It may be a far cry from the millions of blogs active in the West, but Morocco’s blogosphere has taken off as the liveliest free-speech zone in largely conservative Muslim North Africa. The Moroccan "Blogoma", as it is called, is home to at least 30 000 sites.
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/ 12 December 2007
Ecologists say a tragedy is unfolding in North Africa where construction firms are moving in on some of the last unspoilt stretches of Mediterranean coastline in the search for profits. With Spain trying to preserve what remains undeveloped on its built-up shoreline, Morocco has stepped forward as a willing host for large-scale tourism development.
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/ 10 December 2007
More than 50 people were missing after an immigrant boat sank off Morocco over the weekend, authorities said on Monday. Officials in the town of Dakhla, on the coast off the Western Sahara, said the boat was heading for the Spanish Canary Islands from Mauritania when it sank on Saturday 28 nautical miles (more than 50km) offshore.
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/ 11 November 2007
Draft Moroccan legislation has earmarked nearly 30% of the state’s 2008 budget for security, underscoring anti-terrorism concerns after spring suicide attacks, a government source said on Saturday. The state is expected to pour about 45-billion dirhams (,8-billion) into security, a 29% boost from 2007.
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/ 24 October 2007
France will help Morocco build a civil nuclear energy industry to underpin its development, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on a visit to the North African country. Morocco lacks the energy reserves of neighbouring Algeria and has sought for years to build nuclear power stations to provide enough electricity to feed industrial growth and rising living standards.
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/ 10 October 2007
In his Saharan robes the tanned Frenchman passed unnoticed in Nouadhibou, a chaotic Mauritanian fishing port with an iron ore terminal and a lucrative second line in drug and people smuggling. Those he befriended knew Dominique Christian Mollard as an undercover worker with a non-governmental organisation.
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/ 26 September 2007
Moroccan Sidi Kaddour Maksouri (123) is the world’s oldest living man, the newspaper al-Ahdate al-Maghribia reported on Wednesday, challenging the Guinness World Records book’s presentation of 112-year-old Japanese Tomoji Tanabe as the world’s oldest male.
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/ 25 September 2007
Violent protests against the cost of bread have prompted the Moroccan government to annul a 30% price hike linked to soaring global grain costs. Protesters clashed with police and cars were torched and buildings damaged in the demonstrations on Sunday in Sefrou, 200km east of the capital, Rabat.
A Moroccan court sentenced a journalist to eight months in prison on Wednesday and gave a suspended six-month sentence to his boss for publishing secret military intelligence documents. The verdicts came a week after a military court handed down stiff sentences to eight army officers involved.
The South African wheelchair basketball team are on the brink of qualifying for the Paralympic Games in Beijing after advancing to the final of the qualifier on Saturday. Team Sasol beat Egypt 71-53 in their semifinal at the Omnisports Stadium in Rabat and will now clash with Morocco for the one Africa spot at the Paralympics.
After three days sitting in a dusty clearing, Ibrahim is beginning to wonder if a European tourist will ever hire one of his camels for a tour of the rose-lined boulevards of Marrakesh. ”The number of visitors has dwindled to nothing in the past week,” said the 21-year-old Moroccan, his lips pale and dry in the summer heat. ”I’ve been waiting for three days but not a single tourist has come for a ride.
The European Union has warned Morocco of the ”almost certain probability” of terrorist attacks in the North African country and urged more security at Western embassies and tourism sites, a newspaper said on Monday. On Friday, Morocco raised the security alert level to the highest rating of ”maximum”, suggesting a terror strike was imminent.
Sub-Saharan Africa must urgently impose power rationing on companies and populations to limit the effects of a worsening energy crisis, industry and government experts said. Decades of underinvestment in electricity networks and growing populations mean the poorest 20% in the region have no access to electricity.
Morocco, which has slashed cannabis cultivation by nearly half over the past four years, hopes to eradicate the main remaining area of cultivation in the northern Rif mountains by opening up the region and introducing substitute crops. The eradication programme encourages farmers to switch to other crops.
Morocco is facing an ”extreme” threat of more terror attacks in Casablanca and other cities following a spate of suicide bombings, a government spokesperson said on Wednesday. ”Terrorism can strike any time,” said spokesperson and Communications Minister Nabil Benbdellah.
Two suicide bombers killed themselves in an attack on United States diplomatic offices in Morocco’s commercial hub Casablanca on Saturday in the first such targeted bombings in four years, witnesses said. Two suicide bombers killed themselves in an attack on United States diplomatic offices in Morocco’s commercial hub Casablanca on Saturday in the first such targeted bombings in four years, witnesses said.
