– NEWS –
Uganda’s long-time leader Museveni wins election: Uganda’s long-time President Yoweri Museveni has been re-elected, electoral officials say, amid accusations of vote fraud by his main rival Bobi Wine. Museveni won almost 59% of the vote, with Bobi Wine trailing with about 35%, the Electoral Commission said. Wine vowed to provide evidence of vote-rigging when internet connections were restored. The government shut down the internet ahead of voting day, a move condemned by election monitors. Wine said Friday the military had entered his home while the country waited for election results. Wine said every legal option was on the table to challenge the official results, including peaceful protests. The campaign and election were marked by a deadly crackdown by security forces on opposition supporters and an internet shutdown. In one week of protests in November, at least 54 people died.
bbc.com, apnews.com, reuters.com
83 killed in Darfur violence: The death toll from tribal violence between Arabs and non-Arabs in Sudan’s West Darfur province climbed to at least 83 on Sunday. Women and children were among the dead, with around 160 injured in the militia attacks. The deadly clashes erupted after a fistfight between two residents in a camp for displaced persons — which culminated with a man from the Arab Rizeigat tribe being stabbed to death. Family members of the man was stabbed to death attacked people in the Krinding camp and other areas on Saturday. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was deeply concerned about the violence and called on the Sudanese authorities to expend all efforts to de-escalate the situation and bring an end to the fighting.
dw.com, apnews.com
War threatens between Ethiopia and Sudan: The armed clashes along the border between Sudan and Ethiopia are the latest twist in a decades-old history of rivalry between the two countries. The immediate issue is a disputed area known as El Fashaga, where the north-west of Ethiopia’s Amhara region meets Sudan’s breadbasket Gedaref state. Last week, the Sudanese Civil Aviation Authority set up a no-fly zone over El Fashaga border area in El Gedaref, after an Ethiopian military warplane entered Sudanese airspace on Wednesday. But Minister of Information, Feisal Mohamed Saleh, denied that Sudan and Ethiopia are in conflict over the border in a press statement at Khartoum Airport.
bbc.com, dabangasudan.org
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UN peacekeepers under attack in Mali: A fourth UN peacekeeper from Ivory Coast died from injuries inflicted by an improvised explosive device and an attack by unidentified gunmen in northern Mali’s Timbuktu region, the United Nations said Thursday. The attack began when the peacekeepers’ vehicle struck an improvised explosive device during a security operation along the Douentza and Timbuktu axis about 12 miles north of the town of Bamabara-Maoude in the Timbuktu region. The gunmen who then fired on the peacekeepers later fled the scene and medical evacuations were carried out by helicopters.
apnews.com
Violation of procurement law during KSK secret exercises in Namibia? For years, the German military’s elite unit Command Special Forces (KSK) has been carrying out secret training operations in the Namibian desert. According to media reports, the training took place on the ranch of a former KSK soldier who allegedly maintains close contacts with the right-wing extremist milieu for years. Now the defense ministry is investigating violations of public procurement law. There are concrete indications that the former soldier’s ranch was used only because of his personal contacts with his former colleagues.
tagesschau.de
Covid surge in South Africa: South Africa will vaccinate 40 million people, or two-thirds of its population, against Covid-19 in order to achieve herd immunity, its health minister said, as a mutant variant drove daily new cases above 21,000 for the first time. A more contagious coronavirus variant, first found on South Africa’s east coast late last year, is driving a second wave of infections, pushing its total to 1.15 million, or about a third of the continent’s cases. Deaths from Covid-19 in South Africa have surpassed 30,000, and Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said private and public hospitals were struggling to manage the influx of patients.
reuters.com
Riots on the anniversary of the revolution in Tunisia dw.com
Nigeria’s ambassador criticizes Germany for handling of stolen colonial art tagesspiegel.de
Egypt says reviewing $23 billion high-speed train network with Siemens reuters.com
Former Slovak foreign minister becomes UN special envoy in Libya aljazeera.com
– BACKGROUND –
Increasing violence against schools in Cameroon: There is growing violence against students in the civil war that has been raging in western Cameroon for four years. In the region, English-speaking separatist militias are fighting against the French-speaking majority in the country’s government and for an independent state of Ambazonia. To build pressure, these groups are forcing the area’s schools to close. Seven children were murdered in Kumba in October during attacks on schools. In the regional capital Bamenda, lessons are being held under military protection. For safety reasons, pupils do not put on their school uniforms until they have entered the educational facilities and take them off again before they leave.
