 Salam, you're watching the International Daily Roundup, people's dispatch is selection of some of the top stories from around the world. Let's first take a look at today's headlines. Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez, to be the candidates for Colombia's historic packed coalition. A new report indicates 80% of Africa's rural population lacks safely managed drinking water. A Communist Party activist in Swaziland has been detained and assaulted. And Algerian political prisoner Fethigares has been released. Our first story is from Colombia, where the left-wing historic packed coalition will field Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez as its presidential and vice presidential candidates in the May elections. The duo obtained the highest votes in the primaries held on 13 March. According to the latest opinion polls, the unity ticket of the progressive forces is favored to win the upcoming presidential election on May 29, with about 47% of the voting population indicating its preference. Speaking at the announcement, Petro said, and I quote, Today we have reached a definitive moment. We have achieved an undeniable triumph. Millions of Colombians want the country to change, and today they are the majority. Petro is a former mayor of Bogota and was also the progressive candidate in the 2018 elections. Francia Marquez is a lawyer and environmental leader and a native of Causa. Marquez has stated that she will work on addressing the environmental crisis and the reparation of the rights of Colombian Afro-descendant communities. In 2018, Marquez won the top prize recognizing Nature's Defenders, the Goldman Environment Prize, and at the time she also gave a speech honoring the ancestral knowledge of her community. The elections in Colombia followed a disastrous pandemic, during which the administration of right-wing President Ivan Duque was widely criticized. There has also been a huge amount of violence against activists and social society leaders. 80% of the rural population on the African continent lacks safely managed drinking water. As much as 75% of the same population lacks safely managed sanitation, and as many as 70% lack basic hygiene services. These details were revealed in a special report of the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program for Water Supply Sanitation and Hygiene. 40% of the population in urban Africa also lack safely managed drinking water. The UNICEF and the WHO warned that the Sustainable Development Goals targets will not be met in Africa unless a 12-fold increase can be achieved in the rate of expansion of access to safely managed drinking water, safely managed sanitation requires a 20-fold increase to meet SDG targets, and basic hygiene services need as much as 42 times increase. In Swaziland, Bongi and Kambhule, an activist of the Communist Party of Swaziland, was allegedly abducted by the police from the capital city of Mbabaane on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 23rd. He was reportedly released at night, but also assaulted. At the time, he was picked up by a truck of policemen, and Kambhule, who is in his mid-30s, was returning from the Manzini court, where charges against two other activists were being heard. The other two activists were arrested on the 22nd of May, 2021, on accusations of vandalising and burning the Manzini police station. The said incident occurred after police forces attacked the memorial service for a student, Thabani and Moe. The student's dead body was found earlier that month, four days after he was allegedly killed by the police, who then tried to cover up the murder. The protest against police brutality in the aftermath of the student's killing snowballed into unprecedented country-wide, anti-monarchist and pro-democracy protests by June, which for the first time swept across rural Swaziland as well. And finally, Algerian opposition figure and leader of the leftist Democratic and Social Movement Party, Fethi Ghares, was granted an early release from prison on Tuesday 22nd of March. Ghares was arrested on June, 2021 and sentenced to a two-year term in jail in January, on charges of insulting the head of state, inciting an armed assembly, contempt for a legal authority, and dissemination of information that could harm the national interests. According to reports, the 47-year-old activist left the Al-Haraj prison after the Algerian court of appeal awarded him a revised sentence of one year in prison, including six months suspended during an appeal trial, which began on the 8th of March and concluded on the 22nd. The prosecution at the trial had requested a three-year prison sentence. Ghares was active in the anti-establishment Hiraq protest, which first started in 2019 against then president Abdelaziz Bouteflika. This was after the president announced that he would seek a fifth consecutive term in power. The nationwide protests ultimately forced Bouteflika to resign and ended his authoritarian regime after almost 30 years in power. The weekly Hiraq demonstrations continued against a subsequent government as well, with protesters demanding substantial, structural, political, and economic reform. Protesters have been demanding the ouster of all politicians, army officials, and business elite from the Bouteflika era who continued to hold important positions of power. Even though several members of the former regime, including prime ministers and other ministers, have since been prosecuted for corruption and sentenced, there are many who have escaped prosecution altogether. According to data released by the CNLD, over 300 Algerians are still being detained in prison for their participation or links with the Hiraq movement or for their involvement in other related campaigns advocating for civil liberties and human rights. That's all we have on this episode of the International Daily Roundup. For more details on all of these stories, head over to our website peoplesdispatch.org and do give us a follow on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. We'll be back again tomorrow. See you then. Goodbye.