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LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — Rebels from the Boko Haram extremist group claimed responsibility Tuesday for abducting hundreds of boys from a school in Nigeria’s northern Katsina State last week in one of the largest such attacks in years,...
He replaces Debretsion Gebremichael, whose immunity from prosecution was removed Thursday.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International said Thursday that scores of civilians were killed in a \"massacre\" in the Tigray region, that witnesses blamed on forces backing the local ruling party.
The \"massacre\" is the first reported incident of large-scale civilian fatalities in a week-old conflict between the regional ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), and the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize.
\"Amnesty International can today confirm... that scores, and likely hundreds, of people were stabbed or hacked to death in Mai-Kadra (May Cadera) town in the southwest of Ethiopia's Tigray Region on the night of 9 November,\" the rights group said in a report.
Amnesty said it had \"digitally verified gruesome photographs and videos of bodies strewn across the town or being carried away on stretchers.\"
The dead \"had gaping wounds that appear to have been inflicted by sharp weapons such as knives and machetes,\" Amnesty said, citing witness accounts.
Witnesses said the attack was carried out by TPLF-aligned forces after a defeat at the hands of the Ethiopian military, though Amnesty said it \"has not been able to confirm who was responsible for the killings\".
It nonetheless called on TPLF commanders and officials to \"make clear to their forces and their supporters that deliberate attacks on civilians are absolutely prohibited and constitute war crimes\".
Abiy ordered military operations in Tigray on November 4, saying they were prompted by a TPLF attack on federal military camps -- a claim the party denies.
The region has been under a communications blackout ever since, making it difficult to verify competing claims on the ground.
Abiy said Thursday his army had made major gains in western Tigray.
Thousands of Ethiopians have fled across the border into neighboring Sudan, and the UN is sounding the alarm about a humanitarian crisis in Tigray.
But the now-familiar scenes of U.S. police officers in riot gear clashing with protesters at Lafayette Park across from the White House and in other cities have police critics charging that the weaponry too often escalates tensions and hurts innocent people.
Protesters in Denver arrived at the hospital with injuries from police projectiles that caused one person to lose an eye and left three other people with permanent eye damage, said Prem Subramanian, a physician who operated on some victims following demonstrations late last month.
A protester takes a knee in front of San Jose Police officers during a protest on East Santa Clara Street in San Jose, Calif., on May 29, 2020, after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Seattle’s mayor and police chief early this month banned tear gas for 30 days before a federal judge ordered the city to stop using pepper spray, flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets.
In New York City, the nation’s largest police department has not used rubber bullets or tear gas during protests.
Amnesty International has documented torture, unlawful detention and sexual abuse of children escaping Boko Haram in the Northeast
At least 10,000 people, including many children, have died in military detention during the conflict
UK funding a flawed 'rehabilitation' centre - full investigation needed into deaths at the site
'This must serve as an urgent warning to the UK Government currently supporting a military abusing the very people it's meant to be protecting' - Kate Allen
Nigeria must urgently address its failure to protect and provide education to an entire generation of children in the Northeast, a region devastated by years of Boko Haram atrocities and gross violations by the military, Amnesty International warned today in a chilling new report.
The 91-page report, 'We dried our tears': Addressing the toll on children of Northeast Nigeria's conflict, examines how the military's widespread unlawful detention and torture have compounded the suffering of children from Borno and Adamawa states who faced war crimes and crimes against humanity at the hands of Boko Haram.
Between November 2019 and April 2020, Amnesty interviewed more than 230 people affected by the conflict, including 119 who were children when they suffered serious crimes at the hands of Boko Haram, the Nigerian military, or both.
Thousands, including children, held in military detention
Children who escape Boko Haram territory face a raft of violations by the Nigerian authorities, including crimes under international law.
A 14-year-old boy whom Boko Haram abducted as a young child before he fled and was placed in detention by the Nigerian military, said: \"The conditions in Giwa are horrible.
Parents sobbed, mobbed their children in hugs and even kissed the ground in gratitude on Friday as they reunited with scores of schoolboys who had been kidnapped a week earlier in northwest Nigeria.
Analysis - The unsolved fatal shooting of the celebrated Oromo resistance singer has ruptured Ethiopia's brittle political system. Can talks on a national scale avert a bad-to-worse outcome for the multiethnic nation?
Activists supported by the government have taken to patrolling the main highway in Maiduguri in anti-jihadist efforts.
Algerian authorities must immediately release journalist Merzoug Touati and drop all charges against him, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
On June 12, Algerian police arrested Touati, a reporter for the news website L'Avant-Garde, while he was covering anti-government protests in the city of Béjaïa, according to journalist and press freedom advocate Mustapha Bendjama, who has followed the case and spoke to CPJ via messaging app, and a statement by the National Committee for the Liberation of Detainees, a local human rights group.
