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DUBAI: Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the son of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, said that he will succeed his father — if he gets enough likes on Twitter.
Kainerugaba, a general in his country’s armed forces and a prolific tweeter, wrote on Monday: “Okay, let those who want me to be president after my father retweet and like. If you convince me, I will do it.”
Okay, let those who want me to be President after my father retweet and like. If you convince me I will do it.
— Muhoozi Kainerugaba (@mkainerugaba) December 5, 2022
As of Tuesday evening, the tweet had racked up more than 2,100 retweets and 7,400 likes. Uganda has a population of more than 47 million.
Kainerugaba, who is commonly referred to by his first name, which means “avenger,” has a track record of ambitious tweets. For example, he previously offered to give Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni a gift of 100 cows. “In our culture you give a girl you like a cow,” he wrote. He has also shared musings about the possibility of invading Kenya.
In response to previous criticism of his tweets, and an apparent suggestion by a journalist in Kenya that he be banned from Twitter, Kainerugaba posted a message in October that said: “I am an adult and NO ONE will ban me from anything!”
I hear some journalist from Kenya asked my father to ban me from Twitter? Is that some kind of joke?? I am an adult and NO ONE will ban me from anything!
— Muhoozi Kainerugaba (@mkainerugaba) October 18, 2022
While Kainerugaba’s latest tweet might seem to be just his latest bizarre and outrageous comment, some observers have suggested that it might very well be part of a carefully considered political strategy, as his 78-year-old father, who has been Uganda’s ruler since 1986, is thought to be grooming him to take the reins of power.
“That family controls Uganda,” said Peter Kagwanja, president and CEO of the Africa Policy Institute. “His mother is in the cabinet and he is the prince, waiting to succeed his father.
“Muhoozi provokes, then his father arranges for him to go and apologize, and in this way he is introduced into the circles of leaders.”
However, Kainerugaba denies any ambition to rule his country. In a message posted immediately before the one saying that he would take over from his father if he got enough retweets and likes, he wrote: “Some people keep saying I want to be president? Frankly speaking that has never been in my mind.”
Some people keep saying I want to be President? Frankly speaking that has never been in my mind. I’m already the leader of my generation! That’s the highest honour I can think of. Our generation will be the greatest!!
— Muhoozi Kainerugaba (@mkainerugaba) December 5, 2022
Time will tell whether he gets enough likes and retweets to convince him to change his mind.
Not everyone in Uganda enjoys as much freedom on Twitter. Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, a prominent Ugandan author and lawyer, has said he was tortured while in detention after sharing a series of tweets that were judged to be insulting to Kainerugaba and his father.
DUBAI: The wife of Paris Saint-Germain’s Achraf Hakimi went to a French court seeking a divorce and half his wealth following his involvement in an alleged rape, but walked away empty-handed.
To the 36-year-old Spanish wife Hiba Abouk’s surprise, the Moroccan defender had no properties or money in the bank, or so she was told by the court, as Hakimi had registered his fortune in his mother’s name.
According to media reports, the wife lodged her divorce claim and demanded half of the World Cup star’s fortune before she discovered the bitter truth that Hakimi’s mother had it all.
French prosecutors said in March that 24-year-old Hakimi had been indicted on rape charges after being questioned by investigators.
Following the news that Hakimi had been placed under judicial supervision, Abouk, who at the time was holidaying in Dubai with their two children, was reported to have decided to part from her husband. Hakimi and Abouk had been married in February 2020.
The media reported that court officials had told Abouk that her husband legally owned nothing and that all his millions, and even his PSG salary, were registered under his mother’s name.
Morocco World News reported last year that the star was the sixth highest-paid African footballer, earning more than $215,000 a week.
His wife was astonished when she was told by the court that more than 80 percent of his salary is credited to his mother’s bank account.
He appears to have no properties, cars, or jewelry registered in his name.
Media reports have estimated Hakimi’s wealth to exceed $70 million. It is registered in the name of his mother, who purchases everything he wants.
Hakimi’s lawyer, Fanny Colin, said that her client being indicted was an “obligatory step for any person being accused of rape,” and would allow the footballer to defend himself.
MOTRIL, Spain: A 50-year-old Spanish mountain climber emerged Friday from an underground cave where she spent 500 days in seclusion as part of an experiment on the effects of isolation on the human body.
Wearing dark sunglasses, Beatriz Flamini smiled and embraced family members who had gathered to greet her as she climbed out of the cave near Motril in southern Spain.
“I haven’t talked to anyone for a year and a half, only myself,” the experienced mountaineer and solo climber told reporters, calling the experience “excellent, unbeatable.”
Flamini began her challenge on November 21, 2021 — before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and while the world was still in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic.
She remained 70 meters (230 feet) underground, except for a week when she was forced to leave the cave because an Internet router that allowed her to call for help in an emergency broke down.
While the problem was being fixed, Flamini remained in isolation in a tent, she and members of her team told daily newspaper El Pais and other Spanish media.
“I don’t know what has happened in the world… for me it is still November 21, 2021,” she told reporters after leaving the cave.
Flamini said she spent her time reading with the aid of artificial lights, exercising, and knitting woolly hats.
She was monitored by a technical team, who left food at an exchange point in the cave without having contact with her.
Flamini had two cameras to document her experience, which will be turned into a documentary by Spanish production company Dokumalia.
“There have been many challenges of this type, but none with all the rules that were set,” said David Reyes of the Andalusian Federation of Speleology, who was in charge of her security.
“Being alone and in total isolation, without contact with the outside, without (natural) light, without time references,” he told reporters.
Spanish Tourism Minister Hector Gomez called it an “extreme endurance test,” which he hoped would have “great value” for science.
Flamini said one of the toughest moments came when the cave was invaded by flies, but she “never” considered abandoning the challenge.
“There have been difficult moments, and it is true that there have been very beautiful moments, and both are what made it possible to carry one,” she said.
“I got along very well with myself,” she added.
NEW DELHI: An Indian farmer whose extraordinary bond with a large bird made him a social media star has asked for his feathered friend to be set free after it was captured by wildlife authorities.
Mohammad Arif rescued the injured Sarus crane — a crimson-necked wetlands species that can grow up to 1.8 meters (six feet) in height — and nursed it back to health.
He set it free six weeks later, but the crane remained near his home in the city of Amethi, trailing the farmer when he went for bike rides and eating out of his hands.
“The bird would stay with its family during the day and return in the evenings. Or in the afternoons when it was hungry it would come and wait at our door,” Arif, 30, told AFP on Thursday.
Videos of the bird and his human guardian went viral on social media and Arif amassed nearly 300,000 Instagram followers by documenting their exploits.
Their remarkable friendship was rudely interrupted last month when authorities captured the crane and later brought it to a zoo in Kanpur, a city more than four hours’ drive away.
The crane is currently in a small quarantine cage, but Arif has asked for the bird — which he refers to simply as “friend” — to be released.
Arif went to visit the crane on Tuesday and video of their emotional reunion was shared online, with footage showing the bird flapping its wings excitedly and jumping up and down.
“The moment I reached the zoo, it recognized my voice,” said Arif. “It appeared quite distressed. Maybe it thought I will get him released from the prison.”
Media reports of the bird’s plight have led to an outpouring of sympathy from the Indian public, with nearly 4,000 people signing an online petition demanding the crane’s freedom.
“The crane committed no crime. Is being friendly with human beings a crime?” text accompanying the petition said.
The Sarus crane is the tallest flying bird in the world and is listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Less than 20,000 of the species remain in India, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
Arif said his friend should be released either into the forest or a bird sanctuary.
“It has never lived in a cage before, it has always lived free,” he said.
He was also confident the bird would return to his home.
“The moment they release it, it will come back to me,” he said.
WASHINGTON: The 2019 release of the first image of a black hole was hailed as a significant scientific achievement. But truth be told, it was a bit blurry — or, as one astrophysicist involved in the effort called it, a “fuzzy orange donut.”
Scientists on Thursday unveiled a new and improved image of this black hole — a behemoth at the center of a nearby galaxy — mining the same data used for the earlier one but improving its resolution by employing image reconstruction algorithms to fill in gaps in the original telescope observations.
Hard to observe by their very nature, black holes are celestial entities exerting gravitational pull so strong no matter or light can escape.
The ring of light — that is, the material being sucked into the voracious object — seen in the new image is about half the width of how it looked in the previous picture. There is also a larger “brightness depression” at the center — basically the donut hole — caused by light and other matter disappearing into the black hole.
The image remains somewhat blurry due to the limitations of the data underpinning it — not quite ready for a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, but an advance from the 2019 version.
This supermassive black hole resides in a galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, about 54 million light-years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This galaxy, with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun, is larger and more luminous than our Milky Way.
