The first signs of a takeoff of Africa’s green economy are raising hopes that a transformation of the continent’s fortunes may be under way, driven by solar power and an increase in low-carbon investment.

African leaders are meeting this week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the Africa Climate Summit, a precursor to the global UN Cop30 in November. They will call for an increase in support from rich countries for Africa’s green resurgence, without which they will warn it could be fragile and spread unevenly.

Richard Muyungi, the climate envoy and adviser to the president of Tanzania, said: “Africa is ready to be part of [the global fight to stave off climate breakdown] provided we are supported with finance, technology and capacity-building.

“There has been an increase of investments in some areas but Africa still needs a lot of financing to be able to be part of the global solution, and to address the challenges we are facing.”

Green energy is booming in Africa, with 20 countries breaking records for imports of solar panels in the 12 months to June. According to the thinktank Ember, imports of photovoltaic equipment from China rose by 60% over the past year, from 9MW in 2024 to 15MW of capacity, with a tripling of imports to countries outside South Africa.

Though the increase is impressive, it is from a low base. Africa, which boasts the greatest potential for solar power, has lagged far behind other countries in installations. Only 4% of global solar generation last year was in Africa, and in 2023, the International Energy Agency reported that Belgium had as many solar panels as the entire continent.

“There is a glimmer of light [in the increased investment] but this is still quite meagre compared to other continents in the global south,” Muyungi said.

Last year’s imported panels would add about 5% to current electricity generation capacity in 16 countries, according to Ember, but the need remains vast. About 600 million people in Africa lack access to electricity, and about a billion have only firewood or dirty fuels for cooking. Women and girls are worst affected.

Melaku Yirga, the regional director for Africa at Mercy Corps, a humanitarian organisation, said: “Renewable energy is not only Africa’s greatest opportunity, it is also an urgent necessity. Renewable power enables everything from irrigation and food storage to early-warning systems, healthcare and livelihoods.”

While recent increases in renewable energy investment were welcome, Yirga said the public sector and overseas aid were still vital.

“Africa has no shortage of ambition in renewable energy, but without stronger international finance and the right incentives, the private sector will remain on the sidelines and adaptation goals will go unmet,” he said.

“Private sector financing must be met with public commitments, and funding must also be long-term and reliable – short grants rarely achieve full impact, as meaningful engagement with governments and communities takes time and requires significant upfront investment.”

Reductions in overseas aid from rich countries are causing consternation among African governments, many of which are blighted by record debt burdens, exacerbated by the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and recent interest rate rises.

Macky Sall, the former president of Senegal, said: “The drop in official development assistance fundamentally changes the climate calculus. Where does that leave Africa, if we can no longer count on our partners’ promises?

“The costs of the climate crisis have fallen most heavily on Africa. We are not the cause. We are not only footing the largest bill – we are also seeing the cheques to stem the damage cancelled.”

Private sector companies will put cash into renewable energy, but few will help Africa adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis, which are already being felt in the form of droughts, floods and crop failures. Investment to build resilience – such as water storage systems, better infrastructure and new farming techniques – is lacking.

A report published at the summit on Monday showed that while Africa needed at least $70bn a year to adapt to the effects of the climate crisis, and possibly much more, only $15bn was provided in adaptation finance to the continent in 2023.

Without urgent action to address that vast financing gap, Africa’s future costs from climate impacts will balloon, wiping out a fifth of GDP by 2050.

Patrick Verkooijen, the chief executive of the Global Center on Adaptation thinktank, says rich countries must increase their finance for adaptation in Africa, which is responsible for just 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions while bearing the brunt of climate breakdown.

“Europe [and other countries] will shoot themselves in the foot if they defund ODA,” he said. “African leaders will see it as a stab in the back.”

While Africa is behind in climate adaptation, its riches are increasingly sought after by China and the rest of the rich world.

Africa boasts some of the biggest deposits of “critical minerals” – elements vital to building renewable energy components. Cobalt, lithium, copper, nickel, rare earths and other minerals are abundant in parts of Africa, which has spurred a global scramble for the resources.

Human rights abuses have soared in some mining areas, with child labour and the exploitation of adult workers, particularly women, in places such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Africa’s under-resourced public sector is struggling to contain the damage and ensure resource extraction is done responsibly, without causing environmental devastation and in a way that benefits local people.

Africa also abounds in gas, with reserves of the fossil fuel that have scarcely been tapped in some countries. Muyungi insisted they must be allowed to exploit those resources, despite the impact on the climate crisis. “We do not envisage anything to stop us using gas – we need it for our development,” he said.

For rich countries to tackle the climate crisis, Africa’s assistance will be essential. If global north governments fail to address the continent’s needs, they will feel the impact. Roughly 60% of Africa’s population is under 25, a “youthquake” that could spur development or, if poorly handled, will be felt around the world.

Abay Yimere, a scholar at the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University in the US, said: “If the climate crisis is not tackled in Africa, that will be a problem for migration. If we do not provide them with jobs, and adapt to climate change, the impact will be huge and not controllable. The global north should look at this from their own national perspectives and see where their interest lies.”

Aid cuts in east Africa have led to cases of babies being born with HIV because mothers could not get medication, a rise in life-threatening infections, and at least one woman having an unwanted abortion, according to interviews with medical staff, patients and experts.

A report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) sets out dozens of examples of the impact of disruption to Pepfar – the president’s emergency plan for aids relief – in Tanzania and Uganda.

Pepfar, a leading US global health programme, launched in 2003 and is credited with saving millions of lives, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.

The report is based on interviews with 39 doctors, nurses, people living with HIV, service providers and other experts. It focuses on the first 100 days after Pepfar-funded programmes were instructed to stop work as part of a US government freeze on foreign aid.

Health workers reported shortages of drugs to control the virus, resulting in increased serious infections in people living with HIV and children being born with the virus because mothers could not get medication to prevent it being passed on. Clinics have closed, and people are skipping vital doses to eke out their supply of medication, raising the risk of drug-resistance.

Some programmes have been able to resume activities in the months since the interviews, said Emily Bass, one of the report’s authors, offering “temporary mitigation” of the harms, but there exists a “narrow window” for the US Congress to act to secure resources that will stabilise remaining services and prevent the loss of decades of progress.

The Trump administration is reportedly refusing to release about half of the $6bn (£4.5bn) funding allocated by Congress for Pepfar in the 2025 fiscal year.

In Tanzania and Uganda, HIV prevention and treatment programmes were reliant on Pepfar. The stop work order meant clinics were unable to dispense drugs bought with US money for several days, before a waiver came through allowing treatment to continue.

Even then, disruption to supply chains meant doctors could not dispense as many drugs as usual, they said, perhaps giving patients supplies for a few weeks rather than months. Rumours spread that normal access was unlikely to return.

A mental health project research coordinator told PHR: “Someone did an abortion because of that rumour [that antiretrovirals were no longer available]. She said, ‘Oh well, I don’t want to have a baby who is HIV positive. I will be blamed myself, so I don’t want.’”

By late April, one clinic reported that 25% of the pregnant women living with HIV that it supported had given birth to a child with HIV. Its clinician said drugs had not been delivered and existing stocks would not stretch far enough.

The US government waiver allowed HIV prevention programmes to continue only for pregnant or breastfeeding women. It left key at-risk groups unprotected – in Tanzania and Uganda, LGBTQ+ people, sex workers and people who use drugs face criminalisation and stigma.

Specialist services making it easier for them to access care have been hardest hit, the report found, warning of worsening discrimination when those people sought help from mainstream government clinics.

The report also found that people’s trust in domestic government, US foreign aid and antiretroviral medications had been damaged. Many said they feared a “dark” future, anticipating increased costs for care and opportunists pushing fake cures.

The US government must “immediately restore, renew, preserve and protect global health funding for essential HIV services, including full funding commensurate with need for global HIV programs in the FY 2026 budget, and subsequently reauthorise the Pepfar program”, the authors concluded, so that there can be “a planned, feasible, and transparent transition to country leadership and ownership of programs”.

Lawyers for five men deported by the US to Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, said they are being denied proper access to their clients, who they said are being imprisoned illegally.

The men from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba have criminal convictions, but had all served their sentences and been released in the US, their lawyers said. The US deported them to the small southern African country without warning in July, claiming they were “depraved monsters”.

The US has sent migrants to several third countries, as Donald Trump’s administration ramps up deportations. Eight men were sent to South Sudan in July, Rwanda accepted seven migrants last week and Uganda has agreed to take in asylum seekers. The US also deported 252 Venezuelans, first sending them to a notorious prison in El Salvador for four months.

The lawyers said they have been unable to have private conversations with their clients, who are allowed one short video call a week in the presence of prison staff. A local lawyer representing the five men has been prevented from visiting them in the maximum security Matsapha correctional centre.

The Emaswati lawyer filed a case demanding access to the men, but a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed when the judge did not show up, said Alma David, who is representing the Yemeni and Cuban men.

When the men, who had all been in the US since they were children, were first deported, US assistant homeland security secretary Tricia McLaughlin claimed they were “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back.”

In response, Jamaica’s foreign minister, Kamina Smith, said: “The government has not refused the return of any of our nationals to Jamaica,” and would work to return any deportees to the country. She later said that diplomats visited Orville Etoria in prison in Eswatini on 21 August and found him “in good spirits”.

Etoria, 62, came to the US legally in 1976, aged 12, said his lawyer Mia Unger, of the Legal Aid Society. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1997. He obtained an undergraduate degree in prison, was released on parole in 2021 and was working in a men’s shelter and studying for a master’s degree in divinity when he was deported.

He had been reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as required and obtained a Jamaican passport earlier this year at their request. His relatives told Unger he had first been put on a plane to Jamaica and then removed, she said, adding that his being sent to Eswatini “makes no sense”.

Relatives of the four other men did not want their identities disclosed, their lawyers said. The Yemeni man, who served 22 years in prison for murder and was released in 2020, had been living in Michigan and is 70, his lawyer David said. The Cuban man, also convicted of murder, is in his mid-50s and had been working for a plumbing company in Florida. He was released from prison in 2012, David said.

She spoke to both men while all five deportees were with guards and the prison chief, who said that only the US embassy in Eswatini could grant access to the men. “Since when does the US embassy have jurisdiction over Eswatini’s national prisons?” she said.

Tin Thanh Nguyen, representing the Vietnamese and Laotian deportees, said the men were aged 34 and 45 and released in 2015 and 2023 respectively. The Laotian man’s relatives reported he was starting to show signs of depression.

“The United States is outsourcing their detention … to purge the United States of immigrants and refugees and to make a spectacle of deportations,” Nguyen said.

Last month, a group of Eswatini NGOs challenged the country’s acceptance of the deportees on constitutional grounds, arguing that parliament had not been consulted and that the men’s human rights were being violated.

