Daniel Wallis

Lunchtime at an upmarket Kenyan safari lodge in what should be the slow off-season, and the dining room is packed with tourists from all over the world. Chattering excitedly in many languages as they watch antelope, buffalo and a giraffe grazing just a short distance away across a stone terrace, they are driving an unprecedented boom in a key sector of East Africa's biggest economy.

The world's poor, who are the least responsible for global warming, will suffer the most from climate change, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told environment ministers from around the world on Monday. ''The degradation of the global environment continues unabated ... and the effects of climate change are being felt across the globe,'' Ban said in a statement.

The top United Nations envoy to Somalia, making his first visit since a war last month, said on Thursday the Horn of Africa nation now had its best chance to end 16 years of anarchy and bloodshed. Francois Lonseny Fall made a swift visit to Mogadishu two weeks after Ethiopian and Somali government troops swept aside Islamists who had run south Somalia for six months.

Western and African diplomats called on Friday for the urgent dispatch of peacekeepers to Somalia to stabilise the country after a two-week war in which Ethiopian-backed government forces routed Islamist fighters. The International Contact Group on Somalia held closed-door talks in Nairobi with Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf.

The United Nations has not given up on sending its own troops to reinforce a peacekeeping force in Darfur, despite strong Sudanese opposition, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said on Wednesday. Speaking to reporters in Nairobi, Annan also described the situation on Sudan's border with Chad as ''very fragile and volatile''.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan launched a plan on Wednesday to help Africa fight global warming, and criticised a ''frightening lack of leadership'' in confronting what he called one of the world's biggest threats.

Saying billions of the world's poorest people are at risk from global warming, Kenya urged a 189-nation conference on Monday to do more to fight climate change and help Africa. Kenyan drummers and dancers started the annual November 6 to 17 talks to chart ways to widen the United Nations's Kyoto Protocol beyond its first period.

No Ugandan rebels have arrived yet at remote camps in south Sudan where they are supposed to assemble under the terms of a landmark truce that began last week, Ugandan negotiators said on Thursday. According to the deal that came into effect on August 29, Lord's Resistance Army fighters were given three weeks to gather at the two locations.

Ugandan rebels hidden in the Democratic Republic of Congo will not surrender unless the International Criminal Court (ICC) scraps arrest warrants for them, the deputy commander of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) said late on Tuesday. Vincent Otti said his fighters would stay in the bush as long as the warrants stayed in place.

Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony has accused government troops of violating a truce in his first comments since the start of an agreement seen as a major breakthrough in ending his 20-year insurgency. The military denied it and said it was ''religiously'' observing the deal struck on Saturday that gives Kony's Lord's Resistance Army guerrillas three weeks to assemble at camps in south Sudan.

Uganda's army by Wednesday had not chosen the safe routes northern rebels are supposed to take from the bush to camps in southern Sudan as part of a truce that may mark the end of one of Africa's longest wars. The delay in announcing the routes should not deter Lord's Resistance Army guerrillas in the north from setting off on foot, a government spokesperson said.

A truce that could spell the end of one of Africa's longest and most brutal wars came into effect on Tuesday, Uganda's military said. Under the pact signed on Saturday at peace talks in southern Sudan, the fugitive rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) have three weeks to assemble at two south Sudanese camps.