Africa

Former Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.), who was caught with $90,000 in marked currency stuffed in his freezer, was sentenced to 13 years in prison. The 62-year-old was convicted of using his office to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and seek millions more, mainly by promoting business deals in Africa. Prosecutors said that he was involved in 11 bribery schemes from August 2000 to August 2005 and that he and his family stood to gain more than half a billion dollars.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Friday that it would greatly increase agricultural grants designed to reduce hunger and poverty in Africa and South Asia. The $306-million commitment over four years included $164.5 million to the Nairobi, Kenya-based Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, for efforts to improve soils and help small farmers boost crop yields. The Rockefeller Foundation contributed an additional $15 million to the effort.

When museums display African art and Modern art together, they generally do so to illustrate how seeing Africa's arresting masks and fantastic figures helped Picasso and other Modern artists escape the constraints of Realism and move into Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism. But in a new gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, African art is framed as a contemporary art form in its own right, not just an aesthetic enabler for a century of Modern artists.

The Spice Girls said Friday they are cutting back their reunion tour "due to family and personal commitments." They canceled concerts in China, South Africa, Australia and Argentina. The tour that reunited the British "Girl Power" group in a blaze of publicity will end Feb. 26 in Toronto. "It was not possible to fit everything in," a spokesman said.

In the gloomy shade deep in Africa's rain forest, the noontime silence was pierced by the whine of a far-off chain saw. It was the sound of destruction, echoed from wood to wood, continent to continent, in the tropical belt that circles the globe. From Brazil to central Africa to once-lush islands in Asia's archipelagoes, human encroachment is shrinking the world's rain forests. The alarm was sounded decades ago by environmentalists, but was mostly unheeded. The picture, meanwhile, has changed: Africa is now a leader in deforestation.

This western Kenya village was slowly dying five years ago. One in three people was HIV-positive, then a virtual death sentence. Coffin-makers couldn't work fast enough and the nearby hospital overflowed with HIV patients. No family went untouched, but stigma was so severe that few got tested and the word AIDS was rarely uttered. Today, with an influx of U.S.-funded antiretroviral drugs, prevalence rates have dropped to single digits. The AIDS ward has shut down.

After crossing Africa from west to east and back, the central issues that followed President Bush on his tour all came together Wednesday in the white stucco Osu Castle here on the Atlantic shoreline. With gusto, the president declared "that's baloney" to the notion that the United States was preparing to establish military bases in Africa. "Or, as we say in Texas, that's bull," Bush said at a news conference with Ghanaian President John Kufuor.

Thirty years ago, as President Carter was preparing to visit West Africa, a Nigerian government official asked a member of Carter's advance team whether the president would like to attend a public execution on a Lagos beach. It is safe to say that no government official made such an inquiry of President Bush's staff as it prepared the agenda for the six-day, five-nation African trip he completed Thursday.