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Witnesses Say More Than 200 Killed in Ethiopia Ethnic Attack

UNITED NATIONS — Tensions between Russia and the West are aggravating talks about the future of one of the United Nations’ biggest and most perilous peacekeeping operations, the force sent to help Mali resist a decadelong Islamic extremist insurgency.

The U.N.’s mission in the West African nation is up for renewal this month, at a volatile time when extremist attacks are intensifying. Three U.N. peacekeepers have been killed this month alone. Mali’s economy is choking on sanctions imposed by neighboring countries after its military rulers postponed a promised election. France and the European Union are ending their own military operations in Mali amid souring relations with the governing junta.

U.N. Security Council members widely agree the peacekeeping mission, known as MINUSMA, needs to continue. But a council debate this week was laced with friction over France’s future role in Mali and the presence of Russian military contractors.

“The situation has become very complex for negotiations,” said Rama Yade, senior director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

“The international context has a role, and Mali is part of the Russian game on the international stage,” she said.

The peacekeeping mission began in 2013, after France led a military intervention to oust extremist rebels who had taken over cities and major towns in northern Mali the year before. MINUSMA now counts roughly 12,000 troops, plus about 2,000 police and other officers. More than 270 peacekeepers have died.

France is leading negotiations on extending the mission’s mandate and is proposing to continue providing French aerial support. The U.N.’s top official for Mali, El-Ghassim Wane, said the force particularly needs the capabilities of attack helicopters.

But Mali strongly objects to a continued French air presence.

“We would call, therefore, for respect for our country’s sovereignty,” Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop told the council Monday.

Mali asked France, its onetime colonial ruler, for military help in 2013. The French military was credited with helping to boot the insurgents out of Timbuktu and other northern centers, but they regrouped elsewhere, began attacking the Malian army and its allies and pushed farther south. The government now controls only 10% of the north and 21% of the central region, according to a U.N. report this month.

Patience with the French military presence is waning, though, especially as extremist violence mounts. There have been a series of anti-French demonstrations in the capital, which some observers suggest have been promoted by the government and a Russian mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group.

Mali has grown closer to Russia in recent years as Moscow has looked to build alliances and gain sway in Africa — and both countries are at odds with the West. High-ranking Malian and Russian officials have been hit with European Union sanctions, sparked by Russia’s actions in Ukraine since 2014 and by Mali’s failure to hold elections that had been pledged for this past February.

Against that backdrop, Security Council members squared off over the Wagner Group’s presence in Mali. The Kremlin denies any connection to the company. But Western analysts say it’s a tool of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s campaign to gain influence in Africa.

The Wagner Group has committed serious human rights and international humanitarian law violations, according to allegations by the EU and human rights organizations. In Mali, Human Rights Watch has accused Russian fighters and Mali’s army of killing hundreds of mostly civilian men in the town of Moura; Mali said those killed were “terrorists.” The U.N. peacekeeping force is investigating, as is the Malian government.

The recent U.N. report on Mali remarked on “a significant surge” in reports of abuses committed by extremists and Malian forces, sometimes accompanied by “foreign security personnel.” It didn’t name names, but British deputy U.N. Ambassador James Kariuki said council members “are under no illusions – this is the Russian-backed Wagner Group.”

Mali says otherwise. While officials have said Russian soldiers are training the Malian military as part of a longstanding security partnership between the two governments, Diop insisted to the Security Council that “we don’t know anything about Wagner.”

However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a TV interview in May that the Wagner Group was in Mali “on a commercial basis.”

Russian deputy U.N. Ambassador Anna Evstigneeva told the Security Council that African countries have every right to engage soldiers-for-hire. And she suggested they have every reason to, saying Mali’s security “continues to unravel” despite European military endeavors.

She blasted Western unease about Russia’s tightening ties to Mali as “neocolonialist approaches and double standards.”

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres plans a six-month review to consider ways to retool MINUSMA.

To Sadya Touré, a writer and the founder of a women’s organization called Mali Musso, told the council her country “should not be a battlefield between major powers. … People are the ones who are suffering the consequences of these tensions.”

Source: Voice of America

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Two Nigeria Churches Attacked; Worshippers Killed, Abducted

ABUJA, NIGERIA — Gunmen attacked two churches in rural northwestern Nigeria on Sunday, killing three people, witnesses and a state official said, weeks after a similar attack in the West African nation left 40 worshippers dead.

The attack in Kajuru area of Kaduna state targeted four villages, resulting in the abduction of an unspecified number of residents and the destruction of houses before the assailants escaped, locals said.

It wasn’t clear who was behind the attack on the Kaduna churches. Much of Nigeria has struggled with security issues, with Kaduna as one of the worst-hit states. At least 32 people were killed in the Kajuru area last week in an attack that lasted for hours across four villages.

Worshippers were attending the church service at the Maranatha Baptist Church and at St. Moses Catholic Church in Rubu community of Kaduna on Sunday morning when assailants “just came and surrounded the churches,” both located in the same area, said Usman Danladi, who lives nearby.

“Before they [worshippers] noticed, they were already terrorizing them; some began attacking inside the church, then others proceeded to other areas,” Danladi said. He added that “most of the victims kidnapped are from the Baptist [church], while the three killed were Catholics.”

The Kaduna state government confirmed the three deaths by bandits who “stormed the villages on motorcycles, beginning from Ungwan Fada, and moving into Ungwan Turawa, before Ungwan Makama and then Rubu. Security patrols are being conducted in the general area” as investigations proceed, according to Samuel Aruwan, Kaduna commissioner for security.

The Christian Association of Nigeria condemned Sunday’s attacks and said churches in Nigeria have become “targets” of armed groups.

“It is very unfortunate that when we are yet to come out of the mourning of those killed in Owo two Sundays ago, another one has happened in Kaduna,” Pastor Adebayo Oladeji, the association’s spokesman, told The Associated Press.

Many of the attacks targeting rural areas in Nigeria’s troubled northern region are similar. The motorcycle-riding gunmen often arrive in hundreds in areas where Nigeria’s security forces are outnumbered and outgunned. It usually takes months for the police to make arrests.

Authorities have identified the attackers as mostly young herdsmen from the Fulani tribe caught up in Nigeria’s pastoral conflict between host communities and herdsmen over limited access to water and land.

Source: Voice of America

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Climate Change Could Intensify Violence Against Women, Study Says

Weather disasters that happen more often because of climate change create conditions in which gender-based violence often spikes, according to new research.

The study, published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health, reviewed research from five continents and found increased violence against women and girls in the aftermath of floods, droughts, hurricanes and other extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent as the planet warms. Humanitarian organizations that respond to weather disasters should be aware of this troubling trend when planning their operations, the study authors said.

“When we think of climate change effects, we think of some very drastic and very visual things, things like floods, disruptions of cities, supply chain disruptions — which are all very valid and very real risks of climate change,” said study author Sarah Savic Kallesøe, a public health researcher at Simon Fraser University in Canada. “But there are also some more veiled consequences that are not as easily visible or easily studied. And one of those things is gender-based violence.”

The researchers scoured online databases to find studies on rape, sexual assault, child marriage and other forms of gender-based violence following extreme weather events.

The initial search, based on broad keywords like “violence,” “women,” and “weather,” yielded more than 20,000 results, each of which Savic Kallesøe and her colleagues screened individually to determine whether they were relevant.

Only 41 studies that assessed links between gender-based violence and extreme weather made the cut. The researchers then graded the robustness of each study’s methodology using standard rubrics for grading data quality. Although many of the papers were flawed and a few contradicted each other, most studies — especially the higher quality ones — reported a rise in gender-based violence following extreme weather, Savic Kallesøe said.

For instance, one study found that new moms were more than eight times as likely to be beaten by their romantic partners after Hurricane Katrina if they had suffered storm damage than before the storm hit. Five studies of good or fair quality linked drought in sub-Saharan Africa to upticks in sexual and physical abuse by romantic partners, child marriage, dowry violence, and femicide.

And interviews with survivors revealed that seeking disaster aid can make women more vulnerable: “The shelter is not safe for us. Young men come from seven or eight villages,” said one survivor to researchers following Cyclone Roanu in Bangladesh in 2016. “I feel frightened to stay in the shelters. I stay at my house rather than taking my teenage daughter to the shelters,” she added.

Lindsay Stark, a social epidemiologist at the Brown School of the Washington University in St. Louis, said the pattern “is something that those of us who are working in the humanitarian space know intrinsically, because we see it all the time. So, it is very nice to see this distillation of the evidence.”

