Musings From Abroad

USA: Protests continue over killing of Congolese refugee, Patrick Lyoya by Michigan officer

Published

3 years ago

April 17, 2022

The death of a 26-year-old Congolese refugee, Patrick Lyoya, has ignited demands for Police reform as dozens of demonstrators gathered Saturday in a fresh protest in Grand Rapids, eastern USA.

The enraged protesters were chanting “there is no justice in this land” and “Justice for Patrick.”

Patrick Lyoya was killed in Grand Rapids, Michigan on April 4 by a Michigan police officer with a gunshot after the officer couldn’t subdue him in a duel during a traffic stop. The death of the 26-year-old Congolese-American has ignited the protests against racism and demands for Police reform.

Prior to the shooting, he appeared to be wrestling on the ground with the officer in a video recorded by the passenger in his car.

Lyoya’s death is the latest in a grim litany of Black unarmed people dying at the hands of police. Recall that 46-year-old, George Floyd, was murdered in May 2020 in the U.S. city of Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old white police officer leading to international outrage.

Patrick Lyoya’s parents said they had fled the war in DR Congo only to have their “son killed with bullets” in the United States.

Speaking at a press conference, attorney Ben Crump described the attack as an “unnecessary, unjustifiable, excessive use of fatal force” that saw the officer “escalate a minor traffic stop into a deadly execution.”

There was nothing, he said, “to justify him reaching for his service revolver, taking it and putting it to the back of Patrick’s head, and pulling the trigger. blowing his head off. “

“If it’s wrong to shoot civilians in the back of the head in Ukraine, it is wrong for the police to shoot civilians in the back of the head here in Grand Rapids, Michigan”, he added.

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Musings From Abroad

French army begins Chad pullout

Published

1 day ago

December 10, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

Just two weeks after local authorities said they were terminating their defence collaboration, the French army announced that jets deployed in the capital N’Djamena had returned home on Tuesday, marking the beginning of France’s military departure from Chad.

The government of Chad, a crucial Western partner in the war against Islamic jihadists in the area, unexpectedly terminated its defence cooperation treaty with France on November 28, a decision that caught French authorities off guard.

It is still unclear how the evacuation will be executed and if any French forces will remain in the central African country at all, even after the first Mirage aircraft returned to their base in eastern France on Tuesday.

“It marks the beginning of the return of French equipment stationed in N’Djamena,” Army spokesperson Colonel Guillaume Vernet said.

Due to anti-French sentiment and military takeovers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, France has already withdrawn its troops from those West African nations.

Decades of French military participation in the Sahel area came to an end with the departure from Chad, and more recently, French military operations against Islamist extremists in the region were discontinued.

There are still around 1,000 French soldiers in Chad. Vernet stated that it would still take several weeks for the two nations to establish a schedule for reducing its activities.

Musings From Abroad

Court documents show Meta contractor overlooked Ethiopia rebel threats to moderators

Published

1 day ago

December 10, 2024

Ifeoluwa Dada

New evidence cited by Reuters suggests that a contractor employed by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, overlooked threats against content moderators by Ethiopian rebels during a case contesting the removal of dozens of moderators in Kenya.

Last year, 185 content moderators sued Meta and two contractors for losing their positions with Sama, a Kenyan business that moderated Facebook material, for seeking to form a union.

After Facebook switched contractors, they were barred from applying for the same jobs at Majorel.

Foxglove, a British non-profit helping Ethiopian moderators, submitted court filings on Dec. 4 alleging that Sama ignored their accusations that OLA rebels had targeted them for deleting their videos.

In the petition obtained by Reuters, the moderators said Sama accused them “of creating a false account and manufacturing” the threatening messages before agreeing to a probe and transferring one of the rebels’ officially named moderators to a safe house.

In his statement, Moderator Abdikadir Alio Guyo said that OLA had threatened “content moderators who were constantly pulling down their graphic Facebook Posts.”

“They told us to stop removing their content from Facebook or else we would face dire consequences,” he said, adding that his supervisor dismissed his concerns.
In his declaration, another moderator, Hamza Diba Tubi, stated that OLA sent him a message with the names and addresses of both himself and his coworkers.

“Since I received that threatening message, I have lived in so much fear of even visiting my family members in Ethiopia,” he said.

After peace negotiations in Tanzania in 2023 failed to end a decades-old conflict, the government of Oromiya, Ethiopia’s biggest province, accused OLA rebels of killing “many civilians” in assaults.