Surrounded by thousands of live scorpions in a laboratory deep in Egypt’s Western Desert, Ahmed Abu al-Seoud carefully handles one of the curved-tailed arachnids before extracting a drop of its venom. A mechanical engineer who worked in the oil sector for almost two decades, Abu al-Seoud decided in 2018 to strike a different path — […]

Chad’s Supreme Court said Wednesday that nine candidates including incumbent President Idriss Deby Itno had been approved to run in the country’s April 11 presidential election. The court rejected seven contenders but upheld 10 candidacies in the vote pitting a fractured opposition against Deby, who has ruled Chad with an iron fist since a 1990 […]

At least 10 rockets slammed into a military base in western Iraq hosting US-led coalition troops on Wednesday, security sources said, leaving one civilian contractor dead. The attack on the sprawling Ain al-Assad base in Iraq’s western desert comes after several weeks of escalating US-Iran tensions on Iraqi soil — and just two days before […]

A Hong Kong teenager became the youngest person so far to plead guilty to rioting during 2019’s huge pro-democracy protests on Wednesday, as he admitted throwing a petrol bomb at police when aged just 14. The judge accepted advice from the city’s correctional services and sent the 16-year-old boy to a detention centre, an alternative […]

Four people including a pregnant woman were killed in northern Burkina Faso on Tuesday when the ambulance they were in was blown up by an improvised bomb, sources told AFP. The ambulance driver, the pregnant woman and two people accompanying her were killed in the explosion in Gaskinde, close to the border with Mali in […]