Giorgia Meloni’s government is under pressure to clarify why a Rome court refused to approve the arrest of a Libyan general accused of war crimes, allowing him to return home to a hero’s welcome on an Italian secret flight in what critics believe was a tactic to shield alleged abuses committed in the north African country as a result of a migrant pact with Italy.

Osama Najim, also known as Almasri, was detained in Turin on Sunday on a warrant issued by the international criminal court (ICC) before being freed on Tuesday owing to a procedural technicality.

Najim, who is chief of Libya’s judicial police, is wanted by the ICC for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as alleged rape and murder. He also presides over Mitiga prison, a facility near Tripoli condemned by human rights organisations for the arbitrary detention, torture and abuse of political dissidents, migrants and refugees.

In a statement on Wednesday, the ICC said Najim was released from custody and transported back to Libya “without prior notice or consultation with the court”.

“The court is seeking, and is yet to obtain, verification from the authorities on the steps reportedly taken,” the statement said, added that it had engaged with the Italian authorities and asked them to consult the court without delay if any problems arose that would “impede or prevent the execution of the present request for cooperation”.

The arrest warrant was issued after many testimonies of his alleged crimes were provided to the ICC.

News of the general’s release was issued to the Italian media about 20 minutes after his flight left Turin’s Caselle airport. An image of him arriving in Tripoli to celebrations was shared on the Facebook page of Libya’s judicial police authority, which had called his arrest an “outrageous incident”.

In a document seen by the Guardian, Rome’s court of appeal did not validate the ICC warrant after the arrest was declared to be “irregular” by the city’s attorney general because it had not been preceded by discussions with Italy’s justice minister, Carlo Nordio.

Andrea Delmastro, the undersecretary at the justice ministry, denied accusations that Najim’s release was a favour to Libya.

A source familiar with the situation said Najim had entered Italy from France on Saturday in a hire car registered in Germany. Accompanied by other Libyans, he attended a football match that evening between Juventus and AC Milan at Turin’s stadium. He was arrested at a hotel in the city by Italy’s anti-terrorist squad, Digos, after a tip-off from Interpol.

Opposition parties have asked Meloni to urgently explain the “very serious” development while calling on Nordio to resign.

“Last night, a state plane landed in Tripoli and brought Almasri home, an [alleged] torturer welcomed with applause and great celebration in his homeland,” a group of opposition parties said in a shared statement. “This is enough to ask for urgent information from Meloni and the resignation of Nordio.”

Ilaria Salis, an Italian MEP who last year spent five months under house arrest in Budapest after demonstrating at an anti-Nazi rally in the Hungarian capital, said: “The government must provide explanations, and they should do so especially for prisoners held in Libyan concentration camps.”

Others noted that the move appeared to contradict the Meloni government’s repeated pledges to crack down on criminals engaged in human trafficking.

“The Italian government claims to want to hunt down human traffickers wherever they are,” said Nello Scavo, a journalist with Avvenire who claimed in his book, Le Mani sulla Guardia Costiera, that Najim was “among the figures capable of blackmailing Italy and Europe with boats”.

“But when the possibility of bringing one of those suspects to international justice arose, Italy returned him to his country, where he now enjoys greater fame and greater consideration because thanks to Italy, a country with strong interests in Libya, he managed to escape the process of the international court.”

The Najim case has put the spotlight on a controversial pact between Italy and Libya, signed in 2017 and renewed every three years. The deal, approved by the European Council, involves Italy funding and equipping the Libyan coastguard to prevent boats of refugees leaving the north African country. Humanitarian groups have criticised it for pushing people back to detention camps where they face torture and other abuses.

Luca Casarini, the head of mission of the NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans, believes the Italian government did not want to hand Najim to the ICC as it would expose Italy’s complicity in the abuses suffered by migrants and refugees in Libya as a result of the pact.

He said: “Because if people start talking [in court] it will show that what they do is criminal and a violation of human rights, and it is done in agreement with [European] authorities. This is a shameful, and I believe unprecedented, episode for Italy.”

The Guardian has written to Libya’s judicial police authority with a request for comment.

Elliot Malunga Delihlazo’s grandmother would say that her brother Bhesengile went to war and never came back. The family knew he had died in the first world war, but they never had a body to bury, only a memorial stone in the rural family homestead in Nkondlo in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province.

Now the Delihlazos know that Bhesengile died on 21 January 1917 of malaria in Kilwa, Tanzania, more than 2,000 miles from home. He was a driver in the British empire’s military labour corps, but was never given a war grave.

Bhesengile Delihlazo was one of 1,700 mainly black South Africans named on a memorial unveiled in Cape Town on Wednesday, as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) begins to honour hundreds of thousands of black and Asian service personnel who died fighting for Britain, but were not commemorated like their white counterparts.

“It pained us that … we can’t find the remains,” Elliot Malunga Delihlazo, a retired history teacher, said after the ceremony to open the memorial to his great uncle. “But we are happy that at last we know exactly that he died in 1917.”

The CWGC was founded in 1917 as the Imperial War Graves Commission, to commemorate those from the British empire who lost their lives in the first world war. It was meant to treat people equally in death, with names engraved on a gravestone or on a memorial.

More than four million black and Asian men served in European and American armies, according to research by Dr Santanu Das, many conscripted or coerced from Egypt and colonies in west and east Africa.

A 2021 inquiry found that 116,000 to 350,000 first world war casualties were never commemorated because of “pervasive racism”. A 1923 letter from the colonial governor of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), cited in the report, said Africans were “hardly in such a state of civilisation as to appreciate such a memorial”.

Another 45,000 to 54,000 African and Asian service members were commemorated “unequally”, according to the report, commissioned after a 2019 Channel 4 documentary, The Unremembered, highlighted missing war graves.

Another memorial is being prepared in Freetown to honour 1,100 members of Sierra Leone’s labour corps. The CWGC is also looking into how to commemorate 90,000 service members who do not have graves or memorials in east Africa.

White South African racism also played a part in Delihlazo and his comrades going unremembered, said David McDonald, CWGC’s operations manager.

“In [other] colonies, black Africans were armed and allowed to fight. In South Africa, there was a strong desire at the time that that was not to be the case, and that’s why these men were filling labour requirements,” he said. “The government didn’t want them to be involved … and I think that’s why the story was gradually forgotten over time, apart from families, who knew that they lost loved ones.”

Sonwabile Mfecane, a local historian, tracked down descendants of six of the men commemorated with wooden posts inscribed with their name and date of death, opened by the CWGC’s president, Princess Anne, in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden.

Many thought their relatives were among the 600 South African Native Labour Corps who died on the SS Mendi when it was rammed by another British ship in the Channel in 1917. On being told what had really happened, two men told Mfecane that recurring dreams about their missing relatives now made sense.

“What we believe in our African spirituality is … we are not cursed, but there is that thing we didn’t break, that chapter we didn’t close,” Mfecane said. “We close the chapter and allow the deceased to proceed.”

Lloyd’s Register, the maritime and industrial group owned by one of Britain’s biggest charities, has apologised for its role in the trafficking of enslaved African people but has been criticised for not going far enough.

Founded in 1760 as the Society for the Registry of Shipping by merchants and underwriters who met at Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in Lombard Street in London, the company provided classification for ships.

The apology comes after Lloyd’s Register (LR) commissioned research into its links to slavery. It also highlights the connections between the maritime and insurance sectors, the businesses that served both and the transatlantic trade in people at the time, which laid the foundations for the global expansion of British financial interests.

The Wilberforce Institute at the University of Hull published the findings from its research focusing on records from 1764 to 1834.

In a statement on its website, LR said that during the period Lloyd’s Register had been engaged in recording information about vessels’ seaworthiness for the use of the trade in buying, selling and insuring them, adding: “It then sold that information on to subscribers, many of whom were actively involved in the slave economy.

“Some of our early committee members were involved in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people. Notably, at least six committee members of the Society for the Registry of Shipping from 1764 were identified as enslavers, while another six were involved in the trafficking of enslaved Africans.

“What is clear from this initial research is that, from our founding in 1760 until the UK’s Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, we played an important role supporting a maritime system that enabled the slave economy.

“We are deeply sorry for this part of our history. Acknowledging this legacy is important for our organisation, the descendants of those affected and those who still live with the consequences of this trafficking, and society as a whole.”

LR said it has made a £1m grant to the National Archives to launch a project to catalogue and share archived materials and support scholarship in the Caribbean and west Africa “for the development of new narratives” on the history of enslavement.

It has also pledged to support the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool in a project enabling descendant communities to research their histories.

LR is owned by one of the UK’s largest charities, the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, which had an income of £560m in 2023.

Laurence Westgaph, of Liverpool Black History Research Group, said £1m was a “pittance” in light of profits generated by exploitation, and questioned why the research only looked at records up to 1834 when the British maritime sector continued to benefit from the plantation economy in the US and Brazil long after slavery was abolished in the UK.

In a statement, LR said: “Whilst the original scope of our research took us up until the abolition of slavery in the British empire in 1834, we know that slavery went beyond this date and recognise that there is much more work for us to do.”

On its site, the company described Britain as a “major participant in the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved African people”, with British ships “forcibly taking and transporting about 3.4 million people, 800,000 of whom died in transit” in more than 10,000 voyages.

LR is unaffiliated to insurers Lloyd’s of London, which apologised for its role in enslavement in 2020, although it emerged from the same coffee house on Lombard Street in London.

A Libyan general wanted for alleged war crimes and violence against inmates at a prison near Tripoli has been arrested in the northern Italian city of Turin.

Osama Najim, also known as Almasri, was detained on Sunday on an international arrest warrant after a tipoff from Interpol, a source at the prosecutors office for the Piedmont region confirmed.

Italy’s justice minister, Carlo Nordio, is evaluating the transmission of the ICC’s request to Rome’s attorney general.