An Eswatini government spokesperson said they would not be responding while court cases were under way.

Ice and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

More than 1,000 people were killed in a landslide in western Sudan on Sunday, according to a rebel group that controls the area.

The landslide destroyed a village in the Marra Mountains area of western Sudan and left only one survivor, said the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army.

The landslide took place on 31 August after heavy rains, said the group, led by Abdelwahid Nour.

“Initial information indicates the death of all village residents, estimated to be more than one thousand individuals, with only one survivor,” its statement said.

The movement, which controls the area located in Darfur region, appealed to the UN and international aid agencies to help recover the bodies of victims, including men, women and children.

The village “has now been completely levelled to the ground”, the statement said.

Sudan’s bloody civil war – now in its third year – has plunged Sudan into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with famine declared in parts of Darfur.

Fighting has escalated in Darfur, especially in El-Fasher, since the army took control of the capital, Khartoum, in March.

Fleeing the raging war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, residents reportedly sought shelter in the Marra Mountains area, where food and medication are insufficient.

The civil war has left more than half the population facing crisis levels of hunger and driven millions from their homes.

With Reuters and Agence France-Presse

Sixty-nine people drowned when a vessel full of migrants overturned off the coast of Mauritania earlier this week, coastguard officials said on Friday.

The accident occurred late on Tuesday after passengers on the boat spotted the lights of a coastal town about 50 miles (80km) north of the capital, Nouakchott, prompting the occupants to press to one side of the boat, causing it to capsize, Mohamed Abdallah, the head of the coastguard, told reporters.

“When the migrants saw the lights of the Mheijrat, they tried to move to one part of the boat, causing it to capsize,” Abdallah said.

The boat is understood to have left the Gambia a week ago, carrying about 160 people, including Senegalese and Gambian nationals.

The initial death toll was reported as 49, but a subsequent count by the official raised the number to 69. Seventeen survivors were pulled from the water by one of the coastguard’s patrols.

Thousands of would-be migrants have died in recent years during the dangerous maritime passage between Africa and Europe. According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), at least 8,938 people died in 2024 attempting to cross borders.

Travellers who pass through Mauritania usually come from neighbouring countries including Senegal and Mali, and are trying to reach Europe. But strong ocean currents and the fragile condition of the vessels make the long crossing perilous. Some people also try to go through the Sahara, which comprises 90% of Mauritanian territory, braving temperatures above 45C.

Human Rights Watch has reported abuses of migrants by Mauritanian security officials.

In a 142-page report released on Wednesday HRW said it had documented “police use of prolonged, painful restraints, limited food and water, and other mistreatment” in a crackdown funded since 2024 by a €210m (£182m) deal with the EU.

Authorities in Nouakchott have not yet responded to the report which has caused debate in government and humanitarian circles this week.

A member of the House of Lords asked a senior British diplomat to help a Ghanaian goldmining venture in which he held shares, claiming that it was “in the UK national interest”, the Guardian can disclose.

The revelation will add to concerns about apparent breaches of parliamentary lobbying rules by Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British army.

The peer is already under scrutiny over his lobbying for several companies, leading in two cases to investigations by the Lords’ standards body.

Lord Dannatt, an unpaid senior adviser to Blue International, sought help from the high commissioner for Ghana in January 2024 on behalf of the company’s Ghanaian subsidiary, Future Global Resources.

The latest disclosure raises new questions about whether the peer breached parliamentary rules by seeking diplomatic assistance for the investment firm, which is focused on west Africa.

At the time, the company was facing financial difficulties at its Bogoso-Prestea mine and was at risk of losing the right to operate the mine, by far its largest asset.

Documents disclosed under freedom of information laws show that on 22 January 2024 Dannatt wrote to Harriet Thompson, then high commissioner for Ghana, seeking her help.

“Please excuse an unsolicited email but I am writing to ask for some assistance on a commercial matter that, although beneficial for the company concerned, is in the UK national interest,” he wrote.

Dannatt said Blue International, in which he held 10,461 shares, was “at a critical juncture” because it was planning a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. He said this would require support from the Ghanaian minister of land, which he believed was likely to be forthcoming. But he warned that the company faced “very serious opposition from other quarters”.

Dannatt then asked to arrange a video conference call with Thompson “to seek your advice and input on their next steps”.

The peer told the Guardian that he had “always sought to abide by the letter and the spirit of all rules and in regard to the matters under discussion believed that I was doing so”.

He said he had always declared any of his interests when engaging with ministers or officials, and said any proceeds from his shares would be donated to charity.

“Moreover, I note that ministers and officials were content to engage with me on the issues I raised and invariably thanked me for bringing matters to their attention,” he added.

Dannatt said the call with Thompson, arranged at the request of one of the directors of Blue International and Future Global Resources, did take place.

“At the time the company’s commercial attempts to reopen the Bogoso-Prestea mine were being frustrated, against the best interests of the local employees, by those from another country outside Africa which also had designs on the mine,” he said.

“At the meeting, my role was to introduce the director, outline the apparent problem and leave it to the others to discuss the way forward.”

Dannatt’s appeal for help from the diplomatic corps appears to have resulted in UK government intervention.

“Following the online meeting, I have seen in subsequent emails that the British high commissioner and some of her staff followed up the issues raised at the meeting with the appropriate Ghanian authorities, with a satisfactory outcome,” he told the Guardian.

The Foreign Office disclosed that Thompson paid a “courtesy call” to Ghana’s attorney general and director of public prosecutions in March 2025 but details of the meeting were redacted.

Dannatt’s intervention on behalf of Blue International appears to have breached parliamentary lobbying rules, which state that members must not “seek to profit from membership of the House by accepting or agreeing to accept payment or other incentive or reward in return for providing parliamentary advice or services”.

Guidance attached to the code, provided to all members of the House, states that peers should “not accept, or agree to accept, payment or other reward in return for doing or not doing something in the performance of their parliamentary duties”.

Such duties include “all types of interaction with members of either House, ministers or officials”.

A director of Blue International said Dannatt had provided “political advice” to the company.

Asked why he had told the British High Commission that intervention was in the national interest, Dannatt said that an official from the commission had “expressed his appreciation that raising this issue has resulted in the sustenance of a UK mining initiative in the region”.

Dannatt’s shares in the company are now publicly tradable, after Blue International completed a $114.5m combination with a US “blank cheque” investment firm, relaunching the mining venture under the name Blue Gold in a deal that was completed in June.

However, there are significant question marks over the likely value of the shares.

The Ghanaian government has revoked the company’s lease at the Bogoso-Prestea mine, one of the largest gold mines in the country. The matter is subject to international arbitration.

Dannatt said he did not know the value of his shares. He said he acquired them when Blue International was working on a now defunct hydroelectric project in Sierra Leone and intended to donate any proceeds from them to Street Child, a charity founded by his son.

Mark Green, a director of Blue International, said he was already in touch with the British High Commission before Dannatt’s involvement but had asked the peer to join a call to “help provide political advice as that has been his role for us”.

“Richard has never asked or intimated for anything in return,” he said. “He is on our advisory board, at our request, in order to give us advice and help us in political situations.”

Green said Dannatt’s advice would help “protect the interest of British taxpayers”.

In early 2024, it emerged that the Treasury had lent Blue International £3.3m of taxpayers’ money via the “Future Fund” the previous year.

The Future Fund was designed to help “start-ups and innovative firms” survive the pandemic by extending them loans that converted into equity.

Dannatt’s lobbying activity has come under scrutiny several times this year.

He is under investigation by the House of Lords authorities over two sets of allegations.

The first followed undercover filming by the Guardian during which he offered to secure meetings with ministers for a potential commercial client. He said his conduct, which emerged as part of the Guardian’s Lords Debate investigation, had not broken Lords rules.

He is also under investigation after he lobbied the government to get financial support worth millions of pounds for a commercial deal he was steering, documents reveal. He said he was not paid and was helping a friend.

Earlier this month the Guardian revealed that he had urged ministers to crack down on the Palestine Action group at the request of a US defence company that employs him as an adviser.

Court transcripts of the subsequent trial of one Palestine activist, obtained by the Guardian, reveal allegations heard in court that Dannatt sought to influence the police’s investigation of the protest.

Dannatt said he was completely unaware of the exchanges in the trial and that allegations he was “seeking to influence” a live criminal case were “baseless”.

Seven people have arrived in Rwanda as part of a deal to accept deportees from the US, the Rwandan government has said.

“The first group of seven vetted migrants arrived in Rwanda in mid-August … Three of the individuals have expressed a desire to return to their home countries, while four wish to stay and build lives in Rwanda,” Yolande Makolo, a government spokesperson, said on Thursday.

Officials offered no information on the nationalities of the seven deportees. Rwanda said on 5 August it would accept up to 250 people from the US, stating that it would have “the ability to approve each individual proposed for resettlement”.

The first arrivals would be “accommodated by an international organisation with visits by the International Organisation on Migration and Rwandan social services,” Makolo said.

Donald Trump’s administration has been pushing a deportation drive, negotiating controversial arrangements to send people to third countries, including South Sudan and Eswatini, formerly Swaziland.

Rwanda signed a lucrative deal in 2022 to accept migrants from Britain, only for the agreement to be scrapped when Labour came to power last year.

Kigali agreed to the scheme with Washington because “nearly every Rwandan family has experienced the hardships of displacement”, Makolo said earlier this month. Those who arrive in Rwanda will be provided with training, healthcare and accommodation, she added.

The Trump administration has defended third-country deportations as necessary as home nations sometimes refuse to accept the deportees.

Rights experts have warned that the deportations risk breaking international law by sending people to countries where they face the risk of torture, abduction and other abuses.

Rwanda has a population of 14 million people and claims to be one of the most stable countries in Africa and has drawn praise for its modern infrastructure. However, the agreement with Britain drew criticism from rights groups and faced a long-running legal challenge.

President Paul Kagame’s government has been accused of human rights violations and of crushing political dissent and press freedoms.

Malawi is facing a critical shortage of tuberculosis drugs, with health officials warning that stocks will run out by the end of September.

It comes just months after the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that the country had successfully reduced tuberculosis (TB) cases by 40% over the past decade.

In March, the WHO’s country representative, Dr Neema Rusibamayila Kimambo, announced that Malawi had also seen a high rate of success in treating TB and a significant reduction in the number of deaths.

But the health ministry, which was already badly hit by the cuts in aid from the US, UK and other donors, has been forced to warn the public of low stocks of first-line TB medicines across Malawi, which means patients may find their treatment disrupted or ended.

Dr Samson Mndolo, Malawi’s secretary for health, said the low stock was down to disruption in the global supply of pharmaceutical ingredients, worsened by declining international support and aid, and said newly diagnosed patients may be denied access to the standard drug regimens.

