China has dispatched its naval forces to the Horn of Africa to set up an army base in Djibouti, where several global players have a military presence. Members of China’s People’s Liberation Army marked the incident at a ceremony at a naval base in the southern Chinese port of Zhanjiang on Tuesday, the Chinese Defense Ministry announced on its website.

China says it will use the base to assist anti-piracy operations, UN peacekeeping and humanitarian relief missions in Africa and western Asia. Beijing also says it will use the base to facilitate military cooperation and joint exercises, as Chinese navy and other services seek to expand their international presence in line with the country’s growing economic and political influence.

The Horn of Africa nation, strategically located in the critical entrance from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, lies at the gateway to the busy Suez Canal waterway and provides a port to neighboring landlocked Ethiopia. The US, France, Japan and several other countries already have a military presence in Djibouti.

In April, US Defense Secretary James Mattis visited Djibouti, which houses Camp Lemonnier, the largest known US military base in the African continent. Mattis also discussed the issue of China’s growing influence in Djibouti with officials of the African country.

Touted by military experts as one of the most strategically important US military bases abroad, Camp Lemonnier has been dramatically expanded since it was built in 2001. The number of personnel stationed there, for example, has jumped from 900 to 5,000 since 2002. The US has been using a fleet of drones stationed at the base to conduct bombing missions against several Muslim countries in the region.

Washington has also deployed a number of drones to the Chabelley Airfield, located some 6 miles (9.5km) to the southwest of Djibouti’s capital. China’s military base in Djibouti will be established just a few miles from Camp Lemonnier, a decision that Washington says would raise “security concerns.”

In August 2015, Djibouti had reportedly ordered the US to vacate its secondary Obock military base in the country in a bid to turn over the installation to the Chinese military and its contingent of 10,000 troops.

The US Defense Department reportedly paid Djibouti nearly $63 million per year for the use of the Camp Lemonnier military base. However China, reportedly offered Djibouti a far more generous offer, namely the completion of a $3-billion railroad project from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to Djibouti.

The West is concerned that closer ties between Djibouti and China may prompt the African country to impose restrictions on US access to the Camp Lemonnier base, which the US uses to collect intelligence on terrorist groups in the region.

Source: Presstv

Sixteen US servicemen have died after the military plane carrying them went down in rural Mississippi, police say. There were 16 people on board the Marine Corps KC-130 when it crashed Monday afternoon in a soybean field in Leflore County, leaving a debris field five miles in radius.

“A USMC KC-130 mishap occurred the evening of July 10. Further information will be released as available,” the US Marine Corps Twitter account said immediately after the incident. Officials said they had recovered 12 bodies from the crash site. “Most of them are going to be Marines,” Leflore County EMA Director Frank Randle, adding he did not assess there were any civilian casualties resulting from the crash.

Marine Corps spokeswoman Lt. Kristine Rascicot also confirmed the crash but refused to release more details. The Lockheed Martin KC-130 aircraft is an extended-range tanker variant of the famous Lockheed C-130 Hercules, modified for aerial refueling operations.

Aircraft based on the C-130 Hercules have four turboprop engines and are primarily used for military transportation. The aircraft also has a heavily-armed AC-130 variant that carries a wide array of anti-ground weapons. The latest notable use of the weapon was in October 2015, when the gunship “mistakenly” attacked a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Source: Presstv

Russian President Vladimir Putin says he is pleased with the “high reliability” of the country’s new Raduga KH-101 cruise missiles, after a number of them were successfully used against terrorist positions in Syria.

“The application of this missile showed a very high degree of reliability. This is really the most modern weapon, with high-precision and high-power, and a decent range of 4,500 kilometers,” Putin said during a meeting of Russia’s Commission on Military Technical Cooperation with Foreign States on Thursday.

The comments came a day after the new breed of air-launched missiles, fired from Tu-95 strategic bomber jets 1,000 kilometers away, successfully hit Daesh targets on the border between Syria’s Hama and Homs provinces.

Putin said the Russian military should boost its defensive capabilities by developing more modern weapons of Kh-101’s quality and, in doing so, use the country’s combat experience from the ongoing anti-terror efforts in Syria.
“Russian weapons are demonstrating reliability and great opportunities during the anti-terror operation in Syria… It is necessary to carefully analyze this combat experience both for the modernization of existing systems and for the development of promising types of military products,” he said.

Raduga made its combat debut in November 2015, when Tu-160 bombers fired 16 of them at Daesh targets across Syria. The missile is capable of carrying high-explosive, penetrating or cluster warhead, while its KH-102 variant can be equipped with nuclear warheads. The missile’s accuracy for moving targets is said to be less than 10 meters.

The KH-101’s design coupled with its use of radar absorbing materials and other stealth technologies allow it to get past the enemy’s defenses and hit targets deep inside its territory from the distance. This means Russia is now capable of carrying out long-range precision strikes, an ability that US Air Force commanders have been long boastful about.

