office because under Malawi law he cannot be sacked.
Senior party members from the ruling coalition were also left out of the new cabinet.
The Ethiopian Embassy reported that one person was killed on Monday during gunfire that was directed at a group of Chinese nationals in Ethiopia’s unrest-plagued Oromia region.
Nine Chinese nationals were targeted by the gunmen during the incident in Garba Guaracha town, which is located about 160 kilometres (99 miles) north of Addis Abeba. One of the nine Chinese victims was killed.
It confirmed that “unfortunately one of them has passed away.”
The embassy has advised Chinese nationals to be more cautious and leave “high-risk areas” immediately.
In Oromia and bordering areas, “pernicious cases of armed attacks, kidnappings and robberies” are common, the embassy added.
The BBC’s attempt to reach to the region’s communications office was not successful.
While relative calm has returned to the war-hit northern region of Tigray following a peace deal signed in November, violence continues to surface in Oromia with fighting between government forces and rebel Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) reported.
Clashes around the region’s borders with neighbouring Amhara have also claimed lives in in the past few weeks.
Last week 20 workers of a factory owned by Nigeria’s Dangote Cement were kidnapped by unidentified gunmen in the region. They were later reported to have been released.
It was the second such kidnapping in recent weeks.
In Myanmar, resistance to military rule has been characterized by optimism.
On February 1, 2021, when the military first took over, there were massive, peaceful protests that resembled a jubilant street party. Demonstrators sang in the streets, carried amusing signs, and dressed silly.
In a nation where the armed forces have a history of using brutality against opponents, there were no illusions about what might happen next. One protester declared that they would be willing to sacrifice 100 or even 1,000 lives to see the military overthrown.
Two years on, some civilians have taken up arms and joined forces with ethnic armed groups that have been fighting for greater autonomy for years. The country now appears embroiled in a fully-fledged civil war and the military is increasingly using air power and heavy weaponry against their poorly-armed opponents.
Some estimates put the 2022 death toll at more than 20,000, including civilians and fighters – second only to Ukraine – but those determined to push the generals from power remain hopeful.
“Some of our comrades have died in battle but giving up now is not an option,” said Albert, a battalion commander for the anti-coup Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF), which primarily operates in Kayah State and southern Shan State, near the Thai border.
“There will be a breakthrough in 2023 if we can keep current momentum.”
New analysis (PDF) released on the eve of the coup anniversary by Tom Andrews, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, found there had been some 10,000 attacks and armed clashes between the military and opponents since the coup, and violent incidents in at least 78 percent of townships between July and December 2022.
While that suggests the regime is no closer to cementing its grip on the country, it does not look to be on the verge of collapse either.
“A new equilibrium has emerged. There must be significant developments on either side to change the current stalemate,” said Min Zaw Oo, executive director at the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security, who has years of experience on conflict in Myanmar.
“The landscape has remained the same in overall 2022,” he said, adding that the military has failed to revert most theatres to “a pre-coup status quo”, while the resistance has been unable to “secure strategic areas”.
The ruins of a village school destroyed in a military air attack on Karen state’s Mutraw district earlier this month [File: Free Burma Rangers via AP Photo]
Anti-coup forces have sought to take control of several key urban centres – like the towns of Moebye in southern Shan State, and Kawkareik and Kyondoe in Kayin State. But while they are often successful at driving the armed forces out, the military’s increasing use of remote artillery and air power is making it hard to hold onto the territory they gain.
“Airstrikes have a big impact on this… We want to take control of cities and urban areas but without air defence, it is quite difficult. Even if we can seize an area, it’s difficult to control it without air defence,” said Taw Nee, spokesperson for the Karen National Union (KNU), one of Myanmar’s oldest and most powerful ethnic armed groups, which has allied with the pro-democracy resistance broadly known as People’s Defence Forces (PDF).
Min Zaw Oo also pointed out that the success rate of attacks on “fortified positions of the military” is about 40-45 percent, but resistance groups are often unable to hold and defend seized bases or outposts. Instead, they often opt to destroy them, as illustrated by the recent burning of an outpost in Kayah State’s Bawlakhe Township.
“The nature of the opposition’s strike is still a guerrilla attack,” Min Zaw Oo said.
Some conflict analysts have argued that resistance groups should continue to whittle away at the regime via guerrilla attacks, rather than trying to seize territory. Anthony Davis, a security analyst with the publication Jane’s Defence, warned in November against “attempting prematurely to transition from guerrilla tactics to semi-conventional operations”.
Shifting the balance
Min Zaw Oo said there are four “obstacles” for the resistance to overcome, including better access to weapons (he estimates only 10 percent of resistance fighters have automatic weapons), securing the backing of more powerful ethnic armed groups and an improved chain of command.
He says support from neighbouring countries such as China and Thailand is also necessary.
“Without overcoming these obstacles, the oppositions would not be able to make a shift in their favour,” he said.
While some major ethnic armed organisations have thrown their weight behind the pro-democracy movement – like the KNU, Chin National Front (CNF), Karenni Army and Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) – others have been more cautious.
The country’s most powerful non-state armed group, the United Wa State Army, has instead taken advantage of the military’s weakened position to demand more formal recognition of the territory it controls. But in a potential game-changer, two other influential groups have increasingly shown signs of cooperating with anti-regime forces.
Albert says he has seen improvements for the KNDF in 2022 compared with the year before, including a more established chain of command, better access to modern weapons and more professional military training.
But he says there have also been setbacks, such as losing the early element of surprise, when the regime was caught off guard by widespread armed uprisings to its rule.
“In the past, the junta underestimated us… now they are well prepared. They plant many landmines around their bases. It takes weeks for retconning to attack them now,” he said.
“And we have to attack it quick and retreat because after 30 or 45 minutes… military jets will come.”
In recent months, the military has escalated its air campaign, shifting from its usual policy of mostly using air attacks to support ground troops or terrorise civilian communities it believes to be aiding resistance fighters.
Now, it is more regularly bombing high-level targets, often in the absence of ground fighting, such as a KIO event in November, the CNF headquarters in early January and a PDF base in late January.
Anti-regime armed groups and human rights activists have repeatedly called for the international community to declare a no-fly zone or impose an embargo on supplying aviation fuel to Myanmar. An Amnesty International investigation last year showed that even fuel sent to Myanmar ostensibly for commercial use was being accessed by the military.
Even in the face of this powerful onslaught, the resistance’s optimism remains apparent.
“We hoped the military would use airstrikes on us one day,” said Myo Thura Ko Ko, spokesperson for the mixed command Cobra Column, which operates under KNU and PDF leadership. He sees the regime’s increased reliance on air attacks as evidence it is losing ground.
“The military uses air strikes when their troops are losing on the battlefield or when their morale is low,” he added.
The military has turned increasingly to air attacks over the past year in a move opponents say is a sign of their weakness [File: Aung Shine Oo/AP Photo]
Htet Ni, a spokesperson for the CNF, agrees.
“We have to continue our revolution even if the worst happens. There is nothing else to say. The stronger the revolution becomes, the more the military’s airstrikes will come to us,” he said.
Htet Ni says the increased reliance on air attacks has only driven the established ethnic armed groups closer to their new PDF allies.
“It has created more unity among us… There will never be any retreat. This is our chance to overthrow the military, so we will go into battle with the people.”
The plaintiffs want damages that reflect Holcim’s contribution to the climate change that has made island life increasingly difficult.
When the first tidal wave struck Pari Island back in 2018, Arif Pujianto’s entire home was flooded for more than 24 hours, contaminating the well from where he sourced his drinking water, rusting his motorbike and leading timber panels to fall off the walls.
The 51-year-old fisherman was forced to abandon his belongings and flee with his wife and son to the other side of the Indonesian island, part of the famed Thousand Islands that lie off Java’s northwestern coast, staying with a friend overnight.
“I was afraid,” Pujianto told Al Jazeera. “I became a refugee on my own land.”
The low-lying island of Pari, about 40km (25 miles) north of Jakarta, is on the front lines of the world’s climate crisis. Extreme flooding is killing off trees and driving away tourists; chaotic weather has devastated fishing hauls; and rising sea levels are submerging the island of 1,500 residents.
On average, Pari lies about 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) above sea level.
“I am angry with the situation,” says Pujianto, who now uses rainwater to desalinate his well. “I want to protect my land. I think about the future of my son, my family.”
