Category: Africa
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Twelve people were sentenced to death in Egypt for drug trafficking, in one paragraph of wire copy. The treaty Egypt has signed limits capital punishment to the most serious crimes — and the body that interprets it says drug offences are not among them.
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Illegal mining under Johannesburg is now cracking roads from below. The debate merges two separate problems: the syndicates that run the trade, and the people who are its cheapest input.
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Zimbabwe is clearing street traders from the pavements again. The traders return faster than the enforcement budget lasts — which is what happens when a country tries to police a labour market rather than replace it.
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More than 6,300 confirmed cases and over 3,000 deaths in DR Congo since May. It is the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record, and the strain circulating is the one the vaccines were not built for.
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Two offensives are under way in South Kivu, days after monitors made their first inspection of the ceasefire there. Taking ground while a framework is being set up is not a contradiction — it is the incentive the framework creates.
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A doctors’ network has counted 158 deaths in South Kordofan. No ceasefire framework being discussed for Sudan acknowledges that this front exists — because the fighting there started twelve years before the current war did.
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Soldiers took officers hostage at the Niamey air base that hosts Turkish drones, Russian Africa Corps personnel and the Alliance of Sahel States headquarters. Russia and Algeria helped put it down. The alliance itself did nothing.
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The General Assembly endorsed map projections that show countries at their true relative sizes, by 164 votes to one. The resolution binds nobody. Here is what the Mercator projection actually does, why it was built that way, and what would have to change for the vote to matter.
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Cameroon’s school year starts Monday. The UN counted more than 88 attacks on education in the Anglophone regions in the first half of 2026, and Crisis Group warns August violence could disrupt the reopening. It will be the tenth school year the conflict has taken.
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A vigilante group raided a camp of hundreds of refugees outside Durban’s Home Affairs offices. They were sleeping there because that is what the asylum renewal queue requires — which is the part of the story that explains the rest.