Category: General

The Territorial Police in KMP and Kira Division, has charged to court, Bishop Kibuuka Jacinto, of the Evangelical Orthodox Church, located at Mamre Prayer Center, Namugongo, for the alleged Aggravated Torture of Othieno Denis, a 14 year old, pupil of Christ the King Junior School, Namungoona.

The facts gathered indicate that on the 22.08.2022, the victim was at Mamre Prayer Center, with his mother, Kemigisha Juliet, who works as a cleaner. The mother left him behind and went to town. It was during her absence that the Bishop called the victim and started demanding his money, Ugx. 10,000 which was allegedly stolen by him. Instead of referring the matter to police, he started beating and kicking the 14 year old victim. He then dragged him into his car and continued beating him as they drove to the mother’s home at Namugongo-Janda in Kira Municipality, to recover the money.

It took the intervention of the landlady, who rescued the victim and rushed him to Nuwa Hospital, Nabusugwe-Mukono, where he was admitted. The victim is recovering from the injuries which were classified as Grievous in nature.

The police at Kira upon receiving the complaint, instituted inquiries and obtained very clear accounts of the incident, with relevant witness statements. They retrieved medical documents and reconstructed the scene at Mamre Prayer Center. The Bishop also recorded a statement and was released on bond. It was however, canceled on the 24.08.2022, after charges of Aggravated Torture were sanctioned against him. He was caused to appear in court at Kira on the 25.08.2022.

We do strongly condemn all acts of torture, harassment and intimidation, moreso by church leaders against vulnerable persons. Part of the mission of church, is to defend the poor, marginalized and vulnerable persons and further promote commitment to compassion and justice. The acts therefore, were not consistent with the values of church and not justified under any circumstance.

Source: Uganda Police Force

A group of HIV-positive people has been protesting for more than a month at the central office of India's National AIDS Control Organization, or NACO, in New Delhi, demanding a regular supply of life-saving antiretroviral therapy — also known as ART — drugs across the country.

NACO is the nodal organization of the government of India that manages programs for the prevention and control of HIV and AIDS in the country. ART drugs work by stopping the virus from replicating in HIV-infected people, helping them live longer and reducing or stopping the infection of the virus to others.

Centers that supply ART drugs across India have been out of stock on several antiretroviral drugs for months, threatening the lives and well-being of hundreds of thousands of HIV patients, according to leaders of the group that has been protesting in Delhi since July 21.

"I have been getting distress calls from hundreds of HIV-infected persons from different states of the country reporting the shortage in supply of the ART drugs from the ART centers across the country," Hari Shankar, a leader of the ongoing Delhi protest, told VOA.

"The crisis has been acute since April. Most of them cannot afford to buy the drugs from the market privately," Shankar added. "We will not withdraw from this protest until they, all across the country, start receiving the ART drugs supply regularly."

According to a government estimate, India has 2.3 million people living with HIV. In 2004, the government began providing free ART to the people living with HIV in the country. Now around 1.5 million HIV patients are dependent on the ART provided by the government.

NACO procures ART drugs and distributes them through more than 675 ART centers spread across the country. People undergoing ART visit the centers every one, two or three months to collect their drugs. But since April, the supply of the drugs has been irregular in many parts of the country, many people said.

"Earlier, we regularly used to get the stock of the drugs for one to three months. Now we get the drugs just for three or five days. The ART centers even in some big hospitals in New Delhi are turning us away because of the shortage of the drugs," said Shankar, a member of the Delhi Network of Positive People or DNP Plus, which works to facilitate better medical treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS in New Delhi.

The Delhi protest demanding a regular supply of ART drugs across the country is organized by DNP Plus.

Nisha Jha, another DNP Plus member, said that many people across the country are reporting a shortage of Dolutegravir (DTG) 50 mg, a key ART drug, from the ART centers.

"Those HIV patients who have been on the first line, second line, or third line ART for years, and are also infected with tuberculosis, need to take DTG 50 separately," Jha told VOA.

"Because of the crisis of DTG, lives of thousands of our PLHIV brothers and sisters are in jeopardy now."

There is a crisis of drugs like Nevirapine, Ritonavir, Lopinavir, Abacavir, and Zidovudine — which are used in different ART regimens for HIV ¬patients — at ART centers across the country, Jha added.

The ART centers are asking patients to change their drug regimens because of the shortages of some drugs, many people said.

Surmick Waribam, a leader of HIV patients group Manipur Network of Positive People, or MNP Plus, in the northeastern state of Manipur, said the normal protocol calls for HIV patients to undergo certain medical tests before their ART regimens are changed.

"The ART centers are asking HIV patients to change the regimens without conducting any such medical tests. The patients are scared to change the regimen, fearing adverse impacts on their health. Being very poor, most of them cannot afford to buy the drugs from the market. So, they are left with no option but to change the regimen," Waribam told VOA.

In response to a query from VOA, Dr. Manisha Verma, a spokesperson for the Indian health ministry, said in an emailed statement that there is "adequate stock for around 95% [of HIV patients] in India."

"There is no stock-out of drugs and there are no instances of disruptions or non-availability of treatment services or ARV medicines at the national and state levels," Verma said.

Dr. Mothi SN, an HIV and AIDS specialist, said that since the global roll-out of ARV medicines began in 2004, the HIV/AIDS scenario changed from being a "rapidly progressing fatal illness" to that of "a chronic manageable illness like diabetes or hypertension with a near-normal life expectancy."

"Regular intake of ARV medicines and prompt adherence to treatment are resulting in added years of life. People with HIV may survive the infection and finally die of other age-related diseases like stroke, heart disease, cancer, etc.," Mysore-based Mothi told VOA.

"To achieve the optimum outcome, prompt adherence to uninterrupted ARV therapy becomes the cornerstone of management of people living with AIDS."

Waribam from Manipur said the shortage in supply of his regular ARV drugs forced him to switch to a new regimen of drugs.

"For my ARV drugs, I am dependent solely on the ART center. So, in June, like most of around 14,000 [people living with HIV] in Manipur, I agreed to switch to the new drugs the ART center offered. Even then, the ART centers are giving us drugs for three, five or 10 days," Waribam said.

"Like thousands of others, I am also anxious and in doubt, if the new drugs would succeed to keep my viral load under check and not cause any damage to my health. …The authorities are playing with the lives of the PLHIV."

Source: Voice of America

An Ebola vaccination campaign will start in the Congolose city of Beni on Thursday after a new case of the virus was confirmed this week, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.

More than 200 vaccine doses have been arrived in Beni, in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo, it said.

The latest confirmed case has been genetically linked to a 2018-2020 outbreak in North Kivu and Ituri provinces, which claimed nearly 2,300 lives.

Six people were killed in another flare-up from that same outbreak last year.

A WHO spokesman told Reuters the shots were provided by the organization and that inoculations would start on Thursday.

Congo's dense tropical forests are a natural reservoir for the Ebola virus, which causes fever, body aches, and diarrhea, and can linger in the body of survivors only to resurface years later.

The vast central African country has recorded 14 outbreaks since 1976. The 2018-2020 outbreak in the east was Congo's largest and the second largest ever recorded, with nearly 3,500 total cases.

Congo's most recent outbreak was in northwest Equateur province. Itwas declared over in July after five deaths.

Source: Voice of America

A journalist who ran an online local news program was shot to death Monday in southern Mexico, making him the 15th media worker killed so far this year nationwide.

Prosecutors in the southern state of Guerrero said Monday that Fredid Román was gunned down in the state capital, Chilpancingo.

Román’s program, “The Reality of Guerrero,” focused heavily on state-level politics. He also wrote a column.

Guerrero is a state where drug gangs, armed vigilantes and other groups regularly clash.

2022 has been one of the deadliest ever for journalists in Mexico, which is now considered the most dangerous country for reporters outside a war zone.

