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Royal Mail workers begin fresh 48-hour strike

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By Daniel Thomas

Business reporter, BBC News

30/11/2022

Postal workers at Royal Mail have begun a fresh 48-hour strike in a row over pay and conditions.

It is the latest in a series of walkouts involving 115,000 workers and will hit deliveries across the UK.

The Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents the workers, says it wants a pay rise that matches the soaring cost of living.

Royal Mail says it has made a revised pay offer but "no talks are happening".

Postal workers walked out on Thursday and Friday last week, and another wave of strikes is planned in the run-up to Christmas - on 9, 11, 14, 15, 23 and 24 December.

Clara Challoner Walker, who runs the Cosy Cottage Soap Company in Malton, Yorkshire, said the strikes were having a "significant impact" on her business.

Image caption,

Clara Challoner Walker says the strikes are having a big impact on her business

She uses Royal Mail because it is too expensive to send her relatively small soap and skincare orders via courier companies.

She said the strikes could really damage the business during the "critical" Christmas trading period, when it makes most of its profits for the year.

"There will be consequences and we will have to take a hit, we can't up our prices to enable us to send things by courier," Ms Challoner Walker told the BBC.

"We do feel sympathy for the [Royal Mail workers]. But I would question the union bosses as to whether striking at this time of year... is achieving what they are looking to achieve."

On strike days Royal Mail will not be able to deliver first and second class letters, but will deliver as many parcels and Special Delivery letters as possible.

• Parcel delivery prioritised over mail, staff claim
• Is this the new winter of discontent?
• How will Royal Mail strikes affect Christmas deliveries?

The dispute began this summer after Royal Mail rejected union demands for a pay rise that matched inflation - the rate at which prices rises - which is currently 11.1%.

The union also objects to proposed changes to working conditions, such as ending a number of allowances and the introduction of compulsory Sunday working.

Royal Mail has since offered a pay deal that it says is worth up to 9% over 18 months, calling it its "best and final offer".

But the CWU said that offer represented a "devastating blow" to postal workers' livelihoods and urged the public to "stand with their postie".

Mark Dolan, London divisional representative for the CWU, said: "This is our 11th day of strike action and the action we are taking today is about saving this great British institution.

"We're not prepared to stand by and watch this great public service tuned into another gig economy service where they want to get rid of the current workforce and replace them with workers on 20% less money and less terms and conditions than we currently have."

Image caption,

Sam Smith says the strikes create a "customer service headache"

Sam Smith runs Pot Gang, which sells grow-your-own vegetable and herb kits online. The firm uses Royal Mail to send hundreds of boxes to customers every day, but he said it used more expensive courier companies on strike days to prevent deliveries being delayed.

"The general public generally aren't too forgiving when it comes to [late] deliveries," he told the BBC. "It creates a bit of a customer service headache for us."

Mr Smith said he sympathised with the striking workers but that "ultimately Royal Mail is a business and has to deal with businesses".

"We need to know that things will be arriving reliably and on time for a fair price [this Christmas]," he added.

What does Royal Mail say?

Royal Mail has been struggling as it moves from its traditional business of delivering letters - which is no longer profitable - to the fast-growing world of parcel deliveries.

The company faces fierce competition from courier companies and is losing around a million pounds a day. It said the strikes have added £100m to its losses, and has announced plans to cut up to 10,000 jobs.

As well as improving its offer to workers, Royal Mail says it has promised more generous redundancy terms and a profit-sharing scheme.

Earlier this month, it asked the government to allow it to stop letter deliveries on Saturdays as it reported a sharp loss for the first half of the year.

It wants to move from a six-days-a-week letter delivery to five, from Monday to Friday only. However, parcel services would continue to run all days of the week.

BBC Breakfast viewers rage over 'car crash' interview with Royal Mail boss who says his workers will 'ruin Christmas'

Royal Mail workers are on strike today and tomorrow


Seren Hughes

Reporter 30 NOV 2022

Simon Thompson, Chief Executive Officer of Royal Mail, spoke to BBC Breakfast. Credit: BBC


BBC Breakfast viewers raged over a 'car crash' interview with a Royal Mail boss who said strikers will 'ruin Christmas'. Royal Mail Chief Executive Simon Thompson was on the show this morning as strikes are underway at Royal Mail.

Mr Thompson said: "We are doing everything we can to protect Christmas, while the Communication Workers Union (CWU) leadership are doing everything they can to destroy Christmas."


Pushed on the question of whether he turned up to the last stage of talks, Mr Thompson dodged the question, instead saying: "Well I think that is not true. We had three weeks of talks which I was very involved with including over the weekend."

