Team withdraw from Africa Cup of Nations, but organisers insist that the tournament will still go ahead Togo's traumatised footballers have pulled out of the Africa Cup of Nations after the death toll from a machine-gun ambush on their team bus rose to three. But organisers in Angola dismissed calls for the tournament to be abandoned because of security concerns and said the opening ceremony and first...
Separatist leader says gunmen meant to shoot Angolan troops escorting team to Africa Cup of Nations A senior official of the dissident group that launched a fatal ambush on the Togo football team has expressed his "condolences", saying rebels attacked their bus by mistake. ...
Angola was stupid to hold Africa Cup of Nations games in Cabinda. But this has nothing to do with the World Cup As Malawi and Algeria took the field today in the second match of the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations tournament, the stadium in Luanda was almost completely empty apart from officials and security men. That no attempt was made to entice Luanda's crowds to matches not involving the home team was...
The attack on the Togolese team in Angola has brought attention to a region rife with repression, conflict and oil exploitation After many years of being completely ignored by the international media, Cabinda, the sliver of Angolan territory that sits between Africa's two Congos, has made it into the headlines. Suddenly, everyone wants to know about the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda...
Your article ( Africa needs more than latter-day Livingstones , 3 January) ignored the excellent work being conducted by Abta tour operators to ensure that their activities ensure fair and equitable benefits for local people. It is untrue that these activities merely line the pockets of tour operators and destination governments. We work with our members specifically in the area of responsible...
t just affect the natural environment but the whole ecosystem that depends on it. Successful adaptation then, needs to put local communities at its centre In Africa, food production will be hit by more frequent and more extreme heat waves and droughts if climatic changes continue at their current pace. The new report from the World Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Climate Extremes, Regional Impacts, and the...
s the middle of a working day, in the middle of the week, but the trickle of worshippers at the Synagogue Church of All Nations is quickly becoming a flood. Around 1,000 people sit silently on plastic chairs cooled by dozens of floor fans at the church – a building reminiscent of an aircraft hangar just off Accra's industrial Spintex Road – watching its founder delivering a sermon on his own dedicated...
Photographs from the Guardian Eyewitness series ...
Heavily subsidised fuel in Nigeria has spawned a fuel smuggling industry in nearby Togo and Benin ...
s finance minister acknowledged that more than three-quarters of the fuel consumed there was illegally imported from Nigeria. In Togo, population 6 million, a 250-litre barrel sells for $300, a small fortune in a country where about two-thirds of the population live in poverty. Some smugglers and local dignitaries have reaped generous rewards, and "micro-petro-states" have sprung up on either side...
s independence. The regime has been supported by the army ever since and in violation of constitutional provisions, Faure Gnassingbé was installed in power by army generals after his father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma , died in February 2005 after 38 years in power. That year, a fraudulent electoral process "legalised" the coup. Protests were suppressed by massacres. To this day, the dictatorial regime remains...
s growing power The female wing of a civil rights group is urging women in Togo to stage a week-long sex strike to demand the resignation of the country's president. Women are being asked to withhold sex from their husbands or partners from Monday, said Isabelle Ameganvi, leader of the women's wing of Let's Save Togo. She said the strike will put pressure on Togo's men to take action against President...
t feature specifically in the MDGs, but many campaigners say lack of provision for the disabled is holding back development progress. Here 14 people with disabilities tell us about the challenges they face in their countries Interactive: Global development voices: Living with disabilities Debate: Talk point: Fighting the stigma of disability Antenor Ruperto Montalvan Miranda, 66, lives in Lima, Peru...
There are estimated to be 1 billion disabled people around the world. Here, 14 tell us about the challenges they and other people living with disabilities face in their countries Jaz Cummins Lisa Villani ...
s UN-estimated $1.3bn (£800m)-a-year drug trade to fund terror, looms on the horizon. Ghana sits at the centre of the new cocaine-transit zone. In January this year, President John Atta Mills told Barack Obama's assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Johnnie Carson, that he fears "a bleak future for the Ghanaian people" . "Ghana is struggling with drug trafficking and increased drug use,"...
s food and agriculture ministry summed up one of the themes that emerged at a nutrition forum of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) – helping nutrition find its place in the agriculture sector. Health, nutrition and agriculture experts from the 15 Ecowas countries said nutrition usually gains attention only in the context of crisis and emergency response, but it should be integral...
French people working in Niger have been kidnapped along with one from Togo and one from Madagascar Five French people working in Niger have been kidnapped along with one from Togo and one from Madagascar, France's foreign ministry said today. The seven, who were employees of the French nuclear reactor builder Areva and a subcontractor, were seized near the uranium-mining town of Arlit as they slept....
s a round-up of some other interesting developments that deserve recognition on this blog... It appears that seven out of 10 Scots continue to read newspapers, either in print or online, at least three to four times a week, according to a survey conducted by Ipsos MORI Scotland, reported by AllMediaScotland . The telephone survey - conducted on 1,013 people in mid August - also found evidence to suggest...
s not the growth of 'one-party politics' in Africa that's the problem; it's the trend for anti-democratic power sharing Simon Tisdall lamented the comprehensiveness of Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi's victory in the country's recent parliamentary elections – his Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front won approximately 97% of parliamentary seats – by arguing that it is evidence for...
s development. For starters, if this terrible incident had not taken place, the African Nations Cup would have been a little footnote in most reports. "Africa" is still often only in the news only because of war, as a development "burden" or as a humanitarian crisis. The western media too often see the whole continent of Africa as one country rife with corruption, "tribal" conflicts, natural and humanitarian...