Africa's week in pictures: 5 - 11 February 2021
A selection of the week's best photos from across the continent and beyond:
All pictures subject to copyright.
Phyllis Pena said she charged at him before he could run away, and held him until police in Lake Jackson, Texas, arrived.
U.S. President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping held their first phone call as leaders and appeared at odds on most issues, even as Xi warned that confrontation would be a "disaster" for both nations. While Xi has called for "win-win" cooperation, Biden has called China America's "most serious competitor" and vowed to "out compete" Beijing. On Thursday, Biden told a bipartisan group of U.S. senators at a meeting on the need to upgrade U.S. infrastructure the United States must raise its game in the face of the Chinese challenge.
Ms Hawley called the protest 'an assault' on her home, though there was no damage and no violence occurred
Georgia election officials say they’re referring for possible criminal prosecution a potential voter fraud case involving a group recently linked to one of the state's new Democratic U.S. senators — The New Georgia Project. U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat elected to the Senate last month, is named as a respondent in the case because of his former ties to the group, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. It’s among 35 cases involving potential violations of election law being sent from the State Election Board to the attorney general or local prosecutors, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement Thursday.
Police have identified a person of interest in the fatal shooting of 26-year-old Yale graduate student Kevin Jiang. Jiang, who attended the Yale School of Environment, was shot to death on Lawrence Street in New Haven, Connecticut on Saturday night. The person of interest in the case has been identified by police as 29-year-old Qinxuan Pan, who is considered to be armed and dangerous, NBC Connecticut reported.
Bolivia said on Thursday it had inked an agreement with China´s Sinopharm locking in an initial supply of half a million doses of the company´s vaccine against coronavirus by the end of February. Bolivian President Luis Arce said China's President Xi Jinping had agreed to sell Bolivia 400,000 doses and had donated another 100,000 doses to the South American nation, among the poorest in the region. Bolivia has been rocked by political and social upheaval since contested elections in 2019 saw longtime president Evo Morales leave office.
The lawyer went on the cable news channel to call the impeachment managers' argument 'offensive'
If not a lot of luxuryOriginally Appeared on Architectural Digest
Senator Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) is under investigation for his involvement in the New Georgia Project, a voter registration organization founded by Stacey Abrams, which officials say failed to follow state election deadlines in 2019. The Georgia State Election Board voted 3-0 Wednesday to launch an investigation into Warnock’s time as chairman of the board for the New Georgia Project in 2019, when officials say the group violated state election rules that require voting registration organizations to submit completed voter application within ten days after they are received from the voter. Officials say the New Georgia Project submitted 1,268 applications to the Gwinnett County elections office after the ten-day deadline in 2019. The board will refer the investigation to Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican. The only Democrat on the board, as well as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, abstained from the vote. Nse Ufot, the CEO of New Georgia Project, pushed back against the claims in a statement, saying the board meeting was “the first time we heard about the allegations regarding NGP’s important voter registration work from 2019.” “We have not received any information on this matter from the Secretary or any other Georgia official,” Ufot said. In December, Raffensperger announced an investigation into the New Georgia Project and other voter registration groups, alleging that they had “sought to register ineligible, out-of-state, or deceased voters.” Warnock resigned from the New Georgia Project on January 28, 2020. Abrams founded the organization in 2014 and later made an unsuccessful bid for Georgia governor, losing by roughly 55,000 votes to Governor Brian Kemp. She claimed that Kemp, who was then- Georgia secretary of state, had won thanks to voter suppression efforts he implemented during his time in office, such as purging voter roles.
A judge on Thursday refused prosecutors’ request to issue a new arrest warrant for an 18-year-old from Illinois accused of killing two people during a police brutality protest in Wisconsin last summer. Kenosha County Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger alleged that Kyle Rittenhouse failed to update his address when he moved out of his Antioch apartment in November, amounting to a bail violation. In addition to a new arrest warrant, Binger asked Judge Bruce Schroeder to increase Rittenhouse's bail by $200,000.
An opposition-ruled Indian state said on Thursday it had asked the federal government to halt the supply of a homegrown COVID-19 vaccine until its efficacy could be proven in an ongoing late-stage trial. India, which has reported the world's second-highest number of COVID-19 cases after the United States, has vaccinated more than 7 million front-line workers since Jan. 16 using COVAXIN developed by Bharat Biotech as well as a vaccine licensed from AstraZeneca and Oxford University. Bharat Biotech, which created COVAXIN with the state-run Indian Council of Medical Research, has said efficacy data from the late-stage clinical trial on nearly 26,000 volunteers will be out by next month, leading to criticism from epidemiologists that it was approved too hastily for emergency use.
