24, November 2020

Yaoundé: Canada’s High Commissioner visits Aims-Cameroon, learns about the next Einstein Initiative ⁰

The High commissioner of Canada to Cameroon, His Excellency Richard Bale, on Tuesday, November 10, 2020 graced the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cameroon with his presence at exactly 9 am.
The visiting ambassador, upon arrival, had the opportunity for full exposure to AIMS and her Ecosystem of Transformation, the Academic Life at AIMS-Cameroon, and the AIMS-Cameroon Teacher Training Program, thanks to a presentation by the Institution’s Center President, Prof. Dr. Mama Foupouagnigni, the Academic Director, Prof. Marco Garuti, and the English Pedagogic Adviser of the AIMS-Cameroon Teacher Training Program, Mme. Emilia Babila.

The ambassador equally had the opportunity to meet and interact with the students, tutors, and staff of AIMS-Cameroon who welcomed him with chants of gratitude for his interest in building the African society.

H.E Richard Bale did not part ways with the students without encouraging them to work harder and seize the unique opportunity of being at AIMS to forge friendships across Africa.

After the visit, he expressed complete satisfaction to have been in the midst of the AIMS-Cameroon community.

“It was a great visit, I learned a lot about AIMS and it was a pleasure to meet all the team” he said.

Source: Aims Cameroon

23, November 2020

Biya ignoring Boko Haram, regime using foreign counterterrorism aid to fund the brutal Southern Cameroons war ⁰

Paul Biya’s regime is ignoring the battle against Boko Haram and the Islamic State and using foreign counterterrorism assistance to fund its brutal repression of citizens with legitimate grievances.

Cameroon was once thought to be an island of stability in a sea of instability, but that mirage started to crumble in 2016, as President Paul Biya mishandled what many in the outside world call the “Anglophone Crisis,” but what to many Cameroonians (English and French speakers alike) is just further evidence of the lack of political freedom, accountability, and competence that has plagued the country since 1961.

For the second year in a row, the Norwegian Refugee Council selected Cameroon as the most neglected displacement crisis in the world. More than 1 million Cameroonians have been displaced internally, tens of thousands have fled to Nigeria, and thousands more from other countries have escaped to Cameroon to flee Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), or violence in the Central African Republic.

Both the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide report that Cameroon is at risk for mass atrocities and urgent action is needed. Since the beginning of 2020, violence has surged both in the Anglophone Southwest and Northwest regions and in the Far North region, where Boko Haram and ISWAP are resurgent.

The Cameroonian government has conflated the Far North jihadist threat with the Anglophone crisis in an effort to maintain the flow of international support. The Cameroonian government has conflated the Far North jihadist threat with the Anglophone crisis in an effort to maintain the flow of international support. At the U.N. General Assembly in September, Cameroonian Foreign Minister Lejeune Mbella Mbella asked for increased international cooperation in support of the country’s ongoing struggle against “terrorism.” His belabored attention to “multilateralism,” however, belied Cameroon’s usual intemperate reaction to any international comment about its internal politics, economic policies, or conduct of its military operations.

Cameroon does all it can to reduce the international consequences of its failed militarization strategy against legitimate grievances in its Anglophone regions. Rather than seeking peace through political compromise and better governance, the regime confuses the international community by describing the crisis as a two-front war against “terrorists” and “criminals.”

After two years of painstaking research using GIS tools and open-source data analysis, we have drawn the conclusion that Cameroon’s military operations against Anglophones in the Southwest and Northwest regions have noticeably weakened Cameroon’s efforts against Boko Haram and ISWAP, leading to broader regional insecurity.

