Nigeria, Mali, Hong Kong.
Today's three stories you should know.
Nigeria
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged the Nigerian government to investigate a Reuters news agency report that alleged the Nigerian army ran a secret and illegal abortion programme in which about 10,000 women and girls had their pregnancies terminated. Nigeria’s defence chief yesterday said the military had no intention of investigating the report because it was not true. The report said that women who refused, many of whom had been raped by members of the Boko Haram armed group, were beaten, threatened at gunpoint or drugged into compliance.
More from Al Jazeera here.
Mali
A German aid worker who had been held hostage for more than four and a half years in Niger has been freed, according to the humanitarian agency he worked for. The group, Help, gave no details about how Jorg Lange’s release came about. He had been kidnapped by the ISIL group in Niger’s Tillaberi region in April 2018. Armed groups linked to ISIL and al-Qaeda have for years kidnapped foreigners for ransom in the Sahel region. Five foreigners are believed to remain in captivity: Reverend Hans-Joachim Lohre, a German priest, French journalist Olivier Dubois, American Jeffery Woodke, Australian doctor Ken Elliott and Romanian national Iulian Ghergut.
More from AP here.
Hong Kong
Hong Kong media tycoon and pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai has been sentenced to almost six years in prison on fraud charges that his supporters say are trumped up. Lai was arrested as part of a crackdown on the city’s pro-democracy movement in 2019 and his influential newspaper Apple Daily was shut down. The sentence is the latest in a series against prominent members of the pro-democracy movement. China has now all but dismantled Hong Kong’s special status and any remaining autonomy.
More from BBC here.