Musings From Abroad

Will Smith, Jada Pinkett might be heading for a messy, expensive divorce

Published

3 years ago

April 24, 2022

Hollywood has been buzzing with stories about veteran actor, Will Smith and wife, Jada Pinkett’s marriage being in a turmoil and the power couple could be heading for a divorce following the controversy generated by the infamous Oscars slap Will gave comedian Chris Rock for denigrating Jada.

Hollywood sources say since the Oscars 2022 incident, Will and Jada’s marriage has been going through a lot of stress as the couple are barely communicating, and could be heading for a ugly and expensive breakup.

The King Richard actor had made headlines on March 27 when he stormed the Academy Awards stage and slapped Rock after the anchor had made a nasty joke on Jada’s closecropped hair, calling her “G.I. Jane.”

The scandal led to the Academy of Motion Pictures banning Smith from attending any of the Academy’s events, including the Oscars, for the next 10 years.

Sources close to the couple say Jada has openly talked about their marriage troubles on her show Red Table Talk, and the couple is reportedly not getting along after the incident.

“Ever since the Oscars scandal, the tension between them has been palpable. There have been problems for years, but they’re barely speaking right now,” Mirror UK wrote on the pending divorce.

“Ever since the Oscars, the tension between them has been palpable. There have been problems for years, but they’re barely speaking right now.

“If they were to split, Will has a fortune of $350 million that Jada would be entitled to under California law. It could be one of the ugliest divorces in showbiz history and drag on longer than Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s did.

“Will obviously doesn’t want a divorce but there is only so much he can take. Will has made no secret of how uncomfortable he feels about Jada sharing every personal detail of their marriage. This is the last straw and could force him to finally end things,” the magazine said.

Jada had once revealed that she didn’t want to marry Will in the first place, but only did because she was pregnant.

“I was under so much pressure, you know, being a young actress, being young, and I was just, like, pregnant and I just didn’t know what to do. I never wanted to be married. I really didn’t wanna get married,” Jada had said on one of her previous Red Table Talk episodes.

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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.