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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.
Government yesterday told the diplomatic community that it was investigating the alleged abduction of three MDC Alliance officials, indicating the State’s prime objective was to expose and prosecute the perpetrators or reveal the involvement of a third force.
Responding to the diplomatic community’s concerns over the abduction, torture and sexual abuse of Harare West legislator Joanah Mamombe, Cecilia Chimbiri and Netsai Marova, Foreign Affairs minister Sibusiso Moyo said the government was equally worried.
He further said some media organisations and the diplomatic community had concluded that the government was responsible for the alleged abuses.
Moyo, however, said government would not ignore glaring similarities which exist between recent alleged abductions, which he claimed had hallmarks of a stage-managed theatre designed to soil the State’s image and divert attention from squabbles in the main opposition MDC Alliance.
The three MDC Alliance activists claimed that they were arrested at a roadblock before being abducted at Harare Central Police Station by State security agents, who went on to dump them in Bindura after subjecting them to torture and sexual abuse.
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
This makes it imperative for governments to apply social assistance programme for the poor and vulnerable .
According to the World Bank, per capita spending on social assistance programmes is lower in low- and middle-income countries (less than $1,000) than in high-income countries ($4,000-$5,000).
It reports that Nigeria's total spending on social assistance programmes is 0.28% of GDP and covers only 7% of the population.
This is aimed at financial support for the poor and vulnerable whose incomes or livelihoods are at risk due to natural, human or economic crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdown.
Others include youth employment and community social development projects, like the home-grown school feeding programmes to address poverty and hunger.
LOS ANGELES — The city and county of Los Angeles presented plans to relocate and shelter thousands of homeless people living in encampments and tents on the streets and near freeways under the threat of the coronavirus May 20.
In papers filed in Los Angeles federal court, officials promised over the next 10 months to find or create short- and/or long-term housing for more than 6,000 people, including those living under and adjacent to freeways, and those currently staying in recreation centers and motel and hotel rooms throughout the region.
In its nine-page proposal, the city and county prioritized two elements of the homeless population: those residing in the city’s COVID-19 emergency shelters — recreation centers and city-funded Project Roomkey rooms — and people who have taken shelter under freeway overpasses and underpasses, and near entrance and exit ramps.
Officials detailed three pilot projects, including the deployment of hygiene facilities near 16th Street and Maple Avenue near the Santa Monica (10) Freeway, where a group of people are living under a freeway; a modular housing, or pallet, program, providing shelter for up to 100 persons, expected to open within 10 weeks; and an safe parking program for recreational vehicles that allows safe 24-hour parking in a designated area exclusively for campers and is expected to open within four weeks, according to the document.
The ongoing operating and service commitments needed to sustain the interventions and keep people off the streets “come with a substantial cost,” one that must be shared between the city, the county, and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, according to the filing.
On June 1, 1956, all NAACP offices in Alabama were forced to close, as a result of Attorney General John Patterson’s nine-year injunction against the civil rights organization. This left a void in local civil rights leadership and a desperate need for a new group to lead Birmingham’s black community in its campaign to end unfair treatment from whites. Recognizing this need, local black leaders called a mass meeting at Sardis Baptist Church. Approximately 1,000 people attended and created the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Its mission was to fight for freedom, democracy and first class citizenship for Birmingham blacks. Unlike the NAACP, they vowed to attain their goals through direct action and to test the validity of Jim Crow laws through the courts.
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was appointed as president of the ACMHR. He was known for tirelessly pushing reforms for blacks and placing his members and himself in danger to attain them. The group’s goals included hiring black policemen, integrating Birminghams public schools, and desegregating all public accommodations.
Their initial efforts were unsuccessful. An attempt to enroll black students in an all-white school was met by mob violence, a bus boycott failed due to lack of unity, and gains made in school desegregation led white officials to close facilities rather than integrate them.
In 1957, the group became affiliated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Together in 1963, they created “Project C,” a month-long campaign involving protests and mass marches led by Shuttlesworth and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., then pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. The project was met with brutal white opposition, including the use of clubs, dogs, hoses, and enough arrests to overflow the city jail. The project ended on May 10, 1963; one month later President Kennedy announced his plan to desegregate public facilities in Birmingham.
On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.
An early career in health care led to political aspirations for Eddie Bernice Johnson, culminating in her current position representing Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives. She is an advocate for women, children, and human rights.
Born in Waco, Texas, in 1935 to parents Lee Edward Johnson and Lillie Mae (White) Johnson, Bernice Johnson traveled to Indiana to attend college when there were no educational opportunities for her as a black woman in Texas. She earned a diploma in nursing from St. Mary’s College of Notre Dame in 1955. One year later she married Lacey Kirk Johnson. The couple had one son, Kirk, and then divorced in 1970. Bernice Johnson continued her education. She later received a BS in nursing from Texas Christian University in 1967 and a MS in public administration in 1976 from Southern Methodist University.
Johnson was the chief psychiatric nurse at the Dallas Veterans Administration Hospital until 1972 when she was elected to the Texas House of Representatives, the first African American woman ever elected to public office from Dallas. She also became the first woman in Texas history to lead a major Texas House committee when she chaired the Labor Committee. Five years later, President Jimmy Carter appointed her to be the regional director for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. When Carter left office in 1980, Johnson entered the private sector as a business development consultant in Dallas.
In 1986, she re-entered politics and was elected as a Texas state senator who advocated for fair housing, minority-owned businesses, and health care services. The 1990 census created new congressional districts for Dallas, and Johnson served on the reapportionment committee. Her involvement with the redistricting created controversy when she ran for one of the new seats, but in 1992 she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. As a House member, she has served on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee as well as the Committee on Science and Technology.
