Two presidential commissions have recommended the mass eviction of Maasai people from some of East Africa’s most iconic conservation areas and tourist destinations. Advocacy group Survival International says this is an example of colonialist “fortress conservation”.

Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan set up the commissions following previous evictions of Maasai pastoralists from parts of the world famous Serengeti ecosystem, and large protests in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in 2024.

Now, despite a global outcry at the earlier evictions, the two Commissions have:

• Backed the previous evictions and called for them to continue, including in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Ngorongoro and neighbouring Lake Natron.
• Described the historic Maasai presence in the area as an “environmental pressure” that needs reducing.
• Threatened local NGOs that support the Maasai, accusing them of “spreading misinformation or propaganda” because they “conflict with government interests”.
• Called for the “relocation” of all “non-conservation activities” [in other words, Maasai occupancy of the land] to outside the conservation areas.
• Called for removal of the existing recognition of the Maasai people’s right to live in the Ngorongoro area.

An anonymous Maasai spokesperson said today:

We are blamed for environmental degradation while the unchecked expansion of tourism is ignored. Forced relocation, disguised as policy, has deprived our people of basic rights and dignity.

We reject any continuation of these measures and condemn the Commission’s failure to reflect the voices, realities, and rights of our people.

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The authorities maintain that these are “voluntary relocations.” However, the Maasai have overwhelmingly said no to moving.

The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When it was established, the ancestral right of the Maasai to live there with their cattle was explicitly acknowledged.

But UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee has backed the so-called “voluntary relocations”, and UNESCO endorses the “fortress conservation” model that underpins Tanzania’s approach.

Survival International director Caroline Pearce said today:

These commissions were a sham, a gimmick designed to give Tanzania’s violent persecution of the Maasai a veneer of respectability. It was widely predicted that they’d back further evictions: the whole saga just confirms that colonial-style fortress conservation is alive and well in Tanzania today, and enthusiastically endorsed by UNESCO.

These recommendations give the green light to more evictions, in Ngorongoro and beyond. And while the Maasai are robbed of their lands and livelihood, the government, tour operators and so-called conservationists will enrich themselves from a landscape emptied of its original owners.

Featured image via the Canary

The Confederation of African Football’s (CAF) recent decision to declare Morocco the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) champions, despite Senegal’s victory in the final on the pitch, has sparked widespread anger in Senegal.

The decision, issued by CAF’s Appeals Committee, came after accepting the Moroccan Football Federation’s appeal and declaring Senegal the loser due to withdrawal, based on Article 84 of the tournament regulations. This has caused a major shock in both the sporting and public spheres within the country.

AFCON: Senegal reaction

The players expressed their categorical rejection of the decision, emphasizing that championships are decided on the field, not through administrative paperwork.

Pape Demba Diop, a Toulouse player, wrote on his Instagram story:

I think we’re living in a crazy world.

Defender Moussa Niakhaté reposted photos of the team receiving their medals, commenting:

Come and take them! They’re crazy! This isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s reality.

El Hadji Malick Diouf delivered a sharp message:

Prove yourselves, champions… This title is decided on the pitch, not by email.

Idrissa Gueye opted for a more measured approach, stating:

Titles and trophies are fleeting… The most important thing is that every fan returns home with their dignity intact. The Senegalese people have shown their worth, and no one can take away the pride we have experienced.

Anger spreads

Various media outlets quoted Claude Le Roy, the former Senegal coach, who described the decision as “absurd,” saying:

I had never imagined, even for a single second, that the Confederation of African Football could go this far into such ridiculous absurdity,” he said.

When we see how CAF is being run under Motsepe, who is considered a follower of Gianni Infantino, who from the beginning wanted to give this trophy to Morocco at any cost.

He added:

There are a lot of manipulations and suspicious deals within CAF. I believe this matter is not over yet, and that Senegal will eventually regain its rights, but it is unfortunate that CAF’s image has reached this level.

And:

This decision will make the whole world laugh at the African continent, which I love very much.

In the political arena, MP Guy Marius Sagna expressed his anger, saying:

Shame on the corrupt CAF. Thank you to the Lions of Senegal, you are the true champions.

Minister of Water and Sanitation Cheikh Tidiane Dièye wrote:

We have the cup, the honor, and the smile. Proud of the Lions of Teranga. You keep the court and the shame.