Some hospitals in the country have already reported having to borrow stock from other facilities.

In the city of Blantyre, the TB officer, Lackson Namuku Gama, said the district pharmacy had no stocks at all of the TB drugs to distribute to the 45 health facilities it supplies.

Gama said: “We registered zero stock of the TB drug at our district pharmacy, especially the RHZE, which is the main drug used in the initial phase of treatment. To save our patients, we had to run up and down and borrow from other facilities to ensure we have something to give to our patients.

“We have scaled down on the dose ration given to the patients,” he said.

Gama said the district has also run out of the cartridges used for diagnosis of TB samples and that they had been forced to stop all testing.

The TB officer for the neighbouring district of Rumphi, Umar Mwamadi, estimated that the district had enough stocks of drugs to last another month.

“We are not yet affected by the stock out, but we are also at a greater risk because our drug can only take us up to mid or late September,” he said.

Wongani Nyirenda, a hospital official in Machinga district, said stocks were also low there.

“The situation is manageable because we can mobilise drugs from one facility or district which has [stocks] to another, which is in need, to save lives. But the problem may get worse in the next few weeks when all facilities will be [without supplies],” said Nyirenda.

A Malawi health rights activist, Maziko Matemba, called on the government to intervene to avoid chaos as more facilities across the country struggled to find supplies.

“It is high time African countries should start manufacturing some of these drugs,” he said.

Despite the decline in cases, TB remains a public health concern in Malawi and has been hit badly by the drop in international funding, with an estimated incidence rate of 119 per 100 000 people (compared with eight per 100,000 in the UK) and a mortality rate of 38.6 per 100,000. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 47% of TB cases in Malawi are co-infected with HIV.

Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries, with 70% of its 21.66 million people living in extreme poverty, on less than $2.15 a day, and 51% of the population eating less than the minimum daily calorie intake.

An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants”.

The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania.

The programme, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities – Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and Nagai – and the African nations.

Media coverage in the four countries, and Japanese-language references to the articles, have been blamed for triggering an ugly backlash on social media in Japan, along with a wave of angry calls and emails to the Japanese cities’ offices.

Some critics appeared to believe that “hometown” status meant that people from the African countries would be given special permission to live and work in their Japanese partner cities.

“If immigrants come flooding in, who is going to take responsibility?” said one social media post.

One post on X claiming that Kisarazu was “seriously considering handing over the city to Africans” attracted 4.6m views.

The four cities have received thousands of complaints from confused residents. “Our team of 15 officials spent a whole day handling hundreds of phone calls and thousands of emails from residents,” an official in Sanjo told Agence France-Presse.

The town has received 350 phone calls and 3,500 emails since Monday, the official said, while Imabari has fielded 460 calls and 1,400 emails from residents asking if the town had adopted a new immigration policy.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, said the claims were baseless. “There are no plans to promote accepting immigrants or issue special visas,” he told reporters.

The cities also attempted to set the record straight. The mayor of Kisarazu, Yoshikuni Watanabe, pointed out that the city had hosted Nigerian athletes during the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, adding that project would not lead to “accepting migrants”.

He added: “Our initiatives will involve cooperating in the education of young people based on discipline through baseball and softball, and it’s not a programme that will lead to relocation or immigration.”

The mayor of Sanjo, Ryo Takizawa, said in a statement: “It is not true that the city has requested to accept migrants or immigrants from Ghana, and the city has no plans to make such a request in the future.”

Some attributed the outcry to an article in the Tanzania Times that carried the headline “Japan dedicates Nagai city to Tanzania.”

The word “dedicates” was translated on social media into the Japanese word sasageru, which could be interpreted to mean the town was being “sacrificed” to Tanzania, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Nigeria’s government also appeared to have misunderstood the details of the programme, describing Kisarazu as a location open to “Nigerians willing to live and work [in Japan]”. Japan’s government, it added, would create a special visa category for skilled people from the West African country.

Japan’s foreign ministry has reportedly asked the Nigerian government to issue a correction, while JICA – a government agency – said several media organisations had published articles containing “inaccuracies and potentially misleading information”.

“JICA is currently urging the relevant local media and the African government [sic] to promptly correct the inaccuracies contained in their coverage,” it said on its website.

Botswana’s president has declared a public health emergency due to shortages of essential medicines and equipment, as a downturn in the global diamond market and US aid cuts take a toll on the country’s finances.

The announcement came after the Ministry of Health suspended non-urgent surgeries on 4 August, stating that the country was short of medicines to treat hypertension, diabetes, cancer, asthma and eye conditions, as well as supplies including bandages and sutures and those for sexual and reproductive health.

The president, Duma Boko, said in a televised address on Monday night that the country’s medical supply chain had failed, as he announced 250m pula (£13.8m) in funding for emergency medicines, the distribution of which would be overseen by the military.

Boko blamed the state procurement agency Central Medical Stores (CMS), which he said in turn blamed middlemen, for ratcheting up drug prices in the southern African country, which has a population of about 2.5 million and is the world’s largest diamond producer by value.

He said: “The current prices often are inflated five to 10 times. And under the current economic conditions, this scenario is not sustainable.”

Boko, who defeated the party that had been in power for six decades in elections last November, said the CMS had quoted 705m pula for a year’s worth of the medicines that Botswana needed. Meanwhile, a new emergency taskforce received a quote of less than 80m pula.

Thabo Seleke, a University of Botswana lecturer, said the CMS was plagued by dysfunction, inertia, unmet reform pledges and corruption allegations, adding: “There have been yearly reports from the auditor-general, which … flagged incomplete procurement records, missing contracts and recurrent delivery delays.”

Also feeding into the problem is the dire state of Botswana’s economy and public finances, which contributed to Boko’s victory last year. There is no end in sight for the three-year downturn in the price of diamonds, which in 2024 accounted for about 25% of Botswana’s GDP, one-third of government revenues and 80% of exports, according to the International Monetary Fund. The economy shrank by an estimated 3% in 2024.

Zoë McCathie, an analyst at the consultancy Signal Risk, said: “The diamond downturn has been a lot more sustained than diamond mining companies and the state itself had initially predicted. As a result, the state was not as prepared for this as it could have been.”

The Ministry of Health, in its 4 August statement, said it owed 1bn pula to “private health facilities and supplies, amongst others”.

Botswana is a world leader in tackling HIV/Aids. In 2000, one in eight children were born with HIV. In 2023, it was fewer than 100. Earlier this year, it became the first country with a high HIV-positive population to be awarded the World Health Organization’s gold-tier status for eliminating mother-to-child – or “vertical” – HIV transmission as a public health threat.

However, while Botswana buys its own antiretroviral drugs to treat HIV, it has also been hit by US aid cuts announced in January. Before the cuts, the US funded about one-third of the country’s HIV response, according to UNAids – $55m (£41m) annually from the US president’s emergency plan for Aids relief (Pepfar) and $12m via the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Some, but not all, global Pepfar funding has since been restored.

A court case challenging Eswatini’s acceptance of five people deported by the US has been postponed until September, after the attorney general failed to show up in court on Friday, according to one of the NGOs that brought the case.

The men from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, who the US said were dangerous criminals, were flown to the small southern African country in July, as the administration of Donald Trump bids to deport millions of immigrants and asylum seekers.

The men’s imprisonment, at the maximum security Matsapha correctional centre, caused outrage in Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, whose king, Africa’s last absolute monarch, appoints the prime minister and cabinet.

A group of NGOs and activists filed a legal challenge last week, arguing that the deal, whose terms have been kept private by the government, was unconstitutional. In legal papers, they said the deportations violated due process and that the prison where the deportees are being held is 190% over capacity.

The Southern African litigation centre (Salc), whose programme manager is one of the plaintiffs, said at the time: “This litigation signals to the continent and the world that African nations cannot serve as dumping grounds for unresolved issues.”

The US had previously deported 252 Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they spent more than four months in a notorious prison before being returned to Venezuela. Eight men were sent to South Sudan after spending weeks in a shipping container in Djibouti. Uganda and Rwanda have also agreed to take in deported migrants.

The high court case has been postponed to 25 September and may be referred to the constitutional court by the high court judges, the Salc said in a Facebook post.

Zakithi Sibandze, national coordinator of rural women’s assembly Eswatini, one of the plaintiff NGOs, said: “This agreement is unconstitutional because it should have been presented to and approved by our members of parliament. That clearly didn’t happen, and you could see our MPs were completely in the dark based on how they grilled the government about it.”

She added: “The government assures us these individuals are in secure facilities, but that does not ease our fears. We have heard stories of criminals escaping from prison. We are not convinced.”

In papers submitted to the court on Thursday, the attorney general argued that the case was not urgent and plaintiffs did not have legal standing. The papers said: “The [constitution] empowers Government to executive international agreements in the name of the crown.”

Melusi Simelane of the Salc, said: “We want the details of this deal … the prime minister and this government, they are withholding information, information that is very pertinent to our rights as citizens.”

A government spokesperson declined to comment given that the matter was in court.

A court case challenging Eswatini’s acceptance of five people deported by the US has been postponed until September, after the attorney general failed to show up in court on Friday, according to one of the NGOs that brought the case.

The men from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, who the US said were dangerous criminals, were flown to the small southern African country in July, as the administration of Donald Trump bids to deport millions of immigrants and asylum seekers.

The men’s imprisonment, at the maximum security Matsapha correctional centre, caused outrage in Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, whose king, Africa’s last absolute monarch, appoints the prime minister and cabinet.

A group of NGOs and activists filed a legal challenge last week, arguing that the deal, whose terms have been kept private by the government, was unconstitutional. In legal papers, they said the deportations violated due process and that the prison where the deportees are being held is 190% over capacity.

The Southern African litigation centre (Salc), whose programme manager is one of the plaintiffs, said at the time: “This litigation signals to the continent and the world that African nations cannot serve as dumping grounds for unresolved issues.”

The US had previously deported 252 Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they spent more than four months in a notorious prison before being returned to Venezuela. Eight men were sent to South Sudan after spending weeks in a shipping container in Djibouti. Uganda and Rwanda have also agreed to take in deported migrants.

The high court case has been postponed to 25 September and may be referred to the constitutional court by the high court judges, the Salc said in a Facebook post.

Zakithi Sibandze, national coordinator of rural women’s assembly Eswatini, one of the plaintiff NGOs, said: “This agreement is unconstitutional because it should have been presented to and approved by our members of parliament. That clearly didn’t happen, and you could see our MPs were completely in the dark based on how they grilled the government about it.”

She added: “The government assures us these individuals are in secure facilities, but that does not ease our fears. We have heard stories of criminals escaping from prison. We are not convinced.”

In papers submitted to the court on Thursday, the attorney general argued that the case was not urgent and plaintiffs did not have legal standing. The papers said: “The [constitution] empowers Government to executive international agreements in the name of the crown.”

