Test strugglers Bangladesh and Zimbabwe have both turned down an offer by Kenya to play them in a one-day international, claiming their national sides needed a break, local officials said on Monday. Kenya are keen to play top-quality opposition ahead of this month’s International Cricket Council International Cup semifinals in Namibia.
No image available
/ 30 September 2005
Southern Sudan’s new parliament sat for the first time on Friday in the southern capital of Juba to discuss the region’s post-war constitution, according to reports monitored in the Kenyan capital. The legislature is part of a peace deal signed by the Khartoum government and the former southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement .
No image available
/ 29 September 2005
A Ugandan was arrested after being caught roasting his neighbour’s dog in order to eat it, local media reported on Thursday. Police arrested Hakim Abale Asega on a tip-off from neighbours who said they found him barbecueing ”a fat brown dog”. They suspected he had earlier clubbed it to death.
No image available
/ 29 September 2005
The four parties that make up Ethiopia’s largest opposition alliance, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