On a four-hour visit to Mali on Friday, United States First Lady Laura Bush said she was ”touched” by the African country’s effort to educate its young people. Mali was the last stop on the former schoolteacher’s tour of Africa, which also included visits to Zambia, Mozambique and Senegal.
Two-time Grammy Award winner Ali Farka Toure of Mali, one of Africa’s most famous performers, died Tuesday after a long illness, Mali’s Culture Ministry announced. He was 67. Toure played a traditional Malian stringed instrument called the gurkel, and was best-known overseas for his 1995 collaboration with American guitarist Ry Cooder on Talking Timbuktu.
In 1994, authorities in Mali launched a programme to eradicate guinea worm — a parasite that can grow to a length of almost a metre inside the human body, later emerging through a blister in the skin. While the programme was very successful in its first six years, a troubling resurgence of guinea worm was reported last year in the central Mopti region.
"Our country has an enormous potential when it comes to water resources. If we develop these resources properly, they should allow us to try and get beyond food self-sufficiency," says Mali’s President, Amadou Toumani Toure. He was speaking at an international water conference that took place in the capital, Bamako.