Najim was reportedly chief of Libya’s judicial police and director of Mitiga prison, a facility close to Tripoli condemned by human rights’ groups for the arbitrary detention, torture and abuse of political dissidents and migrants and refugees. It is not clear whether he is still in either role.

The arrest warrant was issued by the international criminal court (ICC) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as alleged rape and murder.

The general was in Turin for a football match on Saturday between Juventus and AC Milan accompanied by other Libyans, according to the Italian press. They reported he was arrested at a hotel in the city.

The NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans wrote on X that the arrest “came after years of complaints and testimonies from victims, sent to the international criminal court, which conducted a difficult investigation”.

Nello Scavo, a journalist on the Italian newspaper Avvenire, wrote about the general in his book, Le Mani sulla Guardia Costiera, in which he described him as being “among the figures capable of blackmailing Italy and Europe with boats”. In the book, Scavo alleged that Najim illegally transferred migrants “from both unofficial and official places of detention in Tripoli to the Mitiga facility, for the primary purpose of using them for forced labour as a form of slavery”.

The Libyan judicial police reportedly condemned what they described as Najim’s “arbitrary detention”, calling his arrest an “outrageous incident” on Facebook.

The arrest puts the spotlight on a controversial pact between Italy and Libya, signed in 2017 and renewed every three years. The deal, approved by the European Council, involves Italy funding and equipping the Libyan coastguard to prevent boats of refugees leaving the north African country. Humanitarian groups have criticised it for pushing people back to detention camps where they face torture and other abuses.

In November 2022, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), a German NGO, filed a criminal complaint at the ICC against several high-profile European politicians for allegedly conspiring with Libya’s coastguard to illegally push back people trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of refuge in Europe.

Scavo told the Guardian that many testimonies from migrants and refugees presented to the ICC had provided evidence for the investigation into Najim. “It would be a turning point if a trial could be opened before the ICC, but I fear that many countries are afraid of what he might say, because these are representatives of authorities who have relations with Italy, with Malta and in general with Europe,” he said.

The hardline immigration policies of Georgia Meloni’s government, including a similar deal with Tunisia, are at least partly credited for the sharp decrease in refugees crossing from north Africa in 2024.

A Libyan general wanted for alleged war crimes and violence against inmates at a prison near Tripoli has been arrested in the northern Italian city of Turin.

Osama Najim, also known as Almasri, was detained on Sunday on an international arrest warrant after a tipoff from Interpol, a source at the prosecutors office for the Piedmont region confirmed.

Italy’s justice minister, Carlo Nordio, is evaluating the transmission of the ICC’s request to Rome’s attorney general.

Najim was reportedly chief of Libya’s judicial police and director of Mitiga prison, a facility close to Tripoli condemned by human rights’ groups for the arbitrary detention, torture and abuse of political dissidents and migrants and refugees. It is not clear whether he is still in either role.

The arrest warrant was issued by the international criminal court (ICC) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as alleged rape and murder.

The general was in Turin for a football match on Saturday between Juventus and AC Milan accompanied by other Libyans, according to the Italian press. They reported he was arrested at a hotel in the city.

The NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans wrote on X that the arrest “came after years of complaints and testimonies from victims, sent to the international criminal court, which conducted a difficult investigation”.

Nello Scavo, a journalist on the Italian newspaper Avvenire, wrote about the general in his book, Le Mani sulla Guardia Costiera, in which he described him as being “among the figures capable of blackmailing Italy and Europe with boats”. In the book, Scavo alleged that Najim illegally transferred migrants “from both unofficial and official places of detention in Tripoli to the Mitiga facility, for the primary purpose of using them for forced labour as a form of slavery”.

The Libyan judicial police reportedly condemned what they described as Najim’s “arbitrary detention”, calling his arrest an “outrageous incident” on Facebook.

The arrest puts the spotlight on a controversial pact between Italy and Libya, signed in 2017 and renewed every three years. The deal, approved by the European Council, involves Italy funding and equipping the Libyan coastguard to prevent boats of refugees leaving the north African country. Humanitarian groups have criticised it for pushing people back to detention camps where they face torture and other abuses.

In November 2022, the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), a German NGO, filed a criminal complaint at the ICC against several high-profile European politicians for allegedly conspiring with Libya’s coastguard to illegally push back people trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of refuge in Europe.

Scavo told the Guardian that many testimonies from migrants and refugees presented to the ICC had provided evidence for the investigation into Najim. “It would be a turning point if a trial could be opened before the ICC, but I fear that many countries are afraid of what he might say, because these are representatives of authorities who have relations with Italy, with Malta and in general with Europe,” he said.

The hardline immigration policies of Georgia Meloni’s government, including a similar deal with Tunisia, are at least partly credited for the sharp decrease in refugees crossing from north Africa in 2024.

South African police are hunting an alleged “kingpin” of illegal mining after he escaped from custody following a rescue operation last week in which 78 bodies were brought out of an illicit goldmine.

James Neo Tshoaeli, a Lesotho national known as Tiger, has been accused by other illegal miners of being a ringleader who was allegedly responsible for assaults, tortures and deaths underground, as well as keeping food from others, the South African Police Service said.

Tshoaeli was neither booked into custody nor admitted at any local hospitals for medical care, police said, describing his escape as an “embarrassment”. “Heads will roll once they find those officials that aided the kingpin to escape from police custody,” they said. “Tiger is a fugitive of justice and is considered dangerous.”

In late 2023, police launched Operation Vala Umgodi (Plug the Hole) to try to stamp out illegal mines across South Africa’s north-eastern mining belt. Officers blocked supplies of food, water and medicine from being sent to workers underground in attempt to force them to the surface so they could be arrested.

After reports of dead bodies at an illegal goldmining site near Stilfontein earlier this month, the government launched a rescue operation. Over four days last week, a crane winch lifted 246 survivors and 78 bodies from the 1.2-mile-deep shaft. Local volunteers said they had previously hauled out nine dead miners using a hand-operated rope pulley system.

Activists and relatives of the miners blamed South African authorities for what they called a “massacre” of starving people unable to resurface. Officials said the men, known as zama zamas (those who try), could have exited via a different mineshaft but stayed underground to avoid arrest.

In recent years, illegal miners have flocked to sites in South Africa that mining companies have abandoned as no longer commercially viable. Analysts estimate there could be 30,000 zama zamas producing 10% of South Africa’s gold output from 6,000 abandoned mines, often controlled by violent criminal syndicates.

Since 18 August, 1,907 illegal miners have come out of the abandoned goldmines around Stilfontein, according to police. Most were from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Lesotho, with just 26 from South Africa. Police have blamed Lesotho nationals for leading the operations.

“You have got people who voluntarily entered mines and did some illegal activities and in the process died inside those mines,” South Africa’s finance minister, Enoch Godongwana, told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. “To then come back and say the state is going to take the blame for that, in my view, is misplaced.”

Reuters contributed to this report

A fuel tanker exploded after flipping over in central Nigeria on Saturday, killing 70 people who had scrambled to take the fuel.

Kumar Tsukwam, the head of the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) in Niger State, said a truck carrying 60,000 litres of gasoline had an accident at about 10am at the Dikko junction on the road linking the federal capital Abuja to the northern city of Kaduna.

“Most of the victims were burnt beyond recognition,” Tsukwam said. “We are at the scene to clear things up.”

An FSRC statement said a “large crowd of people gathered to scoop the fuel” when “suddenly the tanker burst into flames, engulfing another tanker.

“So far 60 corpses recovered from scene, the victims are mostly scavengers,” it said.

Last year, shortly after his election, President Bola Tinubu abolished a fuel subsidy, sending prices of essentials and other goods soaring, triggering protests.

The price of gasoline has increased fivefold in 18 months, leading many to risk their lives to recover fuel during tanker truck accidents, which are common in Africa’s most populous country.

Niger state governor Umaru Bago said in a statement that the explosion was “worrisome, heartbreaking and unfortunate”.

He said an undisclosed number of people also experienced various degrees of burns.

In October, more than 170 people died in a similar incident in Jigawa State, in northern Nigeria.

In 2020, the FRSC listed 1,531 fuel tanker accidents which claimed more than 535 lives.

The World Health Organization (WHO) could see lean years ahead if the US withdraws membership under the new Trump administration. Such a withdrawal, promised on the first day of Donald Trump’s new administration, would in effect cut the multilateral agency’s funding by one-fifth.

The severe cut would be uncharted territory for the WHO, potentially curtailing public health works globally, pressuring the organization to attract private funding, and providing an opening for other countries to influence the organization. Other countries are not expected to make up the funding loss.

The WHO works to improve the health of millions of people globally – from working to eradicate polio and tuberculosis to coordinating US HIV and Aids prevention work in Africa.

“There are many influential people around him that say he’ll announce the withdrawal on day one in office,” Lawrence Gostin, a global health law expert at Georgetown University who opposes US withdrawal from the WHO, said. “The threat is real, it’s palpable and it’s likely.”

The WHO has declined to comment on any potential preparations for such a move.

In a press conference on Thursday, a WHO spokesperson, Dr Margaret Harris, told reporters: “This is a government in transition, and as a government in transition they need the time and space to make their own decisions, to make that transition. And we are not going to make any comment further.”

The same day, the WHO made an “emergency appeal” for funds, citing the threats of climate breakdown and conflict to world health. In addition, the WHO held its first ever “investment round” in May 2024, promising to use member states’ financial commitment to save 40 million lives through 2028.

A US funding withdrawal would also put pressure on the WHO Foundation to make up the shortfall. The independent Swiss entity was established during the pandemic to raise funds from “non-state actors”, including wealthy individuals and corporations. The foundation was announced in May 2020, the same month that President-elect last threatened to withdraw US funding from the WHO.

“The WHO plays a critical role in global health security, disease outbreaks and eradication, international emergencies, and mobilization of global cooperation,” Anil Soni, CEO of the WHO Foundation, said in a statement.

