At least 40 people were killed in an airstrike on a market in southern Khartoum, Sudan, the local volunteer emergency room said in a statement on Sunday.
It is the largest single-incident civilian death toll of the civil war in the country which began on April 15, as fighting in residential areas intensifies.
Air and artillery strikes in residential areas have intensified as the war between the Sudanese army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) nears the five-month mark with neither side declaring victory or showing any concrete signs of pursuing mediation, Reuters reported.
Drones carried out a series of heavy air strikes on Sunday morning on southern Khartoum, a large district of the city occupied mainly by the RSF, an eyewitness who saw the strike told Reuters, asking not to be identified for security reasons.
Images shared by a body of local volunteers called the Southern Khartoum Emergency Room showed many women and men injured as well as what appeared to be dead bodies covered in cloth, some piled together.
Residents of the area tend to be day workers who cut off from jobs are too poor to afford the cost of escaping from the capital.
Mohamed Abdallah, a spokesman for the Emergency Room, which tries to provide medical and other services, said the injured had to be transported on rickshaws or donkey carts.
In a statement, the RSF accused the Sudanese army of carrying out the attack, as well as other strikes. The Sudanese army denied responsibility and blamed the RSF.
Strikes in western Omdurman last week killed at least 51 people across two separate days. With most hospitals closed and no functioning local government, volunteers struggle to document the full extent of deaths. MEHR News Agency
LIBREVILLE, Sept. 10 (Xinhua) — Raymond Ndong Sima, Gabonese transitional prime minister, on Saturday published the list of 26 members of his government.
According to the list, this transitional government is made up of 26 ministers, including the head of the transitional government. Key government positions were held by new figures, including Murielle Minkoue Epse Mintsa, minister of institutional reform. Three ministers from the outgoing cabinet remained in the new transitional government. Camelia Ntoutoume-Leclercq retained her portfolio as minister of national education, while Hermann Immongault, former minister of foreign affairs, was named as minister delegate for the interior, and Raphael Ngazouze, previously in charge of professional training, took over the ministry of public function. According to the transitional charter, members of the transitional government will not be able to be candidates in a future presidential election.
Brice Oligui Nguema, Gabonese transitional president, on Thursday appointed Sima as prime minister, head of the transitional government. Sima, 68, served as prime minister from 2012 to 2014; he ran for president in the presidential elections both in 2016 and 2023. Nguema promised, at his inauguration ceremony on Monday, a new constitution by referendum, a new electoral code, and a reliable penal code, after a coup leading to the overthrow of Ali Bongo on Aug. 30. He pledged to “return power to civilians” and hold “free” and “transparent” elections after the transition without specifying the election date and duration of the transition.
Gabon’s leading opposition group, Alternance 2023, which claimed to be the winner of the elections on Aug. 26, has called on the international community to encourage the junta to hand power back to civilians. Bongo was allowed to go abroad Wednesday for medical checkups, a week after being kept under house arrest since the coup. “Given his state of health, former President of the Republic Ali Bongo Ondimba is free to move. He can, if he wishes, go abroad to carry out his medical checks,” according to a statement by the transitional president. On Aug. 30, a group of military officers appointed Nguema, commander-in-chief of the Gabonese Republican Guard, to head the transition after launching a coup earlier in the day following the announcement of the reelection of Bongo by the national electoral body. Bongo, 64, once served as minister of defense and other posts in the government. He was elected president of Gabon in 2009 and was reelected in 2016. Xinhua
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, Britain’s top government-appointed cleric, places a crown on the head of King Charles, the country’s hereditary ruler, during the coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London, 6 May. Mirrorpix/MEGA
More than 35 years ago, leaders of the Church of England voted against divesting from apartheid South Africa.
One would think that today’s leaders of Britain’s official state religion would look back on that decision with shame and an earnest desire to learn from their grave errors.
But that does not appear to be the case as Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the church’s top cleric, has made clear with his denial that Israel perpetrates apartheid against the Palestinian people.
At an event in London on Wednesday, Welby was asked if Israel is an apartheid state.
“I know it’s going to be an unpopular answer,” Welby said before asserting, “I don’t want to use the word apartheid because the apartheid regime in South Africa – and I knew Desmond Tutu and listened to him at length on this – the apartheid regime was built on a constitution that in the very fabric of the constitution, set up apartheid.”
“It remains a risk if the constitution changes to an apartheid constitution, then it obviously would become an apartheid state. But until that happens, I won’t use that word about Israel,” Welby added.
So as long as it doesn’t say it’s an apartheid state, Welby is happy to take Israel’s word for it.
Nonetheless, the cleric seems to oblivious to the fact that Israel’s constitutional “basic law” was revised in 2018 to even more deeply entrench Jewish supremacy over indigenous Palestinians throughout historic Palestine – essentially confirming that it is an apartheid regime.
After denying apartheid, Welby did indulge in some light hand-wringing that Israel “is in a place of turmoil” and that “what’s happening in the settlements” is “unjust” and “against international law.”
But those mild statements could just as easily have come from a British government or European Union official. They hardly demonstrate the courage of a moral leader.
Tutu called it apartheid
It is particularly grotesque and reprehensible that Welby invoked his fellow churchman, the late, great Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to shield Israel from being named as an apartheid state.
