Замовники оцінюють показники підтримки як ознаку боротьби «між суверенізованим підходом щодо посилення безпеки і вірою в колективну оборону»
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Yaounde, Cameroon — Officials in Sub-Saharan Africa countries have agreed it is important to reduce over-dependence on imported fish and seafood from North Africa and the European Union and instead they should strive to cultivate fish-farming, which will create jobs for unemployed youth. The officials, meeting in Cameroon, said their goal is to invest some of what they collectively spend on importing fish each year, and put that funding into developing local fish farms. They hope to re-direct to local fish farmers a large amount of the $7 billion spent annually on importing seafood.
Fish farmer Tanyi Hubert demonstrates how every day he catches and sells at least 10 kilograms of fresh fish from his pond in Nkolbisson, a neighborhood in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde.
He told government officials from 12 African countries, who were in Cameroon on Monday, that he makes at least $40 each day since he started selling fish one year ago from his riverside fish pond, in which he farms fish.
Hubert said he is one of several hundred youths the government of Cameroon trained, and provided financial assistance of about $4,000 each, to begin a fish farming business.
Eta Collins Ayuk is the director of the Limbe National Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture created by the government of Cameroon to train fish farmers. He said several hundred unemployed Cameroonians who have received training in fish farming are today supplying fish to local markets and raising enough money to take care of their families.
“The catch we get from the wild is rapidly declining and the only way to ensure fish and fish products availability for local consumption should be through the farming of fish, which is aquaculture. We train people to create jobs. We don’t train people to go and search for employment,” said Collins.
Eta said efficient local fish farming will reduce the large amounts of money Cameroon spends each year on importing fish from North Africa and Europe.
The government of this central African country says it has spent about $200 million in 2024, to import 60% of the 550,000 tons of fish and seafood it needs this year to feed its 30 million civilians.
Officials and fish farmers from Sub-Saharan African countries meeting in Yaounde on Monday said Africa alone accounts for close to 13% of the world’s total fish imports.
The continent spends close to $7 billion to import fish and seafood from Europe and North African countries, including Morocco, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, officials said.
Olodayo Ganiyu, chief executive officer of Aquapet Ventures, a Nigerian company that promotes local fish farming, said it is unfortunate that, despite its huge potential of abundant natural resources including oceans, rivers, lakes, waterways and coasts, Africa still spends huge sums of money to import fish.
“We [Nigeria] import thousands of tons of fish every year, that cost us $1.2 billion. Now the government of my country is encouraging so many people to come into fish farming. A time will come in Nigeria when you will not see any imported fish again. Many people are now encouraged to invest more in aquaculture so that the scarce dollars used in importation of frozen fish into the country will be channeled into health, education and other infrastructure,” he said.
Olodayo said participants at the Yaounde meeting this week agreed to try to guide their countries to soon invest about 60% of the money they normally use to import fish, to instead pursue local fish farming development and production. The plan aims to create jobs for African youths who, due to widespread poverty and joblessness, are leaving their countries to seek work in Europe.
The participants said Africa has over 30,000 kilometers of untapped coastline to gradually expand the fishing industry, which has the potential to drive economic growth, ensuring food security and creating jobs.
Cameroon’s livestock minister, who goes by only one name, Taiga, said the African Continental Free Trade Area, alongside global initiatives, has prepared a blueprint for Africa to use its vast fishing resources to fight hunger and propel development.
Taiga said Cameroon and Sub-Saharan countries will succeed to stop the importation of fish and seafood from North Africa and Europe, just as they succeeded to stop the importation of frozen chicken and pork from developed countries. He said the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development is presently assisting African countries to produce fish locally and reduce dependence on imports.
Taiga spoke on Cameroon state TV. He said African nations are fighting to stop illegal fishing on their coastal waters but did not say how.
The United Nations reports that Africa this year accounted for 13.1 million tons of fisheries and aquaculture production, which is six percent of the world’s annual total. At the conference Monday, officials said they hope that by 2026, some 60% of money they use to import fish will be invested in local production.
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday said it transferred the $20 billion U.S. portion of a $50 billion G7 loan for Ukraine to a World Bank intermediary fund for economic and financial aid.
The Treasury Department said the disbursement makes good on its October commitment to match the European Union’s commitment to provide $20 billion in aid backed by frozen Russian sovereign assets alongside smaller loans from Britain, Canada and Japan to help the Eastern European nation fight Russia’s invasion.
The disbursement prior to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration in January is aimed at protecting the funds from being clawed back by his administration. Trump has complained that the United States is providing too much aid to Ukraine and said he will end the war quickly, without specifying how.