Melusi Simelane of the Salc, said: “We want the details of this deal … the prime minister and this government, they are withholding information, information that is very pertinent to our rights as citizens.”

A government spokesperson declined to comment given that the matter was in court.

Uganda has reached an agreement with the US to take in deportees from third countries who may not get asylum, but are “reluctant” to go back to their own countries, according to Uganda’s foreign ministry.

Uganda won’t accept people with criminal records or unaccompanied minors under the temporary arrangement, ​​ the foreign ministry’s permanent secretary said in a statement. He did not say whether Uganda was receiving any payment or other benefits and how many deportees it would accept.

“Uganda also prefers that individuals from African countries shall be the ones transferred to Uganda. The two parties are working out the detailed modalities on how the agreement shall be implemented,” Bagiire Vincent Waiswa said.

The government of the east African country is the latest to strike a deal with the US, which is seeking to expel millions of undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers and foreigners with criminal convictions.

In July, five immigrants from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, who Washington said had been convicted of serious crimes, were flown to Eswatini, where they are now in a high security prison. The deportations are being challenged by a group of Swazi and southern African NGOs, with a high court hearing scheduled for Friday.

Also in July, eight men from various countries were deported by the US to South Sudan, via Djibouti, where they were held for weeks in a shipping container. Meanwhile, more than 250 Venezuelans were repatriated to Venezuela after being sent to a notorious El Salvador prison in March without due process.

Uganda is a US ally and has been ruled by 80-year-old president Yoweri Museveni for almost 40 years. His political opponents are regularly sent to jail.

On Wednesday, a Ugandan official denied that it had reached a deal with the US, saying that they did not have the facilities and infrastructure to accommodate immigrants. The denial followed a CBS News story on Tuesday that cited internal government documents, reporting that the White House had reached deportation deals with Honduras and Uganda.

Uganda hosts nearly 2 million refugees and asylum seekers, most from other east African countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan and Sudan.

Uganda has reached an agreement with the US to take in deportees from third countries who may not get asylum, but are “reluctant” to go back to their own countries, according to Uganda’s foreign ministry.

Uganda won’t accept people with criminal records or unaccompanied minors under the temporary arrangement, ​​ the foreign ministry’s permanent secretary said in a statement. He did not say whether Uganda was receiving any payment or other benefits and how many deportees it would accept.

“Uganda also prefers that individuals from African countries shall be the ones transferred to Uganda. The two parties are working out the detailed modalities on how the agreement shall be implemented,” Bagiire Vincent Waiswa said.

The government of the east African country is the latest to strike a deal with the US, which is seeking to expel millions of undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers and foreigners with criminal convictions.

In July, five immigrants from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, who Washington said had been convicted of serious crimes, were flown to Eswatini, where they are now in a high security prison. The deportations are being challenged by a group of Swazi and southern African NGOs, with a high court hearing scheduled for Friday.

Also in July, eight men from various countries were deported by the US to South Sudan, via Djibouti, where they were held for weeks in a shipping container. Meanwhile, more than 250 Venezuelans were repatriated to Venezuela after being sent to a notorious El Salvador prison in March without due process.

Uganda is a US ally and has been ruled by 80-year-old president Yoweri Museveni for almost 40 years. His political opponents are regularly sent to jail.

On Wednesday, a Ugandan official denied that it had reached a deal with the US, saying that they did not have the facilities and infrastructure to accommodate immigrants. The denial followed a CBS News story on Tuesday that cited internal government documents, reporting that the White House had reached deportation deals with Honduras and Uganda.

Uganda hosts nearly 2 million refugees and asylum seekers, most from other east African countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan and Sudan.

Pressure is mounting on the Tanzanian government to release a woman with severe intellectual disabilities who has been in prison awaiting execution for 13 years.

Lemi Limbu, who is now in her early 30s, was convicted of the murder of her daughter in 2015. A survivor of brutal and repeated sexual and domestic violence, she has the developmental age of a child.

Limbu’s legal team is now worried about her deteriorating health. On a visit to the prison in June, one of her lawyers found that Limbu required assistance to walk, her stomach was swollen and her mental health had worsened. “She looked sick, weak and sad,” the lawyer said.

In Tanzania, the death penalty is the mandatory sentence for murder. Limbu’s original conviction in 2015 was nullified in 2019 due to procedural errors. But she remained incarcerated awaiting a new trial.

In 2022, she was retried and sentenced to death a second time. The court did not consider her intellectual disabilities or history of abuse. An appeal was filed in 2022 but no date for a hearing has been set.

“The constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania requires courts to not delay dispensation of justice unreasonably,” said the lawyer. “According to our laws, justice should not only be done, but be seen to be done.”

“This is a woman who absolutely should not be in prison,” said Prof Sandra Babcock, a clinical professor of law and the faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, who is acting as a legal consultant in Limbu’s case.

“This is a woman who is not violent, who represents no threat. You could release her tomorrow, and, as long as she had some kind of support for her disability, she would be able to live a reasonably productive life in society. She is somebody who needs protection.”

A coalition of 24 African and international human rights groups earlier this year condemned Limbu’s sentence as part of an appeal to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights to look at the plight of women on death row throughout Africa.

Limbu grew up in an environment of violence. Her father beat her mother and she was repeatedly raped by men in her village, who would drag her from her home. She gave birth at 15 after becoming pregnant by rape.

At about 18, she married an older man and had two more children. She later fled from her husband, who beat her, and moved to a different village with her youngest child, Tabu, who was about a year old.

There she met Kijiji Nyamabu, an alcoholic, who told Limbu he would marry her – but he said he would never accept her baby daughter, Tabu, because she had been fathered by a different man.

Shortly afterwards, Tabu was found strangled. There were no witnesses and Kijiji had already fled by the time Limbu brought the authorities to her daughter’s body. She was arrested in August 2011 but Kijiji was never detained.

At her first trial in 2015, Limbu pleaded not guilty. Unable to read or write, she said she did not know the contents of a statement that police claimed she had made admitting to the murder. She said she was beaten, threatened at gunpoint and detained for two days at the police station.

At her 2022 retrial, the high court did not allow evidence from medical professionals. A clinical psychologist who evaluated her had concluded she had a severe intellectual disability and the developmental age of a 10-year-old child or younger.

Under international law, Limbu should not be held criminally liable, given her intellectual disability.

Prison conditions in Tanzania are “dire”, according to Fulgence T Massawe, director of access to justice at the Legal and Human Rights Centre, a Tanzanian advocacy organisation.

He said that in terms of supplies and sanitation, conditions in prisons were bad and the prevailing belief was that it was not a hotel “and people are here to serve their term”. ”

In a letter requesting a UN special rapporteurs appeal to the Tanzanian government, Babcock wrote: “Without urgent intervention, the poor standard of care Limbu is receiving creates an unacceptable risk that her condition will deteriorate further and become critical.”

She said Limbu’s case was “a clear example of the profoundly unjust consequences of Tanzania’s mandatory death penalty”, adding: “Limbu has been a victim of abuse since childhood and is uniquely vulnerable because of her intellectual disability.”

South Africa’s sport, arts and culture minister, Gayton McKenzie, is under investigation by the country’s human rights commission for historical social media posts containing a highly offensive racial slur, reigniting a debate about racism, identity and the lingering effects of colonialism and apartheid.

McKenzie, an anti-immigrant populist from the Coloured community with a history of stirring up controversies, was given a Wednesday evening deadline by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to issue an approved apology, undergo sensitivity training, donate to an agreed charity and delete the X posts, which were still online at the time of publication.

The posts came to light after the hosts of a podcast called Open Chats said on an episode that Coloured people committed incest and were “crazy”. The podcast segment was later removed.

McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance party, which got 2% of the vote in 2024 national elections and draws its support mainly from Coloured people, filed complaints with the police and the SAHRC. McKenzie told the national broadcaster: “There should be no place to hide for racists.”

Social media sleuths soon unearthed posts made on X between 2011 and 2017, where McKenzie had used the word “kaffir” – a racial slur for black people – though he was not directing it at particular individuals.

In posts on X on 11 August, McKenzie denied being racist and said he was also Black.

“I did tweet some insensitive, stupid and hurtful things a decade or two ago, I was a troll & stupid,” he wrote. “I cringe when seeing them and I am truly sorry for that. I shall subject myself to the investigation.”

Tshepo Madlingozi, the SAHRC’s anti-racism commissioner, told a local TV channel, Newzroom Afrika, on 17 August: “The use of the K-word has been declared unlawful. The use of the K-word, to quote the constitutional court, is unutterable … the court has made it very clear that it is one of the most offensive slurs that one can use.”

He said of the posts still being online: “The harm is ongoing, the harm continues and the alleged offences are still there.”

The white minority apartheid regime, which took power in 1948, forcibly separated South Africans into Native, Coloured, Indian and White categories. It lumped together mixed-race people – descendants of south-east Asian enslaved people, Khoisan Indigenous communities and Europeans – as Coloured and gave them slightly better benefits than their Black counterparts.

Today, official data is still collected in four racial categories – Black African, Coloured, Indian/Asian and White. Coloured people were 8.2% of the population in the 2022 census.

The tensions that the apartheid “divide and rule” strategy fostered are still evident.

“In my entire life, I have never called anybody the K-word, never. We are the victims. This is a political campaign,” McKenzie said in a Facebook Live video on 10 August. McKenzie and his spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Tessa Dooms, co-author of the book Coloured, said: “Even if what he had to say was not meant to be derogatory, in a context where Coloured communities have been accused of anti-blackness, the use of that word by a very prominent Coloured figure in society would always be read in the context of presumed anti-blackness.”

She said that while some Coloured people were racist, “anti-blackness was cultivated as part of the apartheid project”.

The enduring tensions are owing, in large part, to many communities still living in the separate areas forced on them by apartheid, said Jamil Khan, who researches Coloured identities at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.

Khan said: “What this shows us, really, is that South Africans don’t really know each other.”

Uganda said it has not reached any agreement with the US to take in undocumented immigrants, contradicting reports that the east African country had struck a deal with the Trump administration to do so.

Henry Oryem Okello, Uganda’s state minister for foreign affairs, told Reuters the country does not have the capability to take in immigrants. It comes as the US has deported migrants convicted of crimes in the US to non-native countries including South Sudan and Eswatini.

“To the best of my knowledge we have not reached such an agreement. We do not have the facilities and infrastructure to accommodate such illegal immigrants in Uganda. So, we cannot take in such illegal immigrants,” Oryem said.

On Tuesday, CBS News, citing internal government documents, reported that the White House had reached deportation deals with Honduras and Uganda. CBS News wrote that Uganda had “agreed to accept deportees from the US who hail from other countries on the continent, as long as they don’t have criminal histories”.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.

