'Tsunami-sunk' Roman ruins discovered in Tunisia

Yahoo – AFP, August 31, 2017

A handout picture released by the Tunisian National Heritage Institute and the

 University of Sassari on August 31, 2017 shows archaeologists diving off the coast 

of Nabeul in northeastern Tunisia at the site of the ancient Roman city of Neapolis

(AFP Photo/Handout)

Nabeul (Tunisia) (AFP) - Vast underwater Roman ruins have been discovered off northeast Tunisia, apparently confirming a theory that the city of Neapolis was partly submerged by a tsunami in the 4th century AD.

"It's a major discovery," Mounir Fantar, the head of a Tunisian-Italian archaeological mission which made the find off the coast of Nabeul, told AFP.

He said an underwater expedition had found streets, monuments and around 100 tanks used to produce garum, a fermented fish-based condiment that was a favourite of ancient Rome.

"This discovery has allowed us to establish with certainty that Neapolis was a major centre for the manufacture of garum and salt fish, probably the largest centre in the Roman world," said Fantar.

"Probably the notables of Neapolis owed their fortune to garum."

Fantar's team started work in 2010 in search of the port of Neapolis but only made the breakthrough find of the ruins stretching out over 20 hectares (almost 50 acres) this summer thanks to favourable weather conditions.

The discovery also proved that Neapolis had been partly submerged by a tsunami on July 21 in 365 AD that badly damaged Alexandria in Egypt and the Greek island of Crete, as recorded by historian Ammien Marcellin.

Israel freezes controversial settlement law

Yahoo – AFP, Stephen Weizman, August 18, 2017

International law considers all settlements to be illegal, but Israel distinguishes
between those it sanctions and those it does not (AFP Photo/Jack GUEZ)

Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's Supreme Court has frozen implementation of a law legalising dozens of Jewish settlements built on private Palestinian land, which the UN labelled a "thick red line".

The decision was condemned by rightwing Israeli politicians who accused the judiciary of overruling the will of Israel's parliament.

Court documents seen by AFP Friday show that Judge Neal Hendel issued Thursday an open-ended restraining order suspending a bill passed by parliament that would retroactively legalise a number of outposts across the occupied West Bank.

The decision was in response to a petition brought by 17 Palestinian local councils on whose land the settlements are built.

Israeli and Palestinian rights groups were also parties to the petition.

Hendel wrote in his decision that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit had asked him to grant the order.

It did not specify a time limit but demanded that Israel's parliament, the Knesset, deliver its response by September 10 and that Mandelblit submit an opinion by October 16.

The act, known as the "legalisation law", was passed in February and brought immediate condemnation from around the world.

International law considers all settlements to be illegal, but Israel distinguishes between those it sanctions and those it does not -- so-called outposts.

Mandelblit himself warned the government the law could be unconstitutional and risked exposing Israel to international prosecution for war crimes.

UN envoy for the Middle East peace process Nickolay Mladenov said following the February Knesset vote the bill set a "very dangerous precedent."

"This is the first time the Israeli Knesset legislates in the occupied Palestinian lands and particularly on property issues," he told AFP at the time.

"That crosses a very thick red line."

Rightwing condemnation

Rightwing parliamentarians criticised the court decision, saying it undermined the sovereignty of Israel's parliament.

"This is a dangerous intervention by the court against Knesset legislation," MP Bezalel Smotrich of the far right Jewish Home party, which is part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper.

"Time after time the judiciary tramples on the decisions of one governmental authority or another. This story must stop."

Mandelblit had suggested the bill would be likely to be struck down by the courts from when it was first proposed.

The act allows Israel to appropriate Palestinian private land on which settlers built without knowing it was private property or because the state allowed them to do so.

Palestinian landowners whose property was taken for settlers would be compensated with cash or given alternative plots.

Palestinians said the law was a means to "legalise theft" and France called it a "new attack on the two-state solution."

Some members of Netanyahu's right-wing government advocate the annexation of much of the West Bank, a move that would end any hope of an independent Palestinian state.

Mladenov said that the "legalisation law" could be a prelude to that.

"It opens the potential for the full annexation of the West Bank and therefore undermines substantially the two-state solution," he said after its passing.

