Category: Africa
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Guinea-Bissau voted on a new constitution that would let the president hire and fire the prime minister and dissolve parliament. Turnout passed 55 per cent; the main opposition party boycotted. Results are due Tuesday.
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Ninety-seven people drowned on Lake Kariba this month — the worst boat disaster in Zimbabwe’s history. The world read the figure 15, because that was the number when the story was still news.
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A town of 18,000 in the far north-east of the Central African Republic is hosting more than 27,000 Sudanese refugees — and since a rebel attack in June, displaced Central Africans too. The response plan is 11 per cent funded.
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State television says dozens of soldiers were killed or arrested after Saturday’s revolt in Niamey. No group claimed the attack and arrests followed inside the army — the two signals that separate a mutiny from an insurgent raid.
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Mutiny, coup attempt or insurgent raid — from outside, in the dark, they look the same. What the state broadcaster, the claims of responsibility and the arrests that follow can tell you, and why officials pull in different directions on the first day.
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Gunfire and explosions hit Niamey’s airport, a major air base and the area around the presidential palace overnight. One security source calls it a mutiny within the armed forces; another calls it a terrorist attack. Both accounts are still standing.
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The only chokepoint in this series that people dug. Egypt earns tolls on every transit, which makes the canal a national budget line as well as a trade route — and in 2024 it emptied out without Egypt closing anything at all.
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More than 300 deaths in a week and over 2,600 since May. Forty health workers have died, wages have gone unpaid, and 16,000 vaccine doses have arrived for an Ebola species the vaccine was never designed against.
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The International Health Regulations Emergency Committee met for a second time on the Bundibugyo virus epidemic, and WHO published updated recommendations on 24 August. They are more detailed than the first set, and now cover mass gatherings and movement inside the country.
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Video from the Central African Republic appears to show a landslide burying miners at an artisanal gold site. Why pit walls fail, why people work them anyway, and why the death toll from collapses like this is rarely established.