The provincial authorities of Ituri in DRC have announced the tightening of their measures aimed at closing the borders with Tchopo, North Kivu and Haut-Uélé in order to fight the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The provincial authorities of Ituri have announced the tightening of their measures aimed at closing the borders with Tchopo, North Kivu and Haut-Uélé in order to fight the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of which positive cases continue to climb in these neighboring provinces.
In a press release made public on July 11, 2020, Governor Jean Bamanisa announced the following measures:
1. Strict health control at the limits between Ituri and Haut-Uele (at
PK51, Boli and Boo), North Kivu (at Luna and Makeke), Tchopo (at
Avakubi level) for vehicles transporting goods;
2. The travels of travelers remain suspended, except with authorization granted after
test;
3. Suspension of passenger flights from the Provinces of North Kivu, Tshopo
and Haut-Uele to the ulturi and vice versa;
4. The same rules apply at the borders with South Sudan and “with Uganda;
5. All travelers coming from these areas must be subject to strict health control measures at the various control points, by washing their hands with soap
or hydro alcoholic solutions and submit to the temperature measurement;
6. Any traveler entering lturi from the countries, cities or localities affected by the
Covid-19 must complete the travelers' health declaration form and specify to POC / POE providers its identity and full address for follow-up in isolation from
14 days ;
7. Travelers with a negative test result can travel within the province;
8. For all trips within the province, the number of passengers on a bus must be
reduced to 1 passenger per seat.
9. Wearing a mask is compulsory in offices, public places, bus
public transportation and airplanes, as well as for all crew members of the trucks carrying the goods.
10. With regard to religions, the wearing of masks, social distancing and the measures decided by the Head of State are compulsory.
Since last week, the province of Ituri has seen the number of its confirmed positive cases triple, from 2 to 6 cases, while its neighbors in particular North Kivu is at 137 cases, Tchopo at 12 and Haut -Uéé at 11.

What was Felix Tshisekede doing in Brazzaville?

President of the Democratic Republic of Congo Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo has been staying since evening of Wednesday, July 15, 2020 in Congo-Brazzaville. President Tshisekedi moved alone, without the Foreign Minister or any other member of the government.

According to the presidential press, the head of state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo-Brazzaville travelled to Congo as part of a 24 hour work stay.

On the same Wednesday when he arrived, he was welcomed by his Congolese counterpart Denis Sassou-Nguesso. Right afterwards, both heads of state had one-on-one exchanges.

Although nothing has officially filtered the content of exchanges between the two personalities yet, it should be noted that this meeting takes place in a particular context characterized by the covid-19 pandemic, which is taking place in several countries around the world, including both Congo.

According to some diplomatic sources, the two heads of state spoke about the coronavirus pandemic and mentioned in particular the upcoming reopening of borders between the two countries, closed for about a quarter as part of the state of health emergency declared in the Worldwide.

According to the same sources, Félix Tshisekedi and Denis Sassou-Nguesso also mentioned the border dispute between the DRC and Zambia. For months now, the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been denouncing the presence, in its territory of the Zambian army.

It should also be reminded that this is already the second trip of the head of state Félix Tshisekedi during this coronavirus health crisis. The first was the one in Belgium at the beginning of July.

Researchers in Israel are using a neural network to track down drone operators by analyzing the flight paths of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

Two scientists from Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev in southern Israel recently presented a paper on their research into counter-drone operations that applies artificial intelligence to hunting down the operators of UAVs.
Dr. Gera Weiss, a professor of computer science at BGU, presented the research at the Fourth International Symposium on Cyber Security, Cryptography and Machine Learning in Be’er Sheva on July 3. The new method analyzes the way drones fly through an environment in order to figure out where their operators are located.
Finding a drone operator, instead of just jamming or shooting down a drone, can be far more effective, since a single operator is often flying multiple drones at once.
“Currently, drone operators are located using RF [radio frequency] techniques and require sensors around the flight area which can then be triangulated,” Eliyahu Mashhadi, a GBU computer science student and lead researcher on the project, told Israel Defense . “This is challenging due to the amount of other WiFi, Bluetooth and IoT [internet of things] signals in the air that obstruct drone signals.”
Mashhadi told Breaking Defense these older methods tend to be catered to specific brands of drones, making a generalized defensive system cumbersome to operate. However, the researchers’ new method looks for patterns in the drone’s route during its flight.
Their simulations provide “a realistic flight experience for the operator that includes sun gazes, obstructions, and other visual effects that produce the reactions of the operators that allow us to identify their location,” Mashhadi told Breaking Defense.
Israel already operates the Drone Guard counter-UAV system, which until recently could only detect incoming drones with man-portable radars. However, Jane’s reported late last month that interceptor systems were being incorporated into Drone Guard, such as jamming devices that make the UAV unable to receive signals from or send them to its operator, as well as kinetic weapons provided by ELTA Land Systems that have been dubbed “Iron Drone,” after the “Iron Dome” air defense system Israel uses to shoot down missiles.
The Pentagon, too, is focusing heavily on drone interception systems, especially in the
aftermath of the September 2019 attacks on two Saudi oil facilities carried out by swarms of suicide drones. In late December, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord told reporters that making between three and five counter-UAV systems in 2020 was a “top priority.”

