The new chief at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) laid out her vision for tackling migration on Monday and stressed the importance of the economic benefits migration can have on the countries receiving migrants.

Speaking from Geneva, Amy Pope focused on the evidence that migration can boost economies by providing well-needed workers or new innovation.

“Our number one goal is to really harness the benefits and the promise of migration, and it’s my belief that when we work together with communities, when we work together with governments, we can start to build out ways to find opportunities for people who are on the move rather than just treating the issue as a problem to be solved,” Pope advised.

“The evidence is fairly overwhelming that migration actually benefits economies,” she added.

Pope also advised that migration was driven by people seeking work and that if “regular realistic pathways” were created and a comprehensive approach adopted towards migration, then the positive benefits of migration could be realised.

Pope went on to confirm that the agency was concerned by the “normalisation” of people dying when crossing the Mediterranean Sea, where there have been hundreds of recent deaths due to unsea worthy or overloaded boats capsizing or breaking apart.

“Our first concern is changing the expectation, changing the narrative and really humanising the people we’re talking about,” Pope said.

“These are people first before we label them as migrants or asylum seekers or anything else and valuing their human life, recognising their dignity is key to everything we say and do,” she added.

Pope recently won her bid to become the first woman to lead the U.N. migration agency defeating the current IOM Director General Antonio Vitorino in a vote for the position.

The organization has nearly 19,000 staff members working in 171 countries to promote “humane and orderly” migration.

Its job in many of its 560 field offices is to provide migrants with food, water, shelter and help with government-imposed paperwork.

The agency also collects and shares vast amounts of data about flows of people to governments, and advises them on policy decisions.

The strongman of eastern Libya, Marshal Khalifa Haftar, was received by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday, his Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) and the Kremlin announced.

Marshal Haftar “met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Choigou in the Russian capital Moscow”, the LAAF announced on their official Facebook page, without giving details.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the meeting to Russian state agency TASS. “The situation in Libya and the region as a whole was discussed”, he said, without elaborating.

It was the first meeting between the two men since 2019, according to Libyan media.

Haftar arrived in Russia on Tuesday to discuss the situation in Libya and bilateral relations with Russian officials, according to LAAF. He was received by Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who has made several trips to eastern Libya to meet the field marshal.

Their last meeting was on September 17, at the LAAF headquarters in Benghazi, a few days after the floods that left thousands dead and missing in the eastern Libyan city of Derna.

For several years now, Russia has been leading a diplomatic offensive in Africa, aiming to supplant the traditional Western powers. Isolated on the international stage and in search of allies, it has stepped up its efforts tenfold since its assault on Ukraine in February 2022.

Moscow maintains close relations with Marshal Haftar, who had used mercenaries from the Russian paramilitary group Wagner in his failed attempt to seize the capital Tripoli, from April 2019 to June 2020.

This failure was followed in October 2020 by a ceasefire agreement, compliance with which is supervised by a military commission comprising five officers from each side.

Since then, hundreds of Wagner members have remained active in the east, which is also the oil terminal zone, and in southern Libya, despite the departure of some of their forces to Mali or Ukraine to fight alongside the Russian army.

Riddled by divisions since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya is governed by two rival administrations: one in Tripoli (west), headed by Abdelhamid Dbeibah and recognized by the UN, the other in the east, embodied by Parliament and affiliated to Khalifa Haftar’s camp.

New advisors to Pope Francis will be officially “created” or appointed on Saturday (Sep. 30) during a ceremony inside St. Peter’s Basilica.

During the event known as consistory, picked clergymen will receive the cardinal’s red three-cornered biretta hat from the Pope.

Three of the 21 new cardinals named last July serve in Africa. Among them is the Archbishop of Cape Town who who spoke, Thursday (Sep. 28), ahead of the consistory .

“I think the church in Africa is young, it’s vibrant, it’s alive and I think we can bring that sense of joy and that sense of hope to people because Africa is a continent of hope. It is quite true that we suffer from many difficulties and many problems, many challenges but our people are people of great hope.”

“Coming particularly from South Africa where we have come through the Apartheid area and where I personally expected in those years that the country would just descend into a civil war, we were able to achieve a democratic country and a peaceful settlement. And I think that, that was a miracle that was given to us and I think that in itself is a sign of hope as well.”

The co-adjutor archbishop of Tabora in Tanzania and the archbishop of Juba, South Sudan will also be appointed on Saturday.

Cardinals serve as advisers to the pontiff on matters of teaching and administration.

Most importantly, they elect the next Pope.

A Cairo University employee was shot and killed by a rejected colleague, the Egyptian Interior Ministry announced late Wednesday, a new case of femicide in the most populous Arab country.

“An employee of one of the faculties of Cairo University” “fired shots” at one of his colleagues, “causing her death,” details the police press release.

And when the authorities got their hands on the suspect in Marsa Matrouh, 450 kilometers west of the capital, “he killed himself by shooting himself with the same weapon” as that used to kill the victim.

According to the state newspaper Al-Ahram, the victim, identified only by her first name, Nourhane, allegedly refused a marriage proposal from her colleague, Ahmed, who was harassing her.

The suspect had already been arrested for having “set fire to the victim’s car five years ago and having threatened him by SMS”, according to the daily.

Only the day before, the local press announced the assassination of a woman by her ex-fiancé as she left work in the chic Heliopolis district, in eastern Cairo.

In 2022, several feminicides had been highly publicized in the country where, the same year, according to the NGO Idrak, 301 women or young girls were killed.

At the end of June, the murderer of a student who refused his advances was sentenced to death.

The same day the courts announced the murder of a television presenter by her magistrate husband.

Two months later, this judge was also sentenced to the death penalty, while a court called for the broadcast of the executions of perpetrators of femicide live on television to “dissuade the greatest number”.

Murder is punishable by death in Egypt, which carried out the fourth highest number of executions in the world in 2022 according to Amnesty International.

In Egypt, although women have been voting since 1956, they remain subject to century-old patriarchal legislation and are the first victims, according to feminists, of the spread of a rigorist Islam associated with the entrenchment of conservatism.

On social networks, Egyptians voiced their frustration: “how long will women have to pay with their lives for saying no?” asked the Speak Up education initiative.

The United States will continue to support “civilian-led” armies in Africa, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in Luanda on Wednesday, blaming militaries on the continent for “subverting the will of the people” through coups d’état.

“When generals subvert the will of the people and put their own ambitions above the rule of law, the security situation deteriorates, and democracy dies,” said Mr. Austin in a speech on U.S. security partnerships in Africa, delivered in the Angolan capital.

The Defense Secretary reiterated the US commitment to “support government policies that advance peace, security and democratic governance together”, stressing that these “elements are inseparable”.

“Africa needs armies that serve its citizens, not the other way around”, he added.

Mr. Austin’s visit to Angola, a first for an American Secretary of Defense, is the third and final stop on his African tour, following Djibouti and Kenya.

On Monday, in Nairobi, the Secretary of Defense indicated that the United States was evaluating various options concerning the future of its military presence in Niger, the day after France announced the withdrawal of its troops.

The United States has some 1,100 troops stationed in Niger, engaged against jihadist groups active in the region.

Niger is one of six African countries where the military has taken power by force in the last three years, along with Gabon, Burkina Faso, Mali, Sudan and Guinea.

The military in power in Bamako have turned to Russia, going so far, according to multiple sources, as to enlist the services of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner.

“Africa deserves better than foreigners trying to tighten their grip on this continent,” said Austin.

“And Africa deserves better than autocrats who sell cheap arms, support mercenary groups like the Wagner Group, or starve populations around the world of grain,” he added, in an allusion to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Oil-rich Angola has long enjoyed close ties with China and Russia.

But since 2017, current president Joao Lourenco has been forging closer ties with Washington, which will partly finance the renovation of a railway line linking the Congolese mining regions to the Angolan port of Lobito, on the Atlantic Ocean.

“Over the past few years, the relationship between the United States and Angola has made enormous progress”, Mr. Austin praised.