"Yassin told me that he had been hit, and I told him to stop his jokes because he likes to joke a lot. He said, ‘Mama, I am not lying, I have been shot. I swear I have been shot.'"

From "Kenyan police shot dead a teenager on his balcony during a coronavirus curfew crackdown" (WaPo).

[Yassin Hussein Moyo, 13] had been standing on his third-floor balcony in a shantytown in Nairobi, watching police storm the neighborhood, beating people who refused to abide by the curfew with their batons, when a police bullet struck his stomach....The curfew, which requires people to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn, is the most stringent limitation and has led to a wave of police violence.... On Saturday morning, a motorcycle taxi driver died from injuries that his family says he sustained from being beaten by a policeman after he dropped off a pregnant woman at a hospital after curfew....

"Cave Found in Kenya in Which People Lived for 78,000 Years/Unique discoveries in tropical forest cave show gradual development of weapons and other skills, negating the theory of sudden spurts of innovation."

Haaretz reports.

Panga ya Saidi is actually a network of caves about a kilometer long in limestone hills: the main chamber is about 100 square meters (1,076 square feet) co-author Prof. Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute tells Haaretz. It was used from the Middle Stone Age to this day, though people don’t live in it any more: now they use it for burials and rituals, he says. In any case, it was big enough to have supported hundreds of people....

At Panga ya Saidi, tools go back to the earliest occupation 78,000 years ago. But the occupants’ technology changed markedly 67,000 years ago, with smaller, finer implements appearing, reflecting changes in hunting practices and skills.

After that turning point, the archaeologists observed a mix of technologies rather than sudden changes. That argues against a series of cognitive or cultural "revolutions" theorized by some archaeologists, they write....

Kenya must redo its election, the Kenyan Supreme Court says.

As the NYT reports, the court agreed with the side that lost the election that "the vote had been hacked and electronically manipulated to assure a victory for President Uhuru Kenyatta."

Most African courts are often under pressure from leaders, [said Dickson Omondi, a country director for the National Democratic Institute, a nonpartisan organization that supports democratic institutions and practices worldwide.], so “It’s a historic moment showing the fortitude and courage of the Kenyan judiciary.”...

Walter Mebane, a professor of statistics and political science at the University of Michigan who studies elections worldwide, volunteered to run the voting results through a computer model he developed to detect electoral fraud. Based on statistics only, and without knowledge of the intricacies of Kenyan politics, he and his team found patterns that showed widespread manipulation.

“It was unlike any data set I had ever seen,” he said. “Every single indicator came up signaling anomalies. It’s a huge red flag that something weird is going on.”

"If you want to survive, come out! If you want to die, stay inside!"

"I knew those guys were lying," said Elosy Karimi, 23, one of the survivors, who stayed inside — inside the ceiling — for more than a day.

"The girl’s family claimed she didn’t know about the arrangement her father made with her future husband..."

"If they told her, they feared, she would run away. A group of men from the tribe came to collect her and led her to a two-day ceremony in the village."

"Please forgive me, we are not monsters," said the terrorist to the 4-year-old boy who had called him "a very bad man."

This Daily Mail item forefronts the daring, outspoken little boy, Elliot Prior. Your heart is supposed to tingle at the boy's courage as he "protected his mother, Amber, who had been shot in the leg" in the Kenyan mall massacre and was the reason the terrorist "took pity." But scroll down and see:

The terrorists said if any of the kids were alive in the supermarket they could leave. 'Amber made the decision to stand up and say "yes".'... After discovering [that Amber Prior] was of French origin, the men began to plead with her and claimed that the Muslim faith ‘was not a bad one.’

‘He told me I had to change my religion to Islam and said “do you forgive us? Do you forgive us?’, the mother told The Independent. ‘Naturally, I was going to say whatever they wanted and they let us go.’

It's nice to think about the boy, but it was the mother, who figured out how to tell the right lies convincingly. She gains pride through the boy, who, at 4, had no way to use strategy and guile, like his mother, who continues to use strategy and guile as she talks to the press and diverts attention away from whatever shame and humiliation she may feel over the lies she chose to tell to save herself and her children.

Presumably, if she had stood tall, proclaimed herself a Christian, and brought death to herself and her children, her courage would have been celebrated at the top of the article. I'm saying this to celebrate Amber Prior.

"I thought it might be better to be like a chameleon — able to adapt and change and blend with our environment rather than conquer it."

Said Ross Langdon, a Tasmanian-born architect who built "eco-lodges and socially sustainable tourism in ecologically sensitive locations." He died in the Nairobi terror attack, along with his partner Elif Yavuz, a Harvard PhD and malaria specialist, who worked for the Clinton foundation.

"Elif was brilliant at her job and a joy to work with.... She was a friend both in and out of the office, and always had a great sense of humor – recently, her baby belly had been the subject of a number of jokes."

ADDED: Many pictures of this couple here.

"Some witnesses said the gunmen had told Muslims to leave and said non-Muslims would be targeted."

BBC reports on the massacre in the upscale shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya:

"They came and said: 'If you are Muslim, stand up. We've come to rescue you," said Elijah Lamau.

He said the Muslims left with their hands up, and then the gunmen shot two people.

The correspondent in Nairobi for the Economist, Daniel Howden told the BBC he spoke to one man with a Christian first name but a Muslim-sounding surname who managed to escape the attackers by putting his thumb over his first name on his ID.

George Obama, arrested.

Marijuana.