READ MORE: Full list of train, bus, nurse, ambulance and Royal Mail strikes before Christmas

Royal Mail workers are on strike today (Image: PA)

He continued: "We have put our final offer to the CWU. We made 11 concessions based on the feedback from our team. I am available at any time at all to make sure that we can discuss exact content of that to make sure its understood. I would encourage the CWU to pause."

Viewers weren't impressed with the Royal Mail boss's response, with many branding his interview a 'car crash' which showed 'the very worst face of corporate greed'

One viewer wrote: "Simon Thompson playing games on #BBCBreakfast brandishing pieces of paper and using ridiculously over the top statements about ‘ruining Christmas’. No wonder the #CWU don’t trust the bosses."

Another said: "If Simon Thompson can't even attend a meeting with the CWU then he needs to resign. He's demonstrated a complete lack of leadership. #ResignSimonThompson"

A third added: "Unbelievable, Simon Thompson the RM chief Is on bbc saying the @CWUnews are out to destroy Christmas while the Royal Mail are trying to save it! Roll on the propaganda…#StandByYourPost #BBCBreakfast #GeneralStrikeNow"

A fourth commented: "As an ex-employee of Royal Mail, Simon Thompson's performance on #BBCBreakfast has made me support the CWU strike even more. What a slimy, nasty, vile man."

Royal Mail workers are on strike today (November 30), tomorrow (Thursday, December 1) and next week on December 9 and December 11 over pay and conditions. MyLondon has approached the Royal Mail for comment.

READ NEXT:

Full list of London Underground, bus and National Rail strikes for the rest of 2022

The London hospitals where nurses will walk out over pay before Christmas

Harrods staff to strike on Black Friday and every weekend in December

Crimean Tatar Activist Gets 17 Years In Prison in Russia On Terrorism Charges

Marlen Mustafaev appears in court in Rostov-on-Don on November 30.

 November 30, 2022

• By RFE/RL's Crimea.Realities

A court in the southwestern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don has sentenced Crimean Tatar activist Marlen Mustafayev to 17 years in prison on terrorism charges.

The Crimean Solidarity public group said the Southern Military District Court sentenced Mustafayev on November 30, with the first three years of his term to be spent in a prison cell and the remainder in a correctional colony. The court added that after his release, Mustafayev will remain under parole-like control for 18 months.

Mustafayev is known for actively supporting political prisoners and assisting their families. He was arrested, along with three other Crimean Tatar activists, in Russian-occupied Crimea in February after their homes were searched.

They all were accused of being members of Hizb ut-Tahrir Islamic group that is banned in Russia as a terrorist organization but is legal in Ukraine.

All three say they are practicing Muslims and members of a group that is legal.

Since Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Russian authorities have prosecuted dozens of Crimean Tatars on various charges that rights organizations have called trumped-up.

SEE ALSO:

Five More Crimean Tatar Activists Handed Lengthy Prison Terms In Russia

In September, the de facto Supreme Court of Crimea sentenced a leader of the Crimean Tatar community, Nariman Dzhelyal, to 17 years in prison on a sabotage charge that he and his supporters call politically motivated.

Moscow's takeover of the peninsula was vocally opposed by many Crimean Tatars, who are a sizable minority in the region.

Exiled from their homeland to Central Asia by Soviet authorities under the dictatorship of Josef Stalin during World War II, many Crimean Tatars are very wary of Russia and Moscow's rule.

Rights groups and Western governments have denounced what they describe as a campaign of repression by the Russian-imposed authorities in Crimea who are targeting members of the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatar community and others who have spoken out against Moscow's takeover of the peninsula.

Russia took control of Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 after sending in troops, seizing key facilities, and staging a referendum dismissed as illegal by at least 100 countries.

UK broadens scope of cyber regulations to cover outsourced IT providers


LONDON (Reuters) -Britain said on Wednesday it would strengthen its cybersecurity laws to better protect essential services like water, energy and transport by bringing outsourced information technology services under the scope of existing regulations.


FILE PHOTO: Hooded man holds laptop computer as cyber code is projected in this illustration picture© Thomson Reuters

"The services we rely on for healthcare, water, energy and computing must not be brought to a standstill by criminals and hostile states," cyber minister Julia Lopez said.

Related video: Dealing With Cyber Crime: Government To Probe Agencies, Step Up Action Against Cyber Attacks
Duration 1:40   View on Watch

The government said it would update 2018 regulations which were designed to make sure companies providing critical services improved their cyber security.

Citing cyber attacks like 'CloudHopper', in which hackers targeted big tech companies, Britain's digital department said the rules needed to be updated to cover companies that provide services such as security monitoring and digital billing.

The Digital Media Culture and Sport department said the regulatory changes would be made as soon as parliamentary time allowed and would apply to "critical service providers, like energy companies and the NHS, as well as important digital services like providers of cloud computing and online search engines."

