ADF

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Youssou N’Dour, Senegal’s — and perhaps Africa’s — most famous musician, is throwing his weight behind malaria eradication in his homeland. N’Dour has performed and toured since the 1970s, blending Senegalese music with soul, hip-hop and jazz. But he is also known for his work as a longtime campaigner for malaria prevention. The disease remains all too common in Senegal, with 500,000 recorded cases in 2015, including 4,400 deaths. Worldwide, malaria killed more than 400,000 people in 2016, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The vast majority were children living in Sub-Saharan Africa. Children are more susceptible…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE FIFA officials say that Africa wants 10 places in the 48-nation World Cup in 2026, up five slots. The current system has 32 teams. “All associations back an expanded World Cup, and Africa hopes for 10 places,” said South African FA President Danny Jordaan. The expansion of the World Cup, passed by the FIFA Council, goes into effect for the 2026 tournament. The new system will feature 16 first-round groups from which winners and runners-up qualify for the knockout phase. Africa has had five places since the 1998 World Cup in France. No African country has advanced past…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Moussa Faki Mahamat, former foreign minister of Chad, assumed office as head of the African Union Commission, pledging to reform the institution and tackle the continent’s crises. Faki took over leadership of the 54-country continental bloc in March, 2017 days after the United Nations announced food emergencies in four countries, including three in Africa: Somalia, South Sudan and northeast Nigeria. The U.N. said the food shortages constitute the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. “The famine that ravages vast areas of Africa these days is a real humiliation for us,” Faki told delegates at the commission’s headquarters…

ADF STAFF Tunisian authorities announced they have stopped more than 27,000 young people from joining terror groups since 2012. Interior Minister Hadi al-Majdoub said the young people have been prevented from traveling to foreign countries where armed conflicts are ongoing. Al-Majdoub said that aside from those prevented from leaving the country, about 800 suspected extremists have returned from abroad, and about 190 of them were arrested. The others are being closely monitored for signs of extremist activity, he told the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. Tunisia has contributed more foreign fighters to ISIS than any other African country. Al-Majdoub said about 3,000…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Tanzania sentenced its most notorious poacher, nicknamed “The Devil,” to 12 years in prison for running an ivory trafficking network across five African countries. Boniface Matthew Maliango, 47, was arrested in Dar es Salaam in September 2015 after a yearlong manhunt. The Elephant Action League, which fights wildlife crime, said Maliango was believed to be responsible for killing thousands of elephants as the head of 15 poaching syndicates operating throughout Burundi, southern Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. He also is accused of leading a poaching network that supplied 66-year-old Chinese citizen Yang Fenglan, known as the “Ivory Queen.”…

THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION Malawi’s government is trying a new strategy to protect its fast-dwindling forests: sending in the Army. With deforestation threatening the capital’s water supply, the government has launched 24-hour military patrols of the country’s major forests. Soldiers are authorized to arrest loggers and confiscate their equipment, said Sangwani Phiri, a spokesman for the Ministry of Natural Resources, Energy and Mining. The move is “a bid to avert unwarranted illegal cutting down of trees,” he said. The strategy of calling on the Malawi Defence Forces (MDF) is one that mimics strategies of other southern African countries, including Botswana and…

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Malian Soldiers and former Tuareg rebels staged their first joint patrol in northern Mali, a key step in a 2015 peace agreement meant to help calm a region under threat from extremism. As helicopters with the United Nations peacekeeping mission hovered overhead, 50 men in distinctive turbans started to patrol the city of Gao in February 2017. The city has been a frequent target of attacks by extremists, including one in January that killed 54. The joint battalion of 600 people is the first to formally combine Malian Soldiers with the rebels from armed independent groups of…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Tunisia’s Coast Guard seized 31 kilograms of pure cocaine, valued at more than $6 million, off the Mediterranean coast. The March 2017 bust came after “suspicious movements” were sighted on a boat off Cape Bon, a peninsula on the strait of Sicily, said Lt. Col. Mohamed Walid Ben Ali, who heads the Coast Guard in La Goulette, near Tunis. Two men fled with the boat after hurling “a large red sack” into the sea that was recovered by authorities and found to contain 30 blocks of pure cocaine. It was the first time that Tunisian authorities have netted…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE South Africa’s Phelophepa train draws a crowd wherever it goes. The sound of the lumbering 19-car clinic-on-rails signals the arrival of badly needed free health care for thousands of South Africans as it tours the country. At a stop in Pienaarsrivier, a town in South Africa’s Limpopo province, dozens of elderly patients and women clutching children showed up to take advantage of the service. “We are so happy. I got two pairs of spectacles, and now I’m going to see the doctor for a checkup,” said 60-year-old Janette Rakgetse from nearby Hammanskraal. “I’ve saved a lot of money.…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Nineteen African countries have launched a network to tackle piracy, high-seas robbery, kidnappings and human trafficking in the strategically important Gulf of Guinea. The Gulf of Guinea Interregional Network (GOGIN) officially began operations after a ceremony in the Cameroonian capital, Yaoundé, in June 2017. “Coastal nations, from Angola to Senegal, have begun working together to combat criminality at sea,” said an official statement from the group. The $9.8 million, four-year initiative funded by the European Union is designed to clamp down on maritime crime in a region where trafficking in human beings and drugs is common. Illegal fishing…