Malawi’s High Court has found prominent businessman Thomson Mpinganjira guilty of attempting to bribe judges in an effort to get them to rule in favour of then-President Peter Mutharika.

Mpinganjira is one of Malawi’s richest people and is known to have links to Mr Mutharika’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Mr Mutharika was re-elected for a second term in May 2019, but the opposition went to court to challenge the results, arguing that they were tainted with irregularities.

Mpinganjira was recorded on tape offering one of the judges
financial inducements to influence the court outcome.In 2020, the court ruled that there had been widespread irregularities and ordered a new election.

Mr Mutharika lost the re-run to Lazarus Chakwera. In Friday’s judgement, the High Court in Blantyre found Mpinganjira guilty of corruption and ordered that his bail be revoked as he waits for sentencing.

A Nobel peace laureate from the Democratic Republic of Congo has called for the establishment of an international criminal court for his country following 25 years of conflict.

The gynaecologist, Denis Mukwege, described the violence perpetrated by dozens of armed groups in the east of the country as intolerable, with people living in fear and horror.

He said investigators should exhume mass graves and preserve evidence of what he said were likely to be war crimes.

Dr Mukwege has treated hundreds of women who have been raped and sexually mutilated by militiamen.

Aid groups say more than five million people have died as a result of the conflict.The UN says one million people have been displaced this year alone, and 25,000 human rights abuses recorded.

A magistrate in Zimbabwe has said that the body of former President Robert Mugabe can be exhumed after a traditional leader said that his burial had violated cultural practices.

Mugabe, who died aged 95 in 2019, was buried in a courtyard of his family homestead. But after a local court hearing in May, the traditional leader said the internment broke local custom, the Reuters news agency reported at the time.

“I give powers to those who are permitted by law to exhume the late Robert Mugabe’s remains from Kutama and rebury them at the National Heroes Acre in Harare,” a copy of the ruling in the local Shona language quoted by Reuters said.Mugabe’s family challenged that ruling, but a magistrate has dismissed the challenge.

The family is likely to appeal to the High Court, the BBC’s Shingai Nyoka says.Mugabe led Zimbabwe from independence in 1980 to 2017, when he was overthrown.

His family says he remained bitter after being ousted from power and did not want to be buried at the national shrine.

A member of Djibouti’s national football team has spent a week in transit at an international airport in France after seeking asylum in the European country.

Nassrodin Aptidon is one of three asylum-seeking Djibouti internationals who went missing at Paris’s Orly airport last Friday as the team travelled for a 2022 World Cup qualifier viaFrance.

Aptidon’s two colleagues – Bilal Hassan and Aboubakar Elmi – received clearance to leave the airport from French authorities on Wednesday following a meeting the goalkeeper had to miss because of a short illness.

He is expecting to hear shortly if he can leave the transit zone at the airport, where he has spent the last seven days and nights.

An experiment that hung rhinoceroses upside down to see what effect it had on the animals has been awarded one of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes.

Other recipients included teams that studied the bacteria in chewing gum stuck to pavements, and how to control cockroaches on submarines.

The spoof prizes are not as famous as the “real” Nobels – not quite.

The ceremony couldn’t take place at its usual home of Harvard University in the US because of Covid restrictions.

All the fun occurred online instead.
The science humour magazine, Annals of Improbable Research, says its Ig Nobel awards should first make you laugh but then make you think.

The head of Gambia’s reconciliation commission has expressed disappointment at the political alliance between the parties of President Adama Barrow and former long-serving leader Yahya Jammeh

They have teamed up ahead of elections in December.

The Truth Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) was established after Mr Jammeh fled the country in 2017 following his election defeat

Testimony has revealed that the former president oversaw murders, torture, targeting of opponents and sexual assault among other crimes during his two-decade long rule.