The government of Cameroon has solicited the services of Facebook to help fight the spread of fake news and hate speech, especially during the upcoming presidential election.

A team from the American online social media and social networking service company has been holding meetings and trainings with stakeholders in Cameroon.

Meanwhile, a two-day symposium on digital rights and elections in Cameroon ends Thursday in Yaoundé.

The rights

The meeting that has brought together different stakeholders was seeking collaboration in the fight against online misinformation during electoral periods without undermining the rights of Internet users.

There were growing fears that the Cameroon government would cut off the Internet, at least to the crisis-hit English speaking northwest and Southwest, during the October 7 presidential poll.

Though the Post and Telecommunications ministry dismissed fears of an imminent Internet blockade as “sheer manipulation and fake news”, critics took the rebuttal with a pinch of salt.

The blackouts

Cameroon has witnessed at least two Internet cuts since January last year with government saying the blackouts aimed at preventing the spread of hate speech and fake news via the social media.

But activists say shutting the Internet was an infringement on the rights of citizens and that the government could adopt other measures to fight against online misinformation without undermining the rights of Internet users.

Culled from The East African

France has admitted that it instigated a “system” that led to torture during Algeria’s independence war in the 1950s and 1960s as it comes to grips with its long-suppressed legacy of colonial crimes.

President Emmanuel Macron will also announce “the opening of archives on the subject of disappeared civilians and soldiers, both French and Algerian,” the Elysee Palace said in a statement on Thursday.

“A general dispensation, by ministerial decree, will be granted so that everyone — historians, families, associations — can consult the archives for all those who disappeared in Algeria,” the statement read. “We’re putting the issue of the missing in the center.”

According to the statement, Macron will formally acknowledge that mathematician Maurice Audin who disappeared in 1957 “died under torture stemming from the system instigated while Algeria was part of France.”

Audin was 25 when he was arrested at his home by French paratroopers on accusations of harboring armed members of the Algerian Communist Party.

Audin, an assistant professor at the University of Algiers, was tortured repeatedly in a villa in the Algiers neighborhood of El Biar. His widow Josette was told 10 days later that the mathematician had escaped while being transferred between jails.

This remained the official version of events until 2014, when Macron’s predecessor Francois Hollande acknowledged that Audin died in detention.

Macron sparked controversy on the campaign trail last year by declaring that France’s colonization of Algeria was a “crime against humanity”. He later walked back the comments, calling for “neither denial nor repentance” over France’s colonial history.

“We cannot remain trapped in the past,” he said.

Macron has shown a rare willingness to wade into the memory of Algeria, arguably the most sensitive chapter in the French experience of the 20th century.

Reacting to the latest development, historian Sylvie Thenault wrote on the Conversation news website that the French state’s acknowledgement that Audin’s death resulted from a “system” pointed to a broader recognition of wrongdoing.

“Through recognition of the state’s responsibilities in the disappearance of Maurice Audin, have the state’s responsibilities in all disappearances in Algiers in 1957 not been recognized?”

During the 1954-62 war, French forces brutally cracked down on independence fighters in the colony ruled by Paris for 130 years, which claimed some 1.5 million Algerian lives.

The French state has never previously admitted that its military forces routinely used torture during the war.

Algerians each year remember May 8, 1945 as a day France initiated a campaign of carnage, known as Setif massacres.

They marked French police firing on a parade celebrating the end of the war. Ensuing riots left 140 French colonists killed, provoking a hugely disproportionate response.

A two-week spree of murder, rape and mutilation and the bombing of Algerian towns led to the deaths of tens of thousands people, according to some accounts.

Conquered by France in 1837, Algeria was a colony. By the 1950s, it was home to millions of French settlers.

In 2014, former President Hollande formally apologized for a similar massacre in Senegal.

Source: Presstv

Some pro Biya comedians passing for opinion leaders and a group of CPDM media houses have reported that there is too much Western interference and diabolic harsh ploy to destabilise Cameroon.

With less than a month to the presidential election scheduled for October 7 in French Cameroun, several Biya regime media houses have made public what they described as maneuvers by the United States government and the European Union for the destabilisation of Cameroon.

In some of the reports, the Cameroon government media gurus observed that the US State Department recently convened a meeting in Washington grouping some presidential candidates and gave the party leaders instructions on how to combat the 85 year-old dictator who has been in power since 1982.

