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The West African economy is expected to be transformed this decade by new oil and gas production. Major construction projects, including a new city outside the capital Dakar, are attracting global investment and enriching a small elite. Most Senegalese see little benefit.Allegations of corruption surrounding the award of a petroleum license to a company run by the president’s brother triggered street protests in 2016. Many Senegalese see international corporations as the only winners.

Now, many protesters worry that Sall will use a change in the constitution in 2016 to extend his rule into a third term.Leaders in Guinea and Ivory Coast have used constitutional changes to act as a reset button on their rule, allowing them to run again.

The reported death in April of a pregnant woman who was refused a cesarean by three midwives also sparked outrage in the country.

Four babies were killed in the Linguere hospital fire, the health ministry said last April.

'Hospitals now places of death'

Too much negligence, indifference, casualness!... Hasn't going to the hospital become a risk today?"

"11 babies. How could this happen? How could they leave those babies in the fire? Why didn't they evacuate them when the fire started? Were emergency services alerted in time? Were there no emergency fire extinguishers on these premises...? No, but that is unacceptable!"

Through an interpreter, Rida says that he used his share of his family's land to pay his passage to the islands — 2,000 euros ($2,380). But the people smuggler tricked him, taking his money and leaving him stranded.

"They eat in the camp, breakfast lunch and dinner. And us? We're hungry. Hungry and ashamed, because it can't go on like this," he says. Pockets of xenophobia have bubbled here since the crisis began. There have been anti-migrant marches and reports of organized groups attacking Moroccans.

As the Spanish government struggled to accommodate the surge of arrivals, hotels left empty because of the pandemic were used as temporary solution. Now it is opening six new migrant camps for 7,000 people on the islands.

Aday Arbelo, an out-of-work welder from Gran Canaria, is also eating at the soup kitchen. "We're all afraid!" he says. "Every day there's police around here, every day there are fights and robberies." "It's awful. One day this is going to explode because there's no solution at all. The government promises and promises and nobody helps."

Rida wants to earn money for his mom's diabetes medicine. He says the family is poor and there's no future for him in Morocco. He's not alone. Moroccans make up one of the largest immigrant groups in Spain. And according to a recent survey by Arab Barometer, an independent research group, 70% of young citizens consider emigrating due to frustrations over a lack of economic opportunities.

"The main problem is not the migrants arriving but the local authorities and the government," Carlsen adds, "the image they are giving in front of the Canarian people — they feel like they are abandoned."

"Life in Senegal is very hard. There's no work or money," he says. "We're fishermen, and the government has sold the sea to foreign boats. To European boats!"

Cristina Taisma Calderín, a 19-year-old student from Las Palmas, has come to offer food and friendship. "This country is not only for us, they are people!" she says. "They have the right to live well in good conditions. And if other people come, let them come."

Spain's Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska has said that the government wants to minimize transfers to the mainland in order to "prevent irregular entry routes into Europe." The center-left government's junior coalition partner, the leftist United We Can party, demanded migrants urgently be allowed to travel, condemning what it considers the "repeated infringement of human rights" in the Canaries.

A spokesperson from Spain's Interior Ministry told NPR that all undocumented migrants without international protection under asylum law face deportation. After the pandemic halted repatriation flights for months, deportations to Morocco, Senegal and Mauritania are now underway.

A Reuters witness saw the army and police deployed to some neighbourhoods to contain the unrest.

There were also protests in the Kaolack region in the south of the country, a local official said.

The growing unrest in Dakar and Touba highlights a dilemma for many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, where measures to protect citizens’ health are also damaging the livelihoods of millions who work in the informal sector, stirring up tensions.

Unable to shuttle passengers between Touba and Dakar, taxi driver Same Diop has started begging in the street alongside dozens of other drivers struggling to support their families.

Touba’s main boulevards were littered with charred tyres and broken branches on Wednesday in the wake of the overnight protest there

scores of demonstrators set fire to an ambulance outside a coronavirus treatment centre.

This frightened us

Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, hailed the “monumental achievement” in curbing the outbreak

United Nations said, killed more than 11,300 people and infected more than 28,500. At the height of the outbreak

“our work is not done, and vigilance is needed to prevent new outbreaks.”

The risk, although significant, was low, he said. The new cases had occurred on average 27 days apart, but there have been none since mid-November

The three West African countries now have the world’s biggest pool of expertise in handling Ebola and greater professionalism, confidence and resources for dealing with it, he said.

Sierra Leone was declared free of Ebola transmission in November and Guinea at the end of December; Liberia was declared Ebola-free in May but then reported a few new cases.

Beating back Ebola is among the few tangible achievements that senior United Nations officials cite as an example of global cooperation

“Relative to its significance to global humanity, there is no issue that gets less attention,” said Lawrenc

“Frankly, this has not been on the A-list of global problems in the way that nuclear proliferation, or terrorism, or global climate change has been,

Investing roughly $4.5 billion a year to improve health systems, advance research, and strengthen the abilities of the World Health Organization and other bodies could avoid $60 billion in losses in the event of a pandemic, the commission concluded.

honor killing in Arab cultures is not solely or even primarily about controlling a woman’s sexuality, per se.

