World

BRAZZAVILLE — The African Union's health watchdog on Wednesday said it was close to securing almost one million mpox vaccine doses, urging manufacturers to share the vaccine-making technology to battle the disease.

Africa is on the front line of the fight against mpox, with the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring an international emergency earlier this month over the viral disease's spread.

"We are moving towards securing nearly a million doses," of mpox vaccines, Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) Director-General Jean Kaseya told a WHO regional meeting in Congo-Brazzaville.

Several countries have promised to send vaccines to African countries hit by outbreaks, with Spain alone pledging 500,000 doses.

Kaseya said 215,000 vaccine doses had already been "secured" from Danish manufacturer Bavarian Nordic, but urged it to share the know-how needed for the vaccines to be made locally.

"We told Bavarian Nordic that we need a transfer of technology towards African manufacturers," he said, adding that he believed mpox vaccines would be made in Africa "very soon".

Formerly known as monkeypox, mpox is a viral disease transmitted from animals to humans that can also be passed from human to human, causing fever, muscle pain and skin lesions.

Its resurgence and the detection in Central Africa of a new strain, dubbed Clade 1b, prompted the WHO to declare its highest international alert level on August 14.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, where the new strain was first detected, has borne the brunt of the epidemic with 90 percent of 2024's reported mpox cases, according to the WHO.

Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda have also been affected.

Kaseya said that there were 22,863 suspected cases and 622 deaths as of August 27 linked to the various mpox strains on the continent.

The director-general was reticent to give details about confirmed cases as "we still have countries with a testing rate of less than 30 percent and we still have countries facing a number of challenges in terms of quality and transport".

According to the WHO, Africa had 5,281 confirmed cases of mpox from the beginning of 2024 up till August 25.

KYIV, Ukraine — Russian bombardments on the eastern Ukraine region of Donetsk killed six people on Wednesday, the governor of the region said, as Moscow announced it had taken another village in the area.

The industrial region has suffered the worst fighting. The Kremlin claimed to have annexed it alongside three other territories in 2022. 

"In the morning the Russians killed four people and destroyed a house in Izmailivka," the regional official Vadym Filashkin said on social media. 

He added that two more people were killed in separate attacks near Chasiv Yar that damaged more than a dozen homes.

Russia's defence ministry announced on Wednesday that Russian forces had taken another settlement, some 20 kilometres from the logistics hub of Pokrovsk.

Regional authorities have recently ordered large-scale mandatory evacuations with Russian forces advancing towards Pokrovsk, once home to around 60,000 people.

Filashkin said that 2,718 people, including 392 children, had been evacuated from frontline areas on Tuesday.

He later said on state media that some 30,000 people remained in Pokrovsk and surrounding villages and that banks would shutter in the town by Sunday.

"This also applies to all other institutions that provide services to the public. So if people evacuate as soon as possible and save their lives, everything will be fine," he said.

An employee of a government services centre in Pokrovsk told AFP by phone that it was unclear whether the facility would remain open, as Russian forces approach.

"I can't tell you what will happen in the future -- in a day, in two days, next week," the employee said.

"Everything in our city is closing. Everything. No shops will be open. Nothing. Most of them are closing."

Kyiv urged residents of the region, which has been partially controlled by Russian proxy forces since 2014, to evacuate after the Kremlin invaded Ukraine.

NOUAKCHOTT — Mauritania and Spain have agreed to strengthen cooperation to combat people smuggling and promote legal migration, during a visit by Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, whose country is facing a surge of migrant arrivals.

The two countries expressed "their commitment to work together to promote safe, orderly and regular migration" and guarantee "the fair and humane treatment of migrants", in a joint declaration signed Tuesday evening.

During a meeting with Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Cheikh El Ghazouani, Sanchez said a key aim of the declaration was to combat human trafficking, Mauritania's national news agency reported.

Nearly every day, Spain's coastguard rescues a boat carrying dozens of African migrants towards the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa.

