BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo — Ballot counting began Sunday after polls closed in The Republic of Congo, where President Denis Sassou N’Guesso is seeking a fifth consecutive term. Results are expected within two weeks.

The elections were marked by a low turnout, as locals said they did not believe the election would result in a change in leadership from Sassou N’Guesso, who has ruled for 42 years. Opposition parties called for a boycott of the election.

Six other candidates challenged the 82-year-old for the top job in the Central African country that boasts one of the largest oil reserves in sub-Saharan Africa. But analysts say none of them can mount a significant challenge against the incumbent.

The internet was shut down across the country as usual during the presidential election and traffic was restricted across the capital.

“Everyone knows that, faced with his six inexperienced opponents, President Denis Sassou-Nguesso will be reelected with a high score as usual. Since the election is not a big issue, we shouldn’t cut off communication,” Clarisse Massamba, a teacher who voted at the Lycée Javoueh in Brazzaville, told The Associated Press.

The campaign period showed a vast mismatch between Sassou N’Guesso and his opponents, with the incumbent being the only candidate to travel around the country to canvass for votes. Roads in the capital city, Brazzaville, were paved with Sassou N’Guesso’s effigies.

Two other major parties boycotted the elections over allegations of unfair electoral practices.

Sassou N’Guesso, running for the Congolese Party of Labor, first came to power in 1979 and ruled until 1992 when he organized the country’s first multi-party elections. He returned to power as a militia leader following a four-month civil war in 1997.

A constitutional referendum in 2015 removed presidential age and term limits, allowing him to run again.

The country is struggling with high international debt, which stands at 94.5% of its gross domestic product, according to the World Bank, and skyrocketing unemployment rates for young people. More than half the country’s 5.7 million population lives in poverty and 47% of the country’s population is under 18.

The election is the latest in a trend of octogenarian African leaders clinging to power. Sassou N’Guesso is the third-longest-serving #African president, only behind Cameroon ’s Paul Biya and Equatorial Guinea ’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

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Louis Okamba, The Associated Press

A large immigration detention camp in Texas is closed to visitors amid measles outbreak

TALLINN, Estonia — Even now, safely in her new home of Estonia, Inna Vnukova says she can’t purge the terrifying memory of living under Russian occupation in eastern Ukraine early in the war and her family’s harrowing escape.

They hid in a damp basement for days in their village of Kudriashivka after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. In the streets, soldiers waving machine guns bullied residents, set up checkpoints and looted homes. There was constant shelling.

“Everyone was very scared and afraid to go outside,” Vnukova told The Associated Press, with troops seeking out Ukrainian sympathizers and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.

In mid-March, she decided that she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, would flee the village with her brother’s family, even though it meant leaving her husband behind temporarily. They took a risky trip by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.

“We had already said our goodbyes to life, cursing this Russian world,” said Vnukova, 42. “I’ve been trying to forget this nightmare for four years, but I can’t.”

Many Ukrainians like Vnukova fled the invading forces. Those who stayed risked being detained — or worse — as Russian forces eventually took control of about 20% of the country and its estimated 3 million to 5 million people.
A new, Russian life in the seized regions

After four years of war, life in shattered cities like Mariupol and villages like Kudriashivka remains difficult, with residents facing problems with housing, water, power, heat and health care. Even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged they have “many truly pressing, urgent problems.”

In the illegally annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Russian citizenship, language and culture is forced on residents, including in school lessons and textbooks. By spring 2025, some 3.5 million people in the four regions had been given Russian passports — a requirement to receive vital services like health care.

Some in the regions say they live in fear of being accused of sympathizing with Ukraine. Many have been imprisoned, beaten and killed, according to human rights activists.

Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed behind in the village for nearly two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him, including an instance where he and a friend were dragged off the street by soldiers. But he survived and soon also escaped the village.

The family traveled through Russia before making it to Estonia, where Inna works in a printing house and Oleksii, 43, is an electrician.

“All life is leaving the occupied territories,” Vnukov said. “The people there aren’t living, they’re just surviving.”

Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine said the Russian military’s practice of wielding “systemic and total control” in the regions continues today.

“Even though a significant number of socially active people have already been detained, Russian special services continue to identify disloyal Ukrainians, extract confessions, and continue to detain people,” Savva said. “Residents face such practices as document checks, mass searches, and denunciations on a daily basis.”

Human rights groups say Russian authorities used “filtration camps” to identify potentially disloyal individuals, as well as anyone who worked for the government, helped the Ukrainian army or had relatives in the military, along with journalists, teachers, scientists and politicians.

Stanislav Shkuta, 25, who lived in occupied Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, said he narrowly escaped arrest several times before reaching Ukrainian-controlled territory in 2023. He recalled being on a bus that was stopped by Russian soldiers.

“It was horrific. Men and women were asked to strip to the waist to see if they had Ukrainian tattoos,” said Shkuta, who now lives in Estonia. “I turned white with fear, wondering if I’d cleared everything on my phone.”

He said his friends who stayed in Nova Kakhovka say life has worsened, with suspected Ukrainian sympathizers stopped on the street or in surprise door-to-door inspections.

“Today, my friends complain that life there has become impossible,” he said.

Russia established a “vast network of secret and official detention centers where tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians” are held indefinitely without charge, said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.

“Everyone knows that if you end up in the basement, your life is worth nothing,” she said.

Russian officials have refused to comment on past allegations by U.N. human rights officials that it tortures civilians and prisoners of war.

About 16,000 civilians have been detained illegally, but that number could be much higher because many are held incommunicado. said Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.

A UN report released last summer said that between July 2024 and June 2025, it spoke to 57 civilians who were detained in the occupied regions, and that 52 of them told of severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, degradation and threats of violence.

One particularly famous case is that of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, 27, who disappeared in 2023 while reporting near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and died in Russian custody. When her body was handed over to Ukraine in 2025, it bore signs of torture, with some of her organs removed, a prosecutor said.

“Russia uses terror in the occupied territories to physically eliminate active people working in certain fields: teachers, children’s writers, musicians, mayors, journalists, environmentalists. It also intimidates the passive majority,” Matviichuk says.

A son of late #Zimbabwe President Mugabe is arrested in South Africa over a shooting.

JOHANNESBURG — A son of former Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was arrested in South Africa along with another man on Thursday over the shooting of a man at a house in Johannesburg, police and a family lawyer said.

Lawyer Ashley Mugiya told The Associated Press that Bellarmine Chatunga Mugabe was one of two men detained and taken in for questioning. Police said both were later placed under arrest and would face charges of attempted murder.

Mugabe is the youngest son of Zimbabwe’s former leader, who died in 2019, and his second wife, Grace Mugabe.

South African national broadcaster SABC said the shooting occurred at the younger Mugabe’s home in a plush Johannesburg suburb and that he was seen in handcuffs in the driveway after police arrived.

South African police said that an employee at the house had sustained a single gunshot wound and was in a critical condition, though it wasn’t clear how many shots in total were fired.

Police did not name the two men who were arrested, though South African police typically decline to name suspects until they have appeared in court and been formally charged.

Police identified the person who was shot as the gardener at the home and said there had been an “altercation,” though they said the motive was still unclear.

Police spokesperson Col. Dimakatso Nevhuhulwi told reporters from the scene of the shooting that the two suspects had been uncooperative when police arrived.

“They have not told us where the gun is,” Nevhuhulwi said. “We cannot definitely say who shot.”

Mugiya, a lawyer based in Zimbabwe, said lawyers in South Africa would represent Mugabe in the case.

Robert Mugabe led Zimbabwe for 37 years before he was deposed in a coup in 2017. He died two years later in Singapore at the age of 95.

The Mugabe family has been embroiled in several criminal cases over the years.

Bellarmine Chatunga Mugabe’s older brother, Robert Mugabe Jr., was fined $300 last year after admitting to possession of marijuana in Zimbabwe.

Grace Mugabe was accused of assaulting a model by beating her with an electrical cord in the presence of her sons at a luxury Johannesburg hotel in 2017. She was Zimbabwe’s first lady at the time and was initially ordered to appear in court before later being granted diplomatic immunity.

Mutsaka reported from Harare, Zimbabwe.

Mogomotsi Magome And Farai Mutsaka, The Associated Press

Drone attack by paramilitary group in Sudan kills 24, including 8 children, doctors’ group says.

Saturday’s attack by the Rapid Support Forces occurred close to the city of Rahad in North Kordofan province, said the Sudan Doctors Network, which tracks the country’s ongoing war. The vehicle was transporting displaced people who fled fighting in the Dubeiker area, the group said in a statement. Among the dead children were two infants.

Several others were wounded and taken for treatment in Rahad, which suffers severe medical supplies shortages, like many areas in the Kordofan region, the statement said.

The doctors’ group urged the international community and rights organizations to “take immediate action to protect civilians and hold the RSF leadership directly accountable for these violations.”

There was no immediate comment from the RSF, which has been at war against the Sudanese military for control of the country for about three years.

Sudan plunged into chaos in April 2023 when a power struggle between the military and the RSF exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere in the country, leaving tens of thousands dead and millions displaced.
WFP aid convoy attacked

An attack on Friday on WFP aid convoy in North Kordofan province, which killed one and wounded several others, said Denise Brown, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Sudan.

Brown said the convoy was heading to deliver “life-saving food assistance” to displaced people in the city of Obeid in North Kordofan when it was struck. The attack burned the trucks and destroyed the aid, she said.

“Attacks on aid operations undermine efforts to reach people facing hunger and displacement,” he said in a statement.

Last week, a drone strike hit close to a WFP facility in the Blue Nile province, wounding a WFP worker, Brown also said.

Emergency Lawyers, an independent group documenting atrocities in Sudan, blamed the RSF for the attack, while the Sudan Doctors Network called it a “flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and amounts to a full-fledged war crime.”

Massad Boulos, a U.S. adviser for African and Arab affairs, condemned the attack on X and called for holding those responsible accountable.

“Destroying food intended for people in need and killing humanitarian workers is sickening,” he said. “The Trump Administration has zero tolerance for this destruction of life and of U.S.-funded assistance; we demand accountability.”

The British minister for international development and Africa, Jenny Chapman, called the attack on the WFP convoy “disgraceful.”

“Civilians are starving,” she wrote Saturday on X. “Aid workers and humanitarian operations bringing vital food should never be targeted.”
Famine report portrays a grim picture

In recent months, Kordofan has become a flashpoint in the war and the army managed to break the RSF siege of two major cities in the region earlier this year.

The devastating war has so far killed more than 40,000 people, according to U.N. figures, but aid groups say that is an undercount and the true number could be many times higher.

It created the world’s largest humanitarian crisis with over 14 million people forced to flee their homes. It has fueled disease outbreaks and pushed parts of the country into famine that still spreads as the war shows no sign of abating.

In a report released Thursday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, said famine was found in two more areas in the western region of Darfur where famine was confirmed for the first time in a displacement camp in August 2024.

The report warned that acute malnutrition is expected to worsen in 2026, with a 13.5 per cent increase in cases of acute malnutrition in children under five and pregnant and breastfeeding women — from 3.7 million children and women in 2025 to nearly 4.2 million in 2026.

Severe acute malnutrition, the most dangerous and deadly form of malnutrition, is expected to increase to 800,000 cases, up 4% from 2025, it said.

Mohamad Abdiladif, country director for Save the Children in Sudan, said children were already dying from hunger-related causes in many part of Sudan.

“Every day we hear devastating stories of parents selling the last of what they own simply to keep their children alive from one day to the next,” he said.

Samy Magdy, The Associated Press

#California #protester left blind in one eye is among string of violent run-ins with federal agents.

