It was raining hard in Tokyo when the Botswana men’s 4x400m relay team made history on Sunday, claiming gold at the World Athletics Championships and stunning the sprinting community. Victory in those conditions felt especially auspicious. It rains so little in Botswana that the country’s people revere precipitation. The Setswana word for rain – pula – also means wealth or blessing, and lends its name to the country’s currency.
World champs: When it pours, the pula reigns
The country’s laughing all the way to the bank after Gaborone quartet pulls off relay coup in Tokyo.
Over the next 18 months, the United States will overhaul its role in global health. A new state department policy, published on Friday, outlines a slower, more orderly pullback than this year’s abrupt closure of USAID.
A more orderly aid exit, but an exit all the same
America has a new plan to pull back from global health funding, but it still wants out.
Many African countries are spending up to 9% of their national budgets on climate disasters. Leaders are trying to future-proof the continent for a world of evaporating climate finance and accelerating pollution.
Bootstraps and shoestrings: How Africa has to beat the heat
Leaders are trying to future-proof the continent for a world of evaporating climate finance and accelerating pollution.
Days after a massive landslide buried about 1,000 people, only a few rescue workers have managed to reach Tarsin, a remote village in the Jebel Marra area of Darfur in Sudan. The landslide on Sunday also killed more than 5,000 animals, including sheep and camels, destroying survivors’ livelihoods.
They fled to the mountain. Then the mountain collapsed.
Tarsin village, on the slopes of Darfur’s volcanic highlands, shielded civilians from warring groups. But its isolation now complicates response ...
In May 2022, an Israeli sniper shot and killed Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. Last week, Israel targeted and killed five journalists in one attack. In between those dates, Israel became the largest killer of journalists in the world.
The world’s greatest killer of journalists
Israel is conducting a war against journalism. But journalists keep on documenting its crimes
All Protocol Observed. Welcome to Issue 212 of The Continent. We join more than 250 newsrooms in 70 countries blacking out front pages in solidarity with journalists in Gaza. Read Ansam al-Kitaa’s despatch from Gaza City: https://bit.ly/212_TC
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From the beginning of the new school year, pregnant girls will no longer be excluded from school in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. All schools except Catholic ones, if men of the cloth have their way.
What would Jesus do?
Catholic schools defy the Democratic Republic of the Congo's ruling on pregnant pupils’ rights to an education, citing ‘morality’ and ‘disc...
The Sahrawi people living in the Tindouf camps of southwest Algeria are facing their worst nutrition crisis since 2010. The Almasar Library Centre in Smara camp started a seed bank, giving families seedlings and training them to create home gardens.
Some food for thought, and little else
As Sahrawi hunger grows and their cause shrinks, a library tries to lend more than books.
Andabluesian: An elder descends through the distinctive alleys of the Medina of the northwestern Moroccan city of Chefchaouen, where the blue hues of its buildings are complemented by ornate mosaics. Photo: Abdel Majid Bziouat/AFP image
The ylang-ylang trade sustains about 10,000 producers in Comoros, which is significant in a country with a population of less than a million. But it also drives deforestation.
The fading forests of sensual ylang-ylang
The ylang-ylang trade sustains about 10,000 producers in Comoros, which is significant in a country with a population of less than a million. But i...