The $50 billion in credit for 30 years will be serviced with the interest proceeds from some $300 billion in frozen Russian sovereign assets that have been immobilized since Russia invaded in February 2022. The Group of Seven democracies have been discussing the plan for months and agreed on terms in October, prior to Trump’s election.
President Joe Biden’s administration initially sought to split the $20 billion loan in half, with $10 billion to be used for military aid and $10 billion for economic aid, but the military portion would have required approval by Congress, a task made more difficult by Republicans’ sweeping election victory. With Tuesday’s transfer, the full amount will be devoted to nonmilitary purposes.
The Treasury said the funds were transferred to a new World Bank fund called the Facilitation of Resources to Invest in Strengthening Ukraine Financial Intermediary Fund. The global lender’s board approved the creation of the fund in October with only one country, Russia, objecting.
The bank, whose charter prevents it from handling any military aid, has run a similar humanitarian and economic intermediary fund for Afghanistan.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen personally oversaw staff executing the wire transfer of the $20 billion to the World Bank fund, a department official said.
“These funds — paid for by the windfall proceeds earned from Russia’s own immobilized assets — will provide Ukraine a critical infusion of support as it defends its country against an unprovoked war of aggression,” Yellen said in a statement.
“The $50 billion collectively being provided by the G7 through this initiative will help ensure Ukraine has the resources it needs to sustain emergency services, hospitals and other foundations of its brave resistance,” she said.
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Доля 21 людини залишається невідомою – вони вважаються зниклими безвісти
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«На жаль, збільшилась кількість загиблих внаслідок ворожого удару. Росіяни вбили 4 людей», заявив Федоров
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MALIBU, CALIFORNIA — Thousands of Southern California residents were under evacuation orders and warnings Tuesday as firefighters battled a wind-driven wildfire in Malibu that burned near seaside mansions and Pepperdine University, where students sheltering at the school’s library watched as the blaze intensified and the sky turned deep red.
A “minimal number” of homes burned, but the exact number wasn’t immediately known, Los Angeles County Fire Department Chief Anthony Marrone said. More than 8,100 homes and other structures were under threat, including more than 2,000 where residents have been ordered to evacuate. Some 6,000 more people were warned to be prepared to evacuate at a moment’s notice.
Ryan Song, a resident assistant at Pepperdine University, said he first noticed the power went out at his dorm late Monday and then looked out the window and saw a huge pink glow.
“I thought, ‘This is too bright,’ and it got bigger and bigger,” the 20-year-old junior said. “I immediately went outside and saw that it was a real fire.”
Song and the other resident assistants went door to door, evacuating students. Most were calm and followed instructions, he said; a few who were scared rushed to their cars to get off campus.
Song spent the next few hours racing back and forth in the dark between his dorm and the main campus to ensure no one was left behind as fire raged down a mountain, he said.
“It felt really close,” he said, adding he was probably less than a mile away. “Seeing the fire rampaging down the hill is obviously scary for students, but I felt like our staff was prepared.”
The university later said the worst of the fire had pushed past campus.
It was not immediately known how the blaze, named the Franklin Fire, started. County officials estimated that more than 9 square kilometers of trees and dry brush had burned. There was no containment.
The fire burned amid dangerous conditions because of notorious Santa Ana winds expected to last into Wednesday.
Marrone said at least a thousand firefighters would be scrambling to get a handle on the blaze before 2 p.m., when winds were expected to regain strength. “Time is of the essence for us to grab ahold of the fire and start getting some containment,” the chief said at a morning news conference.
The fire erupted shortly before 11 p.m. Tuesday and swiftly moved south, jumping over the famous Pacific Coast Highway and extending all the way to the ocean, where large homes line the beach and inland canyons are notoriously fire prone. At one point, it threatened the historic Malibu Pier, but the structure was protected and is intact, officials said.
Pepperdine canceled classes and finals for the day and there was a shelter-in-place order on campus. Helicopters dropped water collected from lakes in the school’s Alumni Park onto the flames.
Firefighters with flashlights and hoses protected nearby homes overnight, ABC 7 reported. As the sun came up Tuesday, smoke billowed over the campus and the adjacent mountains that plunge toward the coast.
North to northeast winds were forecast to increase to 48 to 64 kph with gusts up to 105 kph expected, the National Weather Service’s office for Los Angeles posted on social media platform X.
Power to about 40,000 customers had been shut off by Monday night, including 11,000 in Los Angeles County, as Southern California Edison worked to mitigate the impacts of the Santa Ana winds, whose strong gusts can damage electrical equipment and spark wildfires. Email and phone messages were left with Edison inquiring whether electricity had been turned off in Malibu before the fire started.
