Three main militia groups in a strife-torn eastern province have agreed to lay down their arms ahead of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) historic elections this weekend, the United Nations said on Thursday, offering a glimmer of hope on the same day that violence at a campaign rally underlined tensions in this vast nation.
Russian-speaking pilots sat coolly behind locked cockpit doors, unaware of the failed air conditioning in the passenger-packed cabin of their geriatric aircraft as it sat on a sun-baked African runway. Weasua Air Transport, the Liberian operator of that jet-prop aircraft, was among 92 airlines banned on Wednesday from European airspace due to safety concerns.
Sooty towers of flame spew into the air, night and day, as excess natural gas from the petroleum industry burns off, buffeting Nigerian villagers with jet-force heat and noise. For many living near the dozens of gas flares dotting southern Nigeria, the flames are just another, particularly potent, reminder that the country’s oil wealth has done little to benefit its people.
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/ 21 February 2006
Militants holding nine foreign oil-worker hostages called on Tuesday for independent negotiators to mediate among the hostage-takers and a Nigerian federal government they deem illegitimate. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said there have been no negotiations so far for the liberation of the hostages taken on Saturday.
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/ 23 December 2005
Hundreds of young men decked with tinsel wander before mostly Muslim Senegal’s mosques, hawking plastic Christmas trees. Women pray to Allah beneath an inflatable Santa Claus suspended under a bakery’s eaves. While Muslims recognise Jesus Christ as a prophet, they don’t generally celebrate the date of his birth.
To witness Africa’s unrelenting hunger, look no further than into the fever-bright eyes of 17 severely malnourished infants languishing in a West African hospital. Worse than normal food crises raging in parts of Mali and elsewhere in Africa this year have focused new attention on the politics and geography of hunger across the world’s poorest continent.
Aid workers say the food crisis in Mali is raging largely unnoticed by a world preoccupied with hunger in next-door Niger. There are fears of a replay of the drama in Niger, where the world ignored repeated warnings and only rushed in when images of starving children hit the airwaves.
The expected decision by Group of Eight (G8) leaders to erase some of the debt Africans owe world lenders will free money to build schools and hospitals — but its impact may not be as dramatic as it first appears. Few African countries — even those paying interest — are expected to make good on the principal.
A pair of car bombs exploded near government offices in the Iraqi capital on Thursday, killing 18 and wounding three dozen, as insurgent attacks against the nation’s nascent security forces left at least eight others dead. On Wednesday, an American was shown at gunpoint on a videotape aired by al-Jazeera television.
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/ 17 September 2004
A brilliant blue wave breaks, perfectly curled by a steady offshore breeze. Like their baggy-shorted brethren the world over, surfers spring upright on their boards, then drop down into a plunging, right-breaking barrel. But at this beach, mosques in pastel colors crumble on the shores, haggard cattle munch the weeds, and the drinks are sweet tea, cooked over open fires in dented aluminum pots on the sand.