International report

In Cameroon, parliamentary and municipal elections take place on Sunday.

There are fears of violence in the country’s minority English-speaking regions, which have been rocked by a three-year crisis.

English-speaking separatists who have been fighting to create a new state called Ambazonia have vowed to disrupt the polls in the anglophone areas.

Since the crisis turned into an armed conflict, nearly a million people have been forced out of their homes and more than 3000 killed.

Local residents in the affected regions say their priority for now is their safety.

Correspondent Alphonse Tebeck sends this report from Bamenda

Human trafficking is a major problem facing many young Kenyans who are seeking employment abroad. The scourge has now taken a new twist as human traffickers target new-born babies in health facilities, just moments after their delivery.

As the power supply problem in Gaza has persisted for the past 14 years, some residents in the territory have organized their own personal initiatives to help sort out the problem. 

Majd Almasharawi is one of those Gaza inhabitants. 

Thanks to her social entrepreneurship, and a company called Sun Box, Majd has been able to install solar panels providing electricity for households and streets in the coastal territory. 

The project is now three years old.

RFI correspondent Rami Almeghari has more

Every January for the past 27 years, Glasgow brims with Celtic music from Scotland, Ireland, but also traditional music from all the continents with Celtic Connections, one of the biggest music festivals in the UK.

Christian Hecq, one of President Macron's favourite actors, stars in a comic adaptation of 'The Fly', a famous science-fiction story where a scientist fuses with a fly during teleportation.

In remote tribal areas of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, where development is still slow, women suffer greatly due to lack of infrastructure and healthcare facilities, especially during pregnancy. However, the situation is slowly changing.

Local communities in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh are suffering outside the health coverage net, with little access to hospitals and doctors.

A majority of maternal deaths in the state occur because of the difficulty of accessing medical care in time, which is one of the major factors contributing to this tragedy.

Many maternal deaths occur when women give birth at home.

In addition, Maoist violence in the state has contributed to making the tribal population wary of using state services.

In the first report of a 2-part series, RFI correspondent Murali Krishnan visits Chhattisgarh to understand how women are coping.

Kenya has been greatly affected by the threat of terror attacks from al-Shabab militants that are believed to be coming from neighboring Somalia.

The attacks have seen many Kenyans losing their lives and have affected the country’s economy, which depends a lot on tourism and other foreign investments.

Economists say 90 percent of the tourism sector in northern coastal areas of Kenya, where al-Shabab militants attacked twice earlier this January, has been affected.

Correspondent Joseph Jira reports from Mombasa.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a plan to build a massive canal connecting Turkey's Sea of Marmara to and the Black Sea.

 

The channel will be an alternative waterway to the Bosphorus, which runs through the center of Istanbul.

 

Erdogan claims the project is vital to saving Turkey's largest city from the threat of supertankers which use the Bosphorus daily.

 

But the project risks resurrecting historical international tensions over the control of one of the world's most important strategic and commercial waterways.

 

That tension has become a new flashpoint between Moscow and Washington as Dorian Jones reports in this second report of a two-part series from Istanbul

 

 

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is planning what is being called the construction project of the decade, a massive canal connecting Turkey's Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea.