Southern Cameroons Secretary of the Economy, Hon. Tabenyang Brado has said that French Cameroun government forces are specifically targeting Ambazonian university graduates in their genocide campaign currently going on in the Federal Republic of Ambazonia. The Ambazonian cabinet minister who made a brief stop in London from a fund raising trip in Italy revealed that more than two thousand university graduates including Southern Cameroons new generation of elites have been killed by French Cameroun army soldiers.

Tabenyang pointed out that the Interim Government gathered from the more 40,000 Southern Cameroonians who fled to neighbouring Nigeria that Ambazonian university students and degree holders were singled out and disproportionately targeted by Cameroon government security forces.

During a town hall briefing hosted by Cameroon Concord News Sessekou Asu Isong in London, Tabenyang also noted that the Francophone soldiers were slaughtering the educated and independent opinion leaders in Southern Cameroons so that there would be no Ambazonian leaders left willing to speak up against French Cameroun pervasive abuse.

The people of Kendem village in Upper Banyang in the Manyu County watched as the elder brother of the Cameroon Concord News Group chairman and editor begged for his life, his arms bound behind his back as soldiers marched the 55-year-old retired gendarmerie officer away. It was the last time they saw him alive.

“My elder brother pleaded with the military not to kill him; he showed them his ID card and said, ‘I’m a gendarme, I’m a gendarme.’ But the Biya Francophone regime had planned to kill our enlighten people, including my elder brother,” said Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai.

“After the attacks in Kwa Kwa, Muyenge, Belo, Menka-Pinyin, Bekora, Menji, Kendem, Dadi, Batibo Where are the unemployed degree holders? Where are the Ambazonian teachers that were paid only by the Parents Teachers Association? They have all been killed” Tabenyang wondered aloud.

The Secretary of the Economy added that there are several educated Ambazonians left in the rural areas, but they will never raise their voices. They are too afraid and they do not have the Jua Paulinus courage.

The US ambassador to Cameroon, Peter Barlerin observed recently that this targeting is well-organized, coordinated, and systematic. The Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia has documented a system of institutionalized discrimination and segregation of Southern Cameroonians that is meant to erase the Anglophone identity. Researchers from the International Crisis Group see comparisons between what is happening in Southern Cameroons and the Rwandan genocide.

“Burning down our towns and villages and killing our university graduates is one way to destroy our culture and remove our history. Its part of the genocide tactic put in place by the Biya Francophone regime. More than 40,000 Southern Cameroonians have fled the state-sponsored terrorism to Nigeria and some 160,000 have been displaced deep within the territory. The UN is still maintaining a kind of deliberate silence, saying it supports dialogue.

By Chi Prudence Asong

A US judge has ruled that President Donald Trump could be deposed in a defamation case. involving unwanted kissing and groping of a woman.

US Judge Jennifer Schechter ordered both parties of the Summer Zervos lawsuit to submit to depositions with a deadline of January 31, 2019.

Zervos is a former contestant on Trump’s “The Apprentice,” who has accused him of sexual misconduct.

Hoping to avoid a deposition for Trump, his lawyers have appealed to New York’s highest court.

Former ‘Apprentice’ contestant battles Trump in court

They had earlier argued that a sitting president cannot be sued in a state court, to which the judge responded in a March 20 ruling that “no one is above the law.”

Trump’s attorneys are trying to stall for time, said Zervos’ attorney Mariann Wang, adding that her legal team had already asked the Trump campaign to hand over information about other women accusing Trump.

“It became clear that the campaign’s position is that any and all documents about other women who have alleged that the defendant subjected them to unwanted sexual touching or inappropriate conduct, that any discovery about them, they would draw a line there,” Wang said, as cited in a Politico report.

According to Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz, such information is “irrelevant.”

Zervos is among a dozen other women who have accused Trump of sexual contact without their permission.

The new announcement was made in the backdrop of growing allegations of sexual misconduct against powerful figures.

Campaigners and rights activists stress that many victims of sexual abuse and exploitation decline to report the incident due to fear, shame, and worry about damage to their career.

Cameroon government attacks against Southern Cameroons settlements in Bekora-Ekondo Titi, Menka Pinyin and Muyenge were all in breach of international law. Human Rights groups have opined that the Francophone army deployed to Southern Cameroons have been targeting innocent Ambazonian civilians and they do not take any precautionary measures to minimize civilian casualties.

Ever since the Southern Cameroons crisis started two years, the UN has not bothered to carry out any major investigation. Renowned international organizations such the International Crisis Group and Amnesty International have interviewed several Southern Cameroons residents who are victims of the air, artillery and mortar strikes.

Local Southern Cameroons media houses have reported that there were no separatist fighters in the Bekora and Menka Pinyin vicinity at the time of the Cameroon government attacks. Cat calls have greeted the burning of towns and villages including the massacre of Southern Cameroons civilians with the Interim Government of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia stating that French Cameroun government actions were indiscriminate attacks that amounted to war crimes.

A senior Southern Cameroons political figure, Hon. Paulinus Jua recently told the so-called Musonge Bilingualism and Multiculturalism Commission that the Biya administration should admit to the scale of damage and war crimes its army soldiers have committed in Southern Cameroons and pave the way for a public independent investigation.

The Francophone dominated Cameroon government military has been implementing a scorch-the-earth policy against what it says are separatist and terrorist targets inside Southern Cameroons. The US ambassador to Cameroon, His Excellency Peter Barlerin has accused the Biya regime that has been in power for 35 years of targeting and killing Southern Cameroons civilians.

By Chi Prudence Asong

Saudi Arabia has started issuing driving licenses to women weeks ahead of kingdom official lifting a ban on women drivers.

On Monday, the kingdom’s general traffic directorate starting replacing internationally driving licenses held by women with Saudi ones throughout the country.

According to the SPA, ten women were given national licenses after handing in their international ones.

“The exchange process is taking place on various spots around the kingdom to lay the ground for women sitting behind the wheels on the roads – a turning point set to be actualized on June 24,” said the SPA.

The move comes a few days after, Amnesty International called on the “international community and allies of Saudi Arabia” to exert pressure on Riyadh to immediately and unconditionally release women’s rights defenders currently detained in the Arab kingdom.

“Saudi Arabia’s allies – in particular the US, UK and France – must push Saudi Arabian authorities to end their targeted repression of human rights activists in the country. European and world leaders must not stay silent in the face of gross and systematic violations of the human rights of activists and human rights defenders,” said the UK-based rights group in a statement.

Over the past few weeks, a number of prominent women’s rights activists, including Loujain al-Hathloul, Iman al-Nafjan and Aziza al-Youssef, were arrested and still remained in detention centers without charge and incommunicado with no access to their families or lawyers.

Most of the detainees are prominent figures, who enjoy considerable respect among the Saudi grassroots, including university professors and a psychotherapist.

Saudi authorities have so far labeled the detainees “traitors”, infuriating the country’s rights activists who fear additional arrests amid much-hyped reports of reforms led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

This is while reforms have been accompanied by heavy-handed crackdown on dissent against Saudi critics, ranging from clerics to some of the very female activists who campaigned for years to end the ban.

During the past few weeks, Saudi authorities have arrested seven women and four men who were outspoken women’s rights defenders in the peninsular country, many of whom had campaigned against the long-standing ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia.

The ban is scheduled to be removed this month, with licenses being issued from 24 June, making Saudi Arabia the last country in the world to permit women to obtain driving licenses.

In September last year, Riyadh removed the driving ban on women as part of reforms to undo the damage the kingdom has suffered for decades of human rights violations both inside and outside of Saudi Arabia.

The move came shortly after women were also permitted access into a sports stadium, for the first time, to watch a concert. Saudi women had also been banned from voting until 2015, when they were allowed to vote in local elections.

Source: Presstv

The United States plans to sharply reduce the number of American Special Operations forces in Africa as part of a new Pentagon strategy that focuses on countering “rising threats” from Russia and China, according to a report.

Defense Secretary James Mattis has ordered a review of America’s elite commando missions in recent weeks which could see counterterrorism forces in Africa slashed by as much as half over the next three years, The New York Times reported on Monday.

The review was issued amid an ongoing assessment of Special Operations forces worldwide after four American service members were killed during an ambush in Niger last year.

US troops killed in Niger ambush

The US has currently more than 7,300 Special Operations troops deployed to 92 countries, with many conducting shadow wars against militants in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere.

Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are worried that the commandos are spread too thin, Pentagon officials said.

The two military leaders have ordered Special Operations and Africa commands to present a range of options by mid-June to meet other challenges, which, in addition to Russia and China, also include North Korea and Iran.

Last month, a Pentagon investigation of the botched US operation in Niger found mistakes on all military levels in the secret mission, which was launched on October 4, 2017 to kill or capture a terrorist leader associated with Daesh.

A group of 30 Nigerien forces accompanied 11 Green Berets, who were traveling in an unarmored SUV. But the mission failed spectacularly when the US and Nigerien forces came under heavy fire from militants in an ambush near the village of Tongo.

The deadly attack accelerated Mattis’s decision to cut some counterterrorism missions in Africa to focus on global powers, two Pentagon officials told the Times on condition of anonymity.

The potential changes are part of a transition period to focus on what Mattis has described as “growing threats” from Russia and China, as outlined in the Pentagon’s new national defense strategy.

“We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models,” Mattis said in a speech at Johns Hopkins University in January as he outlined the new strategy.

“Our military is still strong, yet our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare — air, land, sea, space and cyberspace — and is continually eroding,” he added.

Even before Mattis’s directive, the Special Operations Command had started relying on conventional troops to help handle some of the new challenges since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In places such as Afghanistan and Syria, where Special Operations forces are frequently in combat, conventional soldiers and Marines have also been attached to commando units as additional security or firepower.

At the same time, more Special Operations teams have been deployed to the Baltic nations — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — as well as Eastern Europe to help local commandos identify and confront possible aggression from Russia.

Culled from Presstv