Foreign
Fear of coups grips Africa, Rwanda retire generals, 1,000 soldiers
•Niger junta orders forceful eviction of French ambassador, cancels envoy, family’s visas
The African Union’s Peace and Security Council on Thursday suspended Gabon following the Wednesday overthrow of President Ondimba Ali Bongo by soldiers led by the head of the Republican guards, Gen Brice Nguema.
The continental body in a post on X, formerly Twitter, condemned the military takeover of power in the Central African country.
This came as Rwanda and Cameroon hurriedly retired 1, 029 senior officers in a surprise move against their respective militaries.
The Rwandan authorities approved the retirement of 12 generals, including two four-star generals, James Kabarebe and Fred Ibingira, two three-star generals, Charles Kayonga and Frank Mushyo Kamanzi, and several officers.
According to a Rwandan national newspaper, News Times, the government approved the retirement of 12 generals and many officers. The publication stated that the retirements were announced on Wednesday, in a statement issued by Rwanda Defence Force.
Among those retired are two four-star generals, James Kabarebe and Fred Ibingira, two three-star generals, Charles Kayonga and Frank Mushyo Kamanzi.
Kabarebe and Kayonga have previously served as Chief of Defence Staff of RDF, while the other two have been service chiefs previously
The statement partly reads, “The President has also approved the retirement of 83 senior officers, six junior officers and 86 senior non-commissioned officers, 678 whose contracts ended and 160 medical discharges.”
In Cameroon, President Paul Biya has also reshuffled the military with new appointments to the Controle Generale des Armees.
The new controllers are Capt Ajeagah Njei Félix Colonel and Colonel Nguema Ondo Bertin Bourger.
Appointments were also made to the positions of Technical Advisers, Bureau Commissariat, and Air Force Technical Inspector.
Disclosing its decision after a meeting of its Peace and Security Council, the AU said it “decides to immediately suspend the participation of Gabon in all activities of the AU, its organs and institutions.”
It said the meeting was chaired by the AU commissioner for political affairs, Bankole Adeoye of Nigeria, and the current holder of the council’s rotating chair, Burundi’s Willy Nyamitwe.
Nguema for inauguration
In a new development, the junta in Gabon has said Gen Nguema will be sworn in on Monday as the transitional president as the opposition called for its candidate to be recognised as the winner of weekend elections.
The military in a statement on Thursday sought to reassure international donors they would “respect all commitments” at home and abroad and “phase in” transitional institutions.
The spokesman for the new regime, Col Ulrich Manfoumbi, said on state television that the swearing-in of Nguema would take place at the constitutional court.
Gabon’s opposition Alternance 2023 alliance had remained silent since the coup, but on Thursday called on the military leaders to acknowledge its victory in the election.
The alliance “invited the defence and security forces to the discussion so as to work out the best solution,” following the vote.
Led by university professor Albert Ondo Ossa, Alternance had earlier accused President Ali Bongo of “fraud” and demanded he hand over power “without bloodshed”.
Ossa claimed the Bongo clan remained in control and there had not been a coup but a “palace revolution”. “Oligui Nguema is Ali Bongo’s cousin,” he told France’s TV5 Monde.
He stated, “The Bongos found that Ali Bongo had to be put aside to be able to properly pursue the Bongo system. Oligui Nguema is an underling. Behind him, it’s the Bongo clan keeping hold of power,” he said, urging international help to restore order.
Meanwhile, a serious humanitarian crisis is looming in Niger Republic as the vulnerable population, particularly, women and children, are facing hunger and other hardships in the aftermath of the sanctions imposed on the country by the Economic Community of West African States over the July 26 overthrow of President Mohamed Bazoum by the military.
This came to light as the Niger junta ordered the police to forcefully evict the French ambassador, Sylvain Itte, from the country.
Niger’s foreign ministry announced that Itte had 48 hours to leave, saying he had refused to meet with the new rulers and citing French government actions that were “contrary to the interests of Niger.”
The visas of the French ambassador to Niamey, Sylvain Itte, and his family had been cancelled and police were instructed to expel the envoy, the junta said in a statement dated Aug. 29 and confirmed as authentic on Thursday by its communications head, according to Reuters.
The latest communique sent by Niger’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Itte “no longer enjoys the privileges and immunities attached to his status as a member of the diplomatic staff of the embassy. The police have been instructed to carry out his expulsion.”
Humanitarian crisis
That said, the closure of the borders of Nigeria and other neighbouring countries has starved the francophone nation of food and other critical supplies, putting the beleaguered country on the edge of a humanitarian crisis.
To compel the junta led by Gen Tchiani Abdourahmane to restore the ousted president to power, the 15-member regional bloc imposed stringent sanctions on the Sahel nation and also threatened military intervention to restore constitutional order.
