Cairo : Two bombs exploded outside a hotel in Egypt housing election judges on Tuesday, killing at least one person, state television reported.
The blasts in the city of al-Arish came a day after the second round of a parliamentary election closed.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Islamic State’s Egypt affiliate, Sinai Province, has carried out similar attacks in the region as part of its bid to topple the Cairo government.
State television and security sources first said a car bomb exploded then a second blast hit the area about ten minutes later.
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Johannesburg – Humanitarian organisation Gift of the Givers has made contact with the group that took South African Stephen McGown and Swede Johan Gustafsson hostage four years ago.
The organisation’s founder Imtiaz Sooliman said it would soon take possession of a video from the captors, who appeared ready to negotiate with them.
The two were abducted in Mali by al-Qaeda on November 25 2011.
Wednesday will mark exactly four years since the pair was taken hostage.
Sooliman said both families had waited for three years and eight months without any information on McGown and Gustafsson.
“With our involvement, we made contact with the captors in less than four months.
“Our analysis is the following: ‘someone’ agreed to take up our ‘case’, the captors have accepted Gift of the Givers as negotiators on behalf of both hostages, a special video has been prepared for us and they are ready for ‘dialogue’,” Sooliman said.
“We now need to get possession of the video and view the contents, then wait for ‘demands’ or instructions on the way forward or any other relevant messages. Depending on the content of the video and us successfully acquiring it, we may consider releasing it publicly.”
He said a negotiator from Mali made contact with someone who eventually led them to a “connection”, who began communicating with them.
“On Monday November 23 we got a call at 12 noon to say that ‘the video is good and is waiting for us’,” Sooliman said.
“We are making arrangements to fetch the video and waiting for instructions on how and where to obtain it, but we were told that we may have it by Friday November 27.
“We asked isn’t it possible to get it tomorrow, November 25, and asked the person if anyone knew that November 25 is the fourth anniversary of the abduction. The person said he was not aware of that.”
In June a video emerged of the pair in apparent good health.
The two men sported beards and were wearing traditional robes sitting under a tree.
In the video, McGown thanks the South African government and his family for the efforts made to rescue him. He also reiterates his plea for assistance in his release.
Gift of the Givers successfully negotiated the release of South African Yolande Korkie from al-Qaeda in Yemen, in January 2014, in a ransom-free deal.
The release of her husband Pierre Korkie was also secured for December 6 2014, but he and American Luke Somers died that morning in a failed rescue attempt by the American military.
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Tunisia — Tunisia’s Interior Ministry says an explosion has struck a bus carrying members of the presidential guard in the country’s capital, killing at least 11 people.
The blast occurred on the tree-lined avenue in the center of the capital, Tunis. It was unclear what had caused the explosion, which came 10 days after authorities increased the security level in the capital and deployed security forces in unusually high numbers.
Earlier this month, Tunisian authorities announced the dismantling of a cell it said had planned attacks at police stations and hotels in the seaside city of Sousse, about 95 miles southeast of Tunis.
A luxury beach hotel in Sousse was hit by an attack last June that left 38 people dead. In March, an attack at Tunisia’s famed Bardo museum near the capital killed 22 people.
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Five shot in US Black Lives Matter rally over death of African-American man
Five people were wounded, though none gravely, when the gunmen opened fire Monday night at the Minneapolis protest, police said.
Black Lives Matter Minneapolis vowed to continue its daily demonstrations protesting the fatal police shooting of Jamar Clark, 24, whom they said was handcuffed when he was shot in the head on November 15.
“White supremacists attacked the #4thPrecinctShutDown in an act of domestic terrorism,” the group wrote on its Facebook page. “We won’t be intimidated.”
Meanwhile, the mayor of Chicago called for calm ahead of the release of a “hideous” video showing officer Jason Van Dyke fire 16 bullets into Laquan McDonald, 17.
A judge ordered the Chicago police dashcam video released to the public no later than Wednesday.
Van Dyke was charged with first degree murder Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune reported.
It will be the first time a Chicago police officer has been charged with first-degree murder for an on-duty fatality in more than 30 years, the newspaper said.
“We trust police officers to provide safety, build trust and uphold the law. If you violate that you’re going to be held accountable,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel told reporters Monday.
“This is a violation of your conscience and it is wrong and it is hideous.”
Emanuel spoke with community leaders and urged them to remind residents to express their right to protest in a “responsible, focused, peaceful way so your voices and your ideas are heard.”
The city approved a US$5 million (S$7.08 million) settlement for McDonald’s family in April and federal authorities have said they are investigating the case.
His family has said they do not want the video released because it will be too painful to see it played over and over again on the news.
