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Lupita Nyong'o wins best supporting actress Oscar.

Lupita Nyong'o has won the best supporting actress Oscar at the 86th Academy Awards for her role in 12 Years a Slave, defeating a field that included Sally Hawkins for Blue Jasmine and American Hustle's Jennifer Lawrence. Nyong'o, who was born in Mexico but grew up in Kenya, played Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, her first film acting role; her most memorable scene was one in which she receives a flogging for wanting to wash with soap. The film was directed by Steve McQueen, and based on the real-life memoir of kidnap victim Solomon Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor); it also starred Michael Fassbender and Benedict Cumberbatch.

In a moving acceptance speech, Nyong'o said: "It doesn't escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is due to so much pain in someone else's" – the slaves whose story was told in Solomon Northup's memoir on which the film was based.

She thanked her co-stars and her director Steve McQueen, saying: "Thank you for putting me in this position; it has been the joy of my life … I'm certain that the dead are standing around you and saluting you."

She concluded with a message to children everywhere: "No matter where you're from, your dreams are valid."

BY: Andrew Pulver

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Above is a portrait of Kenya’s first family. The photo, released by First Lady Margaret Kenyatta today on her facebook page, features Jomo Kenyatta (President Uhuru Kenyatta’s eldest son), First Lady Margaret Kenyatta, Jaba Kenyatta (second born son), President Uhuru Kenyatta, and daughter Ngina Kenyatta.

Courtesy: KENYAN DAILY NEWS

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Libya says Niger handed over Gadhafi's son al-Saadi, wanted by authorities in Tripoli.

TRIPOLI, Libya - One of Moammar Gadhafi's sons, al-Saadi, was extradited on Thursday to Libya from Niger, where he had taken refuge as his father's regime crumbled in 2011, bringing cheers from Libyans as the government prepares to prosecute him for his alleged role in trying to suppress the uprising against Gadhafi's rule.

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ICC now wants Uhuru Kenyatta to stay in The Hague

International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda wants the Trial Chamber to reverse the conditional leave it granted Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta in light of last Friday’s Appeal Chamber decision.Ms Bensouda wants the judges to recall their ruling that allowed President Kenyatta to skip portions of his trial and align it with Friday’s ruling by the Appeals Chamber in the case against Deputy President William Ruto. In last week's landmark ruling, the Appeals Chamber by a unanimous decision reversed the ruling of Trial Chamber V that had conditionally granted Mr Ruto absence from all the sessions of his trial.

The appellate judges said that though the absence of the accused from trial could be permissible under exceptional circumstances, they faulted the Trial Chamber judges of interpreting the scope of their discretion too broadly thereby making the excusal the rule rather than the exception.“The Appeals Chamber concludes that the Trial Chamber in the present case interpreted the scope of its discretion too broadly and thereby exceeded the limits of its discretionary power,” the five judges of the Appeals Chamber said.“In particular, the Trial Chamber provided Mr Ruto with what amounts to a blanket excusal before the trial had even commenced, effectively making his absence the general rule and his presence an exception."Furthermore, the Trial Chamber excused Mr Ruto without first exploring whether there were any alternative options.

Finally, the Trial Chamber did not exercise its discretion to excuse Mr Ruto on a case-by-case basis, at specific instances of the proceedings, and for a duration limited to that which was strictly necessary,” the ruling stated.And now, Ms Bensouda wants the judges who allowed President Kenyatta to skip parts of his trials, due to begin on November 12, to reverse it, failing which she would seek leave to appeal. "The Office of the Prosecutor will request Trial Chamber V(b) to reconsider its decision to conditionally excuse Mr Kenyatta from continuous presence at his trial or, in the alternative, to grant the OTP leave to appeal that decision," Ms Bensouda’s office said in a brief statement.Rome Statute The reasoning within the Office of the Prosecutor is that the Appeals Chamber decision rendered earlier positions taken by the Trial Chamber moot since it was an interpretation of the Rome Statute.

If Ms Bensouda has her way, then the move by the African Union to lobby the UN Security Council to defer the Kenyan cases will be the only way President Kenyatta can avoid the trial.The Security Council is expected to consider the request in the coming days.The judges who granted Mr Ruto conditional excusal were the same ones who did the same for Mr Kenyatta. They are Judges Chile Eboe-Osuji and Robert Fremr. In the Ruto case, Judge Olga Carbuccia had dissented to the conditional excusal.In the Kenyatta case, Judge Kuniko Ozaki had also dissented and criticised her colleagues’ reasoning to grant the excusal which she said went against the provisions of the Rome Statute.“I find portions of the majority decision reasoning to be repetitive, irrelevant to the question before the Chamber (including the use of selective quotations from various authorities) and/or, in some cases, incorrect,” Judge Ozaki had said in her dissenting ruling.

-Nation Media

Sharing centenary award with Abacha, an insult — Soyinka

Sharing centenary award with Abacha, an insult — SoyinkaNobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, on Saturday said he rejected the centenary award to be conferred on him by the Federal Government because the late military dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha, was included in the list of awardees. In a statement entitled, ‘The canonisation of terror,’ Soyinka said it was an insult for him to be listed alongside Abacha for the award, more so when killings of innocent citizens by the Boko Haram sect was ongoing in the North-East.

Soyinka recalled the state-sponsored assassinations and abuse of human rights that occurred during Abacha’s reign as military Head of State, and asked why the Federal Government had not changed the names of roads, hospitals and other public facilities that were named after Abacha. He said, “Under that ruler, torture and other forms of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance. Nine Nigerian citizens, including the writer and environmentalist, Ken Saro-wiwa, were hanged after a trial that was stomach-churning even by the most primitive standards of judicial trial, and in defiance of the intervention of world leadership. “We are speaking of a man who placed this nation under siege during an unrelenting reign of terror that is barely different from the current rampage of Boko Haram.

It is this very psychopath that was recently canonised by the government of Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of one hundred years of Nigerian trauma.” Soyinka added that by honouring Abacha, President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration had ridiculed Nigeria in the presence of world leaders by glorifying “murderers and thieves.” “What the government of Goodluck Jonathan has done is to scoop up a century’s accumulated degeneracy in one preeminent symbol, then place it on a podium for the nation to admire, emulate and even – worship. “Such abandonment of moral rigour comes full circle sooner or later.

The survivors of a plague known as Boko Haram, students in a place of enlightenment and moral instruction, are taken to a place of healing dedicated to an individual contagion – a murderer and thief of no redeeming quality known as Sani Abacha, one whose plunder is still being pursued all over the world and recovered piecemeal by international consortiums – at the behest of this same government which sees fit to place him on the nation’s Roll of Honour! “I can think of nothing more grotesque and derisive of the lifetime struggle of several on this list, and their selfless services to humanity.

It all fits. In this nation of portent readers, the coincidence should not be too difficult to decipher. I reject my share of this national insult,” the statement read in part.