Prominent journalists of the state owned CRTV have also hinted that the Washington forum was expected to chose a single opposition candidate and fund popular uprisings in case the opposition fails to win on October 7.

The US and EU conspiracy against Cameroon has also been evoked by some opinion leaders in the opposition, like Franck Hubert Ateba, co-founder of the Movement for the Renaissance of Cameroon (MRC), who accused last April the European Union of financing the popular uprising in Cameroon. Franck Hubert revealed that he was approached several times by a colonel of the French police serving with the French diplomatic mission in Yaoundé. According to Franck Hubert, the French officer met him several times in order to participate in the destabilization of Cameroon and assassinate President Biya.

Like many French Cameroun corrupt media organizations owned by the CPDM crime syndicate, the state radio and television is an important tool of blackmail, misinformation and Paul Biya’s image laundering used by pro Biya comedians like Paul Atanga Nji.

CRTV like Cameroon Tribune are used to perpetrate crimes against Southern Cameroonians far worse than the genocide in Rwanda. They are instruments of mass mobilization through falsehood, corruption of the popular conscience and the deification of the 85 year old dictator who has finally destroyed the tribal tolerance miraculously put in place by the late President Ahidjo. CRTV was and is the conduit through which egregious violations and crimes of unimaginable magnitude are perpetrated against Southern Cameroonians.

CRTV is the conduit through which fraud is celebrated and the flames of the North West/ South West divide are fanned and Francophones soldiers are incited to take up arms against innocent Southern Cameroons civilians. These media organizations remain the voice of hate, sycophancy and intimidation. The question one may ask, is, who benefits from these crimes? The answer points to Paul Biya. This does not absolve Paul Atanga Nji  for the crimes he perpetrated or for accepting to perpetrate or oversee the use of CRTV to perpetrate crimes against Southern Cameroonians in which alleged “enemies dans la maisons” “biafrais” “anglobami” “Opposants” and now are blackmailed and targeted on account of their ethnicity or valid claims for self determination.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

The White House is calling Bob Woodward “reckless” and “careless” over his revelations in a new book.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made the comments on Monday, not dismissing the idea of a lawsuit against Woodward over his book.

“A number of people have come out and said Woodward never even reached out to corroborate statements attributed to them, which seems incredibly reckless for a book to make such outrageous claims to not even take the time to get a $10 fact-checker to call around and verify that some of these quotes happened,” Sanders said during Monday’s press briefing.

Some administration officials have already refuted claims attributed to them in the book, titled Fear: Trump in the White House.

They include Defense Secretary James Mattis, chief of staff John Kelly and former Trump attorney John Dowd, all of whom have “aggressively” hit back at the claims.

“I think those are far more credible sources, and far more reliable voices within this administration and that can accurately tell what’s taken place in the building behind me,” Sanders said.

Releasing responses to every single allegation by Woodward “would be a complete and utter waste of our time.”

The veteran journalist has been promoting his book, which describes a paranoid White House under the New York billionaire.

Source: Presstv

Former US Vice President Joe Biden has returned to the popular social media platform Instagram amid speculation that he might be planning to run for president in 2020.

On Friday, Biden posted two photographs of himself and his wife, Jill, participating in a walk for injured veterans in New York. He has gathered more than 1 million followers since then.

According to different polls, Biden leads Trump by several points in a potential 2020 matchup. His blue-collar appeal has put him at the center of talk for months about whether he’ll run against.

According to the Associated Press, Biden will make a decision on the race by early next year. Biden is a strong critic of Trump and his leadership style. He has accused his administration of misunderstanding and misrepresenting the American values.

He has called Trump a “charlatan,” and accused the Republican head of state of taking advantage of frustrated middle class voters.

It seems Biden is remorseful about his decision not to run in the last presidential election, and has claimed that he could have easily defeated Trump.

Biden, a favorite for the 2016 Democratic nomination, announced his decision to not run for the White House in October 2015, cementing former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s standing as the front-runner.

The popular vice president, who lost his son Beau to cancer in May 2015, said back then that he was not emotionally prepared to take on the battle and that it was too late for him to enter the race. Trump proceeded to pull off a historic victory against Clinton.

