Word: sahara
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...thousand miles from anywhere, among the empty flatlands and bare rock hills that mark the Sahara's southern edge, Juba is a place of mud huts and plastic-bag roofs where buzzards lift lazily on the afternoon heat and children wash in the muddy waters of the White Nile. It has no landline telephones, no public transport, no power grid, no industry, no agriculture and precious few buildings: hotels, aid compounds and even some government ministries are built from prefab cabins and shipping containers. There are a few businesses, a few score police, a handful of schools, one run-down...
Easily the most remarkable element of the show is the technical construction of its costumes and props. Actors dressed as blades of grass sport spindly wicker frames around their waists that resemble a more fluid version of hoop skirts, swaying and swirling like reeds in a gentle Sahara breeze. The coarse spines of hair snaking along the hunched backs of the hyenas create spooky, spiky silhouettes...
...world's poorest regions, West Africa already had its work cut out for it in trying to develop economically, fight the advance of the Sahara and establish rules of law. Now the world's largest terrorist group and biggest drug barons are in the mix - as in Afghanistan, only much larger. Niger adds an extra dimension to this worrying picture: it is home to Africa's largest deposits of uranium, needed to build nuclear power stations and weapons. And lawlessness is endemic. While I was reporting in Niamey last April, my car was attacked twice by mobs wielding steel poles...
...Second, West Africa has become a key route for the trafficking of South American cocaine to Europe. Guinea-Bissau is now awash with the stuff, which is off-loaded along its coast and then transported by air, sea or land to Europe. The overland route across the Sahara is facilitated by Niger's Tuareg tribe, which has been staging a low-level rebellion in the northern part of the country since 2007. "In some cases, the value of the drugs being trafficked is greater than the country's national income," Antonio Maria Costa, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs...
...attempting to recreate the quagga, an extinct subspecies of the zebra, and in the U.S., breeders are trying to bring back a giant Galápagos tortoise that was killed off in the 1800s - a process that could take close to a century. (See "Dinosaur-Era Crocodiles Found in Sahara...