Somalia-born rapper K’naan brought his waving flag back home, promising to help his countrymen as they struggle with a devastating famine that has killed tens of thousands of children.
The rapper, who left Somalia as a child more than two decades ago to settle in Canada, made a brief visit to Mogadishu on Sunday. He was mobbed by famine refugees who tried to shake his hand or hug him as he toured Mogadishu’s Banadir Hospital and met with malnourished children.
“I came to Somalia to see the situation here and give any donation I have to the people and anything else available,” he said, speaking in Somali. “I will do all I can to help my people in Somalia.”
He did not perform his hit song Wavin’ Flag, which tells of the difficulties he faced growing up in the lawless, impoverished Horn of Africa nation. A version of that song was used for a Coca-Cola campaign when South Africa hosted last year’s World Cup.
The UN says more than 3.2 million Somalis need food aid. The US says 29,000 Somali children under age five have died.
The UN says tens of thousands of people have already died in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti and has warned that the famine has not peaked. More than 12 million people in the region need food aid, but according to the UN, Somalia has been hit the hardest because of a confluence of conflict and climate change.
Decades of violence in Somalia have left the population vulnerable to the vagaries of weather changes. Islamist insurgents are also attempting to overthrow Somalia’s weak UN-backed government. The most dangerous among the groups is the al-Shabab militant group, which has barred aid agencies from operating in the territories it controls in southern Somalia.
The southern parts of Somalia, which are mainly under the control of al-Shabab extremists, have been worst affected because of the group’s refusal to allow in key humanitarian groups including the World Food Program, the world’s major aid provider.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
RSS