The Atlantic route is perilous due to the strong currents, with thousands of deaths and disappearances every year on overloaded, often unseaworthy boats.

Spain and Mauritania also signed a memorandum of understanding on "circular migration", in which Spain will make its labour needs known to the West African country which will select candidates for work.

The "pilot project" will initially last one year, with a particular focus on young people and women.

Sanchez arrived in Mauritania's capital Nouakchott on Tuesday, marking the start of a three-day trip that also takes in The Gambia and Senegal, three key countries in the migration crisis.

Madrid estimates there are some 200,000 people in Mauritania waiting to make the crossing to the Canaries.

Between January 1 and August 15 this year, 22,304 migrants reached the Islands, compared with 9,864 in the same period in 2023, an increase of 126 per cent, according to interior ministry figures.

Across all of Spain, there were 31,155 arrivals up to mid-August, a 66.2-per cent increase on the 18,745 a year earlier.

Immigration is not a problem

On Tuesday evening, Sanchez stressed the importance of fighting against illegal people smugglers and managing migration in a "humane, safe and orderly way".

"Not so long ago, Spain was also a country of migrants," he said, adding that "immigration is not a problem, but a necessity that comes with certain problems".

"We must fight against the mafias that trade in human beings and play with human lives," and those who "take advantage of the terrible conditions and desperation of those who resort to irregular migration", Sanchez said, as reported by Mauritania's news agency.

Since 2014 at least 4,857 people have died or disappeared while trying to reach the Canary Islands, according to the UN's International Organisation for Migration.

MADRID — Spain will donate 500,000 mpox vaccine doses to countries in central Africa suffering from a surge in cases, the government said Tuesday.

The doses amount to 20 per cent of Spain's total mpox vaccine reserves, the health ministry said in a statement without specifying which nations in the region will receive the vaccines or when they will arrive.

Spain also urged its European Union peers to follow suit and also donate 20 per cent of their mbox vaccine stockpile, saying it" makes no sense to stockpile vaccines where there is no problem," the statement added.

France and Germany have both announced they will each donate 100,000 mpox vaccine doses to countries suffering from the emergency.

No mpox cases have yet been reported in Spain. Sweden's Public Health Agency announced earlier this month it had registered a case of the Clade 1b variant of mpox.

While that was the first case in Europe, the patient had been infected during a visit to an affected African country.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Tuesday said droplets were a minor route of transmission for mpox compared to physical contact, adding that more research was needed to understand how the outbreak is spreading.
WHO  declared an international emergency over mpox on August 14, concerned by the surge in cases of the Clade 1b strain in the Democratic Republic of Congo and its spread to nearby countries.


The UN health agency says on its website that mpox spreads between people mainly through close physical contact with someone who has the virus.
"Close contact includes skin-to-skin (such as touching or sex) and mouth-to-mouth, or mouth-to-skin contact (such as kissing)," it says.



It can also include "being face-to-face with someone who has mpox (such as talking or breathing close to one another, which can generate infectious respiratory particles)".


WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said Tuesday that if a person with the virus had lesions, "if you're talking closely to someone, breathing on them, physically close, face-to-face, there is a possibility" of viral spread, "but this is a minor source".
Instead, "what we're seeing is the close, physical skin-to-skin" contact as the chief route of transmission, she told a briefing in Geneva.

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia fired a wave of attack drones and missiles at Ukraine that killed at least five people, authorities said Tuesday, after a second night of heavy strikes across the war-battered nation.

Within hours of the barrage, Ukraine claimed new advances in its surprise assault on Russia's Kursk border region and reported taking nearly 600 Russian troops as prisoners in the past three weeks.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on social media, saying that four people had been killed and 16 wounded on Tuesday.

AFP journalists in the capital Kyiv heard air raid sirens echo over the city throughout the night as well as an explosion, likely from air defence systems.

Monday's attack was one of Moscow's largest ever on Ukraine, prompting Kyiv to push for permission from allies to use Western-provided weapons to strike deep inside Russia.

