Category Archives: Congo-Brazzaville

Biodiversity declining even faster in ‘protected’ areas, scientists warn Cop16

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Just designating key areas will not meet 30x30 target on nature loss, study says, pointing to oil drilling in parks

Biodiversity is declining more quickly within key protected areas than outside them, according to research that scientists say is a “wake-up call” to global leaders discussing how to stop nature loss at the UN’s Cop16 talks in Colombia.

Protecting 30% of land and water for nature by 2030 was one of the key targets settled on by world leaders in a landmark 2022 agreement to save nature – and this month leaders are gathering again at a summit in the Colombian city of Cali to measure progress and negotiate new agreements to stop biodiversity loss.

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Charity with Prince Harry as director investigating rape and torture claims

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African Parks examines alleged atrocities against Indigenous people by its Congo Republic guards after ‘decade of alerts’ from Survival International

A wildlife charity that has the Duke of Sussex as a board member is investigating allegations of rape and torture by its guards in the Republic of the Congo.

African Parks, which manages 22 national parks and protected areas across 12 countries, said the investigation was its “highest priority” and encouraged anyone with knowledge of any abuse to contact it.

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Blistering barnacles! Tintin mystery in Brussels after bust of Hergé vanishes

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The disappearance of a statue of the comic book artist in his Belgian birthplace was thought to be an act of decolonisation

It would have been a suitable assignment for Tintin, the intrepid Belgian boy reporter and his multi-talented, intuitive dog, Snowy.

Across Brussels, where Hergé, the creator of the eponymous comic books, was born, there are constant reminders of one of its most famous exports. A giant image of the character clinging to the back of a steam train from the book Tintin in America adorns one of the exits from the city’s Eurostar station, while a mural of Tintin, his seafaring friend Captain Haddock and Snowy covers the gable end of a house just over a mile away, surviving graffiti and vandalism.

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Growing numbers of young Africans want to move abroad, survey suggests

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Covid, climate, stability and violence contributing to young people feeling pessimistic about future, survey of 15 countries suggests

African youth have lost confidence in their own countries and the continent as a whole to meet their aspirations and a rising number are considering moving abroad, according to a survey of young people from 15 countries.

The pandemic, climate crisis, political instability and violence have all contributed to making young people “jittery” about their futures since the Covid pandemic began, according to the African Youth Survey published on Monday.

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‘They lost almost everything’: photographing the terror and joy of refugees in DRC

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Alexis Huguet’s image of this twin girl, born as her mother fled into Congo, captures the fragility of life in the Central African Republic

The picture is a joyful one. Laure, a midwife at a health facility in Ndu, a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, holds a healthy newborn girl. The baby’s mother, Ester, was at the health centre for a postnatal appointment after giving birth to twin daughters.

A couple of weeks earlier, when she was heavily pregnant and due to go into labour at any moment, Ester was forced to leave her home in Bangassou, on the other side of a river, in the neighbouring Central African Republic.

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Engineering the future: meet the Africa prize shortlist innovators

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Turning invasive plants into a force for good and powering healthcare with solar – here are three of the 2022 nominees

From a solar-powered crib that treats jaundiced babies to fibre made from water hyacinth that absorbs oil spills, innovators from nine African countries have been shortlisted for the Royal Academy of Engineering’s 2022 Africa prize.

This year half of the shortlist of 16 are women, and for the first time it includes Togolese and Congolese inventors. The entrepreneurs will undergo eight months of business training and mentoring before a winner is chosen, who will receive £25,000, and three runners-up, who win £10,000 each. All the projects are sustainable solutions to issues such as access to healthcare, farming resilience, reducing waste, and energy efficiency. The Guardian spoke to three of the shortlisted candidates.

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‘Gamechanging’ £10m environmental DNA project to map life in world’s rivers

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eBioAtlas programme aims to identify fish, birds, amphibians and land animals in freshwater systems from the Ganges to the Mekong

Concealed by the turbid, swirling waters of the Amazon, the Mekong and the Congo, the biodiversity of the world’s great rivers has largely remained a mystery to scientists. But now a multimillion-pound project aims to describe and identify the web of life in major freshwater ecosystems around the world with “gamechanging” DNA technology.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and UK-based environmental DNA (eDNA) specialists NatureMetrics have launched a partnership to take thousands of water samples from freshwater river systems like the Ganges and the Niger delta to identify the fish, birds, amphibians and land animals that live in and around them.

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Sassou rules like an emperor while Congolese die from extreme poverty | Vava Tampa

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The world has turned a blind eye to Denis Sassou Nguesso’s controversial re-election, which will extend his iron-fisted reign to more than 40 years

The result of last month’s presidential election in Congo-Brazzaville brought no surprises. After 36 years in power, Denis Sassou Nguesso, 77, clinched 88% of the vote with a turnout of more than 67%. Accusations of vote irregularities, including ballot box stuffing, were widespread. His closest rival, who had urged for a “vote for change” died of Covid on the day of the vote.

Television showed a triumphant Sassou at home with his smiling henchmen, as the interior minister, Raymond Zéphirin Mboulou – instead of the head of the electoral commission – announced the win. The question now is whether or not the African Union, the US, the EU, the UK and former colonial power France will simply turn a blind eye to another disputed election result while Congolese are dying from extreme poverty?

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Armed ecoguards funded by WWF ‘beat up Congo tribespeople’

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Exclusive: Inquiry into $21.4m conservation project reports ‘credible’ evidence of abuse

Armed ecoguards partly funded by the conservation group WWF to protect wildlife in the Republic of the Congo beat up and intimidated hundreds of Baka pygmies living deep in the rainforests, an investigation into a landmark global conservation project has heard.

A team of investigators sent to northern Congo by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) to assess allegations of human rights abuses gathered “credible” evidence from different sources that hunter-gatherer Baka tribespeople living close to a proposed national park had been subjected to violence and physical abuse from the guards over years, according to a leaked draft of the report.

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‘I was peeing and a polar bear popped up!’ Secrets of Seven Worlds, One Planet

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Shooting poachers, circling polar bears, flailing four-tonne seals, singing rhinos and the world’s worst sea … the team behind Attenborough’s latest extravaganza relive their thrills and spills

Chadden Hunter, producer, North America and South America

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Son of Congo-Brazzaville president accused of siphoning off $50m

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Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso allegedly used money-laundering scheme spanning six European countries

The son of Congo-Brazzaville’s president has misappropriated $50m (£41m) of public money by routing it through shell companies and secrecy jurisdictions, according to a new investigation.

Six countries in the EU, the US state of Delaware and the British Virgin Islands all played a key role in Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso’s scheme, according to Global Witness. The campaign group said the money was siphoned off through an apparent sham contract Congo-Brazzaville had with a Brazilian infrastructure company.

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French ex-spy suspected of Congo-Brazzaville plot shot dead in Alps

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Daniel Forestier had been investigated over alleged plot to assassinate opposition figure

The body of a former French intelligence agent linked to an assassination plot has been found riddled with bullets in a layby in the Alps.

Daniel Forestier was discovered in a pool of blood in a parking area off a little-used road in Haute-Savoie near Lake Léman. Police said the killing was a “professional job”, and a postmortem revealed he had been shot five times.

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