Since 2019, Boko Haram and ISWAP have conducted larger-scale operations again, attacking Nigerian, Cameroonian, Nigerien and Chadian military targets and inflicting heavy casualties on soldiers and civilians alike. In late September, Nigeria’s Bornu state governor’s convoy was attacked twice in two days not far from the Cameroon border. But the Cameroonian regime is willing to ignore Islamist resurgence around Lake Chad because it perceives the Anglophone crisis as a bigger threat to its tight grip on power. And, unfortunately, it is confident the international community will again ride to the rescue if the situation appears out of control. Call it the moral-hazard problem of the global war on terrorism.

Culled from Foreign Policy

23, November 2020

Taking the last kicks of a dying horse: Trump campaign parts ways with Powell after vote-switching claim ⁰

The campaign of US President Donald Trump has distanced itself from Sidney Powell, after the lawyer was widely ridiculed for alleging baseless conspiracy theories related to the disputed November 3 election.

Trump, who has not conceded defeat after the media declared his rival Joe Biden the winner of the election, had tweeted on November 14 that Powell would be a member of his legal team, alongside his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis.

However, in a statement on Sunday, Giuliani and Ellis said, “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” adding, “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

In an interview with Newsmax, Powell said that Dominion Voting Systems “has a long history of rigging elections” and that this is “what it was created to do to begin with.”

The statement comes just days after an extraordinary 90-minute press conference at the Republican National Committee in Washington, during which legal team members argued that a broad “national conspiracy” to deny Trump reelection was underway.

The team has mounted multiple legal challenges to reverse the results in several key states. However, the efforts have so far met with little success in the courtroom or on the ground.

Powell said that Trump had beaten Biden in a landslide, despite the fact that Biden won the state-by-state Electoral College votes, which decide who takes the White House, by 306 to 232.

Biden is also set to win the popular vote by more than six million votes.

Source: Presstv

23, November 2020

G20 leaders pledge fair global distribution of coronavirus vaccine ⁰

Leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economies vowed on Sunday to spare no effort to supply COVID-19 drugs, tests and vaccines affordably and fairly to “all people”, reflecting worries that the pandemic could deepen global divisions between rich and poor.

The pandemic and prospects of an uneven and uncertain economic recovery were at the centre of a two-day summit under the chairmanship of Saudi Arabia, which will hand the G20 presidency to Italy next month.

“The COVID-19 pandemic and its unprecedented impact in terms of lives lost, livelihoods and economies affected, is an unparalleled shock that has revealed vulnerabilities in our preparedness and response and underscored our common challenges,” the final communique said.

G20 nations will work to “protect lives, provide support with a special focus on the most vulnerable, and put our economies back on a path to restoring growth, and protecting and creating jobs for all.”

On vaccines, tests and treatments, the leaders said: “We will spare no effort to ensure their affordable and equitable access for all people.”

Source: France 24

23, November 2020

Coronavirus payday: Frontrunners emerge in race for vaccine ⁰

Dozens of companies, from biotech start-ups to Big Pharma, are racing to develop a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine, both to meet urgent medical need and for the potential payday.

Positive results from final stage trials of several vaccine candidates have raised hopes that there is light at the end of the tunnel in the quest to curb a pandemic that has already killed nearly 1.4 million people worldwide:

– How many in the pipeline? –

The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified 48 “candidate vaccines” at the stage of clinical trials in humans by mid-November, up from 11 in mid-June.

Eleven of them are at the most advanced “Phase 3” stage, in which a vaccine’s effectiveness is tested on a large scale, generally on tens of thousands of people across several continents.

A European project led by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca on Monday said an interim analysis of its phase 3 trials showed their vaccine had an average 70 percent efficacy in trials involved 23,000 people.

The statement said the drug showed a 62 percent efficacy when people were given two full doses, but this rose to 90 percent in those given only a half dose initially followed by a full dose.

It said the vaccine could be stored, transported and handled “at normal refrigerated conditions” for at least six months and announced plans to develop up to three billion doses in 2021, if it passes the remaining regulatory hurdles.

