Features

ALGIERS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Arab Spring-style protests have rocked Europe’s third-biggest natural gas supplier. Thousands of young Algerians have taken to the streets, fed up with an octogenarian president who’s been in power for 20 years and a weak economy that doesn’t generate enough jobs. While the rare public display of dissatisfaction has sparked a political crisis in the authoritarian state, the country’s energy exports haven’t been disrupted. What’s going on in Algeria?…

ALGIERS (Capital Markets in Africa) – When the Arab Spring rolled across North Africa in 2011, it seemed almost to skip over Algeria. Although the country was ripe for revolution — like its neighbors, it had the combustible combination of chronic youth unemployment and corrupt, repressive leadership — the protests there were almost desultory in comparison with demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt. As a result, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika did not suffer the fate of his…

TRIPOLI (Capital Markets in Africa) – Libya needs more help from the United States to overcome its political divisions, the country’s interior minister said, warning that Islamic State was taking advantage of the chaos to regroup. While the Washington-backed fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has reduced the territory the self-styled “caliphate” holds, its militants are using the Libyan desert to regroup despite a 2016 U.S.-backed anti-terror campaign that pushed them from the…

MONROVIA (Capital Markets in Africa) – Three former senior officials of Liberia’s central bank, including a son of ex-President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, were charged with seven counts of corruption following a probe into the disappearance of about $100 million in cash that was printed abroad. The government has been trying to determine what happened to containers of Liberian dollars that were brought into the small West African nation between 2016 and 2018 under the previous administration,…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – A stem-cell treatment put a London cancer patient’s HIV into remission, marking the second such reported case and reinvigorating efforts to cure the AIDS-causing infection that afflicts some 37 million people globally. The patient has been in remission for 19 months, the International AIDS Society said in a statement. That’s too soon to label the treatment — which used hematopoietic stem cells from a donor with an HIV-resistance gene —…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – Britain’s judges have gotten used to lawsuits from remain supporters trying to frustrate Brexit, with varying degrees of success. Now, with Brexit potentially just weeks away, they’re grappling with a new breed of cases, from companies that need urgent decisions on the consequences of the split. Lawsuits that need to be heard before the U.K. leaves the European Union have been hurtling through the courts. The latest is a trial starting Fridayover…

LONDON (Capital Markets in Africa) – With a month to go until Britain is due to leave the European Union, Theresa May is facing an apparently impossible task as she tries to get her Brexit deal approved by Parliament. Can the prime minister somehow defy the odds and deliver Brexit on time? Negotiations are still ongoing in Brussels, with U.K. Attorney General Geoffrey Cox looking for a way around the problem of the contentious Irish backstop. May’s spokesman said…