DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Niger's military leader has accused the presidents of France, Benin and Ivory Coast of supporting armed groups that attacked an air force base in the capital, wounding four soldiers and damaging an aircraft.
Niger's forces responded quickly to the assault early Thursday, killing 20 of the attackers and arresting 11 others, state television reported.
“We remind the sponsors of those mercenaries, who are Emmanuel Macron (president of France), Patrice Talon (president of Benin) and Alassane Ouattara (president of Ivory Coast), we have sufficiently heard them bark, and they should now in turn be prepared to hear us roar,” Gen. Abdourahamane Tchiani told state television late Thursday.
He didn't provide any evidence to back up his accusation.
Videos that appear to be from the scene captured loud blasts and the sky glowing following explosions that began around midnight and lasted about two hours in the area of Diori Hamani International Airport in Niamey, the capital of the West African country.
Niamey’s airport is a strategic hub that hosts military bases, the headquarters of the Niger-Burkina Faso-Mali Joint Force, and a large uranium stockpile at the center of a dispute with French nuclear company Orano.
West African airline Air Côte d’Ivoire said that one of its aircraft, parked on the tarmac of the Niamey airport, was hit during the exhange of gunfire, resulting in impacts to the aircraft’s fuselage and right wing.
Niger state television reported that one of the assailants killed was a French national, as footage showed several bloodied bodies on the ground. It provided no evidence.
No armed group has so far claimed responsibility for the attack.
Niger has struggled to contain deadly jihadi violence that has battered parts of Africa’s Sahel region, where neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali also are run by military juntas.
In 2025, al-Qaida and Islamic State group-backed militants escalated their campaigns in the Sahel, further threatening the stability of the fragile region and of Niger, which was the key security ally of the West in the region until a 2023 military coup.
Since seizing power, Niger’s military rulers — along with those in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso — have cut ties with France and other Western powers and turned to Russia for military support to fight insurgencies.
The juntas regularly accuse the presidents of Benin and Ivory Coast, two West African countries that maintain close relations with France, of acting as proxies for Paris.
Under the military juntas, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso have seen a surge in attacks and have become more vulnerable to the armed groups, experts say.
The sophistication and boldness of the airport attack in Niger — including the possible use of drones — suggest that the assailants may have had inside help, said Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation.
Laessing said Friday that earlier successful attacks elsewhere in the region appear to have increased the groups’ confidence, leading them to target more sensitive and strategically important sites.
FILE- Motorcyclists ride by the entrance of the airport in Niamey, Niger, Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023. (AP Photo/Sam Mednick, File)
FILE -In this image taken from video provided by ORTN, Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani makes a statement, July 28, 2023, in Niamey, Niger. (ORTN via AP, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — When some Gilded Age gentleman hunters organized a New York event to compare their dogs, could they have imagined that people would someday call it the World Series of dogdom or the Super Bowl of dog shows?
Of course they couldn't. The World Series and the Super Bowl didn't exist. Nor, for that matter, did the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty.
But the Westminster Kennel Club's dog show did, and still does. With the 150th annual show set to start Saturday, here's a then-and-now look at the United States' most famous canine competition.
“The trappings, the window dressing, you know, changes over time. But what’s at the core, what’s the heart of it, which is the love of dogs ... that has been the same,” says club President Donald Sturz.
It comes from the Westminster Hotel, where the show's founders liked to belly up to the bar and brag about their dogs. The hotel is long gone. The moniker stuck.
The club's “First Annual New York Bench Show of Dogs,” in 1877, was no small thing. It featured about 1,200 dogs of a few dozen breeds, ranging from pugs to mastiffs. They included an English setter valued at $5,000, at a time when an average laborer in New York made about $1.30 a day. The Associated Press reported that “the bulldogs are represented by a number of noticeable delegates,” and a family of “Japanese spaniels” was “highly amusing.”
It wasn't the first U.S. dog show, but it wowed and endured. Among U.S. sporting events, only the Kentucky Derby has a longer history of being held every year.
This year's Westminster show boasts 2,500 dogs, representing as many as 212 breeds and 10 “varieties” (subsets of breeds, such as smooth vs. wirehaired dachshunds). Some likely hadn’t made it to the U.S. in 1877. Others didn't exist yet anywhere.
But many are much the same as they were in Westminster’s early days, Sturz says. Some details — the length of muzzles, the thickness of coats — have shifted in this breed or that, and better canine nutrition may have led to “a little bit more size, or a little more bone” in some, he said.
Today, all the canines have champion rankings in a formalized sport with a complicated point system and official “standards” for judging each breed. They compete for best in show, a trophy that Westminster added in 1907. Earlier shows had no overall prize.
