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Fears Rise as Congo Volcano Spews Big Dust Cloud Sat Jul 27,11:18 AM ET By Themistocle Hakizimana GOMA, Congo (Reuters) - A Congolese city half razed by a volcano just six months ago was threatened again on Saturday as a nearby rumbling mountain spewed a massive wall of dust and ash for a second straight day. Experts said they were worried by a towering three-km (two-mile) plume of dust and ash thrown up by Nyiragongo, a dark cone-shaped mountain looming over Goma, home to 500,000 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, many of them displaced by war, on the...

UN finally agrees to feed Goma's starving people James Astill in Goma Wednesday January 23, 2002 The Guardian The United Nations finally announced plans to feed the destitute people of Goma yesterday, almost a week after a river of molten lava swept through the town from the erupting Mount Nyiragongo. Declaring the Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern capital safe - three days after virtually all its 350,000 residents returned - UN officials said food would be handed out today. But the continuing danger of earthquakes was highlighted when the World Food Programme's headquarters at Gisenyi, a mile from Goma, was ...

Monday January 21 4:05 AM ET 50 Killed in Congo Gas Station Blast Photos AP Photo Slideshows AP Photo Volcano Erupts in Congo Audio/Video Lava Flows From Volcano in Congo (AP)   By CHRIS TOMLINSON, Associated Press Writer GOMA, Congo (AP) - Lava flows from a volcanic eruption ignited a gas station, killing about 50 people who were trying to siphon fuel from the elevated tanks, witnesses said. A massive fireball erupted at 8:30 a.m., leaving a huge black cloud over Goma more than 11/2 hours later. The Congolese were at the station trying to steal gas and diesel fuel ...

NYIRAGONGO Democratic Republic of the Congo 1.52°S, 29.25°E; summit elev. 3,469 m; All times are local (= UTC + 2 hours) 18 January Update The following information is based on preliminary reports from various government and news agencies that were received during the ongoing crisis. An eruption began at Nyiragongo on 17 January and, according to news reports, as of 18 January lava flows had destroyed parts of 14 villages and 45 people had been killed. Some reports state that the eruption began at 0500 local time. Other reports state that probably around mid-day, fissures N of the Goma Airport ...

Israel has reached an agreement with the United Nations that will see nearly half of the African asylum seekers it planned to deport go to Western countries.The UN High Commission for Refugees has committed to finding places in Western nations for at least 16,250 of the African migrants from Eritrea and Sudan. In return, Israel will legalize the status of the remaining asylum seekers, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement. At a press conference this morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Canada, Germany and Italy would be the countries where the migrants would be settled. As...

The Israeli government came under additional pressure to change its policy of deporting illegal migrants on Tuesday, as the Congressional Black Caucus and the Jewish Agency both urged a different approach. The CBC has circulated a letter supporting a proposal being made by advocates for the migrants to send them to other countries via the existing international refugee processing systems, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. The Israeli plan, which took effect this month, gives the migrants a choice between deportation with cash incentives and free airfare, or jail for an indefinite time. “As a close friend of the United States...

WASHINGTON — A Democratic congressional delegation urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week to release African asylum seekers being detained in an Israeli prison. In a letter sent to the premier on Tuesday, 11 Democrats who recently visited the Jewish state said “there is no legal justification for deportation” of the roughly 280 asylum seekers from African countries, mostly Sudan and Eritrea, being held in the Saharonim prison in southern Israel. Israel’s Border Authority jailed the asylum seekers last month, after they refused deportation to a third-party country. The Israeli government has said it intends to to force the migrants...

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, announced yesterday he had reached a deal with the UN to resettle thousands of African asylum seekers only to u-turn within hours after a rebellion by his own ministers. The Israeli leader said on Monday afternoon that he had struck an international agreement under which around half of the 40,000 asylum seekers in Israel would be sent to Western countries like Canada, Germany and Italy. Under the terms of the deal, the Israeli government agreed to let the other half stay in the country and to scrap controversial plans to deport them to other...

Citizens from more than 30 countries around the world appealed to the UN Secretary-General to suspend UN Human Rights Commissioner Zaid Ra'ad al-Hussein after calling Judea and Samaria communities a "war crime", following the latest report he issued regarding the pace of construction for Jews in Judea and Samaria. "While tens of thousands of people are being slaughtered in Syria, and while women's rights are being disregarded in Iran, the Human Rights Commissioner is issuing a report on the settlement movement in Israel, which details construction information, calling it a war crime", mentioned the letter. "The Commissioner' s obsession with...

Israeli universities rejected a request to grant refuge to employment-seeking African infiltrators, Channel 20 reported. The idea was proposed by Yoel Marshak, who served as the Kibbutz Movement's activities coordinator until a few years ago. Marshak told Arutz Sheva that "the police are forbidden from entering [universities.] We will ask embassies to host them for a few days. During those days, we will negotiate with the Israeli government. If we don't negotiate now, we'll be negotiating then, in desperation." "There is an international agreement that police do not enter a university campus without permission from the university's management. We will...