It suspended all commercial transactions with Niger, froze its assets in the regional central bank, including the assets of the state and state enterprises in commercial banks, and suspended all financial assistance with regional development banks.
A planned $51m bond issuance by Niger in the West African regional debt market was cancelled by the regional central bank following the imposition of sanctions. Niger had planned to raise $834 million from the regional debt market in 2023.
Nigeria also cut the power supply to the country on the 80mw Birnin-Kebbi line, while Ivory Coast suspended imports and exports of Nigerien goods.
West Africa’s regional central bank, the BCEAO, shut down its branches in Niger, citing risks to operations.
However, the Niger Country Director of the International Rescue Committee, Paolo Cernuschi, said these decisions were having disastrous humanitarian impacts on the most economically vulnerable people in the Niger Republic.
He disclosed in an opinion published by Euronews on Thursday that aid organisations cannot get critical supplies into the country.
The border closures, he noted, had further compounded the political crisis, preventing life-saving humanitarian supplies and essential aid from reaching the communities that needed them most, creating a barrier that separates people from the assistance they require to survive.
Cernuschi explained, “We have en route shipments of life-saving nutritional supplements for 2,300 children that we don’t know when we’ll receive. While we have contingency stocks in place, those will eventually run out.
“If border closures and sanctions persist, aid supplies running out will be all but a certainty, and the capacity of humanitarian actors to continue delivering will be jeopardised.
“By some estimates, supplies in the country at the time of the coup were sufficient for two to three months of humanitarian response. With supply chains requiring from a few weeks to a couple of months to replenish stocks, we are fast approaching the point where shortages will be inevitable.”
The country director said the sanctions had unintended adverse impacts on the lives of ordinary citizens who are already struggling to meet their basic needs.
He advised that humanitarian exemptions must be guaranteed to ensure continuity of humanitarian work in Niger.
He advised that “The international community and regional organisations must prioritise a ‘do no harm’ approach in dealing with this situation. Diplomatic efforts should focus on finding peaceful solutions that prioritise the well-being of all Nigerien citizens, regardless of their socio-economic status.
In response to the situation, the United Nations on Tuesday filed an exemption request for relief supplies to the Niger Republic to the ECOWAS.
The global organisation said sanctions on Niger were blocking vital humanitarian aid such as food and medicine.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representative for Niger, Emmanuel Gignac, stated this at a press briefing during a visit to Geneva.
Reuters reported that trucks with food and humanitarian aid have been piling up at Niger’s land borders since the military coup on July 26, driving up food prices, in a sign of the impact of the sanctions.
Gignac noted, “There is no way to bring humanitarian aid into the country. The immediate goods (affected) are going to be food and then it’s going to be access to medicine, to drugs.”
He added that a formal letter from UN aid chief Martin Griffiths had been addressed to ECOWAS for exemptions.
UN aid flights have also been reportedly grounded because they cannot get access to jet fuel because of the sanctions, complicating aid efforts in the country.
A Nigerian-born Roman Catholic priest, Anthony Odiong, has been convicted by a jury in Texas, United States, for sexually assaulting women under his spiritual care, The Guardian reports.
Odiong, 57, was found guilty on one count of first-degree sexual assault and two counts of second-degree sexual assault after a trial in Waco, Texas.
The jury, made up of eight women and four men, delivered its verdict after about two hours of deliberation on Friday.
The court heard testimony from two women who said Odiong used his role as a priest to manipulate and pressure them into sexual relationships.
He was accused of exploiting his position as a Catholic priest to pursue sexual relationships with women he was providing spiritual direction.
Odiong, who pleaded not guilty, could face life imprisonment on the first-degree charge when sentencing begins on Monday.
Prosecutors said the offences involved two women who testified in court that the priest abused his clerical authority during periods of emotional vulnerability.
One of the women, identified in court documents as Mary Doe, told the jury that Odiong began a sexual relationship with her while providing spiritual counselling during a difficult divorce.
She also testified that her son once walked in on her and Odiong during intercourse at her home.
Another woman, Jane Doe, testified that he pressured her into sexual acts under the guise of spiritual guidance.
The case followed a 2024 report by The Guardian, which first documented allegations of sexual misconduct and coercion against the priest during his ministry in Texas and Louisiana.
Prosecutors said that report prompted one of the victims to come forward to police with further allegations.
Investigators later gathered additional evidence, including DNA linked to a child fathered by Odiong during his time in Louisiana.
Odiong, a naturalised US citizen, was ordained in Nigeria in 1993 and later served in Catholic parishes in Texas and Louisiana.
Authorities said he was suspended from the ministry in 2019 following earlier allegations of misconduct.
