Cairo, Egypt | AFP | Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has been re-elected for a second term with about 92 percent of the vote, preliminary results showed on Thursday, with just over 40 percent of voters casting ballots. Twenty-five million of the 60 million registered voters, or some 41.5 percent, …

Paris, France | AFP | This summer’s World Cup will feature no English referees for the first time in post-war history, nor assistants, after FIFA confirmed its official list of 99 match officials for Russia 2018 on Thursday. England whistler Mark Clattenburg, who retired from Premier League duty last summer, …

Freetown, Sierra Leone | AFP | Veteran politician Samura Kamara, seen as a shrewd political operator, hopes to take up the mantle of outgoing president Ernest Bai Koroma as his hand-picked successor. An economist by training, the 53-year-old Kamara was foreign minister until last year when he stepped down to pursue …

Freetown, Sierra Leone | AFP | The West African nation of Sierra Leone, among the world’s poorest countries despite significant mineral wealth, has been scarred by a brutal civil war and the deadly Ebola virus. Here is some background as Freetown prepares to hold a delayed presidential runoff on Saturday to …

Hong Kong, China | AFP | Touted as an engineering wonder, the world’s longest sea bridge, which connects Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China, includes a snaking road crossing and an underwater tunnel and reportedly uses enough steel to build 60 Eiffel Towers. Nine years after construction began on the 55-kilometre …

How messages on burning ivory from poached elephants might be missed among those for whom it is intended COMMENT | MATTHEW H. HOLDEN & OTHERS |  The tusks of more than ten thousand elephants went up in flames in Kenya on April 30, 2016 – the world’s largest ever ivory …

London, United Kingdom | AFP | There had never been much doubt that in London’s testosterone-fuelled financial sector female workers’ salaries lagged far behind those of their mostly male colleagues. Now this has been confirmed in black and white after the British government forced UK-based banks to publish their own so-called …

Africa is the world’s last frontier market, and Western businesses need to take advantage of its potential COMMENT | LANDRY SIGNE | Since 2000, at least half of the world’s fastest-growing economies have been in Africa. And by 2030, Africa will be home to 1.7 billion people, whose combined consumer and business …

Monrovia, Liberia | AFP | As UN peacekeepers leave Liberia after 14 years, headway in reforming the security forces is being undermined by lack of progress in tackling the country’s traumatic legacy of war crimes, officials say. Liberia’s 1989-2003 conflict killed around a quarter of a million people, while government forces …

Serowe, Botswana | AFP | President Ian Khama of Botswana this week wrapped up a national “farewell tour” before he stands down on Saturday in a power transfer designed to stress his statesmanship and the country’s stability. Khama has visited all of Botswana’s 57 constituencies since December, bidding a long goodbye …