312 dead as mudslides, flooding sweep through Sierra Leone capital

Yahoo – AFP, Saidu Bah, August 14, 2017

Residents struggled to traverse roads that were turned into churning rivers of mud
after Sierra Leone's capital of Freetown was struck by heavy rains (AFP Photo/STR)

Freetown (AFP) - At least 312 people were killed and more than 2,000 left homeless on Monday when heavy flooding hit Sierra Leone's capital of Freetown, leaving excavators to pull bodies from rubble and overwhelming the city's morgues.

An AFP journalist saw several homes submerged in Regent village, a hilltop community, and corpses floating in the water in the Lumley West area of the city, as the government held an emergency meeting to plan its response to one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the city.

Red Cross spokesman Patrick Massaquoi told AFP the death toll was 312 but could rise further as his team continued to survey disaster areas in Freetown and tally the number of dead.

Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries in the world, according to UN indicators.

"I counted over 300 bodies and more are coming," Mohamed Sinneh, a morgue technician at Freetown's Connaught Hospital, told AFP, having earlier described an "overwhelming number of dead" at the facility leaving no space to lay out every body.

Many more of the dead were taken to private morgues, Sinneh said.

Sierra Leone's military, police and Red Cross volunteers were meanwhile deployed in an all out effort to locate and rescue citizens trapped in their homes or under rubble.

Images obtained by AFP showed ferocious, churning dark-orange mud coursing down a steep street in the capital, while videos posted by local residents showed people waist- or chest-deep in water trying to cross the road.

The Sierra Leone meteorological department did not issue any warning ahead of the torrential rains to hasten evacuation from the disaster zones, AFP's correspondent based in Freetown said.

'Lost everything'

Fatmata Sesay, who lives on the hilltop area of Juba, said she, her three children and husband were awoken at 4:30 am by rain pounding on the mud house they occupy, which was by then submerged by water.

"I only managed to escape by climbing to the roof of the house when neighbours came in to rescue me," she said.

Sierra Leone's capital is hit each year by flooding that destroys makeshift settlements throughout

 the city, raising the risk of waterborne diseases like cholera This handout picture released

 on August 14, 2017, by Society 4 Climate Chnage Communication Sierra Leone, shows flooded

 streets in Regent near Freetown.The death toll from massive flooding in the Sierra Leone 

capital of Freetown climbed to 312 on August 14, 2017, the local Red Cross told AFP. Red 

Cross spokesman Patrick Massaquoi told AFP the toll could rise further as his team continued 

to survey disaster areas in Freetown, where heavy rains have caused homes to disappear 

under water and triggered a mudslide. (AFP Photo/STR)

"We have lost everything and we do not have a place to sleep," she told AFP in tears.

Deputy Information Minister Cornelius Deveaux confirmed President Ernest Bai Koroma had called a national emergency, and said his own boss, Information Minister Mohamed Bangura, was in hospital after being injured in the flooding.

Deveaux said "hundreds" of people had lost their lives and had properties damaged, and promised food and other assistance for the victims.

He called on the public to remain calm with rescue efforts underway.

Piles of corpses

The scale of the human cost of the floods was only becoming clear on Monday afternoon, as images of battered corpses piled on top of each other circulated and residents spoke of their struggles to cope with the destruction and find their loved ones.

Meanwhile disaster management official Vandy Rogers said that "over 2,000 people are homeless," hinting at the huge humanitarian effort that will be required to deal with the fallout of the flooding in one of Africa's poorest nations.

Freetown, an overcrowded coastal city of 1.2 million, is hit each year by flooding during several months of rain that destroys makeshift settlements and raises the risk of waterborne diseases such as cholera.

Sasha Ekanayake, Save the Children's Sierra Leone Country Director, said the immediate priority was to provide shelter and protect residents, especially children, from the spread of deadly waterborne diseases.

"We are still in the rainy season and must be prepared to respond in the event of further emergencies to come," she said in a statement.

Flooding in the capital in 2015 killed 10 people and left thousands homeless.

Sierra Leone was one of the west African nations hit by an outbreak of the Ebola virus in 2014 that left more than 4,000 people dead in the country, and it has struggled to revive its economy since the crisis.

