Tag Archives: Congo

Male domination is the natural order of things, some people say. But bonobos, primates with whom we share nearly 99 percent of our DNA, beg to differ. Bonobos are great apes that live in female-dominated societies, a relative rarity among mammals, especially in species where males are the larger sex. While females are smaller than their male counterparts, they reign …

After listening to hundreds of hours of ape calls, a team of scientists say they have detected a hallmark of human language: the ability to put together strings of sounds to create new meanings. The provocative finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, drew praise from some scholars and skepticism from others. Federica Amici, a primatologist at the University of …

Dangerous pathogens left unsecured at labs across Africa. Halted inspections for mpox, Ebola and other infections at airports and other checkpoints. Millions of unscreened animals shipped across borders. The Trump administration’s pause on foreign aid has hobbled programs that prevent and snuff out outbreaks around the world, scientists say, leaving people everywhere more vulnerable to dangerous pathogens. That includes Americans. …

An unidentified illness has killed scores of people and infected hundreds in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the World Health Organization has reported, with preliminary investigations tracing the outbreak to three children who in January ate a bat and died. Fifty-three people in the country’s northwest had died from the disease, out of 431 reported cases as of Feb. 15, …

Numerous programs aimed at averting violence, instability and extremism worsened by global warming are ensnared in the effort to dismantle the main American aid agency, U.S.A.I.D. One such project helped communities manage water stations in Niger, a hotbed of Islamist extremist groups where conflicts over scarce water are common. Another helped repair water-treatment plants in the strategic port city of …

The leaders of more than half of Africa’s nations gathered this week in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s sprawling seaside metropolis, to commit to the biggest burst of spending on electric-power generation in Africa’s history. The World Bank, African Development Bank and others are pledging at least $35 billion to expand electricity across a continent where more than a half-billion people …

We set out again at sunrise, and soon arrived at a mud pit in a hillside. There an industry had emerged in pushing and pulling vehicles up and down the hill. There were belching diesel fumes, and a great deal of yelling. I nicknamed the place Mordor, after Tolkien’s hellscape. Scrambling up the hill, I thought about how everything entering …