Savic Kallesøe emphasized that climate change itself doesn’t directly cause gender-based violence. Instead, she and her colleagues found that gender-based violence is “exacerbated by extreme weather events because it’s a type of coping strategy at the expense of women, girls, and sexual and gender minorities,” she said.

Extreme weather can place people under enormous stress, displace them, force them into crowded relief camps, destroy their livelihoods, and expose them to strangers who might do them harm. Layered over the gender roles that often drive gender-based violence, these risk factors make women especially vulnerable. For instance, a family might marry off a daughter early to have one less mouth to feed after a flood, or a man stressed after a hurricane might snap and strike his wife.

Researchers widely recognize that humanitarian crises, like conflict or forced migration, tend to expose women and girls to violence. That climate disasters would have similar consequences isn’t surprising, said Lori Heise, an expert on gender equity at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

However, the exact ways in which climate disasters lead to gender-based violence still aren’t clear from the data. Few high-quality studies are available — and almost no data has been collected on the challenges faced by LGBTQ people following extreme weather events. The new study highlights the need for more and better research and for humanitarian organizations to engage with women and girls in climate-stressed areas about how best to protect them when disaster strikes, Savic Kallesøe said.

“Gender-based violence is happening all the time, everywhere,” Stark said. “We need to be preventing gender-based violence now … and to understand that if we don’t act now, the situation is going to increase exponentially with the impending climate crisis that we all know is upon us.”

Source: Voice of America

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South Africa Hails COVID-19 Vaccine Patent Waiver

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — South Africa on Saturday hailed a WTO agreement to allow developing countries to start producing their own COVID vaccines following a near two-year battle.

“We secured an agreement. It was a strongly fought agreement,” said Minister of Trade Ebrahim Patel, who along with India and NGOs had been calling for an intellectual property rights waiver on COVID-related treatments.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) announced a relaxation of intellectual property restrictions on vaccines Wednesday in a move aimed at a providing more equitable access to shots but which many observers criticized for being limited in time and scope.

After months of wrangling, and talks going down to the wire this week to win over some major players in pharmaceutical manufacturing to a compromise, the United States and China finally clinched the deal by agreeing on which countries would benefit from the waiver.

Both South Africa and India had been vocal in their demands for such a move which they said was needed to stop “vaccine apartheid.”

According to the WTO, 60% of the world’s population has received two doses of the COVID vaccine but there are glaring examples of inequity with only 17% having been inoculated in Libya, with the figure at 8% in Nigeria and less than 5% in Cameroon.

In a statement, the South African government saluted a waiver designed to provide local vaccine manufacturers with the right to produce either vaccines or ingredients or elements that are under patents, without the authority of the patent holder, hailing this as a notable step forward — even if limited to five years.

Pretoria added that “to scale up the production on the continent, further partnerships will be needed including access to know-how and technologies.”

The accord for the time being excludes, however, tests and costly therapeutic treatments against COVID on which the WTO is to pronounce in the coming six months.

Commercialization in Africa will be a challenge, however.

Durban-based South African pharma giant Aspen, which clinched a deal last November with U.S.-based Johnson & Johnson to manufacture a “made in Africa for Africa” Aspen-branded COVID vaccine Aspenovax, said last month it could pull the plug owing to lack of orders.

“Our focus now is to ensure we address demand by persuading global procurers for vaccines to source from African producers,” said Patel.

South Africa has three sites under the aegis of Aspen in Durban, Afrigen in Cape Town and Biovac, also in Cape Town, which makes the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Afrigen’s biotech consortium makes the messenger RNA shot based on the Moderna formula, the first to be made based on a broadly used vaccine that does not require the developer’s assistance and approval.

Source: Voice of America

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Former Hotel Housekeeper Aims to Give French Workers a Voice

FRESNES, FRANCE — A former hotel housekeeper who fought for the rights of her coworkers has become a symbol of the recent revival of France’s left, which is expected to emerge as the main opposition force in the French Parliament to President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

Rachel Kéké, 48, is poised to win election as a lawmaker when France holds the decisive second round of parliamentary elections Sunday. She placed first in her district with more than 37% of the vote in the election’s first round. Her nearest rival, Macron’s former sports minister, Roxana Maracineanu, received less than 24%.

Macron’s centrist alliance is projected to win the most number of seats in the National Assembly, but it could fall short of securing an absolute majority. In that case, a new coalition composed of the hard left, the Socialists and the Greens could make Macron’s political life harder since the National Assembly is key to voting in laws.

