Independent Online News
Ursula von der Leyen says €900m will be macrofinancial assistance while €105m will help combat people-smuggling
The European Union is considering providing more than €1bn (£850m) in aid for Tunisia to rescue state finances and deal with a migration crisis, the EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said on Sunday.
Chinese intelligence collection from Cuba predates the Biden era, with facilities upgraded in 2019, White House official says
China has been spying from Cuba for some time and upgraded its intelligence collection facilities there in 2019, a Biden administration official said on Saturday, following a report about a new spying effort underway on the island.
The UN on Friday announced that following serious allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse, an entire unit of 60 peacekeepers from Tanzania formerly based in the western part of the Central African Republic (CAR), is to be repatriated.
UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told correspondents that the decision to send the unit home had been made by the Secretariat in New York, following consultations with the peacekeeping mission in CAR, MINUSCA.… Read the rest
Plans to help the people of Ukraine following the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam are centred on saving people “right now”, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths told UN News in an interview on Friday.
“We need to focus on an emergency response right now”, he said, highlighting a three-step plan to provide humanitarian assistance to all Ukrainians impacted, who have faced more than one year of war following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Shoppers in Mali’s Gao, Timbuktu, and Ménaka regions can snap up AK-pattern assault rifles for $750 and cartridges for 70 cents apiece, from locally handcrafted pistols to smuggled French and Turkish machine guns, as a dizzying array of illegal weaponry dots market stalls across the Sahel, a 6,000-kilometre-wide belt in the middle of Africa.… Read the rest