Category: Rest of Africa

Sunday's flash floods submerged the port city of Derna, washing thousands of people and homes out to sea after two upstream dams burst under the pressure of torrential rains triggered by the hurricane-strength storm.

This week, the perennial crisis is threatening the upcoming 2nd Ordinary Session due in October in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.

China also holds huge stakes in Zambia's mining sector.

By Friday, the death toll was still climbing with some local estimates putting the number at 4,000 by close of Thursday, and over 10,000 people still missing. It signals the danger of having a decade-long political crisis unresolved.

A group of 50 human rights organisations led by theExecutive Director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Tirana Hassan says that Sudan is “no longer at the precipice of mass atrocities; it has fallen over the edge”.

"Forty civilians have been killed in an air strike that hit two markets and a number of the city's neighbourhoods," the medical source told AFP from a hospital in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur. The source asked for anonymity out of security concerns.

“I have had the privilege to serve as the United Nations Secretary General’s special representative for Sudan for more than two and a half years,” he told an open briefing on Sudan at the Council, New York.

The enormous surge of water burst two upstream river dams and reduced the city of Derna to an apocalyptic wasteland where entire city blocks, and untold numbers of people were washed into the Mediterranean Sea.

"Living conditions in Ighermane, a remote village in the High Atlas Mountains, have always been rudimentary, but there was water in the houses," said 28-year-old Mohamed Oublay, after filling plastic containers that will be used to wash utensils and prepare dinner outdoors.

As global concern spread, multiple nations offered to urgently send aid and rescue teams to help the war-scarred country that has been overwhelmed by what one UN official labelled "a calamity of epic proportions".