(Reporting by William James, Editing by Paul Sandle)

DECRIMINALIZE DRUGS

Thai temple left empty after monks test positive for meth

Dismissal of four monks in central Phetchabun province highlights problem of drug use in Thailand, a major transit country for meth flooding in from Myanmar.

Seizures of methamphetamine in Thailand reached an all time high in 2021, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (Getty Images)

A Buddhist temple in central Thailand has been left without any monks after all of its members failed drug tests and were dismissed, according to local officials.

Four monks, including an abbot, at a temple in Phetchabun province's Bung Sam Phan district tested positive for methamphetamine on Monday, district official Boonlert Thintapthai said on Tuesday.

The monks have been sent to a health clinic to undergo drug rehabilitation, the official said.

The monks were reportedly removed from the temple, after police administered urine tests on Monday, which all four men failed. Officials did not say what had brought the temple to the attention of police.

"The temple is now empty of monks and nearby villagers are concerned they cannot do any merit-making," he said.

Merit-making involves worshippers donating food to monks as a good deed.

Boonlert said other monks will be reassigned to the temple to allow villagers to continue their religious obligations.

READ MORE: Thailand's monks battle weight problems


Clampdowns and record seizures

Thailand is a major transit country for methamphetamine flooding in from Myanmar's troubled Shan state via Laos, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Seizures of methamphetamine in Thailand reached an all time high last year, according to the UN.

Overall, a record 171.5 tonnes of meth were intercepted in 2021, with more than one billion methamphetamine tablets seized by authorities.

On the street, pills sell for less than around $0.50 (20 baht).

Last month, Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha ordered a clampdown on drugs, after a former police officer who had been dismissed from the force for methamphetamine possession raided a nursery and killed 37 people, mostly children.

Authorities across much of Southeast Asia have also made record meth seizures in recent years.

Authorities struggling to tackle Myanmar's $40b drug market

Civilians trapped as Myanmar rebels squabble over expected China boom
 

RIP
China's former president Jiang Zemin confounded doubters, mended US ties

Former Chinese President Jiang Zemin with then-senator Joe Biden at Beijing in 2001.

 PHOTO: AFP

BEIJING - Plucked from obscurity to head China’s ruling Communist Party after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, former Chinese President Jiang Zemin was expected to be just another transitional figurehead, destined to be a footnote in history.

Yet Mr Jiang, who died on Wednesday aged 96, confounded the naysayers, chalking up a list of achievements after breaking China out of diplomatic isolation in the post-Tiananmen era, mending fences with the United States and overseeing an unprecedented economic boom.

Mr Jiang was last seen in public in October 2019 among other former leaders watching a military parade at Tiananmen Square marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Under Mr Jiang, China weathered the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and won the bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Mr Jiang counted among his proudest achievements the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 after more than 150 years of British rule, even if the territory’s return had been brokered by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in 1984.

More significant probably was his “Three Represents”, a progressive theory with a puzzling name, which helped shape modern China by inviting entrepreneurs - once hounded as the running dogs of capitalism - to join the party.

Despite rumours that he wanted to cling to power, Mr Jiang retired as party chief in 2002, handing the reins to Mr Hu Jintao in China’s first bloodless leadership transition since the 1949 revolution.

His style could surprise his guests, who expected a polished, urbane president but met instead a gregarious ex-automobile factory manager who would sometimes burst into song, recite poems or play musical instruments.

“He had a personal style that was sometimes a bit extravagant. I think he was more of a human being than Hu Jintao,” said politics professor Jean Pierre Cabestan at Hong Kong’s Baptist University.

“Jiang Zemin was more ready to be natural, even though sometimes it could be perceived as vulgar, not very sophisticated.”

The Soviet-trained technocrat was a relative unknown when he was tapped by Deng while serving in Shanghai to take over the reins of power.

Mr Jiang was widely seen as a compromise candidate when he replaced reformer Zhao Ziyang, who was toppled by hardliners for sympathising with the democracy movement crushed by the army around Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

At that time, many compared Mr Jiang to Chairman Hua Guofeng, Mao’s chosen successor, who was ousted by Deng in the late 1970s after a few short years at the helm. But Mr Jiang hung on, adding the presidency to his list of titles in 1993.

Zealous for neighbouring, self-ruled Taiwan to accept Chinese sovereignty, Mr Jiang menaced the island with war games and missile tests in the run-up to its first direct presidential election in 1996, souring bilateral relations for more than a decade.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

China’s former president Jiang Zemin dies, aged 96

Jiang Zemin dies: Sino-S’pore economic ties flourished under ex-China president’s leadership

In 1997, Mr Jiang made an ice-breaking trip to the US.

“American poet Longfellow once wrote, ‘But to act that each tomorrow finds us farther than today ... Act, act in the living present’,” he told then-US President Bill Clinton, speaking in English.