  Rather, Dr. Kanaana states, “What the men of the family, clan, or tribe seek control of in a patrilineal society is reproductive power.  Women for the tribe were considered a factory for making men. The honor killing is not a means to control sexual power or behavior. What’s behind it is the issue of fertility, or reproductive power.”

any alleged misbehavior reflects dishonor on their birth families rather than their husbands’ families.

Interestingly, honor murders are usually carried out by the fathers, brothers, or uncles of the victims – not by husbands.

killed by her blood relatives.

A woman’s reproductive potential belonged to her birth family, and could be “spent” any way they chose – preferably through a marriage that would strengthen the family or clan financially or militarily.

When Islam developed and spread throughout this region, it actually brought a different perspective on this question. Neither the Koran itself nor the hadiths make any mention of honor killing, good or bad. Extra-judicial killings, in general, are forbidden by sharia law; this includes honor killings because they are carried out by the victim’s family, rather than by a court of law.

Nonetheless, today many men in Arab nations such as ​Saudi Arabia, ​Iraq, and Jordan, as well as in Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, adhere to the tradition of honor killing rather than taking the accused persons to court.

It is notable that in other predominantly Islamic nations, such as Indonesia, Senegal, Bangladesh, Niger, and Mali, honor killing is a practically unknown phenomenon.  This strongly supports the idea that honor killing is a cultural tradition, rather than a religious one.

Explorers learned more about areas such as Africa and the Americas and brought that knowledge back to Europe.Massive wealth accrued to European colonizers due to trade in goods, spices, and precious metals.Methods of navigation and mapping improved, switching from traditional portolan charts to the world's first nautical maps.New food, plants, and animals were exchanged between the colonies and Europe.Indigenous people were decimated by Europeans, from a combined impact of disease, overwork, and massacres.The workforce needed to support the massive plantations in the New World, led to the trade of enslaved people, which lasted for 300 years and had an enormous impact on Africa.

When the Ottoman Empire took control of Constantinople in 1453, it blocked European access to the area, severely limiting trade. In addition, it also blocked access to North Africa and the Red Sea, two very important trade routes to the Far East.

Portuguese explorers discovered the Madeira Islands in 1419 and the Azores in 1427. Over the coming decades, they would push farther south along the African coast, reaching the coast of present-day Senegal by the 1440s and the Cape of Good Hope by 1490. Less than a decade later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama would follow this route all the way to India.

Christopher Columbus, an Italian working for the Spanish monarchy, made his first journey in 1492. Instead of reaching India, Columbus found the island of San Salvador in what is known today as the Bahamas.

Columbus would lead three more voyages to the Caribbean, exploring parts of Cuba and the Central American coast.

Great Britain and France also began seeking new trade routes and lands across the ocean. In 1497, John Cabot, an Italian explorer working for the English, reached what is believed to be the coast of Newfoundland. A number of French and English explorers followed, including Giovanni da Verrazano, who discovered the entrance to the Hudson River in 1524, and Henry Hudson, who mapped the island of Manhattan first in 1609.

Over the next decades, the French, Dutch, and British would all vie for dominance. England established the first permanent colony in North America at Jamestown, Va., in 1607.

Other important voyages of exploration during this era included Ferdinand Magellan's attempted circumnavigation of the globe, the search for a trade route to Asia through the Northwest Passage, and Captain James Cook's voyages that allowed him to map various areas and travel as far as Alaska.

The Age of Exploration ended in the early 17th century after technological advancements and increased knowledge of the world allowed Europeans to travel easily across the globe by sea. The creation of permanent settlements and colonies created a network of communication and trade, therefore ending the need to search for new routes.

The Age of Exploration had a significant impact on geography. By traveling to different regions around the globe, explorers were able to learn more about areas such as Africa and the Americas and bring that knowledge back to Europe.

As technology advanced and known territory expanded, maps and mapmaking became more and more sophisticated.

The Age of Exploration served as a stepping stone for geographic knowledge. It allowed more people to see and study various areas around the world, which increased geographic study, giving us the basis for much of the knowledge we have today

While testing has been comparatively limited, the continent appears to have bucked the doomsday predictions of global health experts. The telltale signs of severe outbreaks seen elsewhere — crowded hospitals and a spike in deaths — have emerged in only a handful of African countries. Surveys done by the World Health Organization have found negligible excess mortality rates in most African countries, reducing suspicion that many covid-19 deaths are going uncounted.

even as more research emerges, public health experts caution that the explanation for why Africa’s caseload has remained low will be complicated.

“It is highly unlikely that there is a single, definitive answer as to why this is the case,” said Ngoy Nsenga, a Congolese epidemiologist and the WHO’s program manager for emergency response in Africa. “Youthful populations, warmer climates, less time indoors, less traveling, less obesity and diabetes, immunities derived from other diseases — even other coronaviruses — are all playing a part, we think. But what distinguishes Africa from other places like Brazil that might share those factors, but were still hard-hit, are our human interventions.”

