US warns Westerners may be targeted in Uganda's capital

The US embassy in Uganda has warned that Westerners - including Americans - may be targeted for "terrorist" attacks in the capital Kampala.

It said it had "received information of possible threats" at city locations where Western nationals gather.

Uganda's government said the US had warned of a possible suicide bomber trying to enter the country.

Uganda was under threat because its troops were fighting militant Islamists in Somalia, a spokesman added.

In 2010, Somalia's al-Shabab militants carried out a suicide bombing in Kampala, killing 76 people as they watched the football World Cup final.

The US embassy said an attack "may take place soon".

Some planned events had been cancelled at Kampala hotels, it added.

Border controls have been tightened to stop the suspected suicide bomber and his accomplices from crossing into Uganda, government spokesman Ofwono Opondo told the BBC.

Uganda is a key contributor to the African Union mission fighting al-Shabab inside Somalia.

Last September, Uganda was stripped of the right to host an international cricket tournament because of security concerns.

Ex-Liberia President Charles Taylor to stay in UK prison

Ex-Liberian President Charles Taylor has been ordered to serve the rest of his jail term in the UK, after losing a request to be transferred to Rwanda.

He had argued that he was being denied his rights to a family life, because his wife and children had not been granted UK visas.

The judges rejected this argument, saying they had not properly applied.

A UN-backed court convicted him of war crimes over his support for rebels who committed atrocities in Sierra Leone.

As well as complaining about not being able to see his family, Taylor argued he was being held "effectively in isolation" because he was "too much of a target and too vulnerable" to be kept with other inmates of the Frankland prison in the northern English city of Durham.

He further said he wanted to be on the African continent, where people would share a "cultural affinity" with him.

However, the court found that the rejection of his wife's visa was "due purely to his wife's failure to comply with the United Kingdom visa requirements and her ignoring the assistance offered to her [by the registrar's office] to re-apply".

It further stressed that prisoners did not have the right to choose their place of incarceration.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone trial was held at The Hague on the agreement that he was jailed elsewhere.

The overseas venue for the court case was chosen in case the trial sparked renewed unrest in West Africa.

An act of parliament was passed to allow for Taylor to serve his sentence in the UK, at the cost of the British government, following his conviction.

Taylor was sentenced in 2012 and arrived in the UK last October, having unsuccessfully challenged the decision to be detained there.

Ebola outbreak 'over by August', UN suggests

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa will be over by August, the head of the UN Ebola mission has told the BBC.

Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed admitted the UN had made mistakes in handling the crisis early on, sometimes acting "arrogantly".

A year after the outbreak was officially declared, the virus has killed more than 10,000 people.

The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres says a "global coalition of inaction" led to tragic consequences.

Looking back over the year, the charity suggests its early calls for help were ignored by local governments and the World Health Organization.

Most deaths occurred in the worst-affected countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The head of the UN Ebola response mission told the BBC, when the virus first struck, "there was probably a lack of knowledge and there was a certain degree of arrogance, but I think we are learning lessons.

"We have been running away from giving any specific date, but I am pretty sure myself that it will be gone by the summer."

'Turned away'

The first person to succumb to the disease during this outbreak is thought to have been a toddler in a remote part of Guinea. He died in December 2013.

Three months later the WHO officially announced an outbreak. And it was a further five months before the organisation declared it a public health emergency of international concern. At this point more than 1,000 people had lost their lives.

Henry Gray, MSF emergency coordinator, told the BBC: "We were well aware this was something different in March and April last year and we did try to bring this to the attention of the WHO but also governments within the countries affected.

"And of course it was frustrating that we weren't heard and that has probably led to the scale of the epidemic we see today."

The charity says it should also have used more of its own resources earlier in the crisis.

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Ebola deaths

Figures up to 18 March 2015

10,251

Deaths - probable, confirmed and suspected

(Includes one in the US and six in Mali)

• 4,283 Liberia
• 3,712 Sierra Leone
• 2,241 Guinea
• 8 Nigeria

Source: WHO

Getty

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The analysis, which includes dozens of interviews with MSF staff, says by the end of August 2014 treatment centres in Liberia where overwhelmed.

In January 2015 at a rare emergency meeting, the WHO admitted it was too late to respond.

Dr Margaret Chan, director general, said: "The world, including WHO, was too slow to see what was unfolding before us."

Continued threat

But the organisation says it made it clear from the start "this was a very serious situation".