The US Department of Homeland Security said in June that third-country deportations – sending undocumented migrants from the US to countries other than their own – were necessary to expel people “so uniquely barbaric that their own countries won’t take them back”.

Critics have said the deportations are unnecessarily cruel. In July, the US flew five immigrants from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba to Eswatini – an absolute monarchy with a troubling record. Eswatini, the subject of a damning human rights report by the state department in 2023, said it had accepted the US deportees after “months of robust high-level engagements” with the US.

Though other administrations have conducted third-country removals, the Trump administration’s practice of sending immigrants to countries facing political and human rights crises have raised international alarm and condemnation.

Uganda, a US ally in east Africa, hosts nearly 2 million refugees and asylum-seekers, who mostly come from countries in the region such as Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Sudan.

Diphtheria cases are rapidly increasing across Somalia, officials and humanitarians warn, with children accounting for more than 97% of the cases.

Diphtheria, a highly contagious and deadly bacterial disease that mainly affects children, is preventable by a vaccine. While Somalia has improved vaccination rates in recent years, the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) blames the uptick in cases on persisting immunisation gaps.

Abdulrazaq Yusuf Ahmed, the director of Demartino public hospital in the capital, Mogadishu, said: “The number of recorded cases of children sick with diphtheria has increased across the regions in the whole country. We have received about 49 patients in the whole of 2024 but this year, 2025, we have received 497 diphtheria cases during the last four months alone.”

Deaths had risen from 13 to 42, according to a report by Ahmed’s hospital this month. The report described the resurgence of diphtheria as “one of the most urgent and dangerous threats to public health”.

Earlier this month, the health ministry said it had recorded 1,616 cases and 87 deaths from the disease so far this year.

MSF’s Somalia medical coordinator, Frida Athanassiadis, said: “We are seeing a rapid increase in diphtheria among children under 15 in central Somalia,” adding that they accounted for roughly 97% of cases. “Low vaccination coverage, vaccine hesitancy and poor living conditions are driving the spread.”

Athanassiadis said that in some medical centres the basic resources were “insufficient to cope with rising caseloads”.

MSF said while teams initially had a small emergency stock of the antitoxin, it had now been exhausted, with the health ministry and the World Health Organization helping to distribute the “limited available stock based on needs”.

In July, Save the Children warned that since April cases of measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, cholera and severe respiratory infections in Somalia had doubled from roughly 22,600 to more than 46,000. About 60% of the cases were children under five, it said.

“The sharp rise in vaccine-preventable diseases is linked to the recent aid cuts, which have impacted the health system’s capacity to deliver essential services, including routine immunisation, and to treat and run catch-up campaigns to increase the immunity necessary to halt the outbreak,” the NGO said.

In Mogadishu, one resident, Abdiwahid Ali, said: “Many children in my neighbourhood are sick, some of them hospitalised.”

Anab Hassan, a grocer, said people were concerned about the outbreak. “A friend of mine lost a five-year-old daughter who was diagnosed with diphtheria, and several others told me their children are sick and coughing,” she said. “We hear about children getting sick every day.”

A furious row over whether the Zambian president, Hakainde Hichilema, will preside over the funeral of his predecessor, Edgar Lungu, is raging, as the former president’s family wages a legal battle in South Africa to try to stop his body from being repatriated to Zambia.

The legal fight marks the latest twist in a feud between the two men that goes back at least a decade and has now outlasted the former president, who died in South Africa in June aged 68 while being treated for an undisclosed illness.

Mourners had already arrived at the funeral in Johannesburg in June when it was halted by a high court judge, after an 11th-hour request by Zambia’s attorney general, Mulilo Kabesha. Lungu’s family said he specifically requested that Hichilema not attend his funeral.

On 8 August, the Pretoria high court ruled that Lungu’s body could be sent back to Zambia for a state funeral. Lungu’s older sister Bertha broke down, shouting across the courtroom at Kabesha as she was restrained by other relatives.

Lungu’s family then applied for leave to appeal. On Monday, the high court adjourned the case indefinitely, while South Africa’s constitutional court decides whether to hear the appeal. Meanwhile, conspiracy theories have spread, from rumours that Lungu is not actually dead to speculation that Hichilema wants to use the body for witchcraft.

Many Zambians have joked about the saga. “It’s coming home!” Kodwani Banda, a self-described “youth advocate”, posted to his 356,000 Facebook followers, with an image of white smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel chimney.

“There should have been more sympathy,” said Emmanuel Mwamba, spokesperson for the Patriotic Front, Lungu’s party. “When [government officials] came to South Africa, they were just interested in picking up the body and holding the funeral. It was very mechanical. Their approach lacked sympathy, lacked empathy, lacked a sense of Africanness, a sense of ubuntu.”

Kabesha had previously argued a state funeral with full military honours was a legal requirement, citing a court ruling on the burial of Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda. “The moment that a national mourning is declared, the law kicks in,” he told the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation in June.

Mwamba responded that a state funeral could be held without the current president presiding over it: “His presence doesn’t make it. A state funeral is, in fact, the protocols such as the gun salute, the pallbearers being soldiers, the ceremony being handled by the defence forces.”

Sishuwa Sishuwa, a political historian and senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University, said the burial dispute had heightened political discord in Zambia.

“The faultlines have always been there, but the dispute over Lungu’s burial place has exacerbated the country’s regional and political polarisation,” he said.

“Whatever way the dispute is resolved, it will have a significant bearing on the 2026 elections … A key reason behind the government’s court action in South Africa is to reduce the political costs of burying Lungu in exile.”

Lungu ruled Zambia from 2015 to 2021, taking over when Michael Sata died in office. He then defeated Hichilema in the 2016 presidential election, which Hichilema and his United Party for National Development (UPND) party claimed was rigged.

The following year, Hichilema was sent to prison to await trial on treason charges, after his convoy did not give way to Lungu’s presidential motorcade. Four months later, after an international outcry, he was released and the charges were dropped.

Hichilema finally defeated Lungu in the 2021 elections, amid an economic crisis. Since then, he has been accused of using similar oppressive methods to his longtime rival.

In 2023, police stopped Lungu from going out for runs, saying they were “political activism” that had to be approved in advance to “ensure public safety”. His wife and children have also faced corruption charges, which they have denied and said were politically motivated.

In 2024, Lungu was banned from running in next year’s presidential election by the constitutional court, which ruled that the period from when Lungu took office in 2015 until the 2016 election counted as a full first term.

The African Union has backed a campaign to end the use by governments and international organisations of the 16th-century Mercator map of the world in favour of one that more accurately displays Africa’s size.

Created by the cartographer Gerardus Mercator for navigation, the projection distorts continent sizes, enlarging areas near the poles like North America and Greenland while shrinking Africa and South America. “It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not,” the African Union Commission deputy chair, Selma Malika Haddadi, told Reuters, saying the Mercator fostered a false impression that Africa was “marginal”, despite being the world’s second-largest continent by area, with more than 1 billion people. The union has 55 member states.

Such stereotypes influence media, education and policy, she said.

Criticism of the Mercator map is not new, but the Correct the Map campaign led by the advocacy groups Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa has revived the debate, urging organisations to adopt the 2018 Equal Earth projection, which tries to reflect countries’ true sizes.

“The current size of the map of Africa is wrong,” said Moky Makura, the executive director of Africa No Filter. “It’s the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop.”

Fara Ndiaye, a co-founder of Speak Up Africa, said the Mercator affected Africans’ identity and pride, especially children who might encounter it early in school.

“We’re actively working on promoting a curriculum where the Equal Earth projection will be the main standard across all [African] classrooms,” Ndiaye said, adding she hoped it would also be the one used by global institutions, including Africa-based ones. Haddadi said the AU endorsed the campaign, adding it aligned with its goal of “reclaiming Africa’s rightful place on the global stage” amid growing calls for reparations for colonialism and slavery.

The AU will advocate for wider map adoption and discuss collective actions with member states, Haddadi added.

The Mercator projection is still widely used, including by schools and tech companies. Google Maps switched from Mercator on desktop to a 3D globe view in 2018, though users can still switch back to the Mercator if they prefer.

On the mobile app, however, the Mercator projection remains the default.

Correct the Map wants organisations such as the World Bank and the UN to adopt the Equal Earth map. A World Bank spokesperson said it already used the Winkel tripel projection or Equal Earth for static maps and was phasing out Mercator on web maps.

The campaign said it had sent a request to the UN geospatial body, UN-GGIM. A UN spokesperson said that once received it must be reviewed and approved by a committee of experts.

Other regions are backing the AU’s efforts. Dorbrene O’Marde, the vice-chair of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Reparations Commission, endorsed Equal Earth as a rejection of the Mercator map’s “ideology of power and dominance”.

Mali’s military rulers have arrested a group of military personnel and civilians, including two Malian generals and a suspected French agent, accusing them of attempting to destabilise the country.

The announcement followed rumours in recent days of arrests of army officers. It was made by the security minister, Gen Daouda Aly Mohammedine on the local evening news on Thursday. He assured viewers that an investigation was under way and that the situation was “completely under control”.

The development comes as the military continues to crack down on dissent after a pro-democracy rally in May, the first since soldiers seized power nearly four years ago.

Few details were provided about the alleged coup plotters, what they had intended or the French national implicated in it, beyond identifying him as Yann Vezilier. Mohammedine said he had been acting “on behalf of the French intelligence service, which mobilised political leaders, civil society actors and military personnel” in Mali.

There was no immediate word from France, Mali’s former colonial ruler, on the Vezilier’s arrest.

“The transitional government informs the national public of the arrest of a small group of marginal elements of the Malian armed and security forces for criminal offences aimed at destabilising the institutions of the republic,” Mohammedine said. “The conspiracy has been foiled with the arrests of those involved.”

National television broadcast photos of 11 people it said were members of the group that planned the coup, and Mohammedine identified two generals he accused of being part of the plot, which he said had begun on 1 August.

One of them, Gen Abass Dembélé, is a former governor of the central Mopti region. He was abruptly dismissed in May, when he demanded an investigation into allegations that the army had killed civilians in the village of Diafarabé.

The other, Gen Néma Sagara, was lauded for her role in fighting militants in 2012.

Rida Lyammouri, an analyst at the Morocco-based Policy Center for the New South, said Mali’s rulers were well aware of discontent among the population and members of the military.

“The military leaders are simply not willing to let those grievances build into something more, like a coup, and therefore these arrests seem more of a way to intimidate than a legitimate coup attempt,” he said.

“It’s a continuation of the repeated unjustified arrests and prosecution of anyone speaking against the current regime. We have seen this behaviour against journalists, civil society and political leaders, so it’s not surprising to see this against military members.”

Mali, along with neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, has long fought an insurgency by armed militants, including some allied with al-Qaida and Islamic State.

