Agency Reporter

China is the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the second year in a row, according to a report released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

The CPJ is an independent press freedom advocacy organisation.

The report says, “China, which arrested several journalists for their coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, was the world’s worst jailer for the second year in a row.

“It was followed by Turkey, which continues to try journalists free on parole and arrests new ones.

“Egypt, which went to great lengths to keep custody of journalists not convicted of any crime and Saudi Arabia, follow in that order’’ the report said.

According to the CPJ’s annual global survey, at least 274 journalists have been jailed by Dec. 1, exceeding the high of 272 in 2016.

The CPJ noted that many of 47 prisoners in China were serving long sentences or were jailed in the Xinjiang “without any charge disclosed’’.

It further noted that at a time when the coronavirus rampaged Wuhan, Beijing arrested several journalists for coverage that went against the official narrative.

“The three still jailed on Dec. 1 include independent video journalist, Zhang Zhan, who began posting reports from Wuhan on Twitter and YouTube in early February and was arrested on May 14.

“Her videos include interviews with local business owners and workers on the impact of COVID-19 and the government’s response to it,’’ the CPJ said.

Zhang Zhan was one of several journalists in CPJ’s global census, who relied heavily on social media as all other media outlets are heavily censored or controlled by the state.

READ ALSO: Infrastructures and the burden of China loans

“Her videos are likely still available to a global audience because they are hosted by companies outside China.

“But CPJ found that similar content produced by others who were later jailed had been taken down for reasons that were not clear.

“This hinders research and underscoring longstanding concerns about transparency by global tech giants like Google, Twitter, and Facebook,’’ the CPJ said.

The report further stated that in China, diplomatic spats appeared putting the foreign media in increased peril, and this year, over a dozen journalists working for the U.S. publications in China were expelled.

“Australian citizen, Cheng Lei, a business news anchor for state-run broadcaster China Global Television Network, was arrested in August for allegedly endangering national security amid tension between China and Australia.

“This makes her the second Australian journalist in custody after blogger Yang Hengjun, who has been held on espionage charges since January 2019,’’ the report highlighted.

It further said that the countries, where the number of jailed journalists rose significantly, include Belarus, where mass anti-government protests ensued due to the disputed re-election of the long-time president.

It added Ethiopia, where political unrest has degenerated into armed conflict to the culprits’list.

(ANI/NAN)

Agency Reporter

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday congratulated Joe Biden on his victory in the U.S. presidential election, after Biden won the state-by-state Electoral College vote that officially determines the U.S. presidency, the Kremlin said.

The Kremlin had said it would wait for the official results of the election before commenting on its outcome, even as other nations congratulated Biden on the win in the days after the Nov. 3 vote.

READ ALSO: COVID-19 : Putin yet to take vaccine -Spokesperson

“For my part, I am ready for interaction and contact with you,” the Kremlin cited Putin as saying in a statement.

“Putin wished the president-elect every success and expressed confidence that Russia and the United States, which have a special responsibility for global security and stability, could, despite their differences, really help to solve the many problems and challenges facing the world,” the Kremlin said.

(www.newsnow.co.uk)

Agency Reporter

More than 500 pregnancies were recorded in secondary schools of Benin’s northeastern department of Borgou during the 2019-2020 school year, the Beninese news agency (ABP) reported from Cotonou.

“Altogether, 547 out of 36,487 school girls regularly registered were pregnant during the 2019-2020 school year as against 431 cases in 2018-2019,” ABP reported, quoting Thomas Adam, a Representative of the child protection department of Secondary education and professional and technical training ministry.

Read Also: My wife got pregnant for another man while living with me, man tells court

Adam attributed the increase in the cases of pregnancies to the long cessation of classes observed during the coronavirus pandemic.

Although no strategy linked to the phenomenon was yet made public, several analysts of the Beninese society fear that the crisis linked to the COVID-19 affected the measures taken to eradicate early pregnancies in schools.

Agency Reporter

Attorney General William Barr resigned on Monday, ending a tenure in which the President Donald Trump loyalist carried the administration’s “law and order” message.

His resignation, according to media reports, ultimately dealt the most credible blow to Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was littered with fraud.

Trump, announcing the news, claimed in a tweet: “Just had a very nice meeting with Attorney General Bill Barr at the White House. Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job! As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.

“Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become Acting Attorney General. Highly respected Richard Donoghue will be taking over the duties of Deputy Attorney General. Thank you to all!”

Media reports linked Barr’s departure to President-elect Joe Biden’s clearing the 270-vote threshold in the Electoral College count, formalising his victory over Donald Trump.

Biden reached the milestone with California’s 55 votes. He currently has 302 votes and is projected to receive 306 after Hawaii votes later on Monday. Trump has received 232 votes.

Read Also: TIME magazine names Joe Biden, Kamala Harris as its Person of the Year

The newly-elected president and vice president did not immediately comment on the vote. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have yet to comment as well.

Barr repeatedly and unapologetically prioritised Trump’s political goals while furthering his own vision of expansive presidential power.

In his most notorious move, Barr delivered a misleading summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, essentially clearing Trump in the Russia probe, which drew a sharp rebuke from Mueller himself.

He remained steadfast in his support of the President heading into Election Day, including by launching various operations across the country to combat violence and drug trafficking and reiterating Trump’s message not to participate in mail-in voting prior to the presidential election. He also appointed a special counsel to continue investigating one of Trump’s longtime infatuations, that intelligence and law enforcement violated the law in investigating the 2016 Trump campaign.

But the decision from the former attorney general to rebuke the President’s false claims of widespread fraud in his loss to Democrat Biden represented a final failure of Trump’s often successful attempt to weaponise the Justice Department as a personal and potent political weapon.

Following the 2020 election, Trump’s legal team filed dozens of civil lawsuits in federal and state courts across the country in an effort to prove that Biden did not fairly win the election. Barr told the Associated Press in an interview on December 1 that the Justice Department had not found any such evidence.

“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” he said.

The President was frustrated with his attorney general’s comments to the AP and had a “contentious,” lengthy meeting at the White House the day they were published, according to a person familiar with the meeting.

By early December, Barr was considering leaving his post before January 20, the day Trump leaves office, a source with knowledge of the matter told CNN days after he buffed the President’s election fraud claims. The source said Barr was not happy with Trump and that the former attorney general “is not someone who takes bullying and turns the other cheek!”

The attorney general echoed the President’s anger at coronavirus lockdowns, calling them, apart from slavery, “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.” Barr also asked for the Justice Department to take over the President’s defence in a defamation lawsuit filed against him by Jean E. Carroll, who accused him of sexual assault.

In one dramatic scene in June, Barr ordered authorities to disperse a large crowd of peaceful protesters near the White House so Trump could walk to the nearby historic St. John’s Church, where a fire had been set in the basement the previous night during unrest sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

His extraordinary decision to use force on the protesters underscored his commitment to Trump’s law and order message, and in the days following the incident, he defended his actions and claimed there was no connection between his order and a photo-op Trump staged at the church.