There are now proposals to build-up a rapid response team to react more swiftly to future threats.

Case numbers are falling but MSF says the outbreak is not yet over. Overall cases have not declined significantly since January, the charity warns.

Liberia recorded its first case in more than two weeks on Friday, dashing hopes the country would soon be declared virus-free.

In Guinea, cases are rising again after a dip at the beginning of the year.

Some patients in Sierra Leone are are not on lists of known Ebola contacts, suggesting chains of spread are going undetected.

Dr Derek Gatherer, at Lancaster University, said: "In retrospect, it is now apparent that the delay from December to March was crucial in the dissemination of the virus to several locations in eastern Guinea and then onto the capital, Conakry, which remains one of the few areas with active transmission."

But until zero cases are recorded in all three worst-affected countries for a period of at least six weeks, the outbreak will not be officially declared over.

South Africa: Eskom - a Wake-Up Call to Government and Unions

Deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa persists in referring to the mess that is Eskom as "a challenge". He did so in his Q&A session in parliament last week. But the situation at Eskom is perhaps the greatest crisis ever to face our fragile, non-racist democracy, especially given the global economic climate.

Should (as now seems likely) more widespread load shedding and even national blackouts occur, commerce and industry will be sorely hit. And while householders can make do with candles for light and gas or even wood for cooking, mines, factories and furnaces have no substitute: a dearth of power means a crippling blow to the economy.

Such a crippling blow would cause considerable collateral damage, with workers the major sufferers. Some national capital may also be hurt but, by and large, capital knows no boundaries and can - and will - flee to more energy secure climes, leaving behind an untold number of jobless people.

We have already seen jobs shed as a result of the erratic power supply. This was something raised last weekend in Durban by Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi. Because, although government would never use the term, the energy position is dire.

Complicating matters is the fact that critical local government elections are scheduled for next year. The last thing the governing party wants is to be held responsible for the Eskom debacle. Yet this is clearly where the major responsibility lies and continued denial will merely make matters worse.

However, Ramaphosa is correct in saying there is "light at the end of the tunnel". Except that it is a very long, and potentially very dark, tunnel. This means the situation is so serious that this is no time to play the blame game. Here is a wake-up call not only to government, but to the labour movement as the professed representatives of all sellers of labour.

But President Jacob Zuma has already laid the blame on apartheid, a justification also mentioned in passing by Ramaphosa this week. Their argument is that a major cause of the crisis is a massively successful roll-out of electricity to previously deprived households.

However, while there has certainly been a commendable roll-out, Eskom's figures reveal that this is only a fraction of the electricity demanded and consumed nationally. Mines and the industrial sector consume roughly 60 per cent.

These figures also reveal that residential users, no matter where they are, pay at least double what most of the industrial sector pays and, in some cases, three times as much. Audits undertaken by the power utility also reveal that the bulk of the billions of rand in unpaid electricity bills is owed by the business sector. In fact, in often opaque deals, some of the largest consumers of power have been provided with electricity at below cost.

These are all points taken up by the labour movement. However, cautions and alternative positions put forward since at least 1996 have gone unheeded. Take, for example, labour's warnings about gambling on developing a pebblebed modular nuclear reactor (PBMR), a technology already discarded by Germany. In 2008, the combined labour movement bewailed the fact that R15 billion had been wasted on this project.

It is time for the government to accept responsibility and be honest about the seriousness of the energy problem and the harsh measures that will be necessary to rectify it. This at a time when what has been labelled the "second industrial revolution" continues apace, shedding millions of jobs.

Not that government and the labour movement internationally should not have been aware of the consequences of what has also been called the "micro-chip revolution". In 1983, the Russian born, US Nobel economics laureate Wassily Leontief spelled it out very clearly. He noted that, just as the horse could never adjust to the invention of the tractor, so "the human worker will go the way of the horse".

This fact, along with having to deal with the immediate problem of Eskom and energy, highlights the need for the labour movement to hold government accountable and to put forward, proactively, new policies to retain or even to grow jobs. But this they can only do as truly independent bodies acting in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population who sell their labour in order to survive.

By remaining compromised by association - directly or indirectly - with employers, state or private, or acting as bureaucratic stepping tones to power and privilege for leaders, the labour movement will fail to hold government responsible or to provide any real hope and help for workers, both employed and unemployed.

Almost all mosques destroyed in Central African Republic unrest

Almost all of the 436 mosques in the Central African Republic have been destroyed by months of vicious fighting between Christians and Muslims, the US ambassador to the United Nations said on Tuesday, calling the devastation "kind of crazy, chilling."

Samantha Power spoke to reporters after a Security Council visit last week to the country. She expressed concern about an upcoming possible security vacuum as European Union and French forces pull out and a UN peacekeeping force is still not at full strength.

At least 5,000 people have been killed since Central African Republic exploded into unprecedented sectarian violence in December 2013. Nearly 1 million of the Texas-sized country's 4.5 million residents have been displaced. Many of those who have fled are Muslim.

Power said 417 of the country's mosques have been destroyed. She visited the one remaining Muslim neighborhood in the capital, Bangui, and described the residents as "a terrified population."

Some Muslim women, afraid of leaving the community while wearing their veils, are choosing to give birth in their homes instead of hospitals, the ambassador said.

UN peacekeepers, French forces and a European Union military operation have tried to calm the violence. But Power said the last of the EU force of about 750 troops left the Central African Republic over the weekend, shortly after the Security Council visit.
Nearly one million of Central African Republic's 4.5 million residents have been displaced. (Photo: Getty Images)

"That's a big dropoff in capability," she said. Meanwhile, the French forces have announced a "substantial drawdown" by the end of this year. France had sent 2,000 troops to its former colony.

The UN peacekeeping force remains at about 80 per cent of its planned strength of about 10,000, Power said. The UN secretary-general last month asked for more than 1,000 additional peacekeepers, and Power said the council is "very favorably disposed" to the request.
She said the combined forces have "averted a worst-case scenario," but the country's roving armed groups remain armed.

The ambassador called that a deep cause for concern and said disarmament is a "huge priority."

Africa: Simple Solutions Could Cut Non-Communicable Diseases

Simple policies such as taxing cigarettes could be a cost-effective way to largely meet the proposed global development target of slashing premature deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs), according to a study.

The report, published by think-tank the Copenhagen Consensus Center on 2 March, says that five prevention and treatment interventions "could avert 5 million premature deaths from NCDs in 2030, equivalent to a 28.5 per cent reduction in projected NCD mortality".

A target under Goal 3 of the proposed Sustainable Development Goals aims to reduce premature mortality from NCDs through prevention and treatment by a third by 2030.

To achieve this, the report urges governments in developing countries to do more to address growing health threats such as obesity, heart disease and lung cancer. Interventions could be made relatively cheaply, but must begin now to prevent the problem from snowballing, it says.

Rachel Nugent, a global health researcher at the University of Washington, United States, and the report's author, says poorer countries risk overburdening their health systems if NCDs are allowed to expand. The report suggests that governments should encourage people to reduce the amount of salt they eat, introduce a tobacco tax and ensure access to multi-drug treatment for heart disease.

"These are cost-effective interventions and policies that can be put in place in these countries," Nugent says. "The longer we wait, the more expensive it's going to be to deal with the problem."

The report found that 80 per cent of global deaths from NCDs occur in developing countries, and that the prevalence of these diseases is expected to rise by 27 per cent in Africa over the next decade.

While certain interventions such as a tobacco tax have proved successful in some countries, it has been harder to reduce the risk of NCDs through diet and lifestyle changes, the report warns. Nugent points out that public health education campaigns, although useful, may not be the best way to tackle NCDs.

"A lot of people aren't aware of what high blood pressure is, let alone where it comes from," she says. "It can take decades to change this. People, however, do respond to the prices of things, so there will be a quick response to tobacco taxes."

But Jared Odhiambo Owuor, a programme leader at the Nairobi-based African Institute for Health & Development's Consortium for NCD Prevention and Control in Sub-Saharan Africa, believes education programmes can be effective as long as they are targeted and culturally sensitive.

"In some African countries, there's the perception that a fat, married man is 'well-fed' and well taken care of. The wife is thus told she is doing a good job," Owuor explains. "These perceptions are rooted in culture and can be tackled with targeted education programmes."

The biggest hurdle to implementing these interventions is the weak health systems across developing countries, he says. While the report looks into the costs of delivering the suggested interventions, ranging from healthcare provision and drug research, it does not estimate how much it would cost to improve health systems.

"The heart of the issue is providing effective healthcare, and our health systems have always been underfunded," says Owuor.

In the 2001 Abuja Declaration, African Union member states pledged to allocate at least 15 per cent of their national budgets to public health by 2015. But the vast majority of African nations have yet to meet this commitment.