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BANGKOK, Thailand - A Russian dubbed the "Merchant of Death" for allegedly supplying weapons to Africa's bloody conflicts over power and diamonds was arrested Thursday in Thailand on suspicion of conspiring to smuggle guns to Colombia's leftist rebels. Viktor Bout, 41, whose dealings reportedly inspired a 2005 movie about the illicit arms trade, was arrested at U.S. request in his hotel room in Bangkok, said police Lt. Gen. Pongpat Chayapan. Bout had eluded arrest for years and was finally seized after a four-month sting organized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In New York, federal authorities unsealed a criminal complaint...

LIBREVILLE (AFP) - Dozens of people jeered French President Nicolas Sarkozy as he arrived at the funeral of Gabon's President Omar Bongo Ondimba on Tuesday. Security guards quickly formed a cordon around Sarkozy as he went into the presidential palace to join other leaders from French-speaking Africa at the funeral for Bongo, who led his oil-rich nation for 41 years. Several hundred people were allowed into the courtyard to watch leaders arriving and some applauded Sarkozy but boos soon took over. Dozens of people hurled insults such as "We don't want you -- leave!" at the French president. One man...

Gabon President Omar Bongo Ondimba, whose reign as Africa's longest-serving leader was overshadowed by allegations of massive corruption, has died aged 73, a source close to the French government said. Also announced on the Internet site of French weekly newspaper Le Point, Bongo's death was not officially confirmed by either Gabon or France's foreign ministry. "I was very surprised, like many of my compatriots, to learn of the death of of the Gabonese president via French television," Gabon Prime Minister Jean Eyeghe Ndong said in Libreville. "There are procedures: to begin with, the president has a family." Bongo, who led...

Premiers Thur. Sept. 25 @ 8PM ET/PT 18 new contestants will compete for the $1 million prize in the jungles of the equatorial African nation of Gabon. Who will be the sole Survivor?

Premiers Thur. Sept. 25 @ 8PM ET/PT

Remember Joe Wilson? He's the diplomat who went to Niger to investigate Bush administration claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium, a raw material used in building nuclear bombs, from Africa. He wrote in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed that he had spent the previous February in Niger, "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people ... associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." A story that has to be the most underplayed...

Benin official offers apology for nation's role in slavery MOBILE, Ala. (AP) -- An official of the Republic of Benin has offered an apology to students at a Mobile school for his country's participation in the slave trade. In 1859, Benin, on Africa's west coast, sold 116 slaves to a Mobile sailor aboard a ship called the Clotilde - the last slave ship to arrive in America. Slavery was still legal in the United States at that time, but importing slaves was not. Simon Pierre Adovelande apologized Tuesday to the students at the Mobile County Training School. Thirty of...

LIBREVILLE, gabon–When the body of 13-year-old Ralph Edang N'na was found drained of blood and with gaping wounds in his genitals, chest and neck last month, many in Gabon thought it was politicians who had ordered his killing. The murder of children and young adults, whose organs are eaten or used to make magical amulets, has increased in recent years in the oil-rich central African nation. Campaigners say some Gabonese politicians use the black magic rituals to boost their chances of winning lucrative government posts. With elections to municipal councils on Sunday, many fear a spate of gruesome child murders....

Police have opened an unprecedented investigation into claims that two African heads of state with close ties to Paris have used millions of pounds of embezzled public funds to acquire lavish properties for themselves and their families in France. The inquiry into the affairs of presidents Omar Bongo, of Gabon, and Denis Sassou N’Guesso, of the Democratic Republic of Congo, marks a break with the protection that was accorded to France’s African “clients” by President Chirac and other former leaders. President Nicolas Sarkozy promised in his spring election campaign to put an end to the complicity between Paris and “la...

WASHINGTON - A jury Tuesday convicted a former Bush administration official of four counts of lying and obstructing justice in the first trial to be held in connection with the influence-peddling scandal of lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Researchers Describe How Natural Nuclear Reactor Worked In Gabon The Oklo natural nuclear-reactor site in Gabon. St Louis MO (SPX) Nov 01, 2004 To operate a nuclear power plant like Three Mile Island, hundreds of highly trained employees must work in concert to generate power from safe fission, all the while containing dangerous nuclear wastes. On the other hand, it's been known for 30 years that Mother Nature once did nuclear chain reactions by her lonesome. Now, Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have analyzed the isotopic structure of noble gases produced in fission in a sample from the...

Global News Wire Africa Analysis February 5, 1999 LENGTH: 294 words HEADLINE: AND THEN THERE WERE THREE...: FRANCEVILLE, GABON. BODY: Cogema's closure of the Mounana uranium mine near here leaves sub--Saharan Africa with only three producers of radioactive material -- Niger, Namibia and South Africa (where it is a by--product of gold mining; Africa Analysis, no.307). With uranium prices depressed, and unlikely to pick up in the immediate future, Cogema (Compagnie Generale des Matieres Nucleaires de France) has abandoned plans for a short--life open--pit operation at the nearby Mikouloungou deposit, which contains an estimated 1,100 tonnes of uranium. Mounana's 150--strong...

WASHINGTON - Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., revealed Friday that two years ago he discussed the blown cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame with then CIA director George Tenet and that Tenet "was furious." Tenet promptly called the Justice Department to demand an investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak, Schumer said at a hearing held by House and Senate Democrats. Novak revealed Plame's identity in July 2003 in a column in which he said she played a key role in having her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, sent to Niger to investigate...

Researchers are preparing to test the highly controversial theory of a San Diego scientist, J. Marvin Herndon, who thinks a huge, natural nuclear reactor or "georeactor" -- a vast deposit of uranium several miles wide -- exists at Earth's core, thousands of miles beneath our feet... [I]t might help to explain otherwise puzzling phenomena of planetary science, such as fluctuations in the intensity of Earth's magnetic field... If Herndon's theoretical nuclear reactor really exists, then it should be gushing out antineutrinos that would fly through the roughly 4,000 miles of solid rock and emerge at the Earth's surface.

The world's only known natural nuclear reactor, which decommissioned itself over two billion years ago, could provide insights into how modern nuclear plants can operate more safely. The site, in Gabon, West Africa, ran for 150million years without blowing up, and storing its own waste in a safe manner. The reactor was a natural deposit of uranium. Today, and for the last two billion years, natural uranium will not undergo nuclear reactions, because it contains too little of the fissionable isotope, uranium-235 (U235). But in the distant past, U235 was more abundant, comprising 3% of the total amount - the...

United Nations - CIA-Iraq chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, whose report cast doubt on Bush administration claims that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, was blocked from reaching that same conclusion in 1999-2000 by the Clinton White House. Before officially joining the CIA weapons hunt earlier this year, Duelfer spent more than 8 years hunting WMD at the United Nations, first for the noted Swede Rolf Ekeus, than the flamboyant Aussie Richard Butler. Butler, known for his repeated clashes with Iraq officials, was eventually forced out of his U.N. job by the French and Russian ambassadors in June...

China's need for oil has led it to West Africa's oil fields in the Gulf of Guinea, and to Central Africa, where oil production in several countries is also coming on line. Growing Chinese interest in the region has created a surge of oil-related investments, and has been welcomed by governments and some analysts. But it worries others. In China this month, Gabon's President Omar Bongo received military honors as he arrived for a state visit. Chinese President Hu Jintao said he hoped Mr. Bongo's ninth visit would be a success. Even though Mr. Bongo has been visiting China for...

How the French Plunder Africa France's unchallenged political, economic, and military domination of its former sub-Saharan African colonies is rooted in a currency, the CFA franc. Created in 1948 to help France control the destiny of its colonies, fourteen countries--Benin, Burkina-Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Bissau Guinea, and Chad--maintained the franc zone even after they gained independence decades ago. In exchange for France guaranteeing the CFA franc's convertibility, these countries agreed to deposit 65% of their foreign exchange reserves in a special account within the French Treasury and granted to...

ABON, South Africa — At first blush, the jumble of corrugated-steel shacks sprouting from 123 acres of flat countryside is a mirror of thriving towns all over the nation. Thousands of barren yards, marked by chicken-wire fences and festooned with clotheslines, face dirt lanes dignified by hand-lettered wooden street signs. There are also a taxi stand, a shoe-repair shop, a soccer field. About 15,000 black South Africans call Gabon home. It is their home — but not legally. For this city of squatters is built on part of the 13 square miles of farmland where Abraham Duvenage, its white owner,...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/946730/posts What Bush really said about Iraq -- excerpt from Bush's SOTU (REMINDER)(w. my major points about it)White House ^ | January 28, 2003 | President George W. Bush The Internet will spell the death of the Democrats. For ages, they've been able to control public opinion via their lackeys in the media. Now the public has access to the truth.     http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/946281/posts WHO LIED TO WHOM? (The Original Seymour Hersh Article About Uranium and Niger That Started It All!)The New Yorker ^ | March 31, 2003 | Seymour M. Hersh This seems to have been the first "mainstream"...

Former U.S. Ambassador to Gabon Says Administration Twisted His Findings on Iraq Intelligence The Associated Press WASHINGTON July 7 — An envoy sent by the CIA to Africa to investigate allegations about Iraq's nuclear weapons program contends the Bush administration manipulated his findings, possibly to strengthen the rationale for war. That conclusion came on Sunday from Joseph Wilson, former U.S. ambassador to the West African nation of Gabon, who was dispatched in February 2002 to explore whether Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. That desert country is the world's third-largest producer of mined uranium. Writing in a New York...

BRAZZAVILLE, April 9 (Reuters) - The death toll in a deadly Ebola outbreak has risen to 120 in northwestern Congo Republic, the central African country's health ministry said on Wednesday. An official at the ministry said 135 cases had been recorded since the virus, which has no known cure, struck in January in the dense forests of Cuvette-Ouest, some 700 km (440 miles) north of the capital, Brazzaville. Authorities say the disease has now almost been brought under control. Ebola is passed on by infected body fluids and kills between 50 and 90 percent of victims, depending on the strain....

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 16 Oklo: Ancient African Nuclear Reactors Credit & Copyright: Robert D. Loss, WAISRC Explanation: The remnants of nuclear reactors nearly two billion years old were found in the 1970s in Africa. These reactors are thought to have occurred naturally. No natural reactors exist today, as the relative density of fissionable uranium has now decayed below that needed for a sustainable reaction. Pictured above is Fossil Reactor...