Press reacts

According to the Middle East News Agency, the newspaper “Le Dakar” described the decision as a “scandal in the final,” while “Le Soleil” headlined its front page “The Joke of the Century,” referring to the ridicule of the administrative decision that overturned the results of a match decided on the field.

Amid continued public and player anger, Senegal is preparing to file a formal appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), in what is expected to be one of the most controversial cases in the history of African football.

Featured image via the Canary

Joe Kent, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned on Tuesday, saying that the war on Iran was started due to ‘pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby‘ and he could not support it in “good conscience.”

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this… pic.twitter.com/prtu86DpEr

— Joe Kent (@joekent16jan19) March 17, 2026

Kent wrote to Trump:

This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” . “This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.

Joe Kent is a Gold Star husband; his wife Shannon was killed in 2019 while serving as a CIA officer in Syria — another illegal war by the USA. Kent said the war was also “manufactured by Israel.”

Kent said high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media mounted a “misinformation campaign” that undermined Trump’s America First platform and “sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage a war with Iran.”

Iranian American Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute retweeted Kent’s resignation, saying, “This is big”.

This is BIG! https://t.co/qTVhLBrkue

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) March 17, 2026

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Republicans who have been critical of Trump’s illegal war celebrated the move by Kent.

MAGA podcaster Auron MacIntyre said Kent had paid a dear price for his service.

Kent is a highly respected MAGA veteran who has paid a dear price of his service

The letter claiming that the war was manufactured by Israel is particularly brutal https://t.co/FQ6K1RZuqt

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) March 17, 2026

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Another MAGA podcaster David J. Reilly, said: “God Bless you, man.”

Maybe we were too hard on @joekent16jan19…

God bless you man. https://t.co/g1KGomzYa3

— David J. Reilly 🇺🇸 (@realDaveReilly) March 17, 2026

There was some criticism of Kent for his complicity in imperialism, too.

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The chair of the party’s Red Wall Caucus has told PoliticsHome that Labour will “never rebuild trust” in constituencies in her part of the country until it is seen as having tackled the issue.

On Tuesday night, Rayner, who is seen as a frontrunner to succeed the Prime Minister, criticised the direction of the government in her most significant intervention since resigning from cabinet in September.

Speaking to a reception hosted by the soft left Labour group Mainstream in a Westminster pub, she said the “very survival” of Labour is at stake as the party faces the electoral threat of both Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Zack Polanski’s Greens.

“There is no safe ground for us, and we’re running out of time. The change that people so desperately wanted to see needs to be seen. It needs to be felt,” Rayner said.

The influential backbench MP also specifically criticised new restrictions on settlement policy being brought forward by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Under the changes, set to come into force on Wednesday, migrants will need to wait longer to qualify for permanent settlement in the UK. 

Rayner said the plan to extend the automatic qualifying period for awarding Indefinite Leave to Remain from five to 10 years would “pull the rug” from migrants who have already arrived in the UK, and represent “not just bad policy but a breach of trust”.

Over 100 Labour MPs recently signed a letter organised by backbencher Tony Vaughan urging the Starmer government to rethink the tightening of immigration rules.

The PM has been urged by the left of Labour to pursue a more progressive agenda after the party suffered a seismic defeat to the Greens at last month’s Gorton and Denton by-election.

However, Mahmood has today been backed by Labour MPs who say the reforms are key to defeating Reform in their areas.

Jo White, Labour MP for Bassetlaw and chair of the Labour Red Wall Caucus, told PoliticsHome: “My constituents tell me this is the most important issue that this government has to sort out. We can only move on when they have confidence that the government has done what’s needed, whether it’s the small boats or dealing with the high numbers who have come here in recent years.

“My constituents are calling for fairness, and diverting from this means we will never rebuild trust in constituencies like mine.”

She added: “Recent history has already shown that Labour cannot win a general election without the Red Wall MPs, and seats on the opposition benches will mean that we will never deliver on the economic and social change that we all believe in and desire.”

The ‘Red Wall’ is a phrase commonly used in Westminster to describe post-industrial seats in northern England and the Midlands that have been seen as key to recent election results.

Luke Akehurst, MP for North Durham on the right of Labour, said he was “extremely disappointed” by Rayner’s public intervention on Tuesday night.

“All the polling shows these policies are popular across the electorate,” he told PoliticsHome.

“They aren’t the cause of Labour’s poll malaise, which is driven by the cost of living. Being credible on controlling immigration is critical to Labour’s ability to hold marginal red wall seats at the next elections.”

