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AS THE territory held by Islamic State (IS) shrivelled in Syria, American generals spoke of “stabilisation” and “consolidation”. But seven months after an American-led coalition drove the jihadists from Raqqa, their putative capital, “stable” is not how residents describe the city. Mines, booby-traps and bombs continue to kill and maim. Bodies are still being pulled from the rubble. The lights are off and there is no running water. “The Americans have given us nothing,” said Omar Alloush, a member of the city council, weeks before he was shot and killed in his apartment by unidentified gunmen. The goodwill that first greeted the coalition is fading as popular anger mounts, especially in the Arab heartlands south of Raqqa, along the Euphrates river. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a

Sinwar has seen war and it didn’t work YAHYA SINWAR, 56, has spent his entire adult life in prisons: the concrete Israeli sort and the open-air prison that is Gaza. Yet Mr Sinwar is now, arguably, the most influential man in the Palestinian territories. On May 16th, two days after Israeli soldiers killed about 60 Palestinian protesters at the border fence, Gazans huddled around televisions to learn if the violence would push their scarred enclave into another war. They were not listening to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, or even Ismail Haniyeh, the nominal leader of Hamas, the jihadist group that runs Gaza. They were watching Mr Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, who may one day represent all Palestinians. He was under pressure from militants to avenge the dead. But Mr Sinwar an

Salah strikes again IN THE run-up to Ramadan artisans set to work on fawanis, the lanterns that hang in Egyptian homes and streets throughout the month-long holiday. Many are adorned with geometric patterns or the crescent-and-star symbol of Islam. This year some customers want a different model: a grinning face with a tangle of curls and a Liverpool jersey. Much has been said about Mohamed Salah’s influence on Britain. At a moment of rising xenophobia, a foreign-born Muslim footballer has become a national sensation. “If he scores another few, then I’ll be Muslim too,” fans chant. To the extent that they care about his religion, it is only to fret that the Ramadan fast could hurt his performance in the Champions League final in Kiev on May 26th. His influence runs even deeper in his n

PAUL KAGAME, the president of Rwanda, thinks there is nothing odd about how he won re-election for a third presidential term last year with 98% of the vote. “It could have been 100%,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank in New York a few months later. It is hard to tell how popular Mr Kagame really is. Serious candidates who tried to stand against him were barred from doing so—and then ruthlessly punished. One of them was Diane Rwigara, a young businesswoman who appeared in court this week with her mother, charged with “inciting insurrection or trouble among the population”. The government has also brought charges against her aunt and brother, who live abroad. The prosecution says the charges against Ms Rwigara relate, in part, to comments she made at a press confere

IN A dank, unlit room in a government office in Mbandaka, a sleepy city of 1m people on the banks of the Congo river, Marie-Claire Thérèse Fwelo is booming out her most valuable knowledge to an assembled group of perhaps 80 health workers. “What do we look for?” she asks the class. They respond in unison: “a brutal fever”. And what else? “Someone who has been in contact with an Ebola patient?”, pipes up one. This is the ninth outbreak of Ebola for Ms Fwelo, a 63-year-old Congolese employee of the World Health Organisation (WHO). As a young nurse she was at the hospital where the fever was first isolated in 1976. Since then she has become an expert on epidemic control. Yet this outbreak is the scariest Ms Fwelo has experienced in her own country. Most previous instances of Ebola in the D

ON MAY 9th, the day after the first cases of Ebola were confirmed in Bikoro, an urgent request came into the headquarters of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international charity. Maps of this part of the Democratic Republic of Congo were needed to deliver vaccines and medical help. Yet accurate ones did not exist. MSF turned to the crowd for help. Volunteers, trained using an online tutorial, started analysing satellite pictures and drawing maps. About 450 volunteers have already managed to plot some 67,000 structures and 1,000km of roads in the area of the outbreak, completing in days a task that could have taken months. Some of these new maps (see above) are already in the field. This is not the first time humanitarian organisations have turned to crowdsourcing to help gather dat