AFRICA

Bangui, Central African Republic | AFP | Rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army have kidnapped a record 344 civilians in the Central African Republic in the first half of 2016, according to two specialised NGOs. “The group abducted 344 people there in the first six months of 2016, more than …

Durban, South Africa | AFP | Lebogang Motsumi, 27, still remembers the moment when she learnt she had contracted HIV from a man a decade her senior. “It was August 15, 2009, at 1:00pm,” she said, recalling the instant when her life changed traumatically. “I was so ignorant,” she said. …

Nairobi, Kenya | AFP | Security agencies are killing and abducting men in north-east Kenya who they suspect of links to Islamist extremists, a rights group said Wednesday. Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented 34 “enforced disappearances” and 11 suspected “extrajudicial killings” over two years in Garissa, Mandera and Wajir counties …

Bamako, Mali | AFP | Seventeen soldiers were killed and 35 wounded in central Mali Tuesday in an assault on their base that authorities called a “coordinated terrorist attack”. “The toll has increased: we have lost 17 men and 35 are wounded,” Mali’s defence minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly said. Authorities …

The Ambassador of France to Uganda, Sophie Makame speaks to The Independent’s Ronald Musoke about the relevancy today of the 227th anniversary of Bastille Day – the day when, on  July 14, 1789, an angry mob marched onto the Bastille prison and triggered the French Revolution. Why is the storming …

More than 5,000 people have fled crisis-hit South Sudan into neighbouring Uganda since the latest outbreak of violence began on July 7, the UN said Tuesday, voicing fears that more could follow. An estimated 90 percent of those who have crossed the border in recent days were women and children, …

The outgoing chairperson of the African Union Commission Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma has this Monday morning launched the African Passport at the 27th African Union summit ongoing in Kigali. The head of the African Union and Chad President Idriss Deby Itno and Rwanda president Paul Kagame, who is hosting the Summit, …

Kigali, Rwanda | AFP | Renewed fighting in South Sudan that has claimed more than 300 lives dominated discussions at an African Union summit that opened Sunday in the Rwandan capital Kigali. A shaky ceasefire has held since late Monday following the fighting that raged for four days in Juba, …

The situation in South Sudan has dominated President Yoweri Museveni’s meetings at the sidelines of the ongoing 27th AU summit, in Kigali, Rwanda. Museveni first met the United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki Moon soon after arriving Saturday, and this was followed by meetings with the Ethiopian Prime Minister and …

Juba, South Sudan | AFP | It was looting on an epic scale; a month’s worth of food aid for over 220,000 South Sudanese, all stolen in just two days along with the giant warehouses that stored it. As fighting raged between rival forces in the capital Juba last week, …