After two military coups, the ruling junta expelled French troops in 2022 and turned to Russia for security assistance. But the security situation remains precarious, and attacks by militants have intensified in recent months.

Gen Assimi Goïta was granted another five years in power in June, despite the junta’s earlier promises of a return to civilian rule by March 2024. The move followed the military’s dissolution of political parties in May.

Typhoon Podul crossed southern Taiwan on Wednesday with wind speeds of up to 110mph (177km/h), equivalent to a category 2 hurricane.

Podul had developed a week earlier, near the Northern Mariana Islands, and tracked west across the Philippine Sea, achieving typhoon status on Tuesday before making landfall in south-east Taiwan the following day.

Podul whipped up high waves along the east coast, where a man died after being swept away while fishing. As the storm travelled overland, it dumped large amounts of rain across the south of the island, with 440mm recorded in parts of Pingtung County, causing widespread flooding and agricultural damage.

Schools, offices and businesses closed as the storm approached, and more than 7,000 people were evacuated from their homes, mainly in mountainous regions, amid fears of flash flooding and landslides.

Almost 300,000 homes lost power, shipping routes were suspended, and about 400 flights were cancelled, including domestic trips.

Podul then veered north-east across the Taiwan strait and weakened slightly to a severe tropical storm, before making landfall once again in Fujian province, China, in the early hours of Thursday.

Despite weaker winds, Podul lashed south-east China with similarly torrential rain – Macau on the south coast recorded 110mm in an hour.

Cape Verde experienced similar downpours on Monday after Tropical Storm Erin developed nearby, causing flash flooding on the north-west islands of Santo Antão and São Vicente. The latter received 193mm of rain within five hours, more than 150% of the yearly average.

At least nine deaths have been reported, with several people missing and about 1,500 displaced. Erin will pass to the north of the Caribbean over the weekend, and is expected to achieved hurricane status.

Meanwhile, as a heatwave grips the Middle East, the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley have particularly suffered in recent days. The region is susceptible to high temperatures because of its low altitude – it is several hundred metres below sea level in places – and temperatures approached 50C (122F) on Wednesday.

Unusually high humidity – about 80% at times – has contributed to the sweltering temperatures. As humid air cools more slowly than drier air, overnight cooling has been limited, leading Israel to record its highest overnight minimum on Wednesday, when it reached 38C near Mount Sodom.

Temperature records were also set in southern and western Europe this week as yet another heatwave swept the continent. Alongside myriad date records, several all-time peaks were hit in southern France on Sunday and Monday, including in the department of Aude (43.4C) and the cities of Angoulême, Bergerac and Bordeaux (42.1C, 42.1C and 41.6C respectively).

Also on Monday, it reached record highs in the Croatian cities of Šibenik (39.5C) and Dubrovnik (38.9C).

A world heritage site that was once a famous tourist destination is suffering from signs of disintegration, as climate change affects weather patterns.

The wavy-walled houses covered with singular geometric lines of the Royal Court of Tiébélé in Burkina Faso, established in the 16th century, are recognisable all over the world. The paintings represent the thoughts, culture, and religion of the Kassena people, literally written on the walls.

Tiébélé in southern Burkina Faso is one of only four Burkinabé sites on the Unesco world heritage list. But it is now on the brink of extinction. “Nowadays, it’s easier to build with metal roofs and cement,” says Abdou Anè, a young resident in Tiébélé.

For many years, Tiébélé was an unmissable tourist destination in Burkina Faso. But the jihadist violence that has been rumbling through the country and its neighbours, Mali and Niger, since 2015 is deterring visitors. To reach Tiébélé, for example, a visitor has to cross a bridge known as Nazinon, which was attacked some time ago. Drivers have to keep to 30km/h and it is under heavy military control.

The failed coup d’état of 2015 and subsequent unrest has dampened the tourism industry, with numbers declining every year.

Meanwhile, the threat to the delicate structures from climate change is growing. “To paint the walls, they must be completely dry, but now the rain is unpredictable, and it has already happened that it starts raining while we’re working on restoration,” says Anè. Plastic sheets are not enough to protect the paintings. “Even though we are very proud to be recognised as a world heritage site, we also need help to keep preserving it.”

“Sometimes we get rain during periods when we didn’t before. Before, in March or April, we would get one rain known as the ‘mango rain’, but today we can get three to four rains”, says Anè. “There are trees that no longer produce, and it’s with those that we used to build our houses. This worries the population, especially the elderly who remember what the climate used to be like, because it’s a new kind of change. The rain comes abundantly – more than what people expected. It’s a phenomenon people don’t understand. For example, now we are in August and there is no rain. People are really worried. Those who have seen the seasons of the past and compare them to today are worried. Those who were born into this situation don’t understand the change.”

In Kassena culture, found only in this region of the world, the women are responsible for painting the houses. For the unique painted lines, they use pigments extracted from laterite stone, clay, basalt, and even cow dung – materials native to the region. To fix the markings to the walls, they boil the fruit of the néré tree, also known as the “flour tree”, to make a varnish that seals the paint. All this knowledge and skill resides in the head of octogenarian Kaye Tintama, recognised as a “living human treasure” by Unesco, a living library responsible for passing on the decoration techniques and the meanings behind the walls and shapes of Tiébélé’s houses to new generations.

The award-winning architect Francis Kéré has been inspired by the way the Kassena have used natural materials to protect themselves from intense heat and heavy rain for hundreds of years. “[The] Kassena passed his architecture to the present, to the future generations, and this method is inspiring for me,” Kéré told the Guardian.

The shape of the houses is significant. Round houses such as Ané’s are for unmarried men, but those shaped like a figure of eight are for older women and unmarried daughters, and rectangular houses are for young couples. “They inspired me to use locally available materials to create the habitat, but also the way they create, they involve all the community, which is highly important for me,” says Kéré.

Many of the houses feature a small entrance door to prevent animals from coming in, but also to force visitors to kneel, a position of vulnerability that allows inhabitants to neutralise a possible intruder.

The rooftops are designed to dry cereals after the harvest. On the walls, reliefs of snakes symbolise the spirits of grandmothers or the cultural guardian spirit of the Kassena people, who appears once a year during which the population must remain silent and avoid music as it passes. It’s a monument under open skies that now coexists with concrete, sheet metal, and iron windows. “It’s very hard to find straw to make the roofs,” explains Ané as he points to the paillote of his house, destroyed by the wind.

The men are in charge of building the houses. It takes a month and a mix of earth, straw, and logs to build the structure. “Chemical products have weakened the soil,” explains Ané, lamenting that the houses no longer last like they used to.

In this part of the world, the climate crisis is felt in an accelerated way and without the resources to face it. Even though Sahel countries contribute only 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, they are among those suffering the most from its consequences: temperatures have risen 1.5 times faster than the global average. Additionally, 80% of Burkina Faso’s population lives from agriculture and land-based work.

Political and religious figures in Malian city of Timbuktu have welcomed the return of ancient manuscripts that were removed to the capital, Bamako, more than a decade ago to prevent them from falling into the hands of militants linked to al-Qaida.

According to a UN expert mission, jihadists destroyed more than 4,000 manuscripts and as many as nine mausoleums after occupying the desert city in 2012. Workers at the state-run Ahmed Baba Institute used rice sacks to smuggle the remaining documents out of the city a number of ways, including by donkey cart and motorcycle.

Mali’s military junta began returning manuscripts on Monday, citing the threat posed to them by humidity in Bamako. Officials said the first tranche involved a shipment of more than 200 crates weighing about 5.5 tonnes.

“We now have a responsibility to protect, digitise, study and promote these treasures so that they continue to enlighten Mali, Africa and the world,” the country’s higher education minister, Bouréma Kansaye, said at a return ceremony.

Local political and religious figures who have been clamouring for the return of the manuscripts hailed the move. The documents “reflect our civilisation and spiritual and intellectual heritage” said Timbuktu’s deputy mayor, Diahara Touré.

There appeared to be limited enthusiasm, however, among everyday Malians, who despite being proud of their cultural heritage, seem preoccupied with immediate concerns such as economic hardship and insecurity.

The Malian army and allied Russian mercenaries hold Timbuktu, but the surrounding countryside remains in the control of jihadists who carry out regular hit-and-run raids to unsettle the government. Militants detonated a car bomb near the airport’s military base in June, and at least 30 soldiers and about a dozen attackers were killed in the explosion and ensuing gun battle.

Before the attack, authorities had attempted to show that they were in control by hosting diplomats in Timbuktu. The junta also plans to host a cultural biennale to showcase the city’s cultural heritage in December.

Ulf Laessing, the Bamako-based head of the Sahel programme at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German thinktank, said the government’s gestures were intended as a show of stability, projecting Mali’s ability to improve security.

The militants have mostly attacked the military, but there are concerns that the symbolism of Timbuktu could eventually make it a tempting target.

The manuscripts are unlikely to be targeted, but travel logistics remain fragile. UN and commercial flights operate weekly, but fuel shortages can strand passengers.

The “worst cholera outbreak in years” has killed at least 40 people in the last week in Sudan, according to the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières.

Overwhelmed medical centres are resorting to treating patients on mattresses on the floor, MSF said, as the country’s two-year civil war aids the spread of the disease.

Sylvain Penicaud, MSF project coordinator in Tawila, North Darfur state, said families in displacement and refugee camps often had no choice but to drink dirty water, the main cause of cholera.

“Just two weeks ago, a body was found in a well inside one of the camps. It was removed, but within two days, people were forced to drink from that same water again,” he said.

Sudan’s cholera outbreak was first confirmed by the Federal Ministry of Health a year ago, and there have since been more than 99,700 suspected cases and more than 2,470 related deaths.

The disease is spreading as people flee fighting, and being worsened by heavy rains, which contaminate water and overwhelm sewage systems, public health leaders said.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the public health agency of the African Union, has repeatedly raised concerns about the spread of cholera on the continent, which as of May accounted for 60% of cholera cases and 93.5% of related deaths globally. Vulnerable and conflict-affected states such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan, as well as Sudan, are among the worst affected.

MSF said its teams in Tawila, working with the local health ministry, had treated more than 2,300 cholera patients last month. The hospital’s 130-bed treatment centre had to accommodate 400 patients in the first week of August.

About 380,000 people have arrived in the small town since April as they flee fighting around the city of El Fasher and Zamzam camp, according to UN records.

While the World Health Organization says that during an emergency people need at least 7.5 litres of water a day for drinking, cooking and hygiene, people in Tawila must survive with an average of only three.

MSF said water shortages across Darfur made it “impossible to follow essential hygiene measures, such as washing dishes and food”.

Cholera treatment centres in other towns and regions were also being “overwhelmed”, it said.

