On Sunday, Sudan's Council of Ministers declared a state of alert and emergency regarding the floods that affected six of its states — River Nile, Gezira, White Nile, West Kordofan, South Darfur and Kassala.
According to the Sudan News Agency (SUNA), the Council stressed the importance of mobilising popular efforts to attract internal and external humanitarian support from official and popular bodies, in order to provide assistance to those affected by the situation in these states.
Acting Minister of Cabinet Affairs Osman Hussein Osman confirmed the opening of an account in local and foreign currencies to attract support, and to stand beside those affected by torrential rains and floods. Source Khaleej Times
NAIROBI, Kenya Aug 22 – Raila Odinga’s Azimio La Umoja One Kenya coalition has filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking to overturn President-Elect William Ruto’s victory.
Lawyer Dan Maanzo said the petition was filed online Monday morning.
“Yes we have filed the petition online and as lawyers of Azimio we are ready for the petition and we are very confident that we will succeed because the law is on our side,” he told reporters outside the Supreme Court registry at the Milimani Law Courts.
He said they were now working on delivering the physical documents to the court to be stamped.
“The hard copies will now be brought so that they can be stamped but the online one is already with the court,” he said but declined to provide a copy or reveal the main grounds in the petition.
“No I can’t go into those details because the Chief Justice will say I have started to prosecute the case outside court,” he said.
Anyone wishing to file a petition in the Supreme Court agaist Ruto’s victory has until 2pm Monday which is the deadline for the 7-day window since the declaration of the results by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Chairman Wafula Chebukati.
Ruto was declared president-elect on Monday, scraping past Odinga with a margin of less than two percentage points, after an anxious days-long wait for results of the August 9 vote.
The outcome has been challenged not only by Odinga’s camp but also, in a bizarre twist, by four out of seven commissioners at the election body that oversaw the vote.
“We want to see justice done so that peace can be found,” 77-year-old Odinga said at his Nairobi home after a meeting with religious leaders.
“We have decided to use the law to go before the Supreme Court and table our evidence to show that it was not an election but a joke.”
The veteran opposition leader has now been defeated in all five presidential votes he has contested, even though this year he ran with the backing of outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta and the weight of the ruling party behind him.
No presidential poll outcome has gone uncontested in Kenya since 2002, and the disputes have led to bloodshed in the past.
In August 2017, the Supreme Court annulled the election after Odinga rejected Kenyatta’s victory. Dozens of people were killed by police in post-poll protests.
The aftermath of this year’s court decision is being keenly watched as a test of democratic maturity in East Africa’s richest economy.
Kenya‘s worst electoral violence occurred after the 2007 vote, when more than 1,100 people died in bloodletting between rival tribes. By Jemimah Mueni, Capital News
The group sieged the Hayat Hotel on Friday [source: Getty]
At least 12 people have been killed in an attack by Al-Shabaab, an Islamist insurgent group linked with al Qaeda, in the Somalia capital Mogadishu.
At least 12 people have been killed in Somalia's capital Mogadishu after Al-Qaeda-linked militants attacked a hotel, seizing control in a siege that authorities are still battling to end, an intelligence officer told Reuters on Saturday.
The attackers blasted their way into the Hayat Hotel on Friday evening with two car bombs before opening fire. Somalia's Al-Shabaab insurgents have claimed responsibility.
"So far we have confirmed 12 people, mostly civilians, died," Mohammed, an intelligence officer who only gave one name, told Reuters. "The operation is about to be concluded but it is still going on."
The detonations sent huge plumes of smoke over the busy junction on Friday night, and the sound of gunfire still crackled across the capital by 0700 GMT on Saturday.
Sounds of explosions punctuated the night as government forces tried to wrest control of the hotel back from the militants, witnesses said.
Large sections of the hotel were destroyed by the fighting, they said.
The al Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab group claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist group statements.
Al-Shabaab has been fighting to topple the Somali government for more than 10 years. It wants to establish its own rule based on a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
The Hayat Hotel is a popular venue with lawmakers and other government officials. There was no immediate information on whether any of them had been caught up in the siege. By New Arab Staff & Agencies, New Arab
Kenya’s outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta is yet to publicly congratulate President-elect William Ruto following the announcement of the election results on Monday.
The two leaders had not spoken to each other by Thursday, according to people close to Mr Ruto, including deputy president-elect Rigathi Gachagua.
President Kenyatta has repeatedly expressed his commitment to a smooth transition, the latest assurances coming at separate meetings with a US congressional delegation and a group of local religious leaders on Thursday.
Plans for a peaceful power handover to President Kenyatta’s successor are also believed to be already underway — overseen by a transition committee chaired by Kenya’s head of public service.
The transition could be delayed by a legal challenge of the election results by Raila Odinga.
The Kenyan Supreme Court overturned the results of the presidential election in 2017, on grounds of irregularities in results transmission and vote tallying.
Under the rules and traditions of power transitions in Kenya, the committee is, among other things, expected to facilitate communication between the outgoing president and the president-elect, and the latter should be receiving intelligence briefs.
Kenya has had three smooth transitions to a new president during its 59 years of independence, with the first one in 1978 at the death in office of president Jomo Kenyatta — the incumbent’s father.
This year’s transition team will deal with personal differences between two men who didn’t see eye to eye for the better part of the past five years when they served in the same government.
President Kenyatta campaigned for Mr Odinga in the closely contested election. Mr Odinga, who lost the presidential election to Mr Ruto by a narrow margin, is in the next three days expected to file a petition seeking to have the results overturned.
The Supreme Court will hear and render their decision within 14 days from the date of the petition being filed. The Constitution requires that a president-elect be sworn in on the seventh day from the date of a Supreme Court decision validating the results or a repeat election be held within 60 days in case of a nullification. - OTIENO OTIENO, The EastAfrican
A Kenyan lady drowned while broadcasting a Facebook live. In the video, she reads the comments in between taking plunges into the pool before she ventures into a far end of the pool, never to return.
A Kenyan woman living in Canada is feared to have drowned while enjoying a swim that she was broadcasting live on Facebook.
In a video that went live on Thursday at 9.21pm Kenyan time, the woman — who uses the Facebook name Hellen Wendy — dives into the pool for some time then came back to her phone, which was positioned by the poolside and capturing her swim, to acknowledge the greetings of friends who were typing their responses.
She spoke mostly in Swahili during the livestream session.
“It’s two o’clock here. Nimetoka job, niko poa (just left work, I’m good); just having fun,” she says in the second minute of the clip.
A typical live Facebook live video allows one to broadcast whatever they are doing and also provides a platform for friends to type written comments.
In the video, Hellen — who has done such streams before — is reading the comments in between taking plunges into the pool. She repeatedly says she is having fun.
Her last appearance is at minute 9:59, after which she ventures into a far end of the pool, never to return. At minute 10:36, she is seen battling the water while screaming.
By minute 12.16, the struggle becomes more intense and by minute 14:08, all goes silent. The silence dominates the livestream for well over two hours.
Her phone keeps filming the lifelessness of the pool and its wavy waters.
It isn’t until the final stages of the livestream – which goes on for three hours and 14 minutes – that some men come to the scene. They can be heard talking about a body on the floor of the pool.
From their conversation, they are not sure whether it is a human being because one opines that if it was a person who’d drowned, perhaps the body would have floated.
“Is that real?” asks one man at the pool who is using the very swimming pool rails that Hellen was using as the station for her phone. Shirtless, it is clear that the man is not aware that he is being streamed live.
Hellen’s Facebook account indicates that she lives in Toronto in the Canadian province of Ontario.
The Saturday Nation contacted Toronto police regarding the incident and Cindy Chung, the media relations officer with the Toronto Police Service, said they had not received such a report.
“I don’t have any reports for the woman named on the Facebook account,” Ms Chung said in an email.
“I cannot confirm that this person lives in Toronto or any other details of the post.”
A call to the Kenyan High Commission to Canada did not get us anyone to respond and an email to them was not immediately replied to.
On the Facebook video, many of Hellen’s friends posted their condolences and registered shock at the unexpected turn of events.
“I don’t believe I watched live as you died,” one user says.
According to her public profile, Hellen, who hails from Kisii County, sat her Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education in 2017 and left for Canada some months afterwards. A former classmate described her as kind and social. By Elvis Ondieki, Daily Nation
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