Prosecutors did not immediately offer any further details on the killing of Román, who local media said had previously published a newspaper under the same name and was shot inside his vehicle.

The killing comes just one week after independent journalist Juan Arjón López was found dead in the northern border state of Sonora. Prosecutors said he died from a blow to the head. His body was found in San Luis Rio Colorado, across the border from Yuma, Arizona.

That area has been hit by drug cartel violence in recent years. In March, volunteer searchers found 11 bodies in clandestine burial pits in a stretch of desert near a garbage dump in San Luis.

At the beginning of August, a journalist was among four people killed inside a beer shop in the central Mexico state of Guanajuato.

Authorities said it was unknown whether that attack was related to the journalist’s work, his role as representative of local businesses in the planning of an upcoming fair or something else.

While organized crime is often involved in journalist killings, small town officials or politicians with political or criminal motivations are often suspects as well. Journalists running small news outlets in Mexico’s interior are easy targets.

Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote after Arjón López’s killing that “although some arrests have been made in earlier cases of press killings this year, an ongoing climate of impunity continues to fuel these attacks.”

Source: Voice of America

Prosecutors on Monday asked a judge to sentence Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández to 12 years in prison and bar her from holding public office for life for allegedly leading a criminal conspiracy that irregularly awarded public works contracts to a friend and ally.

“We are faced with the biggest corruption maneuver that this country has ever known,” prosecutor Diego Luciani said in his closing arguments in the trial of Fernández, who was president of Argentina from 2007 and 2015, before becoming vice president in 2019.

The alleged fraud against the state cost the country’s coffers around $1 billion, Luciani said.

The former president has vehemently denied charges against her in the three-year trial and has said the judges already have the sentence against her “written and even signed.”

Fernández has characterized the trial as an effort to use the courts to stop her from ever holding elected office again and her allies have characterized it as a political prosecution.

The presidential office came out in support of Fernández, saying she is the victim of a “persecution by the courts and media.”

Current President Alberto Fernández also expressed “solidarity” with his number two in a social media post.

Luciani told judges they will have the final say on whether “corruption or justice” prevails.

Although Fernández has faced numerous accusations of corruption for events that took place while she was in office, this marks the first time a trial against the former president has gotten this far to include a prosecutor formally requesting a sentence.

Fernández, 69, is accused of leading a conspiracy that involved awarding 51 public works contracts for roadworks to Lázaro Báez in southern Santa Cruz province. Many of those public works were never finished.

Prosecutors say Báez, a former bank employee who went on to become a public works mogul, created the company Austral Construcciones as a way to win state tenders.

An additional 12 people are also indicted in the case, including Báez and Julio De Vido, the minister who was in charge of public works during Fernández’s administration.

A sentence is expected by the end of the year and could be appealed.

Source: Voice of America

The Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIGP) Katsigazi Tumusiime has applauded officers from Counter Terrorism for the tremendous work done in securing the country.

“You have done so much for this country and people out there appreciate it. You are doing a great job and we do appreciate it,” said DIGP Katsigazi.

He made the remarks during his familiarization tour at the Counterterrorism directorate today Tuesday 23rd August 2022 in Naguru.

“You have stopped so many attempts by terrorists that would have caused so much destruction to our citizens. Thank you so much,” he added.

The Deputy Inspector General of Police stressed that Counter Terrorism capabilities are very critical and with limited resources, the directorate has managed to deliver before revealing that more training is to be done to equip the officers with more skills, especially with the advancement of technology.

“We are going to train you more with the limited resources since it’s a matter of prioritizing. Now that we have peace, we can’t tell when these fellows (Terrorists) will strike. We need to prepare for that in terms of training and equipment.”

On the general welfare of the officers, DIGP Katsigazi pledged more apartments to be constructed to accommodate all officers in Kampala and later rollout throughout the country.

The DIGP was received by the Director Counter Terrorism, Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIGP) Abas Byakagaba who took him through different tasks conducted by the directorate.

