NIAMEY (Reuters) - Some 800,000 people will require food aid in Niger in the coming months despite a good harvest last year due to problems supplying cereals to markets, which have pushed up prices, and an influx of Malian refugees, the United Nations said. The U.N. office for humanitarian coordination (OCHA) said they would need food from now until the start of the rainy season, which is usually in July, July and August.

A Nigerian warplane crashed in Niger on Monday, from where it was conducting military operations in neighbouring Mali, and the two pilots were killed, an army source in Niamey said. The fighter jet was part of Nigeria's air fleet engaged with an African force battling hardline Islamists in Mali. The Niger military source said it had suffered a "mechanical" problem. "A Nigerian fighter plane crashed this morning (Monday) in the Dargol zone (west), killing the two pilots," the officer said.

A group of soldiers accused of an attack on an elite commando barracks which the Guinea Bissau government described as an attempted coup were jailed for up five years, a judicial source said on Friday. The 12 defendants were convicted of crimes against the security of the state and attacking a military unit on October 21 last year after a dawn raid which left seven people dead, including six of the attackers.

The party was just getting started at a plush club in this teeming Nigerian city, hip-hop blaring, the bar bathed in blue light -- and champagne bottles on ice already adorning tables. "Too much oil money," said a 40-year-old man at Rhapsody's in the high-end Victoria Island district of Lagos, when asked about Nigerian spending on champagne. Two bottles of Laurent-Perrier chilled in ice buckets on the table in front of him. His company was picking up the tab, like others here, he said, declining to give his name or say what he did for a living.