Monthly Archives: May 2018

3, May 2018

Labour, Tories lock horns in 2018 UK local elections ⁰

The UK’s two main parties, the ruling Conservatives and the main opposition Labour, are set to lock horns in this year’s local elections across England.

Polling stations across the country will open on Thursday between 7am and 10pm local time and voters will head to the ballots to choose candidates that will take more than 4,000 seats across 150 councils in England.

All the seats in capital London’s 32 boroughs and the metropolitan districts of Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Newcastle are also up for grab.

There are no polls in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.

While Prime Minister Theresa May’s party is hoping to keep its grip over main positions, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is positive that his party is set to repeat another strong showing like the one they had in last year’s snap general election.

“The biggest elections are going to be in the main cities, particularly London, Birmingham, Newcastle – we’re going to be working very hard on them. In London particularly, they are going to focus on housing,” he said last December, before proceeding to criticize the Tory government’s treatment of local authorities.

“But it’s also emphasizing the way local authorities have been so underfunded by this government that they are all facing real difficulties … this is the product of seven years of austerity,” he argued. “I’m hoping we do very, very well, but I’m not putting a figure on it.”

May called the snap election thinking that it would easily hand her stronger support in parliament but ended up costing her party its decisive majority.

She further embarrassed the Tories and herself by appealing to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to form a majority government.

A month before the snap election, however, the Conservatives won 1,900 seats in the local elections, up 558 from the year before, while Labour lost 320 to end up with 1,151.

Source: Presstv

3, May 2018

US: President Trump reportedly hiring Bill Clinton’s lawyer ⁰

US President Donald Trump is reportedly hiring Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyer, Emmet Flood, as White House lawyer Ty Cobb quits.

“For several weeks Ty Cobb has been discussing his retirement and last week he let Chief of Staff [John] Kelly know he would retire at the end of this month,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. On Wednesday.

Cobb (pictured below) was the main figure in the Trump team to defend the administration against of allegations of collusion with Russia.

Flood, a veteran Washington lawyer, would be joining the team “to represent the president and the administration against the Russia witch hunt.”

In an interview with ABC News, Cobb said a presidential interview with special counsel Robert Mueller is still being considered.

“It’s certainly not off the table and people are working hard to make decisions and work towards an interview,” Cobb said.

Trump added attorneys Joseph DiGenova and Victoria Toensing to his team of outside lawyers in March.

The investigation, known as the Russia probe, seeks to find out whether the Russian government coordinated with Trump’s aides after the intelligence community’s conclusion that the Kremlin helped with the New York billionaire’s campaign effort ahead of winning the White House, an allegation dismissed both by Moscow and the president.

Source: Presstv

3, May 2018

Southern Cameroons Crisis: Bamenda Arch Diocese confirms release of Father Niba ⁰

A priest in Cameroon’s Northwest region has been released by unknown gunmen after about two days in detention, Catholic Church leaders have disclosed. The Bamenda Archdiocese confirmed that Rev. Father William Niba had been abducted in the town of Belo. He was the principal of St. Bede’s College.

His arrest is said to be connected with the failure to observe a social boycott call by separatists. Local media sources reported that after the kidnapping of the principal panic gripped the school as parents rushed to withdraw their children.

Kidnapping is rampant among a section of the secessionists pushing for independence from French-majority Cameroon. The two Anglophone regions – Northwest and Southwest have long protested marginalization from the central government.

The main separatist group pushing for the so-called Ambazonia Republic command the Ambazonia Defence Forces (ADF) which says it targets members of the security forces but was not engaged in kidnap.

It suggests that other fringe groups are engaged in the kidnappings. The security situation in the region has meant curfews are in place supposedly to control the incidence of attacks.

The army has denied using reprisals against citizens after separatists attack them. That is contrary to reports by local media and rights groups that accuse them of human rights violations.

Source: Africa News

3, May 2018

Southern Cameroons Crisis: Schools Under Attack ⁰

Fresh violence in northwestern Cameroon has forced hundreds of teachers and students from their classrooms. Separatist rebels are targeting schools for not observing calls to strike.

Heavy rains fall as we arrive at Saint Bedes school in the English-speaking town of Ashing.

Dozens of students are carrying boxes out of the school. 17-year-old student Ambe John is leaving.

“I am going home due to what happened in school and for the sake of my principal. I need to go home so he can be rescued,” said Ambe John.

Parents removing their students from Saint Bedes.

Armed men attacked the school on Monday, abducting the principal and the school chaplain. Government officials told VOA for the two men were targeted by anglophone separatists for violating instructions to remain closed in support of the Ambazonian independence movement.

