AFRICA

Riek Machar replaced as South Sudan vice-president Juba, South Sudan | AFP | South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir announced on Monday that former rebel leader Riek Machar had been replaced as vice president, confirming signs of serious divisions within the opposition. Kiir said he had appointed Taban Deng Gai to …

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s justice minister on Monday vowed to jail opposition leader Moise Katumbi if he returned home after leaving the country for medical treatment. Katumbi was seen as the leading challenger to President Joseph Kabila in elections due to be held this year, but left the country …

Lagos, Nigeria | AFP | Nigeria on Sunday celebrated two years without a new case of polio, in a major stride towards Africa being declared free of the devastating disease. If no new case is reported by July 2017, Nigeria will be certified free of the virus, which mainly affects …

Lusaka, Zambia | AFP | Zambian authorities said on Sunday they had called off a planned show by Congolese singer Koffi Olomide following his deportation from Kenya for kicking one of his female dancers. Olomide was scheduled to perform at the annual agricultural trade show in Lusaka this week. “Following …

Mombasa, Kenya | AFP | A Kenyan court sentenced an ivory trafficking “kingpin” to 20 years in jail Friday, a symbolically heavy penalty in a nation where major poachers are rarely punished. Feisal Mohamed Ali, a Kenyan national, must be made an “example (of) for those behind the poaching menace …

Abuja, Nigeria | AFP | Thursday Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday said the government was in talks with oil rebels whose attacks have hit production, as the head of the state-run energy firm laid bare damage to the sector. Buhari said in a statement that “his administration is talking …

Bangui, Central African Republic | AFP | Rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army have kidnapped a record 344 civilians in the Central African Republic in the first half of 2016, according to two specialised NGOs. “The group abducted 344 people there in the first six months of 2016, more than …

Durban, South Africa | AFP | Lebogang Motsumi, 27, still remembers the moment when she learnt she had contracted HIV from a man a decade her senior. “It was August 15, 2009, at 1:00pm,” she said, recalling the instant when her life changed traumatically. “I was so ignorant,” she said. …

Nairobi, Kenya | AFP | Security agencies are killing and abducting men in north-east Kenya who they suspect of links to Islamist extremists, a rights group said Wednesday. Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented 34 “enforced disappearances” and 11 suspected “extrajudicial killings” over two years in Garissa, Mandera and Wajir counties …

Bamako, Mali | AFP | Seventeen soldiers were killed and 35 wounded in central Mali Tuesday in an assault on their base that authorities called a “coordinated terrorist attack”. “The toll has increased: we have lost 17 men and 35 are wounded,” Mali’s defence minister Tieman Hubert Coulibaly said. Authorities …