Prominent Nigerian senator Orji Uzor Kalu has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after being found guilty of 39 fraud charges amounting to $19.6m (£14.9m). Kalu is a member of President Muhammadu Buhari’s All Progressives Congress and a chief whip in the federal parliament’s upper house. He was accused,...
US President Donald Trump and French leader Emmanuel Macron have set out opposing views ahead of a Nato summit. In an occasionally tense press conference, the two politicians sparred over Nato’s role, Turkey, and Islamic State group (IS) fighters. Mr Trump had described Mr Macron’s comments about Nato as “nasty”,...
Evidence for impeaching US President Donald Trump for misconduct in office is “overwhelming”, according to the panel leading the impeachment inquiry. The president placed personal political interests “above the national interests of the United States”, it states in a key report to House lawmakers. He did so by trying to...
One of the people stabbed to death in Friday’s attack at London Bridge has been named as 25-year-old University of Cambridge graduate Jack Merritt. He was one of two people killed when 28-year-old Usman Khan launched the attack at a Cambridge University conference on prisoner rehabilitation. Khan, who had been...
Suriname’s President Desi Bouterse has been sentenced to 20 years in prison over the execution of 15 political opponents in 1982. Bouterse, 74, is currently on an official visit in China and will have two weeks to appeal against the conviction. He was found guilty of planning and ordering the...
The man who carried out the stabbing attack at London Bridge was a former prisoner convicted of a terrorism offence, the BBC has learned. The attacker was out of prison on licence at the time of the attack, in which two people were killed and three were injured, sources said....
US President Donald Trump has signed into law a bill that supports pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. The Human Rights and Democracy Act mandates an annual review, to check if Hong Kong has enough autonomy to justify its special status with the US. Mr Trump said he signed the law...
A 23-year-old Ghanaian based in Canada, Samuel Opoku, has been arrested for allegedly throwing buckets of faecal matter at five people in three separate attacks. Opoku has been charged with five counts of assault with a weapon and five counts of mischief interfering with property. The Toronto Police allege the...
Campaigners have hailed the launch of Nigeria’s first sex offender register as a vital step towards tackling reported cases of sexual abuse, which are rising across the country. The publicly accessible online register of people prosecuted for sexual violence since 2015 will allow public bodies and police authorities to conduct...
People in northern Nigeria are celebrating the renaming of their village from Area of Idiots to Area of Plenty. The local emir announced the Hausa-language name change after residents complained that they had been mocked for years and were ashamed to tell people where they came from. “It was shameful...
Australian intelligence officials have confirmed they are investigating allegations of a plot to plant a Chinese spy in the nation’s parliament. The allegations – first aired by local network Nine – assert that a suspected Chinese espionage ring approached a Chinese-Australian man to run as an MP. The Australian government...
Hong Kong’s opposition pro-democracy movement has made unprecedented gains in the Chinese territory’s district council elections, early results show. According to the figures, pro-democracy candidates have won 278 seats so far, and pro-Beijing candidates 42. Despite fears the vote could be disrupted or cancelled over the unrest, it went ahead...
The Conservative Party is set to launch its general election manifesto, promising to bring back the Withdrawal Agreement Bill before Christmas to achieve Brexit by the end of January. Boris Johnson will unveil the document in the West Midlands on Sunday. It will include a headline promise to “get Brexit...
Pro-democracy protest groups in Hong Kong are urging people not to disrupt Sunday’s local elections in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. They hope the polls will send a message to the government in Beijing after five months of political unrest. The authorities have threatened to suspend voting if there is serious...
The founder and CEO of one of Nigeria’s largest airlines, Air Peace, has been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on charges of bank fraud and money laundering for the alleged illegal movement of more than $20 million, the department said. Allen Onyema was accused of transferring the money...
Niger is changing its national anthem to remove references to former colonial power France almost 60 years after gaining independence. Minister of Cultural Renaissance Assoumana Malam Issa says the government wants to introduce a new anthem to serve as “a sort of war cry reaching into our patriotic core” –...
As part of a memorandum signed between the two nations last year, Beijing will finance $2 billion worth of rail, road and bridge networks, and in exchange, China will be granted access 5% of Ghana’s bauxite reserves. The deal has drawn criticism from environmental activists, political opposition, and international government...
Former President John Dramani Mahama will on November 23 speak at the Young African Leaders Summit to empower youth on the continent. The Summit which is a gathering of young people across the continent, aimed at collating ideas from Africa’s finest youth figures that will be aggregated into relevant themes...
The president of Oxford Union has resigned over a row involving a blind student who was “violently” removed from a society debate. Ebenezer Azamati was “accosted” by a security guard when he tried to return to a seat he had earlier reserved before the discussion on 17 October. On Saturday,...
Ghana and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have signed five co-operation agreements aimed at deepening the bonds of friendship between the two countries. They pacts include a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the exemption of entry visa requirements, an agreement for the promotion and reciprocal protection of investments and an...
The US has shifted its position on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, no longer viewing them as inconsistent with international law. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the status of the West Bank was for Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate. Israel welcomed the move – a reversal...
KPMG has not renewed its sponsorship of the Duke of York’s entrepreneurship initiative, Pitch@Palace. The accountancy firm is thought to have made the decision at the end of October. The controversy over the prince’s ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is understood to have been one reason behind...
The US has shifted its position on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, no longer viewing them as inconsistent with international law. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the status of the West Bank was for Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate. Israel welcomed the move – a reversal...
Ghana and the United Arab Emirates have signed five (5) Co-operation Agreements and Memoranda of Understanding, in different sectors of their respective economies, aimed at deepening the ties of co-operation and the bonds of friendship that exist between the two countries. The agreements were signed on Monday, 18th November, 2019,...
Jennifer Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence and a career foreign service officer, is scheduled to appear before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. In his Sunday tweet, Trump resurfaced an unfounded accusation he has raised against other officials who have testified in the probe, characterizing Williams as...