“We should go along with the trend of the times, and respond to the will of the people, and continue our march forward towards the establishment and development of a constructive, strategic partnership,” he said.

Mr Jiang managed crises in Sino-US relations after the 1999 Nato bombing of Beijing’s embassy in Belgrade and the 2001 collision between a Chinese jet fighter and a US spy plane in Chinese airspace, which plunged bilateral ties to their lowest ebb since diplomatic contact was re-established in 1971.

In 2002, Mr Jiang was one of the few world leaders to meet US President George W. Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

China’s former President Jiang Zemin and former President George Bush in Texas on October 24, 2002. PHOTO: REUTERS

Economy booms, unrest looms

China’s transformation under Mr Jiang did come with serious problems. Political reform stagnated and freedoms were curbed.

He presided over year after year of spectacular growth, but the wealth gap widened, corruption worsened and social unrest grew, forcing his successor, Mr Hu, to champion the have-nots of society.

On Tibet, Mr Jiang was reluctant to deal with the Dalai Lama, the region’s exiled spiritual leader, who had anointed a six-year-old boy as the second most senior monk in Tibetan Buddhism. China placed the child under house arrest in 1995 and named another boy as the 11th Panchen Lama.

Mr Jiang also banned the Falun Gong spiritual group as a cult in 1999 after about 10,000 of its members besieged the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing.

In many ways, Mr Jiang took his cue from the late Mao Zedong, the founder of Communist China.

He did little to discourage the comparison. At celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the People’s Republic in 1999, floats carried giant portraits of Mao, Deng and Mr Jiang past Tiananmen Square.

Mao took a swim in the Yangtze river in 1966 to show he was still fit at 73. When Mr Jiang visited the US in 1997, he took a dip at Hawaii’s Waikiki beach.

Mao, many Chinese say, was a gifted poet. Newspapers splashed one of Mr Jiang’s poems across their front pages in 1999.

Mr Jiang, like Mao, wore his trousers well above his waist and brushed his hair straight back.

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In Pictures: China’s former president Jiang Zemin dies, aged 96

Party elders attend CPC congress opening; former president Jiang Zemin absent

He loved to sing, and sometimes engaged in impromptu sing-a-longs with foreign leaders. He could also display a temper.

In 2000, the usually jocular president gave a furious dressing down to Hong Kong journalists for asking whether the territory’s then-leader, Mr Tung Chee-hwa, was “the Emperor’s choice” to serve for another five-year term.

“The media must raise its knowledge, do you know that? Your questions are too simple, sometimes naive!” Mr Jiang shouted.

While successful economically, China under Mr Jiang stagnated politically. Reform debates from the 1980s were crushed by a fear of instability after the Tiananmen protests and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Still, he did earn his place in China’s socialist pantheon. His “Three Represents” theory was written into the party constitution in 2002, alongside the hallowed Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory.

 REUTERS

Russian Anti-Putin Shaman's Appeal Against Extention Of Forced Psychiatric Care Denied

Aleksandr Gabyshev first made headlines in March 2019 when he called Vladimir Putin "evil" and announced that he had started a march to Moscow to drive the Russian president out of office.


VLADIVOSTOK, Russia -- The Primorye regional court in Russia's Far East has rejected an appeal filed against the extension of forced psychiatric treatment filed by a Yakut shaman who became known across Russia for his attempts to march to Moscow to drive President Vladimir Putin out of the Kremlin.

Aleksandr Gabyshev's lawyer, Aleksei Pryanishnikov, said that Judge Marina Sazhneva pronounced the ruling on November 30. Pryanishnikov added that his client's right to confidentiality was violated during the hearing, as the psychiatric clinic's nurse was always present with a rope in his hands when the lawyer talked to Gabyshev.

The decision to prolong Gabyshev's forced treatment in a psychiatric clinic was made by a lower court in October after the Primorye regional court had ruled in favor of Gabyshev's appeal against the extension of his forced treatment.

That court sent the case back to the Ussuriisk district court for a new hearing, citing inconsistences in medical conclusions regarding the case.

In early August, the Ussuriisk district court ruled that Gabyshev must continue being treated in a psychiatric clinic even though a team of psychiatrists had concluded that he could be transferred from a psychiatric clinic to a regular hospital because his "condition had improved."

However, several days later, a new medical commission concluded that the shaman's mental health "had worsened" and he must be transferred back to a psychiatric clinic.

SEE ALSO:
Increasingly, Russian Activists Find Themselves Sentenced To Compulsory Medical Treatment

Gabyshev, who has been stopped several times by the Russian authorities since 2019 when he tried to march from his native Siberian region of Yakutia to Moscow with the stated goal of driving Putin out of office, was sent to a psychiatric clinic against his will in July last year after a court found him "mentally unfit."