The chaplain was later released but the principal has not been found.

Godlove Nformi left his home in the nearby French-speaking town of Bafoussam to pick up his son when he got news of the attack.

“The matron gave us the information that we should come and take our children home,” he said. “I am feeling too bad because I think that with everything children should have been going to school at least to see that their future is guaranteed.”

Schools in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions — the northwest and the southwest — were shuttered for nearly a year starting in November 2016. Teachers and lawyers were on strike demanding reforms to address what they say is the marginalization of Anglophones in mostly French-speaking country.

Some schools reopened last October, but the crisis has intensified. Late in November, President Paul Biya declared a state of war in the Anglophone regions.

Military on the streets of Kom, northwestern Cameroon.

The government says at least 30 schools have been attacked this year, with at least a dozen teachers either killed or wounded in the northwest and southwest regions. Hundreds more have fled.

Johnson Itoh, the most senior education official in the northwest region, says they have been pleading with the teachers to return since the government has deployed the military to protect them.

“We are having personnel of secondary education especially school heads shot at in the northwest here. The going is tough, the tough must get going. So what we are trying to do is to raise up the morale of those in the field,” said Itoh.

Adolph Deben Tchoffo, governor of the northwest region of Cameroon, has been visiting the villages to encourage parents to send children to school.

The governor says he has come on behalf of President Biya to call on the population to seal a pact of collaboration with the military and administrative authorities so that the rebels, which the government has deemed terrorists, can be defeated. He says all village heads and traditional rulers should create self-defense groups to ward off infiltration.

FILE - Cameroon police officials walk with riot shields on a street in the administrative quarter of Buea some 60kms west of Douala, Oct. 1, 2017. — FILE – Cameroon police officials walk with riot shields on a street in the administrative quarter of Buea some 60kms west of Douala, Oct. 1, 2017.

Since early 2017, the government has responded forcefully to the unrest in the Anglophone regions. Rights group say the crackdown, which has included the detention of hundreds of people and at one point a three-month internet blackout, inflamed tensions, making dialogue more difficult.

The conflict has killed dozens on both sides this year and displaced at least 20,000 people.

Source: VOA

2, May 2018

Southern Cameroons Crisis: French Cameroun spies operating in Calabar, Taraba ⁰

French Cameroun spies are operating a front organization in Calabar and Ikom to exert political pressure on the Buhari government to arrest other Southern Cameroons leaders, Cameroon Intelligence Report has learned. Details of the organization emerged as two alleged spies openly disagreed over the sharing of money in a hotel in Calabar and failing to disclose their affiliation with the Biya regime when questioned by Ambazonian intelligence officers operating in the Cross River State of Nigeria.

The spies who all hail from Manyu Division are accused of secretly promoting French Cameroun interests in the long-running conflict between the Federal Republic of Ambazonia and La Republique du Cameroun using millions of francs CFA of covert funding provided by Yaoundé.

The Southern Cameroons security services recently identified Minister Mengot and the Municipal Administrator for Mamfe, Ayuk John Takunchong as the principal architects of the French Cameroun spying scheme and CIR understands the Acting President of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia, Dr. Samuel Ikome Sako is under pressure to order the arrest of these Manyu traitors as relations between the Southern Cameroons and French Cameroun under Biya continue to deteriorate in the wake of the killing of many Southern Cameroons civilians.

According to a document sent to the Acting President, Minister Mengot has reportedly sponsored many missions to Calabar, the latest being that of the Mayor of Mamfe to help the Nigeria security to identify and arrest innocent Southern Cameroonians who fled into the Cross River State of Nigeria. The Manyu CPDM spying network describes itself in educational materials as a “none profit organization dedicated to raising the level of knowledge in Nigeria about the Anglophone problem and to help the Southern Cameroons refugees return home.”

But Southern Cameroons sources have revealed that the Manyu CPDM initiative is actually one of the many French Cameroun killer networks that are run by elements of the Biya government, including French Cameroun’s military intelligence service. The other ones are in Lagos and Taraba.

The Cameroon embassy in Abuja and its Consulate in Calabar have been given an open cheque with one purpose – to hide Biya regime’s involvement in the killing of thousands of Southern Cameroonians and to influence the Nigerian government’s position on Ambazonia.

