AFRICA

Dakar, Senegal | AFP | A lawyer for Dakar mayor Khalifa Sall, detained since March on corruption charges, on Friday said the prosecutor’s office had ordered his trial to begin next week, despite pending appeals. Sall is accused of misappropriating 1.83 billion CFA francs ($2.85 million, 2.7 million euros) of city …

Bangui, Central African Republic | AFP | Humanitarian groups in the Central African Republic (CAR) have suspended operations, the UN said Friday, after an aid worker was killed in the north of the restive, landlocked nation. “The humanitarian community in CAR continues to pay a heavy price from the rise in …

Goma, DR Congo | AFP | At least 14 United Nations peacekeepers were killed in the restive Democratic Republic of Congo, officials said Friday, in the deadliest attack in the organisation’s recent history. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the peacekeepers, who were from neighbouring Tanzania, were killed in the …

N’Djamena, Chad | AFP | Chad’s interior minister has said that a ban on some protests in the country is justified because of security risks. It comes after a coalition of activist groups earlier this week said they were planning to defy the ban and hold a major anti-government march. Interior …

Yaoundé, Cameroon | AFP | Nigeria called for an end to violence in neighbouring Cameroon, where a crisis sparked by a separatist drive in English-speaking areas has forced thousands of people to seek sanctuary across the border. “The Nigerian state by no means supports the secessionists,” Nigerian ambassador Lawan Abba Gashagar …

Johannesburg, South Africa | AFP | South Africa’s deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa has said he believes the woman who accused President Jacob Zuma of rape, triggered an immediate riposte from the presidential office. Ramaphosa is a leading contender to take over from Zuma as head of the ANC ruling party later …

  Meressa K Dessu | ISS TODAY | With the civil war in South Sudan concluding its fourth year, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) is maximising its efforts to revitalise the Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (ARCSS) through the establishment of a …

Yaoundé, Cameroon | AFP | Cameroonian author Patrice Nganang was arrested at the airport as he tried to fly to Zimbabwe a day after publishing an opinion piece sharply critical of Cameroon’s president, a source said Thursday. Nganang, who teaches literature at New York University, “was taken into custody yesterday …

Harare, Zimbabwe | AFP | Zimbabwe’s new government ordered Thursday that land confiscated from a white farmer to give to an ally of former president Robert Mugabe must be returned. Robert Smart, who grew tobacco and corn on his farm in Makoni in eastern Zimbabwe, was evicted in June after …

Nairobi, Kenya | AFP |  Months of electoral upheaval, sporadic unrest and economic slowdown have hit young Kenyans hard, a nationwide youth survey found Thursday. The struggle to make ends meet has left them disillusioned, apathetic and angry, according to the annual survey of nearly 3,000 Kenyans aged 15-24 years …