South Sudan government has expelled at least 1,000 Ugandan drivers and taxi conductors doing public transport.
Juba government ordered that such jobs be reserved for their nationals.
The chairperson of Ugandan traders in South Sudan, Mr William Ntege, told media in Uganda that this is the second time Uganda’s northern neighbour is issuing similar arbitrary declarations without considering the amount of investment Ugandan traders have injected into developing the transport industry in the young nation.
In 2013 alone about 1,600 Ugandans involved in motorcycle taxi transport business were banned from operating after the Juba government declared that such trade should be a preserve of South Sudanese.
“When we (Ugandan traders) first ventured here (in South Sudan) there was no viable means of transport. So we invested in taxis and boda bodas, but it seems we are now being punished for doing that —developing the transport industry,” Mr Ntege said in an interview yesterday.
{{The US government may consider more individual sanctions if warranted against those found to be thwarting efforts to resolve the South Sudan crisis, visiting state department officials told reporters on Wednesday.}}
Steven Feldstein, the deputy assistant secretary of state in the bureau of democracy, human rights and labour, said all options are on the table to pressure both parties to resume peace talks, which were suspended indefinitely by mediators from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) last week.
“At the moment economic sanctions [on South Sudan] are not on the table, but we are talking about individual sanctions, which we already have done,” said Feldstein at the conclusion of his trip to the capital, Juba.
He warned that those responsible for ongoing violations could be hit with US government sanctions.
“We are thinking about all options right now and we are trying to put more pressure … certainly for the peace to hold,” he said.
South Sudan has been mired in conflict and a worsening humanitarian situation since political tensions in the ruling SPLM erupted in violence in mid-December last year.
The fighting has pitted troops loyal to president Salva Kiir against rebels aligned with former vice-president Riek Machar, who was sacked last July.
Both sides have been accused of committing atrocities, including rape and forced detention and ethnic killings.
During his visit, Feldstein called on the government and opposition forces to show their commitment to holding their fighters accountable for atrocities documented by human rights groups.
“We do believe some sort of mechanism of accountability needs to be in place,” he said.
{{Burundi’s tea export earnings fell 8 percent in the first quarter of 2014 from a year ago, due partly to a higher production from neighbouring Kenya, the biggest regional producer of black tea, the country’s tea board said on Friday.}}
State-run tea board (OTB) said it has collected $5.40 million between January and March from the export of 2,306,702 kg, down from $5.88 million earned the same period in 2013 from the sale of 1,984,806 kg.
“Prices of Burundi’s tea fell, affected by a stronger Kenya output and this also impacted negatively earnings,” said OTB’s export official, Joseph Marc Ndahigeze.
Kenya – the world’s leading exporter of black tea -influences the regional market as the biggest East African economy alone produces 80 percent of the commodity in the region, Ndahigeze told Reuters.
The landlocked nation exports 80 percent of its commodity through a regional weekly auction held in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa.
The average export price per kg for Burundi’s tea dipped $2.34 from $2.97, the tea board report showed.
Tea is the second biggest hard currency earner after coffee and employs some 300,000 smallholder growers in a nation of nearly 10 million people.
Revenue from the commodity dropped to $20.8 million in 2013 from $26.3 million in 2012, depending on a weaker world market.
{{A physician’s argument that Oscar Pistorius would have more “exaggerated fight or flight” responses because of his disabilities, thus resulting in him killing Reeva Steenkamp, has been rejected by US disability rights groups, it has been reported.}}
Testifying for the defence, Wayne Derman, said Pistorius had a deep sense of vulnerability and it was a factor in what he has described as a mistaken shooting.
But the National Organisation on Disabilities in the US told Yahoo! News that the reasoning is an “exploitation” of the athlete’s “physical disability to say that it’s linked to some mental health issue that would cause him to commit murder”.
The group’s president Carol Glazer said if someone is able to win an able-bodied track medal in a world athletics race, then one has “figured out how to adapt his disability”.
Glazer said it was unlikely that the same disability would trigger hyper-vigilance in the same person.
The executive vice president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, Henry Claypoll, said
He doesn’t believe that Pistorius’s disability can justify the killing of Steenkamp.
{{South Africa’s labor minister will meet with striking metalworkers and industry employers on Friday in an attempt to end a labour dispute, a spokesman for the minister said.
“We want the strike to end and are quite hopeful that an agreement can be reached soon,” Mokgadi Pela}}.
{{West African countries and international health organizations adopted a fresh strategy on Thursday to fight the world’s deadliest Ebola epidemic, which has killed hundreds of people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.}}
At a two-day meeting in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, officials committed to better surveillance to detect cases of the virus, enhance cross-border collaboration, better engagement with local communities and closer cooperation with the U.N. World Health Organization and other partners.
Ministers also recommended setting up a sub-regional control centre in Guinea to coordinate technical support. The decisions involve governments, the United Nations, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aid agencies and the private sector.
