Republica Press

Your Business & Political News Source

REPUBLICA PRESS
Your Business & Political News Source

Rwanda

The Cutthroat World of $10 Ice Cream

by

At the time, the upstarts of the borough’s anti-industrial food revolution were looking for any category they could disrupt through local ingredients or handmade production. Brooklynified beer, chocolate and pizza were gathering hype as well as space on store shelves. Yet frozen dessert remained a maltodextrin wasteland.

“We were like, ‘Why is there no great artisan ice cream in New York City?’” Ms. Dundas said.

Ms. Gallivan said there was a “eureka moment” when the women started craving the kind of ice cream that existed in Boston, “where there’s this amazing ice cream tradition.” In New York, “there was like Tasti D-Lite and Baskin-Robbins — nothing worth the calories, as my mom would say.”

Blue Marble’s overarching concept, like that of so many Brooklyn brands, was lofty and vaguely European, featuring “elemental” flavors sourced from upstate farms with unimpeachable organic pedigrees and no candy or breakfast cereal. If the flavorings leaned pious rather than juvenile, crass marketing it was not: Ms. Gallivan, leveraging her expertise in international aid, set up ambitious satellite projects in Haiti and Rwanda, the latter of which continues 10 years on.

And the ice cream was good.

“It’s in the chew,” said Thomas Bucci Jr., a fourth-generation ice cream maker whose Rhode Island factory “co-packs” pints for Blue Marble and other brands. Good ice cream, he said, “has a certain bite, as opposed to the big guys, where it’s just air — it doesn’t even melt.”

To get that texture, Mr. Bucci said, “you can spend $20-30,000 a week on milk and cream alone.” He added — emphatically — that there were no shortcuts.

Compromises beckoned, however, as Blue Marble began racking up successes in its early years, including partnerships with JetBlue and Facebook.

“It’s really hard in a place like New York to not start compromising, because things are expensive and they eat into your margins,” Ms. Gallivan said. Blue Marble refused to cut corners, she said, in the belief that “ultimately quality ingredients and the best ice cream will prevail.”

View Source

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Coronavirus Surges in Kisumu, Kenya

by

KISUMU, Kenya — Before Kenya’s president and other leaders arrived in late May to mark a major public holiday, health officials in Kisumu on Lake Victoria saw disaster brewing. Coronavirus infections were spiking, hospital isolation units were filling up and the highly contagious Delta variant had been found in Kenya for the first time — in Kisumu County.

Dr. Boaz Otieno Nyunya, the county executive for health and sanitation, said he and other health specialists argued and pleaded for the politicians to hold a virtual celebration and skip the mass, in-person events that can supercharge an outbreak. Just weeks earlier, huge political rallies had helped fuel the catastrophic Covid-19 wave in India, where the Delta variant first emerged and became dominant.

Their objections were waved away, the health officials said. President Uhuru Kenyatta, Deputy President William Ruto, the former prime minister Raila Odinga and others descended on Kisumu, drawing large and mostly unmasked crowds who thronged the streets to watch their slow-moving motorcades through the city and gathered to hear them at marketplaces and parking lots.

turning away patients for lack of beds or oxygen, health officials say they fear a wave like the one that ripped through India in April and May could be looming over Kisumu.

“The India example is not lost to us,” Dr. Nyunya said.

Though data on infections and deaths is spotty, more than 23 percent of the people tested for the virus in Kisumu last week were positive — more than double the national rate. Kenya’s overall positivity rate is similar to that of the United States when the pandemic peaked there in January. But the Delta variant was still rare then, the American health system is far more robust than Kenya’s and the U.S. government was ramping up vaccination on a grand scale.

All of Africa is vulnerable, as the latest wave of the pandemic sweeps the continent, driven in part by more transmissible variants. Fewer than 1 percent of Africa’s people have been even partially vaccinated, by far the lowest rate for any continent.

