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Up in arms over the Egyptian President's state visit to France, around 20 protesters gathered outside the Paris National Assembly late on Monday, shouting "down with dictatorship".
The demonstration outside the parliament painted a very different picture to earlier in the day when France welcomed President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with a cavalry parade through Paris.
Before the three-day visit, rights groups accused France of indulging President al-Sisi's "brutal repression of any form of dissent".
"We've come across a President of the Republic who welcomes the butcher of Cairo, the butcher of Egypt, in great pomp, on a state visit, with the Republican Guard," said François de Roche, chief of the NGO Justice and Rights Without Borders.
"We have fallen on our heads. This is unacceptable. France, the country of Human Rights, cannot accept this."
But French President Emmanuel Macron refrained from direct criticism of former army general Sisi, who has cracked down on supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, as well as on leftists and liberals.
Macron told a joint press conference with Sisi that he would not condition the sale of weapons to Egypt and trade ties on human rights as he did not want to weaken Cairo’s ability to counter-terrorism in the region.
"I think it is more effective to have a policy of dialogue than a policy of boycott which would reduce the effectiveness of one of our partners in the fight against terrorism and for regional stability," he said.
To force the issue of human rights would be both "ineffective on the subject of human rights and counter-productive in the fight against terrorism, that's why I won't do it," he added
Nationwide protests have taken place since October 7 despite the disbanding of the controversial Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) police unit.
The demonstrators have been accused of attacking police stations and personnel.
The rallies which are mostly attended by young people have become avenues to vent against corruption and unemployment.
Rights groups say at least 15 people have been killed the demonstrations began in early October.
Nairobi — Burkina Faso authorities should credibly and independently investigate alleged extrajudicial executions of 12 men detained by gendarmes on May 11, 2020 during a counterterrorism operation near the eastern town of Fada N'Gourma, Human Rights Watch said today.
A community leader who investigated the incident said, \"People living around the Tanwalbougou gendarmerie told me they saw the gendarmes and a few VDF returning to the base with many detainees around 4 p.m.\"
\"I lost two brothers that day,\" one man said.
While the government statement did not speculate on the deaths of the 12 men, family members and witnesses who retrieved the bodies from the morgue in Fada N'gouroma and participated in the burials, said they believed the men had been shot in the head.
\"The gendarme post of Tanwalbougou is directly under the command of the regional capital, Fada N'Gourma, tasked with the investigation,\" said a family member.
Community leaders and CISC said numerous Peuhl men from villages around Tanwalbougou had in recent months been executed or forcibly disappeared after their arrest by local gendarmes and noted that victims would be too frightened to respond to judicial summons by local gendarmes.
In 2004 Rev. Al Sharpton of New York City, campaigned for the Democratic nomination for President. Sharpton saw himself as the successor to Rev. Jesse Jackson who campaigned for the Presidency on behalf of the impoverished and oppressed. Although he did not garner as much support as Jackson did in 1984 and 1988, he did focus national attention on his constituency and his proposals to help them. His speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston follows.
Tonight, I want to address my remarks in two parts.
One, Im honored to address the delegates here.
Last Friday, I had the experience in Detroit of hearing President George Bush make a speech. And in the speech, he [asked] certain questions. I hope hes watching tonight. I would like to answer your questions, Mr. President.
To the/our chairman, our delegates, and all that are assembled, were honored and glad to be here tonight. Im glad to be joined by supporters and friends from around the country. Im glad to be joined by my family, Kathy, Dominique, who will be 18, and Ashley.
We are here 282 [228] years after right here in Boston we fought to establish the freedoms of America. The first person to die in the Revolutionary War is buried not far from here, a Black man from Barbados, named Crispus Attucks.
Forty years ago, in 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party stood at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City fighting to preserve voting rights for all America and all Democrats, regardless of race or gender. Hamers stand inspired Dr. Kings march in Selma, which brought about the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Twenty years ago, Reverend Jesse Jackson stood at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, again, appealing to the preserve those freedoms.
