Somaliland:WhatIsNew

      Somalia's President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed Farmajo delivers a speech during the         Sustainable Blue Economy Conference at KICC in Nairobi, Kenya, on November 26, 2018. Yasuyoshi CHIBA / AFP Concerned about a new media law that contains significant improvements but fails to prevent imprisonment for media-related offences, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on Somalia’s most senior federal authorities to decree an urgent moratorium on arrests of journalists, without which press freedom will not be able to progress. The long-awaited package of amendments to the controversial 2016 Media Law that President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, also known as “Farmaajo,” signed into law this week has not, as many had hoped, eliminated the possibility of journalists being jailed in connection with their work. It does contain major advances that will help to guarantee freedom of expression and opinion and press freedom, as enshrined in the ...

The camels will suffer if environment suffers ( Aakhiro nimaan Geel lahayn lama amaanayn ) أَفَلَا يَنظُرُونَ إِلَى الْإِبِلِ كَيْفَ خُلِقَتْ To mark “Earth Overshoot Day,” which lands on 22 August this year, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is publishing alarming statistics about journalists who cover environmental stories. At least ten have been killed in the past five years, while more than 50 press freedom violations linked to environment journalism have been registered during the same period. This is a bad time for environmental journalism, with abuses against its practitioners becoming increasingly frequent, as Brandon Lee knows only too well. A US journalist based in the Philippines reporting for the local weekly Nordis, Lee only just survived a murder attempt in August 2019. Before being ambushed and shot, he said he was “consistently subjected to different threats and harassment, even on social media” in connection with his coverage of environmental issues in...

It does not do, in a society in which the balance of power rests overwhelmingly with the employer, to become dependent on the class power of the boss, says NICK WRIGHT writing in today's (6 August 2020) Morning Star THE runaway success of the Black Lives Matter movement has shaken up politics and thrown up new — and not so new — practical and theoretical problems. Inspired by a tragic event across the ocean, a whole new group of people has found that taking the knee for eight minutes and 46 seconds — the time it took for the life to be squeezed out of George Floyd by a Minnesota cop — is the catalyst for a whole new way of thinking about racism and politics in general. For some people to adopt a posture like taking a knee — one now so deeply embedded in US sporting and political culture — seems to strike a false note in the specifically British context. And some right-wing politicians and pundits hide behind this excuse to cloak their unease at this new movement. ...