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HumAngle’s Investigations Editor, Ibrahim Adeyemi, has been announced one of the 14 journalists selected from all over the world to participate in the 2025 Journalism programme at the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), a prestigious programme that trains professionals to navigate ethical dilemmas in the course of their careers.

The fellowship offers training to young professionals working in disciplines like journalism, business, religion, law, technology, and medicine. Each year, 13 to 16 fellows are chosen from each discipline through a rigorous selection process.

In June and July, Ibrahim will be joining other fellows in a two-week study across several cities in Germany and Poland to examine the historical events surrounding the Holocaust, how professionals acted during that time, and what journalists working now can learn from that conduct.

Ibrahim has done extensive work covering conflict and human rights violations in Nigeria and has received wide recognition for his work. An enterprise journalist covering humanitarian crises, defence, and security, he heads investigations and knowledge management at HumAngle. Although he studied English Language at the Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, Ibrahim deploys accountability journalism to interrogate humanitarian crises, illuminating the grey areas in local and international conflicts. His work has produced remarkable impact, including justice for disadvantaged communities, a voice for the less privileged, punishment for exposed officials, and a contribution to global peace and security.

While his works have tackled criminality and injustice, they have also earned him both local and international journalism accolades, including the One World Media Award, the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism, the Thomson Foundation Young Journalist Award, the Wole Soyinka Awards for Investigative Reporting, and the Kwame Karikari Fact-checking Award for African journalists.

Commenting on being selected for the fellowship, he said he was honoured. 

“I feel quite excited about the FASPE programme because it’s about journalism ethics,” he added. “As a humanitarian journalist, I face ethical dilemmas that require specialised training to tackle. I feel seen as a reporter and an editor covering delicate matters such as conflict, armed violence, terrorism, insurgency, and humanitarian crises. I strongly believe that this fellowship will not only equip me to tackle these ethical conundrums but also empower me to be a better journalist overall. Being accepted into the fellowship makes me even prouder of the work we do at HumAngle and of the unique techniques we deploy to tell human-centred stories.”

Ibrahim is the second HumAngle journalist to be selected for the fellowship. Last year, Managing Editor, Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu, was also selected. 

“I must thank my super boss and Editor-in-Chief, Mr Ahmad Salkida, for providing an enabling environment for us to thrive. My sincere appreciation also goes to HumAngle’s Managing Editor, Ms Hauwa Shaffi Nuhu, for recommending that I apply for this great fellowship, having seen the ethical dilemmas I often face in the course of my duties. I also thank the FASPE jury for considering me for this year’s programme. This means a lot to me, and I am most grateful to God Almighty,” Ibrahim said.

March 2 (UPI) — The royal editor for The Daily Mail on Monday denied using a private investigator to steal information about Prince Harry and his former girlfriend Chelsy Davy.

Prince Harry is suing Associated Newspapers Ltd., which owns The Daily Mail, along with six other plaintiffs including Elton John and Elizabeth Hurley, for using information they obtained illegally.

ANL denies all wrongdoing and said it gathered all information for its stories legally.

The testimony Monday mostly hinged on Mike Behr, a South Africa-based private investigator. Rebecca English, royal editor, said she knew Behr only as “a freelance journalist who could help on Africa stories,” The Guardian reported.

Lawyers asked English about an email from Behr that shared the exact flights that Davy was taking on a vacation with Harry in 2007.

Behr asked in the email if English and the Sun reporter “can plant someone next to her?”

Plaintiffs’ lawyer David Sherborne said the email “could only have been obtained from the computer system” of an airline. That means it came from a “blag” — British slang for a way of obtaining information illegally.

English responded that she didn’t remember the email or ask for those flight details.

“[Behr] was never asked for anything like this, ever,” she said. “That is something I would never even consider doing, now or then,” The Guardian reported.

Sherborne asked about planting someone next to Davy, and English replied: “It’s an absolutely shameful suggestion both by him and by you … clearly there’s no reply to this email, which emphasizes my belief that I never actually saw it.”

He then accused her of using illegal information in a story about a “make-or-break holiday” for the couple. But English said the information was likely from students at the University of Leeds, where Davy was enrolled, “who were friends with Chelsy Davy and part of her circle.”

Sherborne also asked English about a story with the headline, “How Harry fell in love,” from 2004. The story alleged that Harry had shared details of his relationship with Davy with friends at a campfire in Botswana. English said the campfire info came from her coworker Sam Greenhill.

“Sam told me that one of the people that Prince Harry had spoken with ’round the campfire got in touch with the newspaper when news of the relationship broke and gave this information to us,” The Independent reported.