Tonight, we stand with those freedoms at risk and our security as citizens in question. I have come here tonight to say the only choice we have to preserve our freedom at this point in history is to elect John Kerry the president of the United States.
[RFI] Ethiopia's army captured the town of Alamata, in southern Tigray, 115 kilometres from the regional capital Mekelle, according to a statement on Monday by the Ethiopian government, as a conflict between the federal government and Tigray region continues to escalate.
North American Slave Narratives documents the individual and collective story of the African American struggle for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project received a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund the digitization of approximately two hundred texts, including all known narratives of fugitive and former slaves published in broadsides, pamphlets, or book form in English up to 1920 and many of the biographies of fugitive and former slaves published in English before 1920.
All the while, President John Magufuli has led a crackdown on anyone who dares raise concerns about the virus's spread in his East African country or the Government's response to it.
The country's number of confirmed virus cases hasn't changed for three weeks, and the international community is openly worrying that Tanzania's Government is hiding the true scale of the pandemic.
While many African countries have been praised for their response to the coronavirus, Tanzania is the most dramatic exception, run by a president who questions — or fires — his own health experts and has refused to limit people's movements, saying the economy is the priority.
While health experts say recorded coronavirus cases and deaths the world over are undercounts, Opposition leaders accuse Magufuli's Government of hiding the outbreak's true toll.
Kenya closed its border with Tanzania this month except for cargo traffic and imposed stringent testing measures on Tanzanian truck drivers after more than 50 of them tested positive for the virus in a single day.
Gwendolynne Moore is the first African American member of Congress from Wisconsin where she represents the state’s Fourth Congressional District. Moore, a community leader and lifelong civil rights and human rights advocate, is the first woman to represent the Fourth Congressional District. She is only the second woman to be elected to Congress from Wisconsin.
Gwen Moore was born April 18, 1951 in Racine, Wisconsin and raised in Milwaukee. She is the eighth of nine children born to a factory worker father and a public school teacher mother. Moore graduated from North Division High School before attending college at Marquette University. Although she was a teenage mother who went on and off welfare, Moore earned her Bachelor of Arts in political science from Marquette in 1973.
After college, Moore became a housing activist and community leader. She has worked for the city of Milwaukee as a city development specialist and was an organizer with Volunteers in Service to America. Moore has emphasized a desire to increase and improve the quality of housing and communities in Milwaukee. She helped establish a community credit union to assist low-income residents in purchasing homes.
In 1989 Moore was elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly. Four years later she became a member of the Wisconsin State Senate, serving until 2003.
In 2004 Moore ran for the Fourth District Congressional Seat. She was elected and took office on January 4, 2005. Moore serves on the House Committee on Small Business and the House Committee on Financial Services. During her first term in office Moore was a co-sponsor of the SHIELD Act which helps protect victims of domestic abuse from the possibility of pursuit by their attackers. She co-sponsored legislation to oppose predatory lending and has called for the removal of troops from Iraq. Moore has also pushed for expanded Medicaid assistance and introduced legislation which provided support for small businesses.
During her second term beginning in 2007, Moore was appointed to the
Foreign missions in Maseru yesterday urged the country's political parties to expedite the installation of a new government to enable it to get down to the task of addressing the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic and other pressing developmental issues.
In a joint statement yesterday, the European Union (EU), United States of America (USA) and the High Commissioners of South Africa and the United Kingdom said it was necessary to speed up the negotiations for the installation of the new government.
\"The ambassadors of the EU and the USA and the High Commissioners of South Africa and the UK take note of the termination of the four-party coalition government of Lesotho in a consensual decision of the National Assembly,\" the statement reads.
\"It is important now that the negotiations for a new government proceed (sic) as swiftly as possible and that participants focus their deliberations on addressing the main challenges ahead, notably the threat of COVID-19 and the implementation of the reforms agreed in last year's National Dialogue.