The announcement comes after a US-German collaboration between Pfizer and BioNTech reported early in November that phase 3 trials for its mRNA vaccine showed 90 percent efficacy in preventing Covid-19 symptoms and did not produce adverse side effects among thousands of volunteers.

It has since announced further trial results showing the vaccine works 95 percent of the time.

“Efficacy was consistent across age, gender, race and ethnicity demographics,” the company said.

Pfizer is currently seeking Emergency Use Authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and expects to roll out 1.3 billion doses by the end of next year.

Also this month, US biotech firm Moderna said its vaccine also showed almost 95 percent efficacy.

Moderna plans to submit applications for emergency approval in the US and around the world within weeks, and says it expects to have approximately 20 million doses ready to ship in the US by the end of the year.

The company is on track to manufacture between 500 million to a billion doses globally in 2021, it said.

In addition, several state-run Chinese labs are also thought to have produced among the more promising candidate vaccines.

Russia, meanwhile, has already registered two Covid-19 vaccines, even before clinical trials were completed.

– What kind of vaccines? –

Some methods for making a vaccine are tried-and-tested, while others remain experimental.

Inactivated traditional vaccines use a virus germ that has been killed, while others use a weakened or “attenuated” strain.

These vaccines work when the body treats the deactivated pathogen as if it were a real threat, producing antibodies to kill it without endangering the patient with full infection.

So-called “sub-unit” vaccines contain a fragment of the virus or bacteria they are derived from to produce a similar immune response.

“Viral vector” varieties deliver fragments of viral DNA into cells, often hitching a lift off of other virus molecules.

For example, a measles virus modified with a coronavirus protein — the apparatus SARS-CoV-2 uses to latch on to human cells — can by deployed to provide immunity to Covid-19.

Both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines are based on cutting-edge technology that uses synthetic versions of molecules called messenger RNA to hack into human cells, and effectively turn them into vaccine-making factories.

– Safety first –

Trials of two candidate vaccines — made by Johnson & Johnson and Eli Lilly — were “paused” recently over safety concerns.

But that is not necessarily bad news, said Stephen Evans, a professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“The fact that trials are paused should indicate that there should be confidence that the whole process of monitoring the safety of trial participants is working well,” he said.

Recent cases in which recovered Covid patients were infected a second time with a new strain also raise the question of how long vaccines might last.

In October, the US FDA said it would need to see two months of follow-up data after vaccination before giving emergency authorisation for any vaccine use.

“What is different for Covid-19 vaccines is that speed of development and potential approval is much faster due to the public health emergency,” noted the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

But even that pressing need cannot overcome the rules.

“Before approval, all vaccines in the European Union are evaluated against the same high standards as any other medicine,” the EMA said in a statement.

Source: AFP

22, November 2020

US Politics: Federal judge dismisses Trump campaign Pennsylvania lawsuit ⁰

A US federal judge has dealt a new blow to President Donald Trump’s long-shot bid to reverse the results of the disputed presidential election held on November 3.

US District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport, Pennsylvania on Saturday dismissed a lawsuit which sought to overturn the results in the state, calling Trump’s legal claim a “Frankenstein’s Monster.”

Trump, a Republican, has refused to concede defeat in the election and mounted multiple legal challenges to reverse the results in several key states. His Democratic rival, Joe Biden, was declared the projected winner.

However, his campaign’s efforts have so far met with little success in the courtroom or on the ground.

The court decision paves the way for Pennsylvania to certify Biden’s victory there, which is scheduled to take place Monday.

Brann described the case as “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations,” adding, “This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together.”

“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state,” Brann wrote.

“Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”

In response, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said in a statement he was disappointed with the ruling, adding, “Today’s decision turns out to help us in our strategy to get expeditiously to the US Supreme Court.”

Biden won the state-by-state Electoral College votes, which decide who takes the White House, by 306 to 232, according to media reports.

The Electoral College is set to formally vote on December 14, with certifications to occur beforehand.

States’ certification of results of their popular votes is normally routine following a presidential election in the United States.

