Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Cameroon Arrests Opposition Leader;Paul Biya's Police & Military Are Using Live Ammo On Protesters

Cameroon arrests opposition leader who claims he won 2018 election

Maurice Kamto and several others held following protests against result of October poll

Ruth Maclean in Dakar and Agence France-Presse

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Maurice Kamto holds a news conference at his headquarters in Yaoundé after the election. Photograph: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

The Cameroonian opposition leader who claims he won last year’s election has been arrested.

Police arrested Maurice Kamto on Monday along with several other opposition figures, including one who was pulled out of his hospital bed where he was recovering from gunshot wounds sustained at a protest against the central African country’s longtime president, Paul Biya.

Kamto was arrested at a supporter’s house in the economic capital, Douala, and according to local media transferred to the judicial police station in the political capital, Yaoundé, though the prominent lawyer and activist Felix Agbor Nkongho said he had been taken to an unknown destination.

After Kamto was taken away hundreds of people surrounded the house. Police officers fired shots in the air to disperse them.

Kamto and his party, the Cameroon Renaissance Movement, claim that they won the election in October, but the official figures showed them winning only 14% of the vote, in second place to the 85-year-old Biya, who has been in power for 36 years.

Since then the opposition has organised several protests, the latest of which took place on Saturday in towns across the country, and during which 117 people were arrested. Police opened fire on protesters with live ammunition.

The country has been descending into crisis as separatists in the English-speaking part battle with security forces to split off from the Francophone part, with civilians caught in the crossfire. The UN says more than 430,000 people have been displaced and hundreds killed. The military has been accused of killing civilians and looting, while separatists are apparently behind a rising number of kidnappings for ransom. Civilians are frequently deserting their homes and hiding in the countryside.

Paul Biya, who has been in power in Cameroon for 38 years, casts his ballot in last year’s elections. Photograph: Nic Bothma/EPA

The situation in the town of Kumbo, in the north-west region, has deteriorated rapidly since Christmas, with residents of the area reporting that every time they try to go to town the military appears from the barracks nearby and opens fire. Often, they injure or indiscriminately kill civilians, residents say.

“We got up today with serious gunshots as from 4am,” one said last week. “The military have surrounded the park at Mbveh and [have been] shooting up seriously to the extent that they have killed one pregnant woman and wounded one separatist fighter.”

A few days later, another resident said two more fighters and a woman and her child were killed. “Yesterday was terrible in Kumbo again,” the person, who did not want to be named, said. “The military left for Mbveh shooting randomly in the air … people ran abandoning their shops and the military got into some and carried [away] huge sums of money. This morning everybody is scared, but they have not come back again.”

The whole city has been relying on a few springs for drinking water, as the water supply has been cut off due to the crisis. Residents say the water situation is becoming desperate.

The crisis started in 2016 as a demand for English to be used in courts and classrooms in the Anglophone regions.

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Bronx Man Exonerated After False Confession Caused Him To Serve 19 Years In Prison

Bronx man convicted for 1989 murder of mother cleared — 30 years later

By Reuven Fenton and Lia Eustachewich

January 24, 2019 | 1:19pm | Updated

Huwe Burton (right).

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Huwe Burton was wrongly convicted of one of the worst crimes imaginable — fatally stabbing his mom for drug money, then stripping her body naked to make it look as if she had been raped and murdered by an intruder.

He served almost 20 years in prison before he was paroled in 2009, but the Bronx native never truly felt free until Thursday.

That’s when he was finally cleared of the horrific 1989 killing.

“It just felt like a weight was officially lifted,” Burton, now 46, said moments after being exonerated in Bronx Supreme Court.

Burton silently wiped tears from his eyes as Justice Steven Barrett granted a motion to vacate his 30-year conviction.

“Certainly, it is a tragedy that Mr. Burton spent some 20 years in jail for a crime that he did not commit,” the judge said.

“For this, I want to apologize to Mr. Burton for a system that failed him.”

Burton was 16 when he returned home from school and found the body of his mother, Keziah, in her bedroom at their Williamsbridge apartment on Jan. 3, 1989.

His father, Raphael, was visiting relatives in Jamaica at the time.

Eager to make an arrest, detectives forced Burton, then a sophomore at Evander Childs HS, to confess to the slaying, according to a two-year, joint investigation by the Bronx district attorney’s Conviction

Integrity Unit and the nonprofit Innocence Project.

The sleep-deprived teen copped to investigators’ theory — that he was a crack addict who exploded in a rage when his mom refused to give him $200 to pay his dealer.

The 59-year-old nurse, who worked at Beth Abraham Hospital, was found with her wrists bound by a telephone cord, and detectives came up with the idea that her drug-crazed son staged her grisly slaying to look like a rape-murder.

At the time, one investigator publicly declared himself shocked “that someone would degrade their mother to that degree.”

During Burton’s hours-long interrogation, cops browbeat him with threats of statutory-rape charges because he had an underage girlfriend — and also promised that he would be treated leniently and tried as a juvenile in Family Court if he admitted accidentally killing his mom.