deutschlandfunk.de
60 years after the murder of Patrice Lumumba: A lonely statue of DR Congo’s independence hero Patrice Lumumba marks the spot where he was assassinated 60 years ago on Sunday. His family are still seeking justice, with a war crimes investigation in its final phases in former colonial ruler Belgium. Lumumba was among the vanguard of pan-African leaders who led the charge to end colonialism in Africa in the late 1950s. A charismatic speaker, he gained Belgium’s resentment on the very first day of independence, June 30, 1960, delivering a blistering indictment of the brutal colonial regime in a famous speech attended by Belgian King Baudouin. Western powers needed little else to see the 35-year-old firebrand as a threat, particularly after he sought support from the Soviet Union. Aiming to quickly neutralize him, Belgium and the CIA exploited the ambitions of other Congolese leaders, documents show. They succeeded with a young army chief-of-staff named Joseph-Desire Mobutu, who led a coup that overthrew Lumumba in September after just three months as prime minister.
france24.com
Pandemic and Africa on agenda at 2021 One Climate Summit: At least 50 countries committed to protecting 30% of the planet, including land and sea, over the next decade to halt species extinction and address climate change issues, during a global summit Monday aimed at protecting the world’s biodiversity. The event, held annually since 2017, focused on four key themes: the protection of terrestrial and marine ecosystems; increasing funding for biodiversity protection; finding links between deforestation and the health of human and animals; and promoting agroecology. „We know even more clearly amid the crisis we are going through that all our vulnerabilities are interrelated,“ French President Emmanuel Macron said. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed: „We need to step up our efforts to protect biodiversity and natural habitats, not just at some point in time, but now, and not just somehow but considerably, otherwise the consequences will very soon be irreversible,“ she said from Berlin. Ahead of the conference, major funders announced 11.8 billion euros to accelerate the development of the Great Green Wall project in Africa’s semiarid Sahel region.
marketwatch.com, dw.com
Covid vaccination program in Africa sees slow start: There continues to be a clear disparity between the global north and south when it comes to the worldwide distribution of Covid vaccine doses. While the US, Australia and many European countries have secured the majority of all vaccination doses for themselves and have exclusive contracts with the manufacturers for doses that are still to be produced, experts estimate that nationwide vaccinations in Africa will not be achieved until 2024. The Covax global vaccination program initiated by the WHO is fighting to help with this issue, but it is already attracting bitter criticism. Above all, poor countries are demanding support in the project to produce the vaccines that are suitable for them themselves – however, the dissolution of patent law has so far failed due to the veto of rich Western states. For an activist of the “Vaccines for South Africa Now!” Campaign, Covax is therefore only “a fig leaf of the rich to cover up national profiteering with pharmaceutical companies”.
taz.de, n-tv.de
– NUMBER –
During excavations in Saqqara, Egypt, around fifty sarcophagi and a mortuary temple that is more than 2500 years old were discovered.
n-tv.de
– QUOTE –
„Live from One Planet Summit in Paris: Bla bla nature, bla bla important, bla bla ambitious, bla bla green investments, bla bla great opportunity, bla bla green growth, bla bla net zero, bla bla step up our game, bla bla hope…“
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg threw cold water on the French-led One Planet Summit in a tweet.
twitter.com
– AT LAST –
Rebel Wilson says she was kidnapped at gunpoint in Mozambique: The actress Rebel Wilson has said she was once kidnapped at gunpoint and held overnight while staying in Mozambique. The 40-year-old said she was with a group of women in rural Mozambique, and that they were ordered to get out of their vehicle and brought to a house in the middle of nowhere. Wilson said luckily no one was harmed and the next day they were released.
news.sky.com