“The Organization is critical in protecting US business interests worldwide. Its programs in disease surveillance, outbreak response, and pandemic preparedness help prevent disruptions to supply chains, international markets, and trade. No other organization has the capacity and bandwidth to coordinate international rapid response efforts, to share medical research and innovation, and to disseminate critical intelligence worldwide.”

Past WHO Foundation donors include the global food giant Nestlé, the makeup company Maybelline and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The foundation has granted anonymity to some donors, a practice which academics criticize as making it difficult to spot conflicts of interest.

An arm of the United Nations, the US helped found WHO in 1948 through a joint resolution of Congress. The US remains its largest funder, providing about 22% of all member states’ assessed contributions. The US is the only member state that can withdraw from the agency.

The US provided $1.2bn to WHO in 2023 – a fraction of the federal government’s $6.1tn budget and about what Joe Biden spent in one round of student loan debt relief in 2024.

Although the US is legally required to provide written notice of intent to withdraw one year before taking any action, legal experts worry WHO funding could, in practical terms, disappear virtually overnight.

Trump’s renewed efforts to withdraw funding and support from the WHO were first reported in December – one of many potential day-one actions. Like much of Trump’s health policy agenda, the pandemic haunts the promise. Trump argued WHO was overly deferential to the Chinese government during the pandemic, and announced he would withdraw the US in May 2020.

“The world is now suffering as a result of the malfeasance of the Chinese government,” Trump said in a Rose Garden speech in May 2020 announcing his plan to withdraw. “Countless lives have been taken, and profound economic hardship has been inflicted all around the globe.”

Trump’s decision was rendered moot when Biden won the election in 2020, and promptly reversed course. Gostin sees no such reprieve in the upcoming administration.

“This time he has four years to accomplish this goal,” said Gostin.

Resentment against the WHO has simmered in Republican circles since the pandemic. Some conservatives accuse the agency of threatening US sovereignty in a new pandemic treaty, which seeks to distribute vaccines equitably around the world. The first Covid-19 vaccine was released in the US in December 2020. Much of the global south lacked vaccines for years afterward, even as wealthy countries stockpiled doses.

Ironically, legal experts worry that withdrawing the US from the WHO would provide an open door for Chinese government influence, a country Trump views as one of the US’s chief global rivals.

Experts say withdrawing from the WHO could also harm US national security interests by cutting off access to programs such as pandemic preparedness and seasonal influenza strain sequencing (used to develop annual flu shots).

The United States has imposed sanctions on Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, accusing him of choosing war over negotiations to bring an end to the conflict that has killed tens of thousands of people and driven millions from their homes.

The US treasury department said in a statement that under Burhan’s leadership, the army’s war tactics have included indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure, attacks on schools, markets and hospitals, and extrajudicial executions.

Washington announced the measures a week after imposing sanctions on Burhan’s rival in the two-year-old civil war, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Sources said that one aim of Thursday’s sanctions was to show that Washington was not picking sides.

Speaking earlier on Thursday, Burhan was defiant about the prospect that he might be targeted.

“I hear there’s going to be sanctions on the army leadership. We welcome any sanctions for serving this country,” he said in comments broadcast on Al Jazeera television.

Washington also issued sanctions over the supply of weapons to the army, targeting a Sudanese-Ukrainian national as well as a Hong Kong-based company.

Thursday’s action freezes any of their US assets and generally bars Americans from dealing with them. The treasury department said it issued authorizations allowing certain transactions, including activities involving the warring generals, so as not to impede humanitarian assistance.

The Sudanese army and the RSF together led a coup in 2021 removing Sudan’s civilian leadership, but fell out less than two years later over plans to integrate their forces.

The war that broke out in April 2023 has plunged half of the population into hunger.

Dagalo, known as Hemedti, was sanctioned after Washington determined his forces had committed genocide, as well as for attacks on civilians. The RSF has engaged in bloody looting campaigns in the territory it controls.

In a statement, Sudan’s foreign ministry said the latest US move “expresses nothing but confusion and a weak sense of justice” and accused Washington of defending genocide by the RSF.

The US and Saudi Arabia have tried repeatedly to bring both sides to the negotiating table, with the army refusing most attempts, including talks in Geneva in August which in part aimed to ease humanitarian access.

The army has instead ramped up its military campaign, this week taking the strategic city of Wad Madani and vowing to retake the capital Khartoum.

Rights experts and residents have accused the army of indiscriminate airstrikes as well as attacks on civilians, most recently revenge attacks in Wad Madani this week. The US had previously determined the army and RSF had committed war crimes.

In his final news conference ahead of the president-elect Donald Trump’s 20 January inauguration, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Thursday that it was a “real regret” Washington had not managed to end the fighting under his watch.

While there have been some improvements in getting humanitarian assistance into Sudan through US diplomacy, they have not seen an end to the conflict, “not an end to the abuses, not an end to the suffering of people”, Blinken said. “We’ll keep working here for the next three days, and I hope the next administration will take that on as well.”

A human rights lawyer involved in a case featuring a prominent Ugandan opposition leader has been tortured after he was arrested and detained without trial, according to colleagues who have visited him.

Eron Kiiza was assaulted and arrested by soldiers on 7 January while entering a military courtroom where he was representing Dr Kizza Besigye – a political opponent of President Yoweri Museveni – and his aide Haji Obeid Lutale.

He was convicted of contempt of court and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment on the same day. He was immediately transferred to Kitalya prison, 34 miles from the capital, Kampala.

Human rights organisations including Amnesty International and the International Federation for Human Rights have called for Kiiza’s immediate release. In a statement, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders said the sentence “constitutes a violation of international, constitutional and Ugandan domestic law”.

According to Ugandan lawyers Andrew Karamagi and Primah Kwagala, who have worked with Kiiza and visited him in prison, Kiiza showed signs of mental and physical torture. Most parts of his body, particularly joints, knees, nails, knuckles and head, were swollen.

Karamagi said Kiiza was recovering from beatings at the court and in transit to prison. “It is routine that [forces] will beat up arrested people and he was subjected to as much, which explains the pains he was feeling in his chest and lower back, and the bruises I saw when I visited him in prison.”

A deputy spokesperson for Uganda’s armed forces, Lt Col Deo Akiiki, dismissed allegations of torture as “absolute rubbish” and said Kiiza is “very well”. He said Kiiza’s imprisonment did not contravene Ugandan law and that his rights had not been violated.

“Our politicians have gone to the dogs,” he added. “They ride on anything to smear government dirt.”

Reaction to Kiiza’s detention was one of “shock and awe”, said Kwagala, because until last week lawyers had not been beaten, arrested or detained in the course of their work.

“This arrest is testament to the breakdown of rule of law and constitutionalism in Uganda,” she said. “Our constitutional court has barred military courts from handling civilians but this is happening in vain.”

In November Besigye, a political opponent of Museveni, who has been in power for almost 40 years, was abducted in neighbouring Kenya.

He was returned to Uganda and charged with the illegal possession of firearms and with undermining the east African country’s security by a military court, despite being a civilian.

During a court hearing on Monday, treachery, which carries the death penalty, was added to the list of charges.

Besigye’s wife, Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of UNAids, has said the charges against him are politically motivated. His lawyers have rejected the charges as baseless.

Kiiza’s detention comes amid growing restrictions in a year leading up to general elections.

“It’s foreseeable and understandable that repression will simply increase,” said Karamagi. “The situation will get worse.”

Sudan’s military and its allies have taken back a strategic city from the rebel Rapid Support Forces, officials said.

The recapture of Wad Madani, the capital of Gezira province, took place more than a year after it fell to the RSF. Wad Madani had previously been a haven for displaced families in the early months of the war.

The conflict in Sudan started in April 2023 when simmering tensions between the leaders of the military and the RSF exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and other cities across the large north-eastern African country.

The conflict has killed more than 28,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes and left some families eating grass in a desperate attempt to survive as famine hit parts of the country.

Atrocities, including ethnically motivated killing and rape, have been committed throughout the war, according the United Nations and rights groups. The international criminal court said it was investigating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration said the RSF and its proxies were committing genocide, and put sanctions on the RSF leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, as well as seven RSF-owned companies in the United Arab Emirates, including one handling gold probably smuggled out of Sudan.

The military said in a statement that its forces had entered Wad Madani early on Saturday and that they were working to “clear the rebels’ remnants inside the city”.

“Congratulations to the Armed Forces, their supporting forces everywhere and to our people as they reclaim their dignity, security and stability,” it said.

There was no immediate comment from the RSF.

The culture and information minister, Khalid Aleiser, the spokesperson for the government, said the military and its allies had “liberated” Wad Madani, which is about 100km (60 miles) south-east of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital.

Soldiers posted videos on social media purportedly showing forces celebrating with residents in the city centre. One video showed people taking to the streets to celebrate the “liberation” of the city, and shouting, “Allah is Great.”

Since the RSF captured Wad Medani in December 2023, tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes in and around the city.

In recent months the RSF has suffered multiple battlefield blows, giving the military the upper hand in the war. It has lost control of many areas in Khartoum, the capital’s sister city of Omdurman, and the eastern and central provinces.

The war has created the world’s largest displacement crisis, driving more than 14 million people – about 30% of the population – from their homes, according to the UN. An estimated 3.2 million people have crossed into neighbouring countries including Chad, Egypt and South Sudan.

Famine has been detected in at least five areas, including three camps for displaced people in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, according to an international monitoring project, the Integrated Food Security Classification, or IPC. The IPC said five other areas were projected to experience famine in the next six months. More areas are also at risk of famine, it said.

South African police have rescued 26 Ethiopians from a suspected human trafficking ring in Johannesburg after the group broke a window and burglar bar to escape from a house where they were being held naked.

Three people were arrested on suspicion of people trafficking and possessing an illegal firearm on Thursday night after neighbours in the Sandringham suburb heard the commotion and tipped off the police, the Hawks serious crime unit said in a statement. Police urged the public to report any other escaped naked people in the area.

About 60 Ethiopian men were held captive in the bungalow, the local TV station eNCA reported, showing what appeared to be blood spattered below an open window at the front of the house. Police said 11 people were taken to hospital for medical treatment. A number of the Ethiopians are still at large after not being picked up by police.

“The signs that we have is this is a human trafficking matter, because they were actually escaping from that house and they were kept naked, almost as if it’s a modus operandi to keep them humiliated and not trying to escape,” said Philani Nkwalase, a police spokesperson.

South Africa has attracted immigrants from across Africa since the end of apartheid more than three decades ago. However, fears that they are smuggling drugs and driving up unemployment and violent crime have fuelled persistent xenophobia.

There are about 2.4 million foreign-born people in South Africa out of the 62 million population, according to the 2022 census, which aimed to count people regardless of immigration status. While more than three-quarters come from other southern African states, there are about 58,000 Ethiopians in the country.

In August 2024, 82 Ethiopians were discovered crammed into a house in the same area of Johannesburg, without enough food or proper toilet and bathroom facilities. Seven of them were initially deemed to be minors and 19 others said they were underage when they were taken to court on suspicion of entering South Africa illegally.

“They were all undocumented migrants who were not victims of trafficking but were smuggled into the country,” the department of home affairs said in a statement later that month.

Nkwalase said it was not yet clear if the two cases were connected, adding that police were seeking an interpreter as language barriers were preventing officers from getting answers from the men about how, why and when they came to South Africa.

A neighbour of the house from which the Ethiopians had escaped told eNCA she was shocked by the incident, adding that the only time she had seen anyone at the property was a few weeks ago when her son went to retrieve a ball he had kicked over the fence.

A Kenyan judge has declared as unconstitutional sections of the country’s laws that criminalise attempted suicide. In a landmark ruling on Thursday, Judge Lawrence Mugambi of the country’s high court stated that section 226 of the penal code contradicts the constitution by punishing those with mental health issues over which they may have little or no control.

While the constitution says in article 43 that a person has the right to the “highest attainable standard of health”, criminal law states that “any person who attempts to kill himself is guilty of a misdemeanour and is subject to imprisonment of up to two years, a fine, or both”, with the minimum age of prosecution for the offence set at eight years old.

“It is my finding that applying the purpose and effect principle of constitutional interpretation, section 226 of the penal code offends article 27 of the constitution by criminalising a mental health issue thereby endorsing discrimination on the basis of health, which is unconstitutional. It also indignifies and disgraces victims of suicide ideation in the eyes of the community for actions that are beyond their mental control,” Mugambi ruled.

The ruling came after a court petition by, among others, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) and the Kenya Psychiatric Association, in which they contended that the main factors driving up suicide cases include “undiagnosed and untreated mental health conditions as well as mental disabilities which result in suicidal thoughts that may lead to attempted suicide by persons affected”.

“Today’s judgment is a rallying call for an open and candid conversation among individuals, communities, organisations and the government, and it goes a long way in raising awareness, fighting stigma and discrimination,” KNCHR said in a statement, urging communities and families to provide “safe spaces where individuals affected by mental health challenges can share their experiences and seek support without fear of stigma or discrimination”.

Human rights groups and medical practitioners in Kenya have failed in the past to have attempted suicide decriminalised, stating that such persons require specialised medical attention.

In March 2024, officials from Kenya’s leading mental health hospital urged parliament to consider repealing the offending law to shift perceptions and stigma.

Dr Julius Ogato, chief executive officer at Mathari national teaching and referral hospital, said: “Just as diabetes results from a lack of insulin in the body, mental illness involves an imbalance of chemical transmitters in the brain. There is a biological basis for such thoughts. When someone exhibits these thoughts, they require empathy and much-needed support to access treatment.”

While admitting that data on suicide is hard to come by due to the “fragmented nature of reporting systems”, Kenya’s health ministry’s Suicide Prevention Strategy 2021-2026 says the country has an “age standardised suicide rate of 11.0 per 100,000 population, which translates to about four suicide deaths per day”.

The World Health Organization says more than 700,000 people die by suicide every year with over 70% of cases taking place in low- and middle-income countries.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

More than 600 people have been forcibly deported from Libya on a “dangerous and traumatising” journey across the Sahara, in what is thought to be one of the largest expulsions from the north African country to date.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) confirmed 613 people, all Nigerien nationals, arrived in the desert town of Dirkou in Niger last weekend in a convoy of trucks. They were among a large number of migrant workers rounded up by the authorities in Libya over the past month.

“This is something new. There was one expulsion of 400 people last July, but this convoy is the largest number to date,” said Azizou Chehou, of the migrant distress response charity Alarm Phone Sahara.

The expulsions come as EU countries have been accused of ignoring the widespread and systematic human rights violations and abuses against migrants in Libya as they seek to reduce the number of people arriving in Europe, with Italy signing deals with Tunisia and Libya to reduce Mediterranean crossings. According to the Italian interior ministry, 66,317 people reached Italy in 2024, less than half the number in 2023.

David Yambio, spokesperson for the nonprofit organisation Refugees in Libya, said: “This is Europe’s border policy laid bare, outsourcing mass expulsion and death to Libya, where the desert becomes a graveyard.

“Leaders like [Viktor] Orbán, [Giorgia] Meloni, or Trump applaud such efficient cruelty. It’s no accident; it’s the design. The EU pays to erase migrants, to make suffering invisible, and to wash its hands while others do its dirty work.”

Chehou said the journey across the Sahara region between Libya and Niger was “dangerous and traumatising”. “Winter in the desert is very cold and with migrants packed like sardines, fights to find the most comfortable spots can break out and people can fall out of the truck breaking limbs. People will arrive [in Agadez] in a very sorry state.”

Jalel Harchaoui, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a specialist on Libya, said the periodic roundup and expulsion of foreign workers was, “something of a tradition in southern Libya since even during the time of Gadafi”, but that this incident was notable and different because of the large number of people expelled in one go.

“There has been no official announcement nor clear policy – this is simply local authorities rounding people up. However, in the rhetoric of the Haftar coalition [the Libyan National Army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar], which largely controls Sabha [a city in southern Libya where they were deported from], there is often a tendency to demonise foreigners, particularly those from sub-Saharan Africa.”

Libya has long been a destination for those seeking work, with people from Niger, Mali and Chad migrating into southern Libya to work in sectors such as agriculture, construction and retail. Others migrate to the country to earn money to travel to the coast and join a smuggler’s boat to Europe.

A spokesperson for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said it believed more groups of migrants were coming from Libya and that it was “ready to support IOM, particularly in identifying and supporting individuals who may be in need of international protection”.

Mozambique’s opposition leader, Venâncio Mondlane, has returned to the country from self-imposed exile, saying he was ready for talks with the government after claiming October’s elections were stolen from him.

In large dark sunglasses, Mondlane dropped to his knees as he exited the arrivals door of Maputo’s international airport and appeared to be praying. He spoke to journalists outside, wearing a fake flower garland, before his car edged through crowds of cheering supporters.

Mozambique has been beset by protests since the 9 October presidential and parliamentary votes, which Mondlane and his allied party Podemos said they had won. More than 280 people have been killed by security forces, according to the Centre for Public Integrity, a local monitoring group.

“I had to break this narrative that I was absent because of my own will,” Mondlane told reporters in comments that were also broadcast live on his Facebook page. “So I’m here present, I’m here in the flesh, I’m here to say that if they want to negotiate, if you want to talk to me, if you want to sit down for a discussion, I’m here.”

The charismatic populist said he had also returned to witness what he labelled a “silent genocide” of his supporters and to defend himself against charges that he was culpable for damage caused during the protests.

Daniel Chapo, the candidate for Frelimo, the party that has ruled Mozambique since independence from Portugal in 1975, is due to be sworn in as president on 15 January.

On 23 December, the country’s top court declared Chapo secured 65.2% of the vote, which triggered another wave of protests by supporters of Mondlane, who the court said won 24.2% of the vote.

Election observers have said there was evidence of vote rigging, but some analysts have cautioned that Frelimo may still have won without any manipulation.

The outgoing president, Felipe Nyusi, called for talks with Mondlane in November and said in December that they had spoken by phone.

Mondlane previously said he had left Mozambique for an undisclosed location for fear of being assassinated. On 19 October, two of his allies, Elvino Dias, a lawyer, and Paulo Guambe, a film-maker and Podemos official, were shot dead by unknown attackers.

No one has been arrested for the killings, which human rights researchers say fits a pattern of targeted killings of opposition figures without anyone being brought to justice.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, Manase Madia, 50, shows his Mozambican identity card. Once a sign of pride, he does not know what to believe in any more. Over the past few weeks he has seen houses being burned down, and shops and businesses looted, including his own. He now fears for his family, which has scattered in fear.

At a community ground where officials are processing new arrivals before being transferred to a shelter, Madia is one of about 13,000 people who have crossed into Malawi in the past two months, seeking refuge from post-election violence in Mozambique. The arrival of the refugees, albeit in smaller numbers, is reminiscent for people here of the civil war when almost a million Mozambicans sought refuge in the neighbouring southern African nation in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Protests and violent uprisings have continued in Mozambique since the 11 October election, which saw Daniel Chapo, the candidate for the ruling Frelimo party, declared the winner over Venâncio Mondlane, of the opposition Optimist Party for the Development of Mozambique.

In December, Mozambique’s constitutional council upheld the earlier decision, sparking fresh violence. While political members were targeted initially, the protests have metamorphosed into criminality and looting with businesspeople and those who are well off, like Madia, being targeted by marauding gangs.

Madia, who hid in the bush after being tipped off that he was a target, managed to leave the country on a motorbike with his wife and one of his 12 children. He says the violence has disturbed thousands of families in his community and he believes people are being targeted for their money or possessions, no matter what their ideological or political leaning.

