Author: BBC

Tens of thousands of dockworkers have gone on strike indefinitely at ports across much of the US, threatening significant trade and economic disruption ahead of the presidential election and the busy holiday shopping season. Members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) walked out on Tuesday at 14 major ports along the east and gulf coasts, […]

Eighteen people have been killed in a mass shooting in a remote South African town with a manhunt under way to find the perpetrators, police say. Two homesteads on the same street in the town of Lusikisiki, in the Eastern Cape, were targeted, police said, with 12 women and one man killed in one location, […]

It was January 1998 and Robert Bourgi was waiting to see the Gabonese president Omar Bongo, in an antechamber at his seaside palace in Libreville. He was there to collect funds for the approaching French presidential election on behalf of the centre-right Gaullist candidate Jacques Chirac, who was mayor of Paris at the time. Who […]

A zookeeper has been mauled to death by a lion in south-western Nigeria after he failed to secure the locks on its enclosure when he went to feed it, police say. The victim, a 35-year-old man, worked at the Presidential Library Wildlife Park, owned by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, in Abeokuta, capital of Ogun […]

For Daniel Guerra, an aspiring Brazilian sailor keen to travel the world, the job ad was a dream come true. A British yacht owner was seeking two deck-hands to help sail his boat from Brazil across the Atlantic, one of the great ocean journeys. There would be no salary, but all expenses paid – and, […]

An 88-year-old man who is the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been acquitted by a Japanese court, after it found that evidence used against him was fabricated. Iwao Hakamada, who has been on death row for more than half a century, was found guilty in 1968 of killing his boss, the man’s wife and […]

More than 430 people have died from cholera in the past month, Sudan’s health ministry says, as civil war continues to ravage the country. The number of infections has risen to about 14,000, it said in a statement. It said it was doing all it can to “combat cholera in the affected states, amid the […]

A soldier sacked by the Nigerian military after she accused some senior officers of rape and sexual harassment has released a video condemning her treatment. Ex-private Ruth Ogunleye made the allegations via her TikTok account in January, saying she had suffered immensely as a result of her ordeal at the hands of a general and […]

Eswatini’s main opposition leader has been poisoned as part of an assassination attempt and is being treated in hospital, his party says. Mlungisi Makhanya, 46, has been living in exile in neighbouring South Africa for the last two years, saying he fears for his life at home following a violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists in […]

Three men in Benin, including a former minister and the man in charge of President Patrice Talon’s security, have been arrested on suspicion of plotting a coup, the state prosecutor has said. Ex-sports minister Oswald Homeky was caught on Tuesday while handing over six bags of money to the head of the Republican Guard, Elonm […]