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Ugandan opposition leader and popular singer Bobi Wine has been freed after a brief arrest by the police. WIne had been taken away just after he was confirmed as a candidate in next year’s presidential election.
The local NBS Television, reporting from the scene, said the singer was put into a police van amid violent scuffles between police and his supporters.
Wine on Monday had gone to the nomination centre in Kyambogo in the capital, Kampala as Uganda’s electoral body started the nomination process for presidential candidates in the upcoming 2021 general elections.
Police fired tear gas to disperse his supporters who turned up to support him on nomination day.
Bobi Wine presented his nomination papers to the electoral commission to be cleared to challenge President Yoweri Museveni in next year's election.
Joel Senyonyi, spokesman for Wine’s NUP party, said “they [police] used a hammer and broke the windows of his vehicle and forcefully dragged him out … they bundled him into their own vehicle and took off”.
So far, 10 aspirants are vying for the top job. Others include former army commander General Mugisha Muntu and former Security Minister General Henry Tumukunde.
President Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled the country for 34 years, was the first to be nominated. He warned that any opponents who destabilize the country will be dealt with.
One presidential candidate Patrick Amuriat was arrested at the headquarters of his Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) party.
Soldiers and police officers have been heavily deployed at the party's offices, the Daily Monitor newspaper reports.
Mr Amuriat is reported to have vowed to defy restrictions on the number of supporters accompanying him to the electoral commission where he is scheduled to submit his nomination papers at midday. The newspaper has tweeted a video of his arrest.
These are some of the events analysts say makes the outlook of the politics tense as Uganda braces up for elections February next year.
Wine, 38, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, aims to end President Yoweri Museveni’s 34 years in power.
\t On Friday, internet and international calls were cut off across the West African nation in anticipation of the election results, according to locals and international observers in the capital, Conakry.
\t This was the third time that Conde matched-up against Diallo. Before the election, observers raised concerns that an electoral dispute could reignite ethnic tensions between Guinea's largest ethnic groups.
In summary Fewer inmates are available for hand crews so the state is filling the gap. So far, slightly more acreage has burned this year than last year. California will hire nearly 900 new seasonal firefighters to make up for a dwindling number of firefighting inmates as wildfires already have blackened more acreage than last []
The post As wildfire season looms, California adds 900 firefighters to its crews appeared first on Black Voice News.
Malawi's governing party has called for a third presidential election, citing irregularities and intimidation in this week's re-run vote as unofficial tallies show incumbent President Peter Mutharika losing to the opposition leader.
Voters in the southern African country went to the polls on Tuesday for the second time in 13 months after the Constitutional Court scrapped the initial May 2019 presidential election over mass fraud.
The governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) called on Friday on the electoral commission to annul the results collated so far of the second vote and declare a third poll.
DPP administrative secretary Francis Mphepo said in a statement: \"We wish to highlight several incidents that may potentially affect the integrity and credibility of the presidential election results.\"
In February, Malawi's top court found the election was marred by widespread irregularities, including the use of correction fluid to tamper with result sheets.
Democratic Republic of Congo: President Tshisekedi reneges on justice pledge, leaving victims in despair
\tPresident Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo has reneged on his inauguration pledges to strengthen the rule of law, fight impunity and ensure justice, leaving the families of hundreds of people killed during the country’s pre-election crisis in despair, Amnesty International said today.
“President Tshisekedi and his government must acknowledge the pain that victims and their families have been enduring and publicly commit to promptly and effectively prosecute those responsible,” said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s Director for East and Southern Africa.
Victims of 2015-2018 brutal crackdowns denied justice in the DRC, Amnesty International interviewed 115 survivors and victims’ family members, on their quest for justice.
Farcical investigations
\tUnder international pressure, former President Joseph Kabila constituted three committees to investigate the deadly crackdowns on protestors, none of which have resulted in any prosecutions.