On June 13, a state prosecutor charged Touati with inciting an unarmed assembly, distributing publications harmful to national unity, and putting the lives of others in danger by violating COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, according to Bendjama and news reports.
If convicted on the harming national unity charges alone, Touati could face up to 10 years in prison, according to CPJ research.
Today, a judge at the Béjaïa court denied Touati's appeal for parole, and postponed the next hearing in his case until July 1, according to Bendjama and news reports.
[The Herald] In his address to the extraordinary AU summit on Sunday themed \"Silencing the Guns\", President Mnangagwa outlined a multi-pronged approach to resolve conflict and deal with threats from gangs of terrorists or criminals.
Demonstrators who have taken to the streets over several weeks to disband the SARS which is accused of widespread claims of kidnapping, harassment and extortion, while also targeting LGBTQ communities in Nigeria.
(Trinidad Guardian) Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley says “under no circumstances” will Trinidad and Tobago implement an open-door policy to migrants.
The article Trinidad will not have open-door policy for migrants - PM appeared first on Stabroek News.
Nigeria, one-third larger than Texas and the most populous country in Africa, is situated on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. Its neighbors are Benin, Niger, Cameroon, and Chad. The lower course of the Niger River flows south through the western part of the country into the Gulf of Guinea. Swamps and mangrove forests border the southern coast; inland are hardwood forests.
Multiparty government transitioning from military to civilian rule.
The first inhabitants of what is now Nigeria were thought to have been the Nok people (500 BC–c. AD 200). The Kanuri, Hausa, and Fulani peoples subsequently migrated there. Islam was introduced in the 13th century, and the empire of Kanem controlled the area from the end of the 11th century to the 14th.
The Fulani empire ruled the region from the beginning of the 19th century until the British annexed Lagos in 1851 and seized control of the rest of the region by 1886. It formally became the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria in 1914. During World War I, native troops of the West African frontier force joined with French forces to defeat the German garrison in Cameroon.
On Oct. 1, 1960, Nigeria gained independence, becoming a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and joining the United Nations. Organized as a loose federation of self-governing states, the independent nation faced the overwhelming task of unifying a country with 250 ethnic and linguistic groups.
Rioting broke out in 1966, and military leaders, primarily of Ibo ethnicity, seized control. In July, a second military coup put Col. Yakubu Gowon in power, a choice unacceptable to the Ibos. Also in that year, the Muslim Hausas in the north massacred the predominantly Christian Ibos in the east, many of whom had been driven from the north. Thousands of Ibos took refuge in the eastern region, which declared its independence as the Republic of Biafra on May 30, 1967. Civil war broke out. In Jan. 1970, after 31 months of civil war, Biafra surrendered to the federal government.
Gowons nine-year rule was ended in 1975 in
[HRW] Kinshasa -- The Congolese authorities and the United Nations have not done enough to hold human rights violators to account and deliver justice to victims a decade after the landmark UN Congo Mapping Exercise Report was published in October 2010, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said today.
A Terrifying Weekend
Just under 2000 people poured into Mozongo, panic-stricken and desperately fleeing for their lives from a refugee camp housing 800 internally displaced people in the village of Nguetchewe in Cameroon's far north region. The area, already one of the poorest in the world, has seen a significant increase in violent incidents in recent months with around 87 terrorist attacks by the Islamic extremist group, Boko Haram.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Tuesday condemned an attack this weekend the camp for in which 17 civilians were killed and 16 others wounded, according to an official army report. In the very early hours on Sunday, “a \"terrorist attack coupled with suicide bombings left 19 civilians dead — including two suicide bombers and \"16 injured\", the Cameroonian defence ministry had previously announced in a statement.
Camp residents are extremely afraid and feel very unsafe, \"There is a lot of fear. Really. Whoever has actually lived this experience here no longer wants to live in the village, and why is that? Because we have some defences in place, but they are very insufficient,\" expressed a shaken up young man living in the area.
Boko Haram's Regional Violence
A week before the attack the Cameroon army announced they had killed five Boko Haram fighters. In Chad, the jihadists on Friday killed at least 10 civilians and kidnapped seven others in an attack on a village in the troubled Lake Chad region. In March, Chad's armed forces suffered their biggest single-day loss, when 98 soldiers were massacred in their base at Bohoma, on the shores of Lake Chad. In response, President Idriss Deby launched an offensive from March 31 to April 3, declaring at its end that there was \"not a single jihadist left\" in the Lake Chad region. But sporadic violence has continued, with an attack attributed to Boko Haram on an army vehicle last month killing eight Chadian soldiers. The insurgence has prompted the formation of a four-nation anti-jihad coalition, the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), of which the Chadian army is a key component.
