The African country of Namibia has decided to slaughter more than 700 wild animals, including elephants and zebras, and distribute the meat to the public as it faces the worst drought in 100 years.
The Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Tourism has announced that more than 700 wild animals will be slaughtered, and their meat will be distributed to the affected people. Blue wildebeest and 300 zebras are included, and they will be hunted from other areas, including national parks.
The program aims to help mitigate the effects of drought in southwest African countries.
The Namibian government has been in a state of emergency since May due to drought. Half of Namibia’s population is undernourished due to drought.
A Pakistani man with ties to Iran has been charged for allegedly plotting to kill a US official in retaliation for the assassination of Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani, prosecutors said on Wednesday.
Asif Raza Merchant, 46, allegedly sought to hire a hitman to assassinate a politician or a US government official in the United States, the Justice Department and prosecutors said in a statement.
“As these terrorism and murder for hire charges against Asif Merchant demonstrate, we will continue to hold accountable those who would seek to carry out Iran’s lethal plotting against Americans,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020.
“As alleged, Merchant orchestrated a plot to assassinate US politicians and government officials. Today’s indictment is a message to terrorists here and abroad,” US Attorney Breon Peace added.
The intended victim was not identified, but the attorney general has previously said no evidence has emerged to link Merchant with the July 13 murder attempt against former president Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has said the Pakistani national had “close ties to Iran” and that the alleged murder-for-hire plot was “straight out of the Iranian playbook”. Another FBI official said the assassins Merchant allegedly tried to hire were undercover FBI agents.
“After spending time in Iran, Merchant arrived in the US from Pakistan and contacted a person he believed could assist him with the scheme to kill a politician or government official,” the Justice Department said.
“That person reported Merchant’s conduct to law enforcement and became a confidential source.”
Merchant was arrested on July 12 as he planned to leave the country.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations said in August it had “not received any report on this from the American government”.
“But it is clear that this method is contrary to the Iranian government’s policy of pursuing Soleimani’s killer,” the mission said in a statement carried by Iran’s official IRNA news agency.
In 2022, the US charged a Revolutionary Guards member with plotting to assassinate former US National Security Adviser John Bolton. The Justice Department said Shahram Poursafi, who remains at large, had offered to pay an individual in the United States $300,000 to kill Bolton.
Kamala Harris went on the offensive against Donald Trump in a fiery televised debate Tuesday, getting under her rival’s skin as they battled for a breakthrough in an agonizingly close election.
In a performance that earned her the endorsement of pop superstar Taylor Swift, the Democrat clashed with the “extreme” Republican on hot-button issues from abortion to democracy and accused him of being a friend to dictators.
Trump repeatedly raised his voice as he hit back at the vice president on immigration and the economy, branding her a “Marxist” and blaming her for what he said were the failings of President Joe Biden’s administration.
The former president claimed after that the ABC News-hosted clash in Philadelphia was his “best debate”, while Harris’s campaign also claimed victory and challenged him to a second debate in October.
With less than two months until the election, Harris, 59, was under pressure to deliver in front of an audience expected to run into the tens of millions after her sudden replacement as the Democratic candidate in place of Biden.
She started on the front foot by surprising Trump by approaching him to shake his hand before they took to their lecterns.
Then the niceties ended.
Trump, who only a few weeks ago had believed himself to be cruising to victory, reacted to pressure from Harris by resorting to the kinds of finger-jabbing insults and meandering invective that he uses at his rallies.
Harris responded by looking on in amusement and occasionally exclaiming “c’mon”, before declaring that she represents a fresh start after the “mess” of the Trump presidency — and saying: “We’re not going back.”
‘Eat you for lunch’
One of their most intense exchanges was on abortion.
Trump insisted that while having pushed for the end of the federal right to abortion, he wanted individual states to make their own policy.
Harris said he was telling a “bunch of lies” and called his policies “insulting to the women of America.”
Within minutes, Trump hammered at the Democrat’s weak spot on immigration by falsely claiming that she and Biden had allowed “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.”
Harris pointed out that Trump is a convicted felon, called him “extreme” and said it is “a tragedy” that throughout his career he had used “race to divide the American people.”
The rivals also clashed on foreign policy, with Harris telling Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch” when it came to the war in Ukraine and that foreign dictators were “laughing” at him.
Trump shot back by accusing Harris of being weak on the war in Gaza, saying she “hated Israel” and that Israel would be “gone” within two weeks if she was president.
