KENYA

Rwanda, Burundi, large tracts of southern Niger and Chad, and most of Ethiopia are the most vulnerable parts of a continent that could be the biggest loser from global warming, researchers said on Tuesday. Africa has contributed least to greenhouse gases that cause climate change but its underdevelopment means it is also least prepared to deal with the consequences.

Rwanda is seeking the extradition from Britain of four alleged masterminds of the 1994 genocide in which more than half a million people were killed, an official said on Tuesday. Tharcisse Karugarama, Rwanda’s Justice Minister, said his country has formally requested that the British government hand over the suspects.

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.

Kenyan Muslims on Saturday accused the United States of lying about plans by Somali Islamists to carry out suicide attacks in Kenya and Ethiopia. The Supreme Council of Kenyan Muslims said Washington is using the alleged threats as a ploy to attack and destroy Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement.

Kenya is showing commitment to fight corruption that has strained relations with key donors but recognises it still has more work to do to eradicate the problem, a senior World Bank official has said. The World Bank has delayed -million worth of aid to Kenya until it is satisfied that the government is committed to the fight against corruption.

The high-profile murder trial of a British aristocrat charged with killing a Kenyan poacher resumed on Monday with a witness testifying the defendant’s family farm was frequented by the victim. After a month-long break in the trial of Thomas Cholmondeley, the witness said he had gone with the slain man to the farm to poach many times before the May 10 incident.

Kenya have been handed an indefinite ban from all international competitions by football’s world governing body Fifa on Tuesday, according to reports from Nairobi. Fifa’s disciplinary panel are reported to have suspended the country for failing to respect agreements to resolve recurrent problems in their football association.

In a warehouse on the outskirts of Nairobi, the ”Lord of the Ringtones” holds sway over a growing cellphone service empire amid an African explosion in mobile technology. Ken Njoroge’s two-year-old Cellulant firm has seized on the phenomenal surge in cellphone use.

Facing a huge surge in the number of Somali refugees fleeing unrest, Kenya on Friday renewed appeals for dialogue between Somalia’s powerful Islamist movement and weak government to prevent conflict. More than 30 000 Somalis have arrived in Kenya since the beginning of the year.

Kenyan football officials on Thursday accused Fifa of applying double standards in its condemnation of the country as they braced for another suspension for the second time in as many years. Fifa’s executive committee proposed on Wednesday that Kenya be suspended for failing to respect agreements to resolve recurrent problems in the country’s football association.

Eritrea on Wednesday rejected a United Nations Security Council call to immediately withdraw troops from a demilitarised buffer zone on its arch-foe Ethiopia, criticising the world body for ineffectiveness. Asmara claimed it had a sovereign right to have troops on any portion of its soil.

Ethiopian security forces massacred 193 people — triple the official death toll — during anti-government protests following last year’s election, a senior judge appointed to investigate the violence said on Wednesday. Unarmed protesters were shot, beaten and strangled to death, said Wolde-Michael Meshesha, vice-chairperson of the government-backed inquiry.

Presidential election campaigning began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Friday. Frontrunners Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba square off for the second time on October 29 after a run-off election was called following July’s vote. Then, incumbent President Joseph Kabila won 45% of the vote, just short of the 50% needed to be declared president.

More than 120-million Africans face starvation because much of the £3-billion (,6-billion) in aid spent each year to help them is wasted, an aid organisation said on Tuesday. International aid arrives too late, is targeted at the wrong things and is usually only a short term measure that doesn’t tackle the root cause of hunger said humanitarian aid organisation Care International UK.

A more than three-fold jump in the amount of cocaine seized in Africa has sparked fears the continent is rapidly becoming a trafficking hub, African law enforcement officers were told this week. Seizures of the drug across Africa surged from 1,1 tonnes in 2003 to 3,6 tonnes in 2004, according to the most recent United Nations statistics available, far outpacing the worldwide increase of 18% in the same period.

A rally car driver described on Wednesday how he saw the great-grandson of Kenya’s most famous white settler shoot dead a black Kenyan ”by mistake” in a trial that has awakened animosities from colonial times. Thomas Cholmondeley has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Robert Njoya, a local stonemason he accuses of poaching on his land.

The growing tide of Somalis fleeing conflict at home has raised the number of refugees in Kenya to the highest for a decade and is threatening to exhaust food aid stocks, the United Nations warned on Tuesday. About 24 000 people have entered the Dadaab camps in northern Kenya since the start of the year, the UN World Food Programme said.

An elderly nun who was gunned down at the hospital where she worked in Somalia’s capital was ”specifically targeted before being executed by gunmen lying in wait”, a hospital official said on Monday. Willy Huber, regional director of the Austrian-funded hospital where 65-year-old Sister Leonella had worked for four years, said the killing was not random.

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.