Hundreds of other dogs now vie for separate titles in agility and other sports, which kick off this year's show on Saturday.
When Westminster started, the dogs weren’t the only ones with a pedigreed air.
“Everybody was fashionably dressed and wore an air of good breeding,” The New York Times said of the 1877 show — and the paper was talking about the spectators, not the animals. Not to be outdone, some canines also were gussied up in lace collars and ribbons.
Over the years, the event drew entries from foreign royals, American tycoons and modern-day celebrities including Martha Stewart and Tim McGraw. A decades-long list of pro athletes have cheered on their animals, from baseball’s Lou Gehrig and Barry Bonds to the NFL’s Morgan Fox.
Westminster has carried a whiff of bygone, clubby gentility into the 21st century — handlers wear suits and dresses, upper-round judges black tie — and the competition is hardly casual. Many top contenders come in with hired professional handlers and a show record built on near-constant travel, with buzz built through dog-magazine ad campaigns.
Still, many people handle their own dogs and work or are retired from policing, medicine, the military, corporate jobs or other fields. Some of the animals also have jobs, including bomb-sniffing and search-and-rescue.
“It’s an elite event, but it’s one that we want everyone to feel that they can access and be a part of,” says Sturz, a clinical psychologist and retired school district superintendent.
Westminster debuted at Gilmore's Garden, a precursor to today's Madison Square Garden. Nearly every subsequent show has been in some iteration of the building, even after part of it collapsed and killed four people, including a Westminster official, shortly before the 1880 show. Next week's semifinals and best-in-show finals, set for late Tuesday, will be held in the present-day Garden.
From the start, the show has drawn thousands of spectators in person — and many more on TV since the late 1940s, with still more via streaming.
Of course, that's not the only way Westminster has been portrayed on-screen.
Yes, we're talking about “Best in Show,” director-writer-actor Christopher Guest's cult-classic 2000 mockumentary about obsessives and oddballs competing at the fictional “Mayflower” dog show in Philadelphia. Guest attended Westminster during his extensive research for the film.
Is it really like that? As with any satire: sort of. Circulate at Westminster, and you'll certainly see some wound-up people primping and presenting animals, but you'll also see some competitors cheering for each other, sharing expertise and playing with cherished pets.
Show folk had mixed feelings about the movie. But it helped expand Westminster’s audience, says David Frei, who hosted the show broadcast from 1990 to 2016.
“They didn't make fun of the dogs,” Frei said. “They just made fun of the people.”
As Westminster's prominence grew, it became a magnet for complaints that dog breeding puts looks ahead of health. As far back as 1937, some show-goers questioned whether collies' narrow heads and long noses were healthy, according to an AP story at the time.
In recent years, animal welfare activists have sometimes infiltrated the ring or demonstrated on the sidelines. This year, PETA has put up billboards near the venues about the breathing problems of flat-faced dogs, and oxygen-tank-carrying supporters plan to demonstrate outside.
“Westminster has had countless opportunities to evolve, yet it clings to an outdated obsession with aesthetics,” a PETA staff writer said in a recent op-ed distributed by the Tribune Content Agency.
Sturz said the club “has a longstanding history of showing its commitment to dog welfare.”
He notes that the organization has donated to veterinary scholarships, pet-friendly domestic violence shelters, rescue groups and other canine causes. Those ties go all the way back to 1877, when some proceeds from the first Westminster show helped the nation's oldest humane society, the ASPCA, build its first shelter.
FILE - Four Russian wolfhounds arrive by limousine with chauffeur Jim Colby at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden in New York, Feb. 13, 1956. (AP Photo/Jacob Harris, File)
FILE - A security worker wraps up a protester during the best in show competition at the 148th Westminster Kennel Club dog show Tuesday, May 14, 2024, at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson, File)
FILE - Guemart Limited Edition, a Yorkshire Terrier from Mexico City, is groomed by Jesus Guerrero backstage prior to competition in the 131st Westminster dog show Monday Feb.12, 2007 at Madison Square Garden in New York.(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
FILE - Kirby, a male Papillon, and his owner John Oulton react after winning best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club 1999 Dog Show at Madison Square Garden in New York Tuesday, Feb. 9, 1999. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)
FILE - The Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, left, holds Ch. Pugville's Golden Victory during judging of the pug class during the Westminster Kennel Club Show at Madison Square Garden in New York, Feb. 13, 1956, as the dog's owner, Arnold Canton, far right, and dog breeder Harriet Smith, look on. (AP Photo/Jacob Harris, File)
