The Ethiopian lecturer aiming to build his own plane

 A Ethiopian university lecturer who successfully assembled a drone using local materials has told the BBC that he has a bigger vision.

Amanuel Balch is a mechanical engineer who worked for local company Dejen Aviation before joining Dembi Dollo University as a lecturer.

On Tuesday he conducted a successful flight of his locally assembled drone during the university’s innovation day.

He told the BBC that he has assembled two other drones and an aircraft that are on trial stage.

He says this is not his final ambition as he can “make greater things than this… This is just paving my way for my vision”.

He says his final goal “is to build my own aircraft with a capacity of carrying two passengers”.

“I’ll make my dream come true and make my university proud soon,” he adds.

Mr Amanuel is planning to use the drones he is assembling locally for video recording, disaster aid and for environmental protection purposes.

For days, he has been trending on social media after he successfully did a test flight of his drone on Tuesday.

He is now being praised and appreciated by many people including top government officials.

Dembi Dollo University is located in western Oromia where antigovernmental armed groups are active.

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Shelling in east Ukraine, Russia nuclear drill raise tension

 

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Hundreds of artillery shells exploded along the contact line between Ukrainian soldiers and Russia-backed separatists, and thousands of people evacuated eastern Ukraine, further increasing fears Sunday that the volatile region could spark a Russian invasion.

Western leaders warned that Russia was poised to attack its neighbor, which is surrounded on three sides by about 150,000 Russian soldiers, warplanes and equipment. Russia held nuclear drills Saturday in neighboring Belarus and has ongoing naval drills off the coast in the Black Sea.

The United States and many European countries have alleged for months that Russia is trying to create pretexts to invade. They have threatened massive, immediate sanctions if it does.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to choose a place to meet where the two leaders could meet to try to resolve the crisis.

“Ukraine will continue to follow only the diplomatic path for the sake of a peaceful settlement,” Zelenskyy said Saturday at the Munich Security Conference. There was no immediate response from the Kremlin.

Zelenskyy spoke hours after separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine ordered a full military mobilization and sent more civilians to Russia, which has issued about 700,000 passports to residents of the rebel-held territories. Claims that Russian citizens are being endangered might be used as justification for military action.

In new signs of fears that a war could start within days, Germany and Austria told their citizens to leave Ukraine. German air carrier Lufthansa canceled flights to the capital, Kyiv, and to Odesa, a Black Sea port that could be a key target in an invasion.

NATO’s liaison office in Kyiv said it was relocating staff to Brussels and to the western Ukraine city of Lviv.

“They are uncoiling and are now poised to strike, ” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday of Russia’s readiness to launch an attack.

U.S. President Joe Biden said late Friday that based on the latest American intelligence, he was now “convinced” that Putin has decided to invade Ukraine in coming days and assault the capital.

A U.S. military official said an estimated 40% to 50% of those ground forces have moved into attack positions closer to the border. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal U.S. assessments, said the change has been underway for about a week and does not necessarily mean Putin has settled on an invasion.

Lines of communication between Moscow and the West remain open: the American and Russian defense chiefs spoke Friday. French President Emmanuel Macron scheduled a phone call with Putin on Sunday. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed to meet next week.

Immediate worries focused on eastern Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces have been fighting the pro-Russia rebels since 2014 in a conflict that has killed some 14,000 people.

Ukraine and the separatist leaders traded accusations of escalation. Russia on Saturday said at least two shells fired from a government-held part of eastern Ukraine landed across the border, but Ukraine’s foreign minister dismissed that claim as “a fake statement.”

Top Ukrainian military officials came under a shelling attack during a tour of the front of the nearly eight-year separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine. The officials fled to a bomb shelter before hustling from the area, according to an Associated Press journalist who was on the tour.

Elsewhere on the front lines, Ukrainian soldiers said they were under orders not to return fire. Zahar Leshushun, peering into the distance with a periscope, had followed the news all day from a trench where he is posted near the town of Zolote.

“Right now, we don’t respond to their fire because …” the soldier started to explain before being interrupted by the sound of an incoming shell. “Oh! They are shooting at us now. They are aiming at the command post.”

Sporadic violence has broken out for years along the line separating Ukrainian forces from the Russia-backed separatists, but the spike seen in recent days is orders of magnitude higher than anything recently recorded by international monitors: nearly 1,500 explosions recorded in 24 hours.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU’s Executive Commission, said Russian access to financial markets and high-tech goods would be sharply limited under Western sanctions being prepared in case of a Russian attack.

“The Kremlin’s dangerous thinking, which comes straight out of a dark past, may cost Russia a prosperous future,” von der Leyen said.

Denis Pushilin, the head of the pro-Russia separatist government in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, cited an “immediate threat of aggression” from Ukrainian forces in his announcement of a call to arms. Ukrainian officials vehemently denied having plans to take rebel-controlled areas by force.

“I appeal to all the men in the republic who can hold weapons to defend their families, their children, wives, mothers,” Pushilin said. ”Together we will achieve the coveted victory that we all need.”

A similar statement followed from his counterpart in the Luhansk region. On Friday, the rebels began evacuating civilians to Russia with an announcement that appeared to be part of their and Moscow’s efforts to paint Ukraine as the aggressor.

Metadata from two videos posted by the separatists announcing the evacuation of civilians to Russia show that the files were created two days ago, the AP confirmed. U.S. authorities have alleged that the Kremlin’s effort to come up with an invasion pretext could include staged, prerecorded videos.

Ukraine’s military said two of its soldiers died in firing from the separatist side on Saturday.

Authorities in Russia’s Rostov region, which borders eastern Ukraine, declared a state of emergency because of the influx of evacuees. Media reports on Saturday described chaos at some of the camps assigned to accommodate them. The reports said there were long lines of buses and hundreds of people waiting in the cold for hours on end to be housed without access to food or bathrooms.

Putin ordered the Russian government to offer 10,000 rubles (about $130) to each evacuee, an amount equivalent to about half of an average monthly salary in eastern Ukraine.

The separatist regions of Ukraine, like much of the country’s east, are majority Russian speaking, and Putin on Tuesday repeated allegations of a “genocide” there in explaining the need to protect them.

One of the evacuees, a Donetsk resident who identified himself only as Vyacheslav, blamed Ukraine’s government for his plight.

“Let them calm down,” he said. “It’s our fault we don’t want to speak Ukrainian, is that it?”

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Jim Heintz reported from Moscow. Mstyslav Chernov in Zolote, Ukraine, Geir Moulson in Berlin, Aamer Madhani in Munich, Robert Burns and Darlene Superville in Washington, Liudas Dapkus in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv contributed to this story.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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Malawi finds Africa’s first wild polio case in five years

 Malawi has declared a wild polio outbreak after a case was identified in a three-year-old girl – the first of its kind in Africa for more than five years.

The continent was declared free of all forms of wild polio in 2020.

The Malawian authorities are now working to contain any possible spread including by boosting immunization.

Wild polio remains endemic in only two countries in the world – Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The strain that was identified in Malawi was linked to one found in Pakistan, but it is not clear how or when it arrived in the southern African country.

The case was confirmed after tests were carried out on samples from the infected child who was suffering from paralysis, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

Polio usually affects children under five, sometimes leading to irreversible paralysis. Death can occur when breathing muscles are affected.

Twenty-five years ago thousands of children in Africa were paralysed by the virus. But following a mass vaccination campaign across the continent 95% of the population has been immunised.

There is no cure but the polio vaccine protects children for life.

As the case came from Pakistan, it does not affect the continent’s wild poliovirus-free status, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

Wild polio is caught from the environment, but there is another type of polio linked to the oral vaccine (which contains live, weakened virus) that is equally worrying.

It can linger in the gut, mutate and spread in areas where few people are vaccinated. There have been outbreaks of this form of polio in more than 20 African countries in recent years.

But an injectable form of the vaccine is now used, containing dead virus, which does not lead to polio cases.

