JOHANNESBURG: South Africa said on Friday the rate of violence against women in the country was a national disaster, as thousands protested to highlight the problem ahead of this weekend’s G20 summit of world leaders.
The country has one of the world’s highest rates of gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF), leading to deaths five times higher than the global average, according to the United Nations’s gender equality organization UN Women.
In one of dozens of “lie-in” protests countrywide, thousands of people dressed in black lay on the ground for 15 minutes at an event in Johannesburg’s city center, just a few kilometers (miles) from the venue where G20 leaders will meet on Saturday and Sunday.
Organizers said the action was to honor the 15 women murdered every day in South Africa.
A 2022 government survey found that one in three South African women had experienced physical violence and almost 10 percent had faced sexual violence.
More than 10,700 cases of rape were reported to police in the first three months of 2025 but the real numbers are expected to be much higher.
“I’m here standing for not only myself but my younger sisters, my siblings and every woman in South Africa,” said one of the protesters, 23-year-old Lefika Jonathan.
the government’s disaster management said that after evaluating the “persistent and immediate life-safety risks posed by ongoing acts of violence,” it had concluded that GBVF met the “threshold of a potential disaster.”
This made the issue a priority for the executive branch of government and “all organs of state,” it said.
“All we want is justice,” said another protester, 19-year-old student Nomhle Porogo.
She hoped the timing of the protest meant “those in higher positions can hear our cries.”
But she was unimpressed by the decision to wait until South Africa was in the international spotlight to classify the problem a disaster — a longstanding demand from women’s rights groups.
“For them to declare it a national disaster when it suits them and in front of our visitors because they want to make our house look clean for visitors... is an injustice,” she told AFP.
South Africa accepts huge rate of violence against women is national disaster
https://arab.news/2fxnz
South Africa accepts huge rate of violence against women is national disaster
- Organizers said the action was to honor the 15 women murdered every day in South Africa
- More than 10,700 cases of rape were reported to police in the first three months of 2025
Power outages hit Ukraine and Moldova as Kyiv struggles against the winter cold
- Outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova
- Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions
KYIV: Emergency power cuts swept across several Ukrainian cities as well as neighboring Moldova on Saturday, officials said, amid a commitment from the Kremlin to US President Donald Trump to pause strikes on Kyiv as Ukraine battles one of its bleakest winters in years.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova.
The failure “caused a cascading outage in Ukraine’s power grid,” triggering automatic protection systems, he said.
Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions, in the center and northeast of the country respectively. The outage cut water supplies to the Ukrainian capital, officials said, while the city’s subway system was temporarily suspended because of low voltage on the network.
Moldova also experienced major power outages, including in the capital Chisinau, officials said.
“Due to the loss of power lines on the territory of Ukraine, the automatic protection system was triggered, which disconnected the electricity supply,” Moldova’s Energy Minister Dorin Junghietu said in a post on Facebook. “I encourage the population to stay calm until electricity is restored.”
Weaponizing winter
The large-scale outage followed weeks of Russian strikes against Ukraine’s already struggling energy grid, which have triggered long stretches of severe power shortages.
Moscow has sought to deny Ukrainian civilians heat, light and running water over the course of the war, in a strategy that Ukrainian officials describe as “weaponizing winter.”
While Russia has used similar tactics throughout the course of its almost four-year invasion of Ukraine, temperatures throughout this winter have fallen further than usual, bringing widespread hardship to civilians.
Forecasters say Ukraine will experience a brutally cold period stretching into next week. Temperatures in some areas will drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), Ukraine’s State Emergency Service said.
Trump said late Thursday that President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a temporary pause in targeting Kyiv and other Ukrainian towns amid the extreme weather.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and the cities and towns for a week during this ... extraordinary cold,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Putin has “agreed to that,” he said, without elaborating on when the request to the Russian leader was made.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a query seeking clarity about the scope and timing of any limited pause.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed Friday that Trump “made a personal request” to Putin to stop targeting Kyiv until Sunday “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations.”
Talks are expected to take place between US, Russian and Ukrainian officials on Feb. 1 in Abu Dhabi. The teams previously met in late January in the first known time that officials from the Trump administration simultaneously met with negotiators from both Ukraine and Russia. However, it’s unclear many obstacles to peace remain. Disagreement over what happens to occupied Ukrainian territory, and Moscow’s demand for possession of territory it hasn’t captured, are a key issue holding up a peace deal, Zelensky said Thursday.
Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev said on social media Saturday that he was in Miami, where talks between Russian and US negotiators have previously taken place.
Russia struck Ukrainian energy assets in several regions on Thursday but there were no strikes on those facilities overnight, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday.
In a post on social media, Zelensky also noted that Russia has turned its attention to targeting Ukrainian logistics networks, and that Russian drones and missiles hit residential areas of Ukraine overnight, as they have most nights during the war.
Trump has framed Putin’s acceptance of the pause in strikes as a concession. But Zelensky was skeptical as Russia’s invasion approaches its fourth anniversary on Feb. 24 with no sign that Moscow is willing to reach a peace settlement despite a US-led push to end the fighting.
“I do not believe that Russia wants to end the war. There is a great deal of evidence to the contrary,” Zelensky said Thursday.
