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Africa Finance Corporation has extended a $150m senior loan to Kamoa Copper to support the expansion of the Kamoa- Kakula Copper Complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The [...]

2024 AUG 17 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Obesity, Fitness & Wellness Week -- New study results on biological factors have been published. According to news [...]

BRUCE SANDERSON The lineup of 2021 grands crus from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti is an anomaly among the ripe expressions from recent vintages. They are pure and transparent, more like [...]

CAIRO – 21 May 2024: Egypt has strongly condemned a failed coup attempt in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). 'Egypt stands by the legitimate [...]

In mid-March fighting resumed between Mouvement du 23 mars (M23), a Rwandan-backed, ethnic Tutsi-led rebel group, and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government forces in Sake, North Kivu province, following [...]

Kenya Airways has suspended its flights to Kinshasa N'Djili, Democratic Republic of Congo, effective April 30, in response to the alleged illegal detention of two of its staff members by [...]

2024 MAR 23 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Obesity, Fitness & Wellness Week -- According to news reporting based on a preprint abstract, our journalists obtained [...]

The US has unveiled plans to extend the Lobito Corridor, a major transport route snaking through mineral-rich Angola, DRC and Zambia, to the Indian Ocean shores of Tanzania. Speaking at [...]

The market, which is rapidly expanding, was valuated at about $300 million in 2023. Four company leaders, CEO Pascal Doye; Patrick Mukendi, the Secretary General; Board Advisor Valéry Safarian and [...]

The Commission électorale nationale indépendante announced on January 14th that the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS) party of the president-elect, Félix Tshisekedi won 69 seats, the largest share [...]

The incumbent president, Félix Tshisekedi, won a second five-year term-with a landslide 73% of the vote-in the presidential election on December 20th 2023, according to provisional results announced by the [...]

On December 17th the incumbent president, Félix Tshisekedi, held his last political rally ahead of the December 20th presidential and legislative elections, in which 44m eligible voters will elect the [...]

Africa Finance Corporation has extended a $15001 senior loan to Kamoa Copper to support the expansion of the Kamoa-Kakula Copper Complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The expansion […]

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the challenges encountered by international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) operating in armed conflicts within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR). Through a 20-month fieldwork analysis, this research maps logistical risks and highlights key obstacles on the ground for successful humanitarian deployments in dynamically changing and complex environments. The study brings together academics and practitioners, providing practical and concrete recommendations for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to focus on in the conflict zones studied. Design/methodology/approach: Using a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, this research provides valuable insights into the challenges faced by INGOs in conflict zones. After collecting data from the field, including interviews with key stakeholders and on-the-ground observations, the data analysis uses software tools such as Text Analysis Markup System analyzer and Macbeth. By adhering to ethical principles and incorporating a reflexive analysis, the study sheds light on the multidimensional nature of successful humanitarian deployments. Findings: The primary risk in all armed conflict zones, including the DRC and CAR, is insecurity. However, to achieve a successful humanitarian deployment in such contexts, a multidimensional approach is required. This involves first securing the acceptance of local communities and conflict parties, which can be achieved through a deep understanding of both political and customary structures, with a focus on respecting key engagement leaders. Sustainability also plays a crucial role, and NGOs must maintain a secure stock of energy and provide greater initiative for on-the-ground managers to meet the expressed needs of beneficiary populations and involve them from the planning stage onwards. Finally, effective communication, cooperation and collaboration with United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs are essential to overcome procurement, technical and security risks, particularly during the initial deployment phases. Originality/value: This study provides an illustration of the uncommon practice of conducting collaborative research in humanitarian settings amidst two neighboring areas of armed conflict. The authors identified 268 common risk factors across eight categories during five deployment phases. To analyze these risks based on criticality and NGO responsiveness, the authors used a multicriteria method. This approach allowed the authors to validate unanimous judgments, resulting in valuable insights and concrete recommendations.

What's happened? On October 17th the Ugandan police announced that two foreign tourists and a tour guide had been killed in the country's Queen Elizabeth National Park by suspected rebels [...]

What's happened? On October 17th the Ugandan police announced that two foreign tourists and a tour guide had been killed in the country's Queen Elizabeth National Park by suspected rebels [...]

What's happened? On October 17th the Ugandan police announced that two foreign tourists and a tour guide had been killed in the country's Queen Elizabeth National Park by suspected rebels [...]

Byline: Just Earth News New York: UN humanitarians issued an urgent appeal on Tuesday to help millions of people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where chronic violence [...]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to show how pro-gender public policies in the agricultural sectors can contribute to the reduction of gender inequalities in the labour market and the diversification of the Congolese economy. Design/methodology/approach: Computable general equilibrium model that has been adapted to the Congolese economy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)'s SAM. Findings: The results reveal that policies of increasing women's land allocation and government cash transfers to rural female households contribute to the reduction of inequalities in the labour market. However, only the policy of increasing women’s land allocation improves economic diversification. Research limitations/implications: The implementation of the policy of government cash transfers to rural women's households comes at a cost to the government. Future studies to look at the most effective mode of financing for this policy. Moreover, the policy of increasing women's land allocation is feasible in the DRC as there is a lot of unused arable land available. Social implications: In Pillar 1 of the National Strategic Development Plan (PNSD) on Economic Diversification and Transformation, the policy of increasing land allocation to women could be added to the objectives related to strengthening the contribution of agriculture to economic growth and employment creation. In Pillar 3 of the PNSD on Social Development and Human Resource Development, the policy of increasing land allocation to women as well as the policy of increasing government transfers to female rural households could be added to the objectives related to the promotion of employment of youth, women and vulnerable groups. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind for the DRC, which highlights the impact of pro-gender policies on women's employment, particularly in the agricultural sectors and in the diversification of the Congolese economy. This study contributes to policy orientation in DRC. The two policies (increasing land allocation to women and cash transfers to rural women) analysed in this study were chosen in light of the DRC's National Strategic Plan, the first phase of which focuses on promoting employment for vulnerable groups and economic diversification through the development of agricultural sectors.

The Food Consumption Score (FCS), a food frequency indicator developed by the World Food Programme (WFP) that aims to capture both diet quantity and quality of household food consumption, has been validated only against calorie intake in a limited number of rather small countries. This article examines the potential of FCS to capture variation in diet quantity and quality using the 2004/5 Household Consumption and Expenditure Survey (HCES) conducted in the DRC. In addition to quantifying the strength of association between FCS and a series of benchmark variables, a set of nutrient-consistent regional adequacy levels is proposed as an alternative to the standard WFP’s cut-off in identifying food insecure households. We point out several key issues. First, for a country the size of the DRC, but possibly in other settings too, it is necessary to adopt a geographically disaggregated approach to account for regional diversity in food systems and resulting diets. Second, FCS can indeed capture qualitative aspects of food consumption in addition to quantitative ones. Third, increasing the number of food groups, removing their associated weights or truncating their food group score does not structurally improve FCS’s correlation with the benchmark variables. Fourth, the WFP’s threshold is only weakly consistent in terms of nutrient adequacy, marginally relevant to each of the country’s regions and markedly less sensitive and specific compared to the set of nutrient-consistent regional thresholds, which we propose based on the empirical relation between FCS and the mean adequacy ratio (MAR). Lastly, despite several methodological challenges, this work demonstrates the potential use of HCES to conduct this sort of food security validation exercises.

The emergence of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) provides a novel perspective on channel interference suppression to enable the interference signals to mutually cancel out over the air. However, mostly existing research on interference suppression using RIS is based on the assumption of continuous reflection coefficients (CRC), which is not feasible due to hardware limitations in the real world. This paper explores the efficacy of RIS in interference suppression over-the-air with discrete reflection coefficients (DRC). First, the paper formulates an interference suppression ratio (ISR) maximization problem to optimize the DRC and proposes an algorithm based on semidefinite relaxation to solve the ISR optimization problem. Then, the upper and lower boundaries of ISR under the proposed algorithm are derived to provide more insight into its performance. The simulation shows that interference channel gain can be suppressed by 32 dB to 40 dB under DRC limitations.

What's happened? In late March the Banque centrale du Congo (BCC), the central bank of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), announced that it had raised its policy rate by [...]

Summary: Investment from Afreximbank and the UN Economic Commission for Africa will support special economic zones, aiming to shift the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia from being exporters of [...]

Byline: Just Earth News New York: UN Special Representative, Pramila Patten, expressed her 'deep concern' on Thursday over increasing allegations of sexual violence against women and girls being carried out [...]

What's happened? On February 9th East African Community (EAC) member states reaffirmed their commitment to fully deploy troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) provinces of North Kivu and [...]

What's happened? On February 9th East African Community (EAC) member states reaffirmed their commitment to fully deploy troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) provinces of North Kivu and [...]

What's happened? On February 9th East African Community (EAC) member states reaffirmed their commitment to fully deploy troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) provinces of North Kivu and [...]

What's happened? On February 9th East African Community (EAC) member states reaffirmed their commitment to fully deploy troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) provinces of North Kivu and [...]

What's happened? On February 9th East African Community (EAC) member states reaffirmed their commitment to fully deploy troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) provinces of North Kivu and [...]

What's happened? On February 9th East African Community (EAC) member states reaffirmed their commitment to fully deploy troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) provinces of North Kivu and [...]

What's happened? On February 9th East African Community (EAC) member states reaffirmed their commitment to fully deploy troops in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) provinces of North Kivu and [...]

CO2hydrogenation to methanol is an effective way to convert CO2into useful chemicals and fuel. Recently, some of metal-doped zirconia solid-solutions exhibit high selectivity and activity for CO2hydrogenation to methanol. Herein, we report a mechanistic study of the process on MZrOx(M = Ga, Cr) using density functional calculations and microkinetic simulations. It is found that the pathway for methanol formation is → COOH* → HCOOH* → CHO* → CH2O* → CH2OH* → CH3OH* and HCOOH* → CHO* + OH* is the rate-controlling step on both catalysts. The calculated methanol selectivity agrees with the experimental results very well, supporting the mechanism identified. Investigations show that the influence of strain on reaction kinetics and thermodynamics is not “black or white”: while compressive strain greatly promotes the activity and selectivity of GaZrOx, both tensile and compressive strains suppress the catalytic performance of CrZrOx. Analysis also reveals that there is a good transition state scaling (TSS) relation and strain tends to degrade the linear correlation. Furthermore, the error of the predicted barriers using the TSS relation is relatively large, indicating that cautions should be taken when applying TSS relations to estimate barriers.

Design rule checking (DRC) violation (DRV) prediction with early stage design information can help to reduce the iterations of design procedure and can speed up the physical-design closure. It is known that accurately predicting detailed routing-level DRV with information obtained at global route (GR) stage can significantly speed up the design closure. However, without sufficient prediction accuracy, the result may lead to suboptimal design or even longer design time. Therefore, in this article, we propose two machine-learning frameworks to predict the detailed routing-level DRV map of a given design. The first framework is based on the congestion report obtained at global routing stage, and the second framework considers both the placement information and the congestion report of global routing. We then compare the runtime and accuracy of the two models. The proposed frameworks utilize convolutional neural network as the core technique to train these prediction models. The training dataset is collected from 15 industrial designs using a leading commercial automatic placement and routing (APR) tool, and the total number of collected training samples exceeds 26M. A specialized under-sampling technique is also proposed to select important training samples for learning, compensate for the inaccuracy misled by a highly imbalanced training dataset, and speed up the entire training process. The experimental results demonstrate that our both models can result in not only a significantly higher accuracy than previous related works, but also a DRV map visually matching the actual ones closely. The average runtime of using our learned model from the first framework to generate a DRV map is only 3% of global routing, and the prediction accuracy of our learned model from the second framework can improve 7.6% compared to the one from the first framework. Our proposed framework can be viewed as a simple add-on tool to a current commercial placement and global router that can efficiently and effectively generate a more realistic DRV map without really applying detailed routing.

THE All-American Rail Group (AARG) and Angola's Ministry of Transport have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) under which the Houston-based rail and infrastructure consortium will build a $US 4.5bn [...]

A clinical trial to evaluate the antiviral drug tecovirimat, also known as TPOXX, in adults and children with monkeypox has begun in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, [...]

2022 OCT 29 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Obesity, Fitness & Wellness Week -- Investigators discuss new findings in malaria. According to news reporting out of [...]

Paris, France (SPX) Sep 16, 2022 Eutelsat Communications (Euronext Paris: ETL) and Liquid Intelligent Technologies (Liquid), a business of Cassava Technologies, a pan-African technology group, have signed a multi-year, multi-beam [...]

India, Sept. 15 -- Need for humanitarian aid reached an all-time high during January 2018-December 2021 The largest populations in need of humanitarian aid were in Ethiopia, Yemen, the Democratic [...]