Four people were treated for gunshot wounds in Burkina Faso Saturday after French and Burkinabe forces tried to deter protesters trying to block a French army convoy, local sources said.

A source in the town of Kaya north of the capital said demonstrators tried to approach French army personnel on a strip of wasteland where they had spent the night.

"As the protesters tried to get closer, soldiers fired warning shots", and some received "gunshot wounds", they said.

A medical source said "the emergency department at the Kaya hospital received four people with gunshot wounds".

The Sidwaya daily paper said three were wounded, one shot in the cheek.

It was not immediately clear which side had hit the protesters.

A French military source denied anybody had been wounded, rejecting any responsibility.

"A group of protesters tried to cut through the fence to enter the area and the Burkinabe soldiers fired tear gas to disperse the crowd," they said.

"The French soldiers fired a few warning shots over the crowd. Nobody was wounded because of the actions of the French military personnel.

"We do not know of any person who was wounded, even after tear gas was fired."

The convoy is crossing through the former French colony on its way from Ivory Coast to Niger.

It had already been held up this week by protests in the western city of Bobo Dioulasso and in the capital Ouagadougou, where local security forces had to fire tear gas to disperse the demonstrators.

French troops are in the wider region as part of efforts to fight jihadists there.

The French army source said the convoy of some 60 trucks was "not carrying weapons to the jihadists as can be read on social media".

Two Chinese, one Congolese jailed in DR Congo over prostitution
Kinshasa (AFP) Nov 20, 2021 - Two Chinese nationals and a Congolese official were sentenced to 10 years in prison over the procurement of Chinese women as prostitutes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, their lawyer said on Saturday.

"My clients Ye Jingpeng and Lili Bin were sentenced the night of Thursday to Friday to 10 years and three months in prison for procurement involving Chinese women nationals and using fake documents," their lawyer Nicky Bayo told AFP.

"A Congolese foreign ministry civil servant was also sentenced to 10 years in prison for having delivered courtesy visas without the authority to do so," the lawyer said.

"Eight Chinese women on an irregular stay were ordered to pay 1,000 dollars each," the lawyer said.

"Another 23 Chinese women were acquitted for lack of evidence," the lawyer said.

In his summation, the prosecutor said the women received regular wages and accused the two condemned Chinese nationals of "organising the sexual exploitation of young Chinese women in several cities".

One of the acquitted women said she received $500 a month as a waitress.

With a prostitution procurement trial rare in the DR Congo, the case had drawn the attention of the local media and comments on social networks.

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UN pleads for more Madagascar aid as famine looms
Geneva (AFP) Nov 19, 2021
The United Nations pleaded Friday for more cash to help more than a million people in Madagascar threatened by what it has dubbed "the world's first climate change famine". The UN humanitarian agency OCHA said the funding needs had tripled and that it now urgently needed $231 million to provide life-saving assistance and other aid to 1.3 million people in southern Madagascar through next May. So far, however, donors had coughed up only $120 million, it said. Spokesman Jens Laerke told report ... read more