In mid-April, US President Donald Trump ordered US Navy warships in the Mediterranean Sea to fire around 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield in retaliation for a chemical attack that the White House claimed was carried out by the Syrian government.

Both Russia and the US have been leading military campaigns in Syria. Unlike Washington, however, Moscow only intervened upon a request from Damascus and has coordinated its airstrikes with Syrian military forces to avoid civilian casualties.

Source: Presstv

At least 10 people, including a child, were missing and 400,000 were forced from their homes after record rains battered southwestern Japan for a second day on Thursday, sending rivers surging over their banks, a government official and media said.

Parts of Fukuoka Prefecture on the southwestern island of Kyushu were hit by 774 mm of rain in nine hours on Wednesday, about 2.2 times the amount of rain that falls in a normal July, NHK national television said.
Some 7,500 rescuers, including police, firefighters, and soldiers from Japan’s Self Defense Forces, were mobilized to help with evacuations and search for the missing. Forty helicopters were on standby until the weather improved.

“There are many reports of people whose safety cannot be confirmed, things like ‘a child was swept away by the river’ and ‘my house was swept away and I can’t get in touch with my parents,'” chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga told an emergency early morning news conference.

“We will keep in close contact with the disaster-hit areas and work with all our energy to save lives and ascertain the extent of the damage,” he said. Fukuoka and Oita prefectures, both largely rural areas, were the worst-hit by the rain, which was caused by a low pressure area on the Pacific Ocean that fed warm, moist air into Japan’s seasonal rainy front.

Residents spent a worried night at evacuation centers set up at schools and government buildings on high ground amid reports of landslides and flooded roads. “It wasn’t just the rain, there was thunder and lightning, too. I couldn’t see anything ahead of me,” one woman at an evacuation center told NHK.

A schoolboy sitting with his family told NHK, “I haven’t heard from some of my friends, and I’m really worried.” There were no immediate reports of major transportation problems, but television footage showed a railway line left broken and twisted by floodwaters.

The same area was pounded by heavy rain earlier this week from Tropical Storm Nanmadol, which has since passed out to sea. The rain in Japan comes on the heels of a storm system that caused severe flooding across southern China and that killed 56 people and cost almost $4 billion in damage.

(Source: Reuters)

A new opinion poll shows that half of all Americans have more trust in the CNN news outlet than President Donald Trump, as tensions escalate between the US administration and the media. The online poll, conducted by Survey Monkey and reported by Axios Media Company on Tuesday, found that 50 percent of the respondents believed the CNN broadcaster was more trustworthy than Trump, compared to 43 percent who thought the opposite.

Trust, however, is largely split among partisan lines with 89 percent of Republicans favoring the US president and 91 percent of Democrats viewing the CNN news outlet as more trustworthy. Trump was also pitted against the American press and lost out to The Washington Post and The New York Times, with the newspapers being judged more trustworthy by 9 points.

Additionally, the Survey Monkey poll analyzed the attitude of US citizens toward Trump’s tweets, of which the majority of adults with 64 percent (89 percent of Democrats and 38 percent of Republicans) expressed their disapproval. Forty-seven percent of all adults responded by calling the tweets “undignified” and 34 percent describing them as “mean.” The Tuesday poll surveyed 4,965 adults between June 29 and July 3, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

Since his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has repeatedly used the term “fake news” to accuse the CNN and mostly for any coverage criticizing him or his allies. On Sunday, Trump posted on Twitter an altered video of himself wrestling and punching a man with a CNN logo superimposed on his face. The 30-second video became an instant hit after it was retweeted by more than 93 thousand users in less than three hours.

Source: Presstv

The Procureur General of the Centre Court of Appeal has signed a communiqué today the 4th of July 2017, updating the public on investigations relating to the death of the Bishop of Bafia. The press release states that two separate autopsies were carried out on the remains of Bishop Jean Marie Benoit Bala.

After health experts in Cameroon did the first part of the autopsy, international forensic experts invited by INTERPOOL performed the second. The Procureur General stated that according to findings, the most probable cause of death of the man of God was drowning.

Though investigations as to the circumstances under which the prelate died are still on-going, his remains have been handed over to the National Episcopal Council for burial. On 2nd June 2017, the Catholic Community and Cameroonians as a whole were bewildered by the disappearance of the Bishop of Bafia.

His vehicle was eventually spotted on the Ebebda bridge and the corpse retrieved from the River Sanaga two days later. After the corpse was placed in the mortuary, competent officials opened a judicial investigation as to the cause of death that was considered suspicious.

Source: CRTV

Former US President Barack Obama warns against “aggressive” nationalism and President Donald Trump’s decision to leave the Paris climate agreement. Obama made the remarks on Saturday at the Fourth Congress of the Indonesian Diaspora in Jakarta while he and his family were there on holiday.

“We start seeing a rise in sectarian politics. We start seeing a rise in an aggressive kind of nationalism. We start seeing both in developed and developing countries an increased resentment about minority groups and the bad treatment of people who don’t look like us or practice the same faith as us.”

