Mali is a key part of the fight by international forces against jihadist fighters in the Sahel region

Bamako (AFP) - Dogon hunters killed more than 100 people in an attack on a Fulani village in central Mali on Saturday, local officials said, as a UN delegation visited the country.

 

"The new toll is 115 dead" in the village of Ogossagou, said Cheick Harouna Sankare, mayor of neighbouring Ouenkoro. "It is a massacre of Fulani civilians by traditional Dogon hunters."

 

Earlier he had reported the deaths of around 50 people, but warned the toll could rise because many people were unaccounted for. Those bodies had now been found, he said.

 

The victims were shot or hacked to death with machetes, said a security source. Malian troops with local support arrived at the site in the afternoon, and they gave a toll of at least 105, a security source added.

 

Boubacar Kane, the governor of Bankass district, which covers Ogossagou, said the "provisional toll" was 115. Survivors had accused traditional hunters of carrying out the attack, he added.

 

The attack was launched at dawn Saturday in the village near the border with Burkina Faso, said several sources. The district has been the scene of frequent inter-communal violence.

 

Two witnesses questioned separately by AFP said hunters had burned down nearly all the huts in the village.

 

The massacre took place as a delegation from the United Nations Security Council visited the Sahel region to assess the jihadist threat there.

 

The UN mission in Mali, MINUSMA, said in a Twitter message it "firmly condemns such attacks against civilians" and called on the Malian authorities to investigate.

 

The UN said the visiting ambassadors from the Security Council countries met on Saturday with Mali's Prime Minister Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga and discussed with him the volatile situation in the centre of the country.

 

- Land disputes -

 

While local attacks are fuelled by accusations of grazing cattle on Dogon land and disputes over access to land and water, the area is also troubled by jihadist influence.

 

In the past four years, jihadist fighters have emerged as a threat in central Mali. A group led by radical Islamist preacher Amadou Koufa has recruited mainly from the Muslim Fulani community.

 

Since then, there have been repeated clashes between the nomadic Fulani herders and the Dogon ethnic group.

 

Last year that violence cost the lives of 500 civilians, according to UN figures.

 

In January, Dogon hunters were blamed for the killing of 37 people in another Fulani village, Koulogon, in the same region.

 

The Fulani have repeatedly called for more protection from the authorities. The government in Bamako has denied their accusations it turns a blind eye to -- or even encourages -- Dogon attacks on the Fulani.

 

Once considered a beacon of democracy and stability in Africa, Mali in recent years has been dogged by a coup, civil war and Islamist terrorism.

 

Extremists linked to Al-Qaeda took control of the desert north in early 2012, but were largely driven out in a French-led military operation launched in January 2013.

 

In June 2015, Mali's government signed a peace agreement with some armed groups, but the jihadists remain active, and large tracts of the country remain lawless.

 

Despite the presence of UN peacekeepers, a strong French military contingent and the creation of a five-nation military force in the region, jihadist violence has not abated.

 

 

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Medellin authorities on Sunday declared a red alert for the second time in two weeks over the health hazards caused by extreme pollution.

 

The red alert triggered a number of emergency measures, most notably a rush hour ban on half of the city’s motorized vehicles, in all 10 municipalities that make up the Medellin Metropolitan Area.

 

 

According to SIATA, the system measuring air quality in the metropolitan area, 14 of the 19 air quality measuring systems turned to red on Sunday, a day on which there is least traffic traditionally.

 

The emergency measures will last at least until Wednesday in an attempt to improve the air quality to the point that breathing stops being a health hazard.

 

The pollution is mainly due to a growth in the use of cars that are fueled by the substandard gasoline provided by state-run oil company Ecopetrol.

Is Colombia’s oil company Ecopetrol killing citizens for profit?

The company has refused to improve its filtering systems, claiming that they comply with government regulations.

 

Legal sulfur limits

Colombia         United States   European Union

Diesel   50        15        10

Gasoline           300      10        10

 

This situation caused by the pollution is aggravated on days when there is no rain or wind to disperse the sulfur particles produced by the burning of Ecopetrol’s gasoline.

 

Instead of promoting a change in legislation that would obligate Ecopetrol to produce gasoline that would comply with pollution standards applied in the United States and Europe, Medellin authorities discouraged all sporting activity and canceled Sunday’s “cicloruta” that clears many of the city’s roads to promote the use of bicycles.

 

Authorities on Wednesday will decide whether to lift the emergency measures or to extend them.

 

https://colombiareports.com/is-pollution-becoming-a-permanent-health-hazard-in-medellin/ 

 Police swap cocaine with salt in sting operation in Italy's largest drugs bust in 25 years – video

Italian police have taken possession of more than two tonnes of cocaine in the largest drugs seizure in the country in 25 years, after a sting operation involving three other nations across two continents.

 

The drugs, discovered in 60 bags in a cargo container at the Port of Genoa, have a total value of €500m (£436m) and were found with the help of the British, Colombian and Spanish police.

 

The cocaine belongs to various drug-trafficking organisations associated with an organised armed group known as the “Gulf Clan”, which makes use of contacts in numerous European ports where drug expeditions are carried out. The container set off from Colombia and arrived in Genoa last week and was then destined for Barcelona in Spain.

 

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To catch the traffickers in Barcelona, the Italian investigators replaced the cargo of drugs - 1,801 bricks of pure cocaine - with salt and let it continue on its journey. In the Catalan city, Spanish police arrested the alleged recipient of the shipment, a 59-year-old Spaniard.

 

“We had four hours to make a decision,” Maurizio Cintura, lieutenant of the Guardia di Finanza, told the Guardian. “After four hours the container had to leave for Barcelona where the traffickers were waiting for it. We therefore put 40 military in place, unloaded the two tonnes of cocaine and replaced it with 1,800 packets of salt. Then we placed GPS receivers in the load. This allowed us to arrest a 59-year-old man related to drug traffickers at Barcelona port.”

 

Cintura said the investigation began on 22 January in Colombia and that the seized drugs would have been marketed all over Europe. The operation, dubbed ‘‘Genoese snow’’, follows another seizure of cocaine at the port of Livorno on Wednesday.

 

In that case, 644 kilos of cocaine were hidden inside bags of coffee. The drugs were divided into 582 bricks inside 23 bags, hidden in one of the thousands of containers loaded on a ship flying the Portuguese flag and coming from the Spanish port of Algeciras. The value of the cocaine found in the earlier raid was around €130m.

 

Spanish police said that using an empty container was a new technique being adopted by criminal organisations there.

 

The two operations were not connected, police said, although both Italian ports seem to have become important destinations for cocaine trafficking from South America.

 

“The port of Genoa, along with that of Livorno, has become the new narco trafficking crossroads,” said Genoa chief prosecutor, Francesco Cozzi, in a press conference.

 

Prosecutors in Genoa said they were now looking into the connections between the cartels in South America and the drug traffickers in Europe. When asked about the role of the Italian Mafia in the Genoa raid, investigators said: “It is too early to say.”

 

The Calabrian Mafia, or so-called ‘Ndrangheta mafia, is thought to run much of Europe’s cocaine trade. A study by the Demoskopika research institute in 2013 claimed the ’Ndrangheta made more money than Deutsche Bank and McDonald’s put together, with a turnover of €53bn.

 

 

The boy's mother contacted the police after finding a note from her son saying he had left to "travel around the world".

A few hours later, a search team found him walking down a street equipped with encyclopaedias, a toy, money from his piggy bank and a banana, the Russian Interior Ministry reported on its official website.

The young explorer told his rescuers that he was already tired from his trip and wanted to rest. By that point he had travelled on three different buses before continuing on foot.

News of his exploits were widely shared on social media where many users admired the boy's ambition.

"An eight-year-old boy from Astrakhan undertakes a round-the-world-trip by foot. Whereas I complain when I have to travel across town," one Twitter user wrote.

"respect his willingness to get the hell out of Astrakhan," another joked.

The boy also caught the attention of a private language school that offered via Twitter to "teach the young explorer from Astrakhan English for free for a full year".

The viral story led some to recount how they had nearly embarked on "trips around the world" as kids.

"I also left a similar note when I was a kid. But before the journey, I decided to lay down for a bit to gain strength and fell asleep. In the end, I wasn't allowed to go," one user wrote.

Another person recalled being caught when his grandmother found a "stash of food" he had prepared for his trip across the globe.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-47803235

In a video that was released on Friday, “Pablo Beltran” said that while ELN guerrillas continue fighting in Colombia, he and his fellow-negotiators will remain in Cuba.

Following a terrorist attack that killed 22 in the capital Bogota in January, Colombia’s President Ivan Duque has refused to either continue talks or allow the rebel leaders to reunite with their troops.

Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo wants Cuba to extradite the peace negotiators, but this has been rejected by the island state and other countries that have acted as guarantor countries for peace negotiations.

Beltran reiterated his group’s call to resume negotiations, agree to a bilateral ceasefire and ultimately come to a peace agreement as agreed with former President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Juan Manuel Santos.

“We are not interested in escalating the war, which is why we are asking President Ivan Duque to appoint his delegates and resume the dialogues, as well as agreeing to a bilateral cessation of hostilities,” Beltran said in the video that was sent to the NGO “Vivamos Humanos” of former President Ernesto Samper (Liberal Party).

The ELN may say it does not want to increase hostilities, but it has expanded territories under its control, taking advantage of the government’s failure to assume territorial control over the countryside during a peace process with the FARC that began in 2016.

This is confirmed by the Defense Ministry, which registered a 22% increase in terrorist activity between 2017 and 2018, an 86% increase in attacks on oil and road infrastructure and a 16% increase in killed members of the security forces.

“We cannot underestimate the ELN because it is expanding, in Vivamos Humanos we have information that out of 280 municipalities that used to have a FARC presence, the ELN is already in 68, and that is very dangerous for the civilian population,” said Samper.

The former president called on Duque to “make a final effort” to resume talks and end the conflict between the state and the guerrillas that is entering its 55th year this year.

Duque has expressed no interest in talking to the ELN ever since he took office last year and removed the group’s status as an insurgent force, and is now considering it an organized crime organization.

The majority of the Colombian population, however, wants the government to resolve the conflict through negotiations, according to multiple polls

The five-time world Formula One champion says electric-only series Formula E - which his team Mercedes will join next year - is "the future" of motorsport.

Hamilton is contracted to Mercedes until the end of the 2020 season but says he is considering all options for when he quits Formula One.

The 34-year-old reigning F1 champion was grilled about his future at an event at Silverstone to mark Mercedes-Benz’s 125th year in motorsport.

That is something I have kind of been debating - up until now it has always been about Formula One," said Hamilton, in quotes reported by The Sun .

"Being that I have been racing since I was eight years old, I am going to have massive withdrawal symptoms, like every driver has when they stop racing, when Formula One stops for me.
Hamilton suggested he could follow fellow Englishman Gary Paffett into Formula E.

"I actually grew up in the same era as Gary Paffett.

"He is a little bit older than me and he is now racing in Formula E and that is now going to be the future.