Algeria

ALGIERS -- Gunmen attacked a convoy of customs agents traveling through the desert in southern Algeria yesterday, killing 13 and wounding eight, the official APS news agency reported. One other person was reported to have disappeared in the attack in the Ghardaia region, 745 miles south of the capital of this North African nation, APS reported, citing local security sources. The attackers opened fire with machine guns on vehicles transporting the customs agents to a seminar, then set the vehicles afire, according to a report on daily Liberte's website.

Algeria overturned the Arab Spring's revolutionary narrative with elections that bolstered the longtime ruling party and dashed Islamists' hopes of gaining power. The vote did something else, too: It burnished Algeria's democratic image with Western allies who rely on it to fight terrorism and supply natural gas. Few people turned out to vote in last week's elections, and the result did little to boost Algerian rulers' legitimacy at home. But analysts say Algeria needed to hold elections to show it was at least somewhat democratic in the midst of a region-wide push for greater freedoms.

Algeria's prime minister has denied the possibility of any amnesty for militants in a snub to those calling for greater political reconciliation. Ahmed Ouyahia denied on Friday media reports of the amnesty in "the most solemn manner in the world," calling the militants "terrorists. " The head of Algeria's human rights commission, Farouk Ksentini, supported the amnesty to promote reconciliation. Algeria was plunged into civil war after a military coup in 1992 stopped an Islamist party from winning elections.

The European Union observer mission Saturday called Algeria's elections an important step toward reform, even as the opposition denounced the overwhelming win by government parties as resulting from fraud. The EU did say, however, that additional measures could have been taken to increase transparency and trust in the process. Algeria's main ruling party took nearly half the seats in the elections, prompting the independent daily El Watan to describe the election result as the "The Status Quo" in a banner headline — a marked departure from recent elections in other Arab...

ALGIERS, Algeria — The Algerian president’s office agreed yesterday to lift a 19-year state of emergency in a bid to defuse spiraling and potentially dangerous discontent across the nation. The office of President Ab del aziz Bouteflika said the president had approved a government decision earlier in the day to lift the restrictive measure, put in place by the army in February 1992 to combat Islamist extremists. The brief statement said the change was “imminent’’ but gave no date.

ALGIERS -- A suicide bomber blew up a refrigerated truck loaded with explosives at a military encampment outside Algeria's capital yesterday, killing 10 soldiers and wounding 35, a security official said. Al Qaeda in Islamic North Africa claimed responsibility for the attack, which came as the Africa Games opened, the Al-Jazeera TV network reported. The truck drove into the post on the edge of Lakhdaria, a town 50 miles southeast of Algiers in the restive region of Kabylie, as doors opened in the morning for arriving personnel, the security official said on condition...

POLOKWANE, South Africa — Hey, England and America, look who’s on top of your World Cup group. Little Slovenia! Robert Koren scored a late goal yesterday to give Slovenia a 1-0 win over 10-man Algeria in the teams’ opener, putting the Cup’s smallest nation — population 2 million, about the size of Houston — ahead of the United States and England in Group C. On Friday, Slovenia faces the US, while Algeria takes on England....

A secular party in Algeria has announced it will boycott elections in May. Rally for Culture and Democracy party chief Said Saadi said Friday the elections would be a "hoax" and the assembly chosen could just be dissolved by the new president set to be elected in 2014. The party's power base is the ethnically Berber Tizi-Ouzou region east of the capital. It boycotted elections in 2002, but ran in 2007, gaining 19 seats in the 390-person assembly and 3.36 percent of the vote.

Moammar Gadhafi's daughter urged Libyans on Tuesday to overthrow their new rulers, possibly violating the terms of her exile in Algeria. In an audio message broadcast on Syria's al-Rai television station, Aisha Gadhafi called for a revolt against the men who overthrew her father, the government she said "arrived with the planes of NATO. " "My father has not left, he is always among us," she said, following the traditional 40-day mourning period after his death. "Don't forget the orders of your father urging you to continue fighting, even if you no longer hear his voice.

MADRID - A Portuguese court decided yesterday to deny an American request to extradite the fugitive George Wright, decades after he fled in a hijacked jetliner. Wright was convicted of murder in the early 1960s, but he escaped from prison in 1970 and hijacked a domestic Delta flight two years later, alongside four others, and took the plane to Algeria. He eventually settled down under a different identity in a village in Portugal, where he was arrested in September. "This is just a fantastic decision," said Wright's lawyer, Manuel Luis Ferreira.

