Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf may be barred from politics for her sketchy past: consider this a cautionary tale to those calling Liberia “Black America’s Israel”.

Aspiring President for Life of Niger Tandja Mamadou is coming under increasingly criticism from the outside.  But it’s Nigeriens who will doom his mission to create a new one man government.

Foreign governments are beginning to put public pressure of Tandja Mamadou, following his seizure of the power last Friday.  Did anyone mention oil?

For Google Calendar: Fetes Nigeriennes through 2011.

I’ve been waiting for the United States and Canadian governments to weigh in on the Nigerien political crisis.  Today France released a less than pointed statement, accusing Nigerien government policies of “being outside the constitution”, while the EU was a little firmer, mentioning the cash it provides Niamey.  Although members have expressed concern over Tandja’s [...]

While reporters continue to carefully attribute the title “Coup d’Etat” to leaders of Niger’s opposition, events of the last 24 hours make it hard to spin the current situation in any other way.

This was the weekend for Coups: was the death of Michael Jackson assumed to distract us all?  Regardless, a couple of Nigeriens have pointed out the uncanny similarities between the situation of President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya and President of Niger Mamadou Tandja. Despite this, both crises are intimately linked to the history of these [...]

In a radio speech to the nation on Friday night (the sabbath), President Tandja announced he was dissolving the government and would rule by decree.

Just when you’d like to put it to bed, the constitutional crisis in Niger continues, weaving like a distracted taxi driver: from sigh to scream and back again. I’ll focus a bit on three events of importance.  After Tandja sent out a letter lecturing the Constiutional Court on their decision to stop his referendum, his [...]

One of the three best nights for US football just happened in beautiful Bloemfontein, the States reaching the finals of the Confederation Cup by convincingly shutting down Spain, a side unbeaten since 2006, European champions, and argubly the best team in the world right now.  The BBC announcers could confidently predict “Spain will have 70% possession tonight, [...]

I recently saw an appeal from US high school students, raising funds for anti-malarial bed nets to be delivered to the DRC. “When people find out they can donate $10 to save a life,”

Decent caturdays are rarer and rarer now that Icanhascheezburger has, in true capitalist fashion, cornered the market and vanillanized the “genre”. Here are a couple of options: http://www.acc.umu.se/~zqad/cats/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/harbl/interesting/ Related articles by Zemanta A Day Without Cats … PROTEST!!!! (buzzfeed.com)

It seems every time the Nigerien political crisis nears some resolution, it swerves wildly in the other direction. The inevitable end seems to be preordained against President Tandja, barring a true coup d’etat.  But his cadre of supporters, comfortable in their offices can’t face it, and are thrashing around looking for a way to square [...]

Pictures coming out via Twitter and phones are being collected a number of places, including here. A statement by the Worker-communist Party of Iran (WPI): “Long live revolution against the Islamic Republic of Iran!” Member and blogger Saeed Valadbaygi’s Revolutionary Road Blog is at http://shooresh1917.blogspot.com/. The image to the left is students storming a government [...]

This one image sums up the — still — late Omar Bongo Ondimba better than any words could. If you want to see where the postcolonials learned their tricks, look to their models. Omar Bongo (née Albert-Bernard Bongo) was French through and through, like Mitterrand with a sense of style, or like a shorter Félix [...]

Julien Coupet, French situationalist shopkeeper, accused ringleader of “anarcho-autonomous” train saboteurs, and really insufferable pontificator, was finally released yesterday from a Paris jail, on remand.

That the western press is unanimous in it’s explanation of the crash and burn which is 2000′s Zimbabwe should give you pause. Mahmood Mamdani, Africanist and Anthropologist at Columbia, and author of 1996′s Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (which I recommend), thinks we don’t know enough to explain Zimbabwe [...]

Neal Ascherson (of whom I’m unexplainably always somewhat wary) has a thoughtful — and thought provoking for those of us trapped in the US rah-rah news bubble — essay on Abkhazia in the London Review of Books. In the capitol of what the we reflexively (even on the left) call a “Georgian breakaway region” during [...]