People are taking to the streets in Cameroon, hoping to disrupt one of Africa’s most enduring dictatorships. The country’s president, Paul Biya, has been in office for more than four decades and reelected numerous times in contests that are not considered free or fair. But the most recent presidential election, held earlier this month, saw tensions spill over after Cameroon’s Constitutional Council once again declared Biya the winner.

Tampering allegations
The friction emerged when opposition candidate Issa Tchiroma Bakary claimed victory in the election and urged Biya to concede. But Biya, who at 92 is the world’s oldest elected leader, was declared the winner with 53% of the vote. The council said Tchiroma received 35%. Biya “rejected Tchiroma’s claim of victory and accused the opposition candidate of trying to disrupt the electoral process,” said The Associated Press. Afterward, some “pockets of protests broke out.”

Tchiroma said the election was marred with “vote tampering, echoing civil society groups’ earlier reports of ‘several irregularities,’ including attempted ballot stuffing,” said the AP. Tension eventually devolved into violence, most notably a fire in one of the governing party’s offices. 

At least “four people have been killed in clashes” in the country’s economic capital, Douala, while police “fired tear gas” into crowds in Tchiroma’s home city of Garoua, said Al Jazeera. The protesters were also angered by an internet outage that partially cut off web access for the country. Officials blamed the outage on a “submarine cable cut,” but the government also “shut down the internet to suppress demonstrations in 2017,” said Bloomberg.

Test of stability
With Biya now declared the winner, he will “extend his presidency by another seven years and lead the oil-exporting nation until he’s almost 100,” said Bloomberg. Most people in Cameroon, where the “median age is 18, have never experienced life under any other president.” In addition to “political stagnation,” Cameroon is grappling with “significant socioeconomic challenges,” as well as “ongoing conflicts” with jihadist insurgency Boko Haram in the north and a separatist militia in the west, said The Guardian.

What comes next “will be a test for Cameroon’s stability,” said Comfort Ero, the president of the nonprofit International Crisis Group, to The Africa Report. Biya’s party has “maintained an iron grip on power,” said Business Insider Africa, and another victory will “carry global symbolism” toward authoritarianism.

Amazon Web Services “returned to normal operations” about 15 hours after a global outage last week disrupted millions of websites and platforms that rely on AWS cloud servers, including Perplexity, Signal, Slack and Snapchat. The massive crash exposed the fragility of the foundations on which the digital world is built.

What exactly is AWS? 
Generating $106 billion last year, the cloud-computing platform now accounts for the majority of Amazon’s profits and provides the infrastructure underpinning much of the internet. As one of the world’s biggest web-hosting providers, AWS offers storage space and database management and connects traffic to more than 76 million websites. 

It has “positioned itself as the backbone of the internet,” said the BBC. And that’s how it “sells its services: Let us look after your business’ computing needs for you.” 

What went wrong? 
AWS experienced a major outage on Oct. 20 that engineers quickly identified as a Domain Name System error. These types of systems effectively serve as maps or phonebooks that link web URLs to server IP addresses so that traffic is directed to the correct website. “To keep with the phonebook analogy,” when DNS resolution issues occur, servers provide the “wrong numbers for a given name or vice versa,” said Wired. 

Banking services, social networks, messaging apps, government services, airline booking sites and online shopping were affected. Amazon’s website was also down for a while, and the company’s Alexa smart speakers and Ring doorbells stopped working. 

How could this happen? 
The outage has shown how integral AWS and the major cloud-computing services run by Google and Microsoft have become. When AWS “sneezes, half the internet catches the flu,” Monica Eaton, of Florida payment services company Chargebacks911, said to The National. 

When so much of the world’s digital infrastructure runs on a handful of American cloud providers, “resilience becomes as much a geopolitical issue as a technical one,” said Tech.eu. This underscores “just how dependent governments, businesses and users have become on the ‘big three’ cloud giants” and highlights the “urgent need for multiregion, multiprovider strategies to mitigate systemic risk.”

Riya, a mudhol hound and an Indian Border Security Force gold medalist, attends a press conference ahead of a National Unity Day parade in Gujarat on Friday that will feature 150 dogs native to India. The mudhol has historically been overlooked in favor of foreign varieties for security and police work. But now the “honor of India’s ancient breeds” is being “restored,” said The Times.
Sanjeev Verma / Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Police procedurals have been one of the most consistently popular genres since the early days of TV. Starting in the early 1980s, showrunners began adding nuance and social criticism to their stories of police officers fighting crime, sometimes even turning a critical eye on the institution of policing itself. That created not just great police stories but some of the best series ever aired.

‘Hill Street Blues’ (1981-87)
NBC’s series invented the gritty police drama in an era when squeaky-clean cops and black-and-white narratives were the norm. The series “ushered in a new golden age of television, and its ripples are still felt now,” said The New York Times. (Prime)

‘The Wire’ (2002-08)
HBO’s program is a persuasive contender as the best TV show ever made. This sweeping look at the intersection of the drug trade, urban poverty, racism and policing is set in a complicated, unvarnished Baltimore. Through its “unflinching depiction of power, race, class and American life,” the show stands as the “greatest show of the 21st century,” said the BBC. (HBO Max)

‘True Detective’ (2014-)
The first season of HBO’s anthology series is a narrative, cinematic marvel. Set in two timelines, the “artfully written, remarkably acted, stunningly visualized” series is also a “recruitment video for nihilistic pessimism,” as well as an “express elevator to the sub-sub-subbasement of human degradation,” said Time. (HBO Max)