Category: Foreign

From Justina Asishana and Adeola Ogunlade

The president of Egypt, His Excellency Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, has appealed to world leaders to listen to and actively engage their youths in order to move their countries forward.

He sent this message while addressing over 7000 youths and delegates at the closing ceremony at the World Youth Forum held in Sharm Sheik, Egypt. According to the president, by believing in the youths, sharing their dreams, listening to them and giving them the opportunity to express themselves, world leaders will no longer give an opportunity to those who will want to use them as tools to spread hatred and violence.

El-Sisi said, “I want to send a message to the leaders of the world in their entirety: please listen to your youths, engage with them, share their dreams and aspirations and give them the opportunity to express themselves. “As Leaders, soar in their skies, make the youths people who take the floor and take the first steps, not followers. Believe in them, do not leave them prey to those who feed on their aspirations and use them as tools to spread hatred and violence. Fill their hearts with aspirations and endless support, open for them the gates of trust and give them the keys for leadership for there is no present without them and no future with anyone else but them.”

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The president expressed his belief in the youths of the world as they are the catalysts towards construction and development, pointing out that is the reason he has decided to engage youths actively in his country. “I believe in the youths, they are the partners of the present and they are the light of the future. They are the catalyst towards construction and development. Their ambitions have no ceiling, there are no boundaries for their dreams and maybe the experience of the World Youth Forum is the best proof to the fact that youths can turn dreams into a tangible reality.”

In her words, The Executive Director of the National Academy for Youth Training, Rasha Ragheb, announced the launch of an Africa initiative that will help in promoting digital transformation and governmental excellence in collaboration with African Union. Africa’s Regional United Nations Technology Innovation Lab to sponsor technology innovation. This was part of the 10 points recommendation given at the end of the programme.

She said that the digital space offers lots of opportunities for African youth we will be launching this initiative that will help in promoting digital transformation in Africa.

She added that we will be launching an African initiative to combat digital piracy to secure highly sensitive data (HSD). “We are also launching an Arab-African digital platform for publishing women’s studies and funding women initiatives,” she said. Ragheb who is the coordinator of the forum posited further that the forum will be forming a Euro-Mediterranean Committee to combat hate speech in cyberspace and develop mechanisms that would prevent hate practices on social media.

“We are launching a programme to train Euro-Mediterranean youth on leadership by the Egyptian National Academy for Youth Training,” she said.

Our Reporter

Nine people died on Saturday during clashes between demonstrators and police in northern India, raising the nationwide death toll in protests against a new citizenship law to 23, police said. According to The Associated Press (AP), Uttar Pradesh state police spokesman Pravin Kumar said the nine fatalities increased the death toll in the state to 15 in the protests against the new law, which the demonstrators say discriminates against Muslims. The “majority of the dead are young people,” Singh said. “Some of them died of bullet injuries, but these injuries are not because of police fire. The police have used only tear gas to scare away the agitating mob.”

Around a dozen vehicles were set on fire as protesters went amok in the northern Indian cities of Rampur, Sambhal, Muzaffarnagar, Bijnore and Kanpur, where a police station was also torched, Singh said. The ongoing backlash against the law marks the strongest show of dissent against the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he was first elected in 2014. The law allows Hindus, Christians and other religious minorities who are in India illegally to become citizens if they can show they were persecuted because of their religion in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It does not apply to Muslims.

Critics have slammed the law as a violation of India’s secular constitution and have called it the latest effort by the Modi government to marginalize the country’s 200 million Muslims. Modi has defended the law as a humanitarian gesture. Uttar Pradesh state is controlled by Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. An anti-terror squad was deployed and internet services were suspended for another 48 hours in the state. Six people were killed during clashes in Uttar Pradesh on Friday, and police said on Saturday that over 600 in the state had been taken into custody since then as part of “preventive action. In addition, five people have been arrested and 13 police cases have been filed for posting “objectionable” material on social media.

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Police have imposed a British colonial-era law banning the assembly of more than four people statewide. The law was also imposed elsewhere in India to thwart an expanding protest movement demanding the revocation of the citizenship law. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued an advisory on Friday night asking broadcasters across the country to refrain from using content that could inflame further violence. The ministry asked for “strict compliance.” In the northeastern border state of Assam, where internet services were restored after a 10-day blockade, hundreds of women on Saturday staged a sit-in against the law in Gauhati, the state capital.

“Our peaceful protests will continue till this illegal and unconstitutional citizenship law amendment is scrapped,” said Samujjal Bhattacharya, the leader of the All Assam Students Union, which organized the rally. He rejected an offer for dialogue by Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, saying talks could take place when the “government was hoping to strike some compromise.” In New Delhi on Saturday, police charged more than a dozen people with rioting in connection with violence during a protest Friday night in the capital’s Daryaganj area. Two US Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders, denounced the new law on Twitter, and Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad criticized it at a news conference following the conclusion of an Islamic summit in Kuala Lumpur.