A new report by Yahoo News claims the Trump administration has given almost unprecedented leeway to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to wage cyberwar against US adversaries like Russia, Iran, China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The powers came via a secret 2018 order that has now come to light.

According to the Yahoo report, which is based on the testimonies of “former US officials with direct knowledge of the matter,” a secret rule change issued by US President Donald Trump in 2018 allowed the CIA to circumvent the previous vetting process for cyber operations.
Previously, proposed CIA cyber ops had to be rigorously vetted by the National Security Council, a process that might take months or even years. However, once Trump gave the CIA the authority to vet its own proposals, cyber operations went “from idea to approval in weeks,” one official told Yahoo News.
“Trump wanted to push decision-making to the lowest possible denominator,” another official said.
“Before, you would need years of signals and dozens of pages of intelligence to show that this thing is a de facto arm of the government,” a former official told Yahoo News. Now, “as long as you can show that it vaguely looks like the charity is working on behalf of that government, then you’re good.”
According to the official, the agency has used the authority given it by Trump to carry out more than a dozen operations that were on its “wish list.”
“This has been a combination of destructive things - stuff is on fire and exploding - and also public dissemination of data: leaking or things that look like leaking,” they said. The operations were directed against Russia, the DPRK, China and especially Iran.
The rule change specifically gives very wide leeway for the CIA to target institutions that had previously largely been off-limits, ranging from
infrastructure like electrical grids and petrochemical plants to hack-and-dump operations against banks, companies or government agencies. It also allows cyber ops against media entities, religious institutions, charities and other nongovernmental organizations, if even the flimsiest connection can be drawn to a government on Washington’s naughty list.
Some of these operations didn’t sit well with agents. One fumed to Yahoo that “our government is basically turning into f**king WikiLeaks, [using] secure communications on the dark web with dissidents, hacking and dumping.”
The order given by Trump was a type of secret document called a presidential finding or memorandum of notification.
According to the CIA Library, Congress mandated such memoranda informing certain committees of the CIA’s activities after journalist Seymour Hersh revealed the “family jewels” operations in 1974, triggering a huge scandal and cries for more accountability and oversight for US intelligence operations.
The presidential finding in question is not the same document as National Security Presidential Memorandum 13 (NSPM-13), a September 2018 order announced by then-national security adviser John Bolton that eased rules on cyber ops by the Pentagon. However, the rules of engagement remained secret, with the House Armed Services Committee only winning the fight to see the memorandum in March of this year - and the CIA rule changes remained totally unknown.
“I would say that in 8, 9, 10 years under the old decision process, I can count on less than two fingers the number of operations conducted,” an anonymous senior Department of Defense official told reporters in April 2019, Fifth Domain reported . “In this time since mid-August [2018] when the new process went into place, we’ve conducted many more” operations.”
In Bolton’s recently published memoir, he recalls the initiative behind the rule change, noting the Trump administration “needed to scrap the Obama-era rules and replace them with a more agile, expeditious decision-making structure,” adding this involved expanding the US’ “clandestine capabilities” in cyber operations directed against “nonstate actors,” Yahoo News reported.
However, according to Yahoo, the memorandum specifically takes aim at Iran and plays into the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign begun in 2018 with the repudiation of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the reimposition of sanctions against Tehran.
“It was obvious that destabilization was the plan on Iran,” a former official told Yahoo News. Another noted that Bolton “wanted another tool, he wanted another hammer. He was looking at Stuxnet and how to be mean to Iran , so that was probably attractive to him.”
Two examples mentioned by Yahoo News but not confirmed to have been CIA operations were the March 2019
dumping of the names, addresses, phone numbers and photos of Iranian intelligence officers allegedly involved in hacking operations, as well as their hacking tools, and the November 2019
leaking of the details for 15 million debit cards of customers of three banks supposedly linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

As some assailants and rebel groups hoodwink the government of DRC on dropping down weapons,Authorities in DRC blame various rebel militants in Eastern DRC on neighbouring countries

Following a mission carried out ,Monday, July 13, 2020 in the Kambutso village of the Bedu-Ezekere grouping in Djugu territory by the delegation of ex Lendu warlords sent from Kinshasa by the Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi, a faction of the CODECO rebel group said he was ready to lay down his arms and start a peace process with the government.
Tchusta Douglas, nicknamed "Little wolf of the mountain", spokesman for this rebel unit who addressed the members of the delegation, justified the abuses carried out by his movement against the civilian population for 3 years by the concern of " fight against the balkanization of the Congo "and" the protection of the Lendu populations of Djugu against military harassment ".
"We have waged this fight across the whole province of Ituri because our borders are porous, neighboring countries threaten us, notably Uganda's ADF / NALU, Rwanda with its Banyabwisha and the Tutsi , whose main mission is none other than the balkanization of our country "he launched in remarks to various media outlets in the area., He also added:
"Our presence is very necessary and compulsory to stifle these different foreign movements."
Among the requirements, the development of a site for their regrouping with better care as well as an amnesty for all crimes committed by CODECO elements and the recognition of their ranks within the army.
To the provincial authorities, the CODECO militia requests the rehabilitation of all the Lendu chiefs suspended in a manner deemed "illegal" and the resuscitation of all the chiefs of the sectors of the Lendu entities who are accused of "having fled by abandoning their population" while they feared for their safety.
CODECO also posed as a condition for its demobilization, the immediate and unconditional release of all Lendu subjects arrested by the police, many of whom had already been convicted by the military justice system.
Floribert Ndjabu, head of the delegation who received the specifications for this CODECO unit, said he was confident after the meeting and promised to share them with the competent authorities.
A first attempt to canton some 300 CODECO militiamen in Kpandroma last year had been unsuccessful, only a few weeks had been enough for the rebels to return to the bush denouncing poor care by the Congolese authorities.

7 mai mai rebels killed by DRC army(FARDC) in clashes that occurred up to early morning hours of 15/7/2020

 A clash between the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) and Mayi-Mayi militiamen resulted in the death of 7 of these rebels of the Mayi-Mayi / Kyandega faction.
The fact occurred the night of Tuesday to this Wednesday, July 15, 2020, in the locality of Angwalaba, on the border between the territories of Irumu and Mambasa, in Ituri province.
The army spokesman in this province who announces it specifies that 3 weapons of type AK-47 and of bladed weapons were also recovered by the FARDC on patrol in the area.
According to Lieutenant Jules Ngongo, sweeping operations are continuing in the region to find other militiamen. In the meantime, he calls on all negative forces to lay down their arms.
The activism of the Mai-Mai militiamen has been reported in recent years mainly in Mambasa territory, where they have been the source of several atrocities against civilians, medical personnel and sometimes journalists.

This what a human right organisation represented to the UN security council on and about the security situaty in Eastern DRC

Invited to the UN Security Council, United Nations held in early July 2020 from New York by video conference under the presidency of the Republic of Germany, Dismas Kitenge Senga combed through the overall security situation in Eastern DRC, currently characterized by "threats from foreign armies and the resurgence of armed groups" committing atrocities on civilian populations.
In his speech on July 07, the president of the NGO Groupe LOTUS, a human rights organization based in Kisangani, verbally decried to United Nations hosts that "the neutralization of armed groups in the party East of the country constitutes a major challenge for the Congolese army and the forces of Monusco who support it. ”
"At the security level, in the territory under government control, the security and defense forces face a problem of unity of command, dysfunction, insufficient means and ineffectiveness in defending territorial integrity, currently threatened by incursions by armies from neighboring countries into Congolese soil, but also and above all to secure people and their property. Said Dismas Kitenge.
"In areas in armed conflict, despite some successes against the ADF-NALU in the territory of Beni, the neutralization of all the armed groups active in the eastern part of the country constitutes a major challenge for the Congolese army and the forces of the Monusco who support it. "
He added that "the resurgence of elements of the armed group LRA in the province of Bas-Uele and Haut-Uele committing atrocities on civilian populations raises fears of an escalation of violence especially because of the weak presence of the army Congolese and the complete absence of civilian and military units from Monusco. "
Still, the UN Security Council has been exposed to the activism of the armed group, CODECO, still under atrocious threat from Ituri province.
"In Ituri, the activism of the armed group, CODECO, by the commission of atrocities thanks to the local populations constitutes a serious threat to peace and security in this region. Continued Dismas Kitenge Senga.
He also noted that “the difficulties of implementing an effective and coherent policy for the mobilization, disarmament and social reintegration of armed groups are an important challenge to the process of pacification in the eastern part of the country. "
In this same option, insists Dismas Kitenge, the human rights situation in this fragile context, finds it impacted by the commission of frequent human rights violations, the impunity of most of their perpetrators and the difficulties of implementing reforms. necessary and urgent for the improvement of the situation and the advent of the rule of law in the DRC.

Health authorities in Ituri have decided to make masks mandatory in all offices and other public places, after the province recorded its 6th positive case of the Coronavirus pandemic.

According to our confidant source,Health authorities in Ituri have decided to make masks mandatory in all offices and other public places, after the province recorded its 6th positive case of the Coronavirus pandemic.
The provincial health minister, who announced it, said the new patient is a health worker who developed signs before his samples tested positive.
Doctor Patrick Karamura added that the patient is already placed in isolation and around fifty people who have come into contact with him are already listed and followed up by a medical team.
With this new case in Bunia, the number of patients goes from 5 to 6 for Ituri, the first two are already declared cured, while two others are in Mahagi territory, more than 180km north of the province, at the Ugandan border.

If this letter is genuine,then the decision makers in FARDC(DRC army) must be myopic

Did President Tshisekede mean that Banyamulenge in diaspora are being used by Rwanda to resent his gorvenment???