As an Anglican row over gay clergy deepens, growing numbers of conservative American priests are abandoning the liberal United States church and pledging allegiance to traditionalist African bishops instead. Africans, who take a tough line on homosexuality, are keen to recruit the dissident priests as bishops under their own authority.
Africa needs a ”green revolution” to double agricultural output and end chronic food insecurity in the world’s poorest continent, former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan said on Monday. The former top diplomat is the chairperson of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, set up last year with a -million grant.
Kenyan police on Tuesday said they had shot dead at least 25 suspected members of the Mungiki criminal gang since last week, after at least 13 people were killed in a surge of violence blamed on the group. Thursday’s conviction of a former Mungiki leader on weapons charges ended a brief lull in the slaughter.
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/ 19 January 2007
Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Friday urged the African Anglican church to concentrate on the continent’s grim problems rather than on the row over gay clergy, and said persecuting gay people is akin to racism. The debate over the role of homosexuals in the church threatens to split the world’s 77-million Anglicans.
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.
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/ 21 December 2006
After all her goats died in a drought that swept East Africa last year, Habiba Abdi Gedi decided to settle a few kilometres from the Darwa river along the Kenya-Ethiopia border. But then this year abnormally heavy rains in the Ethiopian highlands caused flash floods, bursting the river’s banks, and flooding her home.
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/ 10 November 2006
A Nigerian banker was named African Business Leader of 2006 in a competition to honour major contributors to economic development. Tony Elumelu, chief executive officer of the Lagos-based United Bank for Africa, was hailed by United Kingdom-based African Investor magazine as a believer in excellence.
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/ 6 November 2006
Africa lacks the capacity and projects to attract the levels of investment in clean energy seen in other parts of the world, Kenya’s environment minister said on Sunday. Africa lags behind Asia and Latin America in the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, which lets rich nations fund clean energy projects in developing countries.
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/ 7 September 2006
Hundreds of patients are forcibly held in Burundi’s hospitals — sometimes for months — over unpaid bills and many have to sell prized land or cattle to leave, a human rights report said on Thursday. Health care for mothers and children under five is free in the tiny Central African country whose shattered economy is emerging from more than a decade of ethnic conflict.