Source: Presstv

Former US President Barack Obama has assailed his successor Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers ahead of the upcoming mid-term congressional elections, urging Democrats to curtail the administration’s “abuses of power” and restore a sense of sanity to US politics by voting in November.

In an unusually blistering attack on Trump, Obama said Friday that Americans were living in dangerous times and accused the president and other Republicans of threatening US democracy, dividing the country and undermining Washington’s global alliances.

“In two months we have the chance, not the certainty, but the chance to restore some semblance of sanity to our politics,” he said in a speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “There is actually only one check on bad policy and abuses of power, and that’s you and your vote.”

Obama also mocked Trump for taking credit for the recent economic growth that began under Obama’s administration, and said Trump was exploiting economic anger and cultural fears that have grown in recent years amid societal upheavals.

Trump was dismissive of Obama’s speech. “I’m sorry, I watched it but I fell asleep,” he said during a fundraiser in Fargo, North Dakota. “I found that he’s very, very good for sleeping.”

Other Republicans also shrugged off Obama’s criticism. “In 2016, voters rejected President Obama’s policies and his dismissiveness towards half the country. Doubling down on that strategy won’t work in 2018 either,” said Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Ahrens.

Both major political parties are urging their supporters to vote in the November 6 midterm elections, when Democrats need to gain 23 seats in the House of Representatives and two seats in the Senate to gain majorities in both chambers of Congress and frustrate Trump’s agenda.

The November elections have been seen as a referendum on Trump, who faces a widening federal investigation over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and growing questions about his fitness for office, even by some within his own administration.

The White House has been shaken by an explosive, anonymous article on The New York Times that has plunged Trump’s presidency into its worst crisis yet.

The unsigned article published Wednesday, claimed that senior US officials were quietly working within the Trump administration to frustrate the president’s “worst inclinations.”

Trump has slammed the “gutless coward” who wrote the article and suggested he might take action against the newspaper.

Many senior members of US President Donald Trump’s administration are so alarmed by his “erratic” and “amoral” behavior that they are actively working to undermine him and protect the country from his worst impulses, according to an anonymous “senior official” in the White House.

“President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader,” the official wrote in The New York Times Wednesday.

“The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations,” the official wrote  in an op-ed article entitled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.”

“The root of the problem is the president’s amorality,” the official said.

In the piece, the official described “early whispers” among members of Trump’s cabinet to take steps to remove him as president, but added they decided against it to avoid a constitutional crisis.

The official wrote that the root of the problem was that Trump is amoral and not moored to any discernible principles that guide his decision-making.

Asked about the column during a White House event, Trump called it a “gutless editorial,” bashed the New York Times as “failing,” and ticked off economic achievements that he said were proof of his leadership.

The unsigned piece appeared to reinforce the claims made in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward, excerpts of which were made public Tuesday, that describes a virtual cabal of high-minded White House and cabinet officials scheming to prevent Trump from taking decisions damaging to the US economy and national security.

The Washington Post, which obtained an advance copy of the book by the veteran chronicler of modern presidents, reported Tuesday that Woodward describes Trump manically pressing his staff for actions that could lead to major conflict — leaving them little choice but to disregard his orders.

The White House has condemned Woodward’s book as “nothing more than fabricated stories,” and Trump called it “a work of fiction.”

But the Times op-ed suggests that dissent and resistance inside Trump’s White House are even deeper than Woodward described.

The US Senate confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick, has turned into utter chaos as angry protests erupted and Democrats criticized Republicans for withholding documents about Kavanaugh’s past service at the White House.

It took the nominee over seven hours to be able to deliver his opening statement during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday as shouting protesters were arrested in droves.

According to US Capitol police, 61 protesters were removed from the room and charged with disorderly conduct, along with nine more outside the hearing. The protesters, mostly women, were shouting slogans like “This is a travesty of justice”, “Our democracy is broken” and “Vote no on Kavanaugh.”

Meanwhile, Democratic senators repeatedly interrupted the committee’s Republican chairman Chuck Grassley at the outset of the hearing, quickly turning the session into a ruckus.

They condemned the withholding of the documents and tried to have the proceedings adjourned, as Grassley struggled to maintain order.

