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    Zohran Mamdani’s identity may seem complex but to Ugandans he is simply their ‘own son’

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    Amid the trees clustered with jackfruit and the boda boda motorcycles weaving precariously around Kampala’s congested roads earlier this year was a campaign poster for Katongole Singh, an immaculately coiffed candidate who positively beamed alongside the president, Yoweri Museveni.With a Sikh Indian surname and an indigenous Ugandan first name, Singh is no rarity in the Ugandan capital, where people of Indian descent have lived for more than 125 years. Many people here boast a multi-hyphenated “African Indian” identity – as indeed does the Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 33-year-old running for mayor of New York City.Mamdani – who made shock waves this summer when he defeated Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic primary, setting himself up for a likely victory in the mayoral race this November – was born in Uganda, and moved to New York when he was a young boy. In July Mamdani even returned here for his marriage ceremony, a sprawling three-day affair in Kampala.The same month, the New York Times reported that an anonymous source – alleged to be Jordan Lasker, a well-known eugenicist and neo-Nazi – had hacked internal data showing that on an application to Columbia University in 2009, Mamdani had identified his race as both “Asian” and “Black or African American”.The story sparked outrage from some critics who alleged Mamdani was weaponising identity politics in order to gain preferential access to the prestigious university. (He was not accepted.)Mamdani said he had ticked what he described as “constrained” boxes to capture the “fullness of my background”, and that he did not see himself as African American or Black, but as “an American who was born in Africa”.In Kampala, however, it is clear that Ugandans of Indian descent are unquestioningly considered African – both by Black indigenous Ugandans and by themselves.View image in fullscreen“We have people from India with Ugandan indigenous names, and they speak the Ugandan language,” said Sarah Kirikumwino, a 20-year-old communications student. “They will tell you they actually do not know anything about India because they were born here.”Be that as it may, Indian cultural influence is easy to identify here, not least through food. Near Kampala’s Acacia mall, a Black Ugandan woman selling chai made the sign of the cross before dipping her vegetable samosa into an emerald green chutney.“Asian cuisine such as samosas, chapatis and chai is very well integrated into Ugandan society,” said Aman Kapur, a Kenyan restaurateur of Indian descent, who catered for Mamdani’s wedding. “They were introduced here in the early 19th century by the Asians who were brought in to work.”Mamdani’s mother, the Oscar-nominated film director Mira Nair, is Indian. His father – the post-colonial scholar Mahmood Mamdani – was born to Indian parents in India.Kapoor said Mamdani’s wedding feast was as mixed as the heritage shared between him and his American-Syrian wife, who he met on Hinge: a smorgasbord of Mediterranean, Indian, Pakistani and Ugandan cuisine, including servings of rolex – a staple Ugandan street food of chapati rolled around eggs, which shares the same name as the Swiss watch.The backlash Mamdani faced over his identity reminds Mark Niwagaba – a student at Kampala’s Makerere University – of the “birther movement” conspiracy theory, in which Donald Trump claimed Barack Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen, as the constitution requires of presidents.“Obama’s dad was of Kenyan origin and the mum was Hawaiian – he wasn’t Black enough, and he wasn’t white enough,” the 24-year-old said at an open-mic poetry night at Kardamom and Koffee, a cafe Mira Nair is said to frequent. (Obama’s mother was born in Kansas and studied at the University of Hawaii.) “Mamdani seems to face the same challenge.”The history of Indians in Uganda has not been without strife. South Asian migrants – most of them Indian – were brought into the country by British colonial powers as indentured labourers from 1894. It was Ugandan Indians who built a 600-mile railway that linked Uganda’s side of Lake Victoria to the port of Mombasa in Kenya.View image in fullscreenFavoured by the British to manage tea and coffee plantations, they quickly established successful businesses and gained affluence while Black Ugandans struggled.Then in 1972, Idi Amin expelled about 50,000 Ugandans of south Asian origin, giving them 90 days to leave.Nevertheless, despite now making up less than 1% of the population, Ugandans of Indian descent remain a thriving community here, contributing 60% of tax revenues. From signs for the billion-dollar Madhuvani group to hotels like the four-star Fairway Boutique hotel – one of Uganda’s first hotels, founded by the Jaffer family – the affluence of Ugandans of Indian descent can be seen across the capital.Many have lived their whole lives in Uganda and are accepted as African. Yashwant Patel, 71, who was born in Kampala and now lives in Birmingham, in England, recalls childhoods spent swimming in Lake Victoria, sprawled across the city of Entebbe, and eating mangoes and guavas.