A 21-year-old college student who said he was blinded in one eye by a projectile fired by a federal officer during a Southern California protest said he faces a drastically different life now.

Kaden Rummler said in an interview that he was in agonizing pain and underwent an extensive six-hour surgery to his left eye after he was injured at a Jan. 9 protest over the fatal shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. Rummler said he has no depth perception and can no longer drive. Shards of metal and a nickel-sized piece of plastic remain lodged in his skull, his attorney said, and he is considering suing.

“It’s going to affect every aspect of my life,” said Rummler, who hopes to pursue a career in forestry.

A second demonstrator at the same protest outside a federal immigration building in Orange County told the Los Angeles Times he was also blinded in one eye by a projectile fired by federal agents. Britain Rodriguez, 31, said he was standing on steps outside the immigration building when he was struck in the face.

“I remember hitting the ground and feeling like my eye exploded in my head,” Rodriguez told the newspaper.

The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to questions from The Associated Press about what type of projectile was used. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the agency, said in an emailed statement this week that the protesters were violent and that two officers were injured but didn’t specify the extent of their injuries. DHS said one demonstrator was taken to the hospital with a cut. McLaughlin confirmed to the Times that was a reference to Rummler and called his injury claims “absurd.”

Rummler has been charged with a misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct. One of his fellow protesters was jailed for several days and has been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer.

Rummler’s attorney John Washington said doctors want to know whether the materials in the projectile could be toxic but have been unable to get answers from DHS. Washington said based on their preliminary investigation they believe it was a capsule made from metal and plastic containing pepper spray.

The injuries in California are the latest in a growing number of violent encounters between federal agents and community members during protests over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Federal immigration agents deployed to Minneapolis have used aggressive crowd-control tactics that have become a dominant concern after the deadly shooting of Renee Good.

In Santa Ana, California, hundreds of people marched in the streets on Jan. 9 to protest Good’s killing. A smaller group later congregated outside the federal immigration building, shouting expletives through megaphones about ICE, according to video taken by OC Hawk, a group that films breaking news in Orange County.

The video shows a handful of officers in riot gear standing guard and urging demonstrators to move back. An orange cone is later seen rolling onto a plaza outside the building, and authorities begin firing crowd-control projectiles as they walk toward the crowd.

In the video, an officer is seen grabbing a protester by the arm and Rummler and a few others are seen stepping forward shouting in response. An officer then fires a crowd-control weapon, striking Rummler from several feet away. Rummler grabs his face and falls to the ground, and an officer grabs him by the shirt and drags him backward across the ground toward the building, the video shows. Later, video appears to show him face down on the ground being handcuffed.

Rummler said he joined the protest against immigration authorities because he can’t stand seeing families torn from their homes. Despite his injuries, he said he would do it again.

“I refuse to sit around idly and watch that happen, and in 50 years, I would absolutely regret not trying to make a change,” he said.

Washington, a civil rights lawyer, said his client could have been killed.

“Any officers with just the most basic training would know you don’t shoot someone ever in the face with this, but let alone at point-blank range, and that’s because it is a lethal weapon when used like that, and it very nearly was,” Washington said.

Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at University of South Carolina, said a thorough investigation is needed into the reason for using a high level of force in that situation.

“I don’t know of any projectile where you train to shoot at that close range,” Alpert said.

Amy Taxin, The Associated Press

WARSAW, Dec 17 (Reuters) - Poland has decided to start producing anti‑personnel mines for the first time since the Cold War and plans to deploy them along its eastern border and may export them to Ukraine, the deputy defence minister told Reuters.
Joining a broader regional shift that has seen almost all European countries bordering Russia, with the exception of Norway, announce plans to quit the global treaty banning such weapons, Poland wants to use anti-personnel mines to beef up its borders with Belarus and Russia.

Rwanda-backed M23 rebels have not withdrawn from the eastern Congolese town of Uvira despite an announcement earlier this week that they would pull back, residents told Reuters on Wednesday.