Global stocks sank Wednesday after US President Donald Trump said he was not satisfied with talks that are aimed at averting a trade war with China. Equities were also dented by poor eurozone economic data, and as Trump cast doubt on a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “Trump (is) continuing to drive uncertainty over global trade,” said analyst Joshua Mahony at trading firm IG. “European markets are following their Asian counterparts lower, as a pessimistic tone from Trump is compounded by downbeat economic data,” he added. Markets had surged Monday after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said they had agreed to pull back from imposing threatened tariffs on billions of dollars of goods, and continue talks on a variety of trade issues. However, Trump has declared that he was “not satisfied” with the status of the talks, fuelling worries that the world’s top two economies could still slug out an economically pain
At least five Niger soldiers were killed and a dozen others wounded this week in an attack by suspected Boko Haram militants in the country’s southeast, security sources told AFP on Friday.
“There are dead soldiers and another dozen who were wounded in this Boko Haram attack in Toummour,” one security source told AFP, while another source said “at least five soldiers and one civilian” had been killed.
Toummour is located in the Diffa administrative region, which lies on the frontier with Nigeria and Chad. It has suffered a string of deadly Boko Haram attacks since February 2015, although the area has been relatively calm in recent months.
Last week, the United Nations said there had been a sharp fall in the number of Niger civilians kidnapped, killed or wounded by Boko Haram last year, citing an overall toll of 141 compared with 227 a year earlier.
It did not detail the number of military casualties.
Boko Haram launched an insurgency in northeast Nigeria in 2009 that in 2015 spilt into Niger. It also affects the country’s other neighbours, Chad and Cameroon.
Overall, more than 20,000 people have been killed and more than 2.6 million displaced in the conflict.
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