On Wednesday, Pujianto and three other plaintiffs on Pari announced that they had formally lodged a lawsuit against the Swiss-based cement producer Holcim for its alleged role in the climate crisis. In July 2022, they submitted a request for conciliation in Zug, Switzerland – where Holcim has its headquarters – but with no agreement reached, they have decided to sue the company in the Swiss civil court.
Low-lying Pari island sits off the northern coast of Java and was a popular destination with tourists [Peter Yeung/Al Jazeera]
Supported by the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (WALHI), Swiss Church Aid (HEKS) and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, the plaintiffs are demanding that Holcim, the world’s largest manufacturer of building materials, reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 43 percent by 2030.
They are also demanding the company co-finance adaptation measures on Pari such as mangrove plantations and, significantly, that it pays “loss and damage” for its role in the climate crisis.
According to a HEKS-commissioned study by the Climate Accountability Institute in the United States, Holcim emitted more than 7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 1950 and 2021 – the equivalent of 0.42 percent of all global industrial emissions in human history.
The Pari claimants are seeking a total of 14,700 Swiss francs ($16,000), about $4,000 each, which has been calculated as proportional to Holcim’s contribution to overall climate damage.
“Holcim has been aware of the high emissions created by cement production and its impacts on the climate for at least 30 years,” says Lorenz Kummer, a campaigner at HEKS. “Nonetheless, over that time, the company more than doubled its emissions and those damaging effects are being felt by the people of Pari.”
A spokesperson for Holcim said in a statement that climate action was a “top priority” for the company and that it was “taking individual action and supporting global multilateral frameworks for collective impact to be part of the solution.”
The statement added: “We do not believe that court cases focused on single companies are an effective mechanism to tackle the global complexity of climate action.”
Arif Pujianto says he is worried about the increasing frequency of floods in Pari and wants to protect the island from more harm [Peter Yeung/Al Jazeera]
The Pari islanders’ case against Holcim, one of the first to be initiated by affected parties from the Global South, is part of a growing movement for “loss and damage” and could be the catalyst for more climate litigation.
The case marks the first time a Swiss company is being held accountable in the courts for its role in climate change.
“This kind of litigation shows that policymakers aren’t doing enough to address the needs of the people impacted,” says Noah Walker-Crawford, a researcher specialising in climate litigation at University College London.
“If the claimants were to win, it would set a massive precedent. It would make those responsible for the damage pay.”
‘Global justice’
Campaigners argue it is a matter of “global justice” that people living mostly in developing countries receive compensation as they have been disproportionately affected by climate-related damages and losses – through flooding, heat waves, storms, droughts and more – largely caused by industrialised countries and global corporations.
According to an analysis in July, the US has since 1990 inflicted more than $1.9 trillion in damages to other, mostly poor, countries as a result of its greenhouse gas emissions – through heatwaves, crop failures and other consequences.
At the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in November, European leaders acknowledged their role in the climate crisis and agreed to set up a “loss and damage” fund to help the most vulnerable but no concrete investment has yet been established, nor a mechanism by which the funds can be dispersed.
Bobi says he joined the case because he is worried no one will be able to live on the island in the future [Peter Yeung/Al Jazeera]The island is now hit by several floods every year and fishermen say their catch has been affected [Peter Yeung/Al Jazeera]
Several legal challenges have been brought over climate as time runs out for at-risk communities.
A Peruvian farmer and mountain guide are taking action against the German energy firm RWE, whose case is ongoing, while Friends of the Earth Netherlands won a landmark court ruling in 2021 that ordered oil giant Shell to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent in 10 years.
According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), risks caused by sea level rise including erosion, flooding and salinisation are expected to “significantly increase” by 2100 along all low-lying coasts.
Data from Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency shows that in 2021, there were 5,402 disasters, including 1,794 floods – up from the 3,814 disasters and 784 floods in 2019.
Yonvitner, a professor of fisheries and marine science at Indonesia’s IPB University, warns that if emissions continue on their current trajectory, “disaster” will strike the archipelago’s 17,000 islands and the 150 million people who live near the sea.
“This is a gravely serious issue,” he told Al Jazeera. “Not only Pari but all across the country’s coastal area, there is a significant influence of the climate crisis.”
‘Not normal’
WALHI and HEKS say 11 percent of Pari island has already been submerged over the last decade and that by 2050, most of it will be underwater.
“Indonesia is the largest archipelagic state in the world,” said Parid Ridwanuddin, officer for coastal, marine and small islands for WALHI. “If we continue on the same trajectory, in the future, many islands will disappear. Pari is in serious danger.”
Asmania and some other women have started growing vegetables because the flooding and changing climate has kept tourists away and destroyed their seaweed farm [Peter Yeung/Al Jazeera]
The inhabitants of Pari, which before the COVID-19 pandemic welcomed more than 1,000 tourists every month to its idyllic beaches, live naturally low-carbon lives, actively protecting corals and mangroves. Coconuts, bananas and papaya all grow on the island, and the mangroves teem with fish, crabs and even crocodiles.
“We’re close to nature here,” said Bobi, a 50-year-old fisherman who is one of the islanders involved in the case. “I cry when I imagine the future. Many houses will be destroyed. Nobody will be able to live here.”
“Industries should not only earn money and extract resources, they have to consider sustainability because we only have one planet, no alternative,” he added.
Suleiman, the island’s community leader, says tidal floods that previously occurred once every five years now strike the island several times annually, with three such floods occurring in 2022. Two boats, he says, sank at sea during rough weather.
“Weather changes are normal, they’re part of the season,” he said. “But when things became more serious, when houses were destroyed, I realised this is not normal.”
Asmania, who is also involved in the Pari litigation, says income for her guesthouse has halved since large-scale flooding on the island began.
“After the tidal waves hit the island, many tourists cancelled their reservations,” the 40-year-old said.
Asmania, who like many Indonesians has only one name, says the extreme weather destroyed her seaweed farm so she and several other women have been forced to grow crops on Pari, which is just 2.6km (1.6 miles) long and 430 metres (0.27 miles) at its widest point.
Before the pandemic, more than 1,000 tourists visited the island’s beaches and mangroves every month [Peter Yeung/Al Jazeera]
Edi Mulyono, another claimant and the sixth generation of his family on the island, has been a fisherman for three decades. He says that when previously he could catch in excess of 100kg (220 pounds), he is now lucky to return with 20kg (44 pounds).
As the sun begins to rise above the rows of coconut trees and clear blue waters along Pari, Mulyono is preparing his battered wooden boat for another day at sea.
“I could predict the weather before,” he said. “Across the 12 months of the year, there were seasons for different kinds of fish, like tuna and squid. But now it’s become chaotic. The Earth is getting old. It is in crisis.”
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has stated his intention to prevent state colleges from offering programmes on diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as critical race theory (CRT).
The proposal, which is a part of a larger higher education legislative package, was made public by the Republican governor on Tuesday. It is anticipated that the GOP-controlled state House of Representatives will consider it when its regular session starts in March.
DeSantis, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2024, has harshly criticised DEI initiatives as well as programmes that examine diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), also known as DEI and critical race theory.
Critical race theory is a way of thinking about US history through the lens of racism. Scholars developed it during the 1970s and 1980s in response to what they viewed as a lack of racial progress following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. It centres on the idea that racism is systemic in the nation’s institutions, which function to maintain the dominance of white people in society.
“I think people want to see true academics, and they want to get rid of some of the political window dressing that seems to accompany all this,” DeSantis said at a news conference in the coastal city of Bradenton.
In a statement, the governor’s office said the proposal “raises the standards of learning and civil discourse of public higher education in Florida” by “prohibiting higher education institutions from using any funding, regardless of source, to support DEI, CRT, and other discriminatory initiatives.”
DeSantis promised “no funding” for such programmes. “I think that that’s very important because it really serves as an ideological filter, a political filter,” he said.
The proposal was expected after the DeSantis administration requested in late December that state colleges submit spending data and other information on programmes related to critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion.
The governor is also pushing for education administrators to “realign” courses to provide historically accurate information and not include identity politics. DeSantis’s proposals have not yet been introduced as formal legislation, but the Republican-controlled state house is often eager to carry out his initiatives.
DeSantis and other conservatives have long argued that critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programmes are racially divisive and discriminatory – and are often cited in criticism of what they often call “woke” ideology in education.