During the hearing, the court accused him of committing a "violent act against a police officer" when he was being forcibly removed from his home to be taken to a psychiatric clinic in late January.

The ruling was challenged by Gabyshev's lawyers and supporters, who say his detention is an attempt to silence dissent.

Shaman On 8,000-Kilometer Trek 'To Topple Putin'

The Memorial Human Rights Center in Russia has recognized Gabyshev as a political prisoner and Amnesty International has launched a campaign calling for his release.

Australian PM urges end to Assange proceeding

The New Arab Staff & Agencies
30 November, 2022

Australia's prime minister has said he had personally called on US officials to end legal proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.


Assange has been held in London's high-security Belmarsh prison since 2019 [Getty/archive]

Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Wednesday he had personally called on US officials to end legal proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, declaring: "Enough is enough."

Assange, an Australian citizen, has been held in a London prison since 2019 pending a US extradition request to face trial for divulging US military secrets in 2010 about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I some time ago made my point that enough is enough. It is time for this matter to be brought to a conclusion," Albanese told parliament.

"I have raised this personally with representatives of the United States government. My position is clear."

The Australian leader said he did not have sympathy for many of the 51-year-old's actions.

But he asked: "What is the point of this continuing, this legal action, which could be caught up now for many years into the future?"

Assange has been held in London's high-security Belmarsh prison since 2019, after serving time for skipping bail in a previous case and spending years holed up in Ecuador's embassy.

He could face decades in jail if found guilty in the United States.

Albanese compared Assange's treatment to that of Chelsea Manning, whose 35-year jail sentence for stealing secret documents was commuted by then-president Barack Obama in 2017.

Manning "is now able to able to participate freely in US society," Albanese said.

How African newsrooms are using AI to analyse data and produce good journalism

Catherine Gicheru gives a presentation at an IMS sponsored workshop on AI in newsrooms in Nairobi, Kenya, November 2022.

Newsrooms in Africa are incorporating AI into their media production processes, including news gathering, information analysis and understanding audiences. When used ethically and wisely, AI is a tool that can help journalists tap into growing quantities of digital data for storytelling.

30 Nov. 2022

“How would you explain artificial intelligence (AI) to your grandmother?” veteran editor and digital strategist Catherine Gicheru asked journalists and researchers who met recently in the Kenyan capital Nairobi to examine the use of AI by media around Africa.

The hesitant responses to Gicheru’s question reflected a lack of clarity about AI that pervades media the world over. But, as the IMS-sponsored workshop in Nairobi on 14–15 November went on to demonstrate, the use of AI is increasingly widespread in African news organisations. When used ethically and wisely, AI is an indispensable tool for the continent’s journalists and other media workers wishing to tap into growing quantities of digital data for storytelling and engaging with their audiences.

“People are not sure what AI actually is, and we need to explain the technology in a more straightforward way,” said Ayaan Khalif, Co-founder and Project Manager of Digital Shelter in Somalia. “AI is a simplifier tool. When washing machines came along, I don’t remember people freaking out and saying ‘they (washing machines) are taking our jobs!’ AI is a similar thing – it makes us work a bit faster and with more accuracy.”

AI “has the ability to see through the clouds”, says Harvey Binamu, Technology Officer for Zimbabwe’s Magamba Network. “You can sit with a document cache of millions and millions of records but the ability to sift through it and actually see where the story is, and to point out what they’re trying to bury, that’s telling truth to power.”

Organised by the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) and IMS, the Nairobi workshop also discussed initial findings from a study led by UCLAN’s Dr George Ogola to better understand the current state of AI use in African newsrooms, and to explore AI’s potential in strengthening public interest media in the region. IMS commissioned a similar study for Latin America and central-eastern Europe in 2021.

The latest study, said Dr Ogola, examines how AI is changing everyday newsroom practices across Africa: what the professional and ethical issues around AI-driven automation processes are, and what the prevailing implications for AI-powered automation are in a region that is so unequal in terms of resources, access, digital literacy and other divides.

Professor Charlie Beckett, Director of the London School of Economics’ Polis thinktank and its JournalismAI project, told the Nairobi workshop that AI’s added value to journalism will depend on journalists’ human touch – their creativity and the empathy they have with their audiences. AI, he said, can be part of the whole media production process: from news gathering, analysing information, and even story writing through to understanding audiences’ needs and how they consume news. “Where there’s lots of data, there are opportunities for using AI,” he said.

Many African media are just beginning to explore this potential. “So far we use AI mostly to understand our audience, especially on social media, using the tools that are already provided by some of these social media companies,” said Tony Kirita, Managing Editor of The Chanzo in Tanzania. “But tools that use AI are also helping us to write good articles…AI is something we already use daily and something we’re going to continue to use, and once you have that in mind then it’s easy to explore the tools that are already available and to use them to make your reports better.”

