Fresh clashes between protesters and security forces have erupted in Conakry despite a ban by the junta on demonstrations amid discontent with the regime's planning to transition back to democracy.

The latest clashes came after protests against Guinea's junta and its handling of plans to return to democracy brought the capital to a standstill on Thursday, with organisers claiming that one person was killed.

Protesters in the Conakry suburbs on Friday burned tyres, overturned rubbish bins and threw stones at police vehicles with officers responding with teargas, according to an AFP news agency journalist.

Thursday's protest took place ahead of comments by the chair of a regional bloc who claimed to have persuaded the junta to shorten its timeline for a return to democracy. The junta has not confirmed his comments.

The National Front for the Defence of the Constitution (FNDC), an influential political coalition, called for the demonstrations to denounce the junta's "unilateral management" of the return to civilian rule after it seized power in 2021.

Rough return to democracy

A junta led by Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, which overthrew president Alpha Conde in September last year, has pledged to hand over power to elected civilians within three years. 

But regional powers have rejected this timeline, with Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) suspending Guinea after the coup.

Speaking alongside French President Emmanuel Macron at a briefing in Bissau on Thursday, the ECOWAS regional bloc chair Umaro Sissoco Embalo said he had recently convinced Guinea's junta to hasten the return to democracy.

"I was in Conakry with the president of the commission (of ECOWAS) to make the military junta understand the decision of the summit of heads of state that the transition cannot exceed 24 months", Embalo said.

"They had proposed 36 months, but we succeeded in convincing them," he added.

But Ousmane Gaoual Diallo, a Guinean minister and spokesperson for the transitional government, told AFP that "neither the government nor the presidency confirms this information about the duration of the transition in Guinea".

Source: AFP

Russia has tasked mercenaries to hold sections of the frontline in Ukraine in a sign it is running short of combat infantry, Britain's Ministry of Defence has said, as Kiev steps up a counter-offensive in the south.

The British defence ministry said in an intelligence update on Friday that Russia is relying more on the forces from its private military company Wagner Group for frontline duties.

"This is a significant change from the previous employment of the group since 2015, when it typically undertook missions distinct from overt, large-scale regular Russian military activity," the ministry said on Twitter.

However, the ministry said the mercenaries are unlikely to make up for the loss of regular infantry units or alter the trajectory of Russia's military campaign.

Wagner and the Kremlin were not immediately available for comment outside regular business hours.

Ukrainian counter-offensive

Officials in Kiev said on Wednesday they had observed a "massive redeployment" of Russian forces to the south where British defence officials believe Russia's 49th Army, stationed on the west bank of the Dnipro River, is vulnerable.

The southern city of Kherson, key to Russia's overland supply lines from Russian-annexed Crimea, was now virtually cut off from the other territories occupied by Russia, British intelligence said on Thursday.

Kherson region fell to Russian forces soon after they began what Moscow calls "a special military operation" on February 24.

The Ukrainian military has used Western-supplied long-range missile systems to badly damage three bridges across the Dnipro in recent weeks, making it harder for Russia to supply its forces on the western bank.

Ukraine said its planes struck five Russian strongholds around Kherson and another nearby city on Thursday, the focus of its biggest counter-offensive of the conflict.

Kiev bombed 

Also on Thursday, fifteen people were injured when Russian missiles hit military installations in Vyshhorod district on the edge of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev regional Governor Oleksiy Kuleba said.

Air raid sirens blared as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed parliament alongside visiting Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, as Ukraine marked its Day of Ukrainian Statehood with a public holiday for the first time on Thursday.

More than 10 Russian missiles also hit the Chernihiv region northeast of Kiev, regional Governor Vyacheslav Chausov told Ukrainian TV. Like Kiev, Chernihiv had not been targeted for weeks.

"This was Russia offering greetings on Ukraine’s Day of State Sovereignty," he said, adding there were concerns about a "second phase of ground operations by the enemy".

In addition, Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said Russian forces shelled the town of Bakhmut. At least three people were killed and three were injured, he said.

Source: agencies

Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for strikes on a prison in eastern Ukraine that Moscow said have killed dozens, including some of those captured in battle-scarred Mariupol.

The Russian army and separatists backed by it accused Kiev's forces of striking the jail holding Ukrainian prisoners on Friday — a charge vehemently denied by Ukraine, which in turn pointed fingers at Moscow's forces.

The Russian defence ministry said the jail in Olenivka in the separatist-held eastern region of Donetsk was targeted overnight with US-made advanced HIMARS rocket systems. It said in a statement "40 Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed and 75 wounded".

Denis Pushilin, leader of the separatists, put the death toll from the alleged prison shelling at 47 people. A total of 193 people were held in the jail at the time of the strike, Pushilin said in comments broadcast on Russian state television.

The Russian defence ministry said the Ukrainian prisoners included members of the Azov Battalion, who defended the Azovstal plant in Ukraine's port city of Mariupol.

'Bloody provocation'

Moscow claimed that the "bloody provocation of the Kiev regime" was designed to discourage Ukrainian troops from laying down their arms and surrendering. "This egregious provocation was carried out to intimidate Ukrainian servicemen," the defence ministry said.

Pushilin, the separatist leader, claimed Kiev forces struck the jail because Ukrainian prisoners had begun to testify.

