Nairobi, Kenya | AFP |  Three teenage schoolgirls in Burundi have been sent to prison to await trial for scribbling on a picture of President Pierre Nkurunziza in textbooks, activists said Thursday. The girls, aged 15, 16 and 17, face up to five years in prison for insulting the head …

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The presentation of a poem that prosecution says is loutish and allegedly written to insult the person of the president, received mixed reactions as the trial of researcher Dr Stella Nyanzi kicked off at Buganda Road Court Wednesday. The poem was posted on Stella …

Entebbe, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Deputy Attorney General Mwesigwa Rukutana has said all political parties under the Inter-Party Organisation for Dialogue (iPod) should participate in the National Dialogue. Meeting members of the Inter-Party Organization for Dialogue-iPod at Golf View Hotel on Wednesday, Rukutana said that the leaders of …

  Watamu, Kenya | AFP | Snake antivenoms have been around for 125 years, are effective and can be produced cheaply at scale. Yet Africa, with its abundance of deadly snakes, has an alarming shortage of the life-saving medicine. Experts and campaigners blame a combination of weak production capacity, feeble …

Tokyo, Japan | AFP | From bento boxes to individually wrapped bananas, plastic reigns supreme in Japan. But amid global concern about single-use waste, new legislation could help end the country’s love affair with plastic. The push comes ahead of the G20 summit, which Japan will host in Osaka in …

  Entebbe, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Bishop of Kigezi Diocese George Bagamuhunda has said that the church and cultural leaders have a mandate to protect the environment, citing the Biblical scripture which says the environment existed before man. This was at the ongoing second Uganda Water and Environment …

San Francisco, United States | AFP | Google set out to disrupt the video game world on Tuesday with a Stadia platform that will let players stream blockbuster titles to any device they wish, as the online giant also unveiled a new controller and its very own studio. The California-based …

Entebbe, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Water resources around River Rwizi are declining at a fast rate due to competing demands for water, rampant pollution, and encroachment on buffer zones. This was reiterated by Richard Musota, the Principal Water Officer in the Directorate of Water Resources Management (DWRM) in the …

Cairo, Egypt | AFP |  A water crisis brewing between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan over a contentious Nile dam could escalate into a conflict with “severe humanitarian consequences”, a think-tank said on Wednesday. Egypt, which relies almost totally on the Nile for irrigation and drinking water, fears the Grand Ethiopian …

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Electoral Commission (EC) has completed registration of the Alliance for National Transformation, a political party established by Mugisha Muntu. In a press statement released on Tuesday by Alice Alaso, the former Serere Woman Member of Parliament, the next phase will be to gazette the …