Author: Editor

BENJAMIN Sesko struck in the 96th minute to preserve Michael Carrick’s unbeaten start as Manchester United caretaker head coach and deny West Ham United a crucial win in their battle to avoid relegation. Carrick had won his first four games in charge, a run of victories that had been beyond his predecessor Ruben Amorim, but the sequence of wins came to an end on a rain-lashed night in east London. Carrick will however be grateful for a point after Tomas Soucek’s strike early in the second half put Nuno Espirito Santo’s side on course for a fourth win in five…

AT dawn on August 10, 2024, Yasmin Mahani walked through the smoking ruins of al-Tabin school in Gaza City, searching for her son, Saad. She found her husband screaming, but of Saad, there was no trace. “I went into the mosque and found myself stepping on flesh and blood,” Mahani told Al Jazeera Arabic for an investigation that aired on Monday. She searched hospitals and morgues for days. “We found nothing of Saad. Not even a body to bury. That was the hardest part.” Mahani is one of thousands of Palestinians whose loved ones have simply vanished during Israel’s genocidal…

COLOMBIAN President Gustavo Petro says that he has escaped an assassination attempt while travelling by helicopter with his daughters, after warning for months about an alleged plot by drug traffickers who want to target him. Petro said on Tuesday that his helicopter was unable to land at a destination on Colombia’s Caribbean coast the previous day because of fears that unspecified people “were going to shoot”. “Last night, I couldn’t land because I was informed that they were going to shoot at the helicopter I was travelling in with my daughters,” Petro said in a report carried by the public…

ZIMBABWE’s ‌cabinet backed draft legislation that would change the constitution to extend presidential terms from five years to seven, allowing President Emmerson Mnangagwa to stay in office until 2030. Other proposed changes in the bill presented to the cabinet on Tuesday include ⁠a provision that the president be elected by parliament rather than through a direct popular vote. Others include allowing the president to appoint 10 more senators, boosting the Senate to 90 seats. Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi told a news conference the bill will be sent to the speaker of parliament and published in an official gazette before lawmakers…

ZAMBIA’s High Court has ordered the seizure of assets worth more than $1.3m (£923,000) from Dalitso Lungu, the son of former President Edgar Lungu. The forfeiture order covers 79 vehicles and 23 pieces of land and real estate, including a shopping mall, petrol station, “luxury apartments and an executive residence” in the capital, Lusaka. The judgement said the 39-year-old and his company had failed to provide a credible and verifiable explanation for how the assets were acquired lawfully. Edgar Lungu, who led Zambia for six years from 2015, died in South Africa last June but has yet to be buried…

Al NASSR are expecting Cristiano Ronaldo to end his strike and play again for them on Saturday. The 41-year-old has missed his side’s last two Saudi Pro League (SPL) games because he has been unhappy with the way Al Nassr are being run. After receiving assurances, Ronaldo is expected to return for Saturday’s SPL game at Al Fateh. Before that game, Al Nassr have an Asian Champions League Two game against Arkadag in Turkmenistan on Wednesday. The Portugal captain has missed Al Nassr’s last two games after not featuring in Friday’s Saudi Pro League home win over Al Ittihad. Ronaldo…

AT LEAST four Palestinians have been killed and several others wounded after Israeli forces bombed a residential building sheltering displaced people in Gaza City in a further violation of an October “ceasefire”. The Israeli air attack took place in Gaza City’s Nassr neighbourhood and brought the number of people killed on Monday to at least seven. Footage from the scene showed emergency teams transporting casualties in ambulances as residents carried a body towards the morgue at al-Shifa Hospital. Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim Al Khalili, reporting from Gaza City, said the targeted building had been damaged during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza…

THE United States has issued new guidelines to US-flagged ships travelling through the Strait of Hormuz, calling on them to stay away from Iran’s territorial waters amid tensions between Washington and Tehran. The advisory, released by the US Maritime Administration on Monday, also urged the captains of American ships against granting Iranian forces permission to board US vessels. “If Iranian forces board a US-flagged commercial vessel, the crew should not forcibly resist the boarding party. Refraining from forcible resistance does not imply consent or agreement to that boarding,” the guidelines read. “It is recommended that US-flagged commercial vessels transiting these…

FATAL drone strikes on civilians persist in Sudan’s Kordofan, as the central region has emerged as the latest front line in Sudan’s nearly three-year conflict, the United Nations has said. Addressing the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk painted a grim picture of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has plunged the country into widespread bloodshed and humanitarian catastrophe. “We can only expect worse to come” unless decisive steps are taken by the international community to stop the fighting, Turk said,…

A RUBBER boat carrying 55 passengers, including two babies, has overturned off the coast of Libya, the UN migration agency says. The only survivors, two Nigerian women, were rescued by the Libyan authorities on Friday, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) announced on Monday. The boat was carrying migrants and refugees from various African countries, it said. The boat sank after taking on water approximately six hours after departing from the coastal city of al-Zawiya in north-western Libya. The IOM says that almost 500 migrants have been reported dead or missing trying the cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya so…

