20, April 2018

Syria hands unexploded US cruise missiles to Russia ⁰

Syria has handed over to Russia two unexploded cruise missiles it discovered in the aftermath of the recent attack by the United States, Britain and France, Syrian sources say.

“Two cruise missiles that did not detonate during the US missile strike on Syria overnight on April 14 were found by the Syrian military. Both are in rather good condition. These missiles were handed over to Russian officer the day before yesterday (April 17),” a source in the Syrian Defense Ministry told Russia’s TASS news agency on Thursday.

The Syrian military sent the missiles over on board a plane on Wednesday, the source added. The Russian Defense Ministry had yet to confirm the report.

On April 14, US President Donald Trump along with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Theresa May authorized a joint missile attack against alleged chemical weapons manufacturing sites inside Syria.

The attack, carried out in response to what the US and its allies insisted was a chemical attack by the Syrian government, saw 105 cruise missiles being fired at targets in Damascus and Homs.

It was not clear whether the discovered missiles were American Tomahawks or Scalp/Storm Shadow, codenames for a cruise missile jointly developed by France and the UK.

However, there is a good chance that the missiles were fired by the US military as the UK and France only fired 20 missiles collectively.

Days before the attack, Trump had warned Russia, a key supporter of Damascus in the war against foreign-backed militants, that it should get ready to shoot down “nice and new and smart” US missiles over Syria.

Despite claims by the US military that all missiles hit their targets, the Russian defense ministry said after the attack that 71 missiles were intercepted by Syria’s air defense, which relies on Russian equipment.

This is while none of the missiles landed in Tartus and Hmeymim, where Russian missile defense systems, namely the advanced S-400 system, were deployed to protect Russian bases. Russia did not use its own systems to intercept the missiles.

Trump pressed ahead with his plans to attack despite a decision by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to send a fact-finding mission to the alleged chemical attack in Syria’s Douma upon requests from Moscow and Damascus.

The Russian center for the reconciliation of conflicting parties examined Douma on April 9, two days before the purported gas attack, to find no traces of chemical weapons.

Source: Presstv

20, April 2018

King changes Swaziland’s name to ‘Kingdom of eSwatini’ ⁰

The king of Swaziland, one of the world’s few absolute monarchs, announced on Thursday that his country had changed its name to “Kingdom of eSwatini” to mark 50 years since independence from British rule.

Meaning “place of the Swazi”, eSwatini is the Swazi language name for the tiny nation landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique.

Unlike some countries, Swaziland did not change its name when it gained independence in 1968 after being a British protectorate for more than 60 years.

King Mswati III declared the name change during independence day celebrations at a packed sports stadium in the second city of Manzini.

“I would like to announce that Swaziland will now revert to its original name,” he said, wearing red military uniform.

“African countries on getting independence reverted to their ancient names before they were colonised. So from now on the country will be officially be known as the Kingdom of eSwatini.”

The name Swaziland angers some citizens as it is a mix of Swazi and English.

The move has been mooted for several years, with lawmakers considering the issue in 2015. Mswati III has used the new name in previous official speeches.

The king, who was crowned in 1986 aged 18, rules by decree and has often been criticised for his lavish lifestyle despite the grinding poverty suffered by many of his citizens.

Political parties are banned from taking part in elections and only candidates approved by chiefs loyal to the king can stand for office.

The country, which has a population of about 1.3 million people, suffers the highest HIV rate in the world, with 27 percent of adults infected.

The name change could mean that the country’s constitution is re-written, as well as changes for the Royal Swaziland Police Force, the Swaziland Defence Force and the University of Swaziland.

After independence, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, Nyasaland became Malawi, and Bechuanaland became Botswana.

(AFP)

19, April 2018

Alex Song not on trial with Red Bulls ⁰

Alex Song wasn’t in training with the New York Red Bulls on Wednesday although he is expected back at some point in the future, this as the club reiterates that he isn’t on trial.

For the last two weeks, Song has been training with the Red Bulls in what the club has said has been an opportunity to let a world class player get his fitness; the midfielder is currently out of contract and seeking a club. The idea of Song joining the Red Bulls, a leap in logic made by many fans, made some sense given his resume.

Song can play as a holding midfielder as well as a center back. The Cameroonian international has played with some prominent clubs around the world, including Arsenal, Barcelona and West Ham United. He will turn 30-years old in September.

