Edward Harris
No image available
/ 24 March 2006

EU blacklist highlights trouble in African skies

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.

No image available
/ 17 March 2006

Towers of burning gas: Nigeria’s oil curse

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.

No image available
/ 21 February 2006

Nigerian hostage-takers call for mediation

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.

No image available
/ 23 December 2005

How mostly Muslim Senegal celebrates Christmas

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.

No image available
/ 17 August 2005

Africans go hungry across world’s poorest continent

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.

No image available
/ 14 April 2005

Twin car bombs hit Baghdad

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.

No image available
/ 17 September 2004

Surf’s up in Senegal

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.