“Nobody looked at us like we were invading the place,” Patel recalls. “On the way to Entebbe … you could buy a whole basketful of mangoes which we would eat. I can still remember the juice! And the mango seeds were of course brought from India. Although I hadn’t been to India, my mother and father would say, ‘this is like being in India!’”Many people here consider Mamdani absolutely African. “Our own son is taking up a big position in the US, and we Ugandans are very happy with that,” said Fred Ndaula, a Ugandan tour guide in Kampala. “They are Ugandans. This is their country.”Identity in the US can be complex, however, and not everyone agrees that Mamdani has the right to claim an “African” identity. “African American” is often used to specify the people of Black African descent who were violently amputated from their history and their ancestry through the transatlantic slave trade.View image in fullscreenThe case of Rachel Dolezal – an academic and former president of a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – is one infamous example of a white woman who masqueraded as Black until she was exposed in 2015.“This has generated African-American resentment, and therefore not a surprise that Mamdani’s attempt to accurately reflect his complex heritage on a form designed for binary Black/white thinking would ruffle many US African-Americans,” said Dr Kim D Butler, a Black historian and associate professor at the department of Africana studies at Rutgers University.But Mamdani, she added, “is more closely connected to a specific African country than I have yet to discover for my paternal ancestors, who worked the land of a revolutionary war officer, having left a land whose name we no longer remember these 200+ years.”She added: “‘He’s not really African’ conveys a subtle message we have heard spoken about us – “We’re not really American.”Indeed, Indians from Africa do not always fit easily into US racial categories, notes Amishi Aggarwal, an Indian researcher at the University of Oxford who has been working with refugee communities in Uganda.He points to one of Nair’s films, Mississippi Masala, as a reference point. The film follows a Ugandan-Indian family forced to flee Amin’s Uganda for the US, where one of the daughters falls in love with an African American man played by Denzel Washington. The film shows the racism expressed by her family – even as they face racism, too, as immigrants in the deep south.“There’s a lot of dynamics around caste and class within the Indian-Ugandan community as well, and there can be internal racism,” says Aggarwal.Mamdani’s own history is even more complex: his family moved from Uganda to South Africa, where his father Mahmood taught at the University of Cape Town. The young Mamdani’s affinity to his African Ugandan identity could be attributed in part to the work and activism of his father, the prolific author of several books including on colonialism, the Rwandan genocide, Darfur and the so-called war on terror.Mahmood picked up that activism after moving to the US, where, inspired by Uganda’s independence movement in the 1960s, he joined the civil rights movement and was involved with the Montgomery bus boycotts. He also named his son Zohran Kwame after Ghana’s first democratic president, the icon of Pan-Africanism Kwame Nkrumah.Historian Shamil Jeppie, who worked with Mahmood at the university, first met Zohran Mamdani as a child there. As an anti-apartheid student activist, Jeppie saw not only how race was weaponised by the apartheid regime, but how centuries of migration and mixing of communities created multi-hyphenated identities and communities like his own that couldn’t be understood in the global north.“‘African’ is not a race,” said Jeppie. “Africa is a continent, a space. It’s not co-terminous with race, language or religion. It is populated by all varieties of languages, religion and ethnic groups.”He says it’s no surprise Mamdani’s identity is too complex to fit neatly into a box on a university application. “‘African’, ‘Asian’, ‘Muslim’ – for us Africans, these are not contradictions at all.” More