Zelensky said in Kyiv that Ukraine had used Western-supplied F-16 fighter jets to counter the Russian barrages, and that Ukraine had successfully tested a domestically produced ballistic missile.

The Russian attacks on Monday triggered widespread blackouts and spurred condemnation from Ukraine's allies in Europe and the United States.

Russia said the attack targeted infrastructure linked to the Ukrainian military. NATO member Poland said its airspace was violated during the barrage, probably by a drone.

Since February 2022, Russia has launched repeated large-scale drone and missile attacks on Ukraine, including punishing strikes on energy facilities.

Ukraine's electricity grid operator said Tuesday that emergency blackouts would be applied throughout the day to reduce pressure on the grid following the attacks that damaged energy infrastructure nationwide.

'Break through the border' 

Ukrainian forces have been pushing their offensive in Kursk, a surprise operation that has seen Kyiv gain swathes of territory in three weeks.

The governor of Russia's Belgorod region, which borders Kursk and Ukraine, said Tuesday that he was aware of reports that the Ukrainian army had tried to cross the border.

"Information has emerged that the enemy is trying to break through the border of the Belgorod region," Vyacheslav Gladkov said.

"According to the Russian defence ministry, the situation on the border remains difficult but under control," he said on social media. 

Zelensky said late Monday that Ukraine's cross-border incursion launched on August 6 was partially to "compensate" for Kyiv's inability to strike deeper into Russian territory.

He has been appealing to Ukraine's allies to allow his forces to use Western-supplied weapons to strike targets inside Russian territory as part of efforts to thwart more aerial bombardments.

Ukraine's army chief Oleksandr Syrsky said his forces had made fresh gains in Kursk recently and now controlled 100 towns and villages across 1,294 square kilometres.

He also claimed that Russian forces had redeployed around 30,000 troops to help fend off the Kursk incursion, and that Ukraine had taken 594 POWs during the incursion — the first time Kyiv has offered a precise figure.

Visiting the Kursk nuclear plant -- around 50 kilometres from the fighting -- on Tuesday, UN nuclear watchdog head Rafael Grossi warned that its proximity to the fighting was "extremely serious".

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has urged both Russia and Ukraine to exercise "maximum restraint" to avoid a nuclear accident at the plant.

Despite Kyiv's incursion into its territory, Moscow has been making steady gains in Ukraine and said Tuesday that its forces had captured the village of Orlivka near the strategic railway hub of Pokrovsk.

Zelensky had said late Monday that defending Pokrovsk was "difficult" and that Ukraine was strengthening its positions there as Russian forces advance. 

This week, AFP journalists saw civilians evacuating by train from Pokrovsk, once home to around 60,000 people.

FRANKFURT, Germany — Germany will donate 100,000 mpox vaccine doses to countries in Africa suffering from a surge in cases, the government said Monday.

The vaccines will come from German military stocks and will be made available “in the short term”, government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told reporters.

The aim is “to support in solidarity the international efforts to contain mpox on the African continent”, he said.

The move will see Germany donate nearly all of its mpox vaccine reserves, which total around 118,000 doses, according to the defence ministry.

Germany was also providing financial support to the World Health Organisation (WHO) as well as supporting partners in Africa through the Gavi vaccine alliance, Hebestreit said.

In the medium term, Germany would work with European partners to help the African Union set up local vaccine production, he added.

The WHO this month declared the surge of mpox cases from the Democratic Republic of Congo to other African nations to be a global health emergency. It has also called for greater production and sharing of vaccines.

France announced last week it was donating 100,000 mpox vaccine doses to affected countries, while the US has said it would donate 50,000 doses to DR Congo.

While mpox has been known for decades, a new more deadly and more transmissible strain — known as Clade 1b — has driven the recent outbreak.

The virus has swept across DR Congo, killing more than 570 people so far this year. Outbreaks have been reported in other countries such as Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda since July. The first case in Europe was reported in Sweden earlier this month.

The virus can spread from animals to humans but also between humans through close physical contact.