Another jarring clash came as Trump doubled down on his unprecedented refusal to accept losing to Biden in the 2020 election, before trying to overturn the result.
Harris responded by mocking his catchphrase as a reality TV star, saying that Trump had been “fired by 81 million people.”
Swift endorsement
Taylor Swift broke her silence on US politics minutes after the debate, backing Harris as president and praising her as a “steady-handed, gifted leader.”
Her message on Instagram — which received 3.6 million likes in the space of an hour — was signed off “childless cat lady” in a jibe at an insult that Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance directed at Democrat-supporting women.
The last presidential debate in June had resulted in a crushing victory for Trump, after Biden delivered a catastrophic performance that ended up dooming his reelection campaign.
Biden said the Harris-Trump debate “wasn’t even close”, in a post on X.
Trump had long seemed invulnerable. He has been convicted of falsifying business records to cover up an affair with an adult film star, found liable for sexual abuse, and faces trial on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election — and still is polling neck-and-neck with Harris.
But Harris clearly needled him on one of his favorite, if less serious topics: the size of his trademark rallies.
Attendees, she said, prompting an angry retort, were leaving early out of “exhaustion and boredom.”
At another moment where Trump appeared to be losing his cool, he talked at length about a debunked conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants have been eating local people’s pets in Ohio.
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he said before being corrected by the ABC News moderator that the authorities in the town of Springfield have said this did not happen.
Bangladesh’s war crimes tribunal is to seek the extradition of ousted leader Sheikh Hasina from neighbouring India, its chief prosecutor has said, accusing her of carrying out “massacres”.
Weeks of student-led demonstrations in Bangladesh escalated into mass protests last month, with Hasina quitting as prime minister and fleeing by helicopter to old ally India on August 5, ending her iron-fisted 15-year rule.
“As the main perpetrator has fled the country, we will start the legal procedure to bring her back,” Mohammad Tajul Islam, chief prosecutor of Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), told reporters on Sunday.
The ICT was set up by Hasina in 2010 to probe atrocities during the 1971 independence war from Pakistan.
Hasina’s government was accused of widespread human rights abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killing of her political opponents.
“Bangladesh has a criminal extradition treaty with India which was signed in 2013, while Sheikh Hasina’s government was in power,” Islam added.
“As she has been made the main accused of the massacres in Bangladesh, we will try to legally bring her back to Bangladesh to face trial”.
Hasina, 76, has not been seen in public since fleeing Bangladesh.
Her presence in India has infuriated Bangladesh. Dhaka has revoked her diplomatic passport, and the countries have a bilateral extradition treaty which would permit her to return to face criminal trial.
Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, convicted on appeal of rape and sexual coercion by a Geneva court, is a Swiss intellectual accused of masking violence and radicalism behind a mild facade.
The Swiss court said it “annuls the judgement of 24 May 2023” and sentenced the 62-year-old former Oxford University professor to three years in prison, two of them suspended.
The verdict was slightly more lenient than the three years in prison — half suspended — requested by the prosecutor in the appeals case in May.
The ruling — dated August 28 but not made public until after it was reported by broadcaster RTS early on Tuesday — is likely to be subject to an appeal at Switzerland’s highest court.
Ramadan, a charismatic yet controversial figure in European Islam, has always maintained his innocence.
Ramadan’s accuser, a Muslim convert identified only as “Brigitte”, had testified before the court that he subjected her to rape and other violent sex acts in a Geneva hotel room during the night of October 28, 2008.
The lawyer representing Brigitte said she was repeatedly raped and subjected to “torture and barbarism”.
‘Trap’
Ramadan said that Brigitte invited herself up to his room. He let her kiss him, he said, before quickly ending the encounter.
He said he was the victim of a “trap”.
Brigitte was in her forties at the time of the alleged assault.
She filed a complaint ten years later, telling the court she felt emboldened to come forward following similar complaints filed against Ramadan in France.
The appeals verdict overturns a lower court finding last year acquitting Ramadan of rape and sexual coercion, citing a lack of evidence, contradictory testimonies and “love messages” sent by the plaintiff after the alleged assault.
But during their appeal, Brigitte’s lawyers alleged that Ramadan had exercised significant “control” over the woman, suggesting she had suffered something akin to Stockholm syndrome.
The three appeals court judges pointed to “witness testimony, certificates, medical notes and private expert opinions consistent with the facts presented by the plaintiff”.
“Elements collected during the investigation have thus convinced the chamber of the guilt of the accused,” the court said in a statement.
Ramadan was a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford and held visiting roles at universities in Qatar and Morocco.
He was forced to take a leave of absence in 2017 when rape allegations surfaced in France at the height of the “Me Too” movement.
In France, he is suspected of raping three women between 2009 and 2016.
His large defence team is fighting a Paris appeals court decision in June that the cases can go to trial.
Who is Tariq Ramadan?
Ramadan, 62, is the grandson of the founder of the Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and wrote his doctoral thesis on his ancestor.
He basked in the public spotlight in the 2000s as a professor at Britain’s prestigious Oxford university, lecturing across Europe as well as Morocco, Qatar and Japan, drawing crowds of students wherever he went.
Named by Time Magazine in 2004 among the 100 most influential people in the world for his influence on European Muslims, Ramadan has nevertheless stirred controversy throughout his career.
He has rejected allegations of anti-Semitism as attempts to silence what he sees as legitimate criticism of the Israeli state.
And French defenders of the country’s fierce secularism have accused him of smuggling an identitarian subtext within his modernising message, encouraging young girls to wear the Islamic headscarf or spreading religious fundamentalism.
Well turned-out with trademark trimmed grey hair and beard, Ramadan engaged in verbal jousts with opponents including French polemicist Eric Zemmour, who went on to stand as a far-right presidential candidate in 2022.
He fought back against allegations of fundamentalism, saying he encouraged young Muslims to involve themselves in their societies, calling the headscarf a matter of personal choice, urging “contextualisation” of Islam’s founding texts and condemning violence.
Nevertheless, his attempt to acquire French nationality in addition to his Swiss passport to “provide a concrete, positive example of upholding the values of the Republic” was rejected in 2016 by the then prime minister Manuel Valls.
Court battles in France
Ramadan’s fall from grace began in 2017 when he was first targeted with allegations of sexual violence in France.
In total, four women in France ultimately accused him of rapes between 2009 and 2016, while a Swiss woman converted to Islam filed a criminal complaint in 2018 for a rape she said took place in Geneva 10 years before.
The Swiss case is the one in which Ramadan has now been convicted on appeal.
As the allegations broke, he put his 12-year professorship in contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford on hold as support for him haemorrhaged, including from Qatar.
His 2018 admission that he had sex outside his decades of marriage, in which he had four children with a French woman convert, tarnished his image for some religious and community leaders.
Saying he suffers from multiple sclerosis and depression, Ramadan retired early.
Alongside the Swiss case, a Paris appeals court ruled in June this year that Ramadan should be tried for raping three women between 2009 and 2016, a decision his lawyers have challenged.
The scholar spent more than nine months in pre-trial detention in 2018 but was released in November that year.
‘Fragile’ women
French investigators in 2023 said they had identified a pattern across all the rape allegations.
Ramadan would enter private conversations with women who were “especially fragile, with tumultuous life stories, looking for love, validation and spirituality”.
The discussions would quickly take an intimate and then sexual turn, prosecutors said, leading to an in-person meeting.
Psychiatric experts told the investigation that the women had been fervent admirers of Ramadan as a public figure with religious and academic credentials.
But when it came to the meetings, several women described a complete change of character, with Ramadan becoming violent, ranging from slaps to blows and non-consensual penetration.
Ramadan said he had not carried out “a single act, behaviour or sex act that was not discussed beforehand” with the women.
Many of the cases she documented followed the same pattern: schoolboys steal innocuous selfies from private Instagram accounts and create explicit images to share in the chat rooms, specifically to humiliate female classmates — or even teachers.
Super-wired South Korea, with the world’s fastest average internet speeds, has long battled sexual cyber violence, but experts say a toxic combination of Telegram, AI tech, and lax laws has supercharged the issue — and it is tearing through the country’s schools.
“It’s not just the harm caused by the deepfake itself, but the spread of those videos among acquaintances that is even more humiliating and painful,” Bang, 18, told AFP.
She has received thousands of reports from devastated victims since authorities in August found the first such Telegram chatrooms, typically set up within a school or university to prey on female students and staff.
Deepfake prevalence is increasing exponentially globally, industry data shows, up 500 percent on year in 2023, cybersecurity startup Security Hero estimates, with 99 percent of victims women — typically famous singers and actresses.
