Television Nigerian

A North Korean citizen has been publicly executed by authorities for violating “emergency quarantine measures,” according to Radio Free Asia.

The November firing squad shooting of a man accused of smuggling with his Chinese business partners was ordered in an effort to scare other citizens into strict compliance with the totalitarian nation’s emergency lockdown measures, sources in the country told the international broadcasting corporation.

Despite sharing an 880-mile border with China, where the coronavirus originated, North Korea publicly claims it is free of the virus — but has implemented severe restrictions to prevent its spread, including locking down cities and counties, and banning travel between provinces.

In January, Beijing and Pyongyang closed the border over virus concerns, but smugglers who earn a living bringing Chinese goods into North Korea have continued to travel between the nations, prompting a series of harsher measures enacted last month, including anti-aircraft units and landmines along the border.

“Since the end of November, the Central Committee [of the Korean Workers’ Party] have ratcheted up the existing emergency quarantine measures to ‘ultra-high-level’ emergency quarantine measures,” a resident of North Pyongan province, on the border with China in the country’s northwest, told RFA’s Korean Service on Tuesday.

“The public execution happened because the victim was charged with violating quarantine right before the ultra-high-level emergency measures took effect around November 20th. A man in his 50s who tried to smuggle with Chinese business partners was shot as an example on November 28th,” the source said.

The source quoted in the article did not attend the public execution but had discussed it with a witness. According to that person, the shooting was moved away from the border to the victim’s home county in an attempt to keep news of the execution from seeping into China.

A North Pyongan official told RFA on Wednesday that citizens are becoming increasingly afraid over the ramped-up measures to control their movement.

“While guarding the border seamlessly from the ground, in the air, and at sea, authorities ordered soldiers to shoot anyone approaching the border unconditionally, regardless of who the person is or their reason for being in the area. It is an absolute threat to the border area residents,” said the second source.

“The Central Committee’s order to sound the alarm means we are to warn the people that those who violate the rules will be executed with a firing squad. Even during the Arduous March in the 1990s, when mass defections continued, the government did not threaten the residents of the border area like this,” the second source said, referring to the 1994-1998 famine that killed millions of North Koreans, as much as 10 per cent of the population by some estimates.

The second source said the public execution was in line with North Korean’s typical methods of making an example of someone to scare its people into compliance.

President of the African Development Bank Group, Dr Akinwumi Adesina, has alerted African leaders to the gloomy days ahead for the continent due to the negative impacts of Covid-19 on the economies.

Adesina spoke on Friday at the ‘Virtual 2020 International Forum on African Leadership’ in Ivory Coast.

Projecting what will become of the continent’s economies at the end of 2020, Adesina said Africa’s GDP will decline by $173-236 billion by the end of the year. Africa’s economic growth rate is expected to decline by 3.4%.

He noted that up to 30 million jobs will be lost in Africa by the end of 2020.

The former Nigerian Agriculture minister, who identified the lockdown occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic as the reason for the parlous state of Africa’s economies, however, noted that the development is global.

He said, “The negative impacts on economies have been massive. The African Development Bank estimates that Africa’s GDP will decline by $173-236 billion by the end of the year. Africa’s economic growth rate is expected to decline by 3.4%.

“The world has become more fragile as we all face common existential risks. All are affected, developed and developing countries. There’s no coronavirus for developed countries and coronavirus for developing countries.

“The pandemic has further laid bare the divide in the labour market. Those with skills are able to keep their jobs, while low-skilled workers, especially those employed in the informal sector lost jobs, worsened by the lockdowns. It is estimated that up to 30 million jobs will be lost in Africa by the end of the year.”

He urged African countries including Nigeria not to rely on debt for recovery but instead, better manage the revenue streams from their abundant natural resources.

Adesina further stated, “Building back African economies with resilience requires addressing its high debt levels. Total outstanding debt on the continent is over $700 billion.

“The lesson for Africa is clear: Africa simply cannot accelerate its development by relying only on debt, especially expensive bilateral and commercial debt. Africa must grow by mobilising domestic resources.

“Africa will build back faster by also harnessing and better managing the revenue streams from its abundant natural resources, including minerals, metals, biodiversity, blue economy, forest resources, agriculture and oil and gas, in order to boost domestic savings.”