“At first it was party members who were getting their houses broken into,” he says. “Then some people informed me that I was being targeted and people were planning to come during the evening. They came in hundreds in our community carrying pangas [machetes] and were signalling by whistling while shouting the name of the opposition leader. I fuelled my motorcycle and whisked my family away to my relatives,” says Madia, whose shop was destroyed, and goats and sheep stolen.

He says some of his relatives and adult children are still hiding in the bush without any way to travel to safety. He knows of many in his hometown of Morrumbala in a similar predicament, he adds.

“My brother called me to say the situation has worsened and we should not think about returning anytime soon,” he says. “The people doing violence are our neighbours and they know us very well.”

The Guardian spoke to a dozen people who said how they had made the 30-mile (50km) journey to Malawi with just the clothes on their back and with no food or possessions.

Malawians have been welcoming the refugees, with whom many share a language, despite the country battling one of the worst food shortages in its history after a severe drought. The president has declared a state of disaster and called for international support.

Malawi, a landlocked country, depends on Mozambique’s ports for fuel. The violence and roadblocks further exacerbated fuel shortages, with people having to camp out and sleep in queues at petrol stations.

The district council – with support from Malawi’s Department of Disaster Management Affairs and charities such as the UN refugee agency, UNCHR – is erecting tents to host the thousands of refugees who are now at three centres, including one at a primary school.

At one of the centres, Judith Fukizi, who works for Restoring Family Links, an International Red Cross initiative, is busy making calls, helping to locate members of the same family who have become separated or fled to different areas.

“The ones that approached us said they fled to different locations. Others were attacked at night and they don’t know where their relatives fled. It’s mostly children being separated from their parents.

“The decision of who joins who lies with the people. Some just want to know the welfare and whereabouts of their loved ones,” Fukizi says.

Hilda Katema Kausiwa, operations manager in the refugee department at Malawi’s Ministry of Homeland Security, says they are carrying out a joint assessment with UN agencies and the International Red Cross after receiving reports of refugees arriving due to political conflicts.

“We are looking into issues of hygiene and sanitation where these people are camping. We have also seen some health concerns because other people are coming with health issues.

“We have monitored a number of children who are malnutritioned, so we are working with stakeholders and the district health team to enhance health-screening and ensure all the persons of concern have access to health facilities,” she says, while commending the chiefs and local people who had generously received the refugees.

About 46 hectares (113 acres) of land have been granted to build a settlement and facilities for the refugees. UNHCR, the Red Cross and other organisations have sent tents.

Kausiwa said: “So far, the response has been good. But we are still advocating for additional resources to ensure that we meet the needs of this population. There are issues of food that are critical. As the population continues to grow, we need continued support.

“We know that the times are hard, but we just want to ensure those that we register or screen are genuine asylum seekers that are fleeing persecution and that they should get the relevant support.

“We’re also appealing for continued monitoring of the points of entry to enhance security,” she says, adding they are also planning for public health emergencies, such as mpox.

Mike Dansa, chair of Nsanje civil society organisations, says they are engaged in humanitarian aid, disaster response, food security and health initiatives.

“The influx of asylum seekers is putting significant pressure on local resources and services,” he says. “We are advocating for comprehensive support that addresses not only the basic needs of displaced individuals but also the wellbeing of the host communities who have shown incredible solidarity during these challenging times.

“This situation highlights the critical need for strengthened humanitarian systems, increased resource allocation and sustainable interventions to address the immediate and long-term impacts of displacement,” he adds.

The United States has formally declared that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces have committed genocide during the country’s ongoing civil war, marking the second time in less than 30 years that genocide has been perpetrated in Sudan.

Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, announced the determination on Tuesday while imposing sanctions on the RSF commander Mohammad Hamdan Daglo – known as Hemedti – for his role in what he described as “systematic atrocities”, many perpetrated in west Darfur.

While both the RSF and rival Sudanese Armed Forces have been accused of committing war crimes during the civil war which broke out in 2023, and which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, Blinken detailed a pattern of systematic ethnic violence in which RSF had killed civilians as they tried to flee, and blocked access to essential supplies.

Blinken said that the state department had conducted months of deliberation over the genocide designation. “Based on this information, I have now concluded that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan,” he said.

Blinken’s announcement on Tuesday has come amid heightened global scrutiny of US positions on international conflicts. Just days earlier, Blinken had dismissed suggestions that events in Gaza constituted genocide, responding: “No, it’s not” in an interview with the New York Times.

A paramilitary force that emerged out of the notorious Janjaweed militias that committed atrocities in Darfur in the 2000s, the RSF was deployed by the former Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019 to crack down on pro-democracy protesters during Sudan’s revolution that saw Bashir’s fall in 2019.

In 2023, an uneasy alliance between Hemedti and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the Sudanese army general who became head of the country’s ruling transitional council, broke down, triggering a devastating civil war between the RSF against Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces, and ensuing famine.

Some of the most serious allegations relating to Hemedti and the RSF have once again focused on Darfur, where where up to 15,000 people died in well documented RSF attacks on El Geneina in west Darfur in 2023 targeting the non-Arab Masalit and other ethnic groups.

In his statement Blinken said: “I also determined that members of the RSF and allied Arab militias had committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians. The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys – even infants – on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence.

“Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies. Based on this information, I have now concluded that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan.

“The United States is committed to holding accountable those responsible for these atrocities. We are today sanctioning RSF leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa, known as Hemedti, for his role in systematic atrocities committed against the Sudanese people. We are also sanctioning seven RSF-owned companies located in the United Arab Emirates and one individual for their roles in procuring weapons for the RSF.”

The latest genocide determination follows the US declaration in 2004 that the RSF’s forerunner had committed in Darfur in the early 2000s.

The treasury department simultaneously announced sweeping sanctions against Hemedti and eight connected entities, including UAE-based companies accused of providing weapons and financial support to his forces.

The measures include visa restrictions that will bar Hemedti and his family from entering the United States, specifically citing “gross violations of human rights in Darfur, namely the mass rape of civilians by RSF soldiers under his control”.

The war between RSF and the Sudan Armed Forces, which has so far killed tens of thousands and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, including perpetuating a mass famine for hundreds of thousands and forcing 12 million people from their homes, according to UN estimates. The SAF was not implicated in US sanctions or in the genocide determination.

Last month, rights activists reported at least 127 people, mostly civilians, were killed by barrel bombs and shelling from both sides. On Sunday, an airstrike which targeted a market area for the third time in less than a month, left more than 30 wounded, with five in critical condition, according to local volunteer rescue workers.

Among the sanctioned entities is Capital Tap Holding, a UAE-based company that allegedly channeled money and military equipment to the RSF. Its owner, Abu Dharr Abdul Nabi Habiballa Ahmmed, and several related companies were also targeted for helping the paramilitary group evade previous sanctions.

The genocide determination, which follows earlier findings of war crimes and crimes against humanity, could pave the way for additional international action against the RSF and its supporters.

The United States has formally declared that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces have committed genocide during the country’s ongoing civil war, marking the second time in less than 30 years that genocide has been perpetrated in Sudan.

Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, announced the determination on Tuesday while imposing sanctions on the RSF commander Mohammad Hamdan Daglo – known as Hemedti – for his role in what he described as “systematic atrocities”, many perpetrated in west Darfur.

While both the RSF and rival Sudanese Armed Forces have been accused of committing war crimes during the civil war which broke out in 2023, and which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, Blinken detailed a pattern of systematic ethnic violence in which RSF had killed civilians as they tried to flee, and blocked access to essential supplies.

Blinken said that the state department had conducted months of deliberation over the genocide designation. “Based on this information, I have now concluded that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan,” he said.

Blinken’s announcement on Tuesday has come amid heightened global scrutiny of US positions on international conflicts. Just days earlier, Blinken had dismissed suggestions that events in Gaza constituted genocide, responding: “No, it’s not” in an interview with the New York Times.

A paramilitary force that emerged out of the notorious Janjaweed militias that committed atrocities in Darfur in the 2000s, the RSF was deployed by the former Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019 to crack down on pro-democracy protesters during Sudan’s revolution that saw Bashir’s fall in 2019.

In 2023, an uneasy alliance between Hemedti and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the Sudanese army general who became head of the country’s ruling transitional council, broke down, triggering a devastating civil war between the RSF against Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces, and ensuing famine.

Some of the most serious allegations relating to Hemedti and the RSF have once again focused on Darfur, where where up to 15,000 people died in well documented RSF attacks on El Geneina in west Darfur in 2023 targeting the non-Arab Masalit and other ethnic groups.

In his statement Blinken said: “I also determined that members of the RSF and allied Arab militias had committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians. The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys – even infants – on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence.

“Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies. Based on this information, I have now concluded that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan.

“The United States is committed to holding accountable those responsible for these atrocities. We are today sanctioning RSF leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa, known as Hemedti, for his role in systematic atrocities committed against the Sudanese people. We are also sanctioning seven RSF-owned companies located in the United Arab Emirates and one individual for their roles in procuring weapons for the RSF.”

The latest genocide determination follows the US declaration in 2004 that the RSF’s forerunner had committed in Darfur in the early 2000s.

The treasury department simultaneously announced sweeping sanctions against Hemedti and eight connected entities, including UAE-based companies accused of providing weapons and financial support to his forces.

The measures include visa restrictions that will bar Hemedti and his family from entering the United States, specifically citing “gross violations of human rights in Darfur, namely the mass rape of civilians by RSF soldiers under his control”.

The war between RSF and the Sudan Armed Forces, which has so far killed tens of thousands and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, including perpetuating a mass famine for hundreds of thousands and forcing 12 million people from their homes, according to UN estimates. The SAF was not implicated in US sanctions or in the genocide determination.

Last month, rights activists reported at least 127 people, mostly civilians, were killed by barrel bombs and shelling from both sides. On Sunday, an airstrike which targeted a market area for the third time in less than a month, left more than 30 wounded, with five in critical condition, according to local volunteer rescue workers.

Among the sanctioned entities is Capital Tap Holding, a UAE-based company that allegedly channeled money and military equipment to the RSF. Its owner, Abu Dharr Abdul Nabi Habiballa Ahmmed, and several related companies were also targeted for helping the paramilitary group evade previous sanctions.

The genocide determination, which follows earlier findings of war crimes and crimes against humanity, could pave the way for additional international action against the RSF and its supporters.

The UK cut health aid to some of the world’s vulnerable countries at the same time as recruiting thousands of their nurses, in a “double whammy” for fragile health systems, new analysis has found.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which carried out the research, said Labour had a “duty to fix” aid cuts imposed by the previous government, and to work on increasing the UK’s domestic supply of nurses.

Between 2020 and 2023, direct UK aid for health-related projects in “red list” countries – those with the most severe workforce shortages – fell by nearly 63%, from £484m to £181m.

Spending on projects designed to strengthen the healthcare workforce in those countries fell by 83%, from £24m to £4m.

At the same time, the number of nurses from these countries on the UK’s national register rose sharply. There were 11,386 registered in September 2020, and 32,543 in September 2024.

The Conservative government under Boris Johnson pushed through a £4bn cut to the foreign aid budget, reducing spending from 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) to 0.5%. In last October’s budget, Labour kept government spending at this reduced figure.

Prof Nicola Ranger, RCN general secretary and chief executive, said: “Cuts to aid may have been the previous government’s idea, but it is now this government’s duty to fix it.

“By maintaining the aid target at a lowly 0.5% of GNI, the UK is failing to uphold its international duties, effectively worsening chronic nursing workforce shortages in some of the most under-resourced healthcare systems in the world.

“The prime minister promised ‘change’ on being elected and that must include undoing the damage done to aid budgets by restoring spending to 0.7%,” she said.

An abrupt halt to UK funding for one project in 2021 meant ambulances in Sierra Leone were left without fuel and patients could not get to hospital for emergency treatment. “There is no question that there were fatalities as a result,” said a UK health worker involved in the programme.

Ranger said: “Recruiting heavily from the same countries from which we have deprived aid is a double whammy for some of the world’s most fragile healthcare systems. But it is also a damning indictment of successive governments’ unwillingness to properly fund and grow our own domestic nursing profession.”

The 55 countries on the World Health Organization’s “red list” (formally known as the health workforce support and safeguards list), include Ghana, Nigeria, Nepal, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Somalia.

Other countries are not supposed to actively recruit from red-list countries, although staff from those countries are free to apply for vacancies elsewhere.

The RCN analysis also found the proportion of health-related spending within the UK’s total aid budget declined from 16.7% in 2020 to 7.6% in 2023.

The analysis looks only at bilateral aid – directly between two countries. Some red-list countries will also have received support from the UK through multilateral organisations such as the Global Fund and the World Health Organization.

A government spokesperson said: “The UK remains one of the most generous donors among the G7 and we are committed to restoring development spending to 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) as soon as fiscal circumstances allow.

“We are working to address the global shortage of healthcare workers through our leading multilateral health investments. UK support to the World Bank and Global Financing Facility generates further investment in the global health workforce.”

The spokesperson said a code of practice governing international recruitment of health and social-care staff ensured it was “ethical and sustainable”.

A huge cleanup operation is taking place after a fire devastated one of the world’s biggest secondhand clothes markets.

Thousands of traders’ stalls were destroyed in the blaze that started at about 10pm on 1 January and consumed large sections of Kantamanto market in Accra, Ghana’s capital.

The Ghana national fire service (GNFS) deployed 13 tenders to combat the flames. Goods worth millions of Ghanaian cedi have been destroyed, the GNFS said.

“This is devastating,” said Alex King Nartey, a GNFS spokesperson. “We’ve not recorded severe casualties, but the economic loss is enormous.

“Preliminary investigations suggest faulty electrical connections might have sparked the blaze, although we are not ruling out arson,” Nartey told AFP.

As much as two-thirds of the market has been destroyed and there are estimates that 8,000 people have been affected, though this number is expected to rise.

Alhassan Fatawu owned a stall where he used bits of material from secondhand clothes to make and sell his own designs, and was notified in the early hours of Thursday morning that the market was on fire.

“The man who runs the neighbouring stall called me and said everything had burned. I started panicking,” he said. He went to see the damage for himself at about 9am.

“I found burnt stalls. There were still parts burning,” he said. “I couldn’t salvage a thing [from my stall]. Everything has gone. Now my daily bread has been cut. I used my stall at Kantamanto to sustain myself.”

Before the fire, Kantamanto was a sprawling complex of thousands of stalls crammed with clothes from brands including H&M, Levi Strauss, Tesco, Primark, New Look and more. About 30,000 people depend on the market for their livelihood.

According to the Or Foundation, which campaigns against textile waste in Ghana, 15m secondhand garments from countries in the global north such as the UK, the US and China arrive at the market every week. The Kantamanto community is responsible for recirculating 25m pieces of secondhand clothing every month through resale, reuse, repair and remanufacturing.

The market is a vibrant hub of creativity and a necessary alternative to fast fashion. The fire has left many families in distress after catastrophic losses for retailers, upcyclers and other market members, as merchandise, shops, tools and equipment have been destroyed.

Yayra Agbofah, co-founder of the Revival, a community-led organisation creating awareness, art and jobs with textile waste arriving in Ghana, lost storage space in the blaze. He was at the market on Friday morning along with hundreds of others, clearing the debris. All that remained of many stalls were blackened and charred piles of clothes and ash.

“The goal is to rebuild in a week,” he said. “People have to return to work because they don’t have anything.”

He added: “There has been no information about what the government is going to do. We have to take things into our own hands and rebuild our market.

“The traders have lost everything. A lot are in debt. This is their livelihood. There are no other alternatives. We have to find ways to get our feet back and start work. The only option is to build back and start from scratch. It’s a devastating situation.”

Twenty people are missing after falling into the sea from a tilting boat after it started to take in water in rough seas about 20 miles off the coast of Libya, according to survivors.

Carrying 27 passengers, the six-metre boat had left Zuwara in Libya at 10pm on Monday. Despite the waves, seven people managed to continue the journey on the rickety vessel before being found by an Italian police patrol boat on Tuesday night close to the southern island of Lampedusa.

It was initially believed that the vessel had capsized close to Lampedusa, and so an overnight search and rescue operation was carried out by the Italian police and coastguard in the area of sea south-west of the island.

But according to witness statements from six adult survivors reported by the Italian press, the boat started to take in water about five hours after its departure from Libya and tilted, creating panic and causing 20 passengers to fall overboard.

The witnesses, who included two people from Syria, two from Egypt and two from Sudan, said five women and three children were among those who fell overboard. They said the sea was rough and the winds strong. The seventh survivor was an eight-year-old boy from Syria. All have been taken to Porto Empedocle in Sicily.

According to the news agency Ansa, Italian authorities have ceased the search and reported the incident to their Libyan and Maltese counterparts.

In a separate incident on Monday, two people including a five-year-old child died and 17 survived after the vessel they were on broke down off the northern Tunisian coastline during an attempt to reach Europe.

According to Alarm Phone, an organisation that runs a hotline for people in distress at sea, three boats have capsized off Tunisia since Tuesday.

“So many people have needlessly died and disappeared,” the organisation wrote on X. “What a horrible way to start the new year. Our condolences to the relatives and friends of the dead.”

The dance world is mourning the internationally acclaimed South African dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo, who died in hospital at the weekend aged 39.

Masilo died unexpectedly on Sunday after a brief illness, a spokesperson for her family said in a statement.

Born in Soweto, she was described as a sprite-like, energetic dancer and a fearless rule-breaker, who brought African dance motifs to classic European roles in a career that spanned two decades.

“Deeply respectful of European and contemporary music traditions, but unafraid to go bare on stage and voice her own opinions, she effectively changed the shape and appearance of contemporary dance in South Africa,” said the spokesperson, Bridget van Oerle.

In September, Masilo received the Positano Léonide Massine lifetime achievement award for classic and contemporary dance, when she was praised as “powerful and topical”.

Her revisited versions of the great classics of romantic ballet drew on African dance to speak of the society in which she lived and of tolerance across borders, the award announcement said.

“A brilliant light has been extinguished,” the Joburg Ballet company said, praising Masilo’s “creative force as a choreographer and her wisdom as a human being”.

“Her groundbreaking work reshaped the world of contemporary dance, and her spirit will continue to inspire generations of artists and audiences,” the University of Johannesburg’s arts and culture department said.

The UK-based Dance Consortium, which toured with Masilo in Britain twice, called her death a “tragic loss to the dance world”.

“Her fresh perspective, extraordinary presence and stunning creations wowed and inspired audiences and artists across the UK and around the world,” it said.

Masilo was best known for her reinvention of the great ballet classics such as Swan Lake and Giselle, said Lliane Loots, the artistic director at the JOMBA! dance centre at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

She used her “remarkable skill as a ballet dancer” to meld this European dance form “with the rhythms and intentions of her own histories of African dance and of being South African”, Loots said.

In 2016, Masilo’s Swan Lake was nominated for a New York Bessie award and the following year her Giselle won best performance at the Italian Danza and Danza awards, the family statement said.

In 2018, she won the Netherlands’ Prince Claus “next generation” award, where she was described as an “extraordinary role model for young people and girls”.

The Live Aid campaigner Bob Geldof urged Tony Blair not to appoint an African co-chair to the UK-led organisation working to overhaul international aid to the continent because he thought African leadership was “very weak” on the issue, newly released government documents suggest.

The singer was “scathing about the ability and worthiness of virtually all African leaders” before the establishment in 2004 of Blair’s Commission for Africa, which would produce a report, Our Common Interest, and prompt a landmark pledge by rich nations to boost aid and write off debt.