“I affectionately refer to the previous image as the ‘fuzzy orange donut,’ and have been referring to this image as the ‘skinny donut,’ which sounds incredibly unappetizing. We’ve also discussed ‘diet donut,’ which is equally unappetizing,” said astrophysicist Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, lead author of the research published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The study’s four authors are members of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, the international collaboration begun in 2012 with the goal of directly observing a black hole’s immediate environment. A black hole’s event horizon is the point beyond which anything — stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation — gets swallowed into oblivion.
Medeiros said she and her colleagues plan to use the same technique to improve upon the image of the only other black hole ever pictured — released last year showing the one inhabiting the Milky Way’s center, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*.
The M87 black hole image stems from data collected by seven radio telescopes at five locations on Earth that essentially create a planet-sized observational dish.
“The EHT is a very sparse array of telescopes. This is something we cannot do anything about because we need to put our telescopes on the tops of mountains and these mountains are few and far apart from each other. Most of the Earth is covered by oceans,” said Georgia Tech astrophysicist and study co-author Dimitrios Psaltis.
“As a result, our telescope array has a lot of ‘holes’ and we need to rely on algorithms that allow us to fill in the missing data,” Psaltis added. “The image we report in the new paper is the most accurate representation of the black hole image that we can obtain with our globe-wide telescope.”
The machine-learning technique they used is called PRIMO, short for “principal-component interferometric modeling.”
“This is the first time we have used machine learning to fill in the gaps where we don’t have data,” Medeiros said. “We use a large data set of high-fidelity simulations as a training set, and find an image that is consistent with the data and also is broadly consistent with our theoretical expectations. The fact that the previous EHT results robustly demonstrated that the image is a ring allows us to assume so in our analysis.”
WASHINGTON: Ben Ferencz, the last living prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, who tried Nazis for genocidal war crimes and was among the first outside witnesses to document the atrocities of Nazi labor and concentration camps, has died. He had just turned 103 in March.
Ferencz died Friday evening in Boynton Beach, Florida, according to St. John’s University law professor John Barrett, who runs a blog about the Nuremberg trials. The death also was confirmed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
“Today the world lost a leader in the quest for justice for victims of genocide and related crimes,” the museum tweeted.
Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz immigrated as a very young boy with his parents to New York to escape rampant antisemitism. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Ferencz joined the US Army in time to take part in the Normandy invasion during World War II. Using his legal background, he became an investigator of Nazi war crimes against US soldiers as part of a new War Crimes Section of the Judge Advocate’s Office.
When US intelligence reports described soldiers encountering large groups of starving people in Nazi camps watched over by SS guards, Ferencz followed up with visits, first at the Ohrdruf labor camp in Germany and then at the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. At those camps and later others, he found bodies “piled up like cordwood” and “helpless skeletons with diarrhea, dysentery, typhus, TB, pneumonia, and other ailments, retching in their louse ridden bunks or on the ground with only their pathetic eyes pleading for help,” Ferencz wrote in an account of his life.
“The Buchenwald concentration camp was a charnel house of indescribable horrors,” Ferencz wrote. “There is no doubt that I was indelibly traumatized by my experiences as a war crimes investigator of Nazi extermination centers. I still try not to talk or think about the details.”
At one point toward the end of the war, Ferencz was sent to Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps to search for incriminating documents but came back empty-handed.
After the war, Ferencz was honorably discharged from the US Army and returned to New York to begin practicing law. But that was short-lived. Because of his experiences as a war crimes investigator, he was recruited to help prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials, which had begun under the leadership of US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Before leaving for Germany, he married his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude.
At the age of 27, with no previous trial experience, Ferencz became chief prosecutor for a 1947 case in which 22 former commanders were charged with murdering over 1 million Jews, Romani and other enemies of the Third Reich in Eastern Europe. Rather than depending on witnesses, Ferencz mostly relied on official German documents to make his case. All the defendants were convicted, and more than a dozen were sentenced to death by hanging even though Ferencz hadn’t asked for the death penalty.
“At the beginning of April 1948, when the long legal judgment was read, I felt vindicated,” he wrote. “Our pleas to protect humanity by the rule of law had been upheld.”
With the war crimes trials winding down, Ferencz went to work for a consortium of Jewish charitable groups to help Holocaust survivors regain properties, homes, businesses, art works, Torah scrolls, and other Jewish religious items that had been confiscated from them by the Nazis. He also later assisted in negotiations that would lead to compensation to the Nazi victims.
In later decades, Ferencz championed the creation of an international court which could prosecute any government’s leaders for war crimes. Those dreams were realized in 2002 with establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, though its effectiveness has been limited by the failure of countries like the United States to participate.
Ferencz is survived by a son and three daughters. His wife died in 2019.
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