A Cambodian kickboxer in Southern California has inspired generations of fighters with his determination and his drive. Genia Dulot takes us to the gym with Oum Ry.
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Month: April 2024
Greek coast guard rescues 74 migrants in boat on Mediterranean Sea
ATHENS — Dozens of migrants found in a wooden boat on the Mediterranean Sea between northern Africa and southern Europe have been transported to the Greek island of Crete, Greece’s coast guard said Monday.
The boat with 74 people on board was found 25 nautical miles (46 kilometers, 29 miles) south of the small Greek island of Gavdos on Sunday night, the coast guard said, adding that a patrol boat transported the 73 men and one woman to Crete.
It was not immediately clear where or when the boat launched or what countries the passengers were from.
Greece is a major entry point into the European Union for people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Gavdos, which lies 27 nautical miles south of Crete, and Crete’s southern coastline have seen an increase in migrant arrivals in recent months. In several cases, the coast guard said they had crossed the Mediterranean from the eastern Libyan port of Tobruk, having paid smuggling gangs up to $5,000 each.
The influx has put pressure on authorities on Gavdos, a summer tourism destination about 29 square kilometers (11 square miles) in area that has just a few dozen residents in the off season.
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Cameroon opposition: Senegal is example for fair elections, ousting entrenched leader
Yaounde — Members of Cameroon’s opposition parties are encouraging citizens to learn from Senegal, where a 44-year-old politician was elected last week as the youngest leader on the African continent. They say it’s time for change in Cameroon, where President Paul Biya, now in his 90s, has ruled for more than four decades and is preparing to run for re-election.
Nothing has generated debates on the streets, in offices, within political parties and in Cameroon’s media organs so much as Senegal’s March 24 elections.
Participants in a debate program aired by Equinox Television said civilians in central African countries, especially Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic, Congo and Gabon should emulate the example from Senegal and democratically oust leaders who keep a tight grip on power and rule with an iron fist.
Njamnsi Theodore is a 35-year-old teacher who hopes Cameroonians will get inspired by what just happened in Senegal.
“The results of the presidential election in Senegal and the entire process sends a very clear message to Cameroonians especially the youths,” he said. “Register and vote. If you don’t register, you wouldn’t vote and if you don’t vote you wouldn’t have that chance of getting the leaders that you really want, so register, that is the clear message, that is the lesson we get from the Senegalese situation.”
Opposition candidate Bassirou Diomaye Faye is now Senegal’s president-elect after winning a first-round victory fueled largely by young voters.
In Cameroon, opposition and civil society groups say voter apathy is high because elections are always marred by fraud.
Ninety-one-year-old President Paul Biya has won all presidential elections since the return of multiparty politics in Cameroon in 1990 and is preparing to run again next year.
The opposition says Senegal’s election shows it is possible to stop leaders from clinging to power. Senegal’s President Macky Sall attempted to postpone this year’s election but backed down after widespread protests.
Mbang Boniface is a member of Cameroon’s Renaissance Movement Party. He says youth can remove Biya from power if they register as voters, choose their candidate, vote and defend their votes if necessary after the polls.
He says Senegal’s youths massively voted for Bassirou Diomaye Faye because they believe only young people can effect changes needed on a continent where leaders are generally old and out of touch with the views and aspirations of the population.
“Of course, Senegal is sending a very strong message to Cameroon,” he said. “The Senegalese president is 44 years [old], meaning he is young and able to understand the problems of the youth. Here in Cameroon, we have a president who is 91 years. He started ruling when Faye was just born. Faye is able to understand the problems of the youths unlike here in Cameroon, where the youths will have to sort their problems by themselves.”
But Samson Websi, political analyst at Cameroon’s National Institute of Management and Technology says it will be difficult to oust Biya in an election.
He says unlike in Senegal where government institutions are independent, Biya has loyalists planted throughout the government.
“Senegal stands out as an example to what happens in Cameroon, where democracy is suffering from military involvement in politics,” he said. “Parliament in Cameroon is virtually at the beck and call of the executive. The judiciary in Cameroon is not independent. The president of the republic [Biya] is the head of the judiciary. He is the one who guarantees the independence of the judiciary, which means that democracy is in trouble.”
Cameroon’s government insists that its institutions are independent, while Biya’s Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement Party say the president has fairly won all elections.
They say Biya enables young people to participate in decision-making through bodies such as Cameroon’s National Youth Council. However, the opposition says Biya appoints only youths loyal to him to head the council.
Cameroon’s presidential elections are set for next year. President Biya will set the date.
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Senegal’s democratic process is a source of inspiration for some
Dakar, Sengal — After months of debate and political crisis caused by outgoing president Macky Sall’s decision to delay Senegal elections, the country pulled it off. Elections took place in a calm, credible and transparent setting, a new president was elected and is getting ready to be sworn in. Some say what happened in Senegal may inspire others in sub-Saharan Africa.
The tensions of the last few months in Senegal seem to be fading away – to be replaced by the hope that Senegal’s reputation as a beacon of democracy in the region has been restored.