“He’s not [in] today,” Marsch said on Wednesday about Song being at training. “He left last week to go be with his family for a little bit. There’s a chance that we do see him again. It’s been great having him here but it’s not a trial — it’s just helping him out.”

www.metro.us

19, April 2018

UK investor to develop mall in Cameroon ⁰

British private equity firm Actis is investing in a £200m mall and business park in the central African country of Cameroon.

Planned for the city of Douala, the 18,000-sq-m Douala Grand Mall and Business Park will have a Carrefour supermarket, a multiplex cinema, restaurants and shops. A second phase will include a five star hotel and office spaces.

Douala is the commercial capital of Cameroon, with a population of just under 2.5 million. British High Commissioner to Cameroon, Rowan Laxton, laid the foundation stone for the mall on 11 April with Cameroon’s Minister of Commerce, Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana.

According to the High Commission, the project is funded by the British Investment Fund-Actis, and is being carried out with a local real estate developer, Craft Development.

The scheme is expected to create 4,500 local jobs, with construction scheduled for completion by the end of 2019. “This diversification of portfolio in Cameroon (investing beyond power sector) is a remarkable signal that Cameroon is a good business destination for multinationals like Actis,” said Rowan Laxton.

“As the British High Commissioner, I feel encouraged to persuade more UK investors to come.” Spun out of a UK government investment vehicle in 2004, Actis invests in growth markets across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Source: Globalconstructionreview

19, April 2018

Biya leaving a legacy of corruption and chaos ⁰

President Biya’s much anticipated departure is unlikely to alter the political climate of the country he ruined for more than three decades. It is already heading to two years ever since the Southern Cameroons crisis started and none of his fake policies seems to have delivered the expected result.

The appointment of an ardent Southern Cameroon criminal, Paul Atanga Nji as minister of Territorial Administration signals that Biya’s days of absolute and abusive power are over. This is not to say; however, that Biya – the Right Royal President – will quickly be forgotten. How can Cameroon’s impoverished masses forget a man who so cynically plundered Cameroon’s wealth, hiring a string of jets and stashing billions of Euros in Swiss bank accounts.

The bespectacled tyrant and his lavish lifestyle will long be synonymous with the worst excesses of corruption and greed. Having made himself head of state with full executive powers after the 1984 April 6^th coup, Biya and his gang embarked on a course which would quickly reduce Cameroon to a shambles.

In the 1990s and with the support of a Southern Cameroons pro CPDM comedian, Chief Inoni Ephraim, Biya proclaimed a fake anti colonial doctrine and the beautiful city of Victoria was renamed Limbe and Anglophones were urged to adopt a national costume of French Cameroun design. Not being one to hide his light under a bushel, the son of a wretched Roman Catholic Catechist, Paul Biya Bi Mvondo became the father of the Cameroonian nation.

Today, it is evidently clear that what Mr. Biya is actually leaving behind is a country in name only. In both East and West Cameroon, roads, ports, railways, schools, hospitals and public buildings have all been allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair that it will take any new regime in French Cameroun many years to fix the mess. Ever since the creation of the ruling CPDM crime syndicate in Bamenda, any pretence at good governance or fiscal accountability was dropped as Biya’s cronies dipped their hands in the public coffers and his political opponents squabbled pointlessly among themselves.

In Mvomeka’a, the village of his birth, he has constructed a gaudy palace, a multimillion dollar golf course with ornamental gardens and a runway long enough to accommodate a Boeing 747, which he often leased from Air France for family shopping sprees in Geneva. His cynical exploitation of Cameroon is made possible by French government support.

In return for providing bases from which the French can control the Central African Sub region, Biya has been able to extract the maximum of US and EU aid and indulgence. The French are on hand helping him to carry out the genocide currently going on in Southern Cameroons.

Biya still has the backing of the French government even though growing anarchy and lawlessness threatens him at home. Few could have predicted that the beginning of his end would be occasioned by an uprising born in the remote areas in Southern Cameroons. Reading from a small piece of dirty paper at the Nsimalen International airport in Yaoundé from a trip that took him to the Ivory Coast, Biya appeared like a man who has lost everything: his health, his family and above all, the respect of his people.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai

19, April 2018

Southern Cameroons War: Gov’t forces responsible for civilian deaths in Manyu ⁰

Forces loyal to the Biya regime in Yaoundé and the Rapid Intervention Battalion including a special security outfit fighting the Ambazonian self-defense groups have reportedly killed several civilians in the Manyu County. Our correspondent in the Upper Bayang Sub constituency in Manyu on Thursday confirmed that many civilians lost their lives when they were fired at by Cameroon government forces in Kendem village.

