A Malawian court on Thursday convicted a Chinese national accused of racism and exploiting children in relation to a series of online videos and ordered him to leave the country. 

A judge in the nation’s capital of Lilongwe handed Lu Ke, 27, a 12-month sentence after the man was found guilty of procuring children to take part in entertainment and racially exploiting them.

Public prosecutor Masauko Chamkakala said Lu, who was arrested last year, was given seven days to leave Malawi, having already served his time behind bars. 

“He has already served 12 months, hence his immediate release,” Chamkakala told AFP.

Lu allegedly filmed children singing racist chants about themselves in Chinese — which they did not understand — and then sold the videos on Chinese social media.

In one video, a young child aged about nine was heard saying: “I am a monster with low IQ.”

Chamkakala said Lu has paid compensation to the victims but declined to disclose the amount. 

Lu was arrested in June last year in neighbouring Zambia for illegal entry after fleeing there and was later extradited back to Malawi.

When the allegations surfaced, the Chinese embassy in Malawi condemned the accused’s actions in a statement, saying “the Chinese government has zero tolerance for racism.”  

At least nine people have been killed and 16 injured after an explosive device accidentally detonated in a field in conflict-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, local sources said on Thursday.

The blast occurred on Wednesday evening in Lubwe Sud in North Kivu province’s Rutshuru territory.

Justin Mwangaza, a local civil-society figure, told AFP that a civilian had picked up a bomb in a field and given it to a militiaman when it subsequently exploded. 

“Nine people were killed and 16 injured,” he said.

A nurse at a nearby clinic confirmed the toll, explaining that two people died on the spot and seven later succumbed to their wounds.

Some of the 16 wounded people are in critical condition, the nurse said.

AFP was unable to independently confirm the death toll.

Armed groups have plagued much of eastern DRC for decades, a legacy of regional wars that flared in the 1990s and 2000s. 

One such group, the M23, has captured swathes of territory in North Kivu since taking up arms again in late 2021 after years of dormancy. 

The rebel campaign has displaced over one million people, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha).

Independent UN experts, the DRC government and several Western nations including the United States and France accuse Rwanda of actively backing the M23, despite denials from Kigali.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Thursday for a “serious, broad-based reflection” on reforming the global body’s peacekeeping operations, highlighting persistent “limitations” to their success.

Presenting his most recent policy brief, entitled the “New Agenda for Peace,” Guterres praised the work of UN peacekeeping missions as “saving millions of lives” and preserving ceasefires.

However, the former Portuguese prime minister cited “longstanding unresolved conflicts, driven by complex domestic, geopolitical and transnational factors” as well as a “persistent mismatch between mandates and resources” as exposing the missions’ limitations.

“Peacekeeping operations cannot succeed when there is no peace to keep,” he said.

They also cannot achieve their goals “without clear, prioritized and realistic mandates from the Security Council, centered on political solutions,” he added.

He therefore called for a “serious, broad-based reflection on the future of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, with a view to moving towards nimble, adaptable models with appropriate exit strategies in place.”

Though he did not mention any nations by name, his remarks come just weeks after the Security Council ended the decade old Minusma mission in Mali.

The move followed a surprise withdrawal request from the West African country’s military junta, which said it had failed to meet the security challenges caused by terrorist groups.

Peacekeeping missions are not anti-terrorism forces and are limited by their mandates in how they can engage in conflicts.

“A fragmentation of conflicts involving non-state armed groups, criminal gangs, terrorists and opportunists has increased the need for multinational peace enforcement, counterterrorism and counter-insurgency operations backed by regional or sub-regional groups,” Guterres said.

He pointed to Africa as the continent with the greatest need for this “new generation of peace enforcement missions.”

“The New Agenda for Peace therefore reiterates my call for peace enforcement missions and counter-terrorism operations, led by African partners with a UN Security Council mandate,” he added.

The “New Agenda for Peace” is part of a series of proposals the secretary-general is producing ahead of the United Nations’ major “Summit of the Future” next year.