The coronavirus pandemic could set back incomes in sub-Saharan Africa by a decade as weak oil prices, a tourism standstill and business lockdowns shrink the region's economy 3.2 percent in 2020, an IMF official said Monday. Activity is expected to recover in 2021, but countries first will have to get through a year in which [...]
The construction of a floating solar PV power plant in Seychelles will be delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a top official said recently. Seychelles announced its plan to install a utility-scale floating solar PV system, the first in Africa, in April 2018. Construction of the system which will be located on the lagoon at Le Rocher, [...]
China passed a sweeping national security law for Hong Kong on Tuesday, a historic move that critics and many western governments fear will smother the finance hub's freedoms and hollow out its autonomy. The legislation was unanimously approved by China's rubber-stamp parliament, little more than six weeks after it was first unveiled, sending shockwaves through [...]
Three foreigners who had tested positive for COVID-19 in Seychelles have been re-tested and their results came back negative, while four more mariners among the Spanish fishing crew tested positive, said a top health official on Sunday. The Public Health Commissioner, Jude Gedeon, told a press conference that the three foreigners – a French lady, [...]
Seychelles observed a quiet 44 years of independence on Monday with no customary national activities for the first time amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2015, June 29, which marks the day Seychelles gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1976, is celebrated as the National Day, and usually the highlight every year is a military [...]
The total number of coronavirus cases has topped 10 million globally, according to an AFP tally on Sunday, as the pandemic surges particularly in the United States and Latin America. At least 10,003,942 infections, including 498,779 deaths, have been registered around the world, according to a count at 0930 GMT based on official sources. Europe [...]
Malawi's opposition leader Lazarus Chakwera won this week's presidential election re-run with 58.57 percent of the vote, the electoral commission said Saturday. It was a dramatic reversal of fortune for the incumbent, Peter Mutharika, whose victory in the May 2019 election was overturned by the Constitutional Court, citing widespread fraud. Some 6.8 million voters in [...]
Juvenile sooty terns have been recorded flying from the eastern coast of Africa to off the coasts of Myanmar and Thailand in the search for food, data collected from an ongoing study shows. In September last year, 14 fledgeling sooty terns from the Bird Island colony were tagged with satellite tracking tags and monitored to [...]
Three foreign nationals and seven more mariners tested positive for COVID-19 in Seychelles, bringing the total of active cases to 69, a top health official said on Saturday. Despite the sudden caseload after weeks of COVID calm, Seychellois officials have no immediate plans to re-close the island nation's borders. The Public Health Commissioner, Jude Gedeon, told [...]
On the highest hill overlooking Madagascar's capital Antananarivo, on the site of a sacred pool and within the grounds of a royal palace, an uncanny piece of architecture is rising -- a concrete Roman-style amphitheatre. The scheme is a pet project of President Andry Rajoelina, who claims it will showcase the Indian Ocean island's history [...]
