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Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Yaounde — Chad’s presidential election concludes Monday with civilians going to the polls, a day after members of the military cast their ballots. Transitional President General Mahamat Idriss Deby is facing nine challengers, including his current prime minister. The election, designed to end three years of a military government, has been peaceful so far. However, there is tension over a ban on taking pictures of election result sheets at polling stations. Hundreds of people started arriving at polling stations in Chad's capital N'djamena as early as 5:30 am local time. Among the voters at the University of N'djamena was 29-year-old student Abdel Koura. He says he came out early to vote because he wants a president that will bring peace and provide jobs for youths who are unemployed after completing their education. Koura says voting is his civic right. He says he is calling on all civilians, especially youths, to come out in huge numbers and vote for their leader in peace. He says he is also pleading with Chad's transitional government to avoid chaos by ensuring that the elections are transparent and free and the winner would be who civilians have voted for. Early voting was peaceful. However, Chad’s National Election Management Agency, known as ANGE, said that several thousand polling stations opened late due to what they call logistical difficulties. Chad's transitional president General Mahamat Idriss Deby voted in N'djamena’s second district and pleaded with civilians to go out en masse and perform their civic duty of voting for the person who will manage Chad's affairs for the next five years. ANGE says 8.2 million people are registered to vote. It says Chad's military has been deployed to protect voters’ safety in over 26,500 polling stations. Chad says over 2,500 national and international observers from 120 groups are accredited to monitor the elections. It says applications from another 60 groups were rejected for not respecting the country’s laws. Cyrille Nguiegang Ntchassep is the spokesperson for observers from the six-nation Central African Economic and Monetary Commission. He has concerns that peace will not hold. He says perceivable tensions over a ban on filming or taking photos of result sheets in polling stations and publishing them on social media and radio and television are likely to degenerate into violent clashes because civilians think that the central African state’s elections management body is controlled by Deby who created it. Ntchassep says he does not understand why Chad is reluctant to proclaim election results in a day or two as was the case in Senegal's March 24 presidential polls. Opposition and civil society groups, including the Transformers Party of Deby’s main challenger Succces Masra, said they planned to photograph the election result sheets and distribute them to the international community. They say the move is to prevent ANGE from rigging the elections in favor of Deby. Tahir Oloy Hassan is ANGE’s spokesperson. Hassan says ANGE is a permanent, independent and impartial body that does not receive orders from any state authority including Deby. He says the ban on filming and taking photos of result sheets and prohibition of media organs from having access to some polling stations and sensitive areas is to reduce tensions that may arise from misinformation and manipulation by people who want to see Chad in chaos. He said claims by opposition candidates that Chad's military was instructed to vote for Deby when they went to the polls on Sunday are unfounded. ANGE says it has up to May 21 to publish provisional results and only Chad's Constitutional Council has the powers to proclaim definitive results. The elections are design to end three years of transition that followed the death of Idriss Deby Itno in 2021. Chad's opposition and civil society says the younger Deby's rule was marked by political tensions including October 2022 pro-democracy protests during which the central African state's security forces killed at least 50 people, injured 300 and arrested several hundred others.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is honoring its dedicated workforce during Public Service Recognition Week (PSRW) 2024. Celebrated annually during the first full week in May since 1985, PSRW is a time set aside to honor those who serve our nation as federal, state, county, and local government employees.   

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

New York — Columbia University is canceling its large university-wide commencement ceremony amid ongoing pro-Palestinian protests but will hold smaller school-based ceremonies this week and next, the university announced Monday. "Based on feedback from our students, we have decided to focus attention on our Class Days and school-level graduation ceremonies, where students are honored individually alongside their peers, and to forego the university-wide ceremony that is scheduled for May 15," Columbia officials said in a statement. The protests stem from the conflict that started Oct. 7 when Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking roughly 250 hostages. Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 34,500 Palestinians, about two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. Israeli strikes have devastated the enclave and displaced most of its inhabitants. The University of Southern California earlier canceled its main graduation ceremony while allowing other commencement activities to continue.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

London — Scottish political veteran John Swinney on Monday was named head of the pro-independence SNP party, leaving him poised to become Scotland's leader. Swinney, 60, said on X, formerly Twitter, he was "deeply honored to have been elected as leader of the SNP" after Humza Yousaf resigned last week after little more than a year as Scottish leader and head of the Scottish National Party (SNP). The SNP confirmed Swinney's election after nominations for the post closed at 12 noon (1100 GMT) without any other challengers emerging. Humza stepped down last Monday as he faced a confidence vote in the Scottish parliament that he was set to lose having ditched his junior coalition partners, the Scottish Green Party, in a row over climate policy. Swinney is likely to become the next first minister, head of the devolved Scottish government, but will still need enough votes in the Scottish parliament to be elected first minister. Launching his bid last week, Swinney said he was running "to unite the SNP and unite Scotland for independence", despite polls showing stalled support for a split from the UK. "I want to build on the work of the SNP government to create a modern, diverse, dynamic Scotland that will ensure opportunity for all of our citizens," Swinney told supporters in Edinburgh. Swinney inherits a difficult political legacy with former SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon embroiled in a party funding scandal and a challenging domestic policy landscape. With the SNP heading a minority government in the 129-seat Scottish parliament, he will need the support of another party to form a governing coalition or pass pieces of legislation.

BERLIN — Germany said Monday it recalled its ambassador to Russia for a week of consultations in Berlin following an alleged hacker attack on Chancellor Olaf Scholz's party. Germany last week accused Russian military agents of hacking into the top echelons of Scholz's Social Democrats' party and other sensitive government and industrial targets. Berlin has joined NATO and fellow European countries in warning that Russia's cyberespionage would have consequences. The Foreign Office in Berlin said Monday that the government is taking the latest incident "seriously" and that Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock had decided to call back German Ambassador Alexander Lambsdorff. He would return to Moscow after a week, it said. "The German government takes this event very seriously as behavior against our liberal democracy and the institutions that support it," Foreign Office spokeswoman Kathrin Deschauer said. Baerbock said last week that Russian military cyber operators were behind the hacking of emails of the Social Democrats, the leading party in the governing coalition. Officials said the hackers had exploited Microsoft Outlook. The German Interior Ministry said in a statement last week that the hacking campaign began as early as March 2022, a month after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with emails at the Social Democrat party headquarters accessed beginning that December. It said German companies, including in the defense and aerospace sectors, as well as targets related to the war in Ukraine were the focus of the hacking attacks. Officials said the attacks persisted for months. Relations between Russia and Germany have been tense since Russia's attack on Ukraine. Germany has been providing military support to Ukraine in the ongoing war.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we'll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.