“Africa must build back by focusing sharply on food and nutritional security. For many, the risk of hunger is higher than coronavirus. Without food, medicines or vaccines don’t work. There is vaccination against coronavirus, but there is no vaccination against hunger,” he added.

US President Donald Trump’s niece said her uncle is “criminal, cruel and traitorous” and belongs in prison after he leaves the White House.

Mary Trump, a psychologist, author and outspoken critic of her estranged relative, rejects the notion that putting a former president on trial would deepen the nation’s political divisions.

“It’s quite frankly insulting to be told time after time that the American people can handle it and that we just need to move on,” Mary Trump told The Associated Press in an interview this week.

“If anybody deserves to be prosecuted and tried, it’s Donald,” she added. Otherwise, “we just leave ourselves open to somebody who, believe it or not, is even worse than he is.”

Asked about her comments, a spokesperson for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign emailed a one-sentence response: “Did she mention she has a book to sell?”

Mary Trump, the daughter of the president’s elder brother, Fred Jr., announced this week she is writing a follow-up to this summer’s scathing bestseller about her uncle, “Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

Her new book, “The Reckoning,” from publisher St. Martin’s Press won’t be out until next July. It will trace what she says is America’s collective trauma from its founding on the backs of enslaved Africans to the burgeoning economic and mental health impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

America is “looking down the barrel of an explosion of psychological disorders” from the “trauma of living in a country in which the pandemic didn’t just strike, but it was completely mishandled,” Mary Trump told the AP.

With a doctorate in clinical psychology, she argues that the US needs to reimagine how it deals with mental health and mental illness, treating them with the same vigor as physical maladies.

Mary Trump’s critical writings come amid legal fights with her family.

Her uncle, Robert Trump, sued to block “Too Much and Never Enough” from hitting store shelves, citing a family agreement not to publish stories about core family members without their approval, but a court rejected that.

In September, Mary Trump sued the president, Robert Trump and their sister Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal judge, alleging that they cheated her out of millions of dollars while squeezing her out of the family business. Robert Trump died in August and the lawsuit is pending.

When her book about the family was published in July, the president tweeted that Mary Trump was “a seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn’t stand her!) and me,” and that she had violated a non-disclosure agreement.

The announcement of Mary Trump’s second book came as her uncle continued to falsely insist he won reelection but that the vote was rigged in favor of Democratic rival Joe Biden.

The president has spent the better part of the last month complaining about the results, dispatching a band of lawyers led by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to mount a cascade of futile legal challenges.

Mary Trump said the president’s post-election behavior “makes perfect sense,” given his personality, psychology, and lifelong disdain for losers.

“This is somebody who’s never won legitimately in his life,” she said. “But he’s never lost either. Because in his view, winning is so important and he always deserves to win that it’s OK to lie, cheat and steal.”

Mary Trump said the president inherited his acerbic behavior from his father, Fred Trump, a real estate developer who died in 1999. She called her grandfather “a horrible human being who just reveled in other people’s humiliation.”

“It’s not simply that Donald is horrible and incompetent and cruel, it’s that he’s been allowed to be,” she said. “Every transgression that’s gone on unpunished has been an opportunity for him to push the envelope even further. That’s partially why we’re going to see him smashing as much stuff on his way out the door as he can.”

Mary Trump acknowledges that she has seen the president only sporadically over the last 20 years — she wrote in “Too Much and Never Enough” that he invited her to a family dinner at the White House in 2017 — but, she argues, “he hasn’t changed at all.”

“I’m essentially looking at the same person I knew when I was growing up,” she said.

Donald Trump is facing at least one pending criminal investigation, a probe into his business dealings by the Manhattan district attorney that has been slowed by a legal fight over access to his tax returns.

No ex-president has ever been arrested after leaving office, but Mary Trump argues that shielding powerful people from punishment has historically harmed the country. She used Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s post-war absolution as an example.

“I think it would be a tragedy if Donald and everybody who’s enabled him and committed crimes with him is not held accountable,” Mary Trump said. “It would make it impossible for this country to recover in the long term.”