“Prince Harry hadn’t told them who his girlfriend was but had described her so that, when the stories about Chelsy Davy broke, they realized the significance of what they had been told.

“I thought at the time that the tip was from a contact of Sam’s, but now understand it just came in to the news desk. I think that Sam gave it to me because he knew that I was new to my job as a royal reporter and thought it might be helpful to me.”

Harry testified last month that the people at the campfire — his “closest friends” — would not have shared that information, and if they had, there “would be a lot more out there.”

Tayari Jones was feeling intense pressure to deliver a follow-up to her 2018 bestseller, “An American Marriage.” She was three years past her publisher’s deadline. Worse, she had begun to suffer symptoms of what was ultimately diagnosed as Graves’ disease, a serious autoimmune condition that attacks the thyroid. At the time she didn’t know what was causing pain in her right leg and the intense itching on her arms, legs and torso — or why her handwriting had “gone funky.” Meanwhile, 200 pages in, the novel she owed Knopf Publisher and Editor in Chief Jordan Pavlin wasn’t coming together.

She confided to a close friend, “This book got me feeling like a clown right now.” Jones began to doubt that she was ‘worthy’ of another literary success.

“You know how musicians say ‘that band was swinging’? I wasn’t swinging,” Jones, who lives in Atlanta, tells me during a recent phone call.

She says she turned to an empty notebook, and began word doodling — scrawling random words, going wherever her pen took her. “Kin,” the magnificent novel that emerged, is out now. Oprah recently announced that it’s her latest book club pick (the second time Jones has been honored with the selection).

“Kin: A Novel” by Tayari Jones

(Knopf)

“Kin” was supposed to have been an entirely different book — an of-the-moment novel about gentrification in the New South — but what materialized from Jones’ creative experiment was a tiny Louisiana town called Honeysuckle, amid the 1950s and Jim Crow. Then, as Jones puts it, “Annie and Vernice [her main characters] introduced themselves.” All of Jones’ previous fiction has been contemporary, and at first she didn’t know what to make of the path Annie and Vernice were leading her on. “I don’t write historical,” observes Jones, “I’m a writer of my own era.” Not to mention she’d always been suspicious of writers who claim their characters came to them fully realized.

Even at that point, Jones still believed Vernice and Annie might just be part of a larger backstory, perhaps parents to protagonists she had yet to conjure. “So I stuck with it to find out.” The more she wrote, the more the puzzle pieces began to fit together. Annie’s journey out of Louisiana takes her through a sharecropping brothel in Mississippi, then on to Memphis where she is convinced she will find and reunite with her mother. Meanwhile, Vernice attends Spelman (the HBCU Jones is a ’91 graduate of).

Jones began to suspect that she’d had a previously undetected ulterior motive for moving her book to the past. She wondered if “Kin” was actually an effort to better understand her parents, particularly her mother, a former economist who’d been active in the civil rights movement. “My mother is a very tight-lipped person,” Jones says. “I knew very little about her life, and maybe this was my imagination trying to crack the code.”

Jones’ progress wasn’t without its setbacks. She was deep into the writing of “Kin” when her Graves’ disease flared in earnest. Her blood pressure spiked. She got winded just climbing the stairs to her bedroom. She landed in the emergency room with a life-threatening “thyroid storm,” requiring surgery and daily medication. Then her eyesight deteriorated, which necessitated a month of radiation. But she powered through, and sent off the manuscript.

Jones’ editor, Pavlin, admits the novel she received was a surprise. “But it was as perfect a novel as I’ve ever read,” she says. “No publisher in their right mind would stand on anything as insignificant as a contractual description in the face of such a work.”

“Kin” deftly alternates points of view between Vernice and Annie, narrating events by way of a vernacular that would be at home on a front porch rocking chair. When Annie takes a job at a nightclub in Memphis, she says of its penny-pinching owner: “The man was tight as a skeeter’s teeter.” Jones is equally adept at the delicate prose, as in this description of a well-worn family Bible: “The paper, thin as butterfly wings, was heavy with wisdom.”

While Jones had Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” in mind while writing “Kin,” her take on the subject is singular. “Vernice and Annie remain friends because each of them is the keeper of the other’s true self,” she says. “Friendship is particularly meaningful because it’s a relationship you’re constantly recommitting to — reupping.”

Now that “Kin” is out in the world, and Jones has weathered the bumpy road to publication day, we asked her if she’s nervous about how it will be received eight years after her previous novel was published. “I am not ambitious now in the way I was then,” she says. “I’ve learned what success can and cannot do for a person. You have to learn to be satisfied. People say ‘don’t rest on your laurels,’ but what are laurels for?”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist, and co-founder of the Ink Book Club on Substack. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.