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Several Malian soldiers were killed in the jihadist ambush on Thursday of an army convoy heading for Niger, in the Ménaka region (northeast), a military official and a local elected official said on Friday..."We can speak of about twenty people if we count the dead, wounded and missing Malian soldiers" , said the local elected official, stressing that the balance sheet is "not yet very clear".Both spoke on condition of anonymity in the absence of official communication from the authorities.The elected official reported that the Malian army and paramilitaries from the Russian security group Wagner were deployed in the area....

See video at link. Mauritania is the latest country in the Sahara where gold has been found. Thousands are hoping to strike it rich – but digging for gold is dangerous and impacts upon human health and the environment. This is because to find gold, you need to dig extremely deep holes in the ground; and to extract the precious metal, you need toxic mercury. But that doesn’t put the gold diggers off at all. They compete for the best mining sites and within a short space of time, an entire settlement has sprung up on the desert sands. Michele...

Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi called for allowing Christians and Jews to perform pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam's holiest place. Speaking following prayers with the presidents of Mali, Sierra Leone, Niger, Mauritania and Senegal on the occasion of the Prophet Mohammed's birthday in Timbuktu, Mali, late on Monday, Qadhafi said "Mecca should be a meeting point to all people except heretics and impure". He said that Christians and Jews are not heretics or impure and "believe in God" and should be allowed to go to pilgrimage in Mecca. Qadhafi challenged Muslim religious leaders to allow US President George W. Bush to enter...

UN says tribal clashes in Sudan’s Darfur kill 40 over 3 daysBy Samy Magdy | APApril 5, 2021 at 3:42 p.m. EDTCAIRO — Tribal clashes that erupted over the weekend between Arabs and non-Arabs in Sudan’s western Darfur region have killed at least 40 people and wounded around 60 others, the U.N. said Monday.The violence was between the Arab Rizeigat and the Masalit tribes in Genena, the provincial capital of West Darfur province. It happened after unknown armed men on Saturday shot dead two people from the Masalit, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs agency.https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/medical-group-says-tribal-clashes-in-sudans-darfur-kill-18/2021/04/05/632a566c-9604-11eb-8f0a-3384cf4fb399_story.htmlClashes between Arabs, non-Arabs in Sudan...

Sudan is to normalise relations with Israel, US President Donald Trump says - the latest in a series of Arab League countries to do so. There had been growing speculation Sudan would announce ties in return for being removed from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism. Sudan had been a foe of Israel since the latter's founding in 1948. It comes weeks after similar moves by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain. The two Gulf states became the first in the Middle East to recognise Israel in 26 years. Jordan signed a peace deal with Israel in...

...In 2014, Mauritania passed a law criminalizing slavery but according to The Global Slavery Index, the country still has 90 000 slaves, which represents more than 2 percent of the population of this Islamic republic in West Africa. Those enslaved are darker-skinned Haratin, while their owners are lighter-skinned Moors...

For years, a handful of my colleagues and I have worked to increase awareness of black (abeed) slavery in Muslim countries. The Democrat media complex couldn’t care less. Neither do the notoriously hard-left Black leaders such as Sharpton, Farrakhan, etc. ... Black slavery is rampant in these Muslim-dominated African countries, but no one is talking about it. ... Today, an estimated 529,000 to 869,000 black men, women and children are still slaves. They are bought, owned, sold, and traded by Arab and Muslim masters in five African countries. This statistic estimates those enslaved in Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, and Sudan. It...

The United Nations Human Rights Council has been a bad joke for a long time, with many of the world’s worst human rights abusers honored with membership. But tomorrow we will see the reductio ad absurdum, as Mauritania is voted onto the Human Rights Council. While the Mauritanian government officially denies that slavery is ongoing in the country, Mauritanian watchdog groups allege that one out of every two members of the country’s Haratine ethnic minority group are enslaved, and that as many as 20% of the population is enslaved. The exact number of slaves within the country is unclear, and...

The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed a law last year declaring Israel “the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination.” One might suppose that this “Basic Law” (akin to a constitutional amendment) would be as contentious as the Vatican proclaiming itself Catholic. To the contrary. Although the “nation-state law” changed no policies and affirmed a relationship between Jews and Israel that had been manifest since the country’s founding in 1948, the legislation was exceptionally controversial. One of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main political opponents, opposition leader Tzipi Livni, charged...

There are few people who announce their candidacy for their country’s presidency only days after being released from prison. But anti-slavery activist and slave descendant Biram Dah Abeid is an exceptional man facing exceptional circumstances. “I am from the servile community that makes up 50 per cent of the population (of Mauritania),” said Dah Obeid, a lawyer. “Twenty percent of the fifty percent have been born as property of other men. We were inherited by other people.” Abeid, a prominent and fearless anti-slavery activist who has been jailed and tortured numerous times in his struggle to abolish slavery in the...

