World Food Programme
Red Cross: Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region ‘largely inaccessible’
Ethiopia’s embattled northern region of Tigray remains largely inaccessible, the International Red Cross said Wednesday. The situation has led to starvation deaths, the organization said. “Eighty percent of the Tigray is unreachable at this particular time,” president of the Ethiopian Red Cross Society, Abera Tola, told a press conference. “People in Tigray need everything: food and food items, water and sanitation, medical supplies, and mobile clinics. And humanitarian organizations need access to Tigray to reach the most vulnerable. And this is a call to hold the parties involved: give us safe and unhindered access, respect our teams, respect the medical doctors, respect the health facilities, respect the health workers”, said Francesco Rocca, president of the International Federation of...
FAO: Nigeria, Burkina Faso, others risk famine
A new report by two United Nations agencies warned Friday of a heightened risk of famine in three conflict-torn African states and Yemen, and a high hunger risk in 16 more. The Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Food Programme warned that a “toxic combination of conflict, economic decline, climate extremes and the Covid-19 pandemic … is driving people further into the emergency phase of food insecurity”. The agencies swung the spotlight on Burkina Faso, Nigeria, South Sudan and Yemen, all facing rising levels of acute hunger with potential risk of famine. Issuing “a stark warning” in their Early Warning Analysis of Acute Food Insecurity Hotspots, the agencies said the four countries have areas that could soon slip into famine. Some parts of the population “are already experiencing...
At least 20 massacred during Mozambique initiation ceremony
Suspected militants beheaded over a dozen men and teenagers participating in a male initiation ceremony in northern Mozambique, local sources said on Wednesday, in the latest violent incident in the country’s insurgency-hit northeast. The dismembered bodies of at least five adults and 15 boys were found on Monday, scattered across a forest clearing in Muidumbe district. Islamist militants operating in the area had attacked several nearby villages over the weekend, looting and burning down homes before retreating into surrounding thicket. “Police learnt of the massacre committed by the insurgents through reports of people who found corpses in the woods,” said an officer in the neighbouring Mueda district who asked not to be named. “It was possible to count 20 bodies spread over an area of a...
Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga arrested during banned protests
Police in Zimbabwe on Friday arrested internationally-acclaimed novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga as they enforced a ban on protests coinciding with the anniversary of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s election. Dangarembga, 61, was taken away in a police truck as she demonstrated in the upmarket Harare suburb of Borrowdale alongside another protester, an AFP photographer saw. Streets in the centre of the city were largely deserted as police and soldiers set up checkpoints to prevent entry. Opposition politician Jacob Ngarivhume, head of a small party called Transform Zimbabwe, had called for demonstrations against alleged state corruption and the country’s slumping economy The protests were timed to coincide with the second anniversary of Mnangagwa’s election, which the opposition says was a fraud...