Northern Cameroon, which borders Nigeria, has been the target of deadly attacks by the Boko Haram jihadist group since 2013. The UN agency announced the deployment of an emergency mission to assess the protection and health needs of those affected but - understandably, inhabitants still terrified and uncertain after the jihadist attack.
A Group of Islamic Extremists
Boko Haram — literally meaning \"Western education is a sin\" in Hausa, the most common language in northern Nigeria, was formed in the northeastern region of the country in 2009. In 2016, the group split into two branches: the historical faction, led by Abubakar Shekau, and the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP), affiliated to the jihadists of the Islamic State group.
The group has regularly launched attacks over the last 6 years, staging small-scale raids aimed at stealing livestock and food. And has since spread its violence to Cameroon as well as Niger and
[Nation] The Ethiopian government on Monday refuted claims of planned talks with the Tigray People's Liberation Front, mediated by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in Kampala.
Cameroon is a Central African nation on the Gulf of Guinea, bordered by Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon. It is nearly twice the size of Oregon. Mount Cameroon (13,350 ft; 4,069 m), near the coast, is the highest elevation in the country. The main rivers are the Benue, Nyong, and Sanaga.
After a 1972 plebiscite, a unitary republic was formed out of East and West Cameroon to replace the former federal republic.
Bantu speakers were among the first groups to settle Cameroon, followed by the Muslim Fulani in the 18th and 19th centuries. The land escaped colonial rule until 1884, when treaties with tribal chiefs brought the area under German domination. After World War I, the League of Nations gave the French a mandate over 80% of the area, and the British 20% adjacent to Nigeria. After World War II, when the country came under a UN trusteeship in 1946, self-government was granted, and the Cameroon Peoples Union emerged as the dominant party by campaigning for reunification of French and British Cameroon and for independence. Accused of being under Communist control, the party waged a campaign of revolutionary terror from 1955 to 1958, when it was crushed. In British Cameroon, unification was also promoted by the leading party, the Kamerun National Democratic Party, led by John Foncha.
France set up Cameroon as an autonomous state in 1957, and the next year its legislative assembly voted for independence by 1960. In 1959 a fully autonomous government of Cameroon was formed under Ahmadou Ahidjo. Cameroon became an independent republic on Jan. 1, 1960. In 1961 the southern part of the British territory joined the new Federal Republic of Cameroon and the northern section voted for unification with Nigeria. The president of Cameroon since independence, Ahmadou Ahidjo was replaced in 1982 by the prime minister, Paul Biya. Both administrations have been authoritarian.
With the expansion of oil, timber, and coffee exports, the economy has continued to
Six Chadian soldiers have been killed near the Libyan border and in the southern Lake Chad region where Nigeria's Boko Haram jihadists have stepped up attacks.
[Nation] Trouble is brewing at Maai Mahiu in Naivasha after a group of villagers took away about 72 heads of cattle belonging to the pastoralist community as part of a revenge mission.
Struggling with hunger, Covid-19 and death threats, the residents of Nairobi's Kariobangi shack settlement are speaking out against state demolitions that left thousands homeless.
The demolitions in the Kariobangi Sewage Farmers estate, in the northeast of the city, were carried out in May and continued for days, destroying at least 600 homes in addition to shops, schools and churches.
The state-run Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company (NCWSC) claims ownership of the land, but residents have legal documents from the Nairobi City County that they say prove their rights to the land.
According to George Kegoro, the executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, the privatisation of public land, including through \"corrupt processes\", has contributed to the evictions and demolitions in shack settlements.
Kegoro noted that the Kenya Human Rights Commission is discussing the possibility of seeking \"legal redress\" for the forced evictions and demolitions in Kariobangi.
Maiduguri — A top Boko Haram logistics supplier has been arrested in Borno State by men of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC).
The state NSCDC Commandant, Mr. Ibrahim Abdullahi, while parading the suspect yesterday in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, said he was arrested with a car filled with fuel and other food products.
The Borno NCSDC boss gave the name of the suspect as Bakura Ibrahim, a 35-year-old who was arrested on June 6, at the Muna Garage along Gamboru Ngala Road, Maiduguri.
\"The command came to the conclusion that the rise in attacks is due to logistics supplies and sleeper cells which are very active in the society, hence we intensified our intelligence gathering which yielded positive results,\" he said.
\"On April 4, one Mohammed Mohammed, of Ruwan Zafi, Custom area Maiduguri, was arrested with six vandalised rolls of aluminium conductor cables concealed inside a bag of beans among others,\" he said.
Boko Haram was responsible for the brutal deaths of more than 400 people in and around Maiduguri in northeast Nigeria in February and early March 2014. Among its victims were children watching a soccer match and dozens of male students at a public college in Yobe State, many of whom were burned or shot to death. The group was also blamed for a rush-hour bomb set off in April at a bus station in Nyanya, a city on the outskirts of the capital, Abuja, that killed more than 70 people.
In April, the group kidnapped about 280 girls from a school in the northeast with the intention of making the girls sex slaves. The mass kidnapping—and the governments slow response and inept attempts to rescue them—sparked international outrage and anti-government protests in Nigeria. A social media campaign sparked widespread news coverage of the kidnappings and put pressure on Jonathan to take action against Boko Haram.
In a videotaped message released in early May, Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, said the group planned to sell the abducted girls and threatened to give their hands in marriage because they are our slaves. We would marry them out at the age of 9. We would marry them out at the age of 12. He also reiterated the groups core belief that Western education is a sin.
The U.S. sent a team from the State Department, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon, 80 troops, and manned and unmanned surveillance drones to Nigeria in May to help to locate the girls. Another 68 girls were kidnapped in June in Borno state; 63 of the girls escaped weeks later.
While the world was focused on the search for the girls, violence attributed to Boko Haram continued. About 100 people were killed in a suicide attack in Jos and dozens more died in a series of attacks on villages in May. The violence continued into the summer, with the military stepping up its attacks on the group. In late June, a bomb attributed to Boko Haram killed about two dozen people in Abuja, the capital. The attack on the city, which is located in central Nigeria,
Amnesty International has published two major reports on human rights and environmental issues associated with cobalt mining and launched an initiative that challenged the electric vehicle industry to produce a battery with a completely clean human rights record for all its components.
At the Responsible Business Alliance, the Responsible Minerals Initiative is helping companies understand and improve the social and environmental performance of their cobalt supply chains.
The alliance recently teamed up with RCS Global Group, a company that specializes in responsible sourcing of materials, to expand assessment, monitoring and improvement of artisanal and small-scale cobalt mining practices in the DRC.
Butler says the Responsible Business Alliance now has over 50% of globally identified cobalt refiners -- the companies buying and processing cobalt from small-scale and artisanal mines -- in its program, largely because of customer demand for ethical and sustainable products, investor expectations of responsible sourcing, and global interest in the social and environmental costs of minerals.
Photo courtesy of Sumitomo Metal Mining
A Japanese company, Sumitomo Metal Mining Co., Ltd., recently announced it had developed a method for melting down spent electric vehicle batteries and recovering the cobalt.
The Nigerian government on Monday extended the gradual easing of the lockdown by two weeks as a measure to curb the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in the country.
According to Boss Mustapha, secretary to the Nigerian government, in spite of the modest progress made, Nigeria is still not ready for a full reopening of its economy.
On April 27, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari approved a phased and gradual easing of lockdown measures in the capital city of Abuja, Lagos, the commercial hub, and Ogun in the southwest region from May 4, as the country continued to navigate the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The government aims for a situation whereby the measures put in place would yield sufficient progress, Mustapha said.
The total number of Covid-19 cases in the most populous African country stood at 5,959, and 182 deaths as of Monday, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.
Besides, the president yesterday dispatched security chiefs, led by the National Security Adviser (NSA), Maj. Gen. Babagana Monguno, to Katsina State, rocked by a wave of protests over the insecurity in the state, to find lasting solutions to the deteriorating security challenges bedeviling the state and North-west in general.
In his intervention yesterday, the Sultan of Sokoto and President General of the Jamaatu Nasril Islam, Alhaji Sa'ad Abubakar lll, condemned the incessant killings by Boko Haram insurgents and bandits across the country.
However, on the day the sultan made his intervention, the federal government intensified efforts to address the security siege by criminal cartels as the NSA led other top security chiefs to Katsina State to find lasting solutions to the deteriorating security challenges bedeviling the state and North-west in general.
Monguno yesterday led other top security chiefs to Katsina State in a bid to find lasting solutions to the deteriorating security challenges bedeviling the state and North-west.
Among the security chiefs on the entourage of the NSA were the Inspector General of Police (IG), Mohammed Adamu; Director General, National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Rufai Ahmad; the DG Department of State Services (DSS), Mr. Yusuf Magaji Bichi and the Chief of Defence Intelligence Agency, Air Vice Marshal MS Usman.