\"It is vital during the transition ahead that all those entrusted with government responsibility are especially attentive to maintaining the safety and security of citizens, supporting democratic processes, and preserving human rights and fundamental freedoms,\" the ambassadors said.
This dream of a single national health system could be realised if South Africa is able to articulate a common vision for all its citizens.
But in a complex system such as the health sector, the ideal of universal health coverage as intended by the NHI is unlikely to be attained overnight with the passing of legislation.
Like the process of adapting to the challenges of a chronic disability, the South African health system must moreover cope with the inherent deficits in society resulting from the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, which created the enormous inequities that have been laid bare by the pandemic.
The fundamental divide between the for-profit value system of the private health sector on the one hand, and the human rights-based approach of the public sector on the other, needs to be bridged rather than deepened, building on the intersectoral innovations that the pandemic has elicited.
This COVID-19 pandemic highlights the fact that South Africa already has the technical expertise and capacity, in governance, in health economics, in health systems, in information systems, as well as in community participation in health.
By 1963 Alabama Governor George Corley Wallace had emerged as the leading opponent to the growing civil rights movement. Six months later he gained international notoriety for his stand in the door of the University of Alabama to block the entrance of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, who had been order admitted by a federal judge. Between 1964 and 1976 Wallace ran for President four times (three as a Democrat and once as an Independent) exploiting what he believed was a deep-seated aversion to racial integration among Northerners as well as Southerners. Long before these events, he would at his inauguration as Governor on January 14, 1963, lay out his opposition to integration and the civil rights movement. His excerpted speech appears below.
Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom- loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.
The Washington, D.C. school riot report is disgusting and revealing. We will not sacrifice our children to any such type school system--and you can write that down. The federal troops in Mississippi could be better used guarding the safety of the citizens of Washington, D.C., where it is even unsafe to walk or go to a ballgame--and that is the nations capitol. I was safer in a B-29 bomber over Japan during the war in an air raid, than the people of Washington are walking to the White House neighborhood. A closer example is Atlanta. The city officials
It offers a set of plans, evaluation criteria and practical options to media professionals that can be used to develop critical analysis of war journalism, all derived from, or at least attentive to, proposals on conflict, violence and peace.
In a 2010 book, Reports on Conflicts: New Directions in Peace Journalism, Jake Lynch and Johan Galtung present case studies of media coverage in Korea, Yugoslavia and during the Gulf War.
\"The media can be an 'instrument' of conflict resolution when the information they present is reliable, respect human rights, and represent various viewpoints,\" argues Ross Howard, whose two books, An operational Framework for Media and Peace (2002) and Conflict-Sensitive Journalism ( 2003), have been influential.
The general aim of peace building through peace journalism is therefore to prevent the eruption of violence in conflict, or to transform armed conflict or crisis in the long term into peaceful and constructive forms of dispute resolution.
Contrary to such a stance, peace journalism does not hold a hawkish discourse, not in designating an enemy to kill, or in legitimising conflicts, but in acting upstream to avoid a risk system often resulting from the combination of four factors highlighted by Philippe Hugon (2006; 35):
- Structural: linked to underdevelopment, characterised by the vulnerability and exposure to risk of populations with low resilience due to insufficient availability, market failures, absence of rights and capacities or dysfunctions in the allocation of resources;
- Cyclical, exogenous and endogenous shocks: linked to sudden and unexpected events leading to a strong disturbance of the system and to an unregulated propagation;
- At an institutional and political level: characterised by absences or shortcomings in prevention (monitoring cells, alert systems) and regulation, by instrumentalisation (unemployed young people, religious, politics, or ethnicity);
- Informational: the paroxysmal crisis always responds to a lack of information and to propaganda carried by the political powers and the media.
Dr. Regina Marcia Benjamin, President Barack Obama’s nominee for Surgeon General of the United States, is an accomplished physician whose professional and personal roots are planted deeply in rural America. Dr. Benjamin was nominated for the post by the President on July 13, 2009 and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on October 29, 2009.