The Woolsey Fire that roared through Malibu in 2018, killing three people and destroying 1,600 homes, was sparked by Edison equipment.
Santa Anas are dry, warm and gusty northeast winds that blow from the interior of Southern California toward the coast and offshore. They typically occur during the fall months and continue through winter and into early spring.
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WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors sidestepped some Justice Department rules when they seized the phone records of reporters as part of media leak investigations during the Trump administration, according to a new watchdog report being released as the aggressive practice of hunting for journalists’ sources could again be resurrected.
The report Tuesday from the Justice Department inspector general’s office also found that some congressional staffers had their records obtained by prosecutors by sheer virtue of the fact that they had accessed classified information despite that being part of their job responsibilities.
Though the report chronicles Justice Department actions from several years ago, the issue has new resonance as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for FBI director, Kash Patel, has spoken of his desire to “come after” members of the media “who lied about American citizens” and his belief that the federal government should be rid of “conspirators” against Trump.
Those comments raise the possibility that the Justice Department under new leadership — Trump has picked former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi to serve as his attorney general — could undo a three-year-old policy that, with limited exceptions, prohibits prosecutors from secretly seizing reporters’ phone records during investigations into leaks of sensitive information.
The action from Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2021 followed an uproar over revelations that the Justice Department during the Trump administration had obtained records belonging to journalists at The Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times as part of investigations into who had disclosed government secrets related to the investigation into Russian election interference and other national security matters.
The inspector general found that the Justice Department didn’t follow certain department rules that had been implemented years earlier when seeking reporters’ records in 2020, including having a News Media Review Committee review the request, according to the report. The committee is meant to ensure that officials other than prosecutors, including the head of the department’s office of public affairs, are able to weigh in on such efforts.
Then-Attorney General William Barr, who authorized obtaining the records from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post, did not expressly sign off on the use of non-disclosure agreements that were sought — as was required under department policy, according to the report.
The Justice Department also seized data from the accounts of some Democratic members of Congress over leaks related to the Russia investigation, and sought records through Apple from then-White House counsel Don McGahn.
The department went after records of two members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers, according to the report. The inspector general found no evidence of “retaliatory or political motivation by the career prosecutors” who initiated the requests. The staffers were considered suspects in most cases merely because of the close proximity between the time they accessed classified material as part of their job responsibilities and the publication of news articles containing secret information, according to the report.
Garland’s new policy laid out several scenarios under which the Justice Department still could obtain reporters’ records, including if the reporters are suspected of working for agents of a foreign power or terrorist organizations, if they are under investigation for unrelated activities or if they obtained their information through criminal methods like breaking and entering.
The Justice Department during both Democratic and Republican leadership has struggled with how to balance its determination to protect press freedom and its determination to safeguard national security secrets.
President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, Eric Holder, announced revised guidelines for leak investigations after an outcry over actions seen as aggressively intrusive into press freedom, including the secret seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors.
And Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, announced in 2017 a leak crackdown following a series of disclosures during the investigation into Russian election interference.
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Через атаку РФ загинули троє людей
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«Ліквідація наслідків бойових дій на системі газорозподілу та відновлення газопостачання абонентам – неможливі»
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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to enforce mass deportations has raised alarm bells for immigrants in Florida. VOA Spanish’s José Pernalete says activists and field workers warn that crops could be affected if personnel shortages arise.
See the full story here.
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U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday presided over his final White House Tribal Nations Summit by reaching into the nation’s dark past and establishing a national monument to honor the suffering of thousands of Native children and their families in federal boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries. VOA White House correspondent Anita Powell reports from Washington.
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The fall of Damascus has raised concerns about what’s next for U.S. troops based in the war-torn country, who have been working with allies to keep Islamic State from resurging. VOA’s Carla Babb has more from the Pentagon.
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WASHINGTON — The brazen killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO was likely carried out with a ghost gun, one of the nearly untraceable weapons that can be made a home, police said Monday.
A ghost gun is a firearm without a serial number, and police believe the one used in last week’s shooting of Brian Thompson may have been made with a 3D printer. It was capable of firing 9 mm rounds. The man arrested in the crime, Luigi Mangione, also had a sound suppressor, or silencer, police said.
Ghost guns have increasingly turned up at crime scenes around the U.S. in recent years.
Here’s a look at the weapons and efforts to regulate them:
What are ghost guns?
The firearms are privately made and have no serial numbers.
Generally, firearms manufactured by licensed companies must have serial numbers — usually displayed on the frame of the gun — that allow officials to trace the gun back to the manufacturer, the firearms dealer and original purchaser.
Ghost guns, however, are made of parts that the owner can assemble together. The critical component in building an untraceable gun is what is known as the lower receiver. Some are sold in do-it-yourself kits, and the receivers are typically made from metal or polymer. They include semiautomatic handguns and rifles.
