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Traveling to an African country? Here’s what you need to know

14 July 2021 By Tim McDonnell REUTERS/MOHAMED ABD EL GHANY To draw in tourists, Egypt dropped its Covid-19 testing entry requirement for travelers with proof of vaccination. The coronavirus pandemic has been harsh for Africa’s $50 billion tourism industry, with the fall-off in foreign visitors likely to knock out more than 6% of countries’ GDP on average in 2021, according to the UN.Last […]

North Korea Hastens Construction of Border Walls and Fences

8 July 2021 By Ha Yoon Ah As North Korea builds concrete walls and high voltage wires along the entire China-North Korea border, military units and labor brigades tasked with the construction recently received an order to complete their work by Oct. 10, or Party Foundation Day. A source in Yanggang Province, speaking on condition […]

Looming Water War Over Dam Construction on the Nile River

12 July 2021 Egypt is threatening war with Ethiopia over management of Nile River water. The dispute has been going on since 2011, when Ethiopia began construction of its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Egypt has a much larger and better equipped military than Ethiopia and spends twenty times as much each year on its […]

UN ready to promote ‘win-win solution’ for Blue Nile dam project

July 10, 2021 By Newsroom The United Nations stands ready to support Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan in efforts to resolve their decade-long disagreement over the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), senior officials told the Security Council on Thursday.  UN Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa, Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, reported that recent negotiations under the African […]

Ethiopia’s controversial mega-dam

8 July 2021 Ethiopia’s controversial mega-dam construction on the upper Nile River has caused a decade of regional tensions (EDUARDO SOTERAS/AFP/File) Ethiopia’s construction of a massive dam on a tributary of the Nile River, which the UN Security Council meets about on Thursday, is raising regional tensions notably with Egypt, which depends on the Nile […]

Africa’s ‘Big States Crisis’ Has Deep Historical Roots

7 July 2021 By Howard W. French One of the most important problems in modern African history is also among the most widely misunderstood. For decades, both journalists and scholars have lamented that Africa’s borders were drawn up by outside powers, beginning with Europe’s so-called Scramble for Africa, between 1881 and World War I. This […]

Concern For Migrants At Europe’s African Land Borders

12 Nov 12 2019 Alasdair Lane Clinging desperately to the truck’s undercarriage, it’s hard to imagine the boy’s terror. What horrors drove him to the Spanish border, we’ll never know. The 13-year-old dropped under the lorry’s wheel, and his tiny body was crushed. Another life lost in Europe’s unremitting migrant crisis; but not, like most, […]