“I think the greatest risk in Africa is to look at what happened in Italy earlier on and what happened in India and start thinking we are safe — to say it’s very far away from us and that we may not go the same way,” said Dr. Mark Nanyingi, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Liverpool in Britain. He called the surge in western Kenya a “storm on the horizon.”

said. But experts say the true scale of the pandemic far exceeds reported figures in Africa, where testing and tracing remain a challenge for many countries, and many nations do not collect mortality data.

To forestall the ongoing crisis, Kenya’s Ministry of Health last week imposed a restriction on gatherings and extended a dusk-to-dawn curfew in Kisumu and more than a dozen surrounding counties. But the measures were too late for Dr. Nyunya, who said that thinking back on the deliberations — which involved the county governor Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, a former national health minister — over the celebrations last month, “It makes you feel impotent.”

record cases and deaths, President Yoweri Museveni has imposed a strict 42-day lockdown. Just weeks ago, Rwanda hosted the Basketball Africa League and other big sporting events, raising the possibility for a full reopening. But after a spike in cases, the government introduced new lockdown measures on Monday.

The Democratic Republic of Congo — where the virus has claimed the lives of more than 5 percent of lawmakers ­— is grappling with a third wave as it falters in rolling out vaccines. South Africa, the continent’s worst-hit nation, has reported new infections doubling in just two weeks’ time, with the sharpest increases in major urban centers. Tunisia, where hospitals are full and oxygen supplies are low, is enduring a fourth wave.

“New, higher transmitting variants create a precarious situation in many countries that have weak health systems,” said Dr. Ngozi Erondu, a senior health scholar at the O’Neill Institute at Georgetown University.

The W.H.O. attributes the surge in Africa to lack of vaccination, insufficient adherence to precautionary measures like mask wearing and social distancing and the Delta and other variants.

lament a lack of protective gear and health insurance.

“We are buying our own gloves and masks,” said Dr. Onyango Ndong’a, chairman of the local chapter of the Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union. “We are covering for government inadequacies. We are tired now. We are stretched.”

For now, families who have lost loved ones are adjusting to a new reality.

Edward Onditi, 33, lost both his brother and his mother to Covid-19 this month. He said he left Nairobi to come and assist his family after his brother, Herbert, whom he regarded as a best friend and mentor, fell ill.

For weeks, the family transported Herbert, 43, between three hospitals in two counties — a distance of 70 miles in total — so that he could get high-flow oxygen. On the day before Herbert died, Edward had fish, his brother’s favorite meal, delivered to his isolation ward and promised to take him on a holiday once he was out.

“I’m so touched,” his brother said in a text message sent on June 2.

Barely 12 hours later, he was gone.

A few days later, their mother, Naomi, who had been ailing, succumbed to complications from Covid-19, too.

“It’s one of the toughest moments of my life,” Mr. Onditi said on a recent afternoon, his eyes welling with tears. “Things are just not working. They are not adding up.”

View Source

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Volcanic Eruption in Congo Causes Panic in City of 2 Million

by

GOMA, Congo (AP) — Congo’s Mount Nyiragongo erupted for the first time in nearly two decades Saturday, turning the night sky a fiery red and sending lava onto a major highway as panicked residents tried to flee Goma, a city of nearly 2 million.

There was no immediate word on any casualties, but witnesses said that lava already had engulfed a highway that connects Goma with the city of Beni in North Kivu province.

Mount Nyiragongo’s last eruption, in 2002, left hundreds dead and coated airport runways in lava. More than 100,000 people were left homeless in the aftermath, adding to the fear in Goma on Saturday night.

“We are already in a total psychosis,” Zacharie Paluku, a resident, told The Associated Press. “Everyone is afraid; people are running away. We really don’t know what to do.”

The government said it was putting an evacuation plan into place, but the announcement was made several hours after the sky turned a fiery red, and many already had fled on foot in hopes of crossing the Rwandan border post just outside town. Car horns honked and motorcycle taxis weaved as people tried to escape in panic.

The U.N. peacekeeping mission known tweeted dramatic footage of the city lit by the volcano’s glow, saying it was conducting reconnaissance flights over the city where it maintains a large base.

“The lava doesn’t seem to be headed toward the city of Goma. We remain on alert,” it said.

Some sought refuge aboard boats on Lake Kivu, while others fled to Mount Goma, the highest point in the metropolitan area. Dorcas Mbulayi left her home about an hour after the volcano first showed signs of erupting.

“We were eating when a friend of dad’s called him on the phone and told him to go and look outside,” said Mr. Mbulayi, who was still a child the last time the volcano erupted. “Dad told us that the volcano was erupting and that we were going to go to Mount Goma to escape the lava of the volcano.”

She also blamed authorities “for not informing us in time about the possible volcanic eruption.”

The lack of immediate announcements from authorities and conflicting accounts circulating on social media only added to the sense of chaos in Goma.

Authorities at the Goma Volcano Observatory initially said it was the nearby Nyamulagira volcano that had erupted. The two volcanos are located about 8.1 miles apart.

Charles Balagizi, a volcanologist, said the observatory’s report was based on the direction in which the lava appeared to be flowing, which was toward Rwanda rather than Goma.

View Source

>>> Don’t Miss Today’s BEST Amazon Deals! <<<<

Africa’s Vaccine Drive Is Threatened by India’s Supply Halt

by

NAIROBI, Kenya — The rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis in India is not only forcing hospitals to ration oxygen and sending families scrambling to find open beds for infected loved ones. It is also wreaking havoc on the global vaccination effort.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Africa.

Most nations were relying on vaccines produced by the Serum Institute factory in India. But the Indian government’s decision to restrict exports of doses as it deals with its own outbreak means that Africa’s already slow vaccination campaign could soon come to a near standstill.

Before India suspended exports, more than 70 nations received vaccines it manufactured, totaling more than 60 million doses. Many went to low- and middle-income countries through the Covax program, the global initiative aimed at ensuring equitable access to vaccines.

So far, Covax has delivered 43.4 million doses to 119 countries, but this represents only about 2 percent of the two billion doses it hopes to deliver this year, according to Andrea Taylor, an assistant director at the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Just six million doses have been administered in all of sub-Saharan Africa — fewer than in many individual U.S. states. The prospect of reduced supplies further complicates what was, for many African nations, an already daunting logistical challenge.

Many African governments prioritized administering first doses to more of their populations in the expectation that more doses would soon arrive. Now they are struggling with what to do if there are not enough vaccine supplies to give the full two-dose regimen that offers maximum prevention.

Countries like Rwanda and Ghana, which were among the first to receive doses from Covax, are about to exhaust their initial supplies. In Botswana, inoculations were temporarily halted in some areas this month after the allotted doses were finished. And Kenya, which has almost run out of its initial one million doses, said this week that it would seek to acquire Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer vaccines to continue its inoculation campaign. On Saturday, because of the delays, the country lengthened the timing between the administration of the first and second dose to 12 weeks from eight.

have run through more than two-thirds of their supplies, said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa.

The African Union’s vaccination task force has secured funding to purchase up to 400 million Johnson & Johnson vaccines for member states — but those doses won’t start arriving until fall.

“More than one billion Africans remain on the margins of this historic march to end this pandemic,” Dr. Moeti said.

A spokesman for Gavi, which helps lead the Covax program, said in an email that it was in close contact with the Indian government about restarting vaccine shipments, but that “in terms of timing of next deliveries, we’re not able to confirm at this stage.”

Even as the United States sits on tens of millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the most affordable vaccine in widespread use — African nations are turning to Russia and China for doses made in those countries, despite concerns about lack of clinical data on their efficacy and safety.

Amid the delays, some African countries are facing new and possibly deadlier waves of the pandemic. The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 2,155 deaths from the virus in the past week, up from 1,866 the week before.

In Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and home to one of the continent’s better health care systems, officials have warned of a scarcity of intensive-care beds and oxygen supplies. Last month, the Kenyan government ordered a new lockdown that has prompted anger over the restrictions’ economic impact.

View Source

Biden to Say Armenians Suffered Genocide. Here’s Why It Matters.

by

At the risk of infuriating Turkey, President Biden is set to formally announce on Saturday that the United States regards the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by Turks more than a century ago to be a genocide — the most monstrous of crimes.

Mr. Biden would be the first American president to make such an announcement, breaking with predecessors who did not wish to antagonize Turkey, a NATO ally and a strategically pivotal country straddling Europe and the Middle East.

The expected announcement, which Mr. Biden had signaled when he was a candidate last year, has been welcomed by Armenians and human rights advocates. It carries enormous symbolic weight, equating the anti-Armenian violence with atrocities on the scale of those committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia and Rwanda.

Use of the term is a moral slap at President Tayyip Recep Erdogan of Turkey, a fervent denier of the genocide. He has fulminated at other leaders, including Pope Francis, for describing the Armenian killings that way.

a crime under international law.

Cambodia, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and atrocities including genocide in the former Yugoslavia.

The International Criminal Court, which was created in 2002 in part to prosecute such crimes, has only one pending genocide case — Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, former president of Sudan, who is wanted on two warrants for crimes including genocide in the Darfur region between 2003 and 2008. The court cannot prosecute crimes committed before its inception.

The International Court of Justice, the highest court of the United Nations, ruled in January 2020 that Myanmar must take action to protect Rohingya Muslims, who have been killed and driven from their homes in what the country’s accusers have called a campaign of genocide. The ruling, which has no enforcement power, was the outcome of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Muslim countries that wanted the court to condemn Myanmar for violating the genocide treaty.

The violence against Armenians began during the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey, which included an area that is now Armenia, a landlocked country ringed by Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran.

Starting in 1915, the Ottomans, aligned with Germany in World War I, sought to prevent Armenians from collaborating with Russia and ordered mass deportations. As many as 1.5 million ethnic Armenians died from starvation, killings by Ottoman Turk soldiers and the police, and forced exoduses south into what is now Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

denial of genocide is ingrained into Turkish society. Writers who have dared to use the term have been prosecuted under Section 301 of Turkey’s penal code, which bans “denigrating Turkishness.” The denial is taught at an early age, with school textbooks calling the genocide a lie, describing the Armenians of that period as traitors and declaring the actions by the Ottoman Turks as “necessary measures” against Armenian separatism.

Some have come close. President Ronald Reagan tangentially referred to the “genocide of the Armenians” in an April 22, 1981, statement commemorating the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

But American presidents have generally avoided describing the killings this way to avoid any backlash from Turkey that would endanger its cooperation in regional conflicts or diplomacy.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Biden signaled his intentions a year ago in a speech on April 24, Armenia’s official day of remembrance of the genocide. He used the term “Armenian genocide” and asserted that “we must never forget or remain silent about this horrific and systematic campaign of extermination.” And in recent years, bipartisan anger toward Mr. Erdogan has grown. In 2019, the House and Senate passed resolutions calling the Armenian killings a genocide.

As vice president in the Obama administration, Mr. Biden never enjoyed an easy relationship with Mr. Erdogan, an autocratic leader who gave him an icy reception in August 2016. The two met a month after the failed coup in Turkey that Mr. Erdogan blamed on a Turkish cleric living in exile in the United States.

said last month that he believed Mr. Biden would make the genocide declaration despite knowing that a reset of U.S.-Turkey relations would then become “much harder.”

Mr. Erdogan’s aides have signaled that Mr. Biden’s declaration would face a hostile reaction in Turkey. The foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said in a Turkish media interview this week that “if the United States wants to worsen ties, the decision is theirs.”

According to a tally by the Armenian National Institute, a Washington-based group, at least 30 countries have done so.