In a Nov. 25, 2017 article marking the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, published in the London-based daily Al-Hayat, Lebanese journalist Karam Al-Hilu compared the meager accomplishments of the Arab world in the past century with those of the rest of the countries, particularly Israel. He noted that Israel’s supremacy in the areas of science, economy, society and politics is the source of its strength, as well as the source of Arab failure in confronting it. The following are excerpts from his article:[1] “A century after the Balfour Declaration . . . the Arabs have not managed to build...

Late last night, the Eiffel Tower was evacuated after a knife-wielding Mauritanian-born man shouted “Allahu Akbar” (an Arabic term meaning “Allah is greater [than your God or government]”) before trying to force his way past security. The man, presumably Muslim given what he chose to scream and given the fact that Mauritania is 100% Muslim, was arrested. No one was hurt in the incident. Police arrested the would-be-intruder at around 11.30pm, just half an hour before the tower stops admitting visitors.

A mainly desert territory in north-west Africa, Western Sahara is the subject of a decades-long dispute between Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario Front. The territory is phosphate-rich and believed to have offshore oil deposits. Most of it has been under Moroccan control since 1976. Western Sahara fell under Spanish rule in 1884, becoming a Spanish province in 1934. Nationalism emerged in the 1960s, as nomadic Saharans, or Saharawis, settled in the region. Polisario was set up on 10 May 1973 and established itself as the sole representative of the Saharan people. Some 100,000 refugees still live in Polisario's camps in...

<p>BUFFALO, N.Y. >> A Jordanian-born Palestinian who was imprisoned in the United States for putting a bomb on a Hawaii-bound flight in 1982 has been relocated to the West African country of Mauritania.</p> <p>Mohammed Rashed’s attorney said Monday that Rashed, who had been held in federal detention outside Buffalo, was removed from the United States earlier this month.</p>

Green cards, or Lawful Permanent Residency, puts immigrants on the path to citizenship and allows for lifetime residency, federal benefits, and work authorization. Included in the totals are refugees, who are required to apply for a green card after one year of residency in the U.S. Unlike other types of immigrants, refugees are immediately eligible for welfare benefits including Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and Medicaid Green Card Totals, FY09-FY14: Pakistan (102K), Iraq (102K), Bangladesh (90K), Iran (85K), Egypt (56K), Somalia (37K), Uzbekistan (30K), Turkey (26K), Morocco (25K), Jordan (25K), Albania (24K), Afghanistan (21K), Lebanon (20K), Yemen...

Today's two images are inspired by the "learn something new every day" phenomenon. In this case, the something that was learned was about the Northwest Angle in Minnesota, pictured here (click to go to article, with larger image link). I wanted to find other images of the Northwest Angle, but couldn't find much. However, I did find the interesting site below, with a virtual tour and smallish excerpts from a Landsat poster of Lake of the Woods. The image below was interesting, especially the circularity of the features in the lower part of the image. A Virtual Tour of Lake...

In Mauritania, a vast, desert country straddling sub-Saharan Africa and the continent’s Arab north, anywhere from 4 to 20 percent of the population are slaves. There are few statistics, so the exact figures are unclear, but even the lowest estimate makes Mauritania the country with the highest percentage of slaves in the world. While slaves here aren’t physically chained, many remain imprisoned by deep psychological bonds, as well as crippling poverty. Some consider it a sacred duty to serve their masters, tending to the livestock or doing the housework with no pay. Others, like Essatim, grow up knowing nothing else....

'The desert city of Chinguetti, sinking ever-deeper under the sands of the Sahara, is the last place in the world you would expect to find a library. Yet this crumbling outpost in the west-African country of Mauritania is home to around 6,000 rare books and manuscripts, including some of the oldest Koranic texts in existence which date back to the 9th Century. It was once the prosperous and bustling trade centre of several 'trans-Sahara' trade routes. Traders from all over Europe, north-Africa and the Levant would stop in Chinguetti before moving on to sub-Saharan Africa. There, they would rub shoulders...

A pair of RAF Lakenheath based USAF F-15E Strike Eagles that were bristling with live bombs and air-to-air missiles, along five KC-135R tankers, flew on a secretive and grueling 12 hour mission over the Southern Mediterranean on Monday, May 25th, Memorial Day. Multiple radio interceptors and plane spotters state that four F-15E’s, callsigns ABLE 01 through 04, took off from their home base at RAF Lakenheath laden with yellow banded (live) AIM-9M sidewinders, AIM-120 AMRAAMS and no less than seven 500lb Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs). These aircraft were accompanied by five KC-135Rs tankers, callsign QUID 91 through 95, that...

Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Moscow on Monday where the issue of Middle East peace talks will be raised, Russian authorities announced Thursday. “The two leaders will hold talks concerning key aspects of Russian-Palestinian relations and their future, with particular attention on the trade, economy and humanitarian sectors,” the Kremlin said in a statement according to AFP. There will also be “an exchange of ideas on the process of Israeli-Palestinian talks and other problematic regional situations,” the statement continued, adding that North Africa would also be on the agenda. …