A former mushroom and poultry farmer has been crowned Miss Uganda following a major rebranding of the annual beauty pageant, now designed to promote agriculture in the east African nation.
Leah Kalanguka, 23, overcame 19 other finalists after a competition that saw the glamor of the catwalk ditched for an military-sponsored boot camp on a farm, where contestants had to milk cows and work with goats and sheep.
“The youth will love agriculture because it goes hand in hand with beauty. Right now, farming is mostly done by elderly women,” Kalanguka, wearing a gold dress, tiara and a sash, told reporter’s during the awards ceremony late on Saturday.
Photo: AFP
After years of following the more traditional beauty pageant formula, organizers applied the theme of “Promoting agricultural entrepreneurship among the youth,” to the event and partnered with the Ugandan army — which has major business interests in agriculture.
“It is a great direction because the agriculture sector has great opportunity for jobs, so I am simply grateful that it took that direction and I would really love to see it promoted in our country because [agriculture] is the backbone,” Kalanguka said.
Cohost Roger Mugisha, a Ugandan radio presenter, told the audience that Miss Uganda “has to represent Ugandan values.”
“Agriculture is a Ugandan value and we salute that,” he said.
Kalanguka, who has studied computer engineering and science at Makerere University in Kampala, where she lives, said she was “so happy” and “overwhelmed” to be crowned Miss Uganda.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion