Andrew Cawthorne

Nigeria is expecting its first 4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines next week from the global COVAX vaccine programme for poor and middle-income countries, the head of the World Health Organization mission in Nigeria said on Friday.

The United States will seek election to the U.N. Human Rights Council later this year, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday, marking the Biden administration’s latest international re-engagement.

The U.N. children’s fund UNICEF said on Tuesday it had sent an initial 100,000 syringes for COVID-19 vaccines to the Maldives in preparation for first deliveries of Pfizer and AstraZeneca shots under the COVAX vaccine-sharing plan.

The former ruling party in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray is committed to “extended resistance”, according to an audio message purporting to be from its leader, who accused federal government forces and their allies of rape and looting.

Ethiopians in the war-scarred north are dying from lack of healthcare services, are suffering food and water shortages, and remain “terrified”, according to aid agencies finally accessing remoter parts of Tigray region.

A 24-year-old Italian suspected of fighting in the Middle East since 2014 with al Qaeda-affiliated groups was arrested in Turkey and jailed in Italy, police said on Wednesday.

A candidate for the Bank of England’s supervisory arm for banks defended on Wednesday his senior role on a bitcoin trading platform, saying it took safeguards against money-laundering very seriously.

Pope Francis has issued a new decree making charity funds more transparent and tightening controls on Vatican finances after a scandal over a luxury London property deal.

People arriving in Russia from the United Kingdom must undergo a two-week mandatory self-isolation, the Interfax news agency cited the state consumer health watchdog as saying on Friday.

Ethiopia sent civil servants in Tigray back to work on Monday and ordered gun owners to disarm as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government sought to show normality in the still-isolated northern region after weeks of war.

Ethiopia’s prime minister shifted his focus away from war on Wednesday, opening a cross-border highway to Kenya at the opposite end of his country, while the United Nations voiced alarm over ongoing fighting in the northern Tigray region.

A United Nations team visiting Ethiopia’s rebellious Tigray region was shot at after breaking through two checkpoints, the government said on Tuesday, proclaiming that it did not need a “baby-sitter” for relief operations in the war-hit north.

A senior European Union official said on Friday that an agreement between relief organizations and the Ethiopian government for access to the war-hit Tigray region limits aid to federal-controlled areas only and requires too much bureaucracy.

Ethiopia and the United Nations reached an agreement on Wednesday to channel desperately needed humanitarian aid to a northern region where a month of war has killed, wounded and uprooted large numbers of people.

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed lauded his troops on Monday for ousting a rebellious northern movement, but the leader of Tigrayan forces said they were still resisting amid fears of a protracted guerrilla conflict.

African envoys went to Ethiopia to plead for peace on Wednesday, hours before an ultimatum was to expire for Tigrayan forces to surrender or face an assault on the northern region’s capital that rights groups fear could bring huge civilian casualties.

Forces of Ethiopia’s Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) have destroyed an airport in the town of Axum, state-affiliated Fana broadcaster said on Monday, after federal troops gave them a three-day deadline to surrender.

Tigrayan forces fighting Ethiopian government troops are standing firm on the southern front and engaging soldiers round the town of Adigrat to the north, said Debretsion Gebremichael, head of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, via text message.

The rulers of Ethiopia’s rebellious Tigray region refused on Wednesday to surrender to federal troops and instead claimed they were winning a war that has exacerbated ethnic fractures in the vast nation and further destabilised the Horn of Africa.

Ethiopia’s prime minister warned on Tuesday that a deadline for rebel northern forces to lay down arms had expired, paving the way for a final push on the Tigray region’s capital in a two-week conflict destabilising the Horn of Africa.

Ethiopia has frozen the bank accounts of 34 institutions of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) which governs the rebellious northern region, state-affilated Fana TV said on Tuesday.

Nigerien student Hachimou Abdou has had to catch a boat to classes since river water swamped his route to university in the capital Niamey - one of about 760,000 people hit by severe flooding in recent weeks in parts of West and Central Africa.