A new constitution that has allowed Togo’s long-time head of state Faure Gnassingbé to shift to a new role as all-powerful prime minister – and escape the constraint of presidential term limits – has triggered anger on the streets of the capital, Lomé. Protests are set to continue this Friday. At least five demonstrators have died while confronting official security forces in recent weeks. But it is not the orthodox political opposition – predictably crushed in local elections last week – that has mobilised frustrated young Togolese people. Instead it is musicians, bloggers and activists who have tapped into popular anger...

Five Australian women who were strip-searched and invasively examined at Doha airport have won the right to sue Qatar Airways after an appeal. The women were ordered off a flight and checked for whether they had given birth after a baby was found abandoned in an airport bin in 2020 – an incident that sparked global outrage. An Australian judge last year found the state-owned airline could not be prosecuted under the laws governing global travel, and said the proposition its staff could have intervened was “fanciful, trifling, implausible, improbable, [and] tenuous”. The women appealed, with the full bench of...

Warning: This story contains accounts of rape and other violence that readers may find distressing. Helene was 17 years old when a gang attacked her neighbourhood in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. She strokes her baby daughter, asleep in her lap, while describing how armed men abducted her as she tried to flee, and held her for over two months. “They raped me and beat me every single day. Several different men. I didn’t even know their names, they were masked,” says the young woman, whose name we have changed to protect her identity. “Some of the things they did to...

 Indonesian authorities said Thursday they have arrested two foreigners accused of smuggling cocaine to the tourist island of Bali. A Brazilian man and a South African woman were arrested separately on July 13 after customs officers at Bali’s international airport saw suspicious items in the man’s luggage and the woman’s underwear on X-ray scans. Indonesia has extremely strict drug laws, and convicted smugglers are sometimes executed by firing squad. The 25-year-old Brazilian man, who police identified by his initials as YB, was arrested with 3,086.36 grams (6.8 pounds) of cocaine in the lining of his suitcase and backpack shortly after...

One after another, the friends and family of the four University of Idaho students killed in their home by Bryan Kohberger vented their emotions in sobs, insults and curses before a packed courtroom Wednesday as he was sentenced to life in prison. Ben Mogen, the father of Madison Mogen, credited her with helping keep him alive through his fight with addiction. He called her “the only thing I’m proud of.” Dylan Mortensen, a roommate of the victims who told police of seeing a strange man with bushy eyebrows and a ski mask in the home that night, called Kohberger “a hollow vessel,...