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      Rwanda accepts seven people from US as part of deportation deal

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      Seven people have arrived in Rwanda as part of a deal to accept deportees from the US, the Rwandan government has said.“The first group of seven vetted migrants arrived in Rwanda in mid-August … Three of the individuals have expressed a desire to return to their home countries, while four wish to stay and build lives in Rwanda,” Yolande Makolo, a government spokesperson, said on Thursday.Officials offered no information on the nationalities of the seven deportees. Rwanda said on 5 August it would accept up to 250 people from the US, and that it would have “the ability to approve each individual proposed for resettlement”.The first arrivals would be “accommodated by an international organisation with visits by the International Organisation on Migration and Rwandan social services”, Makolo said.Donald Trump’s administration has been pushing a deportation drive, negotiating controversial arrangements to send people to third countries, including South Sudan and Eswatini, formerly Swaziland.Rwanda signed a lucrative deal in 2022 to accept migrants from Britain, only for the agreement to be scrapped when Labour came to power last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKigali agreed to the scheme with Washington because “nearly every Rwandan family has experienced the hardships of displacement”, Makolo said earlier this month. Those who arrived in Rwanda would be provided with training, healthcare and accommodation, she added.The Trump administration has said third-country deportations are necessary because home nations sometimes refuse to accept the deportees.Rights experts have said the deportations may break international law by sending people to countries where they face the risk of torture, abduction and other abuses.Rwanda, which has a population of 14 million people, claims to be one of the most stable countries in Africa and has drawn praise for its modern infrastructure. However, the agreement with Britain drew criticism from rights groups and faced a long-running legal challenge.President Paul Kagame’s government has been accused of human rights violations and of crushing political dissent and press freedoms. More