However, Trump’s refusal to concede has complicated the process and raised concerns that he could cause long-term damage to American voters’ trust in their voting system.

So far, a limited number of Republicans have recognized Biden as the winner. On Saturday and following the ruling, Pat Toomey, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, said that Biden “won the 2020 election and will become the 46th president of the United States.”

“President Trump should accept the outcome of the election and facilitate the presidential transition process,” Toomey said in a statement that congratulated Biden.

The ruling came hours after Republicans also asked for a delay in certification in Michigan, another battleground.

In a letter that repeated claims of irregularities in the state which Biden won by 155,000 votes, the Republicans called for a delay of two weeks to allow for a full audit of results in Wayne County.

Republican Party national committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and the party’s Michigan chair Laura Cox called on the board to “adjourn for 14 days to allow for a full audit and investigation into those anomalies and irregularities.”

Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has, however, said that audits cannot be carried out until after certification as officials do not have legal access to the documents needed until then.

On Saturday, she posted on Twitter that there had been “no evidence” to put into question the result of the election.

“In a nutshell: 5.5m Michigan citizens voted,” she wrote.

“The results of their votes are clear. No evidence has emerged to undermine that.”

Trump has rarely appeared in public after the media declared Biden the winner of the election, but has not given up on his provocative Twitter campaign.

“The proof pouring in is undeniable,” he tweeted Saturday.

“Many more votes than needed. This was a LANDSLIDE!”

Source: Presstv

22, November 2020

Al-Qaeda in North Africa appoints new leader to replace Droukdel ⁰

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has chosen a new leader to replace Abdelmalek Droukdel, who was killed in June by French forces, the SITE monitoring group reported Saturday.

Algerian Abu Obaida Yusuf al-Annabi, the head of AQIM’s “Council of Dignitaries”, was named as Droukdel’s successor, SITE said.

Al-Annabi has been on the American “international terrorist” blacklist since September 2015, according to the Counter Extremism Project.

He has regularly appeared in the group’s propaganda videos, and in 2013 famously demanded that Muslims retaliate against France’s intervention in Mali.

AQIM also confirmed the death of Swiss national Beatrice Stoeckli, who was abducted in Timbuktu while working as a missionary in 2016.

It blamed her death on an attempt by “French crusaders” to free her.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb emerged from a group started in the late 1990s by radical Algerian Islamists, who in 2007 pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network.

The group has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks on troops and civilians across the Sahel region, including a 2016 attack on an upmarket hotel and restaurant in Burkina Faso that killed 30 people, mainly Westerners.

France has more than 5,000 troops deployed in its anti-jihadist Barkhane force in the Sahel.

Source: AFP

22, November 2020

Biya and the rule of law in the two Cameroons ⁰

Many Cameroon political commentators including the renowned Prof PLO Lumumba have described President Paul Biya as a prominent and successful failure. To be sure, Biya has spent all his adult life chasing monetary deals, young Cameroonian and Ghanaian women and hiding from the media both at home and abroad. Biya has never sat in any library in Buea nor in Yaoundé pondering the nuances of Cameroon’s geopolitical structure and constitutional order.

Correspondingly, we of the Cameroon Concord News Group believe that for the past 38 years, when it comes to governing the two Cameroons, Biya simply does not know the rules as laid down by the founding fathers. Take his declaration over the killing of four gendarmes in the Manyu County upon his arrival from the Ivory Coast which was complete and total and which eventually started the war in Southern Cameroons. Biya is like the child on the back of an adult crossing a river and each time the adult smashes a fish, the child arrogantly claims he is the one who has killed the fish.

This is not to say Biya is unfamiliar with the French teleguided legal system running the two Cameroons. To the contrary, he and his family have invested in companies in the two Cameroons that have been the subject of extensive litigation! They include among others CDC, Beauty Voyage, Sitabac, Fokou, Nextel, Groupe Fotso, Camair-Co that have all gone bankrupt numerous times.

