Authorities in Kenya said on Tuesday they had smashed a massive fraud ring that was bilking the country’s famed national parks and wildlife reserves of millions of dollars in entrance fees each year. At least 75 people, including employees of the Kenya Wildlife Service, tour guides and operators have been arrested, they said.
The United Nations Environmental Programme warned on Tuesday that Africa will slip further into poverty if its governments fail to adopt eco-friendly policies to sustain and exploit its natural wealth. It said the continent’s fast-degrading environment faces fresh strains from genetically modified organisms, invasive species and a switch in chemical manufacturing.
”We are here in Africa. We live in the mainstream, we pay taxes like everybody else in the mainstream, we relate with people in the mainstream. We are a naturally occurring phenomenon in the universe,” said activist Donna Smith of gay people in Africa, at the second Africa Conference on Sexual Health and Rights this week in Nairobi.
Delegations from Somalia’s transitional government and the rival Islamic alliance were due to travel to Sudan on Wednesday to participate in Arab League-led mediation efforts, officials said. Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir, the current chairperson of the Arab League, said on Tuesday he would try to bring the two factions to the negotiating table.
Eager to cash in on its stunning wildlife and scenery, Kenya is revamping its maligned film policy and luring filmmakers with incentives in a bid to become the Hollywood of Africa. Mindful of the stiff competition offered by South Africa and Nigeria, Kenyan officials are determined to see the lucrative movie business, which now directly employs 41 000 people in full- and part-time jobs, grow.
Three top members of a United States-backed alliance of warlords have fled their last remaining stronghold in southern Somalia, apparently to discourage an attack on the town by an increasingly powerful Islamic militia, two Somali officials said on Wednesday.
East African states on Tuesday imposed travel sanctions and froze the bank accounts of Somali warlords who have been blamed for igniting the latest round of deadly fighting in Mogadishu. A ministerial meeting of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, a regional bloc key to the formation of Somalia’s transitional government, agreed to the sanctions.
East African ministers on Tuesday sought ways of ending a devastating conflict in Somalia as Kenya pushed regional states to impose wider travel sanctions on warlords blamed for igniting the latest round of fighting in the capital, Mogadishu. The Inter-Governmental Authority on Development also called for support for a powerless transitional government.
Somali leaders met with regional government ministers on Tuesday to try to find a way to empower Somalia’s United Nations-backed government, which watched from the sidelines as a fundamentalist Islamic militia battled warlords and seized its capital.
Six people were killed when a young Kenyan ran amok with a Kalashnikov rifle, the Daily Nation newspaper reported on Friday. The 18-year-old shot wildly round him, killing five people, including three children. When an angry mob failed to catch him, they killed his brother in his place, beheading him with a machete.
A member of a United States-backed secular alliance of warlords fighting for power in Somalia was kicked out of Kenya on Wednesday after police found him staying at a luxury hotel in Nairobi, authorities said. Abdul Rashid Hussein Shiry was taken to the airport for a flight back to neighbouring Somalia.
<a href="http://www.mg.co.za/specialreport.aspx?area=soccer_world_cup_2006"><img src="http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/272488/icon_focuson_wc3.gif" align=left border=0></a>It has been dubbed "The Greatest Show on Earth", and in Kenya that’s precisely what the Soccer World Cup is. So, with just days before the latest tournament kicks off in Germany, excitement among soccer fans in the East African country is mounting.
The success of Islamic extremists fighting for control of Somalia’s capital could prove a setback in the United States war on terrorism, with the defeat of a counterterrorism alliance providing hope for militants elsewhere in the region. The US has not carried out any direct action in Somalia since the deaths of 18 servicemen on a humanitarian mission in a 1993 battle in Mogadishu.
A cholera outbreak has killed at least 424 people and sickened 14 000 since January in southern Sudan, and officials are concerned the disease could spread to other countries, the World Health Organisation said on Friday. The outbreak has hit seven states in southern Sudan, the Geneva-based United Nations organisation said.
After a month of heated debate punctuated by a walk-out by female lawmakers, Kenya’s predominantly male national assembly on Wednesday approved a watered-down version of new sex-crimes legislation. The law boosts penalties for rapists and other sex offenders but drops provisions from earlier drafts that rights activists had deemed key.
A new plan to address corruption in Kenya has been adopted in the East African country — this as the government continues to be criticised for overseeing widespread graft. The National Anti-Corruption Plan was drawn up by the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission, a government body mandated to investigate graft.