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      ‘Debilitating consequences’ in Uganda after USAID cuts – photo essay

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      In northern Uganda, the unfolding consequences of US funding cuts to international humanitarian aid are palpable. Thousands of families have been living in refugee camps along the border with South Sudan for almost a decade, and newcomers are reported every day as the never-ending conflict within the country intensifies.Uganda has long been a crossroads of migration, shaped by historical and contemporary population movements. Today, it hosts over 1.9 million refugees and asylum seekers – one of the largest refugee populations in the world. Persistent violence in South Sudan and the eruption of armed conflict in Sudan have displaced millions. As both countries spiral further into instability, Uganda remains one of the few safe havens in the region.The decision by Donald Trump’s administration to cut support to USAID, a giant in the international humanitarian assistance network, disrupted the lives of millions of people across the continent, and other humanitarian groups were impacted. In March, the World Food Programme (WFP), an international non-profit, announced a cut to food distribution to 1 million refugees in Uganda.The AVSI Foundation, along with many other humanitarian actors, was forced to abandon a project that employed more than 200 local field officers, leaving their families without a steady income, and thousands of refugees unable to enroll in agricultural training, schools, or start small businesses. Before the end of 2024, they had identified 13,000 households to receive support that vanished just a few days after Trump’s inauguration day.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenAmong a slew of executive orders, and actions by the “department of governmental efficiency” (Doge), led then by Elon Musk, the funding cuts dashed people’s hopes and expectations of leaving extreme poverty. A general sentiment of failure and retreat spread among the refugee and host communities. In the following months, a consequent rise in suicides was reported, as Jatuporn Lee, a UNHCR local representative, explained.“Families are struggling to cope with the impact of reduced support, increased food insecurity, higher land rental costs, growing mental health and psychosocial challenges, surges in gender-based violence, school drop-outs, child neglect, abandonment, and child labor,” she said. “We would be cautious about drawing a direct link between funding cuts and suicide rates. As a non-clinical specialist, drawing such a correlation can be misleading. However, these concerning vulnerability trends are clear indicators of growing vulnerability and underscore the urgent need for sustained donor support to promote refugees’ protection, welbeing, and social and economic inclusion.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn April and May, I spent two weeks in several northern Ugandan districts, including Lamwo, Kitgum, Madi-Okollo and Terego, at the very time when new refugees from South Sudan and Sudan were arriving at the border seeking safety. Olive Ngamita, the representative of AVSI Foundation in Kampala, said that 200 humanitarians in Kitgum had to leave, and that they had paid several months of rent in advance, relying on their upcoming salaries.The absence of international humanitarian support left a vacuum in the ecosystem of refugee settlements and host communities. Teachers who stop receiving their salary volunteer to maintain continuity in their students’ education, but struggle to support their families. Since the beginning of 2025, children and youth have been abandoning schools in large numbers, unable to afford the enrollment fees that were once subsidized. Small restaurants and street food vendors, who had looked forward to expanding their activities through loans and microcredit initiatives, have instead scaled back their operations.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn the quiet corners of these settlements, there is a visible loss of rhythm – routines once built around schooling, training sessions and market days have been disrupted. The absence of humanitarian programming leaves young people idle, exposing them to greater risks of recruitment, trafficking or exploitation.Trump and his cohorts replied to harsh criticism of the cuts from the agency’s officials and the humanitarian world, saying they would not cut life-saving aid. Massive humanitarian operations in critical situations have the primary goal of providing food and access to healthcare, indeed. But the bigger picture is to sustain a community, not to let it free fall.One of the first people I met in the Palabek camp in Lamwo was Viola, a 23-year-old pregnant woman who, unable to treat malaria and lower her fever, miscarried. Antimalarials were not delivered to the camp’s clinic. The supply chain, because of the freeze on international aid, had been interrupted. Her story is not an exception. In places where disease can spread fast, even short interruptions in supplies can be fatal.View image in fullscreenUSAID was meant to secure the United States’s dominance as part of a system aimed at stabilizing countries and strengthening diplomatic relations through cooperation. The long-term ramifications of this policy shift are only beginning to emerge. What is unfolding in Uganda today may soon reflect broader regional patterns, where donor disengagement risks creating power vacuums ripe for instability.As Nicholas Apiyo, a Ugandan lawyer and human rights defender, explains: “There is an absolute uncertainty in the future. National and international organizations that depended on USAID have either closed or scaled down their operations. People are left with no continuous care, and many have already lost their lives.“The USAID office in Kampala, is now closed, with debilitating consequences. Although funding for life-saving aid partially resumed, the disruption left a heavy toll on the beneficiaries of treatment to cure Ebola, HIV and malaria. A restoration enabling the supply chain to resume will take time, and lives will be lost in the process.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenUganda will have to adjust to a new funding mechanism, which, according to Apiyo, must increase its national budget for assistance. African countries could now strengthen their ties with Russia, India, Iran and China – those countries are seen as more predictable and less “schizophrenic”, as Apiyo puts it.“You need soft power to rule the world. The colonial roots of the humanitarian system have always had their negative consequences in the majority world as a way to extend its dependency on the donor.”An example of successIn the Madi-Okollo and Terego districts, located near a triple border, hundreds of refugees from the DRC and South Sudan cross into Uganda daily at unofficial border crossing points, converging to form a growing community in established refugee settlements. There, interventions that received funding before the imposition of the new policies remain operational, promoting sustainable economic practices and creating job opportunities. However, educators are concerned that without further funding, those children, out of school without job opportunities, could be driven to illegal survival strategies and be at higher risk of forced recruitment in their country of origin, contributing to internal instability. Local teachers and social workers spoke of “a race against time”, where every month of consistent support can be the difference between a child learning to read or joining an armed group.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenAVSI Foundation implemented the Step – Transition from Emergency to Sustainable Development Program, a project funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation through the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, in collaboration with the Office of the Ugandan Prime Minister, UNHCR, local leaders and partners. It aimed at improving the socioeconomic stability of refugees and host communities by addressing their priority needs through a multisectoral approach. The project reached 600 direct participants.The project promoted the use of renewable technologies among households, increasing adoption from 0% to 61%. These included briquette production, small-scale irrigation, water harvesting, energy-saving cooking solutions, and partnerships with private renewable energy providers.View image in fullscreenBy the end of the initiative, 92% of families reported higher agricultural production. This was supported through training, access to farming tools and seeds, and the establishment of backyard gardens with a reliable water supply. The program also formed 24 production and marketing groups, bringing together refugees and host community members to improve cooperation and create income opportunities.Support systems for the most vulnerable were strengthened, offering mental health and psychosocial services, gender-based violence prevention, and legal assistance through community dialogues, legal clinics and coordinated referral pathways. Cases of abuse and neglect were promptly referred as a result of child protection and birth registration initiatives.Special focus was placed on pregnant adolescents, young women and youth, who received life skills training, mentorship and sport therapy, resulting in 80% showing positive behavior change. Positive parenting sessions also improved family relationships, with follow-up home visits and group mentoring helping communities sustain these changes. These models – holistic, inclusive, and locally adapted – should guide future international efforts. What they demonstrate is clear: when investments are sustained, results follow.View image in fullscreen More