Those interventions have exacted immense economic damage, however, and with many African governments not seeing uncontrolled growth in cases, they have been rolled back in many places.

Health officials, however, caution that the threat is far from over — even if hospitals aren’t filling up.

“During the holiday season, there will be a tendency for large movement from capital cities to villages, remote areas, for people to connect with families. That might drive the pandemic,”

Ndongo Dia, head of the respiratory virus diagnostic laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, isn’t sure why Senegal dodged the worst of the pandemic.

The nation has garnered widespread praise for its quick response, which included sealing its border, rolling out four-hour tests while Americans waited days for results, and imposing a curfew until infections slowed.

Beyond that, Dia said, “our luck is the composition of our population. The number of severe cases is going to be much lower compared to the northern countries, where there are more elderly people.”

Death rates have been higher in South Africa, Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, where a larger percentage of the population is over the age of 65. Those four countries make up two-thirds of all coronavirus deaths in Africa.

Preliminary analyses done by the WHO indicate that Africans may be twice as likely to experience covid-19 without any illness, and that more than 80 percent of cases on the continent have been asymptomatic — a far higher percentage than elsewhere in the world.

“It is not different strains — that I can refute. We have a network of laboratories all over the continent and the world,” he said. “We have sequenced from many places, we haven’t seen dramatically different strains here.”

If anything, the reverse has been the case: responses to the pandemic sharply diverged, even within entities like the European Union, ostensibly committed to common policies.

Mercifully, it has not all been a zero-sum game. In late March 2021, 25 world leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, Johnson, Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel, Cyril Ramaphosa, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the head of the European Council, Charles Michel, as well as the prime ministers of South Korea, Fiji, Thailand, Chile, Senegal and Tunisia – but, depressingly, missing the leaders of the US, Japan, Russia and China – issued a statement explicitly acknowledging the chain linking human and non-human lives and destinies. Invoking the multilateralist idealism of the years following the second world war that sought a reconnected world through the United Nations and agencies like the WHO, they proposed a legally binding international treaty to deal with future pandemics. Such a treaty would embody “an approach that connects the health of humans, animals and our planet”

To some extent, the raising of walls, psychological and institutional, is understandable. The instinctive reaction to contagion breaking out somewhere distant is to erect barriers against its importation

Before long, any possibility of a clear and honest understanding of the common worldwide conditions that allowed such disasters to happen, not least the biological consequences of environmental degradation, became swallowed up by this default vocabulary of competitive nationalism.

two years’ experience of the pandemic, in particular the unpredictable incidence of recurring outbreaks and viral mutations, has made the locking off of discrete zones of exclusion all but impossible. The need for an alternative, transnational approach to containment, mitigation and protection, coordinated by the WHO, has never been more urgent

This moment in world history is no less fraught for being so depressingly familiar: the immemorial conflict between “is” and “ought”; between short-term power plays and long-term security; between the habits of immediate gratification and the prospering of future generations; between the cult of individualism and the urgencies of common interest; between the drum beat of national tribalism and the bugle call of global peril; between native instinct and hard-earned knowledge

If it is a happy answer you want to the question as to which will prevail, it is probably best not to ask a historian. For history’s findings are more often than not tragic, and its boneyard littered with the remains of high-minded internationalist projects.

The appeals of idealists fill whole-page declarations in earnest broadsheets and win funds from far-sighted philanthropic foundations. But the plans and the planners are demonised by the tribunes of gut instinct as suspiciously alien, hatched by cosmopolitan elites: the work of foreign bodies.

Over the past four years, more than 1,600 cybercrime cases on TikTok have been reported to authorities, said Kuber Kadayat, a Nepal police spokesman. He said most of the complaints were related to sharing nude photos or financial extortion.

Last week, the government said it would require social-media companies running platforms used in Nepal to set up liaison offices in the country.

India banned TikTok—citing threats to national security—along with dozens of other Chinese apps in 2020 after a clash between Indian and Chinese troops on the countries’ disputed border.

Nepal isn’t the first to cite concerns about the content shared on the app. Pakistan has banned the app multiple times after authorities received complaints of indecent content, later lifting the bans after receiving promises from TikTok to better control the content. In August, Senegal blocked access to the app citing hateful and subversive content being shared on it.

“The entire world is suffering from this conflict, but we in Africa are already facing the collateral damages,” said Ousmane Sène

For months, African leaders also shunned President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who asked at least twice to address the African Union. Mr. Sall said Thursday that Mr. Zelensky could soon address the organization in a videoconference, although no date has been announced.

More than 14 million people are on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa, according to relief groups, and nearly 40 million people are at imminent risk of famine in West Africa this year, according to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency.

The Kremlin said in a statement that the two leaders would discuss “the expansion of political dialogue and economic and humanitarian cooperation with the countries of the continent.”

In West Africa, one of the most visible effects of the war so far has been on bread prices that were already on the rise. In Burkina Faso, bakers went on strike last month after the government shuttered bakeries that had raised the price of a baguette. In the Ivory Coast, bakers have decreased the size of the baguette in the face of soaring wheat costs.