“The health centres are full,” said Samia Dahab, a resident of Otash displacement camp in Nyala, South Darfur state. “Some areas have water, others have kiosks that are far [away] or empty. Some water is salty, and we drink it unboiled, unsure if it’s safe.”

Tuna Turkmen, MSF’s head of mission in Sudan, said the situation was “beyond urgent” and “spreading well beyond displacement camps now, into multiple localities across Darfur states and beyond”.

In neighbouring Chad, 16 deaths and 288 cases were reported in the second week of August.

Turkmen called for an international response “to provide healthcare, improve water and sanitation services, and begin cholera vaccination campaigns in affected areas at a pace that matches the urgency this catastrophic situation requires”, warning: “Survivors of war must not be left to die from a preventable disease.”

Good morning. The slogan “black is beautiful” rang out from civil rights marches in the US and UK during the 1960s and echoed through liberation struggles across the global south. It became a rallying cry against racist beauty standards that had long cast Black skin, facial features and hair as undesirable.

These movements urged pride in what had been denigrated for centuries, and their message was not limited to people of African or Caribbean heritage. Calls to embrace natural beauty resonated across Asia and much of the global south, directly challenging the colonial belief that lighter skin conferred greater worth.

Yet decades later, that belief seems to endure. Across the world, women of colour continue to use skin-lightening creams, many laced with toxic ingredients, in the hope of meeting beauty ideals shaped by colourism.

Now, we are learning that the results are becoming even more devastating. For the first time, medical journals have reported rising cases of cancers among women of colour using skin-lightening products. The industry, now worth US$10.7bn (£8bn), is expected to grow to US$18.1bn by 2033. Some reports even describe these products being used on babies and young children.

To understand why skin‑lightening creams remain so prevalent, and what can be done to end their appeal, I spoke to Prof Ncoza Dlova, head of dermatology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. That’s after the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Ukraine | Donald Trump told European leaders on Wednesday he would be seeking a ceasefire in Ukraine at his summit with Vladimir Putin on Friday and gave reassurances that he would not make any territorial concessions without Kyiv’s full involvement.

2. UK news | David Lammy has referred himself to the environment watchdog after going fishing with JD Vance without the required licence during the US vice-president’s trip to the UK.

3. Immigration | At least 20 people have died after a boat capsized off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, a United Nations agency and local media reported on Wednesday.

4. UK politics | Keir Starmer is to formally revive Northern Powerhouse Rail this autumn with an announcement expected before the Labour conference.

5. Palestine | The United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied territories has warned that moves to recognise a Palestinian state should not distract member states from stopping mass death and starvation in Gaza.

In depth: ‘It’s psychosocial, political, historical – being lighter is seen as superior’

Recently, a patient walked into Ncoza Dlova’s clinical office in need of support. She had dark-coloured pigmentations, known as ochronosis, and stretch marks on her face and neck. The marks were as a result of a skin-lightening cream she had used for three years. When Dlova asked why she used the cream, she told her that she wanted to look like a friend she felt was more beautiful.

Patients like this are now a daily occurrence for Dlova. “I said ‘I feel sorry about your situation, but unfortunately, I have to be realistic with you: there’s nothing I can do to reverse your skin and make it look like it was before’,” Dlova remembers.

“There was a clear contrast between the face and the hand, with the hand being much darker and the face being much lighter. And then she broke down there and cried. I told her, I know this is painful, but now what I can offer you is using sunscreens to protect your skin from getting worse, or even getting skin cancers.”

The Guardian’s global health correspondent, Kat Lay, reported last month on a string of cases of women dying from cancer after using these products for several decades. Dlova and colleagues are now working on a paper that cites more than 55 cancer cases, from countries including Mali and Senegal.

“People don’t know the complications and side-effects. The patients I see who have side-effects regret it, and say they wish they’d known,” Dlova says.

When did this become an issue?

The use of these creams isn’t a new phenomenon. Reports of African women using skin-lightening creams and suffering harmful effects began emerging as early as the 1970s. At the time, these products often contained mercury as the bleaching agent, but their use was banned in South Africa in 1975 due to the risk of brain and skin damage.

Manufacturers switched to using hydroquinone instead. But in 1975, a professor at Pretoria University, George Findlay, wrote about the harms of hydroquinone in the British Journal of Dermatology. He explained that while the chemical initially lightens the skin, it later makes it rough with dark lumps that can turn into abscesses and ulcers. These effects seem to be accelerated by exposure to the sun, making them particularly dangerous for individuals who use them in African countries.

Dlova tells me this paper was groundbreaking and led to bans in other countries such as Rwanda and Ghana. But their use continues today due to weak regulation, while other companies are now using steroids in skin-lightening cream.

What are the side-effects?

The melanin found in darker skin typically is known to offer some protection against sun damage (though people of colour should still wear sunscreen). Skin-lightening products work by removing the melanin and therefore this layer of protection, and can make some people look lighter, but they come with a whole set of complications. The combination of hydroquinone and steroids can be particularly dangerous.

“The immediate complication is the thinning of the skin, where you find that a person can’t use any products. Whatever they use on the skin, it stings and it burns because the upper layer has been thinned. And then there’s also fungal infections, which are common, because some of the steroids also are immunosuppressants,” Dlova says.

“You can also get steroid-induced acne or rosacea. And some patients, if they’re using steroids, get excessive hair where they are using their products. There’s stretch marks, because of the damage in collagens, and irreversible pigmentation, such as ochronosis.”

The other side-effect increasingly raising alarm? Skin cancer.

The huge problem is that many women are simply unaware. A study Dlova recently carried out, of 700 women, found that 30% were using skin bleaching creams. And of those who were using the products, 90% of them didn’t know about the side-effects.

Is this just affecting African women?

The overwhelming majority of Dlova’s patients are women, though she does see some men. The reasons why are complex. “It’s psychosocial, political, historical, but colonisation is at the root of it. Being lighter is seen as superior,” she says. Research has found that lighter-skinned women often face shorter prison sentences, are seen as more intelligent in job interviews, and have greater career and dating prospects than their darker-skinned peers.

“There’s so much pressure for darker-skinned women to change their skin colour,” Dlova adds. Just how much women are affected is still hard to say due to a lack of data. Across African countries, estimates in studies of its usage range from 25% to 80% of women.

But Dlova was keen to point out that the use of skin-lightening products affects countries across the globe. “This is not exclusively an African issue. It’s a global phenomenon. It’s as common in South Africa as it is in India,” Dlova says, “We know about the caste system in India and we know about colonisation there and in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand. In all those countries, skin bleaching is pervasive. Even in South America.

“It’s important to highlight that, because sometimes people say, ‘Why are Africans changing their skin colour?’ No, it’s everyone who’s Black or darker-skinned trying to be white because of colonisation.”

How can we stop it?

When a number of African countries banned hydroquinone, there was a slight reduction in the marketing of these products. But that’s changed in the past decade because of social media, Dlova says.

Now, a growing number of beauty influencers on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook promote these products with a simple message of personal transformation, while their toxic ingredients are rarely acknowledged. Dlova believes regulation alone is not enough to push back on this worrying trend. She has called for public health campaigns to explain the immediate and long-term risks of using these products, as well as addressing colourism and colonial legacies.

Dlova is part of a global working group set up by the International League of Dermatological Societies to address skin lightening. She explains that the group includes dermatologists from across the world, including Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, South America, Africa, Europe and the US. It also brings together anthropologists, historians, psychologists, community workers and patients.

Her hope is that by involving people from many disciplines and regions, they can develop a multi-pronged approach to the issue. “We just need to look at examples of advocacy that have been successful in the past, such as smoking, HIV, and see how they did it. It has to be sustained and continuous, not just a one-off. It must go on so that people become used to it and they know.”

Of this campaign, she said: “It’s something very close to my heart when I see these patients, some of whom are depressed or suicidal because they realise the damage from the products is permanent. It hurts me to see, it’s very painful.”

What else we’ve been reading

• Since the blockade Israel forced upon Gaza in early March medical evacuations have slowed. This is a devastating account of the children waiting for treatment abroad. Saranka Maheswaran, newsletters team

• National police guidance will now include the ethnicity, and potentially the immigration status, of police suspects. The academic Nasar Meer makes a powerful argument as to why it’s a huge misstep. Aamna

• From Celine Song, director of the much-loved Past Lives, comes the Materialists. Peter Bradshaw reviews the film that prods at the debate of whether we marry for love or money, and if we can do both. Saranka

• I chuckled my way through this piece by Joe Stone on how he tried to cut down his screen time, but ended up replacing one obsession (looking at his phone) for another (not looking at it). Aamna

• A great bit of investigative work showing millions of litres of oil are seeping into UK soil from underground power cables. Yet more evidence of our crumbling energy infrastructure and another environmental headache. Phoebe

Sport

Football | Newcastle are close to signing Jacob Ramsey from Aston Villa for £40m after resisting competition from West Ham for the versatile 24-year-old midfielder.

Tennis | Venus Williams will make her return to grand slam singles at the US Open after a two-year absence. At age 45, Williams will be the oldest singles entrant at the tournament since Renee Richards played there aged 47 in 1981.

Football | Marcus Rashford has offered a withering assessment of Manchester United’s decline, claiming a lack of identity since Sir Alex Ferguson retired has marooned the club in “no man’s land”.

The front pages

The Guardian leads with “Trump warns Putin faces ‘severe consequences’ if no truce agreed”. The Financial Times takes a similar line: “Trump warns ‘severe consequences’ will follow if Putin refuses to end war”. The Times says “Trump in warning to Putin on eve of talks”, while the Telegraph reports “Trump to offer Putin minerals for peace”. The i has “Protect Ukraine from ‘bluffing’ Putin, Zelensky urges Trump”.

The Daily Mail leads on “BBC climbs down over ‘xenophobe’ slur on top Tory”. The Mirror reports “Arena bomber’s brother on 3 murder bid charges”. Finally, the Sun has “Gun plot link to £64m Arsenal deal.”

Today in Focus

How Israel used Microsoft technology to spy on Palestinians

Harry Davies on how Microsoft’s cloud was used to facilitate mass surveillance of Palestinians.

Cartoon of the day | Ella Baron

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

Natural England is celebrating the comeback of 150 previously struggling species, including the return of the Duke of Burgundy butterfly.

A series of targeted conservation projects have facilitated this recovery and demonstrated how a “joined up, collaborative approach” can spell success for conservation.

Celebrations will take place at Brandon Marsh nature reserve, which has returned to hosting the Eurasian bittern, a wading bird which has found a renewed home in habitats of deep pools and reedbeds produced by the programme.

The work done by Natural England has set a positive precedent for further recovery of rare species.

Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday

Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

• Quick crossword

• Cryptic crossword

• Wordiply

France has acknowledged its role in decades of violent repression of independence movements in Cameroon, the latest stage in a slow process of reckoning with its brutal colonial past.

