Outcry in South Africa after woman found stabbed and hanging from tree

The hashtag #JusticeForTshego has been trending on Twitter in South Africa after the horrific killing of 28-year-old Tshegofatso Pule.

Her stabbed body was found hanging from a tree near Johannesburg.

She was eight months pregnant, local media are quoting police as saying.

There are high levels of violence against women in South Africa and last year President Cyril Ramaphosa said the country was one of "the most unsafe places in the world to be a woman".

Crime statistics released last year showed that 2,930 adult women were murdered in a 12-month period from 2017 to 2018, which amounts to one murder every three hours.

Why Donald Trump's Poll Numbers Are Seriously Slipping

President Donald Trump's poll numbers are slipping less than six months outside of the election while former Vice President Joe Biden is seeing his support rise amid a stubborn pandemic and growing protests over the death of George Floyd.

Fifty-five percent of people in a CNN poll published on Monday said they would vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee, while 41% said the same for Trump, who shocked pollsters after he defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a close presidential election in 2016. The CNN poll is not an outlier.

The National Interest

Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury agree terms of two-fight deal

Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury have agreed in principle to meet in two blockbuster fights, according to Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn.

Hearn has been negotiating with Fury’s camp for several weeks and he said the terms were in place for the British world heavyweight champions to go head to head.

No contracts have been signed yet, but Hearn expects WBA, IBF and WBO belt holder Joshua to face WBC champion Fury to determine the undisputed king of the heavyweight scene in 2021.

The Nation

Breonna Taylor: Protesters call on people to 'say her name'

George Floyd, the black man killed in police custody in the US, has become a rallying cry for equality and justice in some of the largest protests against racism since the 1960s.

Protestors have chanted his name for 13 days and his face has been painted in murals from Syria to Belfast.

But other names too have been on the lips of protesters, in particular that of Breonna Taylor, a health worker shot eight times by police who entered her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky on 13 March.

Activists are calling on people to "Say Her Name" as part of a movement to remember black women who have not attracted the same attention as other cases.

On Friday, when Ms Taylor would have turned 27, mourners gathered for a vigil in Louisville and people shared birthday messages on social media writing, "you should have been here to celebrate".

FG considers reopening schools after interstate travel ban

The Federal Government has said that schools may reopen in the country after the ban on interstate movement has been lifted.

The government said that it was been careful not to lead Nigerians into danger as Nigeria continues to record increased cases.

It pointed out that some countries that opened schools hurriedly shut them when their cases spiked.Minister of State for Education, Emeka Nwajiuba stated this during the briefing by the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 in Abuja on Monday.

He stated that the government had not published any date for school reopening as being speculated on the social media.

The federal government had in March shut all schools in the country as part of measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

George Floyd murder suspect Derek Chauvin has bail set at $1.25m

The Minneapolis ex-policeman accused of killing unarmed black man George Floyd has made his first court appearance, where his bail was set at $1.25m (£1m).

Prosecutors cited the "severity of the charges" and public outrage as the reason for upping his bail from $1m.

Derek Chauvin faces charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter. Three other arresting officers are charged with aiding and abetting murder.

Mr Floyd's death in May led to global protests and calls for police reform.

Mr Chauvin, who is white, knelt on Mr Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes while he was being arrested in Minneapolis on 25 May.

He and the three other police officers have since been fired.