Tutu, who helped lead the struggle against South Africa’s racist regime as Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, was among the first major international figures to consistently label Israel’s systematic persecution of the Palestinian people as apartheid.
“We have visited Israel/Palestine on a number of occasions and every time have been struck by the similarities with the South African apartheid regime,” Tutu wrote in 2011, for instance. “The separate roads and areas for Palestinians, the humiliation at roadblocks and checkpoints, the evictions and house demolitions.”
He added that “parts of East Jerusalem resemble what was District Six in Cape Town” – a century-old multiracial community that was destroyed by the apartheid regime in 1966 and declared a whites-only area.
Since Tutu wrote those words, major international and Israeli human rights groups, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have belatedly come to the same conclusion: Israel perpetrates apartheid against the Palestinian people as a whole – one of the most heinous crimes against humanity enumerated in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Official religion
The Church of England’s complicity with apartheid then and now should be shocking given how Welby and the church pose as fearless moral arbiters willing to speak truth to power.
As a fixture of Britain’s ruling establishment, Welby amplified and tacitly endorsed the Israel’s lobby’s destructive smear campaign falsely labeling Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party he headed at the time as “anti-Semitic.”
A former oil executive, one Welby’s first acts after the government named to lead the Church of England was to helprehabilitate Tony Blair, the former prime minister widely reviled for perpetrating, alongside US President George W. Bush, the criminal invasion of Iraq that ended and uprooted millions of lives.
It may be mere coincidence that the archbishop’s son Peter Welby was subsequently given “plum job” at Blair’s Faith Foundation.
The Church of England is moreover only now tentatively addressing its centuries-old wilful profiteering from the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.
Grassroots activism
To be sure, many members of the Church of England’s dwindling rank and file do support justice in Palestine, as do many members of the UK Labour Party – despite the cowardice and betrayal of their erstwhile leaders.
Notably, in 2006, the Church of England’s legislative body did vote for limited divestment from companies that are directly complicit in Israel’s illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territories.
In 2018, the Episcopal Church – the Anglican church in the United States – also decided to divested from several companies involved in the settlements.
It must be clear, however, that these modest steps forward have been the result not of courageous leadership from the top, but the hard work of grassroots activists within the churches challenging the complicity of political appointees like Welby.
But in general, Anglican churches have lagged behind other Christian communities in adopting divestment as a strategy to support justice in Palestine.
Last year, the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA formally affirmed that Israel perpetrates the crime of apartheid and urged members to seek ways to bring it to an end.
And across the United States, grassroots members of Christian, Muslim and Jewish faith groups are participating in the new Apartheid-Free Communities initiative, recently convened by the American Friends Service Committee.
Among its endorsers are several Episcopalian groups.
If the Archbishop of Canterbury won’t listen to Palestinians or to major human rights groups, perhaps he will pay attention to members of his own Anglican communion. By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada
Crime scene tape used for illustration purposes. PHOTO/Internet
Detectives from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations have rescued a 9-year-old grade three pupil from a school in Donholm allegedly kidnapped by his teachers.
In a statement, DCI said the child's father, who had arrived at the school to pick up his son, discovered that the young boy was missing.
The detectives revealed that the distraught father was informed that his son's class teacher, identified as Erick Mosoti, had left the school premises in the company of the minor.
"The pupil's father had gone to fetch his son from school when he found him missing only to be informed that his class teacher Erick Mosoti, had left the school in the company of the minor," the statement read in part.
Shortly after realizing the child's disappearance, the father received a chilling call from the abductors, who were demanding a ransom of Ksh10 million for the safe return of his son.
Fearing for his child's safety, the concerned father promptly reported the abduction to the Buruburu police station. By Ascah Mwango, K24 Digital
A suspected carjacker was on Friday, September 8, 2023, shot dead by police while another was arrested during a raid in Machakos.
According to police commander Patrick Lobolia, the two were highly involved in a car theft syndicate causing sleepless nights to residents in Machakos and neighbouring counties. The stolen vehicles would then be sold to neighbouring counties.
"For the last few weeks, they have been targeting D-Max vehicles along Mombasa Road. We believe that once stolen the vehicles are taken to a neighbouring country," the police boss said.
Lobolia noted that the arrested suspects' primary role in the syndicate was to deactivate the vehicle tracking systems.
In the recent incident that led to their arrest, the two had rented out the vehicle recovered from a car-hiring service situated at City Cabanas. At the time, they claimed that they needed it to transport some items to Machakos.
The car hire service was inclusive of an in-house driver who drove them to their destination.
Shortly after taking off, the two allegedly commandeered the truck and disabled only two of its tracking devices unaware of a third tracking device pinned on the track.
The driver was able to escape and reported the matter to Kyumbi police station leading to a police chase.
The officers were able to catch up with the gang after following the truck. However, they only managed to arrest one suspect after the others escaped in another vehicle.
The officers recovered a stolen Isuzu D-max truck and a fake gun during the operation. They also seized four Safaricom lines, two Airtel lines and a toy pistol.
"Police officers caught up with the gang at Mutituni, with some of the suspects managing to escape in another vehicle. We recovered four Safaricom lines, two Airtel lines and a toy pistol," Lobolia added. By Achieng' Mary, K24
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