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TOPIC: uganda

In The News

More Gaza Exits, Putin Pulls Out Of Nuke Treaty, Meloni Pranked

👋 Hej!*

Welcome to Thursday, where a modest flow of people continue to exit Gaza into Egypt, Putin revokes Russia’s ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni didn’t realize who she was talking to. Meanwhile, we also look at how so-called “Ghost Kitchens” are now spreading through Europe to feed delivery service demand.

[*Swedish]

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Biden In Israel After Hospital Blast, Darfur Ethnic Cleansing, Twitter Rolls Out $1 Fee

👋 Witéj!*

Welcome to Wednesday, where Joe Biden arrives in Israel just hours after hundreds were killed in an explosion at a Gaza hospital, there is new evidence of ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfur region, and some Twitter/X users now have to pay $1 per year. Meanwhile, we unpack the ramifications of Sunday’s Polish election for the war in Ukraine.

[*Kashubian, Poland]

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Anti-Gay Law Leaves Nowhere To Turn For Uganda’s LGBTQ+

Disowned by their families, evicted by their landlords, and persecuted by the state, LGBTQ Ugandans have fewer and fewer places to turn.

KAMPALA — Just two days after the Ugandan Parliament passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act in March, Sam received a call. Her landlord asked her to leave the house she had been renting for almost two years in Kyebando-Kanyanya village, about 4 miles from Kampala.

When Sam, a lesbian who prefers to be identified by one name for fear of stigmatization, asked why she was being evicted, her landlord asked to meet her the following day in the presence of the local chairman (a village leader). She declined, asking for a one-on-one meeting. At the meeting, Sam’s landlord told her that her son, a human rights lawyer, warned her the new law would punish landlords who rent rooms to “homosexuals.”

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Deadly Tripoli Clashes, Wildfires Worldwide, Iceman Baldeth

👋 اسلام عليكم*

Welcome to Thursday, where Libya’s capital sees its worst clashes in years, wildfires rage on the Canary Islands and in northern Canada, and we now know what Ötzi the Iceman may have looked like. For our special Summer Reads edition of Worldcrunch Today, we feature an article by Teresa Son and Emma Gómez in Buenos-Aires-based newspaper Agencia Presentes — and three other stories from around the world on LGBTQ+ news.

[*Ssalamū ‘lekum - Darija, Morocco]

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Green
Nakisanze Segawa

Seeds Of Doubt: East African Suspicions About GMOs And Food Security

East African concerns about food security are accompanied by farmers' concerns that they will not have sovereignty over their own crops in the wake of a push toward GMOs.

WAKISO, UGANDA— Outside her brick house in central Uganda’s Kavule village, Nalwoga Mary, 89, gently spreads out seeds of maize and beans on a tarpaulin. The seeds will be out in the sun all day, every day for almost a week until the moisture completely dries out. They will then be stored either in a plastic container or plastic carryout bags for use in the next growing season. Every harvest, Nalwoga saves around 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) of maize and bean seeds.

Spread over 3 acres of land, her farm has coffee, sweet potatoes, beans, maize and a Ugandan staple: matooke, a type of green banana grown in the country and other places in East Africa. Drying, storing and replanting the seeds is a routine she has followed for over 60 years now.

But a recent conversation with her coffee buyer has raised some apprehensions in Nalwoga’s mind. The buyer informed her about neighboring Kenya’s recent decision to cultivate and import genetically modified organisms and told her what that could mean for farmers like her in Uganda.

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LGBTQ Plus
Awino Okech

The Western Organizations Funding Africa's LGBTQ+ Backlash

Uganda has signed a harsh anti-LGBTQ+ bill into law. It's part of a wider push back against "Western" values that's partly being funded by a global coalition.

Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni assented to the anti-homosexuality bill on May 26, 2023. The new law legislates, among other things, a 10-year jail term for “attempted homosexuality,” a 20-year jail term for “promotion of homosexuality,” a life sentence for “the offense of homosexuality” and a death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.”

Previously there has been been historical surveillance and targeting of queer people in Uganda, but no penalties nearly as harsh as this.

✉️ You can receive our LGBTQ+ International roundup every week directly in your inbox. Subscribe here.

This is reflective of a spate of new laws across Africa. Their proponents argue that they protect the heterosexual African family and “African values” in a rejection of “Western norms”.

Similar laws have been proposed in Ghana and Kenya. In July 2021, members of Ghana’s parliament proposed the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill. In April 2023, a Kenyan member of parliament introduced a Family Protection Bill. Among other things, it prohibits sexual health services and sexual health rights education.

