Riot police fired tear gas at more than 1,000 opposition protesters who gathered in the capital yesterday, the fourth day of rising tensions since the son of the former dictator was announced victorious in a disputed presidential election.
Yesterday’s march was banned by the government, but top opposition candidate Jean-Pierre Fabre has vowed to march every day to protest what he says was a fraudulent election.
Angry protesters, some of them clad in the bright yellow color of the top opposition party, hurled rocks and insults at the police, who carried shields, batons and tear gas canisters. The protesters chanted: “We want change, we want a new president.”
Saturday’s provisional results showed Fabre lost to incumbent President Faure Gnassingbe, who won 60.9 percent of the vote.
Thursday’s election was only the second presidential vote held since the death of Gnassingbe’s father, who seized power in a 1967 coup and ruled the country for 38 years. His son seized power upon his death in 2005.
Gnassingbe’s victory extends the family’s rule into a 44th year and will mean the political dynasty will stay in power for nearly half a century.
“Their family, the Gnassigbes, are murderers,” said protester Jean Ahiagbedor, 28. “They took power by force, and they don’t want to leave. They eat three times a day. We can’t even afford to eat once. We’re tired of them, they need to leave.”
The EU’s observation mission in Togo did not mention evidence of ballot stuffing or vote rigging — as the opposition alleges — in its preliminary report. It did say, however, that there was evidence the ruling party may have tried to buy off voters by handing out rice to the country’s deeply impoverished people.
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS