NEWS OF THE DAY
From Around the World
Africa threat: Even as Islamic State group fighters flee the Middle East and cause fear across Africa’s Sahel region, it is al Qaeda that poses the more serious long-term threat, the U.S. military’s special operations commander in Africa said Friday. Maj. Gen. Marcus Hicks pointed to last month’s deadly attack on the army headquarters and heavily guarded French Embassy in Burkina Faso that was claimed by an al Qaeda-linked group in neighboring Mali. Although close to 1,000 members of U.S. special forces are in Africa and a new G5 Sahel multinational force is taking aim at fighters with shifting alliances to the Islamic State and al Qaeda, reversing the worsening security situation “will be frustratingly, unsatisfyingly slow,” Hicks said.
Congo boycott: Congo on Friday took the extraordinary step of boycotting an international conference that reaped hundreds of millions of dollars to help its people, saying the Central African country’s humanitarian crisis has been exaggerated. It later said some aid groups that accept the money would have their activities banned. The rare and possibly unprecedented snub of the U.N.-led pledging conference by President Joseph Kabila’s government came amid differing views about the needs of a sprawling country where millions are displaced and hungry during a brewing political crisis. Congo’s government has insisted the conference hurts the country’s image, and has downplayed the extent of the widespread hunger and displacement.
Kidnapped journalists: Ecuador President Lenin Moreno confirmed the deaths of three journalists kidnapped along the country’s conflictive border with Colombia. Moreno spoke Friday after a 12-hour deadline ended with the captors failing to meet his demands to demonstrate the hostages were still alive or face a military strike. He said the government has obtained new information that confirmed the journalists were killed. The three employees of El Comercio newspaper were taken hostage three weeks ago by a holdout faction of the demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia while investigating a rise in drugfueled violence along Ecuador’s northern border.
Yellow fever outbreak: Brazil’s Health Ministry says its yellow fever vaccination campaign is significantly short of its goal and that 10 million people still need to be immunized. In January, the ministry launched a campaign to vaccinate more than 23 million people in three states affected by the largest outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease in decades. The ministry had previously said that the campaign had reached 76 percent of the targeted population. But on Thursday, it significantly revised down that figure. It said that Bahia state had reached a 55-percent vaccination rate, Sao Paulo a 52-percent rate and Rio de Janeiro just 41 percent. In the current outbreak, 1,127 people have been infected. Of those, 331 have died. Gorilla birthday: Fatou the gorilla, believed to be one of the world’s oldest, is celebrating her 61st birthday at Berlin’s zoo — nearly six decades after she found her way to Germany from a French bar. Zookeepers on Friday presented Fatou a rice cake decorated with the number 61 in fruit. The zoo says she shares the title of world’s oldest female gorilla with Trudy, a gorilla at the zoo in Little Rock, Ark. She isn’t the oldest inhabitant of the zoo, however. Ingo the flamingo, who arrived there in 1948, has that honor.