Category: NEWSBRIEFS

By Global Information Network

ATLANTA (IDN) – The fierce contest between President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition candidate Raila Odinga since their discarded election in August found echo here in Atlanta between Nairobi’s ambassador to Washington and a prominent U.S.-based legal scholar.

“I can categorically say here looking you straight in the eye that the Supreme Court robbed Uhuru Kenyatta of his win and stole the election from the Kenyan people,” Ambassador Robinson Njeru Githae was reported to say.

Not so, responded Prof. Makua Mutua, a human rights advocate and former dean at the University at Buffalo Law School.

By Global Information Network

NEW YORK | LAGOS (IDN) – “Floods in Africa in August killed 25 times more people than Hurricane Harvey did.” That was the headline of a recent story in Quartz online by Lagos-based writer Yomi Kazeem.

“Like severe floods in southern Asia, the disasters in Africa have been largely under-reported compared to similar events in Houston where Hurricane Harvey, a once in a ‘500-year storm’ has wreaked havoc,” wrote Kazeem.

Across Texas, 50 people have been reported dead due to the tropical storm but across Africa, intense rains and mudslides killed at least 1,240 people in August, he pointed out.

By Global Information Network

PARIS | NEW YORK (IDN) – “The Selous Game Reserve, covering 50,000 square kilometres, is amongst the largest protected areas in Africa and is relatively undisturbed by human impact,” says UNESCO, which decided in 2014 to include it in the List of World Heritage in danger.

Notwithstanding the prominent status given to Selous Game Reserve by including it among world’s 54 properties of “outstanding universal value”, and much to the dismay of environmentalists, Tanzanian President John Magufuli has invited bids for a 2,100-megawatt hydroelectric plant. The project would more than double the country’s power generation capacity, ending chronic electricity shortages.

By Global Information Network

NEW YORK | PARIS (IDN) – Fifty years after over a million Africans fought and thousands died for France during the ferocious battles against the Hitler regime in World War II (1939-1945), French President Francois Hollande has given citizenship and full pensions to African survivors of that war and other conflicts.

In a ceremony at the Elysee Palace in Paris on April 18, the veterans – aged between 79 and 90 – received their new certificates of citizenship. Hollande said France owed them “a debt of blood”.

“France is proud to welcome you, just as you were proud to carry its flag, the flag of freedom,” the President told a group of 28 surviving vets.

BANGKOK (IDN) – At a United Nations forum, Bangladesh, China, India, Laos, South Korea and Sri Lanka have agreed to more than double the number of products under preferential tariff treatment in order to expand trade and boost growth in the region.

The six countries are party to the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA), previously named the Bangkok Agreement, signed in 1975 as an initiative of United Nations Economic and Social Council for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), which functions as the APTA secretariat.

By Global Information Network

NEW YORK | KINSHASA (IDN) – Difficult negotiations have succeeded in bridging the differences between President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and opposition parties who wanted the President to abide by the constitution and step down, having served the two terms he is legally allowed.

President Kabila had sought to stay until 2018 but will now step down by the end of next year. The deal was concluded on New Year’s Eve in the capital Kinshasa, according to negotiators, ending a lengthy stalemate in the country.

By Global Information Network

NEW YORK (IDN) – Israel lashed out at its African and other allies, suspending aid and other relationships in retaliation for their votes on a UN resolution calling for an end to Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

Senegal and Angola were the primary targets of Israeli fury. The two countries were non-permanent members of the UN Security Council when the resolution was adopted on December 23. Both voted with the entire council on the measure which passed unanimously and which Israel had furiously lobbied against.

NEW YORK | ABUJA (IDN | GIN) – Dozens of young girls, rescued from Boko Haram kidnappers, were made victims again by the Nigerian soldiers and policemen assigned to protect them, according to accounts documented by investigators for Human Rights Watch.

The New York-based rights group found forty-three cases of “sexual abuse, including rape and exploitation.” Four victims told HRW they were drugged and raped. Thirty-seven said they had been coerced into sex through false marriage promises and material and financial assistance.

NEW YORK | NAIROBI (IDN | GIN) – Dizzying amounts of taxpayers’ money are alleged to have gone missing from Kenya’s Ministry of Health including 800 million shillings (close to US$8 million) designated for free maternity care for poor mothers to be.

The scandal has stunned even the most jaded media pundits who have seen the theft of public monies throughout their careers.

“This is official corruption at its most cruel and unbelievable,” wrote Otieno Otieno of Kenya’s Daily Nation. “You know Kenya has gone to the dogs when they steal from Kenyatta National Hospital, the country’s largest referral health facility mostly in the news for its stone-age problems like the single broken down cancer machine.”

BERLIN (IDN) – Inadequate infrastructure and weak logistic chains substantially increase the risk that an extreme natural event will become a disaster, find the World Risk Report 2016 released here on August 25 by the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University and Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft – Gemeinsam für Menschen in Not e.V., in cooperation with the University of Stuttgart presented today in Berlin.