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      What will the AI revolution mean for the global south?

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      View image in fullscreenI come from Trinidad and Tobago. As a country that was once colonized by the British, I am wary of the ways that inequalities between the global north and global south risk being perpetuated in the digital age.When we consider the lack of inclusion of the global south in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI), I think about how this translates to an eventual lack of economic leverage and geopolitical engagement in this technology that has captivated academics within the industrialised country I reside, the United States.As a scientist, I experienced an early rite of passage into the world of Silicon Valley, the land of techno-utopianism, and the promise of AI as a net positive for all. But, as an academic attending my first academic AI conference in 2019, I began to notice inconsistencies in the audience to whom the promise of AI was directed. AI researchers can often identify consistent choices for locations where such conferences are hosted, and where they are not. NeurIPS, one of the top AI conferences, has highlighted annual issues for obtaining visas for academic attendees and citizens from the African continent. Attending such a prestigious conference in the field grants one the opportunity to gain access to peers in the field, new collaborations and feedback on one’s work.I often hear the word “democratisation” within the AI community, an implication of equity in access, opportunity and merit for contribution regardless of one’s country of origin. Associate professor of economics Fadhel Kaboub talks about how “a lack of vision for oneself results in being a part of someone else’s vision”, reflecting on how systematically lacking an access to infrastructure results in local trade deficits in economies.As in the time of Nafta’s promise of “free trade”, promises of “AI democratisation” today still exist and benefit mainly countries with access to tech hubs not located in the global south. While the United States and other industrialized countries dominate in access to computational power and research activity, much of the low-paid manual labour involved in labelling data and the global underclass in artificial intelligence still exists in the global south.Much like coffee, cocoa, bauxite and sugar cane are produced in the global south, exported cheaply and sold at a premium in more industrialized countries, over the past few years we have seen influence in AI inextricably tied to energy consumption. Countries that can afford to consume more energy have more leverage in reinforcing power to shape the future direction of AI and what is considered valuable within the AI academic community.In 2019, Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri published Ghost Work, which exposed the invisible labour of technology today, and at the beginning of my tenure at graduate school, the heavily cited paper Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence was published. It has been five years since these seminal works. What would an AI community inspired by the Brics organisation, which united major emerging economies to advocate for themselves in a system dominated by western countries, look like for the global south?I often ask myself how AI has contributed to our legacy, and whose stories it won’t tell. Has AI mitigated issues of mistrust and corruption in less-resourced countries? Has it benefited our civic communities or narrowed educational gaps between less-resourced regions? How will it make society better, and whose society will it make better? Who will be included in that future?A historical mistrust can impede adoption by developing countries. Furthermore, many developing countries have weak institutional infrastructures, poor or nonexistent laws and regulatory frameworks for data projection and cybersecurity. Therefore, even with an improved information infrastructure, they are likely to function at a disadvantage in the global information marketplace.A currency is only as good as its perceived global trust. When thinking about the democratization in AI and a vision of what it could be in years to come, AI’s survival requires including more perspectives from regions such as the global south. Countries from the global south should work together to build their own markets and have a model of sovereignty for their data and data labour.Economic models often consider a definition of development that includes a measure of improvement in the quality of life of the most marginalized of its people. It is my hope that in the future that will extend to our evaluation of AI.

      Krystal Maughan is a PhD student at the University of Vermont studying differential privacy and machine learning More

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      in US Politics

      Travelling to Trump’s US is a low-level trauma – here’s what Africans can do about it

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      Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, I reflect on the increasing difficulty of travel and immigration for many from the African continent, and how one country is plotting a smoother path.Parallel experiences of travelView image in fullscreenI have just come back from holiday, and I’m still not used to how different travel is when not using an African passport. My British citizenship, which I acquired about five years ago, has transformed not only my ability to travel at short notice but it has eliminated overnight the intense stress and bureaucratic hurdles involved in applying for visas on my Sudanese passport.It is difficult to explain just how different the lives of those with “powerful” passports are to those without. It is an entirely parallel existence. Gaining permission to travel to many destinations is often a lengthy, expensive and sickeningly uncertain process. A tourist visa to the UK can cost up to £1,000, in addition to the fee for private processing centres that handle much of Europe’s visa applications abroad. And then there is the paperwork: bank statements, employment letters, academic records, certified proof of ownership of assets, and birth and marriage certificates if one is travelling to visit family. This is a non-exhaustive list. For a recent visa application for a family member, I submitted 32 documents.It may sound dramatic but such processes instil a sort of low-level trauma, after submitting to the violation of what feels like a bureaucratic cavity search. And all fees, whatever the decision, are non-refundable. Processing times are in the hands of the visa gods – it once took more than six months for me to receive a US visa. By the time it arrived, the meeting I needed to attend for work had passed by a comically long time.Separation and severed relationshipsView image in fullscreenIt’s not only travel for work or holiday that is hindered by such high barriers to entry. Relationships suffer. It is simply a feature of the world now that many families in the Black diaspora sprawl across continents. Last month Trump restricted entry to the US to nationals from 20 countries, half of which are in Africa. The decision is even crueler when you consider that it applies to countries such as Sudan, whose civil war has prompted many to seek refuge with family abroad.That is not just a political act of limiting immigration, it is a deeply personal one that severs connections between families, friends and partners. Family members of refugees from those countries have also been banned, so they can’t visit relatives who have already managed to emigrate. The International Rescue Committee warned the decision could have “far-reaching impacts on the lives of many American families, including refugees, asylees and green card holders, seeking to be reunified with their loved ones”.A global raising of barriersView image in fullscreenThe fallout of this Trump order is colossal. There are students who are unable to graduate. Spouses unable to join their partners. Children separated from their parents. It’s a severe policy, but shades of it exist elsewhere by other means. The UK recently terminated the rights of foreign care workers and most international students to bring their children and partners to the country. And even for those who simply want to have their family visit them, access is closed to all except those who can clear the high financial hurdles and meet the significant burdens of proof to show that either they can afford to maintain their visitors or that they will return to their home countries.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt was 10 years before I – someone with fairly stable employment and a higher-education qualification – satisfied the Home Office’s requirements and could finally invite my mother to visit. I broke down when I saw her face at arrivals, realising how hard it had been for both of us; the fact that she had not seen the life I had built as an adult. Compare this draconian measure to some countries in the Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia, that have an actual visa category, low-cost and swiftly processed, for parental visits and residency.A new African modelView image in fullscreenBut as some countries shut down, others are opening up. This month, Kenya removed visa requirements for almost all African citizens wanting to visit. Here, finally, there is the sort of regional solidarity that mirrors that of the EU and other western countries.Since it boosts African tourism and makes Kenya an inviting destination for people to gather at short notice for professional or festive reasons, it’s a smart move. But it also sends an important signal to a continent embattled by visa restrictions and divided across borders set by colonial rule.We are not just liabilities, people to be judged on how many resources they might take from a country once allowed in. We are also tourists, friends, relatives, entrepreneurs and, above all, Africans who have the right to meet and mingle without the terror, and yes, contempt, of a suspicious visa process. If the African diaspora is being separated abroad, there is at least now a path to the option that some of us may reunite at home.