Given the ongoing furor over President Trump's executive order commanding the State Department cartographer to mark the map of the world with "Here be sh***holes", I thought for our Saturday movie date we should have a film about just how bad it can get. Twenty-four years ago, the Rwandan genocide was just about to get under way: In a hundred days, a million people were murdered - with machetes, all very low-tech. Since then, as I noted only the other day, the machete has been introduced to such boring white-bread places as Shelburne, Vermont, and Dundalk, Ireland, and Gothenburg, Sweden,...

In August 2016, then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton took on critics of her husband’s charitable foundation by saying the former first family “went above and beyond” to disclose their donors to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest when she served as America’s top diplomat. On the face, Clinton’s statement is true. A December 2008 voluntary ethics agreement the Clinton Foundation and incoming secretary of State executed with the Obama administration, before called for, disclosed all donors to the Foundation and its various initiatives, something normal charities don’t have to do. But over the years, the Clintons’ compliance...

Obama’s national security advisor is a liar -- and possibly a felon.Former President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice asked for the names of Trump transition officials to be unmasked and made public in raw intelligence files, according to media reports, a move apparently carried out to harm the incoming Trump administration. As recently as March 22, Rice denied knowing anything about the intelligence reports. In an appearance on “PBS Newshour,” she said pretty definitely, “I know nothing about this.” The new news reports paint Rice as a liar. The evidence we know about in the Trump-Russia saga so far...

Liberals are ecstatic that a judge in Hawaii is writing immigration policy for the entire country, and that policy is: We have no right to tell anyone that he can’t live in America. (Unless they’re Christians — those guys we can keep out.) As subtly alluded to in the subtitle of Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, the goal of liberals is for the poor of the world to have a constitutional right to come here whenever they want. I can’t help but notice that the Third Worlders aren’t moving to liberals’...

The Pontiff acknowledges that members of the clergy "succumbed to hatred and violence" as Rwandan government accuses Church of still protecting the guilty. Caption -- Pope Francis has apologised for the Catholic Church's role in the Rwandan genocide (Photo: Getty) Pope Francis has asked for forgiveness for the "sins and failings of the Church" during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, saying he hoped his apology would help heal the African state's wounds. But Rwanda's government indicated it felt the apology did not go far enough, saying the local Church was still complicit in protecting the perpetrators of the genocide. At a meeting...

Pope Francis on Monday begged forgiveness for the "sins and failings of the church and its members" during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, and told Rwanda's president that he hoped his apology would help the country heal. In an extraordinary statement after Francis' meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame, the Vatican acknowledged that the church itself bore blame, as well as some Catholic priests and nuns who "succumbed to hatred and violence, betraying their own evangelical mission" by participating in the genocide.

I don't know whether Gen. Wesley Clark is qualified to be president, but Peter J. Boyer's profile in this week's New Yorker—which paints him as scarily unqualified—is an unfair portrait as well as a misleading, occasionally inaccurate précis of the 1999 Kosovo war and Clark's role in commanding it.Boyer relies heavily on some of Clark's fellow retired Army generals who clearly despise him. The gist of their critique, as Boyer summarizes, is that Clark, while a brilliant analyst, "had a certainty about the rightness of his views which led to conflicts with his colleagues and, sometimes, his superiors." I have...

Eliminating refrigerants known as HFCs could prevent a leap in global warming After being directed for almost 30 years at substances that destroy ozone, the Montreal Protocol will for the first time target a group of greenhouse gases. Beginning today in Kigali, Rwanda, member states of the United Nations are finalizing the terms of what could be the largest commitment to reducing global warming since the Paris Agreement on climate last December. Delegates are likely to take till the meeting’s final day on Oct. 14 to hammer out the knotty details of an amendment to the protocol. Ideally, the...

As many of us suspected, the Clinton Foundation "business" was intertwined with Hillary Clinton's official duties at State. Emails made public through FOIA have shown that Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills passed on classified information to the Clinton Foundation: Hillary Clinton's top State Department aide sent internal agency correspondence to Clinton Foundation officials, raising new questions about how her inner circle handled sensitive information. The internal emails, which were obtained by Citizens United through the Freedom of Information Act, have since been classified. They were passed to the Clinton Foundation by Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff. In one...

State Department officials released roughly 800 of Hillary Clinton's private emails Friday evening, just hours before the South Carolina Democratic primaries begin. The 1,500 pages of emails in the latest batch did not contain any "top secret" emails, an agency spokesman said. The State Department withheld 22 emails from a trove of emails made public earlier this year because they included "top secret" information. Clinton faced a new wave of questions about her private emails this week after a federal judge ruled her top aides should be subject to depositions about their roles in setting up a personal server in...