Are they legal?
It is legal in the U.S. to build a firearm for personal use. Until about two years ago, ghost gun kits were available online that allowed people to assemble the weapons at home without background checks or age verification.
As police found more ghost guns at crime scenes, the Biden administration moved to add age requirements and background checks in 2022.
Buying one now is more like purchasing a regular gun at a gun shop.
The number of ghost guns has since flattened out or declined in several major cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Baltimore, according to court documents.
But gun groups have challenged the regulation in court. The Supreme Court heard a case in October and seemed likely to uphold the regulation. It hasn’t yet handed down a ruling.
Where else have ghost guns been used?
The number of ghost guns recovered by law enforcement increased from 4,000 in 2018 to nearly 20,000 in 2021, according to Justice Department data. However, traditional guns are still used far more often in crimes.
Ghost guns really popped into the public consciousness in 2013 when John Zawahri opened fire on the campus of Santa Monica College in California, killing six people, including his father and brother. Zawahri, who was later shot and killed by police, had assembled an AR-15-style weapon after failing a background check at a gun dealer.
A gunman who killed his wife and four others in Northern California in 2017 built his own weapon to skirt a court order prohibiting him from owning firearms. In 2019, a teenager used a homemade handgun to fatally shoot two classmates and wound three others at a school in suburban Los Angeles.
A mass shooting carried out with an AR-15-style ghost gun left five people dead in Philadelphia in 2023. A ghost gun was also used in a shooting that critically wounded two kindergartners at a tiny religious school in Northern California last week, police said.
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Since winning the election, President-elect Donald Trump has begun a complex transition process involving a carefully selected team to ensure an orderly handover. Members of this group are tasked with assisting in making key appointments, identifying candidates for top Cabinet and federal agency positions and defining public policy priorities.
See the full story here.
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The Biden administration is shoring up its CHIPS Act funding agreements before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. Trump has previously disparaged the CHIPS Act and called for higher tariffs instead of subsidies to incentivize companies to build semiconductor factories. What would be the future of TSMC under the Trump administration?
See the full story here.
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BEIJING — China on Monday said it has launched an investigation into U.S. chip maker Nvidia over suspected violations of the country’s anti-monopoly law, in a move that will likely be seen as a retaliatory move against Washington’s recent chip curbs.
The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said Nvidia is also suspected of violating commitments it made during its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies Ltd, according to terms outlined in the regulator’s 2020 conditional approval of that deal.
It did not elaborate on how Nvidia might have violated China’s anti-monopoly laws.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company’s shares fell 2.2% in premarket trading after the Chinese regulator’s announcement.
The investigation comes after the U.S. last week launched its third crackdown in three years on China’s semiconductor industry, which saw Washington curb exports to 140 companies, including chip equipment makers.
Nvidia has enjoyed booming demand from China, though this has been dented over the past year by U.S. efforts to stop China from acquiring the world’s most advanced chips.
Before the U.S. curbs, Nvidia dominated China’s AI chip market with more than 90 per cent share. However, it currently faces increasing competition from domestic rivals, chief among them being Huawei.
When the U.S. firm made a $6.9 billion bid to acquire Israeli chip designer Mellanox Technologies in 2019 there were concerns that China could block the deal due to U.S.-China trade frictions.
Beijing however later approved the deal in 2020 with multiple conditions for Nvidia and the merged entity’s China operations, including prohibitions on forced product bundling, unreasonable trading terms, purchase restrictions, and discriminatory treatment of customers who buy products separately.
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TikTok asked a federal appeals court on Monday to bar the Biden administration from enforcing a law that could lead to a ban on the popular platform until the Supreme Court reviews its challenge to the statue.
The legal filing was made after a panel of three judges on the same court sided with the government last week and ruled that the law, which requires TikTok to divest from its China-based parent company or face a ban as soon as next month, was constitutional.
If the law is not overturned, both TikTok and its parent ByteDance, which is also a plaintiff in the case, have claimed that the popular app will shut down by Jan. 19, 2025. TikTok has more than 170 million American users.
“Before that happens, the Supreme Court should have an opportunity, as the only court with appellate jurisdiction over this action, to decide whether to review this exceptionally important case,” attorneys for the two companies wrote in the legal filing on Monday.
It’s not clear if the Supreme Court will take up the case.
President-elect Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok the last time he was in the White House, has said he is now against such action.
In their legal filing, the two companies pointed to the political realities, saying that an injunction would provide a “modest delay” that would give “the incoming Administration time to determine its position — which could moot both the impending harms and the need for Supreme Court review.”
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