ADF

THE DAILY NATION, KENYA A new Kenya Air Force unit will operate behind enemy lines to ensure no Soldier is left on the battlefield, especially during the ongoing war against al-Shabaab in Somalia. The main objective of the team, unveiled in June 2016 by Defence Cabinet Secretary Raychelle Omamo, is to safely recover forces who have been captured, downed from an airplane, ejected from a fighter aircraft or inadvertently lost in enemy territory. The special unit hopes to gain capabilities modeled after the U.S. Navy’s Seal Team 6. The decision to establish the unit was made a priority after a Kenya…

REUTERS The United States donated jeeps, communications technology and small aircraft to Tunisia to help protect the border with Libya, where ISIS has gained ground and set up training camps. The North African country was also expecting to receive a number of attack aircraft, Defense Minister Farhat Horchani said, although he did not give details on who would supply them. Tunisia had already built a 200-kilometer barrier along the frontier to guard against militants since gunmen trained in Libya targeted tourists in attacks on a beach hotel and a Tunis museum in 2015. ISIS also launched a major assault on…

THE DAILY MONITOR, UGANDA Uganda will establish a new specialized mountain warfare force to secure the nation’s mountainous regions. President Yoweri Museveni made the announcement at Kyanjuki village in Kasese district at the foot of the Rwenzori Mountains in June 2016. He explained that the difficult terrain needs to be secured to promote tourism. “These places such as the Rwenzori Mountains are very beautiful, and we should cherish them and make them safe,” Museveni said. “Even non-Ugandans love them; that’s why you see them coming here every day and visiting to see them, and as a country, we earn from…

REUTERS In a renovated warehouse in Kinshasa, dozens of young Congolese workers wear headsets and sit in rows of identical orange cubicles, fielding phone calls in six languages. The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first call center gives a glimpse of how the country could follow a path already taken by the Philippines and India and offer jobs to a growing workforce. The Congo Call Center (CCC) handles queries from 8,500 people each day on everything from phone bills to spiritual anxiety and domestic abuse or sexual violence. Domestic clients include two large telecom providers, banks, the local operations of…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Morocco wants to rejoin the African Union, 32 years after quitting the bloc in protest of its decision to accept Western Sahara as a member, King Mohammed VI said in July 2016. “For a long time our friends have been asking us to return to them, so that Morocco can take up its natural place within its institutional family. The moment has now come,” the monarch said in a message to an AU summit in Kigali, Rwanda, the Moroccan Press Agency reported. Morocco quit the OAU in protest in 1984 when the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic was admitted…

MEDIA CLUB SOUTH AFRICA The story of Abdel Kader Haidara, a book collector and librarian from Timbuktu, Mali, reads more like a spy novel than an academic work. When extremists allied to al-Qaida occupied his city in April 2012, he began to fear for the content of libraries and depositories that housed thousands of ancient Arabic manuscripts. So he set up a meeting with his colleagues in the Timbuktu Library Association. “We need to take out the manuscripts from the big buildings and disperse them around the city to family houses,” he told them, as he recalled later in an…

VOICE OF AMERICA When Africans go on Twitter, they are increasingly talking politics. A study by Portland Communications, a London-based business, shows that nearly 10 percent of the most-popular African hashtags in 2015 were related to political issues and politicians. In the U.S. and Britain, only 2 percent of those conversations were about politics, the study shows. The top political hashtag in Africa was #Nigeriadecides during Nigeria’s presidential election in 2015. Another popular conversation was the strife in Burundi. “In the U.K., we were using Twitter a lot and we wanted to know how Africa was using it,” said Mae…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE The government of Cameroon is partnering with French energy giant EDF and the World Bank to fund a $1.2 billion hydroelectric plant, slated to cover up to one-third of the country’s electricity needs. Natchigal hydropower company has a 35-year lease to run the facility in the town of the same name, 65 kilometers from the capital, Yaoundé, CRTV radio of Cameroon reported. Construction on the 420-megawatt plant was scheduled to begin in October 2016. The plant is expected to begin producing power in 2021. EDF has a 40 percent stake in the venture, with the World Bank’s International…

REUTERS The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) has helped detect a type of star known as a white dwarf pulsar, the first discovery of its kind. The news has astronomers eager to use the largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere to unlock the galaxy’s secrets. Scientists believe neutron stars, objects about the size of the sun that shrink at the end of their lives, eventually produce black holes. These incredibly dense objects have been known for decades to produce pulsars, which emit regular radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation at rates up to 1,000 pulses per second. On a…

MEDIA CLUB SOUTH AFRICA A popular variety of handmade commercial paper has messy beginnings. John Matano’s Nampath Paper is one of 17 Kenyan companies that processes elephant dung to make high-quality paper. Matano’s paper is, according to the BBC, as good as paper made from traditional sources. Elephants digest only about 45 percent of their highly fibrous herbivorous diet. Undigested fiber passes straight through them, creating dung that can be easily processed into paper. Or as Matano explained, “An average elephant eats 250 kilograms of food each day. Out of that amount, about 50 kilograms of dung is produced, and…