Day: November 12, 2021

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said Friday the U.S. and France have renewed their “mutual commitment” to collaborate on combatting global terrorism, particularly in Africa’s troubled Sahel region.

“We have a mutual concern there that relates to the ongoing challenges that the countries in the Sahel are facing. Among the many priorities that we share is a concern about what we need to do to address potential violence and ongoing violence,” Harris said at a Paris news conference.

Harris is on a four-day visit to France as part of the Biden administration’s effort to improve soured relations between the longtime allies.

Ties between France and the United States plunged to a historic low in September when Australia scrapped a $65 billion deal to buy traditional submarines from France in favor of an agreement in which Australia will build nuclear subs with the help of the United States and Britain.

“That was not the purpose of this trip, and we didn’t discuss it,” Harris said.

Harris said she and Macron did discus cooperation on transatlantic security, space exploration and global health issues such as the coronavirus pandemic that has led to a dramatic rise in inequality.

“This pandemic has in many ways has highlighted, has magnified the longstanding, pre-pandemic failures and fractures and fissures in our systems,” Harris said. “And so, we talked about what we can do together to address these inequities and the inequality that has existed since the beginning of time around the world.”

Harris will represent the U.S. Friday at a summit with world leaders on Libya ahead of that country’s elections next month. The summit is aimed at ensuring elections are held as scheduled in the North African country that has been torn by civil war since the overthrow of Moammar Ghadafi in 2011.

Source: Voice of America

The United States has imposed new sanctions on Eritrea’s military, ruling party and two senior government officials in connection with Eritrea’s role in the Ethiopian conflict.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced Friday that it had imposed sanctions on the Eritrean Defense Force, whose soldiers have fought in the Tigray region alongside Ethiopian forces, and Eritrea’s sole political party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice.

PFDJ economic adviser Hagos Ghebrehiwet W. Kidan and Eritrean intelligence chief Abraha Kassa Nemariam were also designated, along with two Eritrean businesses linked to the PFDJ: Hidri Trust and Red Sea Trading Corporation.

“We condemn the continued role played by Eritrean actors who are contributing to the violence in northern Ethiopia, which has undermined the stability and integrity of the state and resulted in a humanitarian disaster,” OFAC Director Andrea Gacki said in a statement.

10th UN staffer detained

Meanwhile, U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq said Ethiopia’s federal government had detained a 10th U.N. staffer, who joined nine other imprisoned staff members and more than 70 truckers contracted by the U.N. in Addis Ababa.

Haq said the U.N. was pressing on with efforts to get the staffers and drivers released. “We are continuing with our efforts; we are pushing on all the doors that we can. But we haven’t made the progress that we would have liked to have made,” he said.

The detentions add to worries that the Ethiopian government’s yearlong conflict with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in the country’s north is about to get worse. At the beginning of the conflict, Ethiopian forces flushed from federal military bases in an early TPLF offensive retreated to neighboring Eritrea, which at first fed, clothed and rearmed Ethiopian soldiers before sending its own military into Ethiopia.

Eritrean troops face charges

Eritrea’s parallel campaign to help Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has complicated the war. Eritrean forces have been accused of killing civilians, looting Tigrayan towns, abusing refugees and blocking humanitarian aid, contributing to what some officials fear is a road to Ethiopia’s collapse.

“Eritrea’s destabilizing presence in Ethiopia is prolonging the conflict, posing a significant obstacle to a cessation of hostilities, and threatening the integrity of the Ethiopian state,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement released Friday. He called for Eritrea to withdraw its forces from Ethiopia immediately.

The conflicts in Ethiopia and neighboring Sudan will likely headline Blinken’s upcoming trip to Africa, where he’s scheduled to meet Kenyan, Senegalese and Nigerian officials at their capitals next week. The Biden administration is stepping up efforts to collaborate with African partners on areas of shared interest, according to the State Department.

“I am very concerned about the potential for Ethiopia to implode given what we are seeing both in Tigray but also as we have different forces and different ethnic groups that are increasingly at odds,” Blinken said Friday. “We are working very closely to support the efforts of the former Nigerian President [Olusegun] Obasanjo to mediate a way forward with all the Ethiopian parties.”

The State Department is holding off on approving sanctions on Ethiopia’s national government and the TPLF, but after the U.N.’s recent announcements of detained staffers, Washington’s patience may be wearing thin. The United States is “ready to pursue additional sanctions” if diplomacy isn’t renewed, according to the State Department statement issued Friday.

Source: Voice of America

JOHANNESBURG — Scientists in South Africa have announced the discovery of the first partial Homo Naledi child’s skull in one of the world’s richest hominin fossil sites.

The discovery at a UNESCO World Heritage site near Johannesburg, called the “Cradle of Humankind,” revealed that members of the nonhuman species performed rituals with their dead thousands of years before humans did.

Lee Berger — project leader of the Rising Star Expedition from South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand — and his team searching for Homo Naledi fossils found the partial child’s skull on a remote limestone shelf in the Rising Star Cave. Consisting of 28 fragments and six teeth, the find is being called Fossil Leti — short for the Setswana word “letimela,” meaning “the lost one.”

Leti was discovered 12 meters beyond the Dinaledi chamber, where the first fossils belonging to the previously unknown Homo Naledi species were found in 2013.

Berger, a paleoanthropologist, said Leti’s solitary location was significant.

“She wasn’t dragged in there by a scavenger or carnivore,” he said. “There are no marks of that on her bones. We know she wasn’t washed in there. We can see that from the sediments. We know she didn’t crawl in there because the rest of her body, which would be much stronger than these parts, isn’t there.”

Berger surmised that one of the other Homo Naledi moved Leti to that inaccessible shelf.

Rare finds

Fossilized juvenile hominin skulls like South Africa’s world famous Taung Child and Leti are extremely rare because the remains are so fragile. Homo Naledi remains, in general, are also much more brittle than most other fossils, which have turned to stone.

Bernhard Zipfel, curator at University of the Witwatersrand of one of the largest hominid fossil collections in the world, said of the skull discovery, “It looks like bone that could have been deposited there the other day, certainly not many millions of years ago. And that is also what makes this very interesting. We’re dealing with actual bone here.”

Leti’s discovery was made in 2017 but was revealed to the public only recently. Based on her teeth, scientists determined Leti died between the ages of 4 and 6. Her remains are believed to be as old as other recovered Homo Naledi fossils, said Rising Star Expedition geologist Tebogo Makhubela, who is based at the University of Johannesburg.

“Because of the similarity of the geology — with the same sediments, the same deposition of preservation style — we believe that it is the same time period of 241,000 to 335,000 years old,” Makhubela said.

Leti will soon be included with the other Homo Naledi fragments of over 20 individuals — along with Little Foot, the most complete hominid fossil found so far — in University of the Witwatersrand’s fossil hominid vault.

Source: Voice of America