The answer is more complicated concerning the United Nations, which played a central role in the treaty that made genocide a crime but has not taken a position on what happened in 1915 — 30 years before the global body was created. The website of its Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, in describing the origin of the term genocide, does not mention Armenia. António Guterres, the secretary-general, has skirted the issue.

Asked on Thursday about Mr. Guterres’s view, his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said: “We have no comment, as a general rule, on events that took place before the founding of the U.N.” Genocide, Mr. Dujarric said, “needs to be determined by an appropriate judicial body, as far as the U.N. is concerned.”

Lara Jakes contributed reporting.

View Source

France Enabled 1994 Rwanda Genocide, Report Says

by

NAIROBI, Kenya — France played a “significant” role in “enabling a foreseeable genocide” in Rwanda, according to a report commissioned by the Rwandan government that was released Monday and that echoed the findings of a recent appraisal by France.

The report offered a damning new perspective on the events that led to the killing of at least 800,000 people in 1994, arguing that France “did nothing to stop” the slaughter of ethnic Tutsi by a Rwandan government dominated by members of the Hutu ethnic group.

Twenty-seven years after the genocide, both France and Rwanda are making attempts to set the record straight on what happened during the bloodletting, government officials have said, both to respond to domestic demands and to improve bilateral relations.

The 600-page report, generated by a Washington law firm, concluded that the French government was “neither blind nor unconscious” in regard to the imminent genocide, yet continued in its “unwavering support” for the government of then-Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana. It accused the government of the former French president François Mitterrand of doing so in order to advance and reinforce its own influence and interests in the country.

released a report concluding that the French government bore “overwhelming responsibilities” for the genocide, as it remained allied with the “racist, corrupt and violent” Hutu-led government even as the leadership prepared to slaughter the Tutsis. But the report, commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron and written by historians, cleared the French of complicity in the genocide.

praised the French report, saying it showed how “Rwandan lives were just pawns in geopolitical games.”

“We welcome this report because it marks an important step toward a common understanding of what took place,” Mr. Kagame said. “It shows the desire even for leaders in France to move forward with a good understanding of what happened.”

The report comes as Mr. Kagame faces increasing criticism abroad over his government’s handling of critics, including the ongoing terrorism case against former hotelier Paul Rusesabagina.

The Rwandan government in 2017 commissioned the Washington law firm Levy Firestone Muse to investigate France’s role in the genocide against the Tutsi. The firm’s report draws on a range of sources including government reports, videos, documentaries, and interviews with more than 250 witnesses.

France and Rwanda have for years tussled over accounts of how the genocide transpired and the extent of French complicity. But relations have gradually started to thaw. In 2018, Mr. Macron backed Rwanda’s former foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo to lead the International Organization of La Francophonie, a coalition of French-speaking countries — a move that was widely seen as an effort to bolster relations with Kigali.

Mr. Kagame has also visited France at least three times since 2018, and French media have reported that Mr. Macron might visit Rwanda this year. Nicolas Sarkozy was the last French president to visit Rwanda in 2010.

In recent years, several cases related to the genocide have surfaced in French courts.

Last May, Félicien Kabuga, who was accused of financing the genocide, was arrested in Paris after more than two decades on the run. In July, a French appeals court ended an investigation into the plane crash that killed Mr. Habyarimana, an event that triggered the 1994 genocide and for which Mr. Kagame’s allies were blamed. And a Rwandan priest was arrested in France last week for his alleged role in aiding those who killed people in his church during the genocide.

an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde on Monday, Rwanda’s foreign affairs minister, Vincent Biruta, said the new report would “contribute to the reconciliation between France and Rwanda.”

Mr. Biruta added “If apologies were to be formulated one day, it would be a step in the right direction to restore trust.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris.

View Source

Myanmar’s Bloodshed Reveals a World That Has Changed, and Hasn’t

by

Government-sponsored massacres became less frequent too. But a wave in the 1990s were mostly in countries that, like Myanmar, had histories of civil war, weak institutions, high poverty rates and politically powerful militaries — Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others.