A West Texas judge has a word of caution to those attending court hearings via Zoom: Always check for filters before logging on.
State and federal officials are searching for a white tanker.
Former Vice President Mike Pence was a perhaps unlikely hero of Day 2 of former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial — unlikely because the people lauding his courage and extolling his patriotic fulfillment of duty to God and country were the fairly progressive Democrats prosecuting the case that Trump incited an insurrection on Jan. 6. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), for example, described how Trump "turned on" Pence, who was presiding over the counting of President Biden's electoral win. The impeachment managers also showed new footage of Pence and his family being evacuated from the Senate chamber down some back stairs at 2:26 p.m., 14 minutes after the pro-Trump mob broke into the Capitol building. Pence had been evacuated from the Senate chamber at 2:14 p.m. At 2:24 p.m., the impeachment managers noted, Trump tweeted: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution. ... USA demands the truth!" Video from the siege made clear the rioters were reading Trump's tweets and hunting for Pence. The time Pence was evacuated and Trump tweeted were public knowledge before the impeachment trial started, but it wasn't clear if Trump knew what was going on in the Capitol when he tweeted about Pence. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) may have provided that missing link, HuffPost's S.V. Date and Politico's Kyle Cheney suggest. Trump called Tuberville during the insurrection, via Sen. Mike Lee's (R-Utah) phone, and Tuberville told reporters Wednesday night he had informed Trump that security personnel had just whisked Pence out of the chamber for his safety. "He didn't get a chance to say a whole lot because I said, 'Mr. President, they just took the vice president out. I've got to go,'" Tuberville said. Less than 10 minutes later, Trump tweeted his attack on Pence, strongly suggesting, Date notes, that "Trump was aware of the danger Pence was in at the time he posted his tweet." More stories from theweek.comThe most important person in the impeachment trial is missing. It isn't Trump.5 brutally funny cartoons about Republicans' twisted impeachment logicWould the Capitol mob have killed Mike Pence?
Hathloul, 31, was detained in May 2018 and sentenced in December to nearly six years in prison on charges that U.N. rights experts called "spurious" under broad counter-terrorism laws. Another sister, Alia, said Hathloul was at their parents' home in Saudi Arabia. Rights groups and her family say Hathloul, who had campaigned for women's right to drive and to end Saudi's male guardianship system, was subjected to abuse, including electric shocks, waterboarding, flogging and sexual assault.
State plans to challenge appeal court's ruling on death row inmate
About 1 in 3 Americans say they definitely or probably won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new poll that some experts say is discouraging news if the U.S. hopes to achieve herd immunity and vanquish the outbreak. The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that while 67% of Americans plan to get vaccinated or have already done so, 15% are certain they won't and 17% say probably not. The poll suggests that substantial skepticism persists more than a month and a half into a U.S. vaccination drive that has encountered few if any serious side effects.
High-profile Republicans who don't agree with the party's far-right creep may be headed for the doors. Last week, 120 former GOP elected officials, ambassadors, and strategists, as well as members of past Republican presidential administrations reportedly met up in a massive Zoom call. They discussed early plans to form a "center-right breakaway party" to promote "principled conservatism," running candidates in some races and endorsing Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who match their values in others, people involved tell Reuters. Evan McMullin, the former chief policy director for the House Republican Conference who ran for president as an independent in 2016, co-hosted the call, he told Reuters. "Large portions of the Republican Party are radicalizing and threatening American democracy," he said. "The party needs to recommit to truth, reason and founding ideals or there clearly needs to be something new." Jason Miller, a spokesperson for former President Donald Trump, meanwhile called the group "losers," while Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel indicated in a statement that the party needs to "come together" if it wants to win in 2022. The conversation comes after the Republican party shed thousands of members in the wake of the Capitol riot. Since January, more than 140,000 people have quit the GOP in the 25 states with readily available registration data, The New York Times reports; 19 states don't register voters by party. Pennsylvania saw 12,000 voters change their affiliations, while Arizona's GOP lost 10,000. Trump narrowly lost those states in 2020, and the Arizona GOP has since taken aim at Republicans who didn't dispute the election results. More stories from theweek.comThe most important person in the impeachment trial is missing. It isn't Trump.5 brutally funny cartoons about Republicans' twisted impeachment logicWould the Capitol mob have killed Mike Pence?
Exclusive: A Gaston County man with a long history of violence is charged with threatening to kill President Joe Biden, according to documents obtained by the Observer.
The Philippines is set to receive 600,000 doses this month of Sinovac Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine donated by China, a portion of which will be used to inoculate military personnel, a senior government official said on Thursday. Presidential spokesman Harry Roque told a regular news conference the Feb. 23 arrival of the vaccines is certain, but they would not be administered without the approval of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).