Last year, the governor signed legislation dubbed the Stop WOKE Act, which restricts certain race-based conversations and analysis in schools and businesses. The law bars instruction that says members of one race are inherently racist or should feel guilt for past actions committed by others of the same race, among other things.
This month, the DeSantis administration blocked a new Advanced Placement course – an undergraduate-level programme for high-school students – that would focus on African American studies, saying that teaching it in Florida public schools violates state law. He also accused the course of being historically inaccurate.
So far, at least 25 states have considered legislation or other steps to limit how race and racism can be taught, according to an analysis from Education Week. Eight states, all Republican-led, have banned or limited the teaching of critical race theory or similar concepts through laws or administrative actions. The bans largely address what can be taught inside the classroom.
New higher education proposal builds off our 2022 reforms: – Core courses rooted in Western tradition – Elimination of DEI/CRT bureaucracies – Bolster civics-focused institutes at UF, FSU and FIU – Additional accountability for tenured faculty pic.twitter.com/XV6mExlzHJ
Proponents of diversity programmes and critical race theory have argued they aim to counter institutional racism and teach an accurate version of US history that shows the racism African Americans and other ethnic minorities have faced.
Several Democrats have slammed DeSantis’s plans to interfere in public education. “Nothing says you oppose ideology on college campuses…. like pushing your ideology on college campuses,” Florida house member Anna Eskamani wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
The governor’s move to block the Advanced Placement course on African American studies also drew outrage last week.
“Ron DeSantis banning AP African American Studies because it ‘lacks educational value’ is unmasked white supremacy,” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said in a social media post last week.
“You cannot teach the truth about American history without African American history. Period.”
Head of the Rent Control Department, Emmanuel Hovey Kporsu says landlords are not legally empowered to evict tenants that default on their rent.
Mr. Kporsu said it is wrong to break into the premises of tenants after the expiration of their rent in an attempt to eject them.
He explained that: “the issue with rent in Ghana is that you cannot forcefully eject somebody from your premises after the contract has ended. The fact that the contract has expired and the tenant has not given you the keys to enter the place, you cannot enter the premises.”
Explaining the regulations surrounding the tenancy agreement in Ghana to Umaru Sanda Amadu onFace to Face on Citi TV, Mr. Kporsu said, “probably your tenancy has expired, and you’ve locked the premises, and then you ran away with the keys, the landlord cannot forcefully enter the premises because if he does and the tenant comes back and says he has lost a pot of flowers, the landlord is obliged to pay.”
He advised landlords to report any pertinent issues involving evictions to the Rent Control Department for amicable resolution which requires that, “you come and report to the Rent Control Department, and we make you swear an affidavit to indicate that the place belongs to you, and we give you a notice to be posted in front of the door for a period of two weeks and if the tenant does not appear, we go before a magistrate to seek an order to force open the premises.”
Mr. Kporsu also explained what happens after an entry order is granted by a magistrate.
“When we get the order to forcefully enter the room from the magistrate, we force open the premise and lease any item we see there and give it to the landlord for save keeping for a period of two weeks, and we go back to the magistrate to either auction the things or donate them after the tenant doesn’t appear.”
Residential renting in Ghana has been on an increasing trend for the past two decades. This is a result of the high demand for affordable rental properties. The problem is compounded by an uncompromising demand of landlords to collect a year or two years of prepaid rent from potential tenants.
Research has shown that only 5% of Ghana’s population can acquire their own homes without any form of assistance, with 60% requiring support that is facilitated by the state to access housing whilst 35% will require additional direct support before they can have access to housing.
The assistance required by the households falling into the 60% band comes in the form of supportiveregulations and competitively priced mortgages whereas the lower 35% band needs subsidies in addition.
Francis, 86, says that a “forgotten genocide” is happening in the DRC as he starts his journey through two African countries.
Pope Francis, who recently arrived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as part of a trip to two African countries, has demanded that foreign nations stop stealing Africa’s natural resources for the “poison of their own greed.”
Since Pope John Paul II visited the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1985, when it was still known as Zaire, Pope Francis, 86, is the first pope to make such a trip.
“Hands off the Democratic Republic of the Congo! Hands off Africa!” Francis said on Tuesday to applause in his opening speech to Congolese government authorities and the diplomatic corps in the garden of Kinshasa’s national palace.
Calling Congo’s vast mineral and natural wealth a “diamond of creation”, Francis demanded that foreign interests stop carving up the country for their own interests and acknowledge their role in the economic “enslavement” of the Congolese people.
“Stop choking Africa. It is not a mine to be stripped or a terrain to be plundered,” said history’s first Latin American pope, who has long railed at how wealthy countries have exploited the resources of poorer ones for their own profit.
Residents of Kinshasa welcome Pope Francis on his apostolic journey, in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, on January 31, 2023 [Justin Makangara/Reuters]
Francis pointed the finger at the role colonial powers such as Belgium played in the exploitation of Congo until the country, which is 80 times the size of Belgium, gained its independence in 1960. He also said neighbouring countries are playing a similar role today.
The 86-year-old didn’t identify Belgium or any neighbouring country by name, but he spared no word of condemnation, saying there was a “forgotten genocide” under way.
“The poison of greed has smeared its diamonds with blood,” Francis said.
“May the world acknowledge the catastrophic things that were done over the centuries to the detriment of the local peoples, and not forget this country and this continent.”
Pope Francis is welcomed by residents of Kinshasa on January 31, 2023 [Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media/Handout via Reuters]
Al Jazeera’s Malcolm Webb, reporting from Kinshasa, said hundreds if not thousands of people on the roads followed the pope’s motorcade on motorbikes to the presidential palace from the airport.
“The roads were lined up with church groups and schoolchildren from the many Catholic-run church schools run over here in Congo,” he added.
“The Catholic church runs about 60 percent of health and education services here … it’s what makes the Catholic Church such a significant institution here [in Congo],” Webb added.
About half of Congo’s population of 90 million are Roman Catholics.
The six-day trip, which also includes a stop in South Sudan, was originally scheduled for July 2022, but was postponed because of Francis’s knee problems, which were still so serious on Tuesday that he could not stand to greet journalists in the plane heading to Kinshasa and was forced to use a wheelchair on the ground.
Fighting in DRC
Francis was also supposed to have included a stop in Goma, in eastern Congo, but the surrounding North Kivu region has been plagued by intense fighting between government troops and the M23 rebel group, as well as attacks by fighters linked to the ISIL (ISIS) armed group.
The fighting has displaced some 5.7 million people, a fifth of them last year alone, according to the World Food Programme.
Congo accuses Rwanda of backing the M23 rebel group fighting government troops in the east. Rwanda denies this.
“As well as armed militias, foreign powers hungry for the minerals in our soil commit, with the direct and cowardly support of our neighbour Rwanda, cruel atrocities,” said Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, speaking just before the pope on the same stage.
The pope said the Congolese people were fighting to preserve their territorial integrity “against deplorable attempts to fragment the country”. The pope did not name Rwanda in his address or take sides in the dispute.
Instead of travelling to Goma, Francis will meet with a delegation of people from the east who will travel to Kinshasa for a private encounter at the Vatican embassy on Wednesday.
The plan calls for them to participate in a ceremony in which they jointly commit to forgiving their assailants.
PURC increased the price of electricity by 30% on January 16 and water by 8.3% starting on February 1, 2023.
The PURC justified its decision to approve the increase by pointing to the depreciation of the cedi, skyrocketing inflation, and problems with power generation.
In a release issued by the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), the power distributor said it has cataloged all unit consumption and the expected cost in a “Reckoner,” which clearly explains how the tariff is applied and billed.
“Please note that individual customers’ tariff percentage increase will depend on customer classification and consumption category. The Reckoner will be displayed at all our districts and customer service centres nationwide to guide customers on their electricity purchases.”
“ECG, by this announcement, assures our customers and stakeholders of our commitment to ensuring a smooth implementation of the new tariff.”
Meanwhile, the ECG said it has established customer help desks in all districts and customer service centres to assist, explain and reconcile any challenge.
The move would restructure the federal response to treat the virus asan endemic public health threat, ending some government support.
United States President Joe Biden has informed Congress that his administration will formally end two national emergencies declared to address the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, restructuring the federal response to the virus as an endemic public health threat.
The announcement on Monday came in a statement opposing resolutions being brought to the floor this week by House Republicans to bring the emergency to an immediate end. House Republicans are also gearing up to launch investigations on the federal government’s response to the virus.
“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system – for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy.
