More than 821 million people suffered from hunger worldwide last year, the United Nations reported Monday — the third year in a row that the number has risen. After decades of decline, malnutrition began to increase in 2015, mainly because of climate change and war. ...
In praise of demographic decline
Our expanding ability to automate human work across all sectors makes an ever-growing workforce increasingly irrelevant to improvements in human welfare. That's good news for most of the world, but not for Africa.
'Oldest remains' outside Africa reset human migration clock 150,000 years earlier
A 210,000-year-old skull has been identified as the earliest modern human remains found outside Africa, putting the clock back on mankind's arrival in Europe by more than 150,000 years, researchers said Wednesday. In a startling discovery that changes our understanding of how modern man populated ...
Forty-four migrants, including women and children, plucked from their stricken vessel in the Mediterranean arrived in Malta Tuesday after charity boat Alan Kurdi handed the shipwreck victims over to the Maltese coast guard on the high-seas. Malta agreed to take in those rescued by the ...
African leaders launch free trade zone in what could be economic game changer
African leaders met Sunday to launch a continental free-trade zone that if successful would unite 1.3 billion people, create a $3.4 trillion economic bloc and usher in a new era of development. After four years of talks, an agreement to form a 55-nation trade bloc ...
Ministers from across Africa began work Thursday ahead of a weekend summit to formally launch a free-trade agreement hailed by the continent's 55-nation bloc as "historic." Opening the meeting in the Niger capital Niamey, AU Commission chief Moussa Faki Mahamat lauded the newly minted African ...
Airstrike kills 44 migrants in detention center near Tripoli, prompting UNSC emergency session
An airstrike hit a detention center for migrants near the Libyan capital of Tripoli early Wednesday, killing at least 44 people and wounding dozens of others in an attack that the U.N. human rights chief said could amount to a war crime. The Tripoli-based government ...
Driver with Ebola response team severely injured by Congo mob
A driver working with an Ebola response team is in critical condition after angry crowds hurled rocks at him and set his vehicle on fire. Monday's attack in Beni is the latest against health workers trying to combat the virus that has killed more than ...
20 missing from migrant boat after ferry rescues 27 off Spanish coast
Spanish rescue services are searching for at least 20 people missing from a migrant boat found adrift in the Mediterranean after a passenger ferry rescued 27 people still aboard on Wednesday. The number of migrants arriving in Europe by sea, already declining steadily since 2015, ...
Cocoa prices soar as Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana threaten supply cut
Cocoa prices rose sharply on Wednesday after key producers Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana threatened to stop selling their production to buyers unwilling to meet a minimum price. The threat pushed the September forward contract for the commodity, listed in New York, to $2,540 a ton, ...
1 in 4 Ebola cases go undetected or are caught too late in Congo: WHO
Roughly a quarter of Ebola infections in eastern Congo are estimated to be going undetected or found too late, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert said on Thursday. Some 2,025 cases and 1,357 deaths have been recorded since the epidemic began in August in the ...
Two million Somalis could die of starvation amid drought, U.N. warns
A United Nations emergency relief coordinator says more than 2 million men, women and children could die of starvation in Somalia by summer's end if international aid is not sent quickly to the drought-stricken African country. U.N. Undersecretary-General Mark Lowcock says about $700 million is ...