His lawyers argued during the trial that the relationships were consensual, but prosecutors maintained that he abused his position of authority as a clergy member.
A United States-based 23 year old tech-developer, Tony Kabilan Okeke, led a five-man team of Drexel University, Philadelphia, Penn., U.S. alumni and students to develop Xploit, an automated cybersecurity testing tool for AI agents, an ambitious concept that addresses a growing problem in AI landscape.
Beside Tony Okeke who is the Team Lead, other members of the team are Kamdi Okeke, Kiitan Fawole, Dalu Okonkwo and Michael Moemeke.
Speaking to our reporter on the development, Tony said, “As more businesses deploy AI agents that can take actions and use tools on behalf of customers, these systems become potential security risks. Unlike simple AI assistants, agents have access to tools and can perform real actions – meaning a security vulnerability isn’t just a PR problem, it could have serious real-world consequences.”
3rd from right, Team lead, Tony, Kamdi, Dalu, flanked by UEV partners
The team envisioned a tool that could automatically test an AI agent for vulnerabilities – essentially playing the role of a digital attacker to identify weaknesses before real threats could exploit them. This was the outcome of their brainstorming on November 21, 2025, when Tony led the group to build and pitch Xploit in the “Start-Up In a Weekend” Hackathon hosted on November 21 – 23, 2025 in Philadelphia, by The Foundry & Velric, a Philadelphia-based founder-first community that act as a startup ecosystem catalyst.
Tony designed the system’s architecture and created the initial prototype of the user interface (UI). The UI concept was crucial: it needed to visually show how their automated attacker was thinking, strategizing, and attempting different approaches in real-time, all displayed through interactive graph showing the attack process as it unfolded.
Responsibilities were strategically divided amongst the team. Some members created sample AI agents to serve as “victims” for testing. Tony developed the core attacking system. One person refined the user interface, and others handled the technical infrastructure connecting all the pieces together.
The attacking system itself works like a strategic game player. It would first choose an attack strategy, then create a detailed plan, execute that plan step-by-step by sending messages to the target AI agent, and analyze the responses to determine whether to continue or try a different approach. Throughout this process, the web interface displayed everything happening in real-time, allowing users to watch the automated tester work.
The team then integrated everything — making the attacker communicate with the victim AI agent systems, ensuring the automated testing loop ran smoothly, and polishing the final product. They recorded their demo video and submitted their project before the 9 am deadline on November 23, 2025.
During the afternoon judging session, the team delivered their pitch, framing their project around a massive, unaddressed market shift, highlighting a critical market gap: while the explosion of AI agents in 2025 has seen enterprises deploy them to manage everything from infrastructure to sensitive tasks like financial analysis and customer support, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are left vulnerable because they cannot afford to test them for security flaws. Unlike tech giants, SMBs lack the resources for dedicated AI security teams. Xploit, automated cybersecurity tool, directly addresses this need, positioning itself within a booming continuous automated red-teaming market projected to skyrocket from $495 million in 2024 to $4.9 billion by 2032. Xploit democratizes AI safety, levels the playing field, allowing any business to automatically test and secure their AI agents before deployment.
The judges were impressed enough that they took an unusual step — they asked to see the team’s code and development history to verify the project had actually been built during the hackathon weekend. This verification was necessary because the judges found it hard to believe such a polished product could be created in just one weekend.
The team won the “new project track” award and $1,500 in prize money.
“What made the achievement particularly remarkable” according to Kamdi Okeke, “wasn’t just that we built it over a weekend — it was that, competing amongst a diverse group of 100+ of Philadelphia’s most driven creators, we built Xploit in less than a day of actual development time, transforming an abstract idea into a working, polished prototype through focused collaboration and strategic planning.”
Speaking further, Tony said, “The experience at yet another hackathon, UEV’s Venture Building Weekend hosted in Philadelphia, March 12 – 14, 2026, was a turning point for us. The mentorship and feedback we received from industry operators helped sharpen how we think about the problem and where our approach fits in the market.”
United Effects Ventures (UEV) is a Philadelphia-based pre-seed venture studio. Through its Venture Building Weekend, a competitive hackathon, focused on problem validation and go-to-market strategy, teams refined their ideas with guidance from experienced operators and investors. After a grueling 48-hour sprint, Xploit came tops, outperformed 15 other competing teams, earning a cash award and two advisory sessions with partners at UEV; and most importantly, industry experts validated Xploit’s focus on continuous red-teaming as a strong approach to discovering vulnerabilities in AI-powered products.
Mentors at the hackathon validated both the team’s identification of the problem – the growing security risks posed by AI agents operating autonomously in enterprise environment – and their approach of framing the product as continuous red-teaming platform, which could support an ongoing service model.
