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More than 1,000 U.S. service personnel are in Niger, which until Wednesday's coup by mutinous soldiers had avoided the military takeovers that destabilized West African neighbors in recent years. The country had been seen as the last major partner standing against extremism in a Francophone region where anti-French sentiment had opened the way for the Russian private military group Wagner. Various Islamic extremist groups are active around Niger, which isn't to be confused with Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. Niger lies just to the...
BULLA HAGAR, Kenya (AP) — The United States is stepping up to buy about 150,000 metric tons of grain from Ukraine in the next few weeks for an upcoming shipment of food aid from ports no longer blockaded by war, the World Food Program chief has told The Associated Press. The final destinations for the grain are not confirmed and discussions continue, David Beasley said. But the planned shipment, one of several the U.N. agency that fights hunger is pursuing, is more than six times the amount of grain that the first WFP-arranged ship from U...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The latest in a litany of horrors in Ukraine came this week as Russian firepower rained down on civilians in a busy shopping mall far from the front lines of a war in its fifth month. The timing was not likely a coincidence. While much of the attritional war in Ukraine's east is hidden from sight, the brutality of Russian missile strikes on a mall in the central city of Kremenchuk and on residential buildings in the capital, Kyiv, unfolded in full view of the world and especially of Western leaders gathered for a trio of su...
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces Tuesday began storming the steel mill containing the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol, Ukrainian defenders said, just as scores of civilians evacuated from the bombed-out plant over the weekend reached relative safety and recounted days and nights filled with dread from constant shelling. Osnat Lubrani, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, said that thanks to the evacuation effort, "101 women, men, children and older persons could finally leave the bunkers below the Azovstal s...
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Complaining that the West is "stuffing Ukraine with weapons," Russia is bombarding railroad stations and other targets in an attempt to cut off weapons supplies. Ukrainian's foreign minister has accused Russia of using "missile terrorism tactics" to spread fear. Air raid sirens sounded in cities across the country Wednesday night. Attacks were reported near Kyiv, the capital, and in Dnipro, where a rail facility was hit. Heavy fighting continued at a steel mill in Mariupol, the last stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in t...
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — Some women and children have been evacuated from a steel plant that is the last defensive stronghold in the bombed-out ruins of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, while U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Ukraine's president in the country's capital in a show of American support. Russia's offensive in coastal southern Ukraine and the country's eastern industrial heartland has Ukrainian forces fighting village by village and more civilians fleeing airstrikes and artillery shelling as the war reaches their doorsteps....
CHERNOBYL, Ukraine (AP) — When Russian forces invaded and occupied the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, they dug trenches in one of the world's most radioactive places. Experts fear that they were, in effect, digging their own graves. Thousands of tanks and troops rumbled into the Chernobyl exclusion zone at the start of the war, churning up soil contaminated by the world's worst nuclear disaster. As the anniversary of the April 26, 1986, accident approaches and Russia's war continues, it's clear that Ukrainian authorities were n...
BUCHA, Ukraine (AP) — The coffin was made from pieces of a closet. In a darkened basement under a building shaking from the bombardment of war, there were few other options. Six-year-old Vlad watched as his mother was carried out of the shelter last month and to the yard of a nearby home. The burial was hurried and devastating. Now Russian forces have withdrawn from Bucha after a monthlong occupation, and Vlad's father, Ivan Drahun, dropped to his knees at the foot of the grave. He reached out and touched the dirt near his wife Maryna's f...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Civilian evacuations are moving forward in patches of battle-scarred eastern Ukraine a day after a missile strike killed at least 52 people at a train station where thousands were waiting to leave before an expected Russian onslaught. In the wake of the attack in Kramatorsk, several European leaders made efforts to show solidarity with Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted the support during an interview Saturday with The Associated Press, but said "Of course it's not enough" to change the change the c...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A missile hit a train station in eastern Ukraine where thousands had gathered Friday, killing at least 52 and wounding dozens more in an attack on a crowd of mostly women and children trying to flee a new, looming Russian offensive, Ukrainian authorities said. The attack, denounced by some as yet another war crime in the 6-week-old conflict, came as workers unearthed bodies from a mass grave in Bucha, a town near Ukraine's capital where dozens of killings have been documented after a Russian pullout. Photos from the s...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian forces fought off continuing Russian efforts to occupy Mariupol and claimed to have retaken a strategic suburb of Kyiv on Tuesday, mounting a defense so dogged that it is stoking fears Russia's Vladimir Putin will escalate the war to new heights. "Putin's back is against the wall," said U.S. President Joe Biden, who is heading to Europe this week to meet with allies. "And the more his back is against the wall, the greater the severity of the tactics he may employ." Biden reiterated accusations that Putin is consid...
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — NATO estimated on Wednesday that 7,000 to 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in four weeks of war in Ukraine, where fierce resistance from the country's defenders has denied Moscow the lightning victory it sought. By way of comparison, Russia lost about 15,000 troops over 10 years in Afghanistan. A senior NATO military official said the alliance's estimate was based on information from Ukrainian authorities, what Russia has released — intentionally or not — and intelligence gathered from open sources. The official spo...
