A Somali police officer recently received an unexpected summons from the enemy. An unknown caller ordered him to report to a town outside the capital, Mogadishu, where the extremist group al-Shabab would settle a dispute between him and his brother.
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Gambia’s government is setting up a special prosecutor's office to investigate for severe human rights violations and potentially charge former dictator Yahya Jammeh, who fled into exile in 2017 after 22 years in power.
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye was criminally charged Wednesday by authorities who accused him of inciting violence with his efforts to stage street protests against rising commodity prices that the government largely blames on the war in Ukraine.
TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — Rescue teams searched Wednesday for dozens of people reported missing after a boat carrying migrants from Libya to Europe capsized off Tunisia's coast.
The International Organization for Migration said 30 people were rescued and 75 people were unaccounted for after the boat sank off the city of Sfax in southern Tunisia.
Pfizer said Wednesday that it will provide nearly two dozen products, including its top-selling COVID-19 vaccine and treatment, at not-for-profit prices in some of the world’s poorest countries.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United States on Tuesday urged rapid progress from military to civilian rule in Sudan and threatened sanctions on anyone impeding or blocking the transition to democracy.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africa's neutral stance on Russia's war in Ukraine was a major topic of conversation as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz meets Tuesday with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, to end his three-nation tour of Africa.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Environmental activists are meeting in South Africa this week to press governments and businesses to reduce the production of plastic because it is harming the continent’s environment.
KIGALI, Rwanda (AP) — Rwanda’s military has accused neighboring Congolese forces of injuring several civilians in cross-border shelling and asked regional monitors to investigate.
MADRID (AP) — The Olympic Refugee Foundation and the refugee Olympics team are the winners of this year’s Princess of Asturias Award for sports, the Spanish foundation that organizes the prizes said Wednesday.
PARIS (AP) — Several hundred climate protesters disrupted a TotalEnergies shareholders meeting in Paris and blocked the venue entrance Wednesday to denounce the oil and gas giant’s stake in Russia despite Moscow's war in Ukraine.
TOKYO (AP) — The $1.4 billion Tokyo national stadium, built by the Japanese government for last year’s Olympics, is being viewed as a site for the track and field world championships.
An inspection team from World Athletics — the governing body of the sport — met with Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike on Wednesday and was to tour the stadium on Thursday.
The NFL has expanded the Rooney Rule again, this time to include quarterbacks coaches in a further effort to diversify the coaching ranks.
The change was announced Tuesday at the owners meeting in Atlanta by Jonathan Beane, the NFL’s senior vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer.
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Shaun Norris, the last player to be paired with Tiger Woods in the PGA Championship, headed home to South Africa to see his young children, take a short break from traveling and figure out where his world travels should take him.
LONDON (AP) — WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was reappointed to a second five-year term on Tuesday by the U.N. health agency’s member countries.
No other candidate challenged Tedros for the post amid the ongoing difficulties of responding to the devastating coronavirus pandemic.
LONDON (AP) — Health authorities in Europe, North America, Israel and Australia have identified more than 100 cases of monkeypox in recent days.
Officials around the world are keeping watch for more cases because, for the first time, the rare disease appears to be spreading among people who didn’t travel to Africa, where monkeypox is endemic.
CAIRO (AP) — The U.N. migration agency said Tuesday it aims to help transfer at least 6,750 Ethiopian migrants from war-torn Yemen to their home country in the coming months. It appealed for $7.5 million to assist their return.
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Egypt, host of the next United Nations summit on climate change, will push countries to make good on their pledges to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions, facilitate “non-adversarial” talks on compensation to developing countries for global warming impacts and allow climate activists to protest, said the incoming president of COP27.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. envoy for Somalia urged the country Monday to build on last week's election of a new president and work on national reconciliation, improve relations between the central government and states, and confront the growing threat from the al-Shabab extremist group.
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — The head of the U.N.’s World Food Program is telling billionaires it’s “time to step up” as the global threat of food insecurity rises with Russia's war in Ukraine, saying he’s seen encouraging signs from some of the world's richest people, like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Two high-level speakers at the World Economic Forum gathering say Afghanistan’s most urgent need is saving its economy from complete collapse.
Achim Steiner, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, said Monday in Davos that “we cannot abandon 40 million Afghans simply on the principle of moral outrage.”