A second committee created in February 2018 investigated the use of deadly force against protestors on 31 December 2017 and 21 January 2018, recommending prosecution of security officers who ordered or used excessive force against protestors.
LOS ANGELES — There is still no timetable on when Los Angeles Unified School District campuses may reopen due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the district may need to create a balance of online and in-person classes for the next academic year that starts Aug. 18. That was the word from Superintendent Austin Beutner July Read More...
The post LAUSD has no timetable for reopening campuses appeared first on .
About one in six state lawmakers have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to Dr. Thomas Dobbs of the Mississippi Health Department.
For weeks, politicians flouted mask recommendations inside the state Capitol. Twenty-six state legislators have now tested positive for Covid-19, including Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and State House Speaker Philip Gunn. Neither man wore a mask at a bill signing at the governor's mansion last week.
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said on Tuesday that he and his daughters tested negative for the virus, tweeting they had \"limited contact with the people who were diagnosed.\"
This spike in infections follows an especially busy few weeks in the Capitol. Members have met to discuss the state's budget, an unemployment crisis, and in June, the legislature passed a historic bill to remove the Confederate emblem from the state's flag. Many visitors and advocates attended the Capitol to watch the debate and to protest.
Without masks, it may not come as a shock that the virus spread so efficiently within the legislature. On the floor, desks are packed tightly together, and members gather closely to communicate with their colleagues.
\"We could have done more to prevent this,\" State Rep. Robert Johnson III, the Democratic leader of the state's House of Representatives, said in a statement to CNN.
\"It seems it was all about some erroneous, dangerously promoted political stance. It's disgusting. Our governor refuses to order statewide mask requirements and our leadership decided not to require it at the Capitol.\"
One lawmaker who contracted coronavirus, Rep. Ronnie Crudup Jr., shared that although he did wear a mask most of the time, he could have been more vigilant. \"I can honestly say that I wore my mask 95% of the time when I was around the Capitol and public places, but that 5% can make a big difference,\" he wrote in a Facebook post.
On Thursday, Gov. Reeves mandated mask orders for 13 counties experiencing the greatest spikes of Covid-19, including Jackson, Biloxi and Gulfport. \"Mississippi is in a fight for our lives,\" he said.
Even President Donald Trump, who has stubbornly refused to wear a mask in public and ridiculed those who have, said that he will wear a mask during a visit to Walter Reed National Medical Center on Saturday.
The post Dozens of Mississippi lawmakers have Covid-19 after refusing to wear masks appeared first on L.A. Focus Newspaper.
NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio grabbed a roller Thursday to paint “Black Lives Matter' in front of the namesake Manhattan tower of President Donald Trump, who tweeted last week that the street mural would be “a symbol of hate.” De Blasio was flanked by his wife, Chirlane McCray, and the Rev. []
\"The relationship between Uganda and Rwanda is beyond normal state to state relations.
The relationship between Uganda and Rwanda is beyond normal state to state relations.
But during the Luanda summit in February, it was agreed that the two nations release prisoners being held in their countries, refrain from interference in each other's affairs, protect the Human rights of citizens of both Uganda and Rwanda and continuation of the activities of the Ad-Hoc commission, as a mechanism for monitoring the implementation of the process.
Kagame sacks minister
Across the border, Rwanda's President Paul Kagame recently dismissed from Cabinet, Ambassador Olivier Nduhungirehe, the country's Foreign Affairs Minister who Ugandan observers felt was undermining the relationship between the two countries.
President Museveni on April 27 exercised the powers given to him under article 121 of the 1995 Constitution to pardon 833 prisoners around the country - including Rwandans.
What happens in prison does not stay in prison. The cell blocks and bars give us a false sense of containment. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to the Justice Department, “The average time served by state prisoners released in 2016, from initial admission to initial release, was 2.6 years, and the median time []
The post During the pandemic, is prison a death sentence? appeared first on Daytona Times.
