Author: webdesk

The literary writer’s organization PEN America is expanding its support of writers around the world who face imprisonment for their work by hiring human rights advocate Liesl Gerntholtz to head the new PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Center.

The new center will build on PEN America’s work advocating for imprisoned writers like the Ukrainian freelance journalist Vladyslav Yesypenko, who was first arrested in 2021 in Crimea and remains imprisoned.

PEN America awarded him the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write award in 2022 to draw attention to his case in hopes that he will be freed, like many of the prize’s prior recipients, thanks to the award’s profile and the advocacy of other major international writers.

Yesypenko’s wife will accept the award in his stead later this month in New York and PEN America highlighted his case at a demonstration outside the Russian embassy last year and through press releases following his arrest and sentencing to six years in prison in February.

Under Gerntholtz’s leadership, the new center will help PEN America monitor more cases of imprisoned writers in real time and try to help them leave their country or otherwise protect themselves. This work is often done out of the public eye because of the hostile environment the writers face from countries like Egypt, China and Myanmar.

Gerntholtz, who formerly led the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch among other roles, said the center already has a database of some 700 “writers, intellectuals, visual artists, journalists under threat,” adding that list will be updated and expanded.

Men are disproportionately represented among imprisoned writers, “which means that we are obviously missing the ways that women are silenced,” said Gerntholtz, a native of South Africa.

In another measure of the state of free expression around the world, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists documented the imprisonment of 293 journalists as of Dec. 1, the sixth year in a row that it has documented more than 250 detained reporters.

Within the U.S., CPJ found that 59 journalists were arrested in 2021, usually while they were covering protests.

Source: Voice of America

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres met with Nigerian leaders Wednesday at the end of a two-day visit to Nigeria and three-nation trip to Africa. On Tuesday, he visited internally displaced people (IDPs) in northeast Nigeria and called for them to be safely returned to their homes. Nigerian authorities plan to close all IDP camps in the next few years despite security concerns.

Antonio Guterres arrived the United Nations house in Abuja around 9 a.m. Wednesday and met with U.N. local coordinators before holding talks with Nigerian women’s representatives.

The delegates, led by Nigeria’s minister for women’s affairs, Pauline Kedem Tallen, discussed gender equality and the inclusion of women in politics with the U.N. secretary-general.

“His coming to Nigeria today has given us hope, because we know that he will lend his voice to all the issues affecting women, gender-based violence, early marriage, lack of implementation of some of our laws,” said Tallen.

Guterres afterwards met with Nigeria’s religious leaders and later attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the U.N. house to remember the 23 people killed during the 2011 bombing of the building.

He began his three-nation Africa visit Sunday in Senegal as part of his Ramadan solidarity tour, and later went to Niger.

On Tuesday, he visited northeastern Borno state and met with the state governor as well as IDPs and families impacted by the Boko Haram conflict.

Guterres also visited repentant Boko Haram fighters and praised authorities’ reintegration program for more than 1,000 former fighters.

He also commended authorities’ efforts to resettle displaced people back to their communities and called for more support to rebuild the region.

“The Borno that I found today is the Borno of hope, the Borno with future and I was very impressed to see the policy that is being deployed here, recognizing that you don’t fight terrorism just by military means, you fight terrorism addressing the root causes of terrorism,” he said. “The people that I met today in the IDP camps want to go back home in safety and dignity. The way to address terrorism effectively is to provide not only hope but a future of reality.”

Nigerian authorities have been closing IDP camps since late last year and want to close all camps by 2026. More than 2 million people have been displaced from their homes since the start of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009.

But aid groups have been warning some communities may still be attacked.

“There are multiple solutions when it comes to resettlement. We need to get people stabilized,” said Adenike Oladosu, a climate justice activist, met with the U.N. secretary-general. “Climate change is leading to the rise of armed conflicts affecting people in the region and around and the need for us to see that we have more climate action and not always military action.”

The U.N. secretary-general ended his visit at the Abuja presidential village, where he met with President Muhammadu Buhari and his top Cabinet members.

Source: Voice of America

At least 20 people have been killed in a bus crash in western Uganda, Ugandan police said. Among the dead are at least seven children.

The crash happened Wednesday when the bus, which was traveling from Fort Portal to the Ugandan capital, Kampala, veered off a highway and into a tea estate.

The accident happened around 10:30 a.m. local time two kilometers from Fort Portal.

There has been no information about what caused the crash.

Several photos of the incident were posted on social media and showed emergency responders trying to free people from the wreckage.

Source: Voice of America

The World Health Organization said Wednesday that the number of newly reported coronavirus cases and deaths globally continued to fall in the last week, continuing a decline that began in March.

In its weekly report on the pandemic, the U.N. health agency said there were about 3.8 million new infections and more than 15,000 deaths last week, a 17% and 3% drop on the week respectively. But those figures are believed to be a significant underestimate of COVID-19’s true toll as increasing numbers of countries abandon widespread testing and surveillance.

Still, WHO noted that cases rose by about a third in Africa and 13% in the Americas. There was also a nearly 70% jump in deaths reported in India, although that was attributed to delayed reporting rather than a recent surge of disease.

Last week, authorities in South Africa said they had noted an uptick in COVID-19 cases attributable to the BA.4 mutant of omicron, although they said it was too early to tell if that would result in a significant new wave of disease. Although the BA.4 version of COVID-19’s omicron variant appears more infectious than omicron, WHO said there was no evidence yet that it was leading to substantially higher rates of hospitalization or death.

Salim Abdool Karim, a public health expert at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said that while only a “modest” rise in cases had been noted, South Africa was also in the middle of a holiday period and testing had dropped significantly. He said the cases were slowing and were “not following a rocket-like upward trajectory we would expect” in another spike of disease.

At a press briefing on Wednesday, WHO emergencies chief Dr. Michael Ryan said it was too soon to tell if COVID-19 was entering a seasonal pattern and warned against countries dropping all of their restrictions too quickly — as many in the West have done.

“The jury is still out as to how seasonal this virus will become,” he said, explaining that it wasn’t proven yet that COVID-19 would naturally drop off in the summer and that the world could yet face more unsettling variants. “If people are crowded together in conditions where a new variant is spreading, you will see high levels of transmission,” he said.

Meanwhile in China, authorities continued to crack down on cities, including Beijing, where more than 10% of the subway system was shut down in an effort to curb the virus’ spread, after authorities in the capital already closed down indoor dining, gyms and school classes.

In Shanghai, rigid and widely derided restrictions have led to shortages of food and medical aid along with a wider — though likely temporary — impact on the national economy. Desperate, outraged citizens have confronted authorities at barricades and online, screamed out of their windows and banged pots and pans in a sign of frustration and anger.

Source: Voice of America