The announcement comes as legislators have already ended elements of the emergencies that kept millions of Americans insured during the pandemic. The change would also mean the response can be managed through public health agencies’ normal authorities.
The move, combined with the drawdown of most federal COVID relief money, would also shift the development of vaccines and treatments away from the direct management of the federal government.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar first declared a public health emergency in response to COVID on January 31, 2020 during the administration of then-President Donald Trump. In March 2020, Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency.
The measures have been repeatedly extended by Biden since he took office in January 2021. The Biden administration had previously considered ending the emergency last year, but held off amid concerns about a potential “winter surge” in cases and to provide adequate time for providers, insurers and patients to prepare for its end.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 1.1 million COVID deaths in the US since 2020, although the death rate has dropped dramatically since vaccines became widely available. The agency said about 3,700 people died from the virus last week.
US legislators have already blunted many federal programmes related to COVID, refusing for months to fulfil the Biden administration’s request for billions more dollars to extend free vaccines and testing.
The costs of COVID-19 vaccines are also expected to skyrocket once the government stops buying them, with Pfizer saying it will charge as much as $130 per dose. Only 15 percent of US residents have received the recommended, updated booster that has been offered since the last year.
Free at-home COVID tests will also come to an end, and hospitals will not get extra payments for treating patients after the emergency ends.
On Monday, the World Health Organization said the coronavirus remains a global health emergency, even as a key advisory panel for the group found the pandemic may be nearing an “inflexion point” where higher levels of immunity can lower virus-related deaths.
Biden’s announcement comes as the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on Tuesday on legislation that would terminate the public health emergency.
On Tuesday, UN experts demanded an impartial investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Mali by government forces and the Wagner Group, a Russian private military contractor.
Mali, whose government seized control in a military takeover in 2021, has previously claimed that Russian forces stationed there are not mercenaries but rather trainers assisting local troops with equipment purchased from Moscow.
According to Western powers, Wagner Group contractors are among the Russian forces in Mali.
“Since 2021, the experts have received persistent and alarming accounts of horrific executions, mass graves, acts of torture, rape and sexual violence, pillaging, arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances perpetrated by Malian armed forces and their allies,” said the statement from the independent experts.
Mali’s army spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said last year that the Russian state had nothing to do with military contractors working in Mali, adding that the African country had the right to work with private Russian firms.
Mali is engaged in a fight against armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) who have waged a decade-long conflict that has spread to neighbouring countries.
Tuesday’s statement mentioned the Wagner Group by name, and described credible reports of the involvement of military personnel believed to belong to the group in a massacre of hundreds of people in March.
Survivors have said that white mercenaries suspected to be Russians took part in the massacre in Moura, a market town in central Mali. The incident sparked international uproar and prompted the UN to open an earlier investigation.
Mali’s army has denied any wrongdoing in Moura and said it killed 203 militants there during what it described as a military operation.
The Wagner Group has attracted international attention over its prominent role in fighting during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Last week, the United States designated Wagner as a “transnational criminal organisation” responsible for widespread human rights abuses.
By vetoing the bill, the Conservative government in London exercised “muscular unionism.”
Late last year, Pope Francis was asked by a Spanish newspaper what role, if any, the Catholic Church should play in ending the constitutional standoff in Catalonia.
“Los ingleses resolvieron ‘a la inglesa’ las solicitudes de Escocia,” he replied. “The English resolved the requests of Scotland ‘in an English way.’”
As well as being cryptic, the remark was, I think, meant to be comparative: if the British authorities could facilitate a peaceful referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, surely the Spanish authorities could find a similar solution for Catalonia.
I used to spend a lot of time in Catalonia as a reporter and this was a common refrain among the independence supporters there. Britain is a democracy, they would tell me; Spain is not.
In 2023, however, that contrast – between British constitutional tolerance and Spanish intransigence – is becoming harder to sustain.
On January 16, the United Kingdom government did something it had never previously done in the 24-year history of Scottish home rule: it unilaterally vetoed a law that fell explicitly within Scotland’s devolved jurisdiction.
The law in question – which enjoyed cross-party support among Scottish parliamentarians – was aimed at making life easier for trans people by streamlining the otherwise stressful bureaucratic process of gender transition.
Speaking in the House of Commons, Alister Jack, the Conservative secretary of state for Scotland, argued that the bill risked violating aspects of UK-wide equalities legislation, although he struggled to explain which aspects it would violate and why.
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, hit back. Jack’s decision to trigger a so-called “section 35 order” signalled a “full-frontal attack” on Scottish autonomy, she said, and underscored the Conservative Party’s “contempt for devolution”.
Sturgeon, the leader of the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP), isn’t exactly neutral in this debate, but she may have a point. In recent years, and specifically since Brexit, Tory politicians have become increasingly hostile to any institution that challenges the traditional pillars of power – Westminster, Whitehall, the monarchy – in British public life.
Michael Keating, a professor of Scottish politics at Aberdeen University, calls this trend “muscular unionism”. Another name for it might be Anglo-British nationalism: the belief that the UK is a unitary state, not a union, and that sovereignty in the British system lies exclusively with London.
Brexit turbocharged this “Anglo-British nationalism” because the vote to leave the EU was fuelled, in the first instance, by English eurosceptic sentiment and, in the second, by the rhetoric of “global Britishness”.
The conflation of “English” with “British” in the language of Brexiteers was partly unconscious: England is by far the largest country in the UK and its interests have historically overshadowed those of the smaller Celtic nations.
But it was also compensatory. Voters in Scotland did not in 2016, and do not today, want to be outside the EU. Yet the centralising logic of Brexit, rooted in a predominantly English desire to escape the continent’s “oppressive” political norms, dictates that they must.
Jack’s intervention dovetailed with another ongoing development on the British right: the rise of a reactionary cultural populism that has selected as its latest target the UK trans community.
Britain’s conservative media is in the midst of an incessant campaign against “gender extremism”. “Trans law ‘could turn parents into criminals’,” screamed one recent headline in The Daily Telegraph; “Why teenage girls are on the front line of the trans war,” screamed another.
This campaign has been stoked by Conservative policymakers.
Last October, during her brief tenure as prime minister, Liz Truss railed against the “absurdity” of gender self-identification laws for trans people. On January 21, Kemi Badenoch, the current Tory minister for women and equalities, said she thought “predatory” men would exploit Scotland’s gender recognition reforms to secure access to women-only spaces.
Neither Truss nor Badenoch produced any evidence to support their assertions – because there is no evidence that gender reforms of the sort being proposed by the SNP raise the risk of violence towards women and girls.
But for the British Tories, rational discourse is not the goal here.
After 14 years in power, and with the adrenaline surge of Brexit beginning to wear off, the party is flailing. It has burned through three leaders in the space of six months and is now staring down the barrel of a 20-point polling deficit. Meanwhile, the next UK general election hovers menacingly on the horizon.
The right’s full-blown embrace of transphobia should, then, be seen as a cynical attempt to excite a demoralised Tory base.
The twinning in Tory politics of culture war paranoia with a belligerent form of post-Brexit nationalism bears worrying implications for British democracy.
Alister Jack justified his decision to annul the SNP’s gender bill on the grounds that, once enacted, the new law could have unwanted spillover effects in England.
Yet, almost immediately, one of his Conservative colleagues gave the game away. The Scots have “the right to pass their own laws”, the Member of the Scottish Parliament, Rachael Hamilton, told Channel 4 News on January 17, but only if those laws are “good”.
Needless to say, this is not how devolution was meant to work when the Scottish Parliament was first established in 1999. Nor should the Tories – who haven’t won an election in Scotland for 70 years – act as sole adjudicators on the quality of Scottish legislation.
The problem for supporters of the Union is that Jack’s intervention has made Britishness itself synonymous with social intolerance – a sure-fire repellant for the liberal voters unionists need to stave off the SNP.
The UK once functioned, or was supposed to function, as a plurinational state composed of multiple territorial narratives and demands. Now, under a radicalised Tory party, when the peripheries step out of line, the centre stands ready to set them straight again.
Unfortunately, faced with this tightening constitutional trap, Scotland’s broader political options are limited.
In 2021, Boris Johnson summarily dismissed the SNP’s request for a second independence referendum. In 2022, the British Supreme Court ruled that only Westminster could legislate for a “legitimate” plebiscite on the breakup of Britain – Sturgeon’s central objective as Scotland’s first minister.
Pope Francis’s formulation makes more sense if inverted. For the time being, at least, the Scots will just have to learn how to live in a more English way.
DISCLAIMER: Independentghana.com will not be liable for any inaccuracies contained in this article. The views expressed in the article are solely those of the author’s, and do not reflect those of The Independent Ghana
Due to “surprisingly resilient” demand in the United States and Europe as well as the reopening of the Chinese economy after Beijing abandoned its strict zero-COVID strategy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has slightly increased its outlook for global growth in 2023.
However, the IMF’s most recent World Economic Outlook forecasts represent an improvement over an October prediction of 2.7 percent growth this year, with warnings that the world could easily tip into recession. The IMF predicted that global growth would still fall to 2.9 percent in 2023 from 3.4 percent in 2022.
For 2024, the IMF said global growth would accelerate slightly to 3.1 percent, but interest rate hikes by central banks around the world would slow demand.
IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said recession risks had subsided and central banks were making progress in controlling inflation, but more work was needed to curb prices, and new disruptions could come from further escalation of the war in Ukraine and China’s battle against COVID-19.
“We have to sort of be prepared to expect the unexpected, but it could well represent a turning point, with growth bottoming out and then inflation declining,” Gourinchas told reporters of the 2023 outlook.
Strong demand
In its 2023 gross domestic product (GDP) forecasts, the IMF said it now expected GDP growth in the US of 1.4 percent, up from the 1.0 percent predicted in October and following 2.0 percent growth in 2022.
The fund cited stronger-than-expected consumption and investment in the third quarter of 2022, a robust labour market and strong consumer balance sheets.
It said the eurozone had made similar gains, with 2023 growth for the bloc now forecast at 0.7 percent, compared with 0.5 percent in the October outlook, following 3.5 percent growth in 2022. The IMF said Europe had adapted to higher energy costs more quickly than expected, and an easing of energy prices had helped the region.
The United Kingdom was the only major advanced economy the IMF predicted to be in recession this year.
It forecast the British economy to shrink 0.6 percent this year, compared with a previous expectation for growth of 0.3 percent. People are struggling with higher interest rates, and government moves to further tighten spending are also squeezing growth, it said.
“These figures confirm we are not immune to the pressures hitting nearly all advanced economies,’’ Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt said in response to the IMF forecast. “Short-term challenges should not obscure our long-term prospects — the UK outperformed many forecasts last year, and if we stick to our plan to halve inflation, the UK is still predicted to grow faster than Germany and Japan over the coming years.”
China reopens
The IMF revised China’s growth outlook sharply higher for 2023, to 5.2 percent from 4.4 percent in the October forecast after its ‘zero-COVID’ strategy held back the economy. China’s growth rate was 3.0 percent in 2022, below the global average for the first time in more than 40 years.
Still, the fund added that China’s growth will “fall to 4.5 percent in 2024 before settling at below 4 percent over the medium term amid declining business dynamism and slow progress on structural reforms”.
At the same time, it maintained India’s outlook for a dip in 2023 growth to 6.1 percent but a rebound to 6.8 percent in 2024, matching its 2022 performance.
Gourinchas said together, the two Asian powerhouse economies will contribute more than 50 percent of global growth in 2023.
He acknowledged that China’s reopening would put some upward pressure on commodity prices, but “on balance, I think we view the reopening of China as a benefit to the global economy” as it will help ease production bottlenecks that have worsened inflation and by creating more demand from Chinese households.
Even with China’s reopening, the IMF is predicting that oil prices will fall in both 2023 and 2024 due to lower global growth compared with 2022.
Risks
The IMF said there were both upside and downside risks to the outlook, with built-up savings creating the possibility of sustained demand growth, particularly for tourism, and an easing of labour market pressures in some advanced economies helping to cool inflation, lessening the need for aggressive rate hikes.
But it detailed more and larger downside risks, including more widespread COVID-19 outbreaks in China and a worsening of the country’s property turmoil.
An escalation of the war in Ukraine could lead to a further spike in energy and food prices, as would a cold northern winter next year as Europe struggles to refill gas storage and competes with China for liquefied natural gas supplies, the fund said.
Gourinchas said central banks need to stay vigilant and be more certain that inflation is on a downward path, particularly in countries where real interest rates remain low, such as in Europe.
Democrats in the US House of Representatives have written a letter condemning the violent crackdown on protesters in Peru.
The Biden administration has been urged to halt all security assistance to Peru due to a “pattern of repression” against antigovernment protests that has resulted in more than 50 civilian fatalities by a group of Democrats in the US House of Representatives.
They requested in a letter shared with The Associated Press on Monday that the Biden administration halt its security assistance until it can certify that the crackdown in Peru has ended and the Peruvian officials accountable for violations of human rights have been brought to justice.
This week, Peru’s foreign minister is seeking international assistance for President Dina Boluarte’s government, which is coming under increasing pressure.
Peru’s foreign minister is in Washington, DC, this week seeking international support for President Dina Boluarte’s increasingly besieged government. Pressure has been mounting on Boluarte, formerly the vice president under ex-President Pedro Castillo, to resign the post she inherited last month when Castillo was impeached and arrested for his ill-fated attempt to close Peru’s Congress.
“Security forces have indiscriminately responded with almost no regard for protestors’ human rights,” according to the letter, which was signed by 20 mostly progressive House Democrats. “Rather than working to deescalate tensions, the Boluarte government has substantially increased tensions — including classifying protesters as ‘terrorists’ and limiting citizens’ right of movement.”
The US provides more than $40m annually to Peru in security assistance, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, a research nonprofit. The vast majority is aimed at helping Peru counter drug trafficking.
While protesters were initially demanding Castillo’s release from jail, the unrest has spread across the country, galvanising the support of many poor, Indigenous Peruvians who have benefitted little from Peru’s mining-driven economic boom.
Protesters demand that both Boluarte and Congress stand down and that new elections be held this year. Legislators rejected that on Friday. But after another protester died and Boluarte urged them to reconsider, Congress narrowly agreed on Monday to debate a proposal to hold elections in October, with 66 votes in favour, 49 opposed and six abstentions.
Meanwhile, as the protests stretch into their second month, beleaguered security forces have become more forceful.
Among the incidents cited in the letter, organised by Representative Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, was the national police raid on student dormitories at San Marcos University in Lima, which included the mass arrest of nearly 200 people. That shocked many Peruvians because campuses have long been off-limits to security forces except when crimes are being committed.
The campus invasion drew sharp condemnation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which said it collected testimony from civil society groups who alleged law enforcement officers invaded the bedrooms of student leaders, slung racist remarks at Indigenous activists, and forced women to strip naked and do squats.
Officials from the United Nations and European Union have strongly condemned what they consider the disproportionate use of force. The Biden administration has been more measured, calling for impartial investigations into abuses while also expressing support for Boluarte’s efforts to restore calm and seek a political solution.
Amid the unrest, outgoing US Ambassador Lisa Kenna announced an additional $8m in US support for coca eradication efforts in the remote Upper Huallaga valley, part of the Amazon basin in Peru. Kenna has also met with the defence minister and other Cabinet members.
Such actions send an “ambiguous message”, according to the letter, which was also signed by representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, a longtime voice for human rights in Latin America.
“The US government can and must do more,” they wrote. “We believe our proposed actions would send a powerful signal in support of fundamental rights and help promote effective engagement for a political resolution.”
International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said the UK economy will contract and perform worse than other advanced economies as household costs of living continue to rise.
The economy will shrink by 0.6% in 2023, not slightly grow as previously predicted, according to the IMF.
The IMF did add, however, that it believes the UK economy is now “on the right track” as a result of the Autumn Statement.
The UK outperformed many predictions last year, according to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt.
But shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said the figures showed the UK “lagging behind our peers.”
In its World Economic Outlook update, the IMF, which works to stabilize economic growth, said the UK’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would shrink rather than grow by 0.3% this year.
GDP is a measure for how well, or badly, an economy is doing and in a growing economy, each quarterly GDP figure will be slightly bigger than the quarter before.
If a country’s GDP falls for two quarters in a row, it means it is in recession and its economy is doing badly. Typically, this means companies make less money and the number of unemployed people rises.
The IMF predicted the UK would be the only country—across the world’s advanced and emerging economies—to suffer a year of declining GDP. Even sanctions-hit Russia is now forecast to grow this year.
The IMF said its new forecast reflected the UK’s high energy prices and financial conditions, such as high inflation.
IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told the BBC that for 2022, the UK had had “fairly robust” growth at 4.1%, which he said was “one of the strongest growth numbers in Europe”.
“But it is true that we are forecasting a sharp slowdown in 2023, with growth that would turn even negative for the year.”
He said the revision reflected the “fact that we have a very challenging environment in the United Kingdom”, which he said was caused by high energy prices as well as “high dependence on liquid natural gas”.
Image caption, High energy prices are driving up UK inflation
The Bank of England has put up interest rates nine times since December 2021 in an attempt to reduce inflation – the rate at which prices rise. Mr Gourinchas said these rate rises fed “quickly into mortgages, because a lot of mortgages are adjustable rates”.
“So a lot of homeowners with mortgages are seeing an increase in their mortgage payments.”
Mr Gourinchas said another factor in the UK’s forecast was that employment was still below pre-pandemic levels.
He said the plans outlined by the Treasury in the months since the Autumn Statement showed the UK was “certainly trying to carefully navigate these different challenges and we think that they are on the right track”.
And the IMF said in 2024 it expected the UK economy to grow by 0.9%, up from a previous forecast of 0.6%.
‘Heading for recession’
Sophie Lund Yates, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, told the BBC’s Today programme the UK was not the only major economy struggling and there was a chance it could “squeak out a little more positivity” than the IMF had predicted.
“The Bank of England’s own predictions are slightly brighter than [the IMF’s’ have been],” she added.
“But overall, we are heading for recession, and the big question is how deep that’s going to be.”
Against the backdrop of growing expectations of a milder recession across the world, the IMF’s forecasts for the UK stand out, downgraded by just under a full percentage point since the autumn, and now expected to shrink by 0.6% this year.
The IMF attributes this to rapid interest rate rises, tax rises, higher borrowing costs for businesses, and still high domestic energy prices. The fund said the UK was having to navigate a very complex environment, and that since the Autumn Statement, British policy was now “on the right track.”
But if over the coming year this forecast proves to be correct, it raises questions as to why the UK will have missed out on a better global economic backdrop. The UK is now the only shrinking economy out of 15 published in this report.
The Bank of England will publish its new forecast for the UK economy later this week, alongside an expected further rise in interest rates.
The IMF’s bleak picture for the UK comes after Mr Hunt warned it was “unlikely” that there would be room for any “significant” tax cuts in the spring budget.
The chancellor, who has been under pressure from some in his party to cut taxes to stimulate the economy, has said that lowering inflation “is the best tax cut right now”.
Inflation hit 10.5% in the 12 months to December, close to a 40-year high.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged to halve inflation by the end of the year, although some economists have said price rises will slow without government policies, due to commodity prices and shipping costs decreasing.
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, has also said inflation is likely to fall rapidly this year but has warned a UK recession is still on the cards.
While the IMF predicts the UK economy will contract, it forecasts economic growth of 1.4% in the US, 0.1% in Germany and 0.7% in France.
Mr Hunt said the IMF’s figures “confirm we are not immune to the pressures hitting nearly all advanced economies”.
“Short-term challenges should not obscure our long-term prospects – the UK outperformed many forecasts last year, and if we stick to our plan to halve inflation, the UK is still predicted to grow faster than Germany and Japan over the coming years,” he added.
Economic forecasters are not always 100% right when it comes to predicting the future. The IMF has said its forecasts for growth the following year in most advanced economies like the UK’s have more often than not been within about 1.5 percentage points of what actually happens.
The IMF said the trend of central banks putting up interest rates to try to curb inflation and the war in Ukraine continued to “weigh on economic activity” across the world.
According to experts in air defense, US-made F-16 fighter jets would give Ukraine an advantage over the Russian air force, but only if they were used in conjunction with potent missiles and targeting data that the West would also have to supply, drawing it more actively into the conflict.
Konstantinos Zikidis, a Hellenic Aerospace Industry aerospace engineer with extensive F-16 experience, said of the technology: “It’s not a panacea, not a game-changer.”
Despite President Joe Biden’s Monday statement that the United States would not send F-16s to Ukraine, the majority of NATO members in Europe have left the option open.
“The Sukhoi-35 is larger and faster and has a more powerful radar,” Zikidis told Al Jazeera of the Russian fighter jet the F-16 would be up against.
But the F-16 could overcome the Sukhoi-35 if it carried powerful Western missiles and received tracking data from airborne radar, Zikidis said.
If Ukraine were to receive F-16s, they would likely come from Poland, which has said it is ready to hand over part of its fleet.
These carry the AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, a 10-20km (6-12-mile) range short-range infrared guided missile “undetectable by the target plane’s defence systems”, Zikidis said.
“And they have the AIM-120 AMRAAM, which covers larger distances of up to 100km (62 miles)… [and] can continue to receive target updates from the aircraft that fired it.”
Both missiles are among NATO’s most advanced.
Wing commander Thanasis Papanikolaou, who has flown and commanded formations of F-16s, agrees that, if networked, the F-16 would offer Ukraine a clear advantage.
“The Russians are using older tactics, whereas Western tactics have evolved to use planes in combination with the navy, ground forces, [airborne] and naval radar intelligence – this Western type of warfare is very advanced,” Papanikolaou told Al Jazeera.
“The Su35 may have great abilities, but it is behind the F-16 if equipped with Link 16,” said Papanikolaou, referring to a NATO communications technology that data-links planes, ships and ground forces. “This enables every asset on the battlefield to share the same picture.”
If NATO’s AWACS airborne radar were to operate at the limit of Romanian airspace, it could illuminate virtually all of Crimea, a territory Ukraine says it wants to recapture, and reports suggest the White House is willing to consider helping Ukraine do.
Ukraine wants new tech
Ukraine has suggested it wants some of the most advanced versions of the F-16.
“If we get them, the advantages on the battlefield will be just immense … It’s not just F-16s. Fourth-generation aircraft, this is what we want,” Yuriy Sak, an adviser to defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told Reuters.
Poland, which operates fourth-generation F-16 Block 52+ planes, confirmed on Monday it was prepared to send them to Ukraine if NATO approved the move.
Experts say these carry a “sophisticated” on-board computer and powerful radar.
At the beginning of the war, Ukraine’s air force was spearheaded by 50 MiG-29 fighters and 32 Sukhoi-27s, but they were “overmatched” said a recent RUSI report.
“Russian aircraft could generally see and shoot further while their countermeasures were effective against Ukrainian air-to-air munitions,” the report said.
Moscow’s highly publicised aircraft losses in the opening days of the war dropped after the Russian air force brought in air defences and started jamming Ukrainian radar and hunting Ukrainian anti-air batteries.
Ukrainian pilots partly compensated for their disadvantage in numbers and technology by flying below enemy radar, but the limitations of this tactic were made painfully obvious last October when a Ukrainian Sukhoi-27 and a Sukhoi-24 were shot out of the sky by Russian missiles after performing a “jump” – a brief thrust into higher altitude – to fire at kamikaze drones or enemy air defences.
Western airborne radar failed to spot the incoming missiles, leading to suspicion that Russia may have begun to deploy its fearsome R-37M, a hypersonic missile believed to have been fired more than 200km (124 miles) away by a Sukhoi-57, Russia’s still-experimental multirole stealth fighter.
Against such a combination of arms, even the F-16 Block 52+ may not be a match, say experts, but it does underline Ukraine’s need for a generational leap in air attack capabilities.
Can it be done?
There are clear advantages to the F-16.
It is the world’s most-produced fighter jet, with many being decommissioned in Europe as NATO members transition to the F-35.
Lockheed Martin, which produces the F-16, told the Financial Times it can increase production to replace planes sent to Ukraine.
COO Frank St John said the company was “going to be ramping production on F-16s in Greenville [South Carolina, US] to get to the place where we will be able to backfill pretty capably any countries that choose to do third-party transfers to help with the current conflict”.
The Netherlands’ foreign minister, Wopke Hoekstra, said there were “no taboos” on weapons supplies to Ukraine, and recent reports had suggested that the US Pentagon had seriously considered sending F-16s.
But there are practical and symbolic concerns.
Training Ukrainian pilots on F-16s might not be carried out in time to make a difference in the war this year, say experts.
“The altimeter in Western planes, for example, is in feet. The Soviet altimeter is in metres. It’s two different ways of thinking,” said Papanikolaou.
“It would take many months, and they might have to be piloted by [Western] volunteer veterans,” said Zikidis.
