by Sarah DiLorenzo

PARIS (AP)—The French government wants companies to hire young people so much that it’s offering to pick up the tab.

The new Socialist president, Francois Hollande, told his Cabinet Wednesday that he wants to wage a war on unemployment and unveiled a plan for the government to pay most of the salaries of tens of thousands of young people hired next year.

Unemployment in France is 10 percent, but nearly 23 percent for those under the age of 25. That’s an imbalance that many European countries are struggling with: In Spain, youth unemployment is over 52 percent; it’s 34 percent in Italy.

DAKAR, Senegal (AP)—The rumors started to swirl around Ghana in June: President John Atta Mills was ill, maybe too sick to seek re-election, and he was going abroad to seek medical treatment. Some radio stations went so far as to prematurely report his death.

PROTECTING HIS IMAGE—President Barack Obama listens as the late President John Atta Mills of Ghana, left, speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 8. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

by Tom Odula

VINDICATED—Rebecca Kerubo, mother of three children, sits with her son at her house in Nairobi, Kenya on Aug. 9. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Rebecca Kerubo, a $6-a-day security guard at a Nairobi mall, is one of the city’s countless low-wage slum residents. So when she made a formal complaint that Kenya’s second most powerful judge threatened her with a gun at a security checkpoint, few thought the struggling mother of three stood a chance.

Now it appears, though, that the justice will lose her seat on the bench.

It has become something of a rite of passage for Caribbean political leaders who direct the fortunes of the nations and territories that form the archipelago.

In recent weeks and months, Jamaica’s Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, Guyana’s new President Donald Ramotar, Grenada’s head of government Tillman Thomas and Mia Mottley, a former Deputy Prime Minister of Barbados, came to New York at the helm of a six member delegation of the Barbados Labor Party to meet the Diaspora. What they all did was deliver an interesting message: nationals of their respective countries must continue to play an invaluable role in the further economic and social development of America’s third border.

MIA MOTTLEY