About 60 percent of people in Sierra Leone live below the national poverty line, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The country ranked 179th out of 188 countries on the UNDP's 2016 Human Development Index, a basket of data combining life expectancy, education and income and other factors.

#UPDATE At least 312 people killed as heavy flooding hits #SierraLeone capital Freetown https://t.co/NReFNM6LPY pic.twitter.com/xntBQIh7lk

— AFP news agency (@AFP) August 14, 2017

Rwanda's Paul Kagame: visionary, despot, or both?

Yahoo – AFP, Fran BLANDY, August 1, 2017

Incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame (L) has become one of Africa's
most powerful and admired leaders (AFP Photo/MARCO LONGARI)

Kigali (AFP) - Paul Kagame is revered for stopping Rwanda's genocide and engineering what admirers call an economic miracle, but his critics see a despot who crushes all opposition and rules through fear.

The 59-year-old former guerrilla fighter is seeking a third term in office in August 4 polls after voters massively approved a constitutional amendment allowing him to run again and potentially stay in office for another two decades.

Kagame frames his run as a duty to his country, however the move angered international allies whose patience has worn thin with a man once held up as a shining example of successful post-colonial leadership in Africa.

Yet the president of the tiny central African nation has become one of Africa's most powerful and admired leaders. His counterparts, inspired by Rwanda's turnaround, have tasked him with reforming the African Union.

Shattered by the 1994 genocide and with not a franc left in the national treasury when Kagame took over, Rwanda is now growing at an average seven percent a year while Kigali has transformed into a capital with a gleaming skyline, spotless, safe streets and zero tolerance for corruption.

"Kagame is known as a doer and an implementer, not somebody who says things just like everyone else," said Desire Assogbavi, Oxfam's liason to the AU who also blogs regularly about the body.

His close friend Tony Blair hails him as a "visionary leader" for the remarkable development he has brought about.

'Unapologetically authoritarian'

The president's personality -- described as "unapologetically authoritarian" by author Philip Gourevitch, who wrote a powerful account of the genocide -- was forged by growing up in exile.

In 1960, when he was three, his aristocratic Tutsi family fled to neighbouring Uganda to escape pogroms.

While out of danger, they suffered years of discrimination and persecution that nourished the dream of going back to the homeland they idealised.

Serving in Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's rebel force before and after it seized power in 1986, he rose to become its intelligence chief.

Kagame -- the only president known to have had military training both in the US and Cuba -- later took over command of a small rebel force of Rwandan exiles that sneaked back home hoping to overthrow the regime of Juvenal Habyarimana in 1990, sparking civil war.

Habyarimana's death in an aeroplane crash in 1994 triggered three months of genocide, mostly of minority Tutsis by youths in the Hutu majority whipped into a frenzy of hate.

Kagame, a father of four, was just 36 when his Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel army routed the forces who had slaughtered an estimated 800,000 people and seized Kigali, becoming the de facto leader of the nation.

'New breed of dictator'

Kagame soon became the darling of an international community deeply ashamed at having stood by during the genocide, even as his RPF was accused of killing tens of thousands of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo while pursuing genocide perpetrators.

It was accusations Kagame was backing rebel groups in the DRC -- which he staunchly denies -- that finally pushed his allies to take a tougher line, with several suspending aid to Rwanda in 2012.

And criticism has grown louder over his rights record.

Kagame's critics have ended up jailed, forced into exile or assassinated. Rights groups slam the repression of the media and opposition.

Kagame won elections in 2003 and 2010 with 95 and 93 percent respectively. Observers say real opponents are silenced while those allowed to run in elections serve as a democratic facade.

One of Rwanda's rare critical journalists, Robert Mugabe, describes Kagame as the quintessential modern dictator.

"We have a new breed of dictators... they hire PR agencies they form a narrative and these dictators are smart enough to know what the western world wants to see and wants to hear."

Kagame, his aloof gaze piercing through black-rimmed glasses, coolly brushes off criticism over his governance and slams the "arrogant" West for dictating to Rwandans what freedom is.

"A strong leader is not necessarily a bad leader. I don't know where we would be today if a weak leader had taken over this country (after the genocide)," Kagame told Jeune Afrique magazine in 2016.