Barrister Agbor Balla, president of the Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa, told VOA, Senegal’s success may have helped turn the wave of military coups in the region.
“If Macky Sall had stayed longer, it might’ve given rise to a coup d’etat look at the other countries around Senegal in West Africa, we’ve seen how civilian governments have been toppled by the military,” said Balla.
A feeling echoed by Ibrahima Diallo, founder of FNDC, National Front for the Defense of Democracy and Human Rights in Guinea, a country that recently experienced a coup. Diallo told VOA the lessons of democracy in Senegal have resonated.
“I think the electoral process in Senegal has given more power and solid arguments to pro-democracy activists in Guinea and the rest of West Africa to say there are no other ways to follow but the democratic way for stability and development of our countries,” he said.
Diallo said he and others were hopeful the junta led by Mamadi Doumbouya, who toppled Guinean President Alpha Conde in 2021 would soon organize elections, but it never happened.
“We decided to demonstrate to remind the junta that when it took over, it had promised to transition the country into civilian rule, I was arrested and spent 9 months in prison without being tried only because I was asking the junta to respect what they had said by organizing free and fair elections to transition to civilian rule and go back to their military barracks,” he said.
Prince Michael Ngwese Ekoso is the national president of the United Socialist Democratic Party in Cameroon, a country that has been ruled by the same leader for over four decades.
“We’ve had a lot of setbacks on the watch of this current regime. Just like the Senegalese stood up and said we would follow the aspirations of the people and they would follow the institutions of the laws of the land, I am calling on Cameroonians especially young Cameroonians like me as well as other people to go and register massively in the electoral lists,” he said.
At 48 years old, Ekoso hopes to one day replace his country’s president Paul Biya, 91, one of the longest-serving presidents in Africa.
He congratulates the people of Senegal and President-elect Bassirou Diomaye Faye whose victory in the recent election followed a political crisis sparked by outgoing President Macky Sall’s failed attempt to postpone the vote. Faye defeated ruling party coalition candidate Amadou Ba in the first round with over 54% of the vote.
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Extreme drought in southern Africa leaves millions hungry
MANGWE, Zimbabwe — Delicately and with intense concentration, Zanyiwe Ncube poured her small share of precious golden cooking oil into a plastic bottle at a food aid distribution site deep in rural Zimbabwe.
“I don’t want to lose a single drop,” she said.
Her relief at the handout — paid for by the United States government as her southern African country deals with a severe drought — was tempered when aid workers gently broke the news that this would be their last visit.
Ncube and her 7-month-old son she carried on her back were among 2,000 people who received rations of cooking oil, sorghum, peas and other supplies in the Mangwe district in southwestern Zimbabwe. The food distribution is part of a program funded by American aid agency USAID and rolled out by the United Nations’ World Food Program.
They’re aiming to help some of the 2.7 million people in rural Zimbabwe threatened with hunger because of the drought that has enveloped large parts of southern Africa since late 2023. It has scorched the crops that tens of millions of people grow themselves and rely on to survive, helped by what should be the rainy season.
They can rely on their crops and the weather less and less.
The drought in Zimbabwe, neighboring Zambia and Malawi has reached crisis levels. Zambia and Malawi have declared national disasters. Zimbabwe could be on the brink of doing the same. The drought has reached Botswana and Angola to the west, and Mozambique and Madagascar to the east.
A year ago, much of this region was drenched by deadly tropical storms and floods. It is in the midst of a vicious weather cycle: too much rain, then not enough. It’s a story of the climate extremes that scientists say are becoming more frequent and more damaging, especially for the world’s most vulnerable people.
In Mangwe, the young and the old lined up for food, some with donkey carts to carry home whatever they might get, others with wheelbarrows. Those waiting their turn sat on the dusty ground. Nearby, a goat tried its luck with a nibble on a thorny, scraggly bush.
Ncube, 39, would normally be harvesting her crops now — food for her, her two children and a niece she also looks after. Maybe there would even be a little extra to sell.
The driest February in Zimbabwe in her lifetime, according to the World Food Program’s seasonal monitor, put an end to that.
“We have nothing in the fields, not a single grain,” she said. “Everything has been burnt (by the drought).”
The United Nations Children’s Fund says there are “overlapping crises” of extreme weather in eastern and southern Africa, with both regions lurching between storms and floods and heat and drought in the past year.
In southern Africa, an estimated 9 million people, half of them children, need help in Malawi. More than 6 million in Zambia, 3 million of them children, are impacted by the drought, UNICEF said. That’s nearly half of Malawi’s population and 30% of Zambia’s.
“Distressingly, extreme weather is expected to be the norm in eastern and southern Africa in the years to come,” said Eva Kadilli, UNICEF’s regional director.
While human-made climate change has spurred more erratic weather globally, there is something else parching southern Africa this year.
El Niño, the naturally occurring climatic phenomenon that warms parts of the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years, has varied effects on the world’s weather. In southern Africa, it means below-average rainfall, sometimes drought, and is being blamed for the current situation.
