NIAMEY, Niger: Niger’s military regime, which took power in July, accused France of deploying forces in several West African countries with a view to “military intervention.”
“France continues to deploy its forces in several ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) countries as part of preparations for an aggression against Niger, which it is planning in collaboration with this community organization,” regime spokesman Col. Major Amadou Abdramane said in a statement broadcast on national television on Saturday.
Relations with France, Niger’s former colonial power, degraded swiftly after Paris stood by ousted president Mohamed Bazoum following the July coup.
The Sahel state is also embroiled in a standoff with the West African bloc ECOWAS, which has threatened to intervene militarily if diplomatic pressure to return Bazoum to office fails.
On August 3, Niger’s coup leaders renounced several military cooperation agreements with France, which has about 1,500 soldiers stationed in the country as part of a wider fight against jihadists.
On Tuesday, a Paris defense ministry source told AFP the French army was in talks with the military regime over withdrawing “elements” of its presence in Niger.
On September 1, the regime said its chief of staff had “received the commander of French forces in the Sahel... to discuss a plan for the disengagement of French military capabilities.”
Niger military accuses France of deploying forces with eye to ‘intervention’
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Niger military accuses France of deploying forces with eye to ‘intervention’
- France continues to deploy its forces in several ECOWAS countries as part of preparations for an aggression against Niger
Students in rebel-held eastern Congo brave insecurity to take exams
The Rwanda-backed insurgents seized eastern Congo’s two largest cities in an offensive earlier this year and are now trying to show they can govern. African leaders along with Washington and Doha are meanwhile trying to broker a peace deal that would put an end to a conflict with roots in the Rwandan genocide more than three decades ago.
The state exams, administered across the sprawling central African country for students hoping to go to university, began on Monday and will continue through mid-June.
Administering them throughout the east of Democratic Republic of Congo required having education officials personally escort documents and other materials from the capital Kinshasa into M23-held cities and towns.
“We were among those who went to Kinshasa to collect the items,” said Jean-Marie Mwayesi, an education official in South Kivu province, where M23 claims considerable territory.
“Thanks to the combined efforts of our teams and partners, all 111 centers we cover have been served.”
President Felix Tshisekedi’s government announced last month it was waiving exam fees — which normally exceed $40 — for students in North and South Kivu provinces, citing insecurity.
While M23 has previously said it seeks the ouster of Tshisekedi’s government, the group’s leader Bertrand Bisimwa told Reuters that it still recognized Kinshasa as the administrator of national exams.
“Our presence in the eastern part of our country does not make this a separate country,” Bisimwa said.
“The education of our children is apolitical. It must be protected against any political divergence because we all work for the interest and well-being of our children.”
Human rights groups have repeatedly accused M23 of executing civilians including children — allegations the group has denied.
Exauce Katete was among the students who sat for exams at a school in the South Kivu regional capital Bukavu, which fell under M23 control in February and where insecurity including vigilante violence has increased since then.
“Yes, security is there. I can still see a few people outside, responsible for keeping us safe. There are no disturbances, no noise, everything is going well,” Katete said, referring to plainclothes officers positioned by M23 outside the school.
Mwayesi, the local education official, said that of 44,000 students who registered in his zone, nearly 42,000 showed up, speculating that the remainder may have been displaced by fighting.
India’s Modi arrives in Kashmir to open strategic railway
- Modi is launching a string of projects worth billions of dollars for the divided Muslim-majority territory
- His office broadcast images of Modi at a viewing point for the Chenab Bridge, a 1,315-meter-long steel and concrete span
SRINAGAR, India: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Kashmir on Friday, his first visit to the contested Himalayan region since a conflict with arch-rival Pakistan last month, and opened a strategic railway line.
Modi is launching a string of projects worth billions of dollars for the divided Muslim-majority territory, the center of bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan since their independence from British rule in 1947.
Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan fought an intense four-day conflict last month, their worst standoff since 1999, before a ceasefire was agreed on May 10.
