In early 1881, as the French army invaded neighbouring Tunisia, the police tightly controlled the arrival of two commodities in the port of Algiers: gunpowder and news. Reports target everything from subversive printed material to songs describing distant events told by meddah in market-squares, detailing. This paper aims to examine the uses of news, and specifically news of international events, as an explosive social commodity in colonial Algeria. Such news was widely consumed in a variety of formats: cable wires dashed across the Mediterranean from Paris to Algiers to materialise in newsrooms on French-language newspapers; apocalyptic prophecies roamed the countryside drawing on events in the Ottoman Empire to predict the imminent end of the time of the French; rumours of imminent British invasion paralyzed seemingly remote mountainous towns. Sometimes news was written, sometimes it was whispered in cafés maures, sometimes it was in Italian, sometimes in classical Arabic. All of these formed a complex ecosystem tying the material with the intellectual. Algeria may have been a part of France, but it was not simply cut off from the rest of the world, and once news penetrated into Algeria, it took on a complex life of its own. Since Chris Bayly's work on British India in Empire and Information, historians have pointed to the connection between information control and imperial domination in colonial contexts. Fewer scholars have ventured beyond the concerns of the state, however, to inquire into the uses of information by different groups in colonial society, as the state's paranoia of foreign subversion left it open to manipulation. Settlers, Muslim notables, foreign interlopers and disgruntled peasants used various forms of news to gain prestige, money, or to frame others in complex cabals involving excessive knowledge of faraway places. A particular article or seditious song, if reported to the authorities, could blow up an individual's status or career and easily lead to censorship and deportation. Vast state resources poured into controlling and surveilling news not only failed to prevent information from flowing, they could be harnessed by unscrupulous individuals for their own benefit. For reformers and revolutionaries, news of distant events, events where Muslim lived in independent states or where colonised peoples struggled under other imperial powers, provided tools to envisage an alternative horizon for Algeria beyond French rule.