AQIM Maritime Terror Plot Disrupted: Algerian officials recently detained three terrorists from al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb plotting a COLE-like attack against U.S. or European ships in the Med. Had this attack been executed, it would have represented a significant escalation in AQIM’s tactics, which thus far have been mostly focused on kidnapping Westerners for ransom and smaller local ...

Chief says winning a regulatory green light in Brussels, China and South Africa will be time consuming but no more than a ‘legal formality’

British Prime Minister David Cameron called the drive to finish the Doha round of world trade talks a failure and insisted the European Union should instead negotiate free trade deals with the United States and Africa.  More »

Lisette Talate died the other day.  I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people's resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera pa...

Hillary Clinton's recent visit to West Africa highlights that despite the EU's higher spending on development aid, it is unable to sell itself as a champion of human rights or make its voice heard internationally, say Christina Barrios and Paul Nolan of the Madrid-based FRIDE think tank. More »

In 2010 the Dutch deployed a submarine to the Horn Of Africa after a request from NATO. And while most newspapers focused on the lack of Dutch surface vessels around the Horn of Africa, after HNLMS Zuiderkruis left for retirement (the next surface vessel to go is HNLMS Van Amstel),  there is a Dutch vessel in the area: HNLMS Dolfijn, join operation Ocean Shield. In 2010 the Dutch sub was 4 mo...

Tony Cunningham MP, Labour's Shadow International Development Minister, responding to the publication of the ‘A Dangerous Delay’ report by Save the Children and Oxfam, said:

Thousands of lives and millions of pounds were lost needlessly because of a "dangerous delay" in the response to the East Africa famine, a report has found.

Army foils coup attempt on tiny island of Guinea-Bissau Err, Guinea-Bissau ain’t an island folks. Given recent history a failed coup there is hardly news (umm, well, maybe it’s the failure that makes it so?) but to call it an island is pure ignorance. Sure, it has islands as part of it, true, but then

To understand the momentousness of 2011, it's worth remembering that this time last year no one knew that, within weeks, revolution would sweep across North Africa, including the most populous and important country in the Arab world. True, the uprising had already started in Tunisia. But it was impossible to predict that by the end of the year we would have seen the ignominious flight of one ...