Geldof was instrumental in persuading the then prime minister to set up a “Brandt II” report, similar to the 1980 Brandt report on international economic development, which would lead to a “Marshall plan” for Africa, a reference to the US plan to rebuild Europe after the second world war. It would coincide with the UK’s presidency of the G8 nations group and the 20th anniversary of Live Aid.

But behind the scenes, Geldof and the government had different ideas on how it should be set up, official papers released to the National Archives show.

Geldof stressed in one letter to the prime minister that Blair’s personal leadership was vital if it was to succeed. “I do think this needs to be a direct commission from you personally – your vision, your authority, your weight,” he wrote.

He also called for speed so it could report back in time for the G8 summit that Blair was hosting at Gleneagles in July 2005. “I know I’m pushy, and I know you’re up to your neck, but something short of the normal seven-week delay response would be welcome (do you use Royal Mail?). Seriously though, this must be implemented almost immediately,” Geldof wrote.

A No 10 letter from October 2003, reporting on a telephone conversation between Blair and Geldof, said: “The PM spoke with Bob Geldof today. Geldof argued that unless we found a way to allow Africans to make livelihoods at home they would come to our shores, resulting in massive social upheaval. African leadership had been very weak.”

Other Downing Street officials urged caution. One said they could face “opprobrium” from Geldof and his fellow Live Aid campaigner Bono if they were unable to deliver on the plan.

Liz Lloyd, a senior adviser on international development, expressed concern over Geldof’s desire that the commission, while being chaired by Blair, should also be independent, and she stressed the government must have oversight.

“If this document is going to have your name and be sold by you, [Geldof] must accept that we have the final editing role,” she wrote to Blair.

The fact Geldof was opposed to a chair from Africa was particularly “tricky”, she added. “He is scathing about the ability and worthiness of virtually all African leaders and sees the audience as primarily the US,” she noted.

“He therefore does not want an African co-chair, content to ride with your name to give it credibility.”

She continued that they would need “prominent African involvement” and suggested Blair “talk carefully” to the then South African president, Thabo Mbeki, to secure his support.

The ensuing pledge at Gleneagles to double aid and extend debt relief was hailed by Geldof as “mission accomplished”, although some anti-poverty campaigners complained that he had got too close to the government and that it did not go far enough.

Tony Blair’s government discussed diverting £2m earmarked to prevent conflict in Africa in order to fund a controversial pilot scheme to process and house asylum-seekers in Tanzania, newly released government files show.

Under the scheme, Britain would have offered Tanzania an extra £4m in aid if it opened an asylum camp to house people claiming to be Somalian refugees while their applications to live in Britain were assessed.

Hilary Benn, the then international development secretary, wrote to the then home secretary, David Blunkett, in 2004 saying the migration partnership with Tanzania was “off the ground”, files released to the National Archives in Kew, west London, show.

“As the quickest way forward, therefore, I would propose a PES transfer of £2 million from the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool to the Home Office budget, on the understanding that you – with help, I hope, from Jack Straw – will find the resources needed to fill the remaining shortfall,” Benn wrote in January 2004.

Straw, the then foreign secretary, responded, writing to Blunkett in February 2004 that he had “some reservations” about using ACPP funding in this way, but was willing to agree a one-off transfer.

The then armed forces minister, Adam Ingram, however, wrote to Benn to say that while he agreed that the removal of refused asylum seekers should be addressed, he did not “consider it appropriate” to draw on the ACPP fund.

Ingram wrote: “In the medium and longer terms improving stability in Africa is likely to be one of the more sustainable means of reducing the flow of economic and other migrants; that is what the ACPP exists to achieve. Perhaps there are other more appropriate funding sources we should look at in this case.”

The 2004 asylum camp scheme – put forward at a time when Blair sought to persuade voters that his government still controlled Britain’s borders – was dropped in the face of opposition in Tanzania and criticism from the EU, with some German officials likening the proposals to concentration camps.

More than 60 people have died after a road accident in southern Ethiopia, the local health authority said on Sunday.

Sidama state is in the south of Ethiopia, about 300km south of the capital Addis Ababa.

The Sidama regional health bureau said on Facebook that “a car accident has claimed the lives of 66 people so far”, without giving further details.

The incident occurred at Gelana bridge in Bona Zuria Woreda, according to the bureau.

“Four injured passengers are receiving medical treatment at the Bona general hospital,” it added.

Blurred images shared by the health bureau showed a mass of people surrounding a vehicle, partially submerged in water, with many seemingly attempting to help pull it from the waters.

Other images shared by the bureau appeared to show bodies covered in blue tarpaulin, lying on the ground.

The bureau expressed its condolences to the victims of the crash, and said more information would be made available when it received it.

At the top of the Ado-Awaye hills lies a lake suspended 433 metres above sea level. Local people say the lake is named Iyake (Yoruba for “crying woman”) after a weeping, barren woman who fell in the water hundreds of years ago, conferring on it powers of fertility.

This belief in the divine is evident in the foothills, where a huge boulder is emblazoned with the words, written in golden letters: “Here we come: African Jerusalem.”

Ado-Awaye, a tourist site as sleepy as the community it shares a name with in the south-western Nigerian state of Ogun, gets a modest 3,000 or so visitors annually. Most of these are religious worshippers who climb the 369-step path to the top, where they camp or visit the lake, which is reportedly one of only two natural suspended lakes in the world. Others are hikers or visitors to an annual festival held every November.

But as Nigeria experiences its worst cost of living crisis in decades, tourism is on the back burner. Even Detty December, the country’s month-long potpourri of festivities, has been affected.

And in Ado-Awaye, divine pilgrimages have slowed down. “[Just] over 2,400 came this year because of current economic challenges,” said Niyi Okunade, a prince of the community who organises site tours.

On paper, Nigeria is a tourist haven. In the north, there is the colourful Kano Durbar festival, the sand dunes of Yobe and the country’s most popular game reserve in Bauchi. In the Middle Belt, teas, strawberries and apples grow in towns around the Mambilla and Jos plateaus, with some of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet.

Down south, there are waterfalls, museums, colonial-era relics and carnivals, as well as dozens of beaches along the seven states that border the Gulf of Guinea where small resorts are tucked away in endless tranquillity. There are also spots where visitors can enjoy an array of street food and those seeking the coldest of drinks can request “mortuary standard” beers. On the streets, huge speakers keep the mood electric, blasting Afrobeats and other genres from Owerri bongo to Fuji music.

Billionaires reportedly go whale-watching on a couple of small islands outside Lagos that connect to the Atlantic. The River Osun still draws thousands every year, despite record levels of pollution from gold mining.

This year, Nigeria’s multitude of stars were joined by foreign celebrities from Chloe Bailey and Saweetie to Tyla and Gunna in Lagos for Detty December. The multipurpose 12,000-seater Lagos Arena is being built to allow events to be hosted all year round.

But according to the tourism ministry, there were only 1.2 million visitors to Nigeria in 2023, 20% more than in the preceding year. The figure was on par with Ghana (1.1 million) but pales in comparison to those of South Africa (8.48 million) and Kenya (1.95 million).

Ikemesit Effiong, head of research at Lagos-based geopolitical research consultancy SBM Intelligence, blames an infrastructure deficit and an undercurrent of insecurity in a few areas choking tourism.

“[There is] a dearth of world-class hotels, especially in secondary and tertiary cities … a siloed hospitality culture which doesn’t integrate events, logistics and catering into a coherent whole – for example with travel packages – and a lack of customer awareness of promising locations, festivals and even the country’s tourism potential,” he said.

“Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and even Ghana do a much better job of selling their countries domestically and overseas than Nigeria.”

Okunade says that Ado-Awaye is lacking “modern hotel accommodation for the visiting tourists” as well as a lift or cable car system to elevate the site to world-class standards. “Government should invest more,” he believes.

In the 60s and 70s, Nigeria attracted medical tourists from across the world but many of its hospitals are now shadows of their former selves.

In the absence of tourists, rampaging bandits and terrorists have set up bases in remote areas; the feared Sambisa forest, where Boko Haram reportedly kept the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls, was an abandoned game reserve.

The Obudu mountaintop cattle ranch, a project in the biodiversity-rich Cross River state, and its international marathon have lost their shine since the tourism-loving, saxophone-playing governor who initiated them left office. The annual Calabar Carnival, where the singer Akon dramatically rolled about in a white balloon while headlining in 2012, has declined in status too. Many museums are semi-open, with barely any upgrades in decades.

Nigeria has a wide network of underused airports and airfields and an improving rail system. But on one night this month, every conveyor belt at the new Lagos international airport terminal went out of service, leaving passengers waiting for their luggage for more than two hours.

Henry Erikowa, founder of Falcorp Mangrove Park, an ecotourism resort in the former oil capital of Warri, said young people were not as interested in preserving their heritage, or working in tourism, as in the past and should be incentivised to do so.

“They are all interested in oil money now,” said Erikowa, who has been looking for trainee zookeepers for years.

In 2009, one of Nigeria’s most distinguished public servants launched Good People, Great Nation, a rebranding campaign for Nigeria’s image abroad. But Dora Akunyili, the information minister who made her name working to combat counterfeit medicines, failed to get a buy-in from the government she served or from the wider population.

Some say a similar but better-run effort, backed by the government at the highest levels, is needed to drive the change required to make Nigeria a true tourism powerhouse.

“You have to create a culture of serving people, not just have people in service roles … A lot of that work has to be top-down driven, with policymakers at the federal and state levels,” said Effiong. “Many potential Nigerian tourist hotspots are left on their own to figure this out and it makes for a hodge-podge of experiences.”

The UN has authorised a new African peacekeeping mission to continue its fight against the al-Qaida-affiliated group al-Shabaab in Somalia, but there are doubts about whether troops from neighbouring Ethiopia will remain part of the deployment.

The UN security council adopted a resolution on Friday allowing the deployment of up to 12,626 personnel to support the Somali government’s nearly two decades-long fight against the al-Shabaab insurgents.

