AFP news

There is mounting international concern over China's steep rise in Covid infections since Beijing abruptly lifted years of hardline restrictions last month, with hospitals and crematoriums quickly overwhelmed.

As "there is no proof" of wrongdoing at this stage, it is right the trip by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Thursday and Friday should go ahead, a spokesman for Borrell said.

Tunisia, struggling under debt worth nearly 90 percent of its Gross Domestic Product, reached an agreement in principle with the global lender in mid-October for a bailout package worth around $2 billion.

There is growing concern over China's steep rise in Covid infections since Beijing last month abruptly lifted years of hardline restrictions, with hospitals and crematoriums quickly overwhelmed.

The move to supply the French-made AMX-10 RC to Ukraine -- a light tank model in service since the 1980s that is being phased out in the French military -- represents a significant shift in French military support for Ukraine.

The strike on Makiivka has led to Moscow's biggest admission of loss of life since it sent troops to Ukraine in February 2022 and has been met with anger at home.

Last month, Kenyan President William Ruto said the government was ready to sell its entire stake in the airline, which has been languishing deep in the red for years.

More than a dozen countries have imposed testing requirements on visitors from China, citing concerns about a lack of transparency in Beijing's infection data and the risk of a new variant of the virus emerging.

The Spanish High Court is investigating one of Obiang's sons, Carmelo Ovono Obiang, his security director Isaac Nguema Endo and Security Minister Nicolas Obama Nchama, the source said.

The cash-strapped North African country is battling 10 percent inflation alongside slow growth, high unemployment and shortages of basic goods, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

In a rare admission, Russia on Monday said 63 servicemen were killed when a temporary deployment point was struck in Makiivka in a part of eastern Ukraine held by pro-Moscow separatists since 2014.

"I am here to declare that the ban on political rallies is now lifted," President Samia Suluhu Hassan, who took power after the death of John Magufuli in 2021, told a gathering of political leaders at State House in Dar es Salaam.

Week in, week out, the elderly editor has made the 1,200-kilometre (750-mile) round trip across the semi-arid Karoo region in the country's south.

The strike is the latest in a string of similar actions as Tunisia grapples with an economic crisis that has led to frequent shortages of basic goods from petrol to cooking oil.

It is a time-honoured and labour-intensive craft, but one increasingly shunned by young people in the North African kingdom.

About 20,000 performers divided into dozens of troupes marched in the city centre while playing music and dancing for the annual Cape Town Minstrel carnival.

Three women soldiers among the original group detained in July, and who were freed in early September, were sentenced to death in absentia.

An AFP correspondent in the impoverished port city of Tripoli said men, women and children -- mostly refugees from Syria but also about 50 Lebanese -- were on board the vessel when it got into difficulty.

The Tutsi rebel group has in recent months advanced to within a few dozen kilometres of provincial capital Goma.

For the nine stationed permanently in the city centre fire station, it has been a year of war and fire.

Last month, Beijing abruptly began dismantling its "zero-Covid" containment policy of lockdowns and mass testing, three years after the coronavirus first emerged in the city of Wuhan.

Official photos showed the German theologian's body on a catafalque in the chapel of the monastery in the Vatican grounds where he spent the last decade of his life.

The issue has become a huge political problem for the Conservative government, which has promised to bring down illegal immigration and break the smuggling gangs that carry out the crossings.

The violence followed clashes last month in South Sudan's far north that uprooted thousands in Upper Nile state.

Federal police, "based on the power given... by the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia constitution to protect/guard federal institutions" entered Mekele "and started work", their agency said in a Facebook statement.

Forty-nine troops from Ivory Coast were held after they arrived at Bamako airport on July 10.

Twitter has been riven by chaos since the controversial billionaire completed his $44 billion acquisition in October and quickly moved to cut costs.

Hospitals across China have been overwhelmed by an explosion of Covid cases following Beijing's decision to lift strict rules that had largely kept the virus at bay but tanked its economy and sparked widespread protests.

The court in Abidjan, the country's commercial hub, found the four "guilty of the deeds for which they are accused and sentences them to life imprisonment," Judge Charles Bini announced.