The accusation comes after US Central Command said its forces had on Monday attacked missile sites and boats in southern Iran that were trying to lay mines in the Gulf, while Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said it fired at US aircraft trying to enter its airspace.
“The US terrorist army, continuing its illegal and unjustified actions since the ceasefire… has, in the past 48 hours, committed a gross violation of the ceasefire in the Hormozgan region,” the Iranian foreign ministry said in a statement.
It added that Tehran “will not leave any evil unanswered and will not hesitate to defend the Iranian nation,” without elaborating.
Tuesday’s statement came as a top Iranian delegation was in Qatar for talks as part of a “diplomatic process” aimed at ending the war with the United States, which broke out on February 28.
AFP
Iranian authorities held mass public weddings in Tehran for couples who signed up to a state-sponsored scheme declaring their readiness to sacrifice their lives in the war against the US and Israel.
The ceremonies conducted late on Monday involved hundreds of couples in several major squares in the capital, including more than 100 in the vast Imam Hossein square in central Tehran, according to reports in Iranian media.
They were broadcast on state TV in a bid to boost wartime morale, with US President Donald Trump repeatedly threatening new military action against Iran amid a shaky ceasefire which halted the fighting that began on February 28.
Those involved had signed up, according to Iranian media, for the so-called “self-sacrifice” scheme (janfada in Persian) where people pledged to put their lives on the line in the war by, for example, forming human chains outside power stations.
Iranian authorities say millions of people, including top figures such as the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and President Masoud Pezeshkian, have put their names forward.
Couples arrived at the Imam Hossein square in military jeeps with mounted machine guns and were married on a stage in a ceremony presided over by a cleric, AFP images showed.
The stage was festooned with balloons and with a giant image of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who has yet to appear in public since being elevated to the position after the killing of his father and predecessor, Ali Khamenei, on the first day of the war.
“Certainly, the country is at war, but young people also have the right to marry,” one young woman in a white Islamic bridal dress, who was not named, said beside her groom in footage published by the Mehr news agency.
A man in a dark suit, beside his bride-to-be, said they were happy the occasion marked the anniversary of the marriage of the Prophet Ali, revered by Shia Muslims, to Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed.
“We received their blessings. Furthermore, we came to offer our best wishes to the people in the streets,” he said.
Mehr said 110 couples had taken part in the Imam Hossein Square ceremony alone. The AFP images showed crowds of well-wishers clasping roses and watching on.
Since the start of the war, Iranian authorities have held, on a near-daily basis, major pro-government gatherings in a bid to highlight popular mobilisation amid the conflict.
AFP
The Nigerian community in the United States has been thrown into mourning following the sudden death of Eric Ezeokoli, a student of California State University, Long Beach.
Ezeokoli, who was born on October 6, 1960, reportedly died on Friday, April 11, 2026, at Saint Mary’s Hospital after a brief illness.
Until his death, he was studying Engineering at the university, also known as Long Beach State University. Sources disclosed that he had previously lived in San Jose before relocating to the Los Angeles area.
Tragically, at the time of his passing, Ezeokoli was said to be homeless and living in his car, with no fixed address.
The deceased was originally from Anambra State, although details about his exact hometown remain unclear. There are indications he may have hailed from Aguata, but this has not been officially confirmed.
Efforts are currently underway to locate his family members and relatives in Nigeria. Members of the Nigerian community and concerned individuals are appealing to anyone with useful information about Ezeokoli’s background or family to come forward.
A contact person, Paul Kizito Eze, has been designated to receive information that could help trace the deceased’s relatives.
The appeal has also been extended to people from Anambra State, particularly those familiar with communities in Aguata, to assist in identifying and notifying the family.
The situation has sparked renewed concern over the welfare of some Nigerians living abroad, especially those facing hardship and isolation.
Anyone with relevant information is urged to reach out urgently to assist in reconnecting the late Ezeokoli with his family for proper burial arrangements.
-
News4 days agoPower Doesn’t Last Forever, It Has Expiry Date — VeryDarkMan Warns Wike
-
Politics4 days agoSpeaker suspended over anti-party activities
-
Crime4 days agoEnugu Police Foil Kidnap Attempt, kill 2 Suspects, Recover AK-47, Other Weapons
-
Crime3 days agoPosters of Abducted Seven Teachers, 39 Pupils Flood Oyo Communities
-
News4 days agoRights Group Petitions IGP, Seeks Probe of Police Role in Controversial Enugu Land Disputes
-
News4 days agoPolice Declare 6 IPOB Members Wanted Over Protests Against Kanu’s Jail Terms
-
Crime3 days agoAbducted Students: Oyo Assembly refuses to negotiatie with bandits
-
Sports4 days agoMbah Rewards Rangers Players, Management with Plots of Land, N150m for Winning NPFL