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Sunday highlighted victims of the mpox virus in his weekly prayers and called on governments and the pharmaceutical industry to do more to get vaccines to the worst hit countries.

"I pray for all the infected people, in particular the population of Democratic Republic of Congo, so affected, I express my closeness to the local churches most touched by this disease," the pope said during his Angelus prayers in St Peter's Square.

The World Health Organisation(WHO) this month declared the surge of mpox cases from DR Congo to other African nations to be a global health emergency. It has also called for greater production and sharing of vaccines.

"I encourage governments and private industry to share the technology and available treatments so that nobody lacks adapted medical care," the pope said.

While mpox has been known for decades, a new more deadly and more transmissible strain -- known as Clade 1b -- has driven the recent surge in cases. 

Clade 1b causes death in about 3.6 per cent of cases, with children more at risk, according to the WHO.

The virus has swept across DR Congo, killing more than 570 people so far this year. Outbreaks have been reported in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda since July. The first case in Europe was reported in Sweden last week.

The virus can spread from animals to humans but also between humans through close physical contact.

SOLINGEN, Germany — German police said Sunday that a Syrian man has given himself up and confessed to killing three people and wounding eight others in a knife rampage at a street festival.

The random attack as thousands of people gathered on Friday night in the western city of Solingen has stunned Germany.

Two men aged 56 and 67 and a 56-year-old woman were killed, officials said.

Four of the wounded remained in a serious condition. All of the victims were stabbed in the neck, according to police.

Police said in a statement that the suspect was a 26-year-old Syrian who had "given himself up to authorities... and declared himself responsible for the attack".

German prosecutors said they had launched a "terrorist" investigation.

According to the Bild and Spiegel newspapers, the suspect arrived in Germany in December 2022 and had a protected immigration status often given to those fleeing war-torn Syria.

The jihadist Islamic State group's Amaq propaganda arm has claimed responsibility for the attack, saying "the perpetrator of the attack on a gathering of Christians" in Solingen "was a soldier of the Islamic State".

IS said the attack was carried out as "revenge for Muslims in Palestine and everywhere", in an apparent reference to the Gaza conflict.

The claim could not be immediately verified.

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said the suspect was not known to the security services as an extremist considered dangerous.

Habeck — who called for tougher knife laws on Sunday -- said "Islamic terrorism" was one of "the biggest security dangers" Germany faces.

High alert

The attack took place as thousands of people gathered for the first night of a "Festival of Diversity", part of a series of events to mark Solingen's 650th anniversary.

The whole festival has now been cancelled.

Witness Lars Breitzke told the Solinger Tageblatt newspaper he was near the attack, close to the main stage, and "understood from the expression on the singer's face that something was wrong".

"And then, a metre away from me, a person fell," said Breitzke, adding that when he turned around, he saw other people on the ground in pools of blood.

German officers indicated Sunday that a suspect arrested a day before at a raid at a hostel for asylum seekers, not far from the scene of the attack, was being considered a "witness".

A 15-year-old boy was also arrested, suspected of failing to report a criminal act.

National and local leaders, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, said the country had been "deeply shocked" by the deaths in Solingen, a city of 160,000 people.

Germany has been on high alert for extremist attacks since the Gaza war erupted on October 7 with the Hamas attacks on Israel.

German street festivals and markets have previously been hit.

A truck rampage at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 killed 12 people. In May, a police officer was killed and five people were wounded in a knife attack at a far-right rally in Mannheim, with an Islamist motive suspected.

Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had warned this month that Germany was in "the firing line" of Islamist groups.

During a visit to the site of the tragedy Faeser called for the country to "remain united" as she denounced "those who want to stir up hatred".

"Let us not be divided," she said.

Scholz's centre-left coalition faces regional elections next week in the east of the country, where the far-right AfD is leading in polls.

Germany took in more than a million asylum seekers in 2015-2016 at the height of Europe's migrant crisis.

The influx was deeply divisive in Germany and fuelled the popularity of the AfD.