Cameroon

John Carroll junior forward Lionel Owona has started a project to collect used basketball shoes that will be sent to Cameroon to benefit underprivileged young basketball players.   Owona is asking anybody who has used basketball shoes that can still be worn to please donate them to help grow the sport in the African country.  Any donations can be left with John Carroll coach Tony Martin at the school in Bel Air .  The shoes will...

Mike Owona was set to play basketball next year for a program transitioning to the Division I level. But after a coaching change, the John Carroll senior will instead suit up for an established DI team that has appeared in four NCAA tournaments. Owona committed Sunday to Fairleigh Dickinson, a Northeast Conference school located in Teaneck, N.J. “It feels pretty good,” Owona said. “I finally have it out of my mind. I feel good about it.” Owona had been committed to UMass-Lowell, a Division II powerhouse that will play its first season of DI competition during the 2013-14 season.

Scientists are warning that another disaster is possible at a lake in Cameroon that suddenly released huge amounts of carbon dioxide in 1986, killing 1,700 people, as well as cattle, birds and other animals.The deadly gas came from the bottom of Lake Nyos, and an international team has concluded that about 300 million cubic meters of the gas have again accumulated under the lake, making it "very dangerous" to those who have resettled there.The group estimated that 3 million cubic meters were being added annually, a meter being slightly longer than a yard.

John Carroll junior forward Lionel Owona has started a project to collect used basketball shoes that will be sent to Cameroon to benefit underprivileged young basketball players.   Owona is asking anybody who has used basketball shoes that can still be worn to please donate them to help grow the sport in the African country.  Any donations can be left with John Carroll coach Tony Martin at the school in Bel Air .  The shoes will...

Egypt won its sixth African Cup of Nations title, and second in a row, by beating Cameroon, 1-0, behind Mohamed Aboutreika's goal in the final yesterday in Accra, Ghana. Aboutreika scored in the 77th minute, converting Mohamed Zidan's cross for his fourth goal of the tournament. A crucial error from Rigobert Song led to Aboutreika's goal. Cameroon's captain had two chances to clear the ball but got tangled in a needless duel with Zidan and lost the ball. Zidan squared it perfectly, and Aboutreika finished powerfully in the bottom right corner.

UNITED NATIONS -- Transparency International, a small independent organization that has been tracking for four years how the public and international businesses view corruption worldwide, has published its largest survey to date, looking at 85 countries and ranking only one completely clean: Denmark.The 1998 Corruption Perception Index, like its predecessors, is a "survey of surveys," using a combination of studies by risk analysts, opinion polls and research institutions to rank countries by how they are perceived.

NAIROBI, Kenya -- A Kenya Airways jet with 114 people aboard crashed early yesterday in a dense forest in the western Africa nation of Cameroon, government officials said, but efforts to reach the wreckage were hampered by heavy rainfall. There was no information on survivors. Airline officials said they lost contact with the Nairobi-bound Boeing 737-800 only 11 minutes after its midnight takeoff from Douala, Cameroon. Kenya Airway's Flight 507, which originated in the Ivory Coast, was carrying 105 passengers from 23 countries, including one American, airport officials said.

AKAM, Cameroon -- The glow from the cooking fire danced on the walls of the smoky hut, and Luci Mbala knelt on the dirt floor to prepare dinner with the practiced swing of a machete. She was making a favorite meal for her family of 11, deep in the West African forest. Her husband, Junior, had come home holding a monkey with white-milk-mustache lips, olive-brown fur and, now, a red patch from Junior's shotgun blast. She'll fry up the meat, add some salt, pepper, beef stock and bush mangos, then boil it into a stew.

BERO, Chad - Sitting in the shade of a giant mango tree, the chief of this tiny Central African village of mud brick homes considers for a moment what to make of the untapped oil reserves beneath him. Are they piles of gold or the seeds of his village's destruction? Stroking his chin thoughtfully, Daingar Ndingambaye, the slender 45-year-old leader, concludes, "We don't know what to expect in the future, but we hope that good things can happen." He's speaking of a pipeline that will carry up to 250,000 barrels of oil a day from deposits near his home across the tropical scrubland of southern Chad, over the mountains of eastern Cameroon, and through the rainforest homes of isolated Pygmy tribes before it reaches gas tanks in the West.

Mike Owona was set to play basketball next year for a program transitioning to the Division I level. But after a coaching change, the John Carroll senior will instead suit up for an established DI team that has appeared in four NCAA tournaments. Owona committed Sunday to Fairleigh Dickinson, a Northeast Conference school located in Teaneck, N.J. “It feels pretty good,” Owona said. “I finally have it out of my mind. I feel good about it.” Owona had been committed to UMass-Lowell, a Division II powerhouse that will play its first season of DI competition during the 2013-14 season.

Egypt won its sixth African Cup of Nations title, and second in a row, by beating Cameroon, 1-0, behind Mohamed Aboutreika's goal in the final yesterday in Accra, Ghana. Aboutreika scored in the 77th minute, converting Mohamed Zidan's cross for his fourth goal of the tournament. A crucial error from Rigobert Song led to Aboutreika's goal. Cameroon's captain had two chances to clear the ball but got tangled in a needless duel with Zidan and lost the ball. Zidan squared it perfectly, and Aboutreika finished powerfully in the bottom right corner.

NAIROBI, Kenya -- A Kenya Airways jet with 114 people aboard crashed early yesterday in a dense forest in the western Africa nation of Cameroon, government officials said, but efforts to reach the wreckage were hampered by heavy rainfall. There was no information on survivors. Airline officials said they lost contact with the Nairobi-bound Boeing 737-800 only 11 minutes after its midnight takeoff from Douala, Cameroon. Kenya Airway's Flight 507, which originated in the Ivory Coast, was carrying 105 passengers from 23 countries, including one American, airport officials said.

On weekdays, Emmanuel Tabi is a caring licensed nurse practitioner. But yesterday, during an afternoon soccer match, he violently slid into an opponent, folding him to the ground and releasing a plume of dust from the burnt grass. Baltimore's annual International Festival includes a World Cup-style soccer tournament in its mix of reggae, blues, pad Thai, jerk chicken, martial arts demonstrations and Ms. Ida the Yodeling Lady. The event's theme is "Celebrating One Baltimore." But you wouldn't know that by watching the soccer field.

AKAM, Cameroon -- The glow from the cooking fire danced on the walls of the smoky hut, and Luci Mbala knelt on the dirt floor to prepare dinner with the practiced swing of a machete. She was making a favorite meal for her family of 11, deep in the West African forest. Her husband, Junior, had come home holding a monkey with white-milk-mustache lips, olive-brown fur and, now, a red patch from Junior's shotgun blast. She'll fry up the meat, add some salt, pepper, beef stock and bush mangos, then boil it into a stew.

MBONG, Cameroon -- Ask the villagers here, and they are unanimous: They hunt monkeys and other animals to feed their families, selling only the occasional catch to people passing through this part of west-central Africa. Villagers blame the declining numbers of monkeys, antelope-like duikers and other creatures squarely on commercial poachers who supply bushmeat to consumers in the cities and, to a surprising extent, around the world. "I'm worried," said Olivier Minko, who has noticed a decline in the number of animals in the past decade.

Solange Kengni and Marie Tamfu played soccer back in their native Cameroon, so when they arrived at W.E.B. DuBois as freshmen, they wanted play on their school team. The only problem was that the school had no girls soccer team. Last year, Kengni and Tamfu decided to do something about that. "The girls had been asking," DuBois athletic director Linda Mitchell-Holmes said. "I've been here three years, and the first year they weren't interested. Last year they said, `Can we start a team?

New York. The University of Maryland Eastern Shore's award of an honorary degree to Cameroon's President Paul Biya Sunday will be sadly ironic. His government has launched a brutal crackdown on the university in his own country. Since the beginning of April, hundreds of students from the University of Yaounde are reported to have been detained, held in deplorable conditions and subjected to physical abuse.Academic freedom in Cameroon is characterized by self-censorship, reinforced by the pervasive presence of security agents and occasional acts of violence by the authorities.

A Maryland woman who fled to Cameroon after being convicted last year for her role in the forced detention of an 11-year-old girl has been expelled from her native African country and returned to the United States to serve the prison sentence she skipped out on, federal officials announced yesterday. Theresa Mubang, 42, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was returned to the United States on Saturday after being detained in Cameroon last week. Last year, a federal jury in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt convicted Mubang of involuntary servitude and harboring an illegal alien for financial gain.

A Maryland woman who fled to Cameroon after being convicted last year for her role in the forced detention of an 11-year-old girl has been expelled from her native African country and returned to the United States to serve the prison sentence she skipped out on, federal officials announced yesterday. Theresa Mubang, 42, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was returned to the United States on Saturday after being detained in Cameroon last week. Last year, a federal jury in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt convicted Mubang of involuntary servitude and harboring an illegal alien for financial gain.

A Memorable Place To the summit of Mount Cameroon By Christa Hasenkopf SPECIAL TO THE SUN After my first year of teaching, I hopped a plane to Cameroon last June to visit a college roommate who was working in the Peace Corps. Climbing Mount Cameroon, the highest mountain in West Africa, was high on my to-do list. At 13,435 feet above sea level, Mount Cameroon would be the highest elevation either my friend or I had climbed, and to top it off, it's an active volcano with craters, hardened lava flows and even rain forests at its foot.