The National Identification Authority (NIA) has asked the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to report the state agency to the police if the party has any evidence to back its election rigging allegations made against the Authority on Thursday, 14 May 2020.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC), at a press conference, raised fears that the decision of the Electoral Commission to compile a new register of voters using passports and the NIA's Ghana card as proof of eligibility may give undue advantage to the governing New Patriotic Party and President Nana Akufo-Addo and also help the incumbent to rig the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections in December 2020.
According to the biggest opposition party, over 10 million Ghanaians are unable to retrieve their Ghana cards from the NIA several months after they were registered, a situation which the Chairman of the party, Mr Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, said will make it impossible for them to be captured on the new electoral roll.
At a counter-press conference on Friday, 15 May 2020, the Executive Director of the NIA, Prof Ken Attafuah, said it was a \"disturbing allegation that the NIA, in consent with the Electoral Commission, embarked on an election-rigging agenda in order to benefit the New Patriotic Party, and most disturbingly, to disenfranchise a significant portion of the Ghanaian populace from their rights to exercise their franchise\".
\"I want to assure the good people of this country that the NIA is not involved in any such criminal design or enterprise with the EC, with the government of Ghana or any with any person or entity whatsoever described.
The Ugandan government has said people like Musasizi are partly to blame for the floods, and wants them to leave the wetlands for good.
Last year, wetlands covered just 8.4 percent of Uganda, down from 15.5 percent in 1994, according to the environment ministry.
In 2014 the government ordered the cancellation of all land titles there, issued illegally by local officials because the law prohibits private ownership of wetlands.
A subsequent survey of four central districts identified 1,700 titles in wetlands, said Collins Oloya, the acting director of environmental affairs at the environment ministry.
Now the rising waters are forcing people out of the wetlands, doing Oloya’s work for him.
[DW] On October 31, Ivorians will elect a new leader. President Alassane Ouattara is running for a third controversial term. The opposition is urging supporters to shun the poll -- a political crisis appears imminent.
Preparations for next year's general elections got off to a bumpy start yesterday after authorities at the Electoral Commission (EC), rejected Opposition demand for a new 2021 roadmap, born out of a meticulous consultative process.
But the Commission maintained that the elections would go on as planned and asked Opposition parties to either accept the new roadmap announced on Tuesday or push for last-minute constitutional amendments to the current electoral laws.
Under the revised EC roadmap, political parties were given one month to organise their internal elections (primaries).
\"As an electoral management body that is interested in holding free and fair general elections, you ought to have sufficient consultation with all key stakeholder before you roll out this \"scientific\" revised roadmap...\" the letter to EC reads in part.
\"In the most ridiculous fashion, the Commission has released a revised roadmap for the 2021 General Election; which roadmap violates every aspect of a free and fair election, envisaged under Article 1(4) of the Constitution of Uganda,\" Mr Kyagulanyi said in a Facebook post yesterday.
Malawi’s electoral commission appealed for “peace and calm” on Wednesday as it counted ballots following a historic poll to re-elect a president after Peter Mutharika’s victory was overturned.
Voters in Malawi went to the polls on Tuesday for the second time in just over a year after the Constitutional Court dramatically ruled that last year’s polls were fraught with “grave and widespread” irregularities.
Results from the May 2019 election sparked countrywide protest that lasted months, a rare occurrence in the impoverished southern African country.
It took the top court six months to sift through the evidence before concluding that Mutharika was not duly elected and ordered fresh elections.
The chairman of the Malawi Electoral Commission, Chifundo Kachale, said tallying of the votes from 5,002 polling stations was underway.
“We appeal to Malawians to maintain peace and calm as the vote-counting continues,” Kachale told a news conference in Blantyre.
Mutharika has accused the opposition of inciting violence following isolated incidents which the police and electoral commission said had not affected the election.
“It’s obvious that the opposition is doing this,” he told reporters after voting in Blantyre, claiming some of his party monitors were “chased away, some were beaten”.
“It’s obviously people that are afraid of the will of the people that are engaging in these barbaric acts,” he alleged.