At least 467 people have died of the virus since February, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
“The governments are required to mobilise relevant sectors, community, religious and political leaders to improve awareness, psycho-social support and understanding of the Ebola situation,” Francis Kasolo, WHO Africa director for disease prevention and control, told a news conference.
The meeting’s final communique made no reference to increased financial support for the effort and there was little detail about how the measures would be implemented. Even so, ministers said the meeting had provided a valuable forum to share ideas.
Health ministers also said it was essential for regional bodies such as the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States to lead the effort.
There is no plan to close borders in a bid to prevent the spread of the disease but instead efforts at the border to educate people about risks should be stepped up, said Liberian deputy health minister Bernice Dahn.
{{African nations have agreed to suspend military operations for six months against FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) in Congo to give them more time to lay down their arms, regional government officials said.}}
The FDLR rebels, who seek to overthrow the Rwandan government and who include former soldiers and Hutu militia held responsible for Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, announced in April they would disarm. Some began doing so in May.
Disarmament would improve the prospects of stability in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where millions have been killed in nearly two decades of conflict that has sucked in an array of armed factions and national armies.
Congo is a major producer of diamonds and metals, including copper and gold.
The suspension was announced after a meeting in Angola on Wednesday of foreign ministers from a regional bloc including states in central and eastern Africa.
“The results of this surrender (of FDLR arms) are not sufficient … but still the member states deemed that as acceptable,” Angola’s Foreign Minister Georges Chikoti told national news agency Angop. He said the FDLR’s progress towards disarming would be reviewed after three months.
The FDLR and previous incarnations of the group have operated in Congo’s eastern borderlands since they fled Rwanda following the genocide that claimed over a million Tutsi lives. They are regularly accused of human rights abuses, including massacres of civilians.
The rebels offered to disarm and take up political dialogue on May 30 but so far only around 200 fighters have surrendered out of an estimated 1,500.
The FDLR continues to prepare militarily despite claiming readiness to lay down its arms, U.N. experts said in an interim report on Thursday.
{{India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was greeted by near-empty streets lined by security personnel on his first official visit to Kashmir on Friday, as separatists enforced a strike to demand political dialogue about the future of the divided region.}}
Kashmir is split between rivals India and Pakistan. Demonstrators on the Pakistan-controlled side burnt an effigy of Modi and India’s tricolour flag on Friday to protest the prime minister’s visit.
Schools and shops were shuttered and normally busy roads were free of traffic in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian controlled Kashmir, when Modi arrived to meet army commanders in one of the most world’s most militarised regions.
“It is our earnest wish that Mr. Modi and the newly elected NDA government understand the ardent political message we seek to convey through this act,” said separatist leader Mirwaiz Omar Farooq.
Police erected barricades to stop and search vehicles entering Srinagar ahead of Modi’s arrival, and soldiers flanked main roads throughout the Himalayan region that has been racked by insurgency for decades.
Modi has long been associated with a Hindu nationalist organisation that wants to end the semi-autonomous status that Muslim-majority Kashmir nominally enjoys. His government has promised to renew the debate on the sensitive issue.
Modi was later due to inaugurate a hydroelectric dam in the mountains, barely a mile from the Line of Control, the de facto border dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
The nuclear-armed neighbours have been quarrelling over the region they both claim in full since freedom from British colonial rule in 1947. Hundreds of thousands of troops are stationed along either side of the border, making it a dangerous flashpoint despite a ceasefire that has reduced – but not ended – cross-border firing in recent years.
France has become the latest country to increase airport security in line with a request from Washington to enhance screening for flights to the US.
On Wednesday the US warned of a “credible” terrorism risk to international flights, without revealing the specifics of the threat.
The UK and Germany are among those who have complied with the request.
On Thursday security was increased in Uganda’s capital Kampala following a “specific threat” to its airport.
France’s civil aviation authority, DGAC, said the enhanced screening “will be carried out in a way to limit as much as possible inconvenience to passengers”.
It warned however that “delays are possible”.
A DGAC spokesman said “we cannot divulge the added measures” being taken.
Dozens of direct flights from France to the US are believed to be affected. Officials are recommending passengers arrive at airports early to allow time for screening.
On Thursday the UK said that it too would increase checks because of an “evolving threat” but said people should travel as usual.
{{‘Credible threat’}}
A US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said on Wednesday the requests were in response to a “real-time” and “credible” threat, but that he could not comment on specific intelligence matters.
This new increased threat warning has been triggered by a fear amongst western intelligence agencies that some of al-Qaeda’s sophisticated bomb-making expertise has proliferated out of Yemen to Syria.
For the last five years jihadists in Yemen have been working on so-called “artfully-concealed devices” – hard-to-detect explosives that contain no metal and emit only a faint vapour.
Three times now they have been able to smuggle these onto international flights. Only one exploded, killing the man carrying it but nobody else, after the plane landed.
There is equipment in place to detect such devices at most major UK airports but it is not used on every passenger.
What is alarming the US Department for Homeland Security is the possibility that jihadists with European passports are now in Syria, learning how to construct such devices before returning home.