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      in US Politics

      Eswatini opposition attacks US deal as ‘human trafficking disguised as deportation’

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      Civil society and opposition groups in Eswatini have expressed outrage after the US deported five men to the country, with the largest opposition party calling it “human trafficking disguised as a deportation deal”.The men, from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, were flown to the small southern African country, an absolute monarchy, last week as the US stepped up deportations to “third countries” after the supreme court cleared them last month.Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, is landlocked by South Africa and Mozambique and has a population of about 1.2 million. It is Africa’s last absolute monarchy and has been ruled by King Mswati III since 1986.The government estimated the five men would be held for about 12 months, a spokesperson, Thabile Mdluli, said, adding: “It could be slightly less or slightly more.”She said Eswatini was ready to receive more deportees, depending on the availability of facilities and negotiations with the US, which has also deported eight people to South Sudan after holding them for weeks in a shipping container in Djibouti, and more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador.Officials have said the men, who were put in solitary confinement, were safely imprisoned in Eswatini. However, they have refused to disclose the terms of the deal, other than to say the US was footing the costs of keeping the men locked up and that they would work with international organisations to deport them to their home countries.View image in fullscreenMany civil society organisations and politicians were not convinced. “This action, carried out without public consultation, adequate preparation, or community engagement, raises urgent questions about legality, transparency, and the safety of both the deported individuals and the people of Eswatini, especially women and girls,” said a coalition of seven women’s groups.The organisations delivered a petition to the US embassy on Monday calling for the US to take back the deportees, for the deportees’ human rights to be respected, and for Eswatini not to become a “dumping ground for unresolved problems from elsewhere”.The groups’ leaders held a protest outside the US embassy on Friday, where they sang, danced and held up signs with messages including: “Whose taxpayers?”, “Eswatini is not a prison for US rejects” and “Take the five criminals back to the US!!”Eswatini’s largest opposition party, the People’s United Democratic Movement (Pudemo), said in a statement: “Pudemo vehemently condemns the treacherous and reckless decision by King Mswati III’s regime to allow the United States of America to dump its most dangerous criminals on Swazi soil.“This is not diplomacy but human trafficking disguised as a deportation deal. It is an insult to all Emaswati who value peace, security, and the sanctity of our homeland.”The coordinating assembly of NGOs, an umbrella group, said the situation was “deeply alarming” and condemned the “stigmatising and dehumanising language used by US officials”. It called for the Eswatini-US agreement to be made public and to be suspended pending “genuine public consultation and transparent national dialogue”.View image in fullscreenTricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security, said in a post on X on 16 July that the men, who she said had been convicted of crimes including child rape, murder and burglary, were “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back”.She added: “These depraved monsters have been terrorising American communities but … they are off of American soil.”Eswatini’s prime minister, Russell Dlamini, told local media on Friday that the government was confident it would safely manage the prisoners. “Eswatini is currently holding inmates who have committed more dangerous crimes than those attributed to the five deportees,” he said.A prison service spokesperson, Baphelele Kunene, said the country’s citizens should not be afraid. “We can confirm that the five inmates in question have been admitted to one of our high-security centres where they are responding very well to the new environment,” he said. “Even though they come from the US, there is no preferential treatment for them as they are guided by the same prison regulations, eat the same food as others and are also expected to exhibit the same and equal amount of respect for prison protocols.”The US state department’s most recent human rights report on Eswatini, in 2023, said there were “credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; [and] political prisoners or detainees”.Political parties are banned from taking part in elections, which the system’s advocates argue makes MPs more representative of their constituents. In September, Pudemo’s leader, Mlungisi Makhanya, was allegedly poisoned in South Africa. The party said it was an assassination attempt, which Eswatini’s government has denied.The Department of Homeland Security has been contacted for comment. More

