Covid assaults the MENA region Iran, Jordan and Morocco have recorded thousands of new Covid-19 infections in recent days, the World Health Organization said Thursday, warning that lockdowns could not stamp out the pandemic. “More than 60 percent of all cases in the past week were reported from three countries — the Islamic Republic of […]
Here are the latest developments in the coronavirus crisis as of 17 November: Europe tops 15 million cases – Europe on Tuesday topped 15 million confirmed infections, while France passed the two million mark. Worldwide, the coronavirus has killed at least 1,330,385 people and infected at least 55,162,610 since the outbreak emerged in China last […]
Egyptian authorities on Wednesday arrested a second staff member of a leading local human rights group, the organisation said, days after its office manager was detained. “Karim Ennarah, director of criminal justice at EIPR, arrested while on vacation in Dahab, South Sinai,” the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights said on Twitter. “He has been escorted […]
Algeria’s supreme court on Wednesday said the brother of former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and two ex-intelligence chiefs convicted of conspiracy against the state would be retried after appeals. The once mighty Said Bouteflika was long seen as the real power behind the presidency after his brother suffered a debilitating stroke in 2013. He had served […]
In this episode, Arezki Daoud discusses with Do Christophe Ouattar of World Neighbors (http://WN.org) how NGOs are operating in the Sahel. Topics include coping with growing insecurity, environment degradation, the impact of Covid-19 on humanitarian affairs and much more.
The head of Algeria’s top private media group was jailed for five years on Sunday, the company said, the toughest sentence handed to a press mogul in the North African country. Anis Rahmani, chief of the Ennahar group, is the latest figure close to the clan of former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to be handed a […]
Algeria imposed new coronavirus restrictions Sunday, closing sport and cultural centres as well as beaches after a spike in infections. The government called on Algerians to fight what it called a “concerning phase” of the pandemic. Algeria has registered more than 68,000 infections and at least 2,100 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health, with […]
Morocco’s army has responded to fire by the Polisario Front along the UN-patrolled buffer zone in Western Sahara, said an online report picked up by the official MAP news agency. “Since 13 November 2020, Polisario militias have fired provocative shots along the line of defence without causing human or material damage,” MAP said, citing the […]
Tarhuna, Libya: A year ago armed men took Mohamed al-Magri’s son for questioning as fighting raged around the Libyan capital, and now he fears Haitham was killed and buried in a mass grave. Magri believes the masked men took his son at gunpoint in revenge, because his family backed the 2011 revolution that ousted Libyan […]
A man who worked in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s press office has been charged with spying for Egypt, prosecutors said Monday. The German national, named as Amin A., began working for the visitor service of the federal government press office (BPA), headed by Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert, in 1999. “He used this position from at […]
The reported deaths of Al-Qaeda’s top two leaders in recent months have raised questions about the future strategy and strength of the terror network, already a shadow of the global force it was two decades ago. The New York Times reported last week that Al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah, who went by the nom-de-guerre […]
For three decades, a UN-monitored ceasefire has kept a fragile peace in the disputed Western Sahara. Now a row over a remote desert truck stop is prompting talk of a return to war. The pro-independence Polisario Front declared the ceasefire over on Friday, after Morocco deployed military engineers to extend its network of defensive walls […]
The pro-independence Polisario Front said Saturday that clashes are continuing in the disputed territory of Western Sahara after the Moroccan army launched an operation in the buffer zone on its southern border. “Fighting is continuing after the crime committed by Moroccan troops in Guerguerat,” senior Polisario official Mohamed Salem Ould Salek told AFP. The ceasefire […]
An Egyptian man set himself alight in central Cairo in an anti-government protest on Thursday, but was stopped before the blaze grew too severe, a security source said. Mohammed Hosni doused himself in fuel while another man filmed him making a speech criticising the government in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square, the epicentre of Egypt’s 2011 […]
The 23.8-percent turnout was a record low for a major vote in Algeria, with fewer than 15 percent of eligible voters endorsing the constitutional document Algerians approved constitutional reforms in a referendum, though with a record low turnout, the country’s constitutional council announced Thursday as it handed down the definitive result of this month’s vote. […]
Dozens of polio cases have been detected in Chad just months after the UN declared the disease eradicated in Africa, but the government and World Health Organization said Friday that the infections were a vaccine-derived strain. Sixty-six cases have been detected so far, a spokesman for the vaccination programme in Chad’s health ministry, Abdramane Adji, […]
France announced Friday that its anti-jihadist force in Mali had killed the military commander of an Al-Qaeda-aligned group linked to attacks in the region. The killing of Ba Ag Moussa is a major boost for the thousands-strong French Barkhane force stationed in the Sahel region of Africa for over half a decade in a grinding […]
Italian coastguard rescues migrant boats near Lampedusa Italy’s coastguard rescued about 170 migrants on two separate rubber oats in Mediterranean waters, news agency AGI reported Friday, hours after a crisis hotline signalled they were in distress. Some 79 migrants were rescued first and brought to the Italian island of Lampedusa, followed by another 90 people, […]
Polisario Front declares end of truce The pro-independence Polisario Front declared a three-decade-old ceasefire in the disputed Western Sahara was over on Friday after Morocco launched an operation to reopen the road to neighbouring Mauritania. The Polisario, which had warned on Monday that the 1991 ceasefire was hanging by a thread, said the move by […]