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian forces pushed deeper into Ukraine's besieged and battered port city of Mariupol on Saturday, where heavy fighting shut down a major steel plant and local authorities pleaded for more Western help. The fall of Mariupol, the scene of some of the war's worst suffering, would mark a major battlefield advance for the Russians, who are largely bogged down outside major cities more than three weeks into the biggest land invasion in Europe since World War II. "Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it...
Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared at a huge flag-waving rally at a packed Moscow stadium Friday and lavished praise on his troops fighting in Ukraine, three weeks into the invasion that has led to heavier-than-expected Russian losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home. Meanwhile, the leader of Russia's delegation in diplomatic talks with Ukraine said the sides have narrowed their differences. The Ukrainian side said its position remained unchanged. The invasion has touched off a burst of antiwar protests...
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Several hundred people line up every morning, starting before dawn, on a grassy area outside Nairobi's largest hospital hoping to get the COVID-19 vaccine. Sometimes the line moves smoothly, while on other days, the staff tells them there's nothing available, and they should come back tomorrow. Halfway around the world, at a church in Atlanta, two workers with plenty of vaccine doses waited hours Wednesday for anyone to show up, whiling away the time by listening to music from a laptop. Over a six-hour period, only one p...
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Ethiopia's government on Tuesday summoned all capable citizens to war, urging them to join the country's military to stop resurgent forces from the embattled Tigray region "once and for all." The call to arms is an ominous sign that all of Ethiopia's 110 million people are being drawn into a conflict that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, once declared would be over within weeks. The deadly fighting has now spread beyond Tigray into neighboring regions, and fracturing in Africa's second most p...
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The fighters now retaking parts of Ethiopia's Tigray region will pursue soldiers from neighboring Eritrea back into their country and chase Ethiopian forces to Addis Ababa "if that's what it takes" to weaken their military powers, their spokesman said Tuesday, as a conflict that has killed thousands of civilians looked certain to continue. In an interview with The Associated Press, Getachew Reda said that "we'll stop at nothing to liberate every square inch" of the Tigray region of 6 million people, nearly eight months aft...
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — International aid groups said Friday that at least four staff members have been killed in the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region, while Ethiopia and a frustrated United Nations aired differing views on a growing humanitarian crisis as food and other supplies run out for millions of people. The Danish Refugee Council said its three staffers killed last month had worked as guards at a project site. "Sadly, due to the lack of communications and ongoing insecurity in the region, it has not yet been possible to reach their f...
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The African continent has surpassed 2 million confirmed cases as the top public health official warned Thursday that "we are inevitably edging toward a second wave" of infections. The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the 54-nation continent had crossed the milestone. Africa has seen more than 48,000 deaths from COVID-19. Its infections and deaths make up less than 4% of the global total. The African continent of 1.3 billion people is being warned against "prevention fatigue" as countries loosen p...
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has fractured global alliances and go-it-alone has turned ugly, some world leaders say Friday's awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the U.N. World Food Program was a commitment to the belief that only a concerted effort can save humanity from further disaster. "This not only recognizes your tireless work for food security on our planet, but also reminds the key importance of multilateralism that delivers results," European Council President Charles Michel said in a congratulatory m...
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A new snapshot of the frantic global response to the coronavirus pandemic shows some of the world's largest government donors of humanitarian aid are buckling under the strain: Funding commitments, for the virus and otherwise, have dropped by a third from the same period last year. The analysis by the U.K.-based Development Initiatives, obtained in advance by The Associated Press, offers a rare real-time look at the notoriously difficult to track world of aid. At a time when billions of people are struggling with the pandemi...
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Protesters against Africa's first COVID-19 vaccine trial burned their face masks Wednesday as experts note a worrying level of resistance and misinformation around testing on the continent. Anti-vaccine sentiment in Africa is "the worst I've ever seen," the CEO of the GAVI vaccine alliance, Seth Berkley, told an African Union vaccine conference last week. "In general, people in Africa know the diseases and want to protect each other," he said. "In this case, the rumor mill has been dramatic." The trial that began last w...
KATITIKA, Kenya (AP) — The hum of millions of locusts on the move is broken by the screams of farmers and the clanging of pots and pans. But their noise-making does little to stop the voracious insects from feasting on their crops in this rural community. The worst outbreak of desert locusts in Kenya in 70 years has seen hundreds of millions of the bugs swarm into the East African nation from Somalia and Ethiopia. Those two countries have not had an infestation like this in a quarter-century, destroying farmland and threatening an already vulne...
TOMALI, Malawi (AP) — A pinch in the leg, a squeal and a trickle of tears. One baby after another in Malawi is getting the first and only vaccine against malaria, one of history's deadliest and most stubborn of diseases. The southern African nation is rolling out the shots in an unusual pilot program along with Kenya and Ghana. Unlike established vaccines that offer near-complete protection, this new one is only about 40% effective. But experts say it's worth a try as progress against malaria stalls: Resistance to treatment is growing and t...
JEBUL SIRAJ, Afghanistan (AP) — The children will inherit any peace that comes to Afghanistan, if only they can live to see it. Whimpering and badly malnourished, they are among the most vulnerable in a country that remains one of the poorest in the world. Now an expected United States-Taliban agreement to end nearly 18 years of fighting raises questions about whether the foreign aid largely propping up the country will drop as troops withdraw. Much depends on the Taliban, who have indicated they want that aid to continue even as they call f...