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      in Elections

      Mamdani Travels to Uganda in Break From Mayoral Campaign

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      Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, said that he and his wife were going to the African country where he was born to celebrate their recent marriage.Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, said on Sunday that he was visiting Uganda, where he was born, in a break from campaigning for the general election in November.In a video posted on X and Bluesky, Mr. Mamdani said he was making the trip to Africa with his wife, Rama Duwaji, whom he married in February, to celebrate their marriage with family and friends.He left the city during the traditional summer lull in the weeks after the June primary, while, at the same time, his most formidable opponent, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, was seeking to strengthen his own run on an independent ballot line with appearances across New York in the aftermath of his surprise defeat by Mr. Mamdani.In a statement, Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who is running for re-election as an independent, criticized his opponent for taking a vacation. (Mr. Adams has taken numerous trips abroad before and after becoming mayor, including a weeklong “spiritual journey” to Ghana shortly after his election in 2021.)“At a time when public safety, housing, and education remain top concerns for working New Yorkers, the mayor is here — managing the responsibilities of running the largest city in America,” Mr. Adams said in a prepared statement. “This election is about who’s prepared to lead, not who can rack up the most passport stamps or press headlines. Eric Adams is working. Others are sightseeing.”A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Mamdani’s spokesman, Jeffrey Lerner, said in a statement that the candidate would return to New York before the end of the month “and looks forward to resuming public events and continuing his campaign to make the most expensive city in America affordable.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump administration to destroy nearly $10m of contraceptives for women overseas

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      The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need.A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000. The contraceptives are primarily long-acting, such as IUDs and birth control implants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives. It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was set to occur by the end of July.“It is unacceptable that the State Department would move forward with the destruction of more than $9m in taxpayer-funded family planning commodities purchased to support women in crisis settings, including war zones and refugee camps,” Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, said in a statement. Shaheen and Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, have introduced legislation to stop the destruction.“This is a waste of US taxpayer dollars and an abdication of US global leadership in preventing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths,” added Shaheen, who in June sent a letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, about the matter.The department decided to destroy the contraceptives because it could not sell them to any “eligible buyers”, in part because of US laws and rules that prohibit sending US aid to organizations that provide abortion services, counsel people about the procedure or advocate for the right to it overseas, according to the state department spokesperson.Most of the contraceptives have less than 70% of their shelf life left before they expire, the spokesperson said, and rebranding and selling the contraceptives could cost several million dollars. However, the aide who visited the warehouse said that the earliest expiration date they saw on the contraceptives was 2027, and that two-thirds of the contraceptives did not have any USAID labels that would need to be rebranded.The eradication of the contraceptives is part of the Trump administration’s months-long demolition of the Agency for International Development (USAID), the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid in the world. After the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) erased 83% of USAID’s programs, Rubio announced in June that USAID’s entire international workforce would be abolished and its foreign assistance programs would be moved to the state department. The agency will be replaced by an organization called America First.In total, the funding cuts to USAID could lead to more than 14m additional deaths by 2030, according to a recent study published in the journal the Lancet. A third of those deaths could be children.“If you have an unintended pregnancy and you end up having to seek unsafe abortion, it’s quite likely that you will die,” said Sarah Shaw, the associate director of advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices, a global family planning organization that works in nearly 40 countries. “If you’re not given the means to space or limit your births, you’re putting your life at risk or your child’s life at risk.”MSI tried to purchase the contraceptives from the US government, Shaw said. But the government would only accept full price – which Shaw said the agency could not afford, given that MSI would also have to shoulder the expense of transportingthe contraceptives and the fact that they are inching closer to their expiration date, which could affect MSI’s ability to distribute them.The state department spokesperson did not specifically respond to a request for comment on Shaw’s allegation, but MSI does provide abortions as part of its global work, which may have led the department to rule it out as an “eligible buyer”.In an internal survey, MSI programs in 10 countries reported that, within the next month, they expect to be out of stock or be on the brink of being out of stock of at least one contraceptive method. The countries include Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Senegal, Kenya and Sierra Leone.Shaw expects the stock to be incinerated. “The fact that the contraceptives are going to be burned when there’s so much need – it’s just egregious,” she said. “It’s disgusting.” The Department of State spokesperson did not respond to a request for information on the planned method of destruction.The destruction of the contraceptives is, to Shaw, emblematic of the overall destruction of a system that once provided worldwide help to women and families. USAID funding is threaded through so much of the global supply chain of family planning aid that, without its money, the chain has come apart. In Mali, Shaw said, USAID helped pay for the gas used by the vehicles that transport contraceptives from a warehouse. Without the gas money, the vehicles were stuck – and so were the contraceptives.“I’ve worked in this sector for over 20 years and I’ve never seen anything on this scale,” Shaw said. “The speed at which they’ve managed to dismantle excellent work and really great progress – I mean, it’s just vanished in weeks.”Other kinds of assistance are also reportedly being wasted. This week, the Atlantic reported that almost 500 metric tons of emergency food were expiring and would be incinerated, rather than being used to feed about 1.5 million children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, almost 800,000 Mpox vaccines that were supposed to be sent to Africa are now unusable because they are too close to their expiration date, according to Politico.The cuts to foreign aid are slated to deepen. Early on Friday morning, Congress passed a bill to claw back roughly $8bn that had been earmarked for foreign assistance.“It’s not just about an empty shelf,” Shaw said. “It’s about unfulfilled potential. It’s about a girl having to drop out of school. It’s about someone having to seek an unsafe abortion and risking their lives. That’s what it’s really about.” More