Henry Tufnell, Labour MP for Mid and South Pembrokeshire, said his colleague must “back Shabana” and her reforms, saying “the country wants it, and we need to deliver, otherwise Reform will do something much more extreme.”

Mahmood herself doubled down on the asylum reforms in a speech last week, warning concerned Labour MPs that the current system is  “eroding trust” with the public.

“Hard-working people across this country engage in the daily struggle to make ends meet.

“They see a state that they pay taxes towards, yet it is unable to stop the flow of dinghies across the channel. They see a state that is paying billions towards hotels. It doesn’t look fair because it’s not fair, and it erodes their trust in government,” the Home Secretary said.

Speaking to PoliticsHome this afternoon, an unnamed Labour MP in the Red Wall group said Mahmood’s reforms are “not just about me keeping my seat at the next election, it’s what’s morally right”.

Another Labour MP added: “If we can’t deliver the changes that the public supports, then we can’t govern. The government’s immigration policy can’t be changed by Angela Rayner in the basement of some dingy pub.”

An MP in the party’s Blue Labour group, which advocates more socially conservative positions, told PoliticsHome: “We can’t – must not – retreat into our comfort zone as a party. The country wants these reforms.”

There were suggestions this afternoon that Downing Street could dilute the reforms after Rayner’s intervention, with a spokesperson telling journalists that it was “considering responses” to a Home Office consultation, and would “respond in line with our principles and values”.

However, a government spokesperson later stressed that its position “has not changed”.

“We will always welcome those that come to this country and contribute to our national life. But the privilege of living here forever should be earned, not automatic.

“But between 2021 and 2024, this country experienced levels of migration it had historically seen over four decades. We must be honest about the scale and impact of hundreds of thousands of low-skilled migrants getting settlement,” they said.

The government has sought to clarify that the consultation relates to whether transitional arrangements should be used for migrants who are already in the UK but have not yet received settled status.

Palestinian-American Leqaa Kordia has been released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being held in an ICE prison for a year. But she says she is not free. Not yet.

Kordia was one of around 100 victims arrested for peacefully protesting outside Columbia University against Israel’s genocide in Gaza in 2024. No one was charged. But ICE then imprisoned her in March 2025 on the ridiculous grounds that Homeland Security claimed she was “found to be providing financial support to individuals living in nations hostile to the U.S.”. She had sent money to relatives overseas to help support them.

Kordia was hospitalised after suffering a seizure in detention and an immigration judge ordered her release on bond after New York mayor Zohran Mamdani asked for her release during his recent meeting with Donald Trump.

ICE: all their victims need to be released

On her release, Kordia said that she might be physically free – but is not really free until all ICE’s victims are released:

I’m just breathing the air right now but I’m not free inside until everyone is free and I’m holding them in my heart. We’re gonna keep fighting … there is a lot of injustice in this place.

Trump’s racist deportation gang has expelled more than 675,000 people from the US since he re-entered the White House. More than 68,000 others are held without charge in ICE and Customs and Border Patrol detention facilities. The Trump regime boasts of these numbers. ICE has murdered, or tried to murder, members of the public and smeared them as “domestic terrorists”, Yet it continues to avoid accountability for its crimes with the collusion of the federal government.

A relative of Kordia said that the impact on her had been “unimaginable“:

This past year has taken an unimaginable toll on Leqaa and our entire family. We are grateful to our community that stood beside us every step of the way, and for the countless prayers offered during this past Ramadan — those moments of sincerity and hope carried us through some of our darkest days.

Immigrant rights lawyer Sarah Sherman-Stokes said her legal team was “elated and relieved” but that the fight goes on for her and other victims:

We are elated and relieved that Leqaa can finally return home to her family in New Jersey after a long year in ICE detention. This is an important step in restoring Leqaa’s rights as she continues to be unlawfully targeted by the government for her advocacy for Palestinian rights.

We will continue this fight in both immigration and federal courts for as long as it takes, not only for Leqaa but for the freedom of all people facing unjust retaliation for speaking out against genocide.

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Travis Fife, another lawyer working for Kordia’s freedom, added:

Today we are celebrating the long-delayed news that Leqaa will be reunited with her family in New Jersey. Since her detention over one year ago, the government has taken every effort to deny her basic rights and freedom, blocking her release not once but twice. Leqaa going home today is the bare minimum. We must continue to assert the fundamental First Amendment principle that the government cannot abuse power to punish people for using their voice.