Mutharika, 79, did not take the decision of the constitutional court lightly when it overturned last year’s poll.
He accused judges of working with the opposition to steal the election through what he dubbed a “judicial coup d’etat”.
He had narrowly won the now-discredited election with 38.5 percent of the ballots, beating his closest rival Lazarus Chakwera, 65, by just 159,000 votes .
Victory in the rerun will be determined by whoever garners more than 50 percent of the votes — a new threshold set by the top court.
Some 6.8 million people were asked to vote between Mutharika, Chakwera and an underdog candidate, Peter Dominico Kuwani.
The electoral commission has until July 3 to unveil the results, although the announcement is widely thought likely to come this week.
Kachale says the commission will only announce results after dealing with all the complaints.
AFP
The East African Community (EAC) Council of Ministers suggests Uganda may have breached the agreements on how much water to release from Nalubaale dam -- the main outlet of the world's largest freshwater lake.
Documents filed at the EAC Council of Ministers say Uganda has refused to execute a new policy governing the release of water in Jinja, a decision that has led to flooding of the lake that could claim more lives and cause destruction.
Uganda insists that the policy, which determines volumes of water to be released based on Lake Victoria levels, cannot be implemented as it does not take into consideration several factors, like extraction in the affected countries.
The regional bloc ordered implementation of the schedule after it emerged that Uganda had been violating agreements to maintain the natural Lake Victoria outflow volumes before Nalubaale dam was built.
In 2005, World Bank senior disaster risk management specialist Daniel Kull led a study that showed that Uganda released more than 50 per cent of the allowed water volumes from Nalubaale and Kiira dams over the previous two years.
An effort to clean up plastic waste and turn it into building materials shifts gear as COVID-19 arrives and protective gear falls short
GULU, Uganda - When the Ugandan government ordered all non-essential workplaces shut to contain the coronavirus pandemic in late March, Peter Okwoko and his colleague Paige Balcom kept working.
But the pair - who had been turning collected plastic waste into building materials such as roofing tiles and pavers since last year - shifted gear and instead began manufacturing makeshift plastic face shields from discarded plastic bottles.
\"The doctor from Gulu regional referral hospital requested we make 10 face shield masks urgently because they didn't have enough\" and the hospital had just received its first COVID-19 patient, said Okwoko, 29, a co-founder of Takataka Plastics.
Late last month, the Ministry of Health said Uganda's public hospitals are likely to run out of existing stocks of protective equipment within three months.
Balcom, 26, a mechanical engineer who met Okwoko in 2019 while doing research on plastic pollution in Uganda, said some of the material used in the face shields now comes from hospital waste, such as used intravenous drip bottles.
The East African Community (EAC) Council of Ministers suggests Uganda may have breached the agreements on how much water to release from Nalubaale dam — the main outlet of the world’s largest freshwater lake.
Malawi's electoral commission has appealed for peace and calm as it tallied ballots following a historic poll to re-elect a president after Peter Mutharika's victory was overturned.
The Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) has used the country's coronavirus lockdown to begin a long-awaited redevelopment of the park, including the installation of shelters, lighting and a tarmac surface.
A report released this month by the Britain-based Global Labour Institute (GLI) estimated that plans for a bus rapid transit system could threaten more than 17,000 taxi jobs and 20,000 boda-boda jobs in Kampala's central business district.
Over the last month, the KCCA and transport ministry have registered more than 13,000 taxis and assigned designated routes along which they can operate, according to Byamukama.
Byamukama said the city also wants boda-bodas to register with digital companies such as SafeBoda, a private firm with an Uber-like app and a growing fleet of orange-vested riders.
John Ssemujju, chairman of Kampala Metropolitan Boda-Boda Entrepreneurs, an association of riders which claims 50,000 members, said the boda-boda business is the country's biggest industry.
By STEFANIE DAZIO and CHRISTOPHER WEBER Associated Press LOS ANGELES (AP) — The death of a Black man found hanging from a tree in a Southern California city park last month was ruled a suicide Thursday following a police investigation prompted by outrage from the family who said authorities initially were too quick to rule out the possibility he was lynched. The manner of 24-year-old Robert Fuller's death on June 10 in Palmdale intensified the racial angst that already was at a boiling point following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Family members said they couldn't imagine Fuller taking []
The post Hanging death of Black man in California park ruled suicide appeared first on Black News Channel.
Malawi's parliament has endorsed June 23 as the date for the presidential election re-run after a court annulled last year's vote over irregularities, a lawmaker said.
The election had handed President Peter Mutharika a second term, but with just 38.5% of the vote.
Legally parliament had to validate the new polling date.
He said the court ruling \"clearly states that parliament must set a date for the elections\".
Meantime, a new electoral commission was sworn-in on Tuesday to organise the new vote, after the top court also ordered an investigation into the conduct of the previous one.
The observers recognise that an electoral system governed by a whole series of constantly changing pieces of legislation \"responds to the outcome of political dialogue between the main parties, Renamo and Frelimo, rather than taking a holistic review of the electoral framework.\"
Stop the inclusion of fraudulent results: Under Renamo pressure, the parties agreed an electoral court system which could intervene to redress misconduct and errors by election commissions, STAEs, and polling stations.
Civil society members to be non-partisan
Members of the National Elections Commission (CNE) \"do not represent the public or private institutions or political or social institutions they come from, and defend the national interest\", says the electoral law.
For the 2008-9 elections, parliament (AR) agreed a dramatic change - a majority of CNE members, including the chair (presidente) were nominated by Civil Society Organisations (CSO) to try to force some independence and neutrality.
But this agreement between Frelimo and Renamo to select party aligned CSO members is not specified in the electoral law and clearly goes against the spirit of the law.
Mama Tina to the rescue. Tina Knowles didn’t take kindly to some of the buzz surrounding the release of the trailer of the upcoming “Black Is King” visual album, which waswritten, directed and executive produced by Beyoncé. The visual album from the 24-time Grammy Award-winnerreimagines the lessons of 'The Lion King' for today’s []
The post Tina Knowles Takes to Twitter In Defense of Beyonce appeared first on L.A. Focus Newspaper.
June 28: Chakwera, Chilima sworn in
\tMalawi held an investiture for president Lazarus Chakwera and vice-president Saulos Chilima, hours after the elections body declared Chakwera winner of last Tuesday’s polls.
Key statistics
\t
\t\tLazarus Chakwera, leader of the Tonse Allaince = 2,604,043 votes (58.5%)
\t\tArthur Peter Mutharika of the DPP/UDF alliance = 1,751,877 votes
\t\tPeter Kuwani of Mbakuwaku Movement for Development = 33,456 votes
\t\tOut of the 6,859,570 registered voters, 4,445,699 cast their votes
\t\tThe Commission recorded 57,323 spoilt ballots, representing 1.29%
\t\tThe commission received and resolved 10 complaints from all three participating sides
June 27: Chakwera’s victory confirmed by election body
\tMalawi Electoral Commission (MEC) late Saturday declared opposition alliance leader Lazarus Chakwera as the winner of Tuesday’s presidential re-run election.
June 25: Opposition celebrates unofficial Chakwera victory
\tOpposition chief Lazarus Chakwera has ‘taken the lead’ in Malawi’s poll count, according to unofficial results being projected by multiple local media outlets.
Read more – Malawi election commission appeals for calm as it tallies votes
June 23: Voting ends, ballot counting begins
\tPolls have closed in most parts of Malawi privately-run newspaper The Nation reports.
June 23: Malawians vote in crucial presidential poll rerun despite virus
\tVoters in Malawi have already started casting their ballots today in crucial presidential election rerun pitting incumbent Peter Mutharika and opposition coalition leader Lazarus Chakwera.