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      in US Politics

      Lobbyists linked to Donald Trump paid millions by world’s poorest countries

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      Some of the world’s poorest countries have started paying millions to lobbyists linked to Donald Trump to try to offset US cuts to foreign aid, an investigation reveals.Somalia, Haiti and Yemen are among 11 countries to sign significant lobbying deals with figures tied directly to the US president after he slashed US foreign humanitarian assistance.Many states have already begun bartering crucial natural resources – including minerals – in exchange for humanitarian or military support, the investigation by Global Witness found.USAID officially closed its doors last week after Trump’s dismantling of the agency, a move experts warn could cause more than 14 million avoidable deaths over five years.Emily Stewart, Global Witness’s head of policy for transition minerals, said the situation meant that deal making in Washington could become “more desperate and less favourable to low-income countries”, which had become increasingly vulnerable to brutal exploitation of their natural resources.Documents show that within six months of last November’s US election, contracts worth $17m (£12.5m) were signed between Trump-linked lobbying firms and some of the world’s least-developed countries, which were among the highest recipients of USAID.Records submitted under the US Foreign Agents Registration Act reveal some countries signed multiple contracts, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which has endured mass displacement and conflict over its mineral wealth for years.The DRC is primed to sign a mineral deal with the US for support against Rwanda-backed rebels, providing American companies access to lithium, cobalt and coltan.The DRC – a former top-10 USAID recipient – signed contracts worth $1.2m with the lobbyists Ballard Partners.The firm, owned by Brian Ballard, lobbied for Trump well before the 2016 US election and was a leading donor to the US president’s political campaign.Somalia and Yemen signed contracts with BGR Government Affairs – $550,000 and $372,000 respectively.A former BGR partner, Sean Duffy, is now Trump’s transport secretary, one of myriad links between the US president and the lobbying firm.The government of Pakistan, a country that struggles with extreme poverty but is extremely rich in minerals, has signed two contracts with Trump-linked lobbyists worth $450,000 a month.Pakistan is now tied up in deals with multiple individuals in Trump’s inner circle, including the president’s former bodyguard Keith Schiller.Access to key natural resources has become a priority for Trump, particularly rare earth minerals. These are considered critical to US security, but the global supply chains for them are dominated by China.Other nations are offering exclusive access to ports, military bases and rare earths in exchange for US support.Although Global Witness said the revolving door between governments and lobbyists was nothing new, the organisation said it was concerned by the broader, exploitative dynamics driving new deals.Stewart said: “We’re seeing a dramatic cut in aid, combined with an explicit rush for critical minerals, and willingness by the Trump administration to secure deals in exchange for aid or military assistance.“Dealmaking needs to be transparent and fair. It is vital to recognise the role that international aid plays in making a safer world for all, and that aid should retain its distinct role away from trade.” More