The impact is more severe for those in Mangwe, where it’s notoriously arid. People grow the cereal grain sorghum and pearl millet, crops that are drought resistant and offer a chance at harvests, but even they failed to withstand the conditions this year.
Francesca Erdelmann, the World Food Program’s country director for Zimbabwe, said last year’s harvest was bad, but this season is even worse. “This is not a normal circumstance,” she said.
The first few months of the year are traditionally the “lean months” when households run short as they wait for the new harvest. However, there is little hope for replenishment this year.
Joseph Nleya, a 77-year-old traditional leader in Mangwe, said he doesn’t remember it being this hot, this dry, this desperate. “Dams have no water, riverbeds are dry and boreholes are few. We were relying on wild fruits, but they have also dried up,” he said.
People are illegally crossing into Botswana to search for food and “hunger is turning otherwise hard-working people into criminals,” he added.
Multiple aid agencies warned last year of the impending disaster.
Since then, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema has said that 1 million of the 2.2 million hectares of his country’s staple corn crop have been destroyed. Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera has appealed for $200 million in humanitarian assistance.
The 2.7 million struggling in rural Zimbabwe is not even the full picture. A nationwide crop assessment is underway and authorities are dreading the results, with the number needing help likely to skyrocket, said the WFP’s Erdelmann.
With this year’s harvest a write-off, millions in Zimbabwe, southern Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar won’t be able to feed themselves well into 2025. USAID’s Famine Early Warning System estimated that 20 million people would require food relief in southern Africa in the first few months of 2024.
Many won’t get that help, as aid agencies also have limited resources amid a global hunger crisis and a cut in humanitarian funding by governments.
As the WFP officials made their last visit to Mangwe, Ncube was already calculating how long the food might last her. She said she hoped it would be long enough to avert her greatest fear: that her youngest child would slip into malnutrition even before his first birthday.
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After bridge collapse, Maryland governor urges Congress to pass funding for rebuild
WASHINGTON — With efforts underway to clean up thousands of tons of steel debris from the collapsed bridge in Baltimore’s harbor, Maryland Governor Wes Moore on Sunday urged Republicans to work with Democrats to approve the
federal funding needed for rebuilding the bridge and to get the port economy back on its feet.
Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed early on Tuesday morning, killing six road workers, when a container ship nearly the size of the Eiffel Tower lost power and crashed into a support pylon. Much of the span crashed into the Patapsco River, blocking the Port of Baltimore’s shipping channel.
The Biden administration released $60 million in initial emergency aid on Thursday to assist in cleaning up the bridge debris and reopening the port, which is the largest in the U.S. for “roll-on, roll-off” vehicle imports and exports of farm and construction equipment. The port has been closed since Tuesday, leaving in limbo the jobs of some 15,000 people who rely on its daily operations.
Federal officials have told Maryland lawmakers the final cost of rebuilding the bridge could soar to at least $2 billion, Roll Call reported, citing a source familiar with the
Discussions.
Democratic President Joe Biden has pledged that the federal government will cover the cost, but that will depend on passage of legislation authorizing the funds by both the Republican-led House of Representatives and Democratic-led Senate. The divided
Congress has been repeatedly riven by partisan battles over funding, with hardline Republicans often at odds even with members of their own party.
Moore, a Democrat, said Republicans should be willing to approve the funding for the sake of not just the city of Baltimore, but for the national economy.
“The reason that we need people to move in a bipartisan basis … is not because we need you to do Maryland a favor,” Moore told CNN on Sunday. “We need to make sure that we’re actually moving quickly to get the American economy going again, because the Port of Baltimore is instrumental in our larger economic growth.”
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg expressed optimism on Sunday that Congress would approve the funds necessary for the cleanup and rebuild, noting that the divided legislative body had passed Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package in 2021.
“If there’s anything left in this country that is more bipartisan than infrastructure, it should be emergency response.
This is both, and I hope that Congress will be willing if and when we turn to them,” Buttigieg told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Biden was expected to visit the bridge collapse site this week.
An enormous crane began cutting up portions of the collapsed bridge to prepare them for removal on Saturday, which officials said was the first step of what will be a long and complicated cleanup. A spokesperson for the governor’s office said on Sunday that a 180-metric ton (200-ton) piece of the bridge had been removed and officials were working to determine the best strategy for pulling the ship off the wreckage.
Later Sunday officials said they were preparing to establish an alternate route for “commercially essential vessels,” although few additional details were released and the timing of the alternate route’s opening wasn’t made clear.
In a statement, coordinator Capt. David O’Connell said that the alternate would “support the flow of marine traffic into Baltimore.” Video released by responders showed Coast Guard officials dropping buoys into the water near the site of the collision.
The wreckage and hazardous weather conditions have made it impossible for divers to continue searching for the four remaining bodies of the deceased construction workers in recent days, Moore said.
Moore and other officials have declined to give an estimated timeline for the reopening of the port and the rebuilding of the bridge.
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