Kéké, a Black mother of five who is from the Ivory Coast and settled in France 20 years ago, appeared confident this week while visiting Fresnes, a suburb southeast of Paris, to hand out flyers near a primary school and encourage people to vote for her Sunday.

Kéké, who acquired French citizenship in 2015, knows she represents more than the face of her own campaign. If she wins a place in a Parliament dominated by white men, many of them holding jobs in senior management, it could represent a turning point in the National Assembly reflecting a more diverse cross-section of the French population.

“I am proud to tell Black women that anything is possible,” she told the Associated Press.

Kéké worked as a hotel chambermaid for more than 15 years and eventually climbed the ladder to next job grade, becoming a governess who managed teams of cleaners. But after she started working for a hotel in northwest Paris, she noticed how the demands of cleaning hotel rooms threatened the physical and mental health of the people she supervised.

She thinks “it’s time” for essential workers to have a voice in Parliament. “Most of the deputies don’t know the worth of essential workers who are suffering,” said the candidate, who has repetitive motion tendonitis in her arm because of her cleaning work and still manages hotel housekeepers.

In 2019, along with around 20 chambermaids who were mostly migrant women from sub-Saharan Africa, Kéké fought French hotel giant Accor to obtain better work and pay conditions. She led a 22-month, crowdfunded strike that ended with a salary increase.

The hotel workers’ grueling but successful battle inspired many. Drafted by hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, Kéké agreed to run in the parliamentary race “to be the voice of the voiceless.”

“People who take public transportation at 4 a.m. are mostly migrants. I stand for them, too,” she said.

She joined Melechon’s party, France Unbowed, during the presidential campaign that resulted in Macron’s reelection in May and then became part of the New Popular Ecological and Social Union, the left-wing coalition trying to curb the president’s power in Parliament.

If elected, Kéké would be in position to support one of the key items on the coalition’s platform: increasing France’s monthly minimum wage from about 1,300 ($1,361) to 1,500 euros ($1,570).

She claimed her rival “doesn’t stand a chance.” That’s not what Maracineanu, 47, the former swimming world champion who served in Macron’s government, thinks.

Campaigning Thursday in Thiais, a farmer’s market town in the Paris suburbs, she energetically tried to convince often skeptical residents of the importance of Sunday’s vote. According to opinion polls, voters from the traditional right are expected to widely support Macron’s candidates in places where their own party didn’t qualify for the second round.

“There are some (voters) who are interested in the election from a national point of view. They want Emmanuel Macron and the majority to be able to govern,” Maracineanu said. “Some others are against Jean-Luc Mélenchon, clearly.”

Born in Romania, Maracineanu arrived in France with her family in 1984 and was naturalized French seven years later at the age of 16. She became the first world champion in French swimming history and silver medalist at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

“I won’t be heading to the National Assembly as a world champion, and Mrs. Kéké won’t go as a cleaning lady,” she said. “You go to the National Assembly to be an MP. Personal trajectories are of course interesting and they’re worth talking about but … the election is about an agenda.”

Only one of them will be elected Sunday.

The first round of the election gave a big boost to the left-wing coalition, which finished neck-in-neck with Macron’s alliance at the national level. The French president needs a clear, if not absolute majority to enact his agenda, which includes tax cuts and raising the retirement age.

One unpredictable factor for both camps: the expected low turnout.

In the first round, less than half of voters went to the polls, echoing disillusion with Macron, the establishment and everyday politics expressed by many.

“I come from a country where you couldn’t vote or when you did, it was useless, and it was always the same candidate who was elected under Romania’s dictatorship before 1989. I know how important a democratic ritual it is and that’s what I try and remind people,” Maracineanu said.

Source: Voice of America

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Covid-19: Angola vaccinates over 34,000 people

Luanda- Angola has vaccinated, in the last 24 hours, 34,426 people.

According to the daily bulletin released Friday, the provinces of note are Luanda (5447), Huambo (3817), Uige (3526), Huíla (3348) and Cabinda (2878).

The cumulative total is 20 258 928 doses administered, of which 13 088 702 are single doses, 7 080 567 are full doses and 687 636 are booster doses.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

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China Defends ‘Zero-COVID’ After US Envoy Warns of Costs

China on Friday defended its tough “zero-COVID” policy after the U.S. ambassador said it was causing serious damage to the global economy and foreign business sentiment.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the Chinese economy is recovering from the effects of the pandemic and “facts prove” the policy mandating lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing is “suitable for China’s national conditions and has stood the test of history.”

