Africa, Sahara | featured news

The U.S. military was closely tracking a one-eyed bandit across the Sahara in 2003 when it confronted a hard choice that is still reverberating a decade later. Should it try to kill or capture the target, an Algerian jihadist named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, or let him go?

Algerian special forces stormed a natural gas complex in the middle of the Sahara desert on Saturday in a "final assault" that ended a four-day-old hostage crisis, according to the state news agency and two foreign governments. At least 19 hostages and 29 Islamist militants have been killed.

With earth’s population headed for 10 billion, much of the growth is in sub-Saharan Africa, where trends that have lowered birthrates elsewhere have not yet caught on.

An ancient lake bed 350 kilometers long has been discovered beneath the sands of Egypt's vast Sahara desert. Geologist Ted Maxwell at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, and colleagues examined high resolution pictures. The lake appeared around 250,000 years ago - during a period of wet climate when the region would have been covered in grasslands - and dried up 80,000 years ago, covering an area of 68,200 square kilometers at its peak.