Let’s start with Chad. The good news is that the International Crisis Group is now hopeful that easing of tensions with Sudan and the upcoming November elections offer hope for a return to peace. The bad news is that a country already plagued by widespread malnutrition is now under water. Neighboring Niger is similarly suffering from flooding, on top of a food crisis brought on by previous drought.
Having done flood and famine, I now turn to war, and point you to an article in the Ugandan paper The Monitor, where a spokesperson for AMISOM, the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia, writes about the conflict there.
But perhaps you want cheerier African news, and here I’m happy to oblige. Nigeria is Africa’s largest online audience, and the tenth largest in the world.
And a TechCrunch writer wonders whether tiny Somaliland may become the world’s first cashless society.
And then there’s the neither disastrous nor particularly cheerful African news department:
Egyptians are the fattest Africans.
In South Africa, the president’s nephew has sold his disputed rights to oilfields in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Finally, outside Africa, there’s The Optimistic Thought Experiment (an article on globalization and bubbles) and the top 10 reasons why wars last too long.
Nice piece by Walt. Getting rid of Rumsfeld was one of Bush’s best foreign policy moves.
Steve