The existing peacekeeping force, known as the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (Atmis), whose mandate ends at the end of this year, will be replaced by the leaner African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (Aussom).

The two peacekeeping forces were preceded by the African Union Mission In Somalia (Amisom) which was the largest, longest running and deadliest such mission in history.

Al-Shabaab, a jihadist organisation with roots in Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion of Somalia, carries out regular deadly attacks across the country and in neighbouring Kenya. In August, almost 40 people were killed and more than 200 were wounded when it attacked a beach in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

James Kariuki, the UK’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, welcomed the resolution, telling the council that it “robustly reinforces” support for Somalia in its fight against al-Shabaab. “It authorises Aussom to support Somalia in its fight against al-Shabaab, strengthen Somalia’s stabilisation efforts, and enable the delivery of humanitarian assistance,” he said.

The French representative at the council also hailed the adoption of the resolution as an “important step forward” and a “new stage in the support for Somalia’s efforts to combat the al-Shabaab group”.

It wasn’t clear if Ethiopia, which has been a major contributor to the two past iterations of the peacekeeping forces, would be allowed to continue to play a role. Somalia and Ethiopia have been embroiled in a year-long dispute over a sea access deal that landlocked Ethiopia reached with the separatist northern Somaliland region – which Somaliland officials say would lead to Ethiopia becoming the first country to recognise the region’s statehood.

The agreement between Somaliland and Ethiopia has been strongly opposed by Somali officials, who have called it an attempt to “annex” a portion of their territory. The deal would reportedly grant Ethiopia a portion of Somaliland’s coast for potential naval use.

Somalia first hinted in the summer that it might remove Ethiopia from a long-running African Union peacekeeping mission against al-Shabaab in parts of southern and central Somalia, and replace its contingent with troops from other countries, including Egypt, with which Ethiopia has its own disputes over a dam it has constructed along the Nile.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, brokered an agreement between the feuding neighbours last month labelled the Ankara declaration, which was meant to address Ethiopia’s sea access concerns. At that time, Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, said Ethiopia would be permitted to keep its troops in the peacekeeping mission.

Mohamed Rabi Yusuf, the Somalia representative to the UN, said the Somali government had carried out a “comprehensive review of its security arrangements” and had obtained commitments from other countries willing to commit troops to Somalia. “This commitment addresses any security vacuum created by Ethiopia while sustaining progress in the fight against al-Shabaab,” Yusuf said.

The Ethiopian delegate, who was present at the UN security council meeting, said his country was “ready to continue its role in the post Atmis mission”, adding that “extra-regional actors”, a likely reference to Egypt, should abandon their “reckless pursuit”.

Ayub Ismail Yusuf, a Somali MP and member of the Somali parliament’s foreign affairs committee, called on the Somali government to exclude Ethiopia from the peacekeeping force. “No nation can trust another where their sovereignty was threatened by them,” he posted on X.

However, in a late post on X, Somalia’s national security advisor, Hussein Sheikh-Ali, suggested a decision had not yet been reached on whether Ethiopian troops would be permitted to remain, but added: “The spirit of the Ankara declaration remains strong and alive.”

Earlier this week, the Somali government claimed that Ethiopian troops attacked members of its armed forces in the southern Jubbaland state, causing casualties and injuries. Ethiopia denied the allegation, attributing it to unnamed “third-party” actors, according to a statement.

International trade in rhino horns should be legalised, a leading wildlife expert has urged.

Writing in the research journal Science, Martin Wikelski argues only carefully monitored, legitimate transactions in horns can save the world’s remaining species of rhinoceros.

“A few years ago, I was very much against this idea but now looking at the grim situation we are in I believe we have to change our attitude to the issue of trade in rhino horn,” said Wikelski, of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Germany.

“International crime syndicates have overcome every countermeasure that conservationists have mounted to defend rhinos from poachers. The result has been a drastic drop in numbers of animals. By legalising trade in rhino horn we can take back control of the market and halt the loss.”

Wikelski’s idea would be to remove the horn and allow a new one to grow while selling the horn to make money. This could be used to fund protection for the rhino. At present, removed horn is stored in secure vaults.

However, the proposal to use stocks to create a legitimate trade in rhino horn has triggered worried responses from many conservationists, who reject the idea that such a scheme would save the rhino from the attention of poachers. Current demand for illegal rhino horn already far exceeds the potential legal supply and is projected to grow as wealth increases in consumer countries, they argue.

“In addition, a legal rhino horn market could increase demand, provide opportunities for money laundering, and complicate law enforcement’s ability to distinguish legal sources from illegal sources,” Rascha Nuijten, director of Future For Nature Foundation, wrote in a response to Wikelski’s arguments that was also published in Science.

Rhino horn is made of keratin, a protein from which hair and fingernails are made and it is said to have curative properties according to traditional Chinese medicine, despite there being no scientific evidence to support such claims.

“It was traditionally prescribed in Asian medicine in the belief that it can reduce heat and toxins from the body,” said Jo Shaw, chief executive officer of Save the Rhino International. “More recently, demand has been more status driven and rhino horn is now embedded in serious organised, transnational crime networks.”

The impact of this criminal interest has been devastating. At the beginning of the 20th century, half a million rhinos roamed Africa and Asia. By 1970, numbers had dropped to 70,000, and today there are about 27,000 left on the planet, made up of five species: two from Africa, the black and the white rhino, and three in Asia; the Javan, Sumatran and the greater one-horned rhino.

There are more than 6,000 black rhinos in Africa and more than 17,000 white, while there are an estimated 4,000 one-horned rhinos in India and Nepal. By contrast, it is thought there are fewer than 70 Javan rhinos and between 34 and 47 Sumatrans, which are both found only in Indonesia. The latter two species, along with black rhinos, are rated as being critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature .

Today, about half of the world’s white rhino population is privately managed. However, since the late 2000s, demand for white rhino horn and large-scale poaching activities have increased dramatically. “As a result these estate owners who act as guardians for the species are giving up their custodianship because of the costs of protecting them against determined poachers and because of threats to their own personal safety,” Wikelski told the Observer last week.

He added that at state rhino sanctuaries, such as the Kruger national park in South Africa, authorities have decided to continue to dehorn rhinos to deter poaching, with limited success. Deaths continue to be high and have destroyed rhinos’ social systems, changing their behaviour. “The answer is to create a controllable, traceable trade,” Wikelski said.

But this claim was questioned by Shaw. “Numbers of white rhinos have actually increased last year and they are not the ones that are threatened with extinction. It is the black, Java and Sumatran rhino that we ​really have to worry about and there is no certainty that legalising trade in white rhino horn will benefit their conservation.”

Shaw said that rather than take polarising positions promoting or opposing legalisation of international trade, it would be more helpful to tease out the practicalities of exactly how such a trade could be assured to benefit all five species of rhinos. “We would need to see the necessary level of detail and control to provide confidence that such a gamble wouldn’t end up doing more harm than good.”

Nearly one in five of the world’s children live in areas affected by conflicts, with more than 473 million children suffering from the worst levels of violence since the second world war, according to figures published by the UN.

The UN humanitarian aid organisation for children, Unicef, said on Saturday that the percentage of children living in conflict zones around the world has doubled from about 10% in the 1990s to almost 19%, and warned that this dramatic increase in harm to children should not become the “new normal”.

With more conflicts being waged around the world than at any time since 1945, Unicef said that children were increasingly falling victim. Citing its latest available data, from 2023, the UN verified a record 32,990 grave violations against 22,557 children, the highest figures since the security council mandated monitoring of the impact of war on the world’s children nearly 20 years ago.

The death toll after nearly 15 months of Israel’s war in Gaza is estimated at more than 45,000 and out of the cases it has verified, the UN said 44% were children.

In Ukraine, the UN said it had verified more child casualties during the first nine months of 2024 than during all of 2023, and predicted there would be a further increase in 2025.

“By almost every measure, 2024 has been one of the worst years on record for children in conflict in Unicef’s history – both in terms of the number of children affected and the level of impact on their lives,” Unicef’s executive director, Catherine Russell, said.

“A child growing up in a conflict zone is far more likely to be out of school, malnourished, or forced from their home – too often repeatedly – compared with a child living in places of peace,” Russell added. “This must not be the new normal. We cannot allow a generation of children to become collateral damage to the world’s unchecked wars.”

Unicef drew attention in particular to the plight of women and girls, amid widespread reports of rape and sexual violence in conflicts. It said that in Haiti there had been a 1,000% increase in the number of reported incidents of sexual violence against children over the course of 2024 alone.

Unicef also pointed out that children were especially affected by malnutrition in times of war, a particularly lethal threat in Sudan and Gaza. More than half a million people in five conflict-affected countries are in famine.

Conflict also seriously affects children’s access to healthcare and education. Forty per cent of unvaccinated or undervaccinated children live in countries wholly or partly affected by conflict, making them far more vulnerable to outbreaks of diseases such as measles and polio. Polio was detected in Gaza in July, the first time the virus had appeared there for a quarter of a century. A UN-led vaccination campaign, enabled by a series of temporary and partial ceasefires, managed to reach more than 90% of the child population.

Unicef reported that more than 52 million children in conflict-affected countries were deprived of education, saying most children across the Gaza Strip, and a significant proportion of children in Sudan, had missed out on more than a year of school. In other countries in conflict, including Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, schools had been damaged, destroyed or repurposed, leaving millions of children without access to learning.

“The impact on children’s mental health is also huge,” Unicef said. A study backed by the charity War Child earlier this month reported that 96% of children in Gaza felt that their death was imminent and almost half wanted to die as a result of the trauma they had been through.

“Children in war zones face a daily struggle for survival that deprives them of a childhood,” Russell said. “Their schools are bombed, homes destroyed, and families torn apart. They lose not only their safety and access to basic life-sustaining necessities, but also their chance to play, to learn, and to simply be children. The world is failing these children. As we look towards 2025, we must do more to turn the tide and save and improve the lives of children.”