ERLING Haaland’s stoppage-time penalty earned Manchester City a dramatic 2-1 win at Liverpool on Sunday to reduce Arsenal’s lead at the top of the Premier League back to six points. City were heading for defeat at Anfield with six minutes to go before Bernardo Silva cancelled out Dominik Szoboszlai’s stunning free-kick to spark an incredible finale. Haaland put City in front from the spot before the visitors had another goal ruled out, and Szoboszlai was sent off in the same incident after a VAR review. Victory was City’s first away to Liverpool in front of a crowd since 2003 and…

HAMAS’s political leader abroad, Khaled Meshaal, has rejected calls to disarm Palestinian factions in Gaza, arguing that stripping weapons from an occupied people would turn them into “an easy victim to be eliminated”. Speaking on the second day of the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha on Sunday, Meshaal described the discussion around Hamas handing over its weapons as a continuation of a century-long effort to neutralise Palestinian armed resistance. “In the context that our people are still under occupation, talking about disarmament is an attempt to make our people an easy victim to be eliminated and easily exterminated by Israel,…

IRANIAN human rights activist and 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison, according to her lawyers and a group that supports her. Mohammadi, 53, was on ⁠a week-long hunger strike that ended on Sunday, the Narges Foundation said in a statement. It said Mohammadi told her lawyer, Mostafa Nili, in a phone call on Sunday from prison that she had received her sentence on Saturday. “She has been sentenced to six years in prison for gathering and collusion to commit crimes,” Nili told the AFP news agency. She was also…

A BITTER war of words has escalated further after Ethiopia ordered neighbouring Eritrea to “immediately withdraw its troops” from Ethiopian territory, with the pair seemingly inching towards a new conflict. Relations between the two Horn of Africa countries have long been fraught. In recent months, Addis Ababa has accused Eritrea of supporting insurgents on Ethiopian soil — allegations Asmara denies. “Developments over the last few days indicate that the government of Eritrea has chosen the path of further escalation,” Ethiopian Foreign Minister Gedion Timothewos told his Eritrean counterpart in a letter dated Saturday. He demanded that Asmara “withdraw its troops…

A SOUTH African man named in a major police corruption probe has died after reportedly shooting himself at a petrol station. Police are now investigating the death of Wiandre Pretorius, 41, who last week said he had survived an assassination attempt. Pretorius’s name had been mentioned at the ongoing corruption inquiry, known as the Madlanga Commission. This was in connection with the 2022 murder of a man, Emmanuel Mbense, allegedly at the hands of police officers. Four of the 12 people named as persons of interest in that killing are now dead themselves, a police spokesperson said. At 22:00 local…

PALESTINIANS in Gaza still struggle to find clean water despite four months of so-called “ceasefire”, waiting hours per day to obtain mere litres. Israeli forces stormed the eastern area of Azzun town, east of Qalqilya, in the occupied West Bank. Wafa, citing local sources, reported that army forces raided the area surrounding the eastern part of the town and seized the house of Marwan Al-Qatish, turning it into military barracks. The forces also blocked the movement of citizens in the area after detaining and interrogating them. Similarly, Israeli forces stormed the village of al-Lubban Asharqiya, south of Nablus. According to…

FORMER US president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton are calling for their congressional testimony on ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to be held publicly to prevent Republicans from politicising the issue. The couple had been ordered to give closed-door depositions before the House Oversight Committee, which is probing the deceased financier’s connections to powerful figures and how information about his crimes was handled. Hillary Clinton will appear for her deposition on February 26, while Bill Clinton will appear on February 27, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said in a statement. Democrats…

SOUTH Africa’s Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen has said he will not seek re-election as the party’s leader in April – a move that may threaten the stability of the coalition government. The DA, South Africa’s second largest party, entered into a coalition with its arch rival the African National Congress in 2024 after the ANC lost its parliamentary majority. Steenhuisen took over leadership of the pro-business DA in 2019 and currently serves as agriculture minister in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government. The 49-year-old was widely expected to run again but was reportedly forced to abandon his bid because of…

THE impact of a flourish of the US president’s pen in Washington a year ago continues to be felt on individual lives some 13,000km (8,000 miles) away in South Africa. There was a collective gulp among some in the health sector here when, hours after he was inaugurated, President Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing US aid commitments. For South Africa that meant the potential loss of an estimated $400m (£295m) that the US contributed each year to the country’s HIV programmes – representing about a fifth of what it was spending on the issue. Last year, the government…

FOR decades, football fans in Nigeria have lived in the distant memories of the mid-to-late 90s and the early 2000s. That era had Kanu Nwankwo as an “Invincible” with Arsenal; Sunday Oliseh anchoring the midfield for teams like Juventus and Borussia Dortmund; and Austin Okocha dancing with the ball at the Reebok Stadium. It was a period when Nigerian players were regulars at some of the most hallowed football cathedrals in Europe. But after years of seeing the country’s players relegated to the periphery of the global game, that sense of relevance for Nigerian footballers may have just returned. Ademola…