Leqaa Kordia is not the only person who is unfree outside a prison. As Nelson Mandela said, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”. While the Palestinians and other oppressed peoples remain under the heel of imperial powers, none of us are really free.

Featured image via the Canary

The gutter press are back demonising disability benefit claimants again – just as the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are trying to push through benefit cuts.

The Daily Mail ran with the breathless headline:

One in 10 working age Brits are on disability benefits with 1,000 successful claims A DAY – as pressure piles on Keir Starmer to face down Labour MPs on cutting welfare bill

However, if you can suffer through reading the bile, you’ll see where they got this maths from. There are 43.4 million working-age people in the UK. As of January this year, there are 3.93 million claimants on PIP, which is clearly not 10%.

Unusually for the Mail, I’m sure, they’ve been sneaky cunts. What they’ve done is taken all PIP claimants ever, since the benefit began in 2013, which is 4.5 million. From that, they’ve made an estimation that there are 1,000 claims a day.

DWP claimants: it should be much higher

The thing is, this is true. But it should be much higher.

For starters, that 1,000 is the number of successful claims. The Mail article glosses over the fact that, in those 13 years, 4.4 million claims were denied. It also completely ignores the scale of the backlog to even get PIP.

As the Canary has previously reported, the DWP has diverted staff from dealing with new claims to make it look like they’ve got a handle on the backlog of reassessments. Up until October 2025, there were 40,000 new claimants waiting for their claim to be processed. As a result, clearance for new claims fell by 25%, despite there being 6% less claims than the year before. This also means the decision time has risen, from 14 weeks in October 2024 to 16 weeks in October 2025.

There’s also the fact that just 3.9 million people claim PIP. The DWP and press make this sound like a huge number, but it’s only a fraction of how many disabled people there are in the country. 16.8 million people self-identify as disabled in the UK, so that’s less than a quarter of them claiming PIP.

There might be a huge uproar over ‘1 in 10 people claiming PIP’, but disabled people make up 25% of the population. It should be 1 in 4.

Why now?

It’s also a question of why now? Why is the Mail deciding to publish what they’re packaging as massively informative about the ‘ballooning welfare bill’ on a random day in March? Well, because we have to look at what was happening last year in March.

This time a year ago, Labour was declaring its new war on disabled people with the cuts announcement coming on 18 March 2025. All around this, we saw weeks and months of ramped-up hate levelled at disabled benefits claimants. Labour tried every dirty trick in the book with giving the press sound bites of wild claims about benefit claimants.

In fact, Labour minister Wes Streeting made this exact claim almost a year to the date of this article being published. The Labour cuts, of course, didn’t all go through, because disabled campaigners rallied, leading to Labour MPs to ‘rebel’.

However, it coming back again isn’t a coincidence. A year on, Labour are still trying to push through its cuts on disability benefits.

Labour is ramping up hatred again

A big reason for the campaigning against cuts last year was that the DWP wanted to change the criteria for who can qualify. This is something that’s still being considered by the Timms Review, for both new and existing claimants. The review is typically a complete fucking shambles, by the way.

Whilst the DWP attempts to make it harder for those with mental health and neurodivergent conditions to claim, the Department of Health is carrying out reviews into whether the conditions are overdiagnosed. This is despite 32 health professionals calling out Streeting’s bullshit on this.

Alongside this, the department is cutting the amount a disabled person who can’t work is entitled to. In April new claimants will be entitled to £200 less a month. This, according to the DWP will ‘tackle perverse incentives’ to not work, such as y’know being able to afford to keep a roof over your head.

The department also wants to eventually move the ‘UC health element’, which people get when they can’t work, over to PIP, which has nothing to do with work and is a harder benefit to qualify for, even before they tighten the criteria. Of course, this will push disabled people into further poverty.

Demonisation of poor people

At the end of the day, the welfare system is supposed to be there to help those who need extra support. We should be proud to support so many people. But instead, in a system where the rich hold all the cards, it’s the poorest in society who are blamed.

Yes, 1000 people a day do qualify for PIP, but we should be supporting far more. And so many will be left without support if the DWP has their way. The press needs to take a long hard look at the way they report on welfare cuts, because they’ll be complicit in a fresh wave of welfare deaths.

Featured image via the Canary