In a letter to the Cameroonian president, Paul Biya, dated 30 July, Emmanuel Macron said it was “up to me today to assume the role and responsibility of France in these events”.

The letter, which was disclosed on Tuesday, conveyed the findings of a joint Franco-Cameroonian commission that investigated the colonial-era repression of independence movements from 1945 to 1971.

It also took into account crimes committed by the French-allied post-independence government of Ahmadou Ahidjo in Cameroon. Biya served as prime minister under Ahidjo from 1975 to 1982.

Macron said in the letter: “The commission’s historians clearly established that a war took place in Cameroon, during which French colonial authorities and military forces committed various forms of violent repression in several regions of the country, a war that continued beyond 1960, with France’s support for actions taken by the independent Cameroonian authorities.

However, Macron did not apologise or mention any form of reparations.

In 1884, the area today known as Cameroon became the German colony of Kamerun. During the first world war, British and French forces seized the territory, which was later split between them by the League of Nations after Germany’s defeat in 1919.

In January the commission, which was announced at a joint press conference given by Macron and Biya in Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital, in 2022, submitted its findings in a 1,035-page report. The human toll of the state-sponsored repression is estimated to have been tens of thousands, included the assassination of the nationalist leader Ruben Um Nyobè.

The Cameroonian singer Blick Bassy, a co-head of the commission, said: “We are only at the beginning of a process that will require several years … to locate and identify the bodies in mass graves and also to address to land issues that continues to affect a large number of Cameroonians today.

“But before anything else [there should be] national mourning, and proper funerals for our compatriot who died for the nation must be organised,” said Bassy, whose 2019 album 1958 paid homage to Nyobè.

“On the French side, public outreach is crucial, integrating this history into the school curriculum so that it is never repeated and also to ensure that the French population can truly understand and accept the country’s history.”

For years, France had refused to confront the ghosts of its colonial empire that stretched from Algeria in northern Africa to Benin in the west. But in recent times a new guard of historians and activists, many from former colonies, have categorised official French narratives that barely mentioned the violence of colonial exploits in the 20th century as polished fiction.

This has coincided with a sustained wave of anti-French sentiment in Francophone Africa that has partly spurred coups against governments in the region deemed to be puppets of Paris.

The former French leader François Hollande admitted the existence of “extremely troubled, even tragic episodes” while visiting Yaoundé in 2015. But Macron, more than any of his predecessors, seems to be responding to this pressure with a series of strategic gestures that are often criticised as incomplete.

In 2018, his government initiated the restitution of 26 cultural artefacts to Benin, a direct response to a groundbreaking report he had commissioned. The report, co-authored by the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese writer Felwine Sarr, argued that these objects were not merely museum pieces but living parts of a cultural memory that belonged back home. A 27th artefact traced to Finland was returned to Benin this May.

Correspondence seen by the Guardian in July revealed that the French government had signalled a willingness to discuss reparations with Niger for the massacre of thousands of citizens in the 1899 mission Afrique centrale (MAC), one of the most violent colonial campaigns in Africa. Again, it stopped short of apologising for its role.

Experts say the conversation now has to move from cultural restitution to a more direct discussion of historical debt and hope that official acknowledgments usher in the real work of reckoning.

Bassy said: “We are at the point in time when Africa is confronting its history … to come to terms with itself but also to approach its future with greater clarity and confidence.”

About 100 people, including several children, risked their lives by trying to swim from Morocco into Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta early on Saturday morning, as the territory’s authorities warned that its overwhelmed reception system was close to collapse.

Recent weeks have seen a rise in the number of people trying to reach Ceuta, with more than 50 children swimming across from Morocco on 26 July alone.

In the latest attempt, on Saturday morning, dozens of people were intercepted as they attempted to enter the enclave. Seven children reached the shore, where they were handed over to the regional authorities.

“About 100 people tried to get in, taking advantage of the foggy conditions, which make it hard to spot people,” said a spokesperson for the Spanish central government’s delegation in Ceuta. “But they didn’t manage to do so because the Moroccan security forces and [Spain’s] Guardia Civil, working together with rescue boats, prevented them from getting to Ceuta.”

However, he confirmed the arrival of the seven children.

Usually people need to swim out from the Moroccan coast, into the treacherous currents of the strait of Gibraltar, to make their way to and around the long border fences that jut out into the sea, cordoning off the Ceuta enclave from Moroccan territory.

The swimming migrants can be easy to pick up when there are just a few – so people try to go in large numbers in fog or at night-time. Those who are intercepted are returned to Morocco.

Last month, Juan Jesús Rivas, the conservative president of the autonomous city, said Ceuta was “totally overwhelmed” by the number of young migrants it was hosting, and called for other Spanish regions to take in some of the children.

“We’re a territory that comprises 20 square kilometres of the 500,000 square kilometres that make up the whole of Spain, but we take in 3% of the minors,” Rivas told El País.

“Who doesn’t get that this is an unsustainable situation? The situation in Ceuta is one of collapse and that poses a very serious risk when it comes to looking after minors and to the city as a whole.”

At the end of July, Alberto Gaitán, the Ceuta government’s spokesman, said the enclave was hosting 528 foreign minors when it was officially able to hold only 27. Gaitán pointed out that contingency plans were already in place to send the children to other Spanish regions.

“Between 2021 and 2024, around 450 minors – to whom we should add another 80 because of family regrouping in different parts of Spain – were relocated to other self-governing regions,” he said. “That shows that other regions, whatever their political hue, are there to help and have shown they can help relieve Ceuta.”

Four months ago, Spanish MPs approved a decree to redistribute the 4,400 foreign minors in the Canary islands, Ceuta and Spain’s other north African enclave of Melilla, across other regions.

The decree, put forward by the socialist-led government and its parliamentary allies, was criticised by the conservative People’s Party (PP), as “arbitrary and unfair”. The far-right Vox party also voted against it, saying it opened “the doors to military-age men who aren’t fleeing any wars and who come from opposing cultures”.

In July, PP-led regions boycotted a meeting on the redistribution of the children. .

According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, 572 people died or went missing last year trying to reach Spain from north Africa, while 155 people have lost their lives so far this year, seven of them children.

A 23-year-old Egyptian man was pulled from the Mediterranean a few weeks ago after trying to reach Spain from Morocco using an inflatable ring and flippers. In 2021, a boy was seen floating on empty plastic bottles in his attempt to reach Ceuta.

Salmata Ouattara remembers 2023 as the turning point for her rice farm.

June is usually the peak of the rainy season in Ivory Coast, but in the preceding years she and other farmers in M’Be on the outskirts of Bouaké, the country’s second biggest city, would wait weeks for rainfall. Then in September, they would watch helplessly as their farmlands were flooded. Some abandoned their farms, frustrated by fluctuating crop yields.

For Ouattara, that was not an option. As her family’s breadwinner, proceeds from the farm catered to the needs of her three children as well as requests from other relatives. Then another farmer mentioned a concept called Smart Valleys that had helped solve similar issues and double his income.

“Before, I made 2 tonnes a year [and] earned at least 400,000CFA [west African francs, equivalent to £528.60],” said Ouattara, who has since added maize, tomatoes and cucumbers to her portfolio. “But as soon as we put Smart Valleys into practice, I made 4.5 tonnes, which makes me 900,000CFA (£1,189.34).”

Smart Valleys is a low-cost initiative by the nonprofit organisation Africa Rice that aims to help farmers get better control over the water on their land, for example by using channels, in order to reduce flooding and increase yields. It also helps farmers diversify crop production.

The programme – backed primarily by Japan’s agriculture ministry – focuses on inland valleys, low-lying areas between hills with fertile soils that are ideal for agriculture but rarely cultivated due to poor water control. Its head, Elliott Dossou-Yovo, said the valleys cover 190m hectares in sub-Saharan Africa, of which only 10% is cultivated.

“In the past, farmers were trying to produce rice only once a year and failing,” said Dossou-Yovo. With his team’s support, fields that used to be abandoned during the dry season are cultivated with alternative crops, thereby diversifying farmers’ portfolios and increasing their incomes.

Africa Rice, established in 1971, set a goal to double rice production within a decade in 2009, when it changed its name from West Africa Rice Development Association. Since achieving that target, it has ambitiously turned to self-sufficiency for member states by 2030.

The core of its work happens a few miles away from Ouattara’s farm at an 800-hectare research campus, where there are facilities including testing sites, a seed science lab and gene bank with 22,000 rice varieties used by scientists to develop improved strains.

Funders include the Gates Foundation, the World Bank, and donor partners including Islamic Development Bank and African Development Bank, though member states also make contributions.

The need for Africa Rice arose because in the 1960s and 70s, rice consumption and population growth surpassed food production rate in west Africa, Baboucarr Manneh, its Gambian-born director general, said. Today, rice that was previously reserved for feasting occasions, is arguably the continent’s most popular staple.

“Rice is very popular because it is easy to cook,” he said. “It used to seem like a luxury food to many consumers, compared with maize and millet. If you go to Sierra Leone, they used to consume a lot of roots and tubers etc, but people now associate those foods with poverty so they prefer rice.”

Sali Atanja Ndindeng heads the rice sector development programme, which develops new varieties in conjunction with market trends and analyses samples received from partner institutions in member countries to help identify good grain quality.

“Our goal is to make rice not just an energy-dense food, but a nutrient-dense food … and at the same time, reduce the impact of rice causing peaks in glucose levels when people consume it,” he said. One way to do this, the team thinks, is to promote the consumption of parboiled rice – which some studies have shown has a lower impact on blood sugar levels – in countries such as Ivory Coast, where it is historically unpopular, to mirror countries like Nigeria where it is prevalent.

Ndindeng’s teams also make pop rice that can be ground to instant flour for children to eat with milk and chocolate as well as rice crackers integrated with local items including ginger, hibiscus, soy and tamarind which are high in zinc and iron, to tackle deficiencies in those micronutrients.

Many barriers are holding back member countries from reaching self-sufficiency. For years, cheap imports have flooded African markets from Asia, where producers benefit from heavy subsidies.

Africa imports about 40% of rice it consumes – about 15 to 16 million tonnes every year. More than half of the imports come from India alone.

In July 2023, India banned rice exports, citing the need to consume more locally. “That created a panic in Africa,” said Manneh. “African ministers had to go to India to negotiate.”

Only a fifth of rice fields in Africa use irrigation, with the rest relying on unpredictable rainfall, so member states are being guided on building climate-resilient systems.

Tanzania is self-sufficient and exporting within east Africa. In west Africa, Nigeria, is close to doing so.

Manneh is hoping for more success stories on a national level, but also on an individual level with farmers such as Ouattara, who are still stunned by what science is doing for their lives.

“They welcomed me … They guided me and I thank them,” she said.