“My nephew is shot in the back and all of those other places 16 times. Even when he was on the ground, the officer was still shooting him,” McDonald’s uncle, Shyrell Johnson, told WGN-TV last week.
Police have said McDonald was high on PCP, acting erratically and lunged at the officers with a knife.
“Despite the graphic nature of the video, we’re confident that my client’s actions were not only lawful, but also within department policy and within his training,” Van Dyke’s attorney, Daniel Herbert, told reporters last week.
“He was in fear for his life.” Van Dyke, who has been on desk duty since the October 2014 shooting, did not speak to reporters when he arrived at the Chicago courthouse Tuesday morning.
In Minneapolis, police have said Clark died in a struggle with police who were responding to a domestic disturbance.
His brother on Tuesday thanked demonstrators for their continued vigilance but asked them to halt activity out of concern, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
“Thank you to the community for the incredible support you have shown for our family in this difficult time,” his brother Eddie Sutton said in a statement, according to the paper.
“In light of tonight’s shootings, the family feels out of imminent concern for the safety of the occupiers, we must get the occupation of the Fourth Precinct ended and onto the next step.”
Minneapolis police said they were “actively investigating the shootings” and that additional uniformed officers had been called to the area.
Matthew Hill
Government avoiding spending cuts ahead of 2016 elections
Falling copper prices and power crisis are hurting economy
Zambia should access emergency funding from the International Monetary Fund to prevent further deterioration in the economy, according to Situmbeko Musokotwane, a former finance minister in Africa’s second-largest copper-producing country.
A team from the Washington-based lender visited the country this month at the invitation of the government to assess the state of the economy and Zambia’s responses to the fiscal issues facing the country. Neither the government nor the IMF mentioned the possibility of talks about an economic program in statements released at the end of the tour on Nov. 20.
“Zambia is quickly running out of money,” Musokotwane said in an e-mail Tuesday. “It is incumbent upon the government to agree with the IMF on a program that not only stabilizes the economy, but also quickly restores investor confidence and re-kindles faster economic growth as it was before.”
The southern African nation has been hit by copper prices that have fallen to six-year lows just as a power crisis hobbles production. Government overspending is also hurting the economy, the IMF said in its end-of-visit statement. The currency has lost 45 percent of its value against the dollar this year and mining companies including the local unit of Glencore Plc are cutting output and retrenching thousands of workers.
Zambia is resisting an IMF deal to avoid the strict conditions that will accompany it, said Musokotwane, who was finance minister from 2008 to 2011. President Edgar Lungu’s government doesn’t want to cut spending before general elections next year, he said.
A spokesman for Zambia’s Finance Ministry didn’t answer a call to his mobile seeking comment.
Irmgard Erasmus, an analyst at NKC African Economics in Paarl, near Cape Town, agreed that the government should get financial help from the fund.
“Zambia needs to urgently agree to a rescue package with the IMF to meet borrowing requirements and re-establish investor confidence,” she said in an e-mailed note to clients Tuesday.
EGYPT DISCOVERS ANCIENT FENCE, DATING BACK OVER 3,500 YEARS
CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s antiquities ministry says archaeologists have found a “giant fence” at the site of an ancient capital city in the northern Nile Delta region, dating back over 3,500 years.
Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty said on Tuesday the discovery was made by the Austrian Archaeological Institute. He did not say when the discovery was made.
He says the fence, from the pharaonic Middle Kingdom, may have been part of a city’s wall. The period coincided with the invasion of Egypt of the Hyksos, an ancient Asiatic people.
The ministry says the structure was found in Tal el-Dabaa in Sharqiya province, where Egypt’s capital of Avaris was located at the time.
Antiquities official Mahmoud Afifi says it’s at least 500 meters (yards) long and 7 meters (yards) thick, made out of sandstone.
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“Until now, the number of the South Sudanese who fled to Sudan due to the security situation in their country amounted to 352,000,” Ahmed Mohamed Adam, Sudan’s Humanitarian Aid Commissioner, said at a press conference in Khartoum on Tuesday.
“These South Sudanese refugees are distributed in 14 Sudanese states, but the majority are in Khartoum state which hosts 142,000 refugees, followed by White Nile state where there are 93,200 refugees,” he said.
He added that Sudan is dealing with the South Sudanese refugees as citizens.
“There are presidential directives that these refugees should be treated as citizens and provided with the necessary humanitarian assistance,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese citizens have fled the violence in their country and crossed to the Sudanese border areas.
South Sudan was plunged into violence in December 2013 when fighting erupted between troops loyal to President Salva Kiir and defectors led by his former deputy Riek Machar.
The conflict soon turned into an all-out war, with the violence taking on an ethnic dimension.
The clashes have killed thousands of South Sudanese and forced around 1.9 million to flee their homes.