President Buhari’s handlers in Yaoundé have allegedly funneled millions of dollars through the Cameroon embassy to contribute to APC elected officials, fund high-profile conferences on the Cameroon Anglophone problem, and pay for other efforts that promotes Buhari’s continued stay in power in the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Source: www.cameroonintelligencereport

2, May 2018

Who’s Killing Civilians in Southern Cameroons? The AGBAW-EBAI DEBATE ⁰

A look at the data behind the headlines amid the worsening crackdown by the army of 86-year-old Cameroon president Paul Biya in Southern Cameroons tells a pathetic story. The UN under very strong French influence has crafted a response and each time the Ambazonian issue is raised up with disturbing evidence, the Antonio Guterres’ gang are quick to say we haven’t seen this or that video. The UN has blatantly refused to call it “Africa’s largest humanitarian crisis” in modern times.

“It’s complicated”. This is often how the crisis in Southern Cameroons is described by the French government and the French surrogates in the African Union including the corrupt Buhari regime in the Federal Republic of Nigeria and these words paint a picture of mass killing on the side of the Biya Francophone Beti Ewondo regime. If we look at the French Cameroun media headlines we assume that its entire ok and some so-called “separatists” are behind the unrest.

So two years into the Southern Cameroons crisis and 57 years into the killing of Anglophone leaders, we have looked at the data on who is killing who. The truth is shocking. The vast majority of Southern Cameroons civilians killed – 99% according to human rights groups and international media sources – have been killed by the government of President Paul Biya and its allies.

This matters as we enter a civil war scenario in Cameroon under the CPDM regime. All efforts at stopping the Southern Cameroons uprising will fail unless we understand where it is coming from. The story of the data is unarguable – if we want to stop the killing of civilians in Southern Cameroons we have to address the brutality of the government of Mr. Paul Biya and its allies.

In this edition of the AGBAW-EBAI DEBATE, we are asking our readers if the Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia should embrace a military response to the killings of Southern Cameroons civilians?

2, May 2018

Australian cardinal could face two trials on sex abuse charges ⁰

Top Pope aide Cardinal George Pell could face two separate trials as he fights to clear his name over historic sexual offence allegations, an Australian court heard Wednesday.

A Melbourne judge on Tuesday ordered the Vatican finance chief, 76, to stand trial on multiple charges, making him the highest-ranked Catholic to face such allegations.

Pell pleaded not guilty, and half of the charges initially filed against him were thrown out.

The exact details and nature of the alleged offenses remain confidential, other than they involve “multiple charges and multiple complainants,” dating from the 1970s and 1990s.

Some of the alleged offences were at a swimming pool in the town of Ballarat in Victoria state where Pell was a priest in the 1970s, and a second set of alleged actions were at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in the 1990s.

At Wednesday’s brief directions hearing in the Victoria County Court, Pell’s barrister Robert Richter argued that because the charges related to different locations and were 20 years apart, they should be split and heard in two trials.

Another court hearing was set for May 16 when final decisions and trial dates are expected to be set.

Pell, who entered the court surrounded by a police cordon, is on bail and has had his passport confiscated.

The former Sydney and Melbourne archbishop has been on leave from the Vatican, returning to Australia to fight the allegations, the most serious of which have been dismissed due to inconsistencies in the evidence.

Pell was one of the Pope Francis’ most trusted aides, handpicked by him in 2014 to make the Church’s finances more transparent.

It cemented a meteoric rise by the Australian, who was Archbishop of Melbourne and then Sydney before being named to the Vatican’s powerful College of Cardinals at the behest of Pope John Paul II in 2003.

In a brief statement Tuesday, the Vatican said it had “taken note of the decision issued by judicial authorities in Australia” and that Pell would remain on the leave of absence granted by the pope to defend himself.

(Source: AFP)

2, May 2018

Trump trying to avoid impeachment as 2018 midterms near ⁰

US President Donald Trump is dialing up efforts to avoid impeachment, GOP sources as the 2018 midterms approach, giving Democrats the chance to win the majority in the US House of Representatives.

If democrats take control of the chamber, they could initiate an impeachment debate and congressional investigation.

“It is super important to the White House, and really the whole White House is very focused on it,” a source told The Hill. “The president is expected to dial up efforts in this regard during and after the August recess.”

According to Maxine Waters, Democratic representative from California, 70 percent of Democrats want to impeach the president, an idea strongly supported within the party’s liberal base.

Such comments have made the president understand the significance of protecting his party’s majority, particularly in the House.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters speaks onstage during the Human Rights Campaign’s 2018 Los Angeles Gala Dinner at JW Marriott Los Angeles.(Photos by AFP)

“We have to keep the House because if we listen to Maxine Waters, she’s going around saying ‘We will impeach him,’” Trump told a rally of supporters in Michigan on Saturday.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) announced recently that protecting the House rather than the Senate is its top priority.