PARIS (AP) — The lone survivor of a 2009 plane crash in the Indian Ocean took the stand Monday in a Paris courtroom, recounting her ordeal as a 12-year-old girl hearing screams, clinging to floating debris and desperately hoping that her mother was still alive.
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — Zimbabwe has opened an international conference to try to win international support for its campaign to be allowed to sell its stockpile of seized ivory.
If the southern African country is not permitted to sell off its 130 tons of ivory, estimated to be worth $600 million, officials warn it may quit the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, CITES.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — More than 300 people have been evacuated from their homes as a result of renewed heavy rains, flooding and mudslides in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province, weeks after severe flooding killed more than 400 people and displaced more than 40,000 others.
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) — A Ugandan opposition figure who is calling for street protests against rising commodity prices is being detained inside his home by police.
Kizza Besigye, a four-time presidential candidate, has been unable to leave his home outside the capital, Kampala, since May 12, with police pitching camp nearby to enforce his apparent house arrest.
OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) — A series of complex challenges, including a lack of funding and political will as well as rising insecurity linked to extremist groups al-Qaida and the Islamic State in Burkina Faso, are obstructing progress on Africa's Great Green Wall, according to experts involved in the initiative.
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said his country is interested in a major gas exploitation project in Senegal as he began a three-nation visit to Africa on Sunday that also is focused on the geopolitical consequences of the war in Ukraine.
BERLIN (AP) — The COVID-19 pandemic is “most certainly not over,” the head of the World Health Organization warned Sunday, despite a decline in reported cases since the peak of the omicron wave. He told governments that “we lower our guard at our peril.”
LONDON (AP) — Scientists who have monitored numerous outbreaks of monkeypox in Africa say they are baffled by the disease's recent spread in Europe and North America.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Some of the world’s biggest mining companies have withdrawn requests to research and extract minerals on Indigenous land in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, and have repudiated Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to legalize mining activity in the areas.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States has removed five extremist groups, all believed to be defunct, from its list of foreign terrorist organizations. In notices published in the Federal Register on Friday, the State Department said it had removed the groups after a mandatory five-year review of their designations.
NEW YORK (AP) — With one notable exception, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan seemed to enjoy guiding American journalist Peter Greenberg around her country for the television show “The Royal Tour.”
GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. is warning that 18 million people in Africa’s Sahel region face severe hunger in the next three months, citing the impacts of Russia's war in Ukraine, the coronavirus pandemic, climate-induced shocks and rising costs.
CAIRO (AP) — Egyptian authorities have transferred a prominent political activist from a maximum-security prison where he was allegedly tortured and denied basic rights to a new correctional facility, his family said on Thursday.
SIYABUSWA, South Africa (AP) — Bold blue, yellow, and pink triangles play off each other in a zigzag pattern marching down the side of a rural home in South Africa's northern Mpumalanga province.
Shapes of ziggurats, diamonds and arrows dance around the structure in clashing yet harmonious colors, instantly recognizable as the work of South African artist Esther Mahlangu.
May 13-May 19, 2022
As Russian attacks continued across Ukraine this week, dominating the news, the 75th international film festival at Cannes began and Ukraine won the Eurovision Song Contest in Turin.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — China says its initiative to build ports and other infrastructure across Asia and Africa, paid for with Chinese loans, will boost trade. But in a cautionary tale for borrowers, Sri Lanka's multibillion-dollar debt to Beijing threatens to hinder efforts to resolve a financial crisis so severe that the Indian Ocean nation cannot import food or gasoline.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A Hong Kong-flagged racing sailboat that led its skippers to win multiple contests around the world came under attack Thursday off the coast of war-torn Yemen, with its crew reportedly targeted by militants who fired warning shots and threatened them with rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
LONDON (AP) — European and American health authorities have identified a number of monkeypox cases in recent days, mostly in young men. It's a surprising outbreak of a disease that rarely appears outside Africa.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican’s financial trial took a series of surreal turns Thursday when a former suspect-turned-star witness was thrown out of the tribunal and a defendant asserted in court documents that she escorted two emissaries of Russian President Vladimir Putin into the Holy See to negotiate the return of holy relics to the Russian Orthodox Church.