As uranium, and maybe oil, raise hopes of income, northern Tuareg rebels have gone to war again
President Mamadou Tandja has declared a state of alert
in the north, the base of Niger's fast growing uranium industry,
after attacks on key targets killed some 50 government soldiers.
The war of words between two non-governmental agencies and French
nuclear energy company AREVA escalated last week, with
public accusations of malpractice in the extraction of uranium
in Niger and Gabon.
While Europe strives to keep out African would-be migrants,
Algeria and, increasingly, Libya daily dump hundreds
of them, penniless, south across the border into Niger.
The European Union's exclusion drive has stiffened since October,
when some 2,000 ...
Niger is at the centre of a row over intelligence used to justify
the United States' invasion of Iraq and the deepening personal
battle between President George W. Bush's White House and
one of Washington's senior Africanist ambassadors, Joseph Wilson,...
Everyone was warned about the food crisis but politicians ignored
it
A new democracy, an empty treasury and a hollow economy
The much hyped, much criticised, trans-Saharan car race, the Dakar-Cairo Rally (still called Paris-Dakar), won huge but costly publicity when, instead of for the first time driving across Libya, contestants were airlifted there from Niamey. Tripoli hailed...
The former ruling party pulled it off again: Mamadou Tandja
of the Mouvement National pour la Société de
Développement polled 59.9 per cent of the vote in the
military-run presidential poll on 24 November. The MNSD also won
38 of ...
The election to replace the dead dictator, General Ibrahim
Baré Maïnassara, is due on 17 October, organised
by the man whose soldiers killed him. Major Daouda Malam Wanké,
now head of the ruling junta, commanded the Presidential Guar...
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