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.