We gathered that during the Kendem attack, the soldiers were able to call for reinforcement from Bamenda which led to the exchange of gunfire between the military and the militants. The regime in Yaoundé has developed a diabolic harsh ploy claiming that there exists an exaggerated speculation on military operations in Manyu involving government troops and suspected Southern Cameroons militants.

A highly placed military official in Mamfe who spoke to our undercover reporter hinted that many soldiers are paying the supreme price for a senseless war declared by the 85 year old President Biya. A rescue team supported by a detachment from the Bamenda mechanized division was dispatched to Eyumojock yesterday to locate and support government troops battling Ambazonian militants.

The onetime beautiful village of Kendem has been deserted. Government forces have mounted a gendarmerie check point near Chief Ako Stanley’s palace. Cameroon Concord News has also gotten information that the Eyumojock attack casualties were heavy.

This item is still developing

By Judith Fon

Cameroon Concord News Group

19, April 2018

Biya regime launches hunt for ghost workers ⁰

Cameroon has launched a mandatory headcount of all government employees in another effort to unmask ghost workers, official said.

Finance minister Louis Paul Motaze, in a statement, said the nationwide census would start from the salary pay-out period of April and end in June.

“The aim of the physical headcount of all civil servants is to identify and expunge irregular workers from the state payroll,” the statement said.

It said further that teams would be deployed to banks, micro-finance institutions and treasury offices, where salaries were paid out.

Fake pensioners

The salaries of workers who would not have been identified within the three months deadline would be suspended, it went on.

Mid last year, President Paul Biya instructed the government to unmask ghost workers and fake pensioners who were defrauding the state of millions of dollars.

However, experts were pessimistic that the latest headcount would succeed as it targets; banks, micro-finance institutions and treasury offices, were the wrong places to monitor real civil servants.

New York based public policy and strategic management consultant Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai, thinks the government will fail “because it is a supply-side approach that does not address the demand-side; to know how the ghost workers entered the payroll in the first place”.

Collect salaries

Mr Ebai, who works with the consulting firm, Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG), advised the Yaoundé administration to instead go for software programs that would purge payrolls of ghost workers.

“You cannot undertake a headcount by focusing on how many people actually collect salaries. How do you, for example, control fraudulent or double identities?

“And who will monitor the monitors, given that in Cameroon, everybody has a price?” Mr Ebai posed.

Cameroon lost about $283,000 (FCFA 150 million) in salaries and other benefits to the ghost workers between 2007 and 2010, according to local newspaper the Kalara.

Source: Today.ng

19, April 2018

US: Trump denies Russia investigation was behind Comey firing ⁰

US President Donald Trump has denied firing FBI director James Comey last year over the agency’s investigation of Russia’s alleged collusion with Trump’s election campaign before the 2016 US presidential election, contradicting the explanation he offered in the days after Comey’s firing was first announced.

“Slippery James Comey, the worst FBI Director in history, was not fired because of the phony Russia investigation where, by the way, there was NO COLLUSION (except by the Dems)!” Trump said via Twitter early Wednesday.

Trump’s comments follow a new book by Comey which intensifies the allegations that Trump may have engaged in criminal obstruction of justice when Comey was fired in May 2017.

In an interview with NBC News two days after the firing, Trump suggested that the Russia probe was behind the firing.

“Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey,” he said then.

“In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, you know, this thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election.”

In his interview with ABC News that aired Sunday night, Comey suggested Russians have information they could use to blackmail Trump and said there is evidence the president obstructed justice in the ongoing Russia investigation.

Comey’s memoir released on Tuesday, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” includes conversations he had with Trump before he was fired in which he implies the president pressured him over the Russia investigation.

When Comey was fired last year, the former FBI chief quickly became the chief prosecution witness for Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigating the Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.

In an interview with National Public Radio on Tuesday, Comey said that he did not have the full picture of Mueller’s probe to be able to make that judgement.

Comey’s written records of several troubling encounters with the president are at the heart of Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump sought to obstruct justice in his attempts to shut down the inquiry.

