Democracy now
In Algeria, the government has declared three days of national mourning, after a military passenger jet crashed outside the capital Algiers on Wednesday, killing 257 people on board. It was Algeria’s worst-ever air disaster and the deadliest plane crash since 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine.
Among the dead in Wednesday’s crash were 26 members of the Polisario Front, a Western Saharan independence movement seeking to end Morocco’s 42-year rule of the West African territory.