Setback for the continent

The first case in Africa for five years is devastating for this young girl who faces a lifetime of paralysis. It is also a setback for a continent that thought it had seen the back of wild polio.

The size of the outbreak is unclear. Only one case has been reported, but paralysis occurs in less than one in 200 polio infections. The immediate goal will be to ensure Malawi does not suffer a large outbreak.

Polio has been one of the most feared diseases for much of human history. But every case is preventable through vaccination. A remarkable global immunisation campaign had pushed the virus back to just Pakistan and Afghanistan.

We are so close to eliminating polio from the world and seeing an end to the tragedy this virus can cause, but the final step has proven the hardest to take.

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Mali orders French military exit ‘without delay’

 

The military junta in Mali has ordered France to withdraw its troops from the country “without delay”.

An army spokesman, Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga, said France had violated military accords between Paris and Bamako when it announced on Thursday it would redeploy its forces to Niger.

President Emmanuel Macron said the withdrawal would take four to six months, but Mali said that it should happen immediately, under the supervision of their forces.

Relations between France and Mali – a former French colony – deteriorated after the military junta in Bamako reneged on an agreement to hold elections this month.

About 5,000 French soldiers have been in Mali engaged in a multi-nation counter-insurgency operation against Islamist militants.

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Peace envoys taken hostage in DR Congo

An attempt to persuade a rebel militia in eastern Democratic Republic Congo to lay down its arms has ended with three peace envoys – all former warlords – being taken hostage.

President Félix Tshisekedi sent Thomas Lubanga, Germain Katanga and Floribert Ndjabu to negotiate with Codeco militiamen who have been accused of multiple atrocities in recent months.

But a spokesman for the group told the French news agency that the Congolese army fired shells during the meeting, and the envoys had been seized. Attempts to reach them by phone have failed.

Codeco claims to represent the interests of the Lendu ethnic group in the fighting that has bedevilled eastern DR Congo for many years.

Lubanga and Katanga served prison sentences of 14 years and 12 years respectively after the International Criminal Court (ICC) found them guilty of committing war crimes in eastern DR Congo

Ndjabu was jailed for 15 years over the killing of nine UN peacekeepers.

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Zambian newspaper’s liquidation declared illegal

The Supreme Court in Zambia has declared the liquidation of the influential privately owned newspaper, The Post, illegal.

In a move that was widely viewed to have been political, the newspaper was liquidated in 2016 for alleged failure to pay its debts and taxes – something the publication always disputed.

The Patriotic Front (PF) was in power at the time.

In a landmark ruling on Thursday in Lusaka, the Supreme Court labelled the liquidation process a “faux”.

Chief Justice Mumba Malila, who headed the panel of judges, ordered the process to be re-started in compliance with the law.

The Supreme Court also ordered the newspaper’s liquidator Lewis Mosho to be part of to the new proceedings and be made to account, even though he may have finished selling the assets of the defunct publication.

“We note that much time has passed since the purported liquidation. We do not believe, however, that such passage of the time has sanitized the wrongful manner in which the liquidation was conducted,” the stinging 55-page judgement said.

“For the avoidance of doubt, we hold that the actions of the liquidator – prior to and post the purported liquidation of the Post Newspaper – are of no legal effect whatsoever,” it added.

The newspaper was critical of the PF and then-President Edgar Lungu, who lost power to opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema in elections last year.

Many Zambians on social media have celebrated the judgement.

Six African nations to get mRNA vaccine technology

The World Health Organization has announced that six African countries will be given the revolutionary mRNA technology to set up their own vaccine production centres – helping the continent acquire self-reliance against the Covid pandemic.

Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia will get the technology used in the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna jabs developed in Europe.

The Senegalese president said the aim was to have 60% of vaccines administered in Africa produced in Africa as well.

In the future, the new African vaccine hub might also produce jabs for diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV.

A ceremony marking the mRNA technology transfer will be held later in Brussels at a summit between the European Union and the African Union.

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