The Counter Terrorism Directorate was established in 2008 as a measure of establishing a mechanism for combating the threats and acts of terrorism in the country.

Currently, the directorate comprises eleven units which include Counter Terrorism Intelligence, Oil and Gas Protection, Tactical Response, and Tourism among others.

Source: Uganda Police Force

— Police in north-western Uganda are investigating the deaths of a dozen people who are suspected to have consumed a locally manufactured gin.

The deaths are said to have been registered between Saturday and Sunday in the Madi-Okollo district.

Several others, including one trader selling the gin known as City 5 Pineapple Flavoured Gin, have been hospitalised with suspected poisoning.

It is not clear what the ingredients in the drink are, but “demineralised water, extra neutral alcohol and pineapple flavour” are listed on the bottle.

A regional police spokesperson said that the gin samples have been collected and will be submitted to the government chemist to conduct tests.

Four suspects have been arrested, and the cottage factory where the gin was being manufactured closed, as investigations continue.

Deaths from adulterated alcohol are common in Uganda. In 2010, at least 80 people died in southwestern Uganda after drinking alcohol laced with methanol, according to authorities. 

Source: Nam News Network

Censors have altered the ending of the recent animated film “Minions: The Rise of Gru” for its domestic release in China, social media users across the country noticed over the weekend.

The editing is yet another example of Chinese authorities editing a popular Hollywood film to make it more politically correct, leading some viewers to lament the changes.

According to posts and screenshots from the movie shared on Weibo, a platform similar to Twitter, censors tacked on an addendum in which Wild Knuckles, a main character in the heist film, was caught by police and served 20 years in jail.

Gru, a co-conspirator of Wild Knuckles, “returned to his family” and “his biggest accomplishment is being the father to his three girls,” screenshots of the film showed.

In the international version, the film ends with Gru and Wild Knuckles, the story’s two thief anti-heroes, riding off together after Wild Knuckles faked his own death to evade capture from authorities.

Numerous online commentators mocked the addendum, saying it resembled a power-point presentation.

DuSir, an online movie review publisher with 14.4 million followers on Weibo, noted that the Chinese version of the film runs one minute longer than the international version and questioned why the extra minute was needed.

“It’s only us who need special guidance and care, for fear that a cartoon will ‘corrupt’ us,” DuSir wrote in a piece published Saturday.

Universal Pictures, the film’s U.S. distributor, did not respond to a request for comment outside of normal business hours.

Huaxia Film Distribution Co. and China Film Co., the film’s distributors in China, did not respond to a request for comment.

China places a quota on the number of overseas movies that can be shown in domestic movie theaters. Many Hollywood films that screen in the country have certain scenes omitted or altered.

At times, some viewers note, alternate endings to films diverge far from the original.

Last year, Chinese viewers of the classic 1999 film “Fight Club” noticed that the original ending, in which the protagonist and his alter ego detonate a set of skyscrapers, was not on the version shown on domestic streaming site Tencent Video.

Instead, an on-screen script said police “rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding.”

The changes were widely mocked among Chinese fans of the original film, and even elicited responses from the film’s director and the author of the novel it was based on. Tencent later restored the original ending.

Source: Voice of America

Switzerland’s 1,400 glaciers have lost more than half their total volume since the early 1930s, a new study has found, and researchers say the ice retreat is accelerating at a time of growing concerns about climate change.

ETH Zurich, a respected federal polytechnic university, and the Swiss Federal Institute on Forest, Snow and Landscape Research on Monday announced the findings from a first-ever reconstruction of ice loss in Switzerland in the 20th century, based in part on an analysis of changes to the topography of glaciers since 1931.

The researchers estimated that ice volumes on the glaciers had shrunk by half over the subsequent 85 years — until 2016. Since then, the glaciers have lost an additional 12%, over just six years.

“Glacier retreat is accelerating. Closely observing this phenomenon and quantifying its historical dimensions is important because it allows us to infer the glaciers’ responses to a changing climate,” said Daniel Farinotti, a co-author of the study, which was published in scientific journal The Cryosphere.

By area, Switzerland’s glaciers amount to about half of all the total glaciers in the European Alps.

The teams drew on a combination of long-term observations of glaciers. That included measurements in the field and aerial and mountaintop photographs — including 22,000 taken from peaks between the two world wars. By using multiple sources, the researchers could fill in gaps. Only a few of Switzerland’s glaciers have been studied regularly over the years.

The research involved using decades-old techniques to allow for comparisons of the shape and position of images of terrain, and the use of cameras and instruments to measure angles of land areas. The teams compared surface topography of glaciers at different moments, allowing for calculations about the evolution in ice volumes.

Not all Swiss glaciers have been losing ice at the same rates, the researchers said. Altitude, amounts of debris on the glaciers, and the flatness of a glacier’s “snout” — its lowest part, which is the most vulnerable to melting — all affect the speeds of ice retreat.

The researchers also found that two periods — in the 1920s and the 1980s — actually experienced sporadic growth in glacier mass, but that was overshadowed by the broader trend of decline.

The findings could have broad implications for Switzerland’s long-term energy sources, since hydropower produces nearly 60% of the country’s electricity, according to government data.

Source: Voice of America

 — Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has rallied National Resistance Movement (NRM) Members of Parliament to support the merging and rationalisation of government agencies, saying this will save the government billions of shillings.

According to a statement from State House, Museveni met the NRM Parliamentary Caucus at Kololo Ceremonial Grounds where he said only profit-making parastatals should be spared.

Citing an example of the National Enterprise Corporation (NEC), the commercial arm of the Uganda People’s Defence Force, he said apart from research institutions, and farmers’ institutions, the government is seeking to retain only money-making parastatals.

“If the government wants to have parastatals, have money-making parastatals, so that when you say you have got a board, it is a money-making board; not a money-eating board. Have no board where there is no money-making,” he said.

The most recent Auditor General’s report indicated that only 13 out of the 26 public corporation and state enterprises analysed made profits. Some included Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Ltd (UETCL), Uganda Electricity Generation Company Ltd (UEGCL), and National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) which posted profits of Shs112 billion, Shs91.9 billion, and Shs47.8 billion respectively. These, however, were not paying any dividends to the government.

The Public Service ministry, in 2018 released plans to realign government ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs) to address challenges of duplication of work, overlaps of mandates, conflicts, and wasteful expenditures, among others.

In February 2021, Cabinet approved a roadmap for rationalisation of government agencies, commissions, authorities, and public enterprises.

Museveni’s impromptu meeting with the legislators comes two months after the House, through a report by an Ad Hoc Committee, raised concern about the impact of the proposed rationalisation of government agencies, urging the ministry to protect employees whose agencies have been affected.

Parliament, where NRM has majority seats, criticised the ministry for reportedly embarking on the mergers without a comprehensive study of the whole government machinery for service delivery, limited consultation on the legal and economic costs involved, and without a business continuity assurance study.

Parliament had given Muruli Mukasa, the Public Service minister, two months to revert with a better plan.

Museveni on Friday, however, made a case for the proposed mergers whose aim the government says is to save the country billions of shillings.

“The total cost savings arising from the rationalisation of 53 government agencies and functions per annum will be Shs649b,” Mary Grace Mugasa, the junior Public Service minister, revealed, adding that the money to be saved includes savings from expenses on wage, facilitation of governing boards and councils, NSSF contributions, non-wage expenses, development expenditure, gratuity, and rent.

She explained that out of 157 government agencies, which were reviewed in 2018, the government took a decision to retain 88 and merge, mainstream and transfer the functions of 69 agencies.

The first phase of the rationalisation exercise has been concluded with 53 out of the 69 government agencies harmonised while the 16 will be rationalised in phase two of the next financial year.

She argued that some of the agencies were created without clear justification, while others had their mandates overtaken by events. 

Source: Nam News Network