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Fighting enters 3rd week in Sudan
WARPLANES on bombing raids drew heavy anti-aircraft fire over Khartoum on Saturday as fierce fighting between Sudan’s army and paramilitaries entered a third week, despite a renewed truce.
Sudan has plunged into chaos and lawlessness since the fightingerupted on April 15 between forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his number two Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Burhan and Daglo have agreed to multiple truces since the start of theconflict, but none has effectively taken hold, with each side blaming the other for breaching them.
The latest three-day ceasefire was agreed Thursday after mediation led by the United States, Saudi Arabia, the African Union
Kim Jong Un’s sister warns vs. US-Sokor plan
NORTH Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister warned Saturday that a US-South Korean agreement aimed at strengthening deterrence against Pyongyang will lead to “more serious danger,” state media reported.
The United States and South Korea vowed this week that North Korea would face a nuclear response and the “end” of the leadership there should it use its own nukes against the allies, as the two countries’ presidents met in Washington.
In Pyongyang’s first response to the Washington summit, Kim Yo Jong said the North remained convinced that its nuclear deterrent “should be brought to further perfection.”
“The more the enemies are dead set on staging nuclear war exercises, and the more nuclear assets they deploy in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula, the stronger the exercise of our right to self-defense will become,” she said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
South Korean President Yoon Suk
Yeol and US counterpart Joe Biden on Wednesday issued what was called the Washington Declaration, bolstering the US nuclear umbrella over South Korea, which is increasingly nervous about Pyongyang’s aggression.
It will involve the “regular deployment of strategic assets” including the first South Korean port visit by a nuclear ballistic submarine in decades, a US official told AFP.
The agreement, however, would “only result in making peace and security of Northeast Asia and the world be exposed to more serious danger, and it is an act that can thus never be welcome”, Kim Yo Jong said.
North Korea has defied years of punishing sanctions to continue work on its banned nuclear and missile programmes, and last year declared itself an “irreversible” nuclear power, effectively ending the possibility of denuclearisation talks. AFP and the United Nations aimed at securing a more lasting truce.
“We woke up once again to the sound of fighter jets and anti-aircraft weapons blasting all over our neighbourhood,” a witness in southern Khartoum told AFP.
Another witness said fighting had been ongoing since the early morning, especially around the state broadcaster’s headquarters in the capital’s twin city of Omdurman.
Residents across Khartoum – home to five million people – have largely sheltered at home despite supplies of food and water dwindling to dangerously low levels, and a lack of electricity.
Some managed to sneak out only during brief lulls in fighting to buy desperately needed supplies. As battles raged on the ground, the two rival generals took aim at each other in the media, with Burhan branding the RSF a militia that aims “to destroy Sudan,” in an interview with US-based TV channelAlhurra. He also claimed “mercenaries” were pouring over the border from Chad, Central African Republic and Niger to exploit the chaos. Daglo denounced the army chief in an interview with the BBC, saying he was “not trustworthy” and a “traitor.”
The clashes have so far killed at least 512 people and wounded 4,193, according to the health ministry, with the death toll feared to be much higher.
Some 75,000 have been internally displaced by the fighting in Khartoum and the states of Blue Nile, North Kordofan, as well as the restive western region of Darfur, the UN said.
Tens of thousands of Sudanese have fled into neighbouring countries including Egypt, Ethiopia, Chad and South Sudan, while foreign countries have carried out mass evacuations of their nationals.
Britain said it would end evacuation flights for its citizens and their relatives on Saturday, after airlifting more than 1,500 peoplethis week.
The United Nations said on Friday that its last international staff had been evacuated from Darfur.
The World Food Program has said the violence could plunge millions more into hunger in a country where 15 million peo-
Russian strikes kill 26, including 5 kids
RUSSIAN strikes battered cities across Ukraine on Friday, killing 26 people including five children, as Kyiv said preparations for a counter-offensive against Moscow’s forces were nearly complete.
The deadly new attacks included a strike on a residential block in the historic city of Uman in central Ukraine, where AFP journalists saw rescue workers extracting victims’ remains from a destroyed residential building.
The barrage of almost two dozen missiles ended a weeks-long pause following the repeated Russian strikes that had aimed to paralyse Ukraine’s energy grid during the winter months.
On Friday evening, workers in Uman, the site of an annual Hasidic pilgrimage, pulled the body of another child from under the rubble. Authorities said Russian cruise missiles killed 23 people -- including four children –
PROTEST ACTION.
An indigenous woman participates in a protest march during the Terra Livre Indigenous camp in Brasilia. The camp will run until April 29, 2023, and is focused on raising awareness about indigenous rights and land issues and promoting indigenous culture. AFP in Uman.
Earlier in the day, Dmitry, a 33-year-old resident from Lugansk, an eastern city under Russian control, was looking for his children.