Mahathir said Saturday that India is a secular state and people’s religion should not prevent them from obtaining citizenship. “To exclude Muslims from becoming citizens, even by due process, I think is unfair,” he said. Following the remark, India’s foreign ministry summoned the Malaysian Charge d’Affaires to lodge a complaint. Government ministers have said Muslims of foreign origin will not be prohibited from pursuing Indian citizenship, but will have to go through the normal process like other foreigners.

Protests against the law come amid an ongoing crackdown in Muslim-majority Kashmir, the restive Himalayan region stripped of its semi-autonomous status and demoted from a state into a federal territory in August.

The demonstrations also follow a contentious process in Assam meant to weed out foreigners living in the country illegally. Nearly 2 million people were excluded from an official list of citizens, about half Hindu and half Muslim, and have been asked to prove their citizenship or else be considered foreign. India is building a detention center for some of the tens of thousands of people who the courts are expected to ultimately determine have entered illegally. Modi’s interior minister, Amit Shah, has pledged to roll out the process nationwide.

Our Reporter

A car bomb went off on Saturday outside a hotel in the Somali town of Galkayo in the Mudug region, killing at least seven civilians, a local military officer said, and wounding dozens.

The official said the driver had failed to enter the hotel compound and instead hit a military pickup parked outside as a barrier. “So far we know of seven people who died, mostly civilians, but the death toll may rise,” said Major Ali Umar. “Over a dozen others were injured, mostly Somali military personnel.”

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A medic at Galkayo hospital said it had received over 30 wounded as a result of the explosion. The militant group al-Shabab, which is trying to topple the central government, could not be reached for comment.

The group is fighting to seize power and establish a state based on its own harsh interpretation of Islamic law. It controls small sections of the Mudug region, but not Galkayo.

The Republican Leader of the United States (U.S.) Senate Sen. Mitch McConnell has declared that the impeachment of President Donald Trump was based on “partisan rage” and the thinnest of evidence.
But, the minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer said in rebuttal to McConnell that Republicans showed “cravenness and blind fealty” to Trump in their vote.

McConnell dismissed the impeachment process, saying that Democrats had been talking about impeaching Trump since before he became the Republican candidate for president in 2016.

The White House hit back at lawmakers after Trump was impeached, slamming the “illegitimate articles of impeachment” and voicing confidence the president would be acquitted in the Senate.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted to send two articles of impeachment to the chamber. McConnell called the vote a “pre-determined end to a partisan crusade”.
The party-line vote saw Republicans uniformly opposing impeachment. But the vast majority of Democrats voted in favour.

The two articles move to the Senate for a trial expected to take place in 2020.
Trump maintains he did nothing wrong and said again on Wednesday that impeachment was an effort to overturn his election win.
He is accused of abusing his office by soliciting Ukraine to dig up dirt on former vice president Joe Biden, a leading candidate among Democrats bidding to run against Trump next year.
Schumer said he would meet with McConnell soon to discuss the rules of the Senate trial.

“The nation turns its eyes to the Senate,” he said, adding that it is up to the chamber to exercise its check on his power.

“I have little doubt that if we tell the president he can escape scrutiny in this instance he will do it again and again,” Schumer said.

But White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement: “Democrats have chosen to proceed on this partisan basis in spite of the fact that the President did absolutely nothing wrong.”

She called the votes in the House of Representatives an “unconstitutional travesty”.

READ ALSO: I want immediate impeachment trial in Senate, says Trump

Grisham said there were no fact witnesses in the hearing and alleged bias by the Democrats.
“The President is confident the Senate will restore regular order, fairness, and due process, all of which were ignored in the House proceedings.

“He is prepared for the next steps and confident that he will be fully exonerated,” the statement said, referring to the upcoming trial in the upper chamber.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday predicted that the impeachment would not be upheld by the U.S. Senate.

Putin told a nationally televised news conference that Trump’s Republican Party has the majority in the Senate.
“It’s unlikely that they would want to remove their party’s representative from power for what are in my opinion absolutely fabricated reasons,” Putin said.

He said the Democratic Party was seeking revenge for losing the presidential election to Trump.
“One party that lost the election, the Democratic Party, is achieving results with other methods, accusing Trump of collusion with Russia, then it turns out there was no such collusion,” Putin said.

The Democratic-led House’s passage of two articles of impeachment on a mostly party-line vote sets the stage for a trial next month in the Republican-controlled Senate – a friendlier terrain for Trump – on whether to convict and remove him from office.

No president in the 243-year history of the United States has been removed from office by impeachment. That would require a two-thirds majority in the 100-member Senate, meaning at least 20 Republicans would have to join Democrats in voting against Trump – and none have indicated they will.