One of his first acts as head of state was to organize a fake coup that was poorly staged; seeking to prevent the Grand Nord of the late President Ahmadou Ahidjo to continue to dominate the politics of the two Cameroons. After widespread outrage and internal protest within the National Gendarmerie – Biya abruptly divided the Grand Nord into North and Far North and the Fulanis and their crowned prince Minister Amadou Ali became the revised version of neo colonial forces.

The United Republic of Cameroon was downhill from there. The two Cameroons have since been mired in one crisis after another, including Lake Nyos, Stolen Victory, Ghost Town, Nsam Fire Disaster, Eseka Train, National Assembly Fire, numerous indictments of Biya cabinet officials, the convictions of Biya’s Prime Minister Chief Inoni, Minister Secretary General at the Presidency, Jean Atangana Mebara and longtime political acolyte Edzoa Titus, Defense Minister Mebo Ngo’o – to name a few.

The 87 year old President Biya has for 38 years cast aside basic norms governing the greatest bilingual nation in Africa about social, economic, religious and legal matters. For example, Biya now uses Twitter to address very sensitive issues in a country that millions cannot access the internet, makes baseless accusations on Ambazonia Restoration Forces fighting for the independence of Southern Cameroons and prosecuting his political rivals.

This bellicosity has confirmed the narrative that Biya is not just a primitive and lawless frog, but a tactless and reckless leader who has destroyed the United Republic of Cameroon. Biya is indeed a French Cameroun Monarch and only his will goes. Biya has turned the two Cameroons into a concentration camp and there’s nothing left. And today, Biya’s Minister of the Interior is an ex-convict-Paul Atanga Nji.

All the judges from the divisional and regional level including the Supreme Court are Biya appointees and none can rule against him. Biya and his Francophone Beti Ewondo regime have destroyed the healthcare system, shattered the National Assembly, the police force and the army and the entire Cameroon public service machinery must bend to Biya’s will. By some strange happenstance, Biya’s claim of total authority over the nation is more evident regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. This is why Cameroon Radio and Television’s senior political man George Ewane regularly opines that Biya is the Living Christ and the Messiah!!

Yes Dr. Ewane, Biya is indeed the best and greatest dictator in the world backed by the French that has successfully consolidated power and effectively craft and exploited the rule of law to advance his family and tribal ambitions.

Yes, Paul Biya is a real dictator transforming the two Cameroons to his advantage and that of his young family and his kinsmen. He is a corrupt leader who – while Dr. George Ewane and the world watches – fails to understand what it means to lead a nation.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

22, November 2020

Paul Biya is offering Cameroon’s Anglophones too little, too late ⁰

The announcement of the elections and the implementation measures comes as Cameroon is embroiled by a conflict in which separatist fighters in the Anglophone Northwest and Southwest regions seek to create an independent state called Ambazonia. This conflict stems from the systematic marginalization of Anglophones, who comprise nearly 20 percent of the country’s population, but was sparked by the repression of demonstrations of teachers and lawyers in the fall of 2016 who demanded linguistic autonomy within their respective institutions.

Now, four years after these demonstrations and in the midst of a war of secession that has killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands, Biya’s government—which has consistently been ranked as one of the most corrupt and authoritarian in Africa—is seeking to enact decentralization measures. While enacting such reforms at the outset of the crisis may have addressed some of the demands of the demonstrators, doing so now is simply another effort of the Cameroonian government to present the image that it is responding to the crisis and grievances of the Anglophone population without engaging in any meaningful dialogue or negotiations with civil society or separatist leaders.

The regional elections, which are slated to occur on Dec. 6, will elect a total of 90 councilors to each of the regional bodies—70 divisional delegates and 20 traditional rulers. The traditional leaders will be selected by regional chieftaincy bodies, the majority of which are dominated by supporters of Biya’s Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) and have backed the party in previous elections.