After taking office in January, Trump issued a travel ban against people from predominantly Muslim countries. The ban and its second version were both blocked by two federal judges. However, on Thursday the US Supreme Court allowed the ban to be enforced pending a full hearing in October.

Trump insists his ban is necessary for national security, but critics have called the ban discriminatory against Muslims. Obama also touched upon the Paris climate accord and the US withdrawal from it which provoked national and international criticism. “In Paris, we came together around the most ambitious agreement in history to fight climate change,” he said, adding the deal “will still give our children a fighting chance.”

He also talked about democracy and freedom of press amid Trump’s continuous barrage of criticism against US media. “If we don’t stand up for tolerance and moderation and respect for others, if we begin to doubt ourselves and all that we have accomplished, then much of the progress that we have made will not continue,” Obama said.
“What we will see is more and more people arguing against democracy, we will see more and more people who are looking to restrict freedom of the press, and we’ll see more intolerance, more tribal divisions, more ethnic divisions, and religious divisions and more violence,” he added.

Trump has recently criticized major US media outlets including CNN, ABC, The New York Times and The Washington Post. He has also launched a personal attack against two MSNBC hosts, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, which was condemned by both Democrats and Republicans alike.

Source: Presstv

Some 60 people are feared to have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea after the dinghy they were on sank off the Libyan coast on Monday. The dinghy set off with 140 to 150 passengers, including women, and started to sink five hours later, media reported on Friday citing testimonies by 80 survivors who were interviewed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

IOM spokesman Flavio Di Giacomo said after the dinghy sank the survivors had been clinging on to bits and pieces until help arrived and transferred them to Italy. The IOM said 95,768 migrants and refugees entered Europe by sea in 2017.

Many of the asylum seekers arrived in Italy and the remainder divided between Greece, Cyprus and Spain. More than 80,000 asylum seekers have landed in Italy since January, up 15 percent in the same period in 2016.

The latest fatalities increased the death toll of people dying attempting the crossing or missing, feared drowned, to more than 2,160 since the beginning of 2017. Many analysts see Western policies as the cause of increased human trafficking.

Source: Presstv

Cameroon authorities forced nearly 900 refugees back to northern Nigeria against their will this week, violating an agreement between the two countries to shield thousands from Boko Haram violence, the United Nations said on Thursday.

The Cameroonian government denied force had been used to send refugees home and said repatriation had taken place with the refugees’ consent. About 887 Nigerians, most of them children, were ferried across the border on Tuesday night in trucks provided by the Nigerian military and Cameroonian police, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said.
“The involuntary return of refugees must be avoided under any circumstances,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a statement. “Returns to Nigeria put a strain on the few existing services and are not sustainable at this time.”

If done forcibly, the move counters an agreement signed by Nigeria, Cameroon and the UNHCR in March stating that Nigerian refugees in Cameroon will not be forced back to a remote region ripped apart by violence and where humanitarian efforts are severely stretched.

“There was no forced repatriation of 887 Nigerian refugees from Banki to Borno State in Nigeria. It happened with their consent,” said Cameroon’s government spokesman Issa Tchiroma Bakary. “Cameroon respects the law and its international commitments.”

The Nigerian official responsible for humanitarian activities in the Boko Haram-affected northeast was not immediately available for comment. Boko Haram has forced more than two million people to flee during its seven-year campaign to create an Islamic state in northeast Nigeria. More than 85,000 Nigerian refugees reside in Cameroon’s Far North region.

Over 11,000 have returned to Nigeria this year as camps in Cameroon struggle to accommodate them. It is unclear how many of these have been forced to leave, but the U.N. has warned against repeated attempts to send refugees home against their will.

Source: DNA

Russia has said it will react “in proportion” to any US military actions against Syria on the pretense of preventing a chemical attack. “We will react with dignity, in proportion to the real situation that may take place,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday during a press conference.

Lavrov added that he hoped the US would not use its intelligence assessments concerning the Syrian government’s alleged intentions to further provoke the country. “I expect that our partners in the region – American, European – will also have an open and comprehensible approach aimed at de-escalation through normalization of the humanitarian situation,” he added.

Earlier in the day, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov cautioned the US against any unilateral action in Syria. He further added that Syrian army troops pose no threat to US forces, and that the US attacks on the Syrian armed forces are provocative in nature.

On Monday, US Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed that the US had “identified potential preparations” for an attack “that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children.”

He added that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian military would “pay a heavy price” if they went ahead with the alleged plan. The Pentagon claims that it has seen activities linked with chemical weapons at Shayrat airfield in Homs province that was hit by American missiles in April.

Different foreign-backed terrorist groups have been wreaking havoc in Syria since 2011. Over the past few months, Syrian forces have made sweeping gains against Takfiri elements, who have lately increased their acts of violence across the country following a series of defeats on the ground.

Source: Presstv