Bringing in Western pilots, even as privateers, could create political complications.
“The Russians will try to present that NATO is directly involved in the Ukraine war, and will threaten nuclear war,” said Papanikolaou.
Ukraine has reportedly prepared a batch of 50 pilots who have flown in Western military exercises and could be trained in three months. And US Congressman Adam Kinzinge introduced a bill to train Ukrainian pilots and support crew on F-15 and F-16 fighter jets as early as June 23 last year. That bill was approved.
The symbolic concern is over losses of aircraft.
Western weaponry has proven largely superior to Soviet-era weaponry during the course of the Ukraine war. But Russia’s development of hypersonic missiles could prove a match for the F-16, ending the narrative of NATO superiority.
“It carries a risk,” said Zikidis. “If you lose an F-16 it will be a big story. Sukhois are falling out of the sky, but that’s not a story.”
Perhaps for such reasons, there are still naysayers in the Western alliance.
German chancellor Olaf Scholz, after bowing to pressure to send Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine, said he would not be sending the jets.
“I made it clear very early on that we are not talking about combat aircraft, and I am doing the same here,” he told the Bundestag this month.
According to official government data, 87 rhinos were killed in Namibia last year, an all-time high compared to the 45 rhinos killed in 2021.
The demand for rhino horn, which is valued in East Asia as a purported medicine and as jewellery despite being made of the same material as rhino hair and fingernails, has caused a decimation of the rhino population in Africa over the years.
On Monday, Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism spokesperson Romeo Muyunda said poachers killed 61 black and 26 white rhinos mainly in Namibia’s largest park, Etosha, where 46 rhinos were found dead.
“We note with serious concern that our flagship park, Etosha National Park, is a poaching hotspot,” Muyunda said, adding that the ministry and law enforcement officials have stepped up efforts against wildlife crime in the park to curb poaching.
The Southern African country is home to the only free-roaming black rhinos left in the world and also accounts for a third of the world’s remaining black rhinos.
Rhino poaching has plagued Southern Africa for decades, especially in neighbouring South Africa and Botswana, leading to anti-poaching programmes, including strict policing and dehorning, or removing horns from the rhinos as a way of discouraging poaching.
Namibia is also home to the second-largest white rhino population in the world after South Africa.
The Save the Rhino Trust estimates there are about 200 free-roamingblack rhinos in Namibia, mainly in the northeast.
Meanwhile, elephant poaching in Namibia has declined over the years, from a high of 101 in 2015 to a low of four elephants poached last year.
It has been two years since a major wave of street protests provoked by the arrest of opposition leader Alexey Navalny hit Russia. To many, the events of January and February 2021 may seem unrelated to the war in Ukraine, but they are, in fact, closely linked.
Let us remember how this story unfolded. In August 2020, Navalny suffered a near-lethal poisoning, which landed him in a German hospital. An investigation by Bellingcat and Der Spiegel established with a high level of certainty that he was poisoned by Russian secret service operatives.
Having barely recovered from the poisoning, Navalny surprised many by returning to Russia five months later. He was apprehended at the airport and has been in jail ever since.
In the following weeks, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in 185 cities across the country, calling for the opposition leader’s release. According to OVD-Info, a group monitoring political repression in Russia, more than 11,000 people were arrested, dozens were injured and about 90 people faced criminal charges.
President Vladimir Putin’s main dark art, which has helped him stay in power for so long, is that of shifting public attention away from domestic troubles. Less than two months after the Navalny protests were suppressed, he ordered the deployment of a massive force at the Russian border with Ukraine in what became a prelude to the full-scale invasion of this country a year later.
These two themes – Russia’s internal instability and the war in Ukraine – are fundamentally interlinked. By waging a war in Ukraine, Putin is avoiding confrontation with his own population and keeping the opposition at bay. He has essentially outsourced his domestic conflict to Russia’s neighbour Ukraine.
Domestic unrest was certainly not the only reason why Putin started preparing for the invasion. That same fateful month, which saw Joe Biden enter the White House, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a drastic change of tack in his Russia policy.
He launched an attack on Putin’s chief ally in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk, whose party climbed to the top of opinion polls in December 2020. Simultaneously, he initiated much-publicised campaigns for joining NATO and doing away with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.
With Medvedchuk still in the game, Putin could have safely counted on the political environment in Ukraine gradually changing in the way that was conducive to his political goals of ending the conflict in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas on his terms. But the forceful removal of his ally from the political scene and the destruction of his increasingly influential media empire made this impossible, prompting the Russian president to resort to a more drastic line of action.
Yet it is on the domestic front where Putin has achieved the most by triggering an escalation in Ukraine. Rising tensions served as a smokescreen for the ultimate destruction of Navalny’s movement and the Russian opposition.
There is a perverse logic to the Kremlin’s actions if you look at the events from its vantage point. Putin and his entourage genuinely believe that Navalny and his supporters are paid agents of the West intent on staging a Russian version of the Maidan protests.
Russia’s initial attack on Ukraine in 2014 was a way of punishing it for its Maidan revolution but, even more importantly, of showing the Russian public what they would face if they followed the Ukrainian example.
The 2014 invasion allowed Putin to quash what remained of the Bolotnaya protest movement, which rocked Moscow in 2011 and 2012. But the relatively calm years following the hot phase of the war in Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 saw public attention in Russia shift again to domestic grievances.
In 2017 and 2018, opinion pollsters started picking up a dramatic shift in public sentiment: The demand for stability was diminishing in favour of political change. In 2018, a Levada Centre poll showed 57 percent of respondents believed “full-scale changes” were needed in the country. This figure rose to 59 percent the following year.
That was also the time when Navalny launched his presidential campaign and set up the largest opposition network in recent history, opening offices in most regions of the country. Fearful of his movement and its Maidan potential, the Kremlin first knocked Navalny out of the presidential race on a made-up pretext and then tried to poison him.
The escalation and eventual full-scale invasion of Ukraine, allowed Putin to do away with the Russian opposition and remove the threat to his regime. This was reflected in opinion polls as well. The share of Russians hoping for change fell to 47 percent in 2022 in Levada’s poll.
Today, Navalny is lingering in jail where he is being treated in a way that borders on outright torture. Every other major opposition politician is either jailed, under house arrest or in exile. Hundreds of thousands of anti-Putin Russians have fled the country, including pretty much all independent journalists and most civil society activists.
As a result, Putin’s political regime appears to be more stable than ever – even if it loses the war in Ukraine. At the end of the day, there is nothing more stable than an isolated authoritarian regime under Western sanctions. Iran, Cuba and North Korea are a testament to that.
A hostile, isolated Russia is also good for the war hawks in the West and in Eastern Europe promoting hardline policies and militarisation. Meanwhile, pro-Ukrainian infowar groups and hawkish commentators in the West are bashing the Russian opposition with even greater fervour than Putin’s regime while also calling for the breakup of Russia.
There is a steep learning curve ahead for Russian leaders and activists before they formulate their (as well as Russia’s) genuine interests and learn to tell friends from foes in the political terrarium of the visionless and disoriented West of the Trump and Brexit epoch. Western ambiguity on Russia’s future does not help when it comes to promoting anti-Putin sentiments in Russia.
That explains why the main figures in Navalny’s movement are keeping a fairly low profile in Western media while focusing on developing a propaganda machine to reach out to audiences in Russia, mostly via YouTube. They are also attempting to relaunch the movement’s regional network, but we won’t hear much about the progress for some time, given that these days activist can only operate in clandestine mode.
In the meantime, with the war raging, Putin can consider himself fairly Maidan-proof.
DISCLAIMER: Independentghana.com will not be liable for any inaccuracies contained in this article. The views expressed in the article are solely those of the author’s, and do not reflect those of The Independent Ghana
Marie Louise Wambale had to flee with almost nothing about ten years ago due to fighting between the M23 rebels and the DRC army in the country’s eastern region, and it took her years to rebuild her life.
She hoped, along with the majority of Catholics in the eastern DRC, that Pope Francis would bring a message of hope at a time when the rebels are posing their greatest threat to this region since 2012.
“Many people were disappointed because they wanted to welcome him to our home, for him to come here and live our suffering, to feel it with his own eyes,” she said. “We wanted him to live it because there are many people who have fled the war. There are pregnant mothers who gave birth in the camps in very bad conditions – many women and children are suffering.”
