Three West African juntas have turned to Russia. The US has declared a stark policy shift towards three West African countries which are battling Islamist insurgents and whose military governments have broken defence ties with France and turned towards Russia. The state department announced that Nick Checker, head of its Bureau of African Affairs, would visit Mali's capital Bamako to convey the United States' respect for Mali's sovereignty and chart a new course in relations, moving past policy missteps. It adds that the US also looks forward to co-operating with Mali's allies, neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, on shared security and economic interests. Absent from the agenda is the longstanding American concern for democracy and human rights.

Biden administration's diplomatic dispute led to U.S. expulsion from Niger, eliminating drone surveillance capabilities needed to combat Sahel region terrorism.

Following 11 years of defence cooperation and millions of dollars spent on maintaining military bases, the United States officially pulled its troops out of Niger this week in a surprise divorce that experts are calling a "blow" to Washington's ambitions for influence in the troubled Sahel region of West Africa. Once-close relations between the two countries saw the US establish large, expensive military bases from which it launched surveillance drones in Niger to monitor myriad armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS). However, those ties collapsed in March when Niger's military government, which seized power in July 2023, cancelled a decade-long security agreement and told the US, which was pushing for a transition to civilian rule, to remove its 1,100 military personnel stationed there by September 15. For months, the US has failed to either fully align with or outright oppose the ruling military, analysts say. On the one hand, Washington seemed ready to maintain defence relations with the new ruling power, but on the other, it felt compelled to denounce the coup and pause aid to Niger.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The U.S. handed over its last military base in Niger -- one of two crucial hubs for American counterterrorism operations in the country -- to local authorities, the U.S. Department of Defense and Niger's Ministry of Defense announced in a joint statement on Monday. The handing over of Airbase 201 in the city of Agadez came after the U.S. troops withdrew earlier this month from Airbase 101, a small drone base in Niger's capital of Niamey. U.S. troops have until Sept. 15 to leave the Sahel country following an agreement with Nigerien authorities.

Direct image-to-graph transformation is a challenging task that solves object detection and relationship prediction in a single model. Due to the complexity of this task, large training datasets are rare in many domains, which makes the training of large networks challenging. This data sparsity necessitates the establishment of pre-training strategies akin to the state-of-the-art in computer vision. In this work, we introduce a set of methods enabling cross-domain and cross-dimension transfer learning for image-to-graph transformers. We propose (1) a regularized edge sampling loss for sampling the optimal number of object relationships (edges) across domains, (2) a domain adaptation framework for image-to-graph transformers that aligns features from different domains, and (3) a simple projection function that allows us to pretrain 3D transformers on 2D input data. We demonstrate our method's utility in cross-domain and cross-dimension experiments, where we pretrain our models on 2D satellite images before applying them to vastly different target domains in 2D and 3D. Our method consistently outperforms a series of baselines on challenging benchmarks, such as retinal or whole-brain vessel graph extraction.

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday said the US is committed to deeper relations with Africa despite global crises as he opened a four-country tour of the continent. Blinken is touring four democracies on the Atlantic Coast – Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Angola – as security deteriorates in the Sahel and doubts grow about a key US base in neighbouring coup-hit Niger. US President Joe Biden welcomed leaders from Africa in 2022 in a show of newfound attention to the continent. But he did not visit Africa last year as promised. Blinken nonetheless quoted Biden as he vowed, "We are all in when it comes to Africa."

The United States military has resumed operations in Niger, flying drones and other aircraft out of airbases in the country more than a month after a coup halted activities, the head of Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa said. Since the July coup that removed President Mohamed Bazoum, the approximately 1,100 US soldiers deployed in the West African country have been confined to their military bases. General James Hecker said on Wednesday that negotiations with the military rulers of Niger resulted in some intelligence and surveillance missions resuming. "For a while, we weren't doing any missions on the bases, they pretty much closed down the airfields," Hecker told reporters at the annual Air and Space Forces Association convention. "Through the diplomatic process, we are now doing, I wouldn't say 100 percent of the missions that we were doing before, but we're doing a large amount of missions that we're doing before," he said.

The CIA is reportedly expanding its armed drone programme in Africa and will start using a military base in the Nigerien desert to carry out raids on areas where ISIL and al-Qaeda are believed to operate. The New York Times reported on Monday that a secret military base in Dirkou, about 250km south of the Libyan border, will soon begin deploying armed drones in an apparent loosening of Obama-era limits on US raids outside conventional warzones. According to the Times, the Pentagon has already carried out five drone raids in Libya this year, including one two weeks ago. While the drones are currently being flown out of bases in Sicily and Niamey, Niger's capital, armed drones "would almost certainly" be deployed from Dirkou "in the near future". The Times added that one of its journalists said he saw "gray aircraft - about the size of Predator drones, which are 27 feet long - flying at least three times over six days in early August".

The United States military's Africa Command has confirmed that its forces began deploying armed drones in Niger earlier this year. The West African country's government granted American forces permission in November 2017 to arm their drones - but neither side had previously confirmed their deployment. "In coordination with the Government of Niger, US Africa Command has armed intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft already in Niger to improve our combined ability to respond to threats and other security issues in the region. Armed ISR aircraft began flying in early 2018," Samantha Reho, spokeswoman for US Africa Command told The Associated Press on Monday. The armed drones are currently deployed to Niger's Air Base 101 in the capital, Niamey.

Niger Air Base 201 is expected to be functional early next year. The base, a few miles outside Agadez and built at the request of Niger's government, will eventually house fighter jets and MQ-9 drones transferred from the capital Niamey. The drones, with surveillance and added striking capabilities, will have a range enabling them to reach a number of West and North African countries.