Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Nguema is hard to avoid in the small African country’s island capital, Malabo.
African Union leaders opened a two-day summit on Thursday overshadowed by the conflict in Libya and an arrest warrant for Muammar Gaddafi.
Afghanistan’s 17-million voters are set to go to the polls on Thursday with security forces on high alert against a threatened Taliban onslaught.
A United States helicopter involved in an anti-Taliban combat operation crashed in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, killing all 10 US soldiers on board, the US military said on Saturday. The crash of the Chinook in Kunar province late on Friday was another blow to coalition forces in Afghanistan after a bomb killed two Italian soldiers near the capital the same day.
In southern Helmand province, one of the main sources of the world’s opium and heroin, turbaned men fit stones into a cobbled road that is meant to lead them away from growing drugs. Crouching, they peer up at a convoy of armoured vehicles and gun-toting American soldiers that rumbles along the first such road in southern Afghanistan, the most dangerous part of this violent land.