Newscast - Africa

Facebook Inc says it shut down a troll farm run by the Nicaraguan government that had been spreading anti-opposition messages across multiple accounts, a move that comes just days before presidential elections are set to be held in the Central American nation.
The social media giant says that the troll farm was intended to amplify pro-government and anti-opposition content.
Threat intelligence lead for Facebook’s parent company Meta, Ben Nimmo says this was really a cross-government operation; the troll farm consisted of several clusters which were run from multiple government entities at once.
He says the company closed 937 accounts, 140 pages and 24 groups on Facebook, as well as 363 Instagram accounts, last month.

India’s country’s prime minister has announced that the country’s economy will become carbon neutral by the year 2070.
The target date is two decades beyond what scientists say is needed to avert catastrophic climate impacts.
India is the last of the world’s major carbon polluters to announce a net-zero target, with China saying it would reach that goal in 2060, and the United States and the European Union aiming for 2050.
Modi also said India would increase its 2030 target for an installed capacity of non-fossil energy from 450 to 500 gigawatts.

China and Russia are pushing the United Nations Security Council to ease sanctions on North Korea by reviving a 2019 attempt to remove a ban on Pyongyang’s exports of statues, seafood and textiles, and expanding it to include lifting a refined petroleum imports cap.
China and Russia want the 15-member council to remove those sanctions with the intent of enhancing the livelihood of the civilian population in the isolated Asian state.
The draft resolution also includes other measures first proposed by Russia and China nearly two years ago, including lifting a ban on North Koreans working abroad and exempting inter-Korean rail and road cooperation projects from sanctions.

The conservative-majority US Supreme Court hears challenges to the most restrictive law passed since abortion was made a constitutional right nearly 50 years ago.
Dozens of protesters gathered outside the court in downtown Washington ahead of two hours of arguments before the nine-member panel.
The Texas Heartbeat Act bans abortions after a heartbeat can be detected in the womb, which is normally around six weeks and makes no exceptions for rape or incest.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority after Donald Trump nominated three justices, is to hear two hours of arguments in a case that has sparked a fierce legal and political battle.

Downing Street says Prime Minister Boris Johnson will fly back to London from Glasgow rather than taking the train, hours after he chided world leaders for not doing more on climate change.
Johnson flew into COP26 late Sunday from Rome, where he was attending a weekend G20 summit, aboard a chartered Airbus plane painted in a patriotic UK livery.
He will use the same jet to return to London after opening a two-day COP26 summit by warning that future generations will not forgive them if leaders fail to act.
Johnson’s spokesman told reporters in Glasgow that it is important that the prime minister is able to move around the country and they face significant time constraints.

More than 120 world leaders meet in Glasgow on Monday in the last, best hope to tackle the climate crisis and avert a looming global disaster.
Observers had hoped a weekend meeting in Rome of leaders of the G20 nations would give a strong impetus to the Glasgow COP26 summit, which was postponed for a year due to the pandemic.
The G20 major economies committed to the key goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the most ambitious target of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement.
They also agreed to end funding for new unabated coal plants abroad — those whose emissions have not gone through any filtering process — by the end of 2021.

Unvaccinated Ugandan MPs will be denied access to the country's parliament building from Monday.
Deputy Speaker Anita Among says the move was to demonstrate a good example in support of the government’s public health policy".
Nile Post reported that Uganda’s parliament becomes the third state institution to ban non-vaccinated people following similar moves by the Ministry of Health and the government-run National Medical Stores.
President Yoweri Museveni said last week that many Ugandans were hesitant to get the jab but expressed hope that some 12 million residents would be vaccinated by the end of December.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed says foreign forces have fought alongside Tigrayan rebels in recent battles in strategically important areas in Amhara region.
He says fighters who are not Ethiopian have taken part in the recent battles around the two cities.
Mr Abiy says the government's calls to arms from a few months ago had not been met with the proper organisation despite the massive number of youths who had joined.
He accused the Tigrayan rebels of wanting to return to power to implement a policy in which members of one group are treated as first-class citizens.
He also repeated an earlier statement from the government that rebel forces had killed more than 100 civilians in Kombolcha, which the Tigrayan forces have denied.

The UN has accused the army in the Democratic Republic of Congo of beating up a human rights activist to death.
The UN Joint Human Rights Office says Cabral Yombo succumbed to injuries after he was tortured by soldiers who were under instructions of local authorities
Mr Yombo had protested against illegal taxes imposed by the Bakano area chief in eastern DR Congo.
The army and the local authorities have not responded to the allegations.

President Muhammadu Buhari has declared that Africa’s ambition of restoring over 100 million hectares of the degraded landscape for productive agriculture is realisable.
President Buhari says it was noteworthy that the meeting was tailored towards ameliorating the problems of land degradation, desertification, depletion of the forest ecosystems and biodiversity in Africa.
He says that Africa’s ambition of restoring over 100million hectares of the degraded landscape for productive agriculture is achievable.