Born two decades before American women won the right to vote, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander overcame obstacles as a female and also as an African American in the elite profession of law. In 1927 she became the first black woman to gain admission to the Pennsylvania Bar, beginning a long career advocating for civil and human rights.
Sarah Tanner Mossell Alexander was born into a distinguished family on January 2, 1898 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her grandfather was Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835-1923), editor of the Christian Recorder and the AME Church Review. Her uncle was surgeon Dr. Nathan F. Mossell (1856-1946), founder of the Frederick Douglass Hospital (now Mercy-Douglass Hospital), and her aunt, Dr. Hallie Tanner Johnson (1864-1901), founded Tuskegee Institute’s Nurses’ School & Hospital. Other uncles were the painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) and Lewis Baxter Moore (1866-1928), Dean of Howard University.
Alexander’s father was Aaron Mossell (1863-1951), an attorney who deserted his wife Mary and two daughters a year after Sadie’s birth. Suffering from depression, Mary Mossell often traveled to Washington, D.C., where relatives cared for the girls.
Although she earned a scholarship to Howard University, Sadie Alexander was directed by her mother to attend the University of Pennsylvania instead, entering in the fall of 1915. There she struggled with discrimination from students and professors. In 1918 she graduated with honors with a B.S. degree in education but at the time was denied election into Phi Beta Kappa.
She continued her studies at the University of Pennsylvania, earning an M.A. and then a Ph.D. in economics, becoming the first black woman in the U.S. to earn the degree. Unable to find work as an African American woman in Pennsylvania, she was hired by the black-owned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1921 and stayed there until 1923 when she returned to Philadelphia to marry her college sweetheart, Raymond Pace Alexander (1897-1974), an attorney. They had two
Nine people, including one police officer, have died in the West African state of Guinea, the security ministry said Wednesday, following days of unrest after a tense weekend presidential election.
In a statement, the ministry pointed to shootings and stabbings in the capital Conakry and elsewhere in the country since Sunday's presidential vote.
\"This strategy of chaos (was) orchestrated to jeopardise the elections of October 18, \" the ministry said, adding that many people had been injured and property was damaged.
Clashes were ongoing in Conakry on Wednesday, where a security officer, Mamadou Keganan Doumbouya, told the press that at least three people had died.
And a local doctor, who declined to be named, said he had received two dead bodies, and nine injured people, at his clinic.
The violence follows the high-stakes election in which President Alpha Conde ran for a third term in a controversial bid that had already sparked mass protests.
With tensions already running high, Guinea's main opposition leader Cellou Dalein Diallo on Monday declared victory in the election -- before the announcement of the official results, which are expected this week.
Opposition supporters are deeply suspicious about the fairness of the poll, although the government insists that it was fair.
Much of the tension in Guinea centres on Conde's candidacy.
In March, the 82-year-old president pushed through a new constitution which he argued would modernise the country. It also allowed him to bypass a two-term limit for presidents, however.
Security forces repressed mass protests against the move from October last year, killing dozens of people.
On Wednesday, plumes of black smoke rose over an opposition stronghold in the capital Conakry, where protesters erected barricades and lit fires, an AFP journalist saw.
Youths in alleyways also hurled stones at police officers stationed along a main artery who fired back tear gas canisters.
The security ministry stated that \"a police officer was lynched to death\" in a Conakry suburb, without specifying when the attack occurred.
In a social media post earlier on Wednesday, Conde appealed for \"calm and serenity while awaiting the outcome of the electoral process\".
- Clashes and barricades -
Ten candidates are in the race besides alongside frontrunners Conde and Diallo, old political rivals who traded barbs in a bitter campaign.
Despite fears of violence after the pre-vote clashes, polling day was mostly calm.
Then Diallo's self-proclaimed election victory ratcheted up tensions, and celebrations by his supporters descended into violent clashes with security forces on Monday.
The opposition politician said that security forces killed three youngsters that night, although AFP was unable to confirm the details.
Security forces also barricaded Diallo inside his house, the politician said on Tuesday.
Monitors from the African Union and the 15-nation West African bloc ECOWAS both said that Guinea's election was mostly fair, despite insistence from Diallo's camp tha
Your Excellency,
Re: Immediate and urgent measures to protect the rights of prison detainees in Tanzania
We the undersigned non-governmental human rights organizations, welcome your government's measures to halt the spread of COVID-19, including closing schools, discouraging public gatherings, informing the public, and establishing three Cabinet committees to lead the response.
As other countries' experiences show, the failure to take measures to decongest prisons can lead to prison riots In response to COVID-19, and the threat to prison populations, neighboring countries like Uganda, in addition to pardoning certain convicted persons, have undertaken to urgently review cases of pre-trial detainees.
Currently, while measures are in place for courts to continue to hear some criminal matters through video conferencing, there has been no publicized directive or collaboration between the offices of the Prosecutor General, the Judiciary, or the legal profession to prioritize reducing the number of detainees, particularly those in pre-trial detention.
We therefore respectfully urge that you consult with relevant stakeholders, including the Honourable Minister of Health, the Commissioner General of Prisons, the Honourable Chief Justice, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Inspector General of Prisons, the Tanganyika Law Society, and other civil society organizations, to put in place a comprehensive COVID-19 plan of action to decongest Tanzania's prisons.
Pending cases not previously scheduled for hearing can be expedited to facilitate early disposition of the case;
During this COVID-19 period, authorities should refrain from arresting people for crimes that do not involve serious offenses, and then only arrest if the person would pose a specific and known risk of harm to others, issuing citations instead;
Prisoners who do not meet the criteria for conditional or unconditional release should not be isolated from legal counsel or relatives.