At least 13 people were killed and 15 injured when a crowded bus smashed head-on into a cargo truck in south-eastern Kenya early on Tuesday, trapping many passengers in the wreckage, police said. The bus was travelling from Nairobi to the port city of Mombasa when it hit the truck shortly after midnight local time.
Somalia is on the brink of major disaster as conflict spirals out of control in Mogadishu and donors fail to respond to humanitarian emergencies in the lawless nation, a senior United Nations envoy said on Tuesday. Already beset with drought and poverty, the people of Somalia have been further hit by the fighting that has engulfed the capital.
A Kenyan court on Wednesday charged a British aristocrat with murder in the fatal shooting of a trespasser on his ancestral ranch, the second killing he has been accused of in the past year. In a case that has reopened festering colonial-era resentments in Kenya’s central Rift Valley, Thomas Cholmondeley pleaded innocent to the charge.
Thirty-two men — including South Africans, an American and a Nigerian — have been arrested in the Democratic Republic of Congo in a reported coup plot, news reports said on Wednesday. The South African Department of Foreign Affairs said it is trying to get comprehensive information on the incident.
For women who are victims of rape, recovery from the violation is typically arduous and draining. When they’re unable to get treatment to prevent possible HIV infection the process is even more fraught, however — something with which Kenya is grappling. Known as post-exposure prophylaxis, the anti-HIV treatment is available in just seven of the 73 government district hospitals in Kenya.
Kenya’s famed lion prides could be driven to extinction because ritual killings by tribal warriors are decimating their ranks in and around the country’s protected game reserves, wildlife experts warned on Tuesday. The findings were immediately dismissed by members of the Maasai tribe, which is blamed for most of the deaths among the country’s dwindling lion population.
Kenyan prosecutors on Monday said a local priest plotted the murder of a septuagenarian Italian bishop in northern Kenya last year in a row over cash donated to the diocese from well-wishers. The accusation came as the prosecution opened its case in the trial of the Father Waqo Guyo Malley and five others.
A British aristocrat who escaped murder charges in Kenya after killing a game warden on his family’s ranch last year shot another man to death on the premises on Wednesday, police said. Thomas Cholmondeley, son of the Fifth Baron Delamere and great-grandson of Kenya’s most prominent early British settler, told authorities he fired at a suspected poacher on the ranch in the central Rift Valley.
In an isolated village in Kenya’s western Siaya district, near Lake Victoria, 75-year-old William Onyango gazes at a faded newspaper clipping pinned to the wall of his dank, makeshift store. ”American politician to visit Kenya”, says the headline. A smiling Senator Barack Obama gazes from the photograph accompanying the article.
The United States has renewed its terrorism alert for East Africa, warning of possible attacks at a time of surging maritime piracy throughout the region, the US embassy in Kenya said Tuesday. The advisory, issued by the State Department in Washington, reminds US citizens that Islamic extremists are active and may be plotting attacks in East Africa.
Nearly 30 years after the birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Kenya on Tuesday celebrated the deliveries of the first children conceived through in-vitro fertilisation in the country. The two baby girls were born to two mothers, aged 30 and 35, at a private hospital in the capital on Monday.
A United Nations envoy on Tuesday urged Eritrea to release nearly 100 000 tonnes of food aid feared to be rotting in warehouses as he appealed for donors to meet an urgent appeal to assist drought-hit East Africa. ”The warehouses are closed and the government has the keys,” he told reporters.
On almost any day, at almost any time, children dressed in rags with bottles filled with glue pressed to their faces stake out the major intersections of Kenya’s capital. No one is sure how many children live on the streets of this city of three million, but they certainly number in the tens of thousands.
A group of alleged Somali pirates captured by the United States navy in March have been freed and returned home to lawless Somalia after the US declined to prosecute them, officials said on Tuesday. Ten of the 12 suspected pirates detained on March 18 after firing on US warships in the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast have been handed over to the International Committee for the Red Cross.
The dark clouds threaten a downpour. Already, light showers have started. But Margaret Wangui, her two-year-old daughter strapped tightly to her back, is not running away from the rains. She is fleeing the city council askaris (guards) who are cracking down on hawkers.
Minibus taxis, referred to as ”matatus”, have long been a ubiquitous feature of the Kenyan landscape, providing transport in cities — and linking urban and rural areas. But a revolution is under way in western Kenya: bicycle taxis are replacing motorised vehicles, their passengers perched on padded seats positioned above the back wheel.