By Lateef Taiwo

Nine people, including four soldiers, were killed Sunday evening when a civilian plane crashed in Sudan due to “technical” reasons, the army said, as the war in the east African country entered its 100th day.

The fighting has left millions trapped in their homes and some without water, particularly in the suburbs of the capital Khartoum where residents were calling for food donations to help them survive.

In a war-devastated district of the city, Abbas Mohammed Babiker says he and his family have only been able to eat once a day. Now even that is in doubt, but on Sunday a citizens’ support group issued an urgent appeal for donations to help people like him.

“We only have enough for two more days,” Babiker said from Khartoum North, where residents said at least one person, a local musician, has already died from hunger.

In Port Sudan, on the east coast largely spared by the war, the army said a child had survived the crash of an Antonov plane which killed nine others. Port Sudan airport is the only one still working in the country due to the conflict.

Since April 15, battles between the army led by Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, RSF, headed by Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, have killed more than 3,900 people, according to the latest toll from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, ACLED.

More than 2.6 million people have been internally displaced, mostly from Khartoum, the International Organisation for Migration said.

Thousands who remain in the capital, particularly in Khartoum North, are trapped without water since the local water station was damaged at the start of the war.

Residents say there is only intermittent electricity and food has nearly run out.

Across the country, about one-third of the population already faced hunger even before the war began, said the United Nations’ World Food Programme. Despite the security challenges, the agency says it has reached more than 1.4 million people with emergency food aid as needs intensify.

“With the fighting, there is no market any more and anyway we have no money,” said another resident of Khartoum North, Essam Abbas.

To help them, the local “resistance committee,” a pro-democracy neighborhood group, issued an emergency appeal.

“We have to support each other, give food and money and distribute to those around us,” the committee wrote on Facebook.

In adjacent Omdurman, Khartoum’s other battle-scarred sister city, locally known violinist Khaled Senhouri “died from hunger” last week, his friends wrote on Facebook.

In his own online posts, Senhouri had said he was unable to leave home because of the fighting and had tried to hang on with the supplies that he had. It wasn’t enough.

At Least 125 Tombs Discovered At Roman-Era Cemetery In Gaza — Officials

Archaeologists working on a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery discovered in Gaza last year have found at least 125 tombs, most with skeletons still largely intact, and two rare lead sarcophaguses, the Palestinian Ministry of Antiquities said.

The impoverished Palestinian territory was an important trading post for civilisations as far back as the ancient Egyptians and the Philistines depicted in the Bible, through the Roman empire and the crusades.

In the past, local archaeologists reburied findings for lack of funding but French organizations have helped excavate this site, discovered in February last year by a construction crew working on an Egyptian-funded housing project.

“It is the first time in Palestine we have discovered a cemetery that has 125 tombs, and it is the first time in Gaza we have discovered two sarcophaguses made of lead,” Fadel Al-A’utul, an expert at the French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research, told Reuters at the site.

One of the two sarcophaguses was decorated with images of grapes and the other with dolphins said A’utul, whose organisation is supervising the work with help from French aid agency Premiere Urgance International.

“We need funds to preserve this archaeological site so that history does not get washed away,” he added.

A’utul said he hoped the site would become a tourist destination, with a museum to display the findings.

At least 25 engineers and technicians were engaged on Sunday, despite the soaring heat, in digging, clearing the dirt, and preserving the skeletons. They have also been piecing together clay jars found inside some of the graves.

“This is unprecedented,” said Jamal Abu Reida, General-Director of Gaza’s Antiquities Ministry.

“It deepens Palestinian roots on this land and shows they date back thousands of years,” he said.

Gaza has been under an Israel-Egyptian economic blockade since 2007 when the Islamist militant group Hamas, which opposes peace with Israel, took control. The narrow coastal territory’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents have since endured several wars.

US-brokered peace talks, aimed at establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, collapsed in 2014 and show no sign of revival.

Twitter Website Replaces Bird Logo With X

Twitter launched its new logo on Monday, replacing the blue bird with a white X on a black background as the company moves toward rebranding as X.

The social media network’s website showed the company’s new logo, but its URL was still showing as twitter.com and the blue “Tweet” button was visible. Some users saw a blue version of the X logo, suggesting the rollout was not yet finalized.

Owner Elon Musk and the company’s CEO had revealed the new logo Sunday, saying the company would be renamed X and move later into payments, banking and commerce.

Founded in 2006, Twitter takes its name from the sound of birds chattering, and it has used avian branding since its early days, when the company bought a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15, according to the design website Creative Bloq.

Tweeting a picture of the company’s new logo Sunday night, Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino said “X is here! Let’s do this.”

Also late Sunday, Musk changed his profile picture to the company’s new logo, which he described as “minimalist art deco,” and updated his Twitter bio to “X.com,” which now redirects to twitter.com.

He also tweeted that under the site’s new identity, a post would be called “an X.”

Musk had already named Twitter’s parent company the X Corporation, and has said his takeover of the social media giant was “an accelerant to creating X, the everything app” — a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become online payments giant PayPal.

Such an app could still function as a social media platform, and also include messaging and mobile payments.

“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino tweeted on Sunday.

Yaccarino, a former advertising sales executive at NBCUniversal who Musk hired last month to be Twitter’s CEO, said the social media platform was on the cusp of broadening its scope.

“X is the future state of unlimited interactivity, centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino tweeted.

Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, the platform’s advertising business has partially collapsed as marketers soured on Musk’s management style and mass firings at the company that gutted content moderation.

In response, the billionaire SpaceX boss has moved toward introducing payments and commerce through the platform in a search for new revenue.

The platform is thought to have around 200 million daily active users, but it has suffered repeated technical failures since Musk sacked much of its staff.

Many users and advertisers alike have responded adversely to the social media site’s new charges for previously free services, its changes to content moderation and the return of previously banned right-wing accounts.

Musk said this month that Twitter had lost roughly half of its advertising revenue since he took control.

Facebook parent Meta also this month launched its text-based platform, called Threads, which has up to 150 million users, according to some estimates.

But the amount of time users spend on the rival app has plummeted in the weeks since its launch, according to data from market analysis firm Sensor Tower.

At Least 33 Dead In Cameroon Building Collapse

Collapse of an apartment building on Saturday night in Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital, left at least 33 people dead and five injured in an absolute emergency, according to a new provisional toll by a fire officer and local authorities.

On Saturday night, at around 01:30, 00:30 GMT, a four-storey apartment building in the north of Douala collapsed onto another one-storey residential building. The accident left 33 people dead and 21 injured, including five in “absolute emergency”, according to a fire officer speaking on condition of anonymity, and the governor of Littoral, one of the country’s ten regions.

Rescue operations, including the clearing of rubble with a mechanical shovel in the hope of finding survivors, began on Sunday and continued into the evening and Monday morning, according to a local resident.

“The situation is under control and the firefighters are working to ensure that no one remains under the rubble,” said Samuel Dieudonné Ivaha Diboua, the governor of the Littoral region, who visited the site on Sunday.

An earlier provisional toll late on Sunday put the death toll at at least sixteen, with five injured in absolute emergency.

On the same day, Douala’s Laquintinie hospital reported that it had treated “thirteen cases from this tragedy”, and recorded two deaths, including “a three-year-old girl and a 19-year-old girl”.

The other eleven people admitted were three children treated in pediatric emergencies, two teenagers, a 28-year-old woman and five men, the hospital said.

In 2016, the collapse of a residential building in Douala caused the death of five people, and the authorities raised the issue of compliance with construction standards. In June of the same year, they had identified 500 buildings “threatening ruin” in the city.

DRC: Soldier Shoots His Family, Kills At Least 14

Congolese army soldier killed at least 14 people, including at least 10 children, with firearms on Saturday in Ituri, in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, we learned on Sunday from concordant sources.

This naval force soldier could not bear that his child was buried in his absence, the day before his arrival in the village of Nyakova, according to testimonies collected by the media. Nyakova is a fishing village located in the territory of Djugu, about 65 km east of Bunia, capital of the province of Ituri.

Last Saturday’s attack left the soldier’s wife, in-laws and two of his children dead, before he turned his gun on other civilians, said Lt. Jules Ngongo, spokesman for the army in Ituri province.

The toll is “14 dead including his two children. The soldier is on the run, he is wanted” to be tried, he said.

The Kivu Security Barometer, KST, group of experts confirmed the circumstances of this tragedy as well as the death toll of 13 civilians, including “10 children and 2 women who allegedly participated in the burial of his son who died in his absence” . According to Banga Bakahuna, president of civil society in the Bahema Banywagi chiefdom, a fourteenth victim died on Sunday morning from his injuries.

Elements of the Congolese army were sent to apprehend the soldier, a member of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, FARDC, who fled after the attack.