GAZA’s health ministry has said at least 241 people were killed in the past 24 hours, as Israel’s military operation continues in the territory. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called the war a “grave crime” against his people. Israel’s army chief Herzi Halevi said the conflict with Hamas would continue for “many more months”. Israel says it hit more than 100 sites on Tuesday, amid reports of impending ground operations in central Gaza. Loud explosions could be heard from the Gaza Strip across the perimeter with Israel in the early hours of Wednesday. Gaza’s health ministry said 382 people had…
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FRENCH police have arrested a 33-year-old man suspected of murdering his wife and four children. An investigation began after their five bodies were found in a flat in Meaux, 40km (25 miles) north-east of Paris. The victims are a woman and her four children aged between nine months and 10 years old. Prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier described a scene of “extreme violence” when police reached the flat, with pools of blood at the scene. The flat showed no sign of break-in and the children’s father was not present, he told a press conference on Tuesday. The alarm was raised after a…
THE DR Congo government said Tuesday that it will outlaw an opposition-led demonstration planned for Wednesday to protest alleged “irregularities” in last week’s elections. Five opposition presidential candidates informed the governor of Kinshasa in a letter published Saturday of their intention to organise the march. But with definitive results still not announced, the government said the protests will be disruptive. “Tomorrow’s demonstrations are intended to undermine the electoral process — the government of the republic cannot accept this,” Interior Minister Peter Kazadi told journalists. “I can assure you that there will be no such march.” The opposition leaders who signed…
ARTIST Galal Yousif managed to flee Sudan when conflict erupted earlier this year with only a few belongings stuffed into a small backpack. The turmoil and bag, in which he had crammed his passport, two pairs of jeans, five shirts and a car key, is depicted in his painting Man With a Heavy Heart. He first created the work as a mural in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, which he reached after a harrowing journey in June. Having now found temporary refuge in Kenya, he has recreated it on canvas – a striking image of a man with a…
BURNLEY manager Vincent Kompany congratulated Rebecca Welch for a “milestone” achievement after she became the first woman to referee an English Premier League football match by taking charge of the Clarets’ 2-0 win at Fulham on Saturday. Welch, a 40-year-old from Washington in northeast England, was working for the National Health Service when she began her refereeing career in 2010. She rose through the officiating ranks and, in 2021, became the first woman appointed to referee a match in the English Football League when she took charge of the fourth-tier fixture between Harrogate and Port Vale. Welch was also the…
THE World Health Organization said it led missions to barely functioning hospitals in northern Gaza at the weekend, describing growing desperation and starving people stripping an aid truck of supplies. The UN health agency and its partners delivered aid, including fuel, to the devastated Al-Shifa hospital, once Gaza’s biggest and most advanced medical facility, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said late Sunday on X, formerly Twitter. What the participants in the December 23 mission witnessed was “rising desperation due to acute hunger,” Tedros said. “Partners demand immediate scale-up of food and water to ensure population health and stability.” Residents of…
SRI Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe granted an amnesty to more than 1,000 convicts and released them from jails across the country to mark Christmas, a prisons official said Monday. Among the 1,004 freed on Monday were Sri Lankans jailed for not being able to pay outstanding fines, Prison Commissioner Gamini Dissanayake said. Sri Lanka is majority Buddhist and a similar number of convicts were freed in May to mark the holiday of Vesak, which celebrates the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death. The latest pardon came after police arrested nearly 15,000 people during a weeklong military-backed anti-narcotics drive that was halted…
ZAMBIAN President Hakainde Hichilema has pardoned 588 inmates in various correctional facilities across the country. The freed prisoners include 11 elderly and one mother with a baby, according to the Minister of Home Affairs and Internal Security Jack Mwiimb. On Mwimb on Sunday told journalists in the capital Lusaka, the life sentence of an inmate was commuted to 35 years while two inmates on death row have their sentences commuted to life. The pardoning of the inmates by President Hichilema was in line with Article 97 of the country’s Constitution which confers authority on the president to pardon or substitute…
AT least four people have died with another 20 feared missing after a river swept away a building in South Kivu, Sunday, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). The accident happened in the rural and mining territory of Mwenga, where local people sheltered from heavy rains under a hangar serving as a makeshift restaurant on the banks of a river. “The heavy rains triggered a landslide” according to Alexandre Ngandu, the deputy mayor of Kamituga, a major town in the eastern South Kivu region. The torrential rains also caused considerable property damage. Experts say extreme weather…
WITH just 19 days to the 34th edition of the Africa Cup of Nations in Ivory Coast, this newspaper takes a look at some of the continent’s biggest stars that will follow the performance of their national teams from the comfort of their homes rather than playing on the pitch Taiwo Awoniyi (Nigeria) Awoniyi is one of the top stars that will be missing at the Africa Cup of Nations in Ivory Coast next year. Initially, there was never any doubt over the availability of the Nigerian for the 34th edition of the biennial African Association football tournament organised by…
