Africa | featured news

Egypt prepared to announce on Tuesday the result of a vote on a new constitution that Islamist President Mohamed Mursi hails as a step toward stability in a country beset by political and economic crisis.

Former South African President Nelson Mandela continues to respond to treatment more than two weeks after being taken to hospital in Pretoria and will remain there for Christmas Day, the presidency said on Monday.

A U.S. Army brigade will begin sending small teams into as many as 35 African nations early next year, part of an intensifying Pentagon effort to train countries to battle extremists and give the U.S. a ready and trained force to dispatch to Africa if crises requiring the U.S. military emerge.

President Mohamed Morsi apparently secured a victory at the polls Saturday for a new Egyptian constitution, locking the country into a bitter contest between his ascendant Islamist camp and his secular opponents.

Smoking rates are declining or flat in much of the world. But they're rising in Africa, where even a child can afford the cost of a single cigarette... On the sunny side of a dusty township street, next to the metal gates of a school, Lucas Moyana's little shop is just a board propped on four plastic crates like a child's lemonade stand.

Egypt's liberal and secular opposition has urged its supporters to vote down a divisive constitution put forward by Islamists, and set conditions for taking part in the referendum that will be hard for organizers to meet.

Former South African President Nelson Mandela is continuing to recover from a lung infection that has put the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader in hospital for the last five days, the government said on Wednesday.

In a development that could further destabilize Mali, Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra resigned on Tuesday, hours after he was arrested by soldiers on his way out of the country.

The freshly scrawled graffiti depicting Mohammed Morsi as a pharaonic Saddam Hussein tells the tale of high hopes dashed with record speed: Barely six months after becoming Egypt's first democratically elected president, the Islamist is widely accused of abandoning pledges of inclusive government for doctrinaire and authoritarian ways....

Egypt's Islamist president has asked the army to help secure a constitutional referendum he is determined to push through despite the risk of more deadly violence between his supporters and opponents accusing him of a power grab.