Though they largely failing to stop those killings as they happened, world leaders and institutions like the United Nations built systems to encourage democracy and avert future atrocities.

Myanmar, a pariah state that had sealed itself off from the world until reopening in 2011, didn’t much benefit from those efforts.

The country also missed out on a global change in how dictatorship works.

A growing number of countries have shifted toward systems where a strongman rises democratically but then consolidates power. These countries still hold elections and call themselves democracies, but heavily restrict freedoms and political rivals. Think Russia, Turkey or Venezuela.

“Repression in the last couple of years has actually gotten worse in dictatorships,” Dr. Frantz said. But large-scale crackdowns are rarer, she added, in part because “today’s dictators are getting savvier in how they oppress.”

Only 20 years ago, 70 percent of protest movements demanding democracy or systemic change succeeded. But that number has since plummeted to a historic low of 30 percent, according to a study by Erica Chenoweth of Harvard University.

Much of the change, Dr. Chenoweth wrote, came through something called “authoritarian learning.”

New-style dictators were wary of calling in the military, which might turn against them. And mass violence would shatter their democratic pretensions. So they developed practices to frustrate or fracture citizen movements: jailing protest leaders, stirring up nationalism, flooding social media with disinformation.

View Source

France Has ‘Overwhelming’ Responsibility for Rwanda Genocide, Report Says

by

PARIS — Blinded by its fears of losing influence in Africa and by a colonial view of the continent’s people, France remained close to the “racist, corrupt and violent regime’’ responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and bears “serious and overwhelming” responsibilities, according to a report released Friday.

But the report — commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 and put together by 15 historians with unprecedented access to French government archives — cleared France of complicity in the genocide that led to the deaths of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and contributed to decades of conflicts and instability in Central Africa.

“Is France an accomplice to the genocide of the Tutsi? If by this we mean a willingness to join a genocidal operation, nothing in the archives that were examined demonstrates this,’’ said the report, which was presented to Mr. Macron on Friday afternoon.

But the commission said that France had long been involved with Rwanda’s Hutu-led government even as that government prepared the genocide of the Tutsis, regarding the country’s leadership as a crucial ally in a French sphere of influence in the region.

Paul Kagame, the Tutsi leader who has controlled Rwanda for nearly a quarter century.

Mr. Macron, who has spoken of his desire to reset France’s relations with a continent where it was a colonial power, is believed to have commissioned the report to try to improve relations with Rwanda.

Though the 992-page report presents fresh information from the French government archives, it is unlikely to resolve the debate over France’s role during the genocide, said Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian expert on the genocide.

“This will not be good enough for one side, and it won’t be good enough for the other side,’’ Mr. Reyntjens said. “So my guess is that this will not settle the issue.’’

According to the report, François Mitterrand, the French president at the time, maintained a “strong, personal and direct relationship’’ with Juvenal Habyarimana, the longtime Hutu president of Rwanda, despite his “racist, corrupt and violent regime.’’

Mr. Mitterrand and members of his inner circle believed that Mr. Habyarimana and the Hutus were key allies in a French-speaking bloc that also included Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known then as Zaire.

The French saw Mr. Kagame and other Tutsi leaders — who had spent years in exile in neighboring Anglophone Uganda — as allies in an American push into the region.

“The principal interest of this country for France is that it be francophone,’’ a high-ranking military official wrote in 1990, according to the report, which concluded: “France’s interpretation of the Rwandan situation can be viewed through the prism of defending la Francophonie.’’

French leaders at the time viewed the Hutus and Tutsis through a colonial lens, ascribing to each group stereotypical physical traits and behavior, compounding their misinterpretation of the events that led to the genocide, according to the report.

In one of the report’s most damning conclusions, its authors wrote, “The failure of France in Rwanda, the causes of which are not all its own, can be likened in this respect to a final imperial defeat, all the more significant because it was neither expressed nor acknowledged.’’

View Source

Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy