Les gars, je devais rentrer a l’ecole aujourd’hui mais ce n’est plus possible.Douala vibre au sons des coups de feux a cause des affronts entre la population et le gendarmerie.La population revendique ou est mecontente de trois choses principales:
1-Le prix de la vie est de plus en plus cher;le carburant a augmente,le lait,la farine,les oeufs,le sucre,et bien d’autres.Le gouvernement a profite de la victoire du Cameroun en demi finale pour hausser le prix du carburant le lendemain de cette victoire.
2- IL y a une chaine de television appele Equinoxe TV qui ces derniers temps avait prensente plusieurs debats pendant lesquels des intellectuel camerounais se vidait de leur point de vue negatif de la politique Paul Biya qui apparemment veut changer la constitution et aura de fortes possibilites de faire de lui le ‘roi’ du camer,c’est a dire qu’il ne quittera pas facilement le pouvoir.Et alors cette television a ete ferme,elle et sa radio mais le peuple a refuse de rester les bras croises.
3- La troiseme chose, je l’ai deja dit , cette nouvelle constitution la! Comme on dit ici; “ol le moto ne veu pas ca”.
Et en ce qui concerne les degats et les greves ici, il y a de cela trois jours qu’on a tue environs 5 personnes a cause des marches a douala.Deux persones sont passes de vie a trepas au abords de l’aeroport international de Douala.Aujourd’hui, rien ne circule, meme le personel.On a brule la station de SNEC dans mon quartier Makepe, qui est au carefour principale,et au meme carefour, la boulangerie bijou a ete casse et la resistance populaire s’est fait un self service.Un grand carefour de trois stations essence a ete bloque ici a bonamoussadi plus precisement le rond point MAETUR.Au niveau de l’hopital general, il y a eu un grand affrontement aujourd’hui avec des coups de feu.A ce qu’il parrait, bonaberi est dans la furreur des coups de feu depuis cinq heure du mat.N’en parlons plus de New-Bell et la plupart des quartiers populaires.Certains enfants pleurent deja.Et si on vis deja cette tension que je prefere appele douce(car il faut etre pessimiste),d’ou viendrons les investiseurs etrangers?Et pourtant tout a commence comme les blagues, je n’ai jamais vecu ca depuis que je vis au Cameroun,popo!Priez que Dieu(JESUS) retablisse la situation et resou ces trois problemes en notre faveur.
Like Guinea and Nigeria, Cameroon is through to the second round of this year’s African Cup of Nations after losing their first match. This is thanks to a three nil spanking of Sudan a few hours ago.
The cameroon squad has been described as disel engine, that starts slowly then gather steam.
They await their next opponent, but know that with Samuel Eto’o on their side, there is no impediment on the way.
Eto’o now tops the chart of goal scorers with 5 goals and holds the CAF record for the highest number of goals ever scored, since the inseption of the African Cup of Nations in 1957.
A Nigerian lesbian who “married” four women last weekend in Kano State has gone into hiding from the Islamic police, with her partners.Under Sharia law, adopted in the state seven years ago, homosexuality and same-sex marriages are outlawed and considered very serious offences.
The theatre where the elaborate wedding celebration was held on Sunday has been demolished by Kano city’s authorities.
Lesbianism is also illegal under Nigeria’s national penal code.
Nigeria’s parliament is considering tightening its laws on homosexuality.
Stoning
Kano’s Hisbah board, which uses volunteers to enforce Islamic law, told the BBC that the women’s marriage was “unacceptable”.
The BBC’s Bala Ibrahim in Kano says Aunty Maiduguri and her four “wives” are thought to have gone into hiding the day after they married.
All five women, who are believed to be film actresses in the local home-video industry, were born Muslims, otherwise they would not be covered by Sharia law.
Hisbah volunteers enforce Islamic law in Kano State
Islam says a man can take up to four wives if he is able to support them.
“As defenders of the Sharia laws, we shall not allow this unhealthy development to take root in the state,” the Hisbah’s deputy commander Ustaz Abubakar Rabo told Nigeria’s This Day newspaper.
Mr Rabo told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme that if the women were found guilty of lesbianism they faced one of two punishments.
For a married woman the offence would be considered adultery for which the punishment is death by stoning. A single woman would be caned.
Large turnout
Our correspondent says the theatre where the colourful wedding ceremony was held was flattened earlier this week.
Several reasons were given for the demolition, including the discovery that it was built on wrongly allocated land.
Eyewitnesses say there was a large turnout for the marriage and guests were given leaflets as a souvenir showing Aunty Maiduguri surrounded by her “brides”.
A Kano police spokesman told the BBC that his officers were not actively looking for the women, but would arrest them if need be.
The Hisbah group, which is run separately from the police, receives state government support.
Two years ago, a Sharia court sentenced a man to six months in prison and fined him $38 for living as a woman for seven years in Kano.
Eleven other states in mostly Muslim northern Nigeria have adopted Sharia law.
Liberia must join an international diamond-certification scheme
The United Nations Security Council has voted to lift a 2001 ban on the export of diamonds from Liberia.The ban was meant to stop proceeds from the sale of so-called “blood diamonds” fuelling wars in West African nations.
Correspondents say the UN decided Liberia has made enough progress, but that it must certify diamonds for sale do not originate from conflict zones.
Two years ago Liberia elected its first democratic leader, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, since its civil war.
Employment hopes
The 15-nation Security Council unanimously passed the resolution, including a provision to review the decision after 90 days, council president, British ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, said.
Nearly half of the world’s diamonds come from west, central and southern Africa.
But the lucrative trade fuelled conflicts in countries such as Angola, Congo, Sierra Leone and Liberia, as rebel groups fought for control of diamonds and found willing international buyers to finance their activities.
Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf had pressed for the ban to be lifted, arguing that funds were desperately needed to improve living standards in Liberia.
Unemployment is at 85% in the West African nation, and this is a chance to create much needed jobs and reinvigorate the country’s economy, says the BBC’s Laura Trevelyan at the UN.
Liberia must now sign up to the Kimberley Process, the UN says, to ensure it does not revert to exporting conflict diamonds.
The international diamond certification scheme, established in May 2000, tracks the origin of diamonds on the international market.
This is the council’s second vote of confidence in Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf’s presidency. In June it lifted an embargo on Liberian wood.
Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf, who took office in January 2006, was the first woman to be elected president of an African country.
Presidential hopefuls Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Left, Stephen Chernin / Getty: Right, Chuck Kennedy / Landov
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was designed and built to be a dreadnought, an all-big-gun battleship that would rule the waves without being dented, slowed or thrown off course. But it has been caught off guard by a submarine named Barack Obama, running silent, running deep — until he surfaced with a spectacular showing in the first round of fund-raising numbers. What startled Clinton’s team was not just Obama’s totals or his success at drumming up contributions over the Internet but also how much he is collecting from the big donors who have fueled Clinton enterprises for the past decade and a half. “It was a real wake-up call,” says a Clinton strategist.
Why the Clinton-Obama knife fight over Democratic territory is a taste of things to come
Clinton’s campaign still professes publicly to be unperturbed, maintaining that it never believed the race would be a cakewalk. “The game plan that we began this campaign with is the game plan we are using today,” insists spokesman Phil Singer. But Clinton’s advisers privately acknowledge that she is retooling her strategy on four fronts: intensifying her fund raising, emphasizing her experience and policy depth (she’s counting on the upcoming debates to put those on display), pondering when and how to go on the offensive against Obama and dusting off the “two for the price of one” theme of her husband’s 1992 campaign. But this time it’s Bill you would get in the bargain.
The fund raising comes first. As her campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, discovered, Obama “works the phones like a dog. He probably did three to four times the number of events she did” in the first quarter. “No matter who I call,” McAuliffe says, “he has already called them three or four times.” So Clinton is stepping up the pace of her cash raising. Instead of big galas, she will be doing more fund raisers in smaller settings that offer extra attention from the candidate — especially for those contributors who can pony up the maximum $4,600 total allowed by law for the primary and general elections. Whereas her forces once warned donors that it would be seen as an act of disloyalty to contribute to anyone but Clinton, they are now inviting Obama’s fund raisers to consider hedging their bets by helping her too. And they are reassuring a new and younger generation of fund raisers that despite the size of her operation, there will be plenty of room at the table for them and their ideas.
Also being added are “small dollar” events, like a recent $100-a-head “Party on the Pier” at New York City’s Pier 94, which are useful for collecting not only money but also e-mail addresses with which she might blunt the advantage that Obama has on the Internet. Having raised her money largely on the coasts until now, Clinton is going inland. Invitations just went out for a May 7 fund raiser in Chicago, which is her hometown — and Obama’s political turf.
Attending all those events across the country, however, means Clinton will have to spend far less time in the Senate, a move that, aides say, she had hoped to put off until later in the election season, considering she was just re-elected to a second term last fall. Clinton’s Senate record — and particularly the skill she has shown working across party lines — has been her answer to those who say she is too polarizing to be elected. But as former majority leader Bob Dole and others have learned, the chamber isn’t an ideal base from which to run a presidential campaign.
Clinton’s challenges go well beyond money, though. She also has what Obama’s handlers are calling an “enthusiasm gap.” The New York State Senator still leads in most polls, but the latest Gallup survey found that 52% of respondents have an unfavorable view of her. Her favorable rating has dropped 13 percentage points since February, to 45%, and has been below 50% in each of the past three Gallup surveys. By comparison, Obama and former Senator John Edwards, her two strongest rivals, registered 52% favorable ratings, and — more significantly — their unfavorables were at about 30%.
So Clinton is lavishing more attention on groups like women, whom she considers her natural constituencies. After radio host Don Imus got fired for his controversial remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, Clinton accepted a long-standing invitation to speak on the campus about women’s equality. And both she and Obama are aggressively courting African-American voters, who are torn between their loyalty to the Clintons and their excitement over the prospect of the first black President. As Obama was telling his life story during a recent appearance with Al Sharpton in New York, Sharpton’s cell phone rang. “Is that Hillary calling?” Obama joked. “Breaking my flow?”
Bill Clinton will also put in more time on the trail, as well as in smaller sessions with donors and activists. Part of his job has been to make the case that his wife and Obama aren’t so different in their records on Iraq: though Obama opposed the Iraq invasion as a Senate candidate, the former President argues, Obama’s voting on the war has been virtually identical to Hillary’s in the Senate. Bill has “verged on feckless in this respect,” grumbles a leading Democratic fund raiser who has defected from the Clinton camp to Obama’s. Both Clintons have made the case to potential fund raisers that the U.S. will probably suffer a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 after the next President is sworn in — and that Hillary is the only Democratic candidate capable of handling such a crisis because of her Senate Armed Services Committee tenure and her years in the White House.
Hillary Clinton is also banking on the grueling schedule of debates, which is “where she will shine,” says a strategist. “This will be her strongest point. She knows this stuff inside out.” But her team says she is not yet ready to begin challenging Obama directly on his lack of specificity. That’s because going on the attack could further boost her negatives and create an opening for Edwards, who has offered far more detailed plans than she has on issues like health care. “They are worried about both Obama and Edwards,” says an outside adviser. “They think if Obama flames out, Edwards rises.” And if that happens, Hillary’s team will have to consider a course correction once again.
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Enow Williams World 