Morocco’s King Mohammed VI on Friday urged North African countries to work together against terrorism following this week’s suicide bombings in Algiers and Casablanca. Two suicide car bombings in Algiers on Wednesday killed 33 people and injured more than 220.
In the single-room shack in Casablanca that has been her home for 27 years, Rachida Raydi laments the loss of two of her seven children, who both ended their lives as suicide bombers. ”I hadn’t seen Ayoub for 10 months and Abdelfettah for nine months. I’m against terrorism,” their 46-year-old mother said.
Moroccan police set up road blocks and barricades on Thursday around the Casablanca district in bid to find accomplices of three suicide bombers who blew themselves up this week. Two men were arrested, including one who entered a house and threatened to blow himself up if he was not given food, a police source said.
For a long time, Moroccans felt relatively safe from the Islamist terrorism plaguing neighbouring Algeria, but that sense of security is now definitively gone. A recent string of suicide bombings and arrests has exposed the vulnerability of the kingdom in a region where al-Qaeda is extending its reach.
Three suspected suicide bombers blew themselves up on Tuesday following a police raid on a house in a Casablanca slum in which a fourth man was shot dead, police sources said. Police have been looking for up to 12 suspected suicide bombers since March 11 when the alleged leader of a suicide squad detonated his explosives belt in a cybercafé to stop police arresting him.
Driss Chraibi, a major figure in Moroccan literature who wrote of Islam, colonialism and the treatment of women in his homeland, has died, Morocco’s state news agency reported. He was 80. Chraibi died on April 1 in south-west France, the MAP agency reported.
Morocco said on Monday it was investigating whether an overnight blast was a militant suicide attack after a man with explosives under his clothes was blown up and three others were wounded at a Casablanca internet cafe. The Sunday night blast occurred in the commercial capital’s Sidi Moumen slum, home to 13 suicide bombers who killed 32 people in Casablanca in 2003.
A royal birth followed immediately by an amnesty for more than a dozen death-row prisoners, among others, is being interpreted in Morocco as a signal that the country is on the verge of making history in the Arab world by being the first to abolish the death penalty.
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/ 15 February 2007
A deadly and carefully planned series of bomb attacks in Algeria by an al-Qaeda affiliate may signal a new escalation in violence that many Algerians hoped had abated, experts say. Tuesday’s bombings flew in the face of the government’s bid to turn the page on a bloody Islamic insurgency that tore the nation apart in the 1990s.
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/ 10 February 2007
The families of 17 people suspected of stealing royal china in Morocco will ask King Mohammed VI to step in and halt their prosecution, a lawyer in the case said on Friday. ”They know the monarch’s mercy towards his subjects,” said Me Abdelatif Wahabi, a defence lawyer in the case.
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/ 8 February 2007
Al-Qaeda’s influence is spreading into the cities and deserts of North Africa. Increasingly, Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians who have known only poverty, corruption and police crackdowns are answering extremist Islam’s call to remake the world — with violence, if need be.
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/ 7 February 2007
Morocco’s multibillion-dollar cannabis crop, the biggest in the world, has shrunk by almost half over three years due to a government eradication campaign and drought. But the next step — convincing farmers in the poor northern Rif region to seek other livelihoods — needs heavy support from the European Union.
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/ 15 January 2007
A Moroccan court on Monday sentenced two journalists who published a list of popular jokes about Islam, sex and politics to suspended three-year jail terms and banned their magazine for two months. Editors and journalists at Nichane, which means ”As it is”, had feared the worst when the state prosecutor said last week the magazine should be banned for good.
South African motorcyclist Elmer Symons was killed in an accident during the fourth stage of the Dakar Rally on Tuesday, race organisers announced. He was the first competitor to die during this year’s race. Organisers were informed during the morning that there had been an accident and a helicopter was despatched to the scene.
Giniel de Villiers won the third stage of the Dakar Rally on Monday, while Carlos Sainz took the overall lead. De Villiers, a South African driving a Volkswagen, finished in two hours, 46 minutes and 12 seconds on the 252km timed section of the 648km trek from Nador to Er Rachidia.
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/ 27 November 2006
Moroccans are currently engaged in a debate about the possibility of reducing the constitutional powers of their king — this after a collective of NGOs issued an appeal titled For a New Constitution That Works. The appeal also speaks of the need for Parliament to be able to investigate and control the executive.