However, the workshop heard that some off-the-shelf AI tools struggle to recognise African languages and African people because these technologies have been “taught” with data from other parts of the world by programmers with inherent cultural biases.

Media’s adoption of any technology was not just a matter of resources, said Dr Ogola. “It also cultural, it’s about business models and it’s about audiences.” This has implications for how the media manage data, he said, “and how we as African societies manage the algorithms that process this data”. Given the cost, African media would be wise to collaborate in developing appropriate AI solutions, he added.

A visit to the newsroom of the Nation Media Group in downtown Nairobi highlighted the extent to which digital data is driving editorial decisions in many newsrooms today. Big screens at the centre of the newsroom display how individual stories are performing online in terms of clicks, likes, shares and the time audience members spend reading each article, prompting some workshop participants to wonder where the quality of journalism came into the equation.

Until now, research has focussed on understanding how AI is being used. “Next we need to understand its impact,” said Professor Admire Mare from South Africa’s University of Johannesburg. “There’s a huge gap in understanding how the technology is impacting on the quality of journalism.”

“Before the workshop, I didn’t know if AI could play a good role in journalism,” said Leyla Mohamed, Editor of Radio Ergo, IMS’ humanitarian news service for the Somali region. “But it can help us identify the useful information we need on social media, for example. It could save us more time so that we improve our work. That’s one of the main opportunities that AI brings to the newsroom I work in now. A challenge is that people could put that information wrongly and people won’t get the correct information. Therefore, journalists still need to check the information we use.”

Factchecking and media monitoring services are also applying AI because of the quantity of data involved. “We have been working for the past seven years to automate our media monitoring system – data capturing, data processing and searching for what we need within the data we collect about media content,” said Farisai Chaniwa, Director of Media Monitors Zimbabwe. The next step, she said, was to develop AI tools that would help MMZ to monitor social media and to convert radio reports into easier-to-analyse text. But even data-heavy and often laborious tasks cannot be left to AI alone. “Factchecking requires you to understand the nuance of the information you are checking,” said Africa Check’s Kenya Editor Alphonce Shiundu. And, like creativity and empathy, understanding nuance favours human intellect.

LGBTQ RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

Ghana’s anti-LGBTQ bill sparks spike in “legally sanctioned” extortion

BY OHOTUOWO OGBECHE
NOVEMBER 29, 2022


Since the law was proposed, instances of violence – including seemingly organised crime – against Ghana’s queer community have increased.

Dyed clothes dry on the rail tracks in Accra, Ghana. Credit: IMF Photo/Andrew Caballero-Reynolds.

Last year, Ghana’s parliament introduced a controversial new anti-LGBTQ bill that could further criminalise same-sex acts and identities. Although homosexuality was initially outlawed under colonial rule – as in many African countries – and then in Ghana’s 1960 Criminal Offences Act, the new bill could significantly increase penalties and offences.

If passed, the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill would introduce jail terms of up to 5 years for same-sex intercourse, up to 10 years for anyone “promoting” LGBTQ activities, and up to 1 year for a same-sex “public show of amorous relations”. Among other things, the law would also forcibly disband all LGBTQ organisations, ban trans healthcare, and prohibit adoption by same-sex couples.

Although it has not yet been signed into law, the anti-LGBTQ bill has already affected the lives of Ghana’s queer communities. A report this year by Outright International found a surge of violence against LGBTQ individuals. Of the 44 queer Ghanaians interviewed in the research, including paralegals and activists, every single one said they knew someone who had suffered some form of harassment or discrimination. These included sexual violence, arbitrary arrests and detentions, beatings, mob attacks, evictions, and forced conversion practices.

Particularly worryingly, the report also found a sharp increase in targeted attacks in the form of blackmail and extortion. Several interviewees reported having been blackmailed and extorted, some more than once.

Donald*, a paralegal based in Accra, for instance, explained that the Grindr app has become a hub for blackmailers in Ghana; “they meet you on Grindr, take your phone, harass you, blackmail you,” he said. Osei, a trans woman, said she was extorted by someone she was considering dating; “he asked me to give him money, and when I refused, he threatened me that he would tell people that I am queer”, she said. Solomon, a transgender woman, was extorted by a man she met on Grindr; he took her money and phone and said he would take her to some priests to “pray for me so I can stop”.

Some criminals are even more emboldened and organised. Mark, an LGBTQ rights activist, received a call from someone saying they had been the victim of violence. When he went to meet the caller, seven men accosted him. They beat him up, took him to a house, stripped him naked, and took pictures and videos of him. The gang demanded GH₵5,000 ($345) from him, but after pleading, they settled for GH₵4,000 ($275). Mark paid them from his mobile money wallet after borrowing some money from a friend.

“They had a knife pointed at me and threatened to kill and bury me in the house, and no one would know,” he said. After releasing him, the men then demanded money from Mark’s phone contacts. “They said they would use those videos as evidence against me if I reported them,” he added. Mark believes the gang had undergone training to target and attack LGBTQ persons.

This trend of organised crime following the introduction of the anti-LGBTQ bill in Ghana should come as little surprise. In Nigeria, the prevalent crime of “kito” – in which predators target and extort queer people usually through dating apps – increased following the introduction of an anti-LGBTQ law in 2014, according to research by The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERS). Perpetrators reportedly regard their crimes as “legally sanctioned” by that bill. It is certainly the case that victims struggle to get justice as they fear reporting violations due to law enforcement’s institutionalised homophobia and transphobia, and for fear of being further targeted by police themselves.

In Ghana, crimes against queer people have already increased despite the anti-LGBTQ bill not being passed yet. The Committee on Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs has held public hearings on the proposed law but has not yet presented its report. The chair and deputy ranking member of the committee – MPs Kwame Anyimadu-Antwi and Francis-Xavier Kojo Sosu, respectively – declined to respond to African Arguments’ questions on the link between the proposed law and rising violence against queer Ghanaians.

When the bill does reach its second reading in Parliament, there is still hope that it might be scrapped. However, as we have seen from Ghana’s experience in the past year, even the possibility of further criminalising queer activities can be seen as sanctioning discrimination, abuse, and crimes against LGBTQ people.

*names of interviewees have been changed to protect their identities


Ohotuowo Ogbeche is a researcher with OutRight Action International.

On blackqueer Fugitivity beyond the Nation-State

BY E.N MIREMBE
NOVEMBER 30, 2022

Debating Ideas aims to reflect the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books.

Credit: Guest editor Rosebell Kagumire’s personal collection

‘Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary. This is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are essentially coercive and indifferent. Country, nation, these concepts are of course deeply indebted to origins, family, tradition, home. Nation-states are configurations of origins as exclusionary power structures which have legitimacy based solely on conquest and acquisition.’

A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging,

Dionne Brand

Dear Shawn,

I started writing this letter after coming across a Mail & Guardian headline that read, ‘Meet Uganda’s first transgender citizen’. Cleopatra Kambugu got her national identity card. Not dead-named, not misgendered. You and I know the hoops anyone has to jump through to simply get that piece of plastic. Imagine having to get one as a trans person. But she managed and I was thinking about you while this story of Uganda’s first transgender citizen was shared.

You have one of these plastics that hold so much weight. Not dead-named, not misgendered. You’ve had it for a while. I bring this up to acknowledge that the language of ‘firsts’ is important to human rights activism and it does important work in highlighting certain issues, but also to point out that we have been subverting and using the inefficiencies of the government to make life possible for ourselves. That you have one is testament. It also articulates a sort of ‘shadow feminism’ that is nestled in unravelling the state logics from within. Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure defines shadow feminisms as taking the form not of becoming, being, and doing but of shady, murky modes of undoing, unbecoming, and violating. Whatever processes many like you have (un)done, violated and otherwise escaped a form of legibility to make sure you are navigating life with a government approved ID, that says you are who you say you are, has given you access to a citizenship that knows you by the name you call yourself. Does that, however, mean a recognition of your transness? Does that ensure at any point, after the recognition, it is afforded to the next trans person who so desires it?

What I am saying is freedom is not, cannot be, a mere ‘truth-telling about oneself’ because as Foucault in Wrong-Doing, Truth Telling explained, the kind of avowal this recognition demands ‘incites or reinforces a power relation that exerts itself on the one who avows.’ The declaration of transness, the recognition of it as such, especially in Uganda, in the neocolonial African state, is almost always a violent encounter to brush up against.

My preoccupation, as you know, is in the elsewhere: otherwise space that we have created outside of these encounters.

Kambugu’s story was picked up by a number of international media and on DW. Speaking of the importance of trans people being recognized, she says, ‘I exist. I’m here. This is what I look like. Can you plan for me? Can you account for me?’ There is, in Kambugu’squestions, an echo of Poetra Asantewa’s desire for ‘a love that has mapped out the possibilities of my existence and made room for each one of them’, which, she asserts, is a love her country cannot afford to give. The idea of a ‘transgender citizen’ is an oxymoron. One can have the documents, the government approved plastics but to be queer (really, to be Black) is to exist outside the bounds of citizenship. The logic of cartography – to confine, to define, to mark – is at odds with blackqueer fugitivity. In Stolen Life, Black studies scholar Fred Moten writes,

‘Fugitivity, then, is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument. This is to say that it moves outside the intentions of the one who speaks and writes, moving outside their own adherence to the law and to propriety.’

I use blackqueer, after Ashon Crawley, within ‘a Black feminist tradition of struggling to make sense of – by producing a fundamental critique against – the normative world, and it practices a restlessness of word and phrase that seeks ways of existence otherwise.’ To foreground a view of blackness and queerness as mutually constitutive. I use blackqueer because of its spatiotemporal capaciousness. The blackqueer makes space for the Kenyans trying to annul laws that outrightly criminalize their existence, for the Nigerians, the Senegalese, the Ghanaians … and what I am gesturing towards is a social world that extends beyond, that cannot and refuses to be written within the ideological fiction of the nation-state. I keep returning to the poet and scholar S. A. Smythe’s question, ‘Do we want the state to love us or do we want to be free? Is what we are fighting for conditional citizenship or are we making demands and laying the grounds for our own emancipation?’

The cartographic, and the demand to be legible within it, is a justification for sites of violence.

Listen, I finally saw the African Renaissance Monument in Dakar in person. Forty-nine-metre bronze statue that towers over the city. It’s majestic and makes for great Instagram #views especially with the lights at night. It captures what I am trying to relay so perfectly. A man holds a child on his shoulder with his other hand around the waist of the woman. I would go into Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State here to rant about this valorization of the nuclear family to the detriment of the community but I’ll just say, it’s so predictably heterosexual. The ‘best’ part of this is the flags of all African states at its feet. Unironically. I saw this and cackled. Nduko o’Matigere coined the term ‘Man-Africanism’ that writer Nanjala Nyabola describes in this way:


‘At the core of Man-Africanism is the idea that people means man: the black man is the natural leader of Africa. Independence is a masculinized discourse, and the liberation of men was to lead to the liberation of women, children, and the elderly. Like other trickle-down theories, this hasn’t been the case. Instead, the consolidation of power in the hands of privileged men has been at the expense of everyone else. But it has been so uncritically woven into intellectual discourse on African history that we have never had a discussion on the real-world impact of Man-Africanism on Africa.’

I am extending this to say that the politics of the nation is the politics of heterosexuality.

I wouldn’t write to you without gossip to share. You know, it’s recently been election season in Kenya. The other day N. (yes, our N.) was telling me they had to get a new cab driver because the one they’ve had for the longest time travelled to the village. He’s contesting for a council seat and guess what? The major blows to his campaign at the moment are that one, he is unmarried, and two, he is the child of a single mother (I hate the phrase ‘single mother’ as you might imagine). This is also why I don’t bother myself with elections anymore. We know the homophobic rhetoric we have to deal with in Uganda’s election cycles. Candidates routinely ‘accuse’ each other of being funded to support the gay agenda. Collateral damage.

Returning to Dionne Brand’s question – ‘What we have to ask ourselves is, as everyone else in the nation should ask themselves also, nation predicated on what?’ – the conception of the citizen in the neocolonial state that was created in the colonizer’s image is one predicated on cis heteronormativity.

I want to know what you think about all this in relation to yourself as ‘Ugandan’. I’m so firmly on the other end that rejects the idea but you usually balance out my views. You think more about the practicalities.

I have been listening to Obongjayar’s Some Nights I Dream of Doors on repeat and I have been trying to imagine blackqueer fugitivity beyond the nation-state, maps as beyond geography, geography as beyond places. Malala Andrialavidrazana’s Figures make me believe in this possibility of reconstruction, the way she works with maps. I could get you a print of her work for your house if I could. I wanted to write you about all this to say you represent, for me, possibility that is beyond state capture.

There’s third eyes to this letter, but it’s still to-for-about-you; blackqueer inventing life.

About the series
‘African Feminisms: A Constant Awakening’ is Debating Ideas’ latest series – co-edited by Rosebell Kagumire – examining social and feminist movements on the continent, the shifts and implications internally and externally. What is shaping the discourse around women’s and gender-diverse people’s issues and their rights? The series will investigate some of the most pertinent intersecting issues such as: understanding the division of theory, policy and practice; new age influences and what grounds them? These themes will be situated in larger continental debates of politics and human development as well as lessons from South-South collaboration in re-centring decolonization in the struggle for equality and freedom.


E.N Mirembe
Mirembe works with art as a curator, editor, writer and researcher. They are a Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and University of the Western Cape Museum fellow. They were a 2021/2022 Center for Arts, Design and Social Research fellow. They have been a curator in residence at Bag Factory Artist Studios in Johannesburg and were also a curatorial fellow for the KLA ART 21 Festival, a contemporary visual arts festival in Kampala produced by 32° Degrees East | Ugandan Arts Trust. Mirembe is also a published writer whose work has been featured on Literary Hub, Africa is a Country, Johannesburg Review of Books, African Feminism, Africa In Words, and others.