“I want to see my children, they are under the rubble,” he said. Rescuers were using cranes to search for survivors among the remains of the multi-storey housing block in the city of 80,000 inhabitants.
“I’ve seen a lot, but I haven’t lost my children before. Now I want to see my children, alive or dead,” Dmitry said.
Russian missiles also hit the central city of Dnipro, already grief-stricken after a January strike on a tower block that killed more than 40 people.
Authorities said the strikes in Dnipro killed a 31-year-old woman and her twoyear-old daughter while they slept.
The young woman’s parents were hospitalized.
“Neighbours say that it was a quiet and kind family,” regional authorities said.
Separately, authorities in the southern region of Kherson said on Friday evening that Russian forces shelled the village of Bilozerka, killing a 57-year-old woman and wounding another three people.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned the latest barrage and vowed a response.
“Only absolute evil can unleash such terror against Ukraine,” he said in his evening address.
His advisor Mykhaylo Podolyak tweeted:
“If you don’t want THIS spread around the world, then give us weapons. Lots of weapons. And add sanctions.”
Moscow said it had targeted reserve units of the Ukrainian military and that “all assigned objects were hit”. AFP ple – one-third of the population – already need aid to stave off famine.
In West Darfur state, at least 96 people were reported to have been killed in the city of Geneina since Monday, according to UN human rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani.
The UN described the situation in Darfur as “alarming” while Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said there were reports of widespread looting, destruction, and burning of property, including at camps for displaced people.
“The current fighting has forced us to stop almost all of our activities in West Darfur,” said Sylvain Perron, MSF’s deputy operations manager for Sudan.
“We are incredibly worried about the impact this violence is having on people who have already lived through waves of violence in the previous years.” AFP
INBRIEF
Italy lifts its block on ChatGPT chatbot
ITALY has lifted its block on ChatGPT after temporarily banning it over data privacy concerns last month, the artificial intelligence chatbot’s owner said Friday.
“ChatGPT is available again for our users in Italy. We are delighted to welcome them back and remain committed to protecting their personal data,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. ChatGPT caused a global sensation when it was released last year for generating essays, songs, exams and even news articles from brief prompts.
But critics have fretted over how ChatGPT and its competitors collect and process their data.
In March, Italy became the first Western country to take action against the popular AI chatbot. AFP
Nikki Haley, others struggle to gain ‘24 ground on Trump
NINE months before the first 2024 US presidential primary, Donald Trump’s onetime UN envoy Nikki Haley is barnstorming early-voting New Hampshire, one of several Republicans scrambling to dent the huge poll lead of the nomination front-runner.
AFP
With Trump’s legal setbacks mounting, Americans are bracing for a parade of contenders positioning themselves as more moderate, less bombastic alternatives to the former president taking another stab at the White House. The lesser known candidates seek to defy early polling and the uncomfortable narrative – for them, at least – that Trump is already dominating the race to square off against incumbent Joe Biden in the general election.
Trump’s challengers “are like a facade on the front of a building.
They’ll end up going away,” Sandra LaRose, an office manager who voted for Trump, told AFP early Friday over a plate of bacon and hash browns at Manchester’s iconic Red Arrow diner.
Supporters of Haley and other hopefuls “are wearing rose-colored glasses,” LaRose, 58, added. “But if you pull back those glasses, does she really have what it takes to lead?”
The 51-year-old Haley, a child of Indian immigrants and a former governor of South Carolina, appeared undaunted Friday as she hosted an intimate town hall in Laconia – her third in three days – where she wore a sweater with “She who dares wins” knitted on the front. AFP
A RECORD number of inmates were serving time in France at the start of this month, official data showed Friday, as the country battles serious prison overcrowding.
France counted 73,080 inmates in prisons equipped to hold just 60,899 people on April 1, according to figures released by the justice ministry. That meant the country’s jails were at 120 percent capacity, it showed.
Prune Missoffe, of the France-based International Prison Observatory rights monitor, said the situation was “only getting worse, month by month.”
The government should “take measures to decrease the pressure on prisons until more structural measures are found,” she said. AFP
Inmates in France reach all-time high Biden to meet 18 Pacific heads in PNG
US President Joe Biden will meet 18 leaders from across the South Pacific when he visits Papua New Guinea in May, the country’s foreign minister said Saturday, signaling a renewed US drive to cultivate regional allies.
The United States and China are vying for influence in what was once a diplomatic backwater, but is increasingly seen as a vital space for commercial, political and military influence.
Papua New Guinea Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko said Biden would attend bilateral talks with his hosts and is “also having a meeting with the 18 Pacific Island leaders” from the Pacific Island Forum – a regional bloc of mostly small states that are scattered across the vast swathe of ocean.
The prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand will be among those attending. Biden is set to become the first sitting US president in at least a century to visit Papua New Guinea when he touches down on May 22. AFP