But while celebrities have powerful backers to protect them — the K-pop agency behind girlband NewJeans recently took legal action against deepfake porn — many ordinary victims are struggling to get justice, activists say.
‘Live in fear’
Prosecution rates are woeful: between 2021 and July this year, 793 deepfake crimes were reported but only 16 people were arrested and prosecuted, according to police data obtained by a lawmaker.
After news of the chat rooms spread, complaints surged, with 118 cases reported in just five days in late August and seven people arrested amid a police crackdown.
But six out of seven alleged perpetrators were teenagers, police say, which complicates prosecutions as South Korean courts rarely issue arrest warrants for minors.
The chatrooms, multiple of which AFP attempted to join before being removed by moderators, have lewd names such as “the lonely masturbator” and rules requiring members to post photos of women they wish to see “punished”.
Victims find themselves “sexually insulted and mocked by their classmates in online spaces”, Kang Myeong-suk, head of victim support at the Women’s Human Rights Institute of Korea told AFP.
“But the perpetrators often face no consequences,” she said, adding that victims now “live in fear of where their manipulated images might be distributed by those around them”.
“Some online comments say the victims should ‘get over it’ as these deepfake images are not even real,” Kang said.
“But just because manipulated images aren’t real doesn’t mean the pain the victims endure is any less genuine.”
Victim blaming
While overall crime rates in South Korea are generally low, the country has long suffered from an epidemic of spy-cam crimes, which led to major protests in 2018 inspired by the global #MeToo movement, eventually forcing lawmakers to strengthen laws.
Even so “the penalties issued are often trivial, like fines or probation, which are disproportionate to the gravity of the offenses”, professor Yoon Kim Ji-young told AFP.
There have also been Telegram porn scandals before, most notably in 2020, when a group blackmailing women and girls to make sexual content for paid chatrooms was uncovered. The ringleader was jailed.
But things have not improved.
President Yoon Suk Yeol’s dismissive views on feminism — which he has blamed for the country’s low birthrate — have signalled to men it is “okay to be hostile or discriminatory towards women”, Yoon Kim said.
South Korean police blame low prosecution rates on Telegram, which is famed for its reluctance to cooperate with authorities. Its founder was recently arrested in France for failing to curb illegal content on the app.
But one victim of a 2021 deepfake porn incident told AFP that this was no excuse — many victims manage to identify their attackers themselves simply by determined sleuthing.
The victim, who requested anonymity, said it had been a “huge trauma” to bring her assailant to justice after she was attacked in 2021 with a barrage of Telegram messages containing deepfake images showing her being sexually assaulted.
Her attacker was a fellow student at the prestigious Seoul National University, who she had rarely interacted with but always thought was “gentle”.
“It was hard to accept,” she said, adding police required her to collect all the evidence herself, then she had to lobby hard for a trial, which is now ongoing.
“The world I thought I knew completely collapsed,” she said in a letter she plans to submit to the court on September 26.
“No one should be treated as an object or used as a means to compensate for the inferiority complexes of individuals like the defendant, simply because they are women.”
The vote is the first since a reform was passed in 2022 that increased the number of seats in the house, reserving a higher number for women and lowering the minimum age for candidates.
Despite the reform, which was a bid to modernise the kingdom’s parliament, voters and candidates have both told AFP the genocide in Gaza is the main issue in Tuesday’s election.
Islamist candidates seeking to capitalise on anger over Gaza were, however, unlikely to score major gains, said analysts who believe the conflict may push abstention rates higher.
Jordan became, in 1994, the second Arab state after Egypt to sign a peace treaty with Israel.
But around half of its population is of Palestinian origin, and there have been regular protests calling for the cancellation of the peace treaty since the genocide started in Gaza after October 7.
Just two days ahead of the vote, a Jordanian man killed three Israeli guards at the border crossing between Jordan and the occupied West Bank — the first such attack since the 1990s.
Voters also worry that no matter the election result, there can be no improvement to the economy until Israel and Hamas reach a ceasefire.
Jordan has seen a decline in tourism since the war began — a sector it relies on for about 14 percent of its gross domestic product.
Compounding the country’s economic woes, public debt has neared $50 billion, and unemployment hit 21 per cent in the first quarter of this year.
Doubts over vote impact
Polling will open at 7:00 a.m. (0400 GMT) local time on Tuesday, and voting will continue until 7:00 p.m. The final results will be announced within 48 hours.
Candidates include tribal leaders, leftists, centrists and Islamists from the country’s largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islamic Action Front (IAF).
In a busy market in central Amman, where campaign posters were on display, views on the vote in the lead-up to polling day were mixed.
“Elections are important and vital. They are our opportunity to make our voices heard and choose who represents us in parliament, even though deep down we doubt there will be significant change,” said 65-year-old retiree Issa Ahmed.
Mohammed Jaber, a shop owner in Amman, meanwhile told AFP: “People are busy with many things, the Gaza genocide and the bad economic situation. They do not know what the parties will be able to achieve.”
According to the election commission, more than 5.1 million people are registered to vote in the country of 11.5 million.
‘All eyes’ on Gaza
“What is happening in Gaza, from daily killing, destruction, and tragedies broadcast daily on television, makes us feel pain, helplessness, humiliation and degradation, and makes us forget the elections and everything that is happening around us,” said Omar Mohammed, a 43-year-old civil servant.
“I feel bitterness. I am not sure yet if I will vote in these elections,” he added.
Candidates have also focused on the conflict, with Islamists seeking to capitalise on solidarity with Gazans.
“The Gaza genocide and the Palestinian cause occupy a major place in the Jordanian elections, as all eyes and minds are on Gaza and Palestine and the massacres taking place there against the Palestinian people,” IAF candidate Saleh Armouti told AFP.
“The elections… should not be delayed and they serve the Palestinian cause and the region, but I also fear that there will be some abstention from voting due to these events,” he added.
Oraib Rantawi, an analyst and the head of the Amman-based Al Quds Center for Political Studies, agreed the war may drive abstention rates higher but he did not think the Islamists’ focus on Gaza would translate into votes.
“The improvement in these forces’ status and parliamentary representation will be modest,” he told AFP.
Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, the prime minister said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and “onto the footy fields”.
Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, Anthony Albanese said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a “scourge”.
Albanese said that the minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years.
The prime minister said his own preference would be to block users aged below 16.
Age verification trials are being held over the coming months, the centre-left leader said, though analysts said they doubted it was technically possible to enforce an online age limit.
“I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts,” Albanese said.
“We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm,” he told national broadcaster ABC.
“This is a scourge. We know that there is mental health consequences for what many of the young people have had to deal with,” he said.
Australia’s conservative opposition leader, Peter Dutton, said he would support an age limit.
“Every day of delay leaves young kids vulnerable to the harms of social media and the time for relying on tech companies to enforce age limits,” he said.
‘Easy to circumvent’
But it is not clear that the technology exists to reliably enforce such bans, said the University of Melbourne’s associate professor in computing and information technology, Toby Murray.
“We already know that present age verification methods are unreliable, too easy to circumvent, or risk user privacy,” he said.
Analysts warned that an age limit may not in any case help troubled children.
It “threatens to create serious harm by excluding young people from meaningful, healthy participation in the digital world,” said Daniel Angus, who leads the digital media research centre at Queensland University of Technology.
“There is logic in establishing boundaries that limit young people’s access,” said Samantha Schulz, senior sociologist of education at the University of Adelaide.
“However, young people are not the problem and regulating youth misses the more urgent task of regulating irresponsible social media platforms. Social media is an unavoidable part of young people’s lives.”
The prime minister said parents expected a response to online bullying and harmful material present on social media.
“These social media companies think they’re above everyone,” he told a radio interviewer.
“Well, they have a social responsibility and at the moment, they’re not exercising it. And we’re determined to make sure that they do,” he said.
Australia has been at the forefront of global efforts to regulate social media platforms, with its online safety watchdog bumping heads notably with Elon Musk’s X over the content it carries.
Boeing’s beleaguered Starliner made its long-awaited return to Earth on Saturday without the astronauts who rode it up to the International Space Station (ISS), after NASA ruled the trip back too risky.
After years of delays, Starliner had launched in June for what was meant to be a roughly weeklong test mission — a final shakedown before it could be certified to rotate crew to and from the orbital laboratory.
But unexpected thruster malfunctions and helium leaks on the way to the ISS had derailed those plans, and NASA had decided it was safer to bring back crewmates Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on a rival SpaceX Crew Dragon though they will have to wait until February 2025.
The gumdrop-shaped Boeing capsule touched down softly at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at 4:01am GMT on Saturday, its descent slowed by parachutes and cushioned by airbags, having departed the ISS around six hours earlier.
As it streaked red-hot across the night sky, ground teams reported hearing sonic booms. The spacecraft endured temperatures of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius) during atmospheric reentry.
NASA had praised on Boeing during a post-flight press conference where representatives from the company were conspicuously absent.
“It was a bullseye landing,” said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s commercial crew program. “The entry in particular has been darn near flawless,” he added.
Still, he acknowledged that certain new issues had come to light, including the failure of a new thruster and the temporary loss of the guidance system.
He added it was too early to talk about whether Starliner’s next flight, scheduled for August next year, would be crewed, instead stressing NASA needed time to analyse the data they had gathered and assess what changes were required to both the design of the ship and the way it is flown.
Ahead of the return leg, Boeing had carried out extensive ground testing to address the technical hitches encountered during Starliner’s ascent, then promised — both publicly and behind closed doors — that it could safely bring the astronauts home. In the end, NASA disagreed.
In response to whether he stood by that decision, NASA’s Stich said: “It’s always hard to have that retrospective look. We made the decision to have an uncrewed flight based on what we knew at the time and based on our knowledge of the thrusters and based on the modelling that we had.”
History of setbacks
Even without a crew aboard, the stakes were high for Boeing, a century-old aerospace giant.
With its reputation already battered by safety concerns surrounding its commercial jets, its long-term prospects for crewed space missions hung in the balance.
Shortly after undocking, Starliner executed a powerful “breakout burn” to swiftly clear it from the station and prevent any risk of collision — a manoeuvre that would have been unnecessary if crew were aboard to take manual control if needed.
Mission teams then conducted thorough checks of the thrusters required for the critical “deorbit burn” that guided the capsule onto its reentry path around 40 minutes before touchdown.
Though it was widely expected that Starliner would stick the landing, as it had on two previous uncrewed tests, Boeing’s program continues to languish behind schedule.
In 2014, NASA had awarded both Boeing and SpaceX multibillion-dollar contracts to develop spacecraft to taxi astronauts to and from the ISS, after the end of the Space Shuttle program left the US space agency reliant on Russian rockets.
Although initially considered the underdog, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has surged ahead of Boeing, and successfully flown dozens of astronauts since 2020.
Meanwhile, the Starliner program has faced numerous setbacks, from a software glitch that prevented the capsule from rendezvousing with the ISS during its first uncrewed test flight in 2019 to the discovery of flammable tape in the cabin after its second test in 2022 to the current troubles.
With the ISS scheduled to be decommissioned in 2030, the longer Starliner takes to become fully operational, the less time it will have to prove its worth.
Trigger Warning: The details of the story could be painful to read.
When he was a witch doctor, Moussa Diallo would regularly smear himself in a lotion made from a clitoris cut from a girl subjected to female genital mutilation.
“I wanted to be a big chief, I wanted to dominate,” said the small but charismatic fiftysomething from northwest Ivory Coast.
“I put it on my face and body” every three months or so “for about three years”, said Diallo, who asked AFP not to use his real name.
Genitalia cut from girls in illegal “circumcision” ceremonies is used in several regions of the West African country to “make love potions” or magic ointments that some believe will help them “make money or reach high political office”, said Labe Gneble, head of the National Organisation for Women, Children and the Family (ONEF).
A ground-down clitoris can sell for up to around $170, the equivalent of what many in Ivory Coast earn in a month.
Diallo stopped using the unctions a decade ago, but regional police chief Lieutenant N’Guessan Yosso confirmed to AFP that dried clitorises are still “very sought after for mystical practices”.
And it is clear from extensive interviews AFP conducted with former faith healers, circumcisers, social workers, researchers and NGOs, that there is a thriving traffic in female genitalia for the powers they supposedly impart.
Many are convinced the trade is hampering the fight against female genital mutilation (FGM), which has been banned in the religiously diverse nation for more than a quarter of a century.
Despite that, one in five Ivorian women are still being cut, according to the OECD, with one in two being mutilated in parts of the north.
Cut and mixed with plants
Before he had a crisis of conscience and decided to campaign against FGM, Diallo said he was often asked by the women who performed excisions around the small town of Touba to use his powers to protect them from evil spells.
Female circumcision has been practised by different religions in West Africa for centuries, with most girls cut between childhood and adolescence.
Many families consider it a rite of passage or a way to control and repress female sexuality, according to the UN Children’s Agency UNICEF, which condemns cutting as a dangerous violation of girls’ fundamental rights.