The Regional Councils have their origins in a 1996 law that amended Cameroon’s 1972 constitution. This constitution was Cameroon’s second following the abolition of a federal form of government by the country’s first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo. Federalism had existed since the former British colony of Southern Cameroons merged with the former French colony of Cameroon in 1961. The constitutional reform of 1996 was announced with the intent of quelling dissent from ethnic and linguistic groups that had been excluded during the first decade of Biya’s government as well as that of his predecessor. The groups that suffered from such marginalization included those from the West and Far North regions, although the predominant group was the Anglophone minority of the Northwest and Southwest regions.

Many years ago, the Cameroonian government agreed to constitutional reforms that had the potential to lead to a devolution of governance to the regional level but refused to implement them.

The discontent that the Anglophone minority felt was compounded by the first multiparty elections held in 1992, during which John Fru Ndi of the Social Democratic Front (SDF) came in second with 36 percent of the vote while Biya won 40 percent. Allegations of electoral irregularities led to a prolonged period of unrest and a deep sense of marginalization within the Anglophone population.

In response, leaders from Anglophone Cameroon convened the All Anglophone Conference in 1993 that resulted in the Buea Declaration, which called for a return to the federated government that existed prior to 1971. In 1994, the second All Anglophone Conference convened and issued the Bamenda Declaration, stating that if Cameroon did not return to a federal form of government, the Anglophone regions of Cameroon would demand independence.

It was largely in response to these growing demands from Cameroon’s Anglophone community that the National Assembly of Cameroon adopted constitutional reform measures to create a more decentralized state. At the time, the National Assembly was dominated by the ruling CPDM party, and the reform measures were backed by Biya and the government. The amendment stated that regions would be given jurisdiction over land management, budgeting, education, and other areas of governance. It also promised that the main organ responsible for overseeing the decentralized form of governance would be the Regional Councils that were established in the amendment. In addition to regional decentralization, the amendment also made the Cameroonian legislature bicameral by creating the Senate, which comprises 100 members; 30 of the senators are appointed directly by the president with the other 70 being selected by municipal councils across Cameroon.

Despite the fact that the constitutional reforms were approved by the National Assembly, the power to convene elections for both the Senate and Regional Councils that the amendment created was given solely to the president. And although nationwide elections occurred for both the presidency and Parliament the year after the amendment was enacted, Biya did not call elections for the Regional Councils or the Senate, meaning that the new bodies were never created.

Culled from Foreign Policy

21, November 2020

Eto’o en route to Spanish third division club Racing Murcia ⁰

Racing de Murcia president Morris Pagniello has confirmed ongoing talks to bring former Barcelona and Inter Milan striker Samuel Eto’o to the Spanish third division.

The Cameroon legend retired from football in September 2019, after spending a year at Qatar SC but he could make a surprise return to the pitch to help Antonio Pedreno’s side ahead of their Copa del Rey outing against Levante on December 16.

According to the club president, the deal is at a ’50-50’ level with support from their sponsors and a decision on the transfer would be made in the coming days.

“At this time of the morning I would say that the signing of Samuel Eto’o by our team is at 50-50,” Pagniello told Marca.

“Next week we will know if we can sign Eto’o. If not, we have a Plan B prepared.

“We have several investors in Mexico and the Emirates who can financially compensate the operation.

“If we sign him, it is the manager’s job to align him. But we are clear that the game against Levante is very important and that it is time for there to be exceptions.”

Racing de Murcia are the most successful club in the Spanish second division with eight Segunda Division titles.

Eto’o is historically the most decorated African Footballer of the Year recipient alongside Yaya Toure with four awards each.

Aside from his achievements on the international stage with Cameroon, the 39-year-old enjoyed a successful career in Europe at Barcelona and Inter Milan where he won four Champions League trophies in total, amongst other domestic honours.

Source: Sportingnews