Dr. Benjamin was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1956 and grew up in nearby Daphne, Alabama.
Regina Benjamin’s parents divorced when she was a child and her mother worked as a domestic and waitress to support Regina and her older brother. Although the family owned land, financial necessity forced them to sell it. She recalled that her family often fished in the Gulf of Mexico to catch their evening meal.
Despite her familys poverty Regina Benjamin set her sights on college. She enrolled in Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana where she met an African American physician for the first time. This encounter persuaded her to pursue a career in medicine. Earning a Bachelor of Science degree from Xavier in 1978, she then attended Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia between 1980 and 1982 but completed her medical degree at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.
Dr. Benjamin helped defray her educational expenses by joining the National Health Service Corps (NHSC) which reimbursed her tuition in exchange for a three-year commitment to practice in a medically underserved community. After residency in central Georgia, she in 1987 settled in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a shrimping town of 2,500 along Alabama’s Gulf Coast near Daphne. She became the only doctor serving the small, impoverished community there.
After fulfilling her three-year obligation to the NHSC, Dr. Benjamin remained in Bayou La Batre. In 1990 she opened her own family practice, enrolled at Tulane University’s School of Business where she earned an MBA, and converted her practice into the Bayou La Batre Health Clinic. When the clinic was destroyed by Hurricanes Georges in 1998 and
Todd D. Robinson is a career U.S. Foreign Service Officer, currently serving as U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala. Robinson, a Minister Counselor who speaks Spanish, Italian, and Albanian, has had a wide range of postings with the Foreign Service. Since his confirmation as Ambassador to Guatemala in September 2014, Robinson has focused on limiting human trafficking and promoting human rights in the region.
A native of Fanwood, New Jersey, Robinson earned a Bachelor of Arts and by 1985, a Master of Arts from Georgetown University, working with the University’s prestigious Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. After a brief stint as a journalist, Robinson was hired by the U.S. State Department as a member of the U.S. Foreign Service in 1986. His first overseas posting was to Colombia in 1987. He was next sent to El Salvador in 1989. Both Colombia and El Salvador were officially recognized as “hardship postings” by the Foreign Service because of high rates of violence and political conflict in the region. From 1991 to 1993, Robinson worked as a Watch Officer in Washington, D.C., managing international communications within the Department of State.
Robinson returned to service in overseas diplomatic postings in 1993, first as a staff assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to Italy and he later worked in a variety of embassy and State Department positions over the following decade. In 1995, he served as a political officer within the U.S. Embassy offices in Vatican City and La Paz, Bolivia. Robinson returned to the U.S. in 1999 to work as a special assistant to Secretary of State Madelyn Albright before his appointment as Deputy Counselor for Political and Economic Affairs in the Dominican Republic in 2000.
Starting in 2004, Robinson served as the primary political and economic advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Albania before becoming Consul General in Barcelona, Spain. Robinson was recognized with Superior Service Awards in 2001 and 2006 and promoted to Senior Foreign Service status in 2007. In 2009, he
It should create a special purpose vehicle -the DOVE (Debts of Vulnerable Economies) fund -- that will demonstrate to the financial markets how a responsible creditor treats African debtors in crisis.
The fund will also pledge that once the global economy begins to grow again it will work with African debtors to ensure that the debt does not become an unreasonable burden on their efforts to rebuild their economies.
Third, the DOVE fund will advocate that all private sector creditors should participate in a comparable standstill, both on debt payments and bond trading, and should applying the same principles as the DOVE fund in determining what to do with the debt of the participating countries after the crisis ends.
Fourth, the fund needs to be large enough to be an influential voice in any discussion among bondholders about the treatment of the participating African countries' debts.
The DOVE fund could encourage these groups to participate by issuing a social impact bond which would only offer holders a return that is linked to the post-crisis growth rate of sub-Saharan Africa and/or to the level of debt payments actually received by the DOVE fund after the crisis.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he can understand why Muslims were shocked by caricatures depicting the prophet Muhammad.