“We have full confidence that (we can) contain the epidemic, steady the economy and achieve the goal of safe economic development,” Wang said at a daily briefing.

China has sought to eliminate outbreaks of COVID-19 with tough restrictions, while most other countries are relaxing their anti-coronavirus measures to live with the disease.

Ambassador Nicholas Burns said on Thursday that the zero-COVID policy has “had a major impact” on business sentiment, singling out as especially damaging a two-month lockdown in Shanghai, China’s largest city and key financial hub.

Most of Shanghai’s 25 million people were confined to their homes or immediate neighborhoods, and hundreds of thousands continue to remain under restrictions. Rolling lockdowns have also continued to Beijing and other cities.

Critics say the policy is disrupting global supply chains and hurting employment and consumption in China. The U.N.’s World Health Organization has called it unsustainable. China denounced the remarks as irresponsible.

Burns said in a virtual address to the Brookings Institution think tank that there were 40,000 American citizens in the Shanghai area before the pandemic, but that “lots and lots of those people have gone home.” Diplomats from Europe, Japan and other countries report similar declines, he said.

“We’re quite cognizant of the need, I think the Chinese government is quite cognizant of the need, to try to get back to a situation of normalcy,” Burns said.

He said few American companies are leaving China completely because of its continuing importance, “but from the results that I’ve read, and the conversations I’ve had with lots of business leaders here, I think there is a hesitancy to invest in future obligations until they can see the end of this.”

The U.S. and China recorded $650 billion in trade last year, and around 1,100 American companies are operating in China.

Chinese restrictions have all but ended visits by U.S. government officials and business leaders, while the number of American students has dropped sharply since China suspended issuing student visas.

“It’s difficult to convince any of my colleagues in Washington to come here if I tell them that when they do it, they’ve to quarantine for 14 days before they can have a single meeting,” Burns said. “And I understand their unwillingness to do that.”

Burns said the Chinese government is signaling that the zero-COVID policy will probably be extended at least into the beginning months of 2023.

Burns, who has declared that relations between Washington and Beijing are at their lowest point since former President Richard Nixon visited in 1972, said China’s aggressive foreign policy has intensified competition between the countries. But he said they still have multiple areas in which they can engage constructively, including on climate change, anti-narcotics measures and agricultural trade.

Burns said much of his job is focused on outreach to the Chinese public, a task made more difficult by COVID-19 restrictions and the government’s strict censorship.

A recent speech on China by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the embassy posted on China’s Twitter-like Weibo social media platform was taken down within about 2½ hours but drew large numbers of views while it was up, he said.

A second attempt to post it three days later resulted in it being censored within 20 minutes, Burns said.

“So that’s the game that they play,” he said.

Source: Voice of America

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Fair tribute to Dr. Agostinho Neto Airport- Eugénia Neto

Luanda – The widower of the first President of the Republic of Angola, Maria Eugénia Neto, considered, this Friday, just the homage to the designation of the new International Airport of Luanda with the name of her husband, Agostinho Neto.

Located in the commune of the Bom Jesus, municipal district of Icolo and Bengo, the new International Airport of Luanda, that received today the first experimental flight, was baptized Dr. António Agostinho Neto, in homage to the First President of Angola.

“It is a just and deserved homage, for being a very important Airport and built in the space where President Agostinho Neto was born”, said the widower, who was delighted for the ceremony, that coincided with centenary of the nationalist.

In the ceremony, held in the terminal two, of the three that compose the Airport, the Presidential Order was read that grants to the airport infrastructure the name of Dr António Agostino Neto.

The document considers Agostinho Neto a historical figure, “whose legacy must be known and perpetuated to future generations, while national, African and international personality.

The first experimental flight of the Boeing 777 type landed at 1 pm in the International Airport Dr. Antonio Agostinho Neto, in an act witnessed by high figures of the Angolan State.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

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WTO Ministers Reach Deals on Fisheries, Food, COVID Vaccines

After all-night talks, members of the World Trade Organization early Friday reached a string of deals and commitments aimed at limiting overfishing, broadening production of COVID-19 vaccines in the developing world, improving food security and reforming a 27-year-old trade body that has been back on its heels in recent years.

WTO Director-General Nzogi Okonjo-Iweala, after a pair of sleepless nights in rugged negotiations, concluded the WTO’s first ministerial conference in 4 1/2 years by trumpeting a new sense of cooperation at a time when the world faces crises like Russia’s war in Ukraine and a once-in-a-century pandemic that has taken millions of lives.

“The package agreements you have reached will make a difference to the lives of people around the world,” said Okonjo-Iweala, landing what she called an “unprecedented package of deliverables” after 15 months in the job. “The outcomes demonstrate that the WTO is in fact capable of responding to emergencies of our time.”

The agreements could breathe new life into a trade body that faced repeated criticism from the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump, which accused the WTO of a lack of fairness to the United States and was caught in a growing economic and political rivalry between the U.S. and China. In recent years, Washington has incapacitated the WTO’s version of an appeals court that rules on international trade disputes.

The WTO operates by consensus, meaning that all of its 164 members must agree on its deals — or at least not get in the way. The talks at times took place in backrooms or inside chats because some delegates didn’t want to be in the same space as their counterparts from Russia — as a way to protest President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has had fallout far beyond the battlefield, such as on food and fuel prices.

Among the main achievements Friday was an accord, which fell short of early ambitions, to prohibit both support for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and for fishing in overtaxed stocks in the world’s oceans. It marked the WTO’s first significant deal since one in 2013 that cut red tape on treatment of goods crossing borders — and arguably one of its most impactful.

“WTO members have for the first time, concluded an agreement with environmental sustainability at its heart,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “This is also about the livelihoods of the 260 million people who depend directly or indirectly on marine fisheries.”

The WTO chief said the deal takes a first step to curb government subsidies and overcapacity — too many operators — in the fishing industry.

More controversial was an agreement on a watered-down plan to waive intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines, which ran afoul of advocacy groups that say it did not go far enough — and could even do more harm than good.

“The TRIPS waiver compromise will contribute to ongoing efforts to concentrate and diversify vaccine manufacturing capacity so that a crisis in one region does not leave others cut off,” Okonjo-Iweala said of the waiver of intellectual property protections.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai hailed a “concrete and meaningful outcome to get more safe and effective vaccines to those who need it most.”

“This agreement shows that we can work together to make the WTO more relevant to the needs of regular people,” she said in a statement.

Her announcement a year ago that the U.S. would break with many other developed countries with strong pharmaceutical industries to work toward a waiver of WTO rules on COVID-19 vaccines served as an impetus to talks around a broader waiver sought by India and South Africa.

But some advocacy groups were seething. Aid group Doctors Without Borders called it a “devastating global failure for people’s health worldwide” that the agreement stopped short of including other tools to fight COVID-19, including treatments and tests.

“The conduct of rich countries at the WTO has been utterly shameful,” said Max Lawson, co-chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance and head of inequality policy at Oxfam.

He said the European Union, United States, Britain and Switzerland blocked a stronger text.

“This so-called compromise largely reiterates developing countries’ existing rights to override patents in certain circumstances,” Lawson said.

Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, whose tough negotiating stance had frustrated some developed countries during the talks, said the ministerial meeting was a “big boost for multilateralism” and showed progress on issues — like fisheries — that have been lagging for decades.

“India is 100% satisfied with the outcome,” he told reporters in Geneva. “I am not returning to India with any worries.”

The meeting also agreed to lift export restrictions that have weighed on the U.N.’s World Food Program, which is trying to offset the impact of rising food prices and fallout from the war in Ukraine on shipments of wheat, barley and other food staples from the country that is a key producer.

Source: Voice of America

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Masfamu signs memorandum to assist vulnerable people

Luanda – A memorandum aimed at developing actions for people in vulnerable situations across the country, with emphasis on children, rural women, elderly and people with disabilities was signed Friday in Luanda.

The Ministry for Social Action, Family and Women Promotion (Masfamu) was signed by the national director for social action, Fátima Cabral, and Fundação Brilhante by its director-general, Bruno Agostinho who said it was a strategic partnership in the framework of Endiama’s social responsibility.

The agreement also foresees the development of actions at community level that promote the empowerment of families in situations of social vulnerability, as well as upgrade the staff of both institutions in the matter of prevention and combat of all forms of violence against the targeted groups.

He added that with this agreement they will further fine tune the machine with the identification of actions and move on to concrete projects, in order to support the Angolan Government’s challenge to improve the living conditions of its citizens, empowering families and leaving behind welfare assistance.

Source: Angola Press News Agency