But after falsely confessing to matricide, Burton was instead prosecuted as an adult, convicted of second-degree murder and weapons possession in 1991 and slapped with a 15 years-to-life prison sentence.

Officials now believe Emmanuel Green, a 22-year-old felon who lived in an apartment below the Burtons, was likely the killer.

Days after Keziah Burton’s death, Green was busted for running a red light — in her stolen car.

“The apprehension of Green in possession of Ms. Burton’s car should’ve been a red flag,” one of Huwe Burton’s lawyers, Innocence Project staff attorney Susan Friedman, said in court.

“However, instead it was perceived by police as a problem — because they had closed the case six days earlier.”

Green was killed in a love triangle a short time later, and his convictions, including for a knifepoint robbery and rape of a teen girl, were never disclosed to the defense.

Burton wouldn’t see freedom until he was paroled in 2009, while Innocence Project lawyers worked to clear his name.

The nonprofit was founded by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, who were part of O.J. Simpson’s defense team.

Prosecutors said they supported Burton’s exoneration because the three detectives who interrogated him used what research now considers “psychologically coercive techniques” to elicit his false confession.

During its re-investigation of Burton’s case, the DA’s office found the cops used the same tactics in two unrelated murder cases three months before his arrest.

Separate juries acquitted the defendants in both of those cases after less than an hour of deliberations each.

District Attorney Darcel Clark said her office would review the other cases handled by the now-retired 47th Precinct investigators — Lt. Frank Viggiano and Detectives Stanley Schiffman and Sevelie Jones.

But, Clark said, “what happened back then, what they did, was not necessarily wrong.”

“That is the way things were done then. The science and things have developed over the years so that now we know that those techniques are not good to produce reliable confessions,” she said.

“For 1989, that was standard practice for NYPD. That’s how they did it. But now we know better.”

Inside the packed Bronx courtroom, Burton lamented his treatment.

“I stand here today for that 16-year-old boy. He didn’t have anyone to protect him,” he told the court.

And he expressed sorrow for his father, who died in 2005 without knowing his son would be vindicated.

“I stand here today for my father, who never made it to this point in the journey, who had the responsibility of dealing with his wife’s death and dealing with his son’s defense at the same time,” he said.

Attending the emotional hearing were two fellow exonerees — Yusef Salaam of the “Central Park Five” and Jeffrey Deskovic, cleared of murdering a high-school classmate in Peekskill, Westchester County.

Afterward, Burton headed to Marcus Samuelsson’s famed Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem to celebrate with his lawyers and girlfriend, Schaunta Booth.

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E-cigarettes help more smokers quit than patches and gum, study finds

LONDON (Reuters) - E-cigarettes are almost twice as effective at helping smokers quit as nicotine replacement treatments like patches, lozenges and gum, according to the results of a major clinical trial.

A saleswoman holds an e-cigarette as she demonstrates vaping at the Vape Shop that sells e-cigarette products in Beijing, China January 30, 2019. REUTERS/Thomas Peter

The study, involving almost 900 smokers, found that 18 percent of e-cigarette users were smoke-free after a year, compared to 9.9 percent who tried quitting using other products.

“This is great news for cigarette smokers who want to quit,” said Richard Miech, from the University of Michigan in the United States who has studied e-cigarettes but was not involved in this trial. “This evidence is persuasive.”

E-cigarettes have no tobacco, but contain nicotine-laced liquids that the user inhales in a vapor. Many big tobacco companies, including British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands and Japan Tobacco, sell e-cigarettes.

Using e-cigarettes, or “vaping”, is considered by many health experts to be an effective way for smokers to give up tobacco, but the scientific community has been divided over their potential public health benefits.

Independent experts said the latest trial, funded by Britain’s National Institute for Health Research and carried out by researchers from Queen Mary University of London, was robust and well-conducted.

Some research has previously suggested e-cigarettes might help smokers cut back or quit altogether, but other studies have raised concerns about their use among teenagers.

This study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found a stronger e-cigarette effect than previous trials. The researchers said this might be due to the inclusion of smokers seeking help, the provision of face-to-face support, and allowing the e-cigarette users to choose their own liquids.

In the trial, 886 smokers were randomly divided into groups to receive either up to three months’ supply of nicotine replacement products such as patches, gum, lozenges and sprays, or an e-cigarette starter pack with one or two bottles of liquid and encouragement to buy their own choice of future supplies.

All participants were also tested to see if they were still smoking tobacco cigarettes, and had weekly one-to-one support for at least four weeks. The researchers said one reason e-cigarettes were found to be more effective may be that they allow for better tuning of nicotine doses to individual needs.

Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, a behavioral expert at Britain’s Oxford University, said the study adds to growing evidence that e-cigarettes can improve health by helping smokers quit.

“More research is needed on the effects of long-term electronic cigarette use, but experts agree e-cigarettes are considerably less harmful than smoking, so switching...is likely to bring substantial health gains,” she said.

Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne

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