Katharine Houreld

An advocacy group on Sunday said new satellite images provide evidence that northern Sudanese troops have committed war crimes.

A helicopter fired warning shots toward a suspected pirate skiff, where six Somali men sat among assault rifles, grappling hooks and a ladder.

A drought in Kenya is so bad that it is even felling the giants of the animal kingdom -- the country's famed elephants.

Nigeria and Angola are Africa's top two oil producers, yet most of their people live in poverty, often in settlements dwarfed by derricks.

Foreign troops should prepare to intervene in Zimbabwe to end a worsening humanitarian crisis, the Kenyan prime minister said on Sunday.

Hundreds of thousands of victims of a brutal 20-year insurgency in northern Uganda remain destitute and traumatised, Amnesty International says.

Kenyan armed forces are accused of preventing aid workers from helping families caught between a brutal militia and an army crackdown.

Dozens of children filed silently into the room, their eyes on the cracks in the floor. One by one they told of being tortured by the Kenyan army.

Kenya's opposition party, determined to bring down the government of President Mwai Kibaki, has called for another day of ''peaceful rallies'' across Kenya in defiance of a ban and despite the deaths of more than 20 people in this week's demonstrations.

The handful of grain Abiye Omar clutches in her skinny hand has travelled a long way from the fertile fields of America's Midwest to the desolate Somali seaside town of Merka. It has sailed on a relief ship through seas plagued by pirates and sharks, then been carried ashore by porters into the hands of aid workers who have to contend with bandits, arsonists and insurgents.

Aid workers are calling it Africa's biggest humanitarian crisis, but no one has to tell Fatima Usman how rapidly things have gone bad in Somalia. The slender 23-year-old's son Mohamed died of hunger. So did her daughter Isha. ''I am praying to God that he will not take this baby yet,'' she says, gently cradling the wizened face of Muhiadeen, her four-month-old son.

Gunmen seized four more foreign workers amid a dramatic rise in violence that has roiled Nigeria's southern petroleum-producing region, oil industry officials said on Wednesday. The attackers carrying assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades stormed a transport vessel carrying the workers in the southern Niger Delta minutes before midnight on Tuesday.