BRITISH billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe has agreed to buy a 25% stake in Manchester United for about $1.3bn (£1.03bn). Ratcliffe’s Ineos Group will take control of football operations. The 71-year-old will also provide $300m (£236m) for future investment into the club’s Old Trafford stadium. The announcement comes 13 months after the club’s owners, the Glazer family, stated they were considering selling to “explore strategic alternatives”. The American family bought the club for £790m in 2005. The only other publicly declared bidder, Qatari banker Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, withdrew his offer to buy 100% of the club in October.…
GAZA’s health ministry says an Israeli air strike killed at least 70 people and 109 injured in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the centre of the strip. A spokesman said the death toll was likely to rise given the large number of families living in the area. The Israeli military told the BBC it was looking into reports of the strike. Israeli and Arab media say Egypt, which borders the Gaza Strip, has put forward a new proposal for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Dozens of injured people were rushed from Maghazi to nearby Al-Aqsa Hospital with footage showing…
AT least 13 people were killed and 38 injured in eastern Indonesia on Sunday in an explosion at a Chinese-funded nickel-processing plant, the owner of the industrial park that hosts the facility said. The island of Sulawesi is a hub for the mineral-rich country’s production of nickel, a base metal used for electric vehicle batteries and stainless steel, and Beijing’s growing investment has stoked unrest over working conditions at its facilities. The accident occurred around 5:30 am (2130 GMT Saturday) at a plant owned by PT Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel (ITSS) in the Morowali Industrial Park in Central Sulawesi province,…
THE Malian ambassador to Algiers was summoned to the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sunday to discuss “the latest developments in the situation in the sub-Saharan country”, the day after Bamako summoned the Algerian ambassador to Mali. The head of Algerian diplomacy, Ahmed Attaf, reminded the Malian ambassador, Mahamane Amadou Maiga, “in a forceful manner, that historically, all Algeria’s contributions to promoting peace, security and stability in Mali have always been based on three cardinal principles from which it has never deviated”, according to a press release from the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These principles are “Algeria’s intransgressible…
THE Senegalese navy has seized 690 kg of cocaine being transported to Europe in an ultra-fast go-fast boat and arrested the five Spaniards on board, the army announced in a statement received by AFP on Sunday. The deep-sea patrol boat intercepted the boat on Friday 220 km off the coast of Senegal. The patrol boat had to use verbal warnings and later warning shots to stop the boat, which had released its cargo before the intervention; 690 kg of cocaine were recovered, the statement said. On November 28 and December 16, the Senegalese army had announced seizures at sea of…
ANTHONY Joshua has won his third fight of 2023 with a TKO victory over Otto Wallin in the main event of the “Day of Reckoning” card in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. After securing consecutive victories over Jermaine Franklin in April and Robert Helenius with a seventh-round knockout in August, Joshua cruised to a fifth-round technical knockout win over Wallin, who had been expected to be a formidable opponent, especially with his southpaw stance. The only defeat on Wallin’s record before Joshua came in 2019 against Tyson Fury, in between the Gypsy King’s first and second meetings with Wilder. Fury won by…
MANCHESTER United’s dismal season continues as their loss to West Ham – a 13th in all competitions – marks their worst start to a season since 1930. The Hammers’ 2-0 win at the London Stadium means United have just one win in seven games in all competitions and sit eighth in the Premier League. Former midfielder Paul Scholes said his old side have “big problems” while manager Erik ten Hag said they are “underperforming”. Ex-England striker Alan Shearer added on BBC Match of the Day: “It is embarrassing for Man Utd. They have scored 18 goals this season, only Sheffield…
GAZA officials said Saturday that more than 200 people had been killed in Israeli strikes in 24 hours, as violence rages on after a UN resolution demanded more aid into the besieged territory. Israel pressed on with its offensive focusing on the southern Gaza Strip, with clouds of grey and black smoke rising over Khan Yunis city. AFPTV images also showed black smoke drifting over the north. The health ministry in Gaza reported 201 deaths in the past 24 hours across the territory, updating the death toll since the start of the war to 20,258, most of them women and…
MORE than 700 Airbus Atlantic staff are believed to have fallen ill following the company’s Christmas dinner, health authorities in France have said. Workers from the aerospace group’s site in western France were left suffering from vomiting and diarrhoea, Agence Régionale de Santé (ARS) said. It is unclear what was on the menu at the festive feast turned nightmare before Christmas. Airbus told the BBC, however, that only “around 100” were taken ill. In a statement, it said it was co-operating with the ARS “to identify the cause of the illness and ensure this cannot happen again in the future”.…
A WEST African delegation led by the leaders of Senegal and Ghana were in Sierra Leone on Saturday to lay the groundwork for a “security mission” in the wake of an alleged coup attempt in November. On November 26, armed attackers stormed a military armoury, two barracks, two prisons and two police stations, clashing with security forces. Twenty-one people were killed and hundreds of prisoners escaped before authorities were able to regain control after what they deemed a coup attempt by members of the armed forces. The violence sparked fears of another coup in West Africa, where Mali, Burkina Faso,…