In the gritty, working class Algiers suburb of Harrache, activists sporting the green baseball caps of the Islamist "Green" alliance hand out election leaflets outside their party headquarters, urging people to vote. A middle-aged man pushed past the young activists. "The last people I voted for were thrown into jail," he said in disgust. "I'm done with that. " Algeria is gearing up for parliamentary elections on Thursday that promise to be the freest ever. But the legacy of the 1991 elections nearly won by Islamists before a military coup ended the voting hangs heavy: Memories...

ALGIERS - Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria's first president and a historic leader of its bloody independence struggle from France, died at his family home in Algiers Wednesday. He was 95. Family members and the state news agency did not give the cause of death, but twice in the last month Mr. Ben Bella had been treated for discomfort at the military hospital of Ain Naadja. The charismatic Mr. Ben Bella, a symbol of pan-Arabist ideology as well as the global anticolonial movement, was president of Algeria from 1963 until he was overthrown in a military coup in 1965 by...

A secular party in Algeria has announced it will boycott elections in May. Rally for Culture and Democracy party chief Said Saadi said Friday the elections would be a "hoax" and the assembly chosen could just be dissolved by the new president set to be elected in 2014. The party's power base is the ethnically Berber Tizi-Ouzou region east of the capital. It boycotted elections in 2002, but ran in 2007, gaining 19 seats in the 390-person assembly and 3.36 percent of the vote.

The first live stream of the Super Bowl drew 2.1 million unique viewers, NBC said Thursday. That's a small fraction of the record 111.3 million viewers that watched NBC's broadcast of the big game. But it was still enough to make it the most-watched single-game sports event online, according to the network. Kevin Monaghan, managing director of digital media for NBC Sports Group, said the live stream "exceeded our expectations in every way. " The New York Giants 21-17 win over the New England Patriots was streamed on NBCSports.com and NFL.com.

The chief executive of Italian energy company ENI says the country's natural gas supplies are OK through Wednesday but if Russia's Gazprom makes more cuts there could be problems. Paolo Scaroni told Radio 24 Sunday night the company is preparing for "difficult moments" should the cold spell gripping Russia continue and Gazprom further reduce supplies to European customers. So far, Italy has made up for Gazprom's recent reductions by stepping up imports from Algeria and from northern Europe.

"To Grammar's House" is a regular column by the Boston Globe copy desk on the style and language used in the newspaper. When you work on a news copy desk, you read a lot of new stories every night. Because of the volume, there's always bound to be a certain number of errors, misspellings, and grammatical problems. And then occasionally, there's just something downright bizarre. In the aftermath of Moammar Khadafy's death, his family and advisers were fleeing all over the place, mostly heading for other countries.

PARIS -- General Alain Le Ray, a World War II Resistance leader whose escape from a notorious Nazi prison forged his image and career, has died at the age of 96, his family said yesterday. General Le Ray, who died Monday, fought in colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie called General Le Ray a "man of conviction and commitment" who "devoted his life to the fight for freedom. " French President Nicolas Sarkozy said General Le Ray "incarnated the highest French military values.

Moammar Gadhafi's daughter urged Libyans on Tuesday to overthrow their new rulers, possibly violating the terms of her exile in Algeria. In an audio message broadcast on Syria's al-Rai television station, Aisha Gadhafi called for a revolt against the men who overthrew her father, the government she said "arrived with the planes of NATO. " "My father has not left, he is always among us," she said, following the traditional 40-day mourning period after his death. "Don't forget the orders of your father urging you to continue fighting, even if you no longer hear his voice.

MADRID - A Portuguese court decided yesterday to deny an American request to extradite the fugitive George Wright, decades after he fled in a hijacked jetliner. Wright was convicted of murder in the early 1960s, but he escaped from prison in 1970 and hijacked a domestic Delta flight two years later, alongside four others, and took the plane to Algeria. He eventually settled down under a different identity in a village in Portugal, where he was arrested in September. "This is just a fantastic decision," said Wright's lawyer, Manuel Luis Ferreira.