Beyond the physical and psychological pain, cutting can be fatal and lead to sterility, birth complications, chronic infections and bleeding, not to mention the loss of sexual pleasure.
Diallo would often accompany the women who do the cutting out into the forest or to a home where dozens of girls would be circumcised, often surrounded by fetishes and sacred objects. So it was relatively easy for the former faith healer to obtain the precious powder.
“When they would cut the clitorises they would dry them for a month or two then pound them with stones,” he said.
The result was a “black powder” which was then sometimes mixed with “leaves, roots and bark” or shea butter that is often used in cosmetics.
They could then sell it for around “100,000 CFA Francs (152 euros) if the girl was a virgin” or “65,000 (99 euros) if she already had a child” or barter it for goods and services, Diallo added.
The ex-witch doctor said he was able to get some of the powder recently — a mix of human flesh and plants, he believes — from a cutter in his village.
AFP was shown the powder but was unable to analyse it without buying it.
‘Organ trafficking’
Former circumcisers interviewed by AFP insisted that clitorises cut from girls are either buried, thrown into a river or given to the parents, depending on local custom.
But one in the west of the country admitted some end up being used for magic.
“Some people pretend they are the girls’ parents and go off with the clitoris,” she said.
Witch doctors use them for “incantations” and sell them afterwards, she claimed.
Another circumciser said some of her colleagues were complicit in the trade, “giving (genitalia) to people who are up to no good” for occult purposes.
Mutilated when she was still a child, one victim told AFP that her mother warned her to bring home the flesh that had been cut.
The trade is regarded as “organ trafficking” in Ivorian law and is punishable — like FGM — with fines and several years in prison, said lawyer Marie Laurence Didier Zeze.
But police in Odienne, who are in charge of five regions in the country’s northwest, said no one has ever been indicted for trafficking.
“People won’t say anything about sacred practices,” lamented Lieutenant N’Guessan Yosso.
The cutters themselves are both feared and respected, locals told AFP, often seen as prisoners of evil spirits.
‘Just nuts’
“A clitoris cannot give you magical powers, it’s just nuts,” said gynaecologist Jacqueline Chanine based in the country’s commercial capital Abidjan.
Even so, the practice is still stubbornly widespread in some parts of the country, according to researchers.
Dieudonne Kouadio, an anthropologist specialising in health, was presented with a box of the powder in the town of Odienne, 150 kilometres north of Touba.
“It contained a dried cut organ in the form of a blackish powder,” he said.
His discovery was included in a 2021 report for the Djigui foundation, whose conclusions were accepted by the Ministry for Women.
Farmers in Denguele district, of which Odienne is a part, “buy clitorises and mix the powder with their seeds to increase the fertility of their fields”, said Nouho Konate, a Djigui foundation member who has been fighting FGM in the area for 16 years.
He said parents of young girls were “gutted” when he told them of the trafficking.
Further south and in the centre west of the country, women use clitoris powder as an aphrodisiac, hoping to prevent their husbands straying, said criminologist Safie Roseline N’da, author of a 2023 study on FGM which also pointed to the trade.
She and her two co-authors discovered that blood from cut women was also being used to honour traditional gods.
They are far from the only Ivorian folk remedies that use body parts, according to lawyer Didier Zeze.
Mystic beliefs keeps it going
“The mystic has a central place in daily life” in the Ivory Coast — where Islam, Christianity and traditional animist beliefs co-exist — said the Canadian anthropologist Boris Koenig, a specialist in occult practices there.
“It touches every sphere of people’s social, professional, family and love lives,” he said, and there is generally nothing illegal about it.
The trade, however, is “one of the reasons that FGM survives” in the Ivory Coast, NGOs argue, where the rate of cutting is generally falling and is below the West African average of 28 per cent, according to the OECD.
Back near Touba, the former witch doctor Diallo recalled how up to 30 women would be cut in a day in the places his magic protected.
The dry season between January to March was the favoured period for circumcisions when the hot Harmattan wind from the Sahara helps scars heal, he said.
Staff at the region’s only social work centre say the cutting is still going on but hard to quantify because it never happens in the open.
Instead, it goes on in secret, hidden behind traditional festivals which have nothing to do with the practice, kept going, they say, by circumcisers from neighbouring Guinea — only a few kilometres away — where FGM rates are over 90pc.