Democratic Senator Cory Booker said the withholding of the documents has left lawmakers unable to properly vet Kavanaugh.

“We cannot possibly move forward. We have not had an opportunity to have a meaningful hearing,” Democratic Senator Kamala Harris said.

“This is the first confirmation for a Supreme Court justice I’ve seen, basically, according to mob rule,” Republican Senator John Cornyn said, a characterization Democrats rejected.

In response, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin said, “What we’ve heard is the noise of democracy.”

Grassley described the Democrats’ request to halt the hearing “out of order,” accusing them of obstruction.

Republicans, who hold a slim Senate majority, can confirm 53-year-old Kavanaugh if they stay united. There were no signs of Republican defections.

If confirmed, Kavanaugh is expected to move the court, with an already conservative majority, further to the right. Senate Democratic leaders, however, have pledged a fierce fight to try to block his confirmation.

On Twitter, Trump reacted angrily, saying the hearing was “truly a display of how mean, angry and despicable the other side is.”

He accused Democrats of “looking to inflict pain and embarrassment” on Kavanaugh.

Source: Presstv

US President Donald Trump has taken yet another swipe at his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who heads the powerful Justice Department, for not blocking two damaging investigations that undermined two Republican candidates ahead of the mid-term congressional elections.

On August 8, Representative Christopher Collins, who was the first member of Congress to endorse Donald Trump for president, was indicted for alleged insider trading, wire fraud, conspiracy and lying to the FBI.

According to the indictment, the New York lawmaker was allegedly involved to a scheme to gain insider information about Innate Immunotherapeutics Limited, a biotechnology company headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

His son, Cameron Collins, and the father of his son’s fiancée, Stephen Zarsky, were also arrested on the same charges. Two weeks later, Representative Duncan Hunter and his wife were indicted by a federal grand jury for spending some $250,000 of campaign funds for family vacations and other personal expenses over a period of seven years.

Just like Collins, the San Diego Republican has remained defiant in face of the charges, accusing prosecutors of having political motives. Both Collins and Hunter are campaigning for re-election in November.

The Trump team is worried that the indictments would help Democrats to score a decisive victory in the House of Representatives and launch their much-anticipated attempt to impeach the Republican president.

This is not the first time that Trump is lashing out at Sessions. The president has regularly taken jabs at Sessions for recusing himself from overseeing a high-profile probe into the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia, which allowed DOJ’s Special Counsel Robert Mueller to dig deep into in the hope of finding any hints of a possible “collusion.”

In late August, Sessions finally hit back at his boss, saying he will not allow political pressure to influence the work being done at the department.

US President Donald Trump has shrugged off the findings of a new poll that shows nearly half of Americans now support his impeachment.

Trump questioned  the accuracy of the ABC News/Washington Post poll in a tweet without mentioning the survey’s latest finding on the question of impeachment.

“The ABC/Washington Post Poll was by far the least accurate one 2 weeks out from the 2016 Election,” he posted on Twitter Friday evening.

“I call it a suppression poll – but by Election Day they brought us, out of shame, to about even. They will never learn!”

The survey, released on Friday, has found that 49 percent of Americans believe Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against Trump. That is more than the percentage of voters – 46 percent — who do not support impeachment.

The poll also showed that 60 percent of voters disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president, a new low.

In the previous ABC News/Washington Post poll in April, Trump’s approval rating stood at 40 percent and his disapproval rating was 56 percent.

Several Democratic Party lawmakers have publicly supported bringing impeachment proceedings against Trump since his longtime attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty last week to charges of bank fraud, tax fraud and violations of election campaign finance laws.

Cohen’s campaign finance law violations stem from hush money payments the lawyer arranged during the 2016 US presidential campaign to women who allegedly had affairs with Trump. Trump is also under growing pressure after a guilty verdict for his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

“I don’t think they can impeach somebody that’s doing a great job. You look at the economy, you look at jobs, you look at foreign, what’s going on with other countries. You look at trade deals. I’m doing a great job,” he said.

Vice President Pence acknowledged that Democrats would l try to impeach President Trump if they regain the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections.

“They’re all talking about it, and so I take them at their word, even though some of them have decided to not talk about that quite so much,” Pence told the Christian Broadcasting Network in an interview published Wednesday.

Source: Presstv