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In The News
Emma Albright, Laure Gautherin, Sophie Jacquier, Marine Béguin and Anne-Sophie Goninet

Drones On Moscow, Maduro Back In Brazil, Cheese Race Win By KO

👋 Lasso fyafulla!*

Welcome to Tuesday, where two people were injured as Moscow has been targeted by another drone attack, Venezuela’s President Maduro is welcomed back in Brazil for the first time since 2019, and a woman wins UK’s annual cheese race by knockout. Meanwhile, Joanna Wisniowska in Warsaw-based daily Gazeta Wyborcza writes that Poland may have been a little too successful at safeguarding its moose population …

[*Tamang, Nepal]

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Society
Patricia Lindrio

The Bitter Core Of Uganda's Billion-Dollar Cocoa Industry: Economic Injustice

Many of Uganda’s small-scale farmers rely on someone else to dry their beans, a practice that keeps them in a cycle of poverty. A new processing factory aims to change that.

BUNDIBUGYO — It’s harvest day on Edson Sabite’s 4-acre cocoa plantation on the hilly slopes in the Bundibugyo region of western Uganda. His two brothers and two teenage sons are helping in the garden by cutting the cocoa pods, removing the beans and placing them in basins, which will later get dried in the sun and sold.

The rural town sits in the Bundibugyo region, in western Uganda, where cocoa beans thrive in a tropical expanse blessed with particularly fertile soil. The area produces more than 70% of the cocoa the country exports. Sabite earns more than many farmers, growing his cocoa on land four times the size of most of the surrounding cocoa farms.

He has the storage facilities to dry his cocoa beans and transport them to buyers, ensuring he gets the highest price possible. But Sabite’s story isn’t typical; most cocoa farmers have small holdings and lack the facilities to dry their beans to secure a higher price than if sold wet, or freshly picked. They are forced to rely on middlemen.

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LGBTQ Plus
Pierre Haski

Why Is Homophobia In Africa So Widespread?

Uganda's new law that calls for life imprisonment for gay sex is part of a wider crackdown against LGBTQ+ rights that is particularly harsh on the African continent.

-Analysis-

Uganda has just passed a law that allows for life imprisonment for same-sex sexual relations, punishing even the "promotion" of homosexuality. Under the authoritarian regime of Yoweri Museveni for the past 37 years, Uganda has certainly gone above and beyond existing anti-gay legislation inherited from British colonization.

But the country of 46 million is not alone, as a wider crackdown against LGBTQ+ rights continues to spread as part of a wider homophobic climate across Africa.

✉️ You can receive our LGBTQ+ International roundup every week directly in your inbox. Subscribe here.

There is exactly one country on the continent, South Africa, legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, and another southern African state, Botswana, lifted the ban on homosexuality in 2019. But in total, more than half of the 54 African states have more or less repressive laws providing for prison sentences.

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In The News
Hugo Perrin, Anne-Sophie Goninet, Bertrand Hauger, Ginevra Falciani

Xi & Putin’s New World Order, More “Partygate” Evidence, Bali New Year

👋 Sziasztok!*

Welcome to Wednesday, where Xi Jinping leaves Moscow after pledging to “shape a new world order” with Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson’s “Partygate” hearing opens and Google rolls out its Bard chatbot. Meanwhile, Anna Akage surveys experts on the likelihood that the Russian president is using a doppelgänger for public appearances.

[*Hungarian]

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Society
Edna Namara

The Mushroom Industry Helping Ugandan Women To Grow Independent

To meet the need, Uganda trains farmers to grow the nutrient-rich fungi. Many beneficiaries are women seeking financial independence.

BUSHENYI — Dorothy Basemera Otim loves a hot bowl of wild mushroom gravy. The retired Ugandan news editor and television personality says for as long as she can remember, she has looked forward to the annual season when suddenly mushrooms spring out of the ground. But lately, that has been rare and unpredictable.

“In the last three years mushrooms have come twice and in different seasons,” she says, as she bends over to pluck some.

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Society
Nakisanze Segawa

The HIV-Positive Ugandans Putting Anti-AIDS Campaign At Risk

“Elite controllers” are those who have HIV but show no symptoms. They’re proving a roadblock to the country’s otherwise promising anti-infection campaign.

LWENGO, UGANDA — Ahmed was certain the test result was wrong. It was 2003, and he and his five months-pregnant wife were at a health facility where she was getting a checkup. As staff did for all expectant parents, a worker prodded them to get tested for HIV. Ahmed’s wife tested negative. He did not. “I thought it was impossible, that my results must have been mistakenly switched with another person’s,” he says. That week, he took two more tests. Both confirmed he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

Health workers and Ahmed’s four wives begged him to start antiretroviral therapy, a cocktail of medications that prevents the virus from multiplying and reduces a person’s likelihood of spreading HIV and developing AIDS. At the time, Ahmed was in his early 40s; to his family, forgoing treatment seemed like courting a premature death. But he didn’t feel sick — no fever, chills or other symptoms — so he refused. Accepting treatment would have meant accepting a diagnosis he didn’t entirely believe, and the stigma that came with it.

Ahmed lives in Lwengo, a town about 165 kilometers (102 miles) southwest of Kampala, the capital. Amid a sweep of banana, cassava and coffee fields, small, white-roofed houses, and tarmacked roads, HIV is something to hide lest neighbors shun or mock a person as a “walking dead.” (That’s why Ahmed asked to be identified only by his first name.)

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