Now Wambale has been tasked with taking this message to the capital, Kinshasa, where she will be among the Congolese faithful chosen to meet Pope Francis.
His long-awaited visit to DRC and South Sudan this week comes after he postponed an earlier trip late last year that had originally included a stop in the volatile east for health reasons. Insecurity, though, has soared in the months since so the pope is limiting his visit to Kinshasa.
“It is clear to anybody that there is a danger. But the danger, I would say, even more than for the pope is for the people,” the Vatican’s ambassador to DRC, Archbishop Ettore Balestrero told The Associated Press news agency.
The security requirements to protect people at a papal mass would be hard under ordinary circumstances, but even more delicate in an already dangerous area like the east, he said.
An estimated two million Congolese are expected at the mass at Kinshasa airport on February 1, which he said would make it the largest crowd event in DRC’s recent history.
Fighting in the eastern DRC, which involves more than 120 armed groups, has simmered for years but spiked in late 2021 with the resurgence of the M23, which had been largely dormant for nearly a decade. The rebels have captured swaths of land and are accused by the United Nations and rights groups of committing atrocities against civilians.
The violence, which has displaced approximately half a million people, has triggered a diplomatic spat with neighbouring Rwanda. Kinshasa has accused Kigali of backing the M23, an allegation also made by UN experts and the European Union.
Rwanda denies backing the group, which continues to resist a concerted pushback from the Congolese military and a regional peacekeeping force.
The region is also increasingly grappling with violence linked to ISIL (ISIS) and al-Qaeda affiliates. Earlier this month, ISIL claimed responsibility for a bomb explosion at a church, which killed at least 14 people and injured dozens while they were praying.
In DRC, the Catholic church mediated rising tensions in 2016 after the government postponed elections, creating an agreement which led to the 2018 vote, said Katharina R Vogeli, founder of CapImpact, a peace-building organisation working in the Great Lakes region.
Religious advisers say people in countries with enormously entrenched problems need to be lifted out of a generational sense of dread and anxiety.
“It’s the message of eternal hope that transcends, which is what people need,” said Ferdinand von Habsburg-Lothringen, a peace-building expert and former adviser to the South Sudan Council of Churches.
“The church has enormous power,” he said. “Though they may not necessarily have political power, they have moral authority.”
The Tory Party chairman, Nadhim Zahawi, was fired on Sunday,and Rishi Sunak has defended his handling of the situation by asserting that he followed “the right process.”
The PM’s ethics adviser conducted an investigation and found that Mr. Zahawi had violated the ministerial code seven times while concealing the fact that HMRC was looking into his tax affairs.
As soon as the investigation was over, Mr. Sunak claimed he “acted pretty decisively.”
According to Labour, Mr. Zahawi should have been fired by the prime minister “long ago.”
Deputy leader Angela Rayner called Mr Sunak a “hopelessly weak” prime minister who had “been dragged kicking and screaming into doing what he should have done long ago”.
“Rishi Sunak shouldn’t have needed an ethics adviser to tell him that Nadhim Zahawi’s position was untenable,” she said.
Ms Rayner and Labour Party chair Anneliese Dodds have now written to the prime minister asking him to “come clean” about when he was made aware of the HMRC investigation into Mr Zahawi.
But speaking in County Durham, the prime minister defended his handling of the situation and stressed his commitment to “integrity”.
“What I have done is follow a process, which is the right process,” he said.
“As soon as I knew about the situation, I appointed somebody independent, looked at it, got the advice and acted pretty decisively to move on.
“The things that happened before I was prime minister, I can’t do anything about. What I think you can hold me to account for is how I deal with the things that arise on my watch.”
Mr. Sunak also stated that he will “take whatever steps are necessary to restore the integrity of politics.”
Asked if Mr Sunak had ever asked Mr Zahawi about press reports about his tax affairs, his spokesman declined to comment, saying he wouldn’t discuss private conversations.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, the spokesman added that the PM had been advised there were were no outstanding issues involving HMRC when he appointed Mr Zahawi in October.
Image caption,Nadhim Zahawi had served as Conservative Party chairman and minister without portfolio in Rishi Sunak’s government
The BBC understands that Mr Zahawi had paid around £5m in total, including a penalty. At the time he was responsible for the UK’s tax system as chancellor under Boris Johnson.
Mr Zahawi has previously insisted that he acted properly, and that his tax error was “careless and not deliberate”.
Supporters of Mr Zahawi have raised concerns about the ethics probe with the BBC, saying he had only one meeting with the prime minister’s independent ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus.
They questioned whether due process had been followed and suggested Mr Zahawi had not been allowed to make sufficient representations.
‘Omissions’
Mr Sunak’s spokesman rejected suggestions the probe was rushed, insisting Sir Laurie had been given enough time to establish the facts.
Sir Laurie found Mr Zahawi’s “omissions” of information constituted a “serious failure to meet the standards set out in the ministerial code”.
He was also critical of the MP for describing news stories about his tax affairs as “smears” in July 2022, and failing to correct the record until earlier this month.
“I consider that this delay in correcting an untrue public statement is inconsistent with the requirement for openness,” he said.
After receiving the findings on Sunday, Mr Sunak wrote to Mr Zahawi to say he had decided to remove him from government.
Mr Zahawi thanked the prime minister and said he took pride in his role in the vaccine rollout and the Queen’s funeral – but did not offer an apology or mention his tax affairs.
He promised to support the prime minister “from the backbenches in the coming years.”
Timeline
April 2021: HMRC starts having interactions with Mr Zahawi, including a meeting with him and his advisers. Mr Zahawi – who was vaccines minister at the time – told Sir Laurie he believed he was “merely being asked certain queries” rather than being investigated. Sir Laurie says Mr Zahawi should have understood this was “a serious matter” and included it in his declaration of interests
15 September 2021: Mr Zahawi is made education secretary by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Sir Laurie says Mr Zahawi again failed to declare his interest
5 July 2022: He is promoted to chancellor. He completes a declaration of interest for his new role but makes no reference to an investigation by HMRC
10 July 2022: Mr Zahawi describes reports he is being investigated by HMRC as “smears”
15 July 2022: He receives a letter from HMRC and subsequently updates his declaration of interests to acknowledge an investigation was under way.
August 2022: Mr Zahawi reaches an agreement with HMRC for failing to take “reasonable care”. The BBC has been told the total amount paid was about £5m
September 2022: A final settlement is agreed with HMRC but Mr Zahawi does not update his declaration of interest form with the new information
September and October 2022: Mr Zahawi becomes a levelling up minister under Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership and Tory Party chair under Rishi Sunak. Again, Mr Zahawi does not update his declaration of interest form
21 January 2023: Mr Zahawi issues a statement acknowledging he reached a settlement with HMRC following an investigation
23 January 2023: The prime minister asks his ethics adviser Sir Laurie to look into the disclosures made about the tax affairs of Mr Zahawi
29 January 2023: The PM receives Sir Laurie’s report, which found there had been a “serious breach of the ministerial code”, and Mr Zahawi is sacked.
The world’s largest humanitarian network says strong preparedness systems are ‘severely lacking’ despite three years of theCOVID-19 pandemic.
All countries remain “dangerously unprepared” for the next pandemic, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has warned, saying future health crises could also collide with increasingly likely climate-related disasters.
Despite three “brutal” years of the COVID-19 pandemic, strong preparedness systems are “severely lacking”, the IFRC said in its World Disasters Report 2022, published on Monday. It called on countries to update their preparedness plans by year’s end.
The world’s largest humanitarian network said building trust, equity and local action networks were vital to get ready for the next crisis.
The recommendations were released on the third anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 an international public health emergency.
“The next pandemic could be just around the corner,” said Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the IFRC, the world’s largest disaster response network. “If the experience of COVID-19 won’t quicken our steps toward preparedness, what will?”
The report said countries need to be prepared for “multiple hazards, not just one”, adding that societies only became truly resilient through planning for different types of disasters because they can occur simultaneously.
The IFRC cited the rise in climate-related disasters and waves of disease outbreaks this century, of which COVID-19 was just one.
It said extreme weather events are growing more frequent and intense “and our ability to merely respond to them is limited”.
The report said major hazards harm those who are already the most vulnerable. It called leaving the poorest exposed “self-defeating”.
The report also said countries should review their legislation to ensure it is in line with their pandemic preparedness plans by the end of 2023 and adopt a new treaty and revised international health regulations by next year that would invest more in the readiness of local communities.
