Officials from foreign and local oil and construction firms gathered at an air force base in the Nigerian oil hub Port Harcourt on Thursday for the handover of 19 hostages freed by the security forces

The killers showed no mercy: They didn’t spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Monday, Nigerian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass...

Africa is the world’s second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30,221,532 km? (11,668,545 mi?) including adjacent islands, it covers 6.0% of the Earth’s total surface area, and 20.4% of the total land area....