Source: Presstv

18, April 2018

Zimbabwe dismisses thousands of striking nurses ⁰

Zimbabwe has fired all nurses who went on strike to demand higher salaries, in a hardline response by the country’s new leadership to growing labor arrest.

Several thousand nurses were sacked in a terse statement issued on Tuesday evening by Vice President Constantino Chiwenga, who accused the strikers of being “politically motivated.”

Patients were turned away from major hospitals after the nurses began their industrial action on Monday, shortly after doctors ended their own weeks-long strike earlier in the month.

“Government has decided in the interest of patients and of saving lives to discharge all the striking nurses with immediate effect,” Chiwenga said in a statement.

He said unemployed and retired nurses would be hired to replace those fired.

Chiwenga was the military general who led the ousting of Robert Mugabe in November when the army briefly took control and ushered Emmerson Mnangagwa into the presidency.

Zimbabwe’s Vice President Constantino Chiwenga

Chiwenga described the nurses’ strike as “deplorable and reprehensible” as the government had released $17 million (14 million euros) to boost their pay and allowances.

He said the funds would now be used to employ new nurses.

Zimbabwe’s nurses association said they “noted” Chiwenga’s statement but added that they remained on strike.

After Mugabe’s 37-year rule, Mnangagwa has vowed to revive the country’s moribund economy and attract foreign investment to fund better public services.

“Government has done everything to comply with the demands of the striking nurses,” Mnangagwa said, according to state-owned media. “This leaves us with no option but to dismiss them.”

More than 90 percent of Zimbabwe’s budget is spent on government wages.

Teachers at public schools have threatened to go on strike if their pay is not increased.

Zimbabwe is due to hold elections in July or August, the first since the shock fall of Mugabe, who ruled since independence from Britain in 1980.

Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s former deputy, is a veteran loyalist in the ruling ZANU-PF party.

(Source: AFP)

18, April 2018

African athletes keep going missing at global sporting events and it’s only going to get worse ⁰

African athletes at the Commonwealth Games in Australia have been in the news for action on and off the track.

The haul of 34 gold medals won by African athletes has been overshadowed by headlines of at least 13 athletes from Cameroon, Uganda, Rwanda and Sierra Leone absconding from team camps. It’s a recurring scenario for hosts of minor to major sporting events held in wealthier nations. For Australia, it happened in 2006 when Melbourne hosted the Commonwealth Games and 2000 when Sydney hosted the Olympics.

The most common reason for this, as with many migrants, is the search for a better life. Even for pro athletes in many African countries, wealthy and more developed countries remain a major draw. Occasionally, athletes make the move to escape political repression back home. The most recent example came at the 2016 Rio Olympics when Feyisa Lilesa, an Ethiopian marathoner, crossed his arms in anti-government protest.

Even though the competition has wrapped up, missing athletes officially have until May 15—when their visas expire—to make plans that allow them to remain in Australia. An obvious option would be to apply for asylum but a successful application will depend on being able to cite valid basis of threat to life in their home countries. Already, a migration agency operating on the Gold Coast says “more than 40 people,” including Commonwealth Games athletes from Africa, have so far come in to discuss potential visa options to allow them remain in Australia.

Another option is to obtain a special skills visa which allows them continue to reside and compete as professional athletes. For example, Ethiopia’s Lilesa was granted special skills visa by the United States after he did not return home given fears of government reprisal after his protest at the Rio Olympics.

The nuclear option would be staying on illegally after the visa expires and, without valid documentation, likely turning to menial jobs to earn money.

For many athletes, applying as part of a team delegation to major sporting events offers a much higher chance of securing visas and traveling safely and for free. Back home, mismanagement, corruption and poor welfare packages as well as sub-par training facilities often means being an athlete is not the most lucrative livelihood. As a result, African athletes, and at times officials, have routinely gone missing at sporting events hosted in more developed nations—21 members of African delegations went missing or claimed asylum after the London Olympics in 2012.

For more talented or high-profile athletes, another option is to switch nationalities and represent countries offering better prospects. It’s a well-exercised option: during the Rio Olympics in 2016, at least 30 Kenyan-born athletes competed for other countries. Indeed, Bahrain’s Olympic track field team was almost entirely made up athletes originally from Africa as half of the men’s team and nearly all of the women’s team hailed from Nigeria, Ethiopia, or Kenya.

Source: Quartz Media