But in an interview with Al Jazeera broadcast on Saturday, he said he could never accept the issue being used to justify violence.
\"I understand and respect that we can be shocked by these caricatures,\" Macron said.
\"I will never accept that we can justify physical violence for these caricatures and I will always defend in my country the freedom to say, to write, to think, to draw.\"
Tensions flared with some Muslim majority countries who have held anti-Macron protests and called for a boycott of French products after he publically promised France would not “renounce the caricatures”.
Macron made the comments following the October 16 murder of French school teacher Samuel Paty, who was killed after he showed his class drawings of the prophet during a debate on free speech.
France was also shaken on Thursday by a deadly knife attack on a church in Nice, the third suspected Islamist attack in the country in little more than a month.
The country has raised its national security alert to the highest level and security has increased at places of worship and schools.
'No problem with Islam'
Macron tried to reach out to Muslims, telling the Qatar-based channel: “I understand the feelings that this arouses, I respect them.\"
\"But I want you to understand the role that I have. My role is to calm things down, as I am doing here, but at the same time it is to protect these rights.”
The president also slammed “distortions” from political and religious leaders and the media over the depictions of the prophet, saying too often people were led to believe that they were created by the French state.
\"Everywhere these last weeks in the Muslim world, we have tried to aggregate the two, by distorting my remarks, by telling lies, by saying the President of the French Republic and thus France, they have a problem with Islam.
\"No, we have no problem with Islam. None,\" he said.
He also denounced calls for a boycott of French goods, saying it was “unworthy” and “unacceptable”.
The quarrel is over the rate at which Ethiopia fills the reservoir behind the dam and its effect on water supplies downstream in Sudan and Egypt—for who the Nile is the primary water source.
On and off since construction started, Egypt has threatened to go to war to secure continued access to the Nile waters.
If Egypt attacked Ethiopia, the antiquated idea that the Nile is a common good to which all have natural rights would collapse.
The Nile has two major tributaries—the White Nile is the headwaters and primary stream of the river, and the Blue Nile, containing 80 per cent of the water and originates in Ethiopia.
For now, Uganda should be able to collect custodian’s fees from South Sudan, Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt, and invest it in protecting the polluted Lake Nalubaale from which the Nile flows, and the real estate of the river that sits on its territory as it flows north.
In 1995, career Foreign Service Officer Mosina H. Jordan was nominated by President Bill Clinton to serve as ambassador to the Central African Republic (CAR). After U.S. Senate confirmation she arrived in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic and presented her credentials on November 29, 1995.
Mosina Jordan was born in Daytona Beach, Florida in 1943, to Frank Montero and Alice Mann. In 1964, she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work from New York University. After she earned her Juris Doctorate from American University in 1973, Jordan became a civil servant, working for the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, and for the Community Services Administration.
In 1982, Jordan started her career with the U.S. Foreign Service as an Administrative Officer for Economic Programs for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington, D.C. After working at USAID headquarters for seven years, she rose in rank to become a Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator. Her first overseas experience came in 1989 when she served as a USAID Representative to Belize. From 1991 to 1995, Jordan supervised various USAID missions as Director for Regional Development in the Eastern Caribbean from an office in Bridgetown, Barbados. In this position, she directed a $24 million development program that promoted economic diversification, free trade, and legal reform for regional sustainability for seven Caribbean island nations.
In 1995, Jordan was appointed Ambassador to the Central African Republic (CAR). Her mission was to promote economic diversification, free market economic development, democracy, and human rights in a nation transitioning to democracy after decades of dictatorships. On May 21, 1996, this mission abruptly changed when CAR army soldiers staged a mutiny at the capital, Bangui, over unpaid wages. Jordan responded by closing the U.S. Embassy, and having her staff and other Americans safely evacuated to nearby Cameroon with the assistance of 35 U.S. Marines. The Embassy