BBC news

Angola exposé: The money chase

By Patrick Smith, Zoe Eisenstein

Angolan Twitter went wild – mostly cheering – when the Lourenço government froze the assets and accounts of Isabel Dos Santos in the country last December. The courts claimed she and her art dealer husband Sindika Dokolo had caused over a billion dollars of losses to the Angolan state. "The Princess" Despite a fortune reckoned at around $2.2bn – many say a gross underestimate – she cultivates a homespun image. An associate recalls their first meeting when Isabel was sitting by a swimming pool in flip flops and a bathing suit. Yet “the Princess” symbolises the failures of her father’s four-decade rule. Isabel dos Santos, left, with Fernando Teles, former CEO of Angolan bank BIC, Americo Amorim, and former CEO of Corticeira Amorim, during the opening of an art exhibition featuring works from the collection of her husband and art collector Sindika Dokolo in Porto, Portugal on March 5, 2015. (AP Photo/Paulo Duarte). Her constant social media posts, taking on Lourenço, senior Angolans and Portuguese anger many. She dismissed advice from public relations advisors, friends and even her husband to rein it in. “She’s at the top of the pyramid of what was happening in this place. She’s the highest exponent, she’s as good as it got,” said a top official in Luanda. “And she was visible and extravagant – they got reckless towards the end. So it’s only normal that people want to see her blood.” Angola versus Dos Santos Angolan officials are doing battle with Dos Santos across the world. They want the United States to impose sanctions on Isabel to bar her from visiting the US and her companies from using US dollars. Last June, Angola signed a $4.1m contract with Washington DC lobbyist Squire Patton Boggs to push its case against the Dos Santos clan. Isabel’s business empire spans several continents but her banking options have shrunk over the last decade. Banks, such as Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Santander will not work with her. Uria Menéndez, the Spanish law firm she retained in Portugal has dropped her. “She’s asked everyone here if they will work for her,” a legal source in Lisbon said. “She thought she was above the law and untouchable but she’s now become literally untouchable - none of the serious firms will go anywhere near her.” Assets frozen In February her Portuguese bank accounts were frozen. Angola’s attorney general has said he will issue an international warrant against Dos Santos if she fails to cooperate with investigations. The charges on the warrant would include: ‘money-laundering, influence-peddling, harmful management … forgery of documents … and other economic crimes,’ he said. At the centre of the charges against Dos Santos are claims that she used her position as chairwoman of Sonangol, Angola’s state oil conglomerate, to make illicit payments via Eurobic bank in Portugal, in which she was the main shareholder, to companies in Dubai controlled by her friends. Luanda Leaks Journalists who have seen a close-guarded cache of 750,000 hacked documents say that she and her associates had ordered millions of dollars of payments to be made after the Lourenço government had sacked her from Sonangol on 15 November 2017. Angola's state oil company Sonangol in Luanda, Angola August 26, 2012. REUTERS/Siphiwe Sibeko Nuhna Ribeiro da Cuhna, who managed Sonagol’s account at Eurobic, was found dead in his garage in Lisbon after local media linked him to Dos Santos’s business operations. Business sources close to Eurobic in Lisbon told us that the dates and timings of the documents seen by the journalists were forged. That could become the subject of a drawn-out legal fight. But it doesn’t settle the conflict of interest raised by Dos Santos’s controlling stake in Eurobic. Insisting on her innocence, Isabel promises to fight through the courts. She had hired Schillings, London-based lawyers and reputation managers who acted for the Gupta family at the heart of South Africa’s state capture scandal, and is threatening to sue journalists behind the Luanda Leaks reports for defamation. The government is guilty of a “concentrated and well-coordinated attack ahead of elections,” said Isabel. “Stolen documents have been leaked selectively to give a false impression of my business activities … all my commercial transactions have been approved by lawyers, banks, auditors and regulators”. Yet those auditing firms have launched their own probes. A top executive resigned from PwC over the affair. Spanish bank Abanca has bought 95% of Eurobic, including Isabel’s share. Over a dozen senior officials working for her companies have quit. And in early April, a Lisbon court ordered the “preventive seizure” of Dos Santos’s 26% stake in Portuguese telecoms company NOS, reported Bloomberg News on 4 April. This followed a generalised freeze in February of all the bank accounts held by Isabel in Portugal; that was in response to a request from the Angolan authorities for judicial cooperation. "Sliver of a chance" Legal experts in Luanda and Lisbon say there is a sliver of a chance that Isabel's representatives might offer to return some funds to Angola. But her closest associates insist she would never return to Luanda to negotiate. A settlement between both parties might be possible, said a consultant with knowledge of the transactions. “You would need the host country to be pulling their finger out to prove that funds that are abroad belong to them rather than to the target and that’s a much harder task.” “Often countries have never faced this situation before, certainly where there are political families involved it’s usually a first,” says Kamal Shah, a UK-based lawyer who has taken on several politically-charged asset tracing cases in recent years. “Generally the targets are a couple of steps ahead of those that are chasing them because they tend to have the best professional advisors”. One of Isabel’s biggest vulnerabilities, according to an expert on Angola’s finances, is her companies using state backing in Luanda to get loans in Portugal to buy large stakes in companies there. “There are difficulties with that in legal terms,” he adds. "Likewise, there are problems with a loan that Dos Santos took in US dollars from Sonangol but tried to repay in Angolan kwanza.” "A purely legal route in getting back the assets"? However, he raises doubts about the viability of a purely legal route in getting back the assets. “Asset tracing is a huge job. Knowing where this stuff is is a big form of pressure. But if she says I’m never moving back to Angola, she could hold out for a hell of a long time. That’s her option. There’s a real issue there.” Jonathan Benton, a former head of the UK government’s international Corruption Unit who now runs a asset-tracing company called Intelligent Sanctuary, agrees that tracking the Dos Santos assets would be an enormous task and investment in time and labour. “A case like this is not that simple (for the UK) … it may require a team of twelve working full-time to try and gather the necessary evidence. Valuable resources I don’t believe they have at present.” That leaves the ball very much in Angola’s court – to invest in a professional forensic investigation and apply as much diplomatic pressure as possible. All that has been made much harder by the global public health crisis this year. The African Report