KENYA

Escalating clashes over fertile land in Kenya’s Mount Elgon region have killed 60 people and forced tens of thousands more from their homes since December, the Kenya Red Cross said on Tuesday. Land is an explosive issue in the East African nation, where for decades top politicians grabbed public land for political patronage.

Top Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Ahmed — seen by many as a key to reconciliation in post-war Somalia — has left the custody of Kenyan intelligence and was reported by a website to be heading to Yemen. ”It’s true that I’m heading to Yemen,” he was quoted as saying on the website of the London-based ONKOD news agency run by a Somali journalist.

A senior leader in Somalia’s Islamist movement wanted by the country’s transitional government has surrendered to authorities in neighbouring Kenya, a Kenyan official and diplomatic sources said on Monday. Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed presented himself to Kenyan officials at the border on the weekend and is being held in an undisclosed location, they said.

Anti-globalisation activists marched on Saturday through Africa’s largest slum, calling for an end to conflict and a new war on poverty at the start of a major protest against global capitalism. Nearly 5 000 delegates attending the World Social Forum trekked from Kibera, the slum featured in the 2005 film The Constant Gardner.

African governments’ failure to deliver on a 2001 vow to spend 15% of budgets on health has cost the continent 40-million lives, activists including Nobel winners Desmond Tutu and Wangari Maathai said on Sunday. ”The governments are to blame of course, but nothing has been done about it because ordinary people have not demanded it,” Maathai said in a call to action.

An annual meeting of social activists worldwide made no tangible achievements since it began in 2001, but has highlighted the importance of social issues, Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said on Friday. The seventh World Social Forum (WSF) begins in Nairobi on Saturday.

African rights champions like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and environmentalist Wangari Maathai will join thousands of fellow campaigners when the continent hosts a global anti-capitalist jamboree this weekend. Organisers predict more than 80 000 people will descend on Nairobi to campaign over trade, poverty, war and the environment.

Faltering peace talks in southern Sudan aimed at ending one of Africa’s most brutal conflicts suffered a new blow Friday after Ugandan rebels pulled out, claiming their security was threatened and they were no longer welcome by Sudanese mediators.

Food aid began reaching 6 000 Somalis on Friday trying to flee fighting in their homeland but blocked from entering Kenya, the United Nations said. A war that ousted south Somalia’s six-month Islamist rulers sent thousands of civilians heading for the border with Kenya.

Kenyan police on Thursday interrogated two al-Qaeda suspects’ wives caught fleeing Somalia, as mystery remained over whether their husbands survived a United States air strike. The US on Monday hit a village in southern Somalia in an attempt to take out an al-Qaeda cell accused of bombing two US embassies and an Israeli-owned hotel.

Rift Valley Fever, a highly contagious virus, has killed 74 people in Kenya and infected hundreds more after spreading from the north-eastern region to the coast, the Health Ministry said on Tuesday. The fever, which is spread through mosquito bites or movement of contaminated animals, causes flu-like symptoms and can lead to death through bleeding.

An outbreak of Rift Valley fever has claimed 25 lives in Kenya in the past week, bringing the death toll to 62 as the disease spreads, health officials said on Thursday. The disease has infected nearly 200 people since an outbreak was first diagnosed in mid-December.

The United States has a right to pursue Somalia’s Islamists, which it believes have ties to international terror networks, the US embassy in Kenya said on Thursday. On Wednesday, the US State Department said the country is working with other countries in the region to ensure that Islamists linked to terrorism are not able to flee the country.

Ethiopian helicopters, helped by United States intelligence, nearly hit Somali Islamist leaders after they fled their last stronghold, officials said on Thursday. Kenyan police said, meanwhile, that a Kenyan military helicopter was ”extensively damaged” after it came under sustained ground fire while patrolling the border with Somalia, hours after the border was closed.

Authorities were on Wednesday deporting dozens of Somali refugees who had fled to Kenya from violence in lawless Somalia as Nairobi tightened security on the frontier. A day after Ethiopian helicopters missed their Islamist targets, instead bombing positions in Kenya, police escorted the refugees across the border into Somalia from a registration centre in Liboi.

Three people have died in Kenya after clashes between police and residents of one of Africa’s largest slums on Sunday. Police were deployed to the sprawling Kibera slum, which houses an estimated 800 000 people, after a political rally became unruly, with opposing sides pelting each other with stones and some forcing a passing train to grind to a halt.

African leaders met in Kenya on Thursday to discuss security, governance and economic development in the continent’s troubled Great Lakes region. The impoverished and volatile area, which includes Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and eastern Democratic of Congo, has been mired in violence since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, which triggered a string of wars and counter-wars.