His office broadcast images of Modi at a viewing point for the Chenab Bridge, a 1,315-meter-long (4,314-foot-long) steel and concrete span that connects two mountains with an arch 359 meters above the river below.
“In addition to being an extraordinary feat of architecture, the Chenab Rail Bridge will improve connectivity,” the Hindu nationalist leader said in a social media post ahead of his visit.
Modi strode across the bridge waving a giant Indian flag to formally declare it open for rail traffic soon after his arrival.
New Delhi calls the Chenab span the “world’s highest railway arch bridge.” While several road and pipeline bridges are higher, Guinness World Records confirmed that Chenab trumps the previous highest railway bridge, the Najiehe in China.
The new 272-kilometer Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla railway, with 36 tunnels and 943 bridges, has been constructed “aiming to transform regional mobility and driving socio-economic integration,” Modi’s office says.
The bridge will facilitate the movement of people and goods, as well as troops, that was previously possible only via treacherous mountain roads and by air.
The railway “ensures all weather connectivity” and will “boost spiritual tourism and create livelihood opportunities,” Modi said.
The railway line is expected to halve the travel time between the town of Katra in the Hindu-majority Jammu region and Srinagar, the main city in Muslim-majority Kashmir, to around three hours.
More than 70 people were killed in missile, drone and artillery fire during last month’s conflict.
The fighting was triggered by an April 22 attack on civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir that New Delhi accused Pakistan of backing – a charge Islamabad denies.
Rebel groups in Indian-run Kashmir have waged a 35-year-long insurgency demanding independence for the territory or its merger with Pakistan.
Six-year-old girl among Myanmar group arrested for killing retired general
- Cho Htun Aung, 68, a retired brigadier general who also served as an ambassador, was shot dead in Myanmar’s commercial capital of Yangon on May 22
Myanmar’s military has arrested a six-year-old child as part of a group it labelled “terrorists” for the daytime killing of a retired military officer and diplomat last month, a junta-run newspaper reported on Friday.
Cho Htun Aung, 68, a retired brigadier general who also served as an ambassador, was shot dead in Myanmar’s commercial capital of Yangon on May 22, in one of the highest profile assassinations in a country in the throes of a widening civil war.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military seized power in a February 2021 coup, overthrowing an elected government led by Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and triggering widespread protests.
The junta’s violent crackdown on dissent sparked an unprecedented nationwide uprising. A collection of established ethnic armies and new armed groups have wrested away swathes of territory from the well-armed military, and guerrilla-style fighting has erupted even in urban areas like Yangon.
“A total of 16 offenders — 13 males and three females — were arrested,” the Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported.
In an accompanying graphic, the newspaper carried the image of the six-year-old child, identified as the daughter of the alleged assassin.
Her face was blurred in an online version of the newspaper seen by Reuters, but visible in other social media posts made by junta authorities.
A junta spokesman did not respond to calls seeking comment.
Golden Valley Warriors, an anti-junta insurgent group, said they killed the retired general because of his continued support for military operations, including attacks on civilians, according to a May 22 statement.
The junta claims the group is backed by the National Unity Government — a shadow government comprising of remnants of Suu Kyu’s ousted administration that is battling the military — and paid an assassin some 200,000 Myanmar Kyat ($95.52) for a killing, the state newspaper reported.
NUG spokesperson Nay Phone Latt denied the shadow government had made any such payments. “It is not true that we are paying people to kill other people,” he told Reuters. Since the coup, Myanmar’s junta has arrested over 29,000 people, including more than 6,000 women and 600 children, according to the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, an activist group.
Fatalities among civilians and pro-democracy activists verified by AAPP during this period amount to more than 6,700, including 1,646 women and 825 children.
Russia sees bleak prospects for expiring nuclear arms pact given ‘ruined’ ties with US
- President Vladimir Putin in 2023 suspended Russian participation in New START, blaming US support for Ukraine
- But Russia would remain within the treaty’s limits on warheads, missiles and heavy bomber planes
Russia sees little chance of saving its last nuclear accord with the United States, due to expire in eight months, given the “ruined” state of relations with Washington, its top arms control official said in an interview published on Friday.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov also told TASS news agency that President Donald Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense project was a “deeply destabilizing” factor creating formidable new obstacles to arms control.
His comments were among Moscow’s bleakest yet about the prospects for the New START agreement, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries, which caps the number of strategic warheads that each side can deploy.
President Vladimir Putin in 2023 suspended Russian participation in New START, blaming US support for Ukraine, although he said that Russia would remain within the treaty’s limits on warheads, missiles and heavy bomber planes.
But if the treaty is not extended or replaced after it expires on February 5 next year, security experts fear it could fuel a new arms race at a time of acute international tension over the conflict in Ukraine, which both Putin and Trump have said could lead to World War Three.
The Federation of American Scientists, an authoritative source on arms control, says that if Russia decided to abandon the treaty limits, it could theoretically increase its deployed nuclear arsenal by up to 60 percent by uploading hundreds of additional warheads.
Ryabkov described Russia-US ties as “simply in ruins.”
“There are no grounds for a full-scale resumption of New START in the current circumstances. And given that the treaty ends its life cycle in about eight months, talking about the realism of such a scenario is increasingly losing its meaning,” Ryabkov told TASS.
“Of course, deeply destabilizing programs like the Golden Dome – and the US is implementing a number of them – create additional, hard-to-overcome obstacles to the constructive consideration of any potential initiatives in the field of nuclear missile arms control, when and if it comes to that.”
Trump said last month he had selected a design for the $175-billion Golden Dome project, which aims to block threats from China and Russia by creating a network of satellites, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, to detect, track and potentially intercept incoming missiles.
Analysts say the initiative could sharply escalate the militarization of space , prompting other countries to place similar systems there or to develop more advanced weapons to evade the missile shield.
Ryabkov’s comments came in the same week that Ukraine stunned Moscow by launching drone strikes on air bases deep inside Russia that house the heavy bomber planes that form part of its nuclear deterrent.
Russia has said it will retaliate as and when its military sees fit.
Bolivia justice minister accuses Morales of ‘terrorism’ over road blockades
- Supporters of the former president have began blocking roads leading to La Paz, the seat of government
- Protests have snowballed into a wider revolt over President Luis Arce’s handling of a deep economic crisis
Siles said the government had filed a complaint against Morales for “terrorism, public incitement to crime and attacks on the security of public services,” among other crimes, over the campaign of road blockades that has paralyzed central Bolivia since Monday.
Supporters of the former president – who served from 2006 to 2019 – began blocking roads leading to La Paz, the seat of government, over the electoral authorities’ refusal to allow Morales to run for a fourth term in August 17 elections.
The protests have since snowballed into a wider revolt over President Luis Arce’s handling of a deep economic crisis, marked by severe shortages of hard currency and fuel.
Many of the protesters have called on Arce, an ally-turned-foe of Morales, to resign.
A leaked audio message on Thursday appeared to capture Morales calling on his supporters in the country’s agricultural heartland to shut down two key roads leading to La Paz.
The government reported more than 40 blockades nationwide on Thursday, which the minister of economy said were causing daily losses of $100 to $150 million.
Around 30 police officers have been injured in clashes with protesters since the beginning of the week, according to Gabriela Alcon, deputy minister of communication.
Morales, 65, was barred by the Constitutional Court from seeking re-election but attempted in vain to register as a candidate last month.
He faced a similar situation in November 2019 when the government of right-wing president Jeanine Anez accused him of “sedition and terrorism.”
Morales had allegedly called on supporters to maintain blockades which caused food and fuel shortages in La Paz.
Morales is also wanted on charges of human trafficking over his alleged sexual relationship with a minor while in office.
He has firmly rejected the charges as a case of “judicial persecution.”