But Ukraine's military said "the armed forces of the Russian Federation carried out targeted artillery shelling of a correctional institution in the settlement of Olenivka, Donetsk oblast, where Ukrainian prisoners were also held".

"In this way, the Russian occupiers pursued their criminal goals — to accuse Ukraine of committing 'war crimes', as well as to hide the torture of prisoners and executions...," the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said in a statement.

Moscow denies involvement in what Kiev describes as war crimes during what it calls its "special military operation".

Around 2,500 Ukrainian fighters surrendered in May under relentless Russian attacks from the ground, sea and air after strong resistance. 

The Azov Regiment and other Ukrainian units defended the steel mill for nearly three months, clinging to its underground maze of tunnels.

Meanwhile, in the south, Russian strikes on the heavily bombed city of Mykolaiv killed five people and wounded seven more, the regional governor said on Friday.

"Today, they shot at another area near a public transport stop," Vitaliy Kim said in a statement on social media.

Mykolaiv, near the Black Sea, has seen roughly half of its estimated population of nearly 500,000 people leave and the city has been shelled daily for weeks.

It is the largest Ukrainian-controlled urban hub near the frontlines in the Kherson region, where Kiev's army has launched a counter-offensive to regain control of the economically and strategically important coastal territory.

Source: agencies

Mexico has declared the water shortage in the northern state of Nuevo Leon a matter of "national security" as the region, home to Mexico's industrial capital has been crippled by a worsening drought in recent months.

In a declaration issued on Friday afternoon, the federal government said available water should be prioritised for public use and said existing federal water concessions to private companies could be modified or reduced.

"We're going to be able to guarantee water (in the state of Nuevo Leon) for eight to 10 more years," President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday during his regular news conference.

Residents of Monterrey, one of Mexico's wealthiest cities, have faced weeks of water rationing due to a dearth of rain and, according to environmentalists, poor resource management.

Monterrey, whose metropolitan area is home to around five million people, has a shortfall of 3,000 liters of water per second, Lopez Obrador said.

"Even once it has started to rain, it will take time" to solve the problem, he added.

About $770 million will be spent to build a 100-kilometre aqueduct that in 18 months will connect the El Cuchillo reservoir with Monterrey, providing 5,000 liters per second, Lopez Obrador said.

Outrage over limited access

Outrage has grown in recent months across Monterrey, as authorities sharply limited water access to residents, even as commercial bottlers and beer companies continued to extract what amounts to billions of gallons of water annually under federal concessions.

Heineken, which according to Mexico's national water authority CONAGUA holds permits in the area for 3.6 million cubic meters of water, said earlier this month it would hand over the equivalent of 20 percent of the potable water used in its processes to residents.

Photos of canned water donated by Heineken went viral on social media in recent days, sparking criticisms from those who continue to lack water at home.

In June, authorities began curtailing access to running water across the metropolitan area to only a few hours each morning.

The water rationing has sparked sporadic demonstrations, with some residents protesting that they have gone stretches of days, and sometimes even weeks, without receiving running water at all.

Bottler Arca Continental, one of the largest Coca-Cola bottlers in Latin America and which also operates in Nuevo Leon, referred a request for questions to the local business chamber Caintra, which declined to comment.

Source: Reuters

The US House of Representatives has passed a bill to revive a ban on certain semi-automatic guns, the first vote of its kind in years and a direct response to the firearms often used in the crush of mass shootings ripping through communities nationwide.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday pushed the vote toward passage in the Democratic-run House, saying the earlier ban "saved lives."

Pelosi displayed a poster of a gun company's advertisement for children's weapons, smaller versions that resemble the popular AR-15 rifles and are marketed with cartoon-like characters. "Disgusting," she said.

She called the latest bill a "crucial step in our ongoing fight against the deadly epidemic of gun violence in our nation."

President Joe Biden hailed the House vote, saying, "The majority of the American people agree with this common sense action." 

He urged the Senate to "move quickly to get this bill to my desk."

However, it is likely to stall in the 50-50 Senate. 

The House legislation is shunned by Republicans, who dismissed it as an election-year strategy by Democrats. 

Almost all Republicans voted against the House bill, which passed 217-213.

Mass shootings plaguing US

The bill comes at a time of intensifying concerns about gun violence and shootings — the supermarket shooting in Buffalo, NY; massacre of school children in Uvalde, Texas; and the July Fourth shootings of revellers in Highland Park, Ill.

Gun reform remains deeply divisive in the United States –– despite the deadly scourge of mass shootings –– with only two Republicans joining Democrats to back the assault weapons ban in the House.

Congress passed a 10-year ban on assault rifles and certain high-capacity magazines in 1994 but lawmakers let it expire in 2004 and sales of the weapons and mass shootings simultaneously have soared since then.

In a statement, Biden said "40,000 Americans die from gunshot wounds every year and guns have become the top killer of children in the United States.

Republicans stood firmly against limits on ownership of high-powered firearms during an at times emotional debate ahead of voting. 

"It’s a gun grab, pure and simple," said Republican Guy Reschenthaler, R-Pa.

Republican Jim McGovern said the weapons ban is not about taking away Americans' Second Amendment rights but ensuring that children also have the right "to not get shot in school."

For nearly two decades, since the previous ban expired Democrats had been reluctant to revisit the issue and confront the gun lobby. But voter opinions appear to be shifting and Democrats dared to act before the fall election. The outcome will provide information for voters on where the candidates stand on the issue./agencies