“Our No. 1 priority is keeping the House. We have to win the House,” RNC political director Juston Johnson told The Associated Press.

The president has also ordered the RNC to prioritize the House.

“It’s clear the message has been, ‘We don’t want to want to have to fool with impeachment proceedings with the final two years of his first term, you better do something,’” a party strategist was quoted as saying.

Source: Presstv

1, May 2018

9 die in attack on church in Central African Republic ⁰

At least nine people, including a priest, have been killed in an attack on a church in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.

Pastor Moses Aliou said on Tuesday that dozens had also been wounded in the attack, which was carried out during the morning service in the Notre Dame de Fatima church.

Witnesses said assailants attacked the church, shooting and using grenades. The church-goers were trapped inside the compound. Police later opened a hole in a wall of the church building to allow people to escape, witnesses said.

“Filled with panic, some Christians began to flee until bullets and grenades begin to fall in the parish grounds, trapping those who remained in the compound,” said Aliou.

The wounded were taken to Bangui’s Community Hospital but it was not clear how many people died in the hospital and how many in the church attack itself.

Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Bangui Walter Brad Mazangue said the priest killed in the attack died as a result of shooting in the church. The priest was identified as Albert Toungoumale Baba. Thousands of Christians gathered near the church to protest the attack when Baba’s body was being carried to the presidential palace.

The attack came near the site of clashes between United Nations peacekeepers and security forces of the Central African Republic on one side and criminal gangs on the other in the PK 5 neighborhood. A total of 21 people were killed during the fighting which came after UN and local forces tried to disarm the gangs.

The Central African Republic has experienced rounds of inter-faith violence in the past, especially in 2013 when “anti-balaka” Christian militants killed many from the Muslim Seleka after a Seleka uprising led to the ouster of President Francois Bozize.

Source: Presstv

1, May 2018

Inner City Press tells UN “Blue Helmets Used by Biya soldiers in Southern Cameroons” ⁰

Amid the worsening crackdown by the army of 36-year Cameroon president Paul Biya in the country’s Anglophone areas, a video has circulated depicting soldiers burning down homes. The Cameroon government army had blue helmet of the type used by UN peacekeepers. On April 30 Inner City Press asked UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ spokesman Stephane Dujarric about the video, the day after publishing a story about it, in Google News. Dujarric said he hadn’t seen the video but militaries should not use UN equipment or colors, presumably when burning civilians homes down.

Inner City Press: a video emerged over the weekend from Cameroon showing or depicting soldiers burning people’s homes in the Anglophone areas, and what… what a lot of people focused on is that one of them, at least, is wearing a blue helmet. I don’t think it means the UN is doing it, but I do wonder, what are the rules? I wanted to ask you, what are the rules if people have served in UN peacekeeping missions… have you seen the video?

Spokesman: “I haven’t seen that particular video, so I can’t comment on the particular helmet, whether it was just blue or a UN helmet. We have seen, in different parts of the world, various security forces and army… we’ve seen reports of them using equipment that they own, which had been painted white or blue and reused domestically. It is a responsibility to ensure that no equipment that has UN markings is ever used in any domestic operation. But, again, I’m not… that’s a matter… that’s an issue of principle. I haven’t… I can’t comment on that specific report.” Hours later, still nothing.

The lack of confidence in the UN in these areas, and on this issue, was inflamed as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in October 2017 stopped by Yaounde on his way from the Central African Republic (where the UN pays Biya’s government for peacekeepers who have been charged with sexual abuse). Guterres did not meet with any opposition figures, and accepted a golden statue from Biya.

Guterres’ envoy Francois Lounceny Fall has publicly said that secessionist are extremists, the word used by Biya to justify the scorched earth strategy exemplified by the video. Inner City Press asked UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Prince Zaid why his Office hasn’t updated the death figures and he claimed it was because the UN has no access.

Guterres’ humanitarian Assistant Secretary General Ursula Mueller visited Cameroon, but not the Anglophone areas. Human Rights Watch didn’t even include Cameroon in its 2018 “World Report,” and told Inner City Press this is because it does not view it as among the 90 most serious problems in the world.

Guterres’ Deputy Secretary General Amina J. Mohammed was in Abuja in her native Nigeria when 47 Cameroonians were illegally sent back by the Buhari government. Buhari was in Washington on April 30 and a protest of Ambazonians planned. Earlier in April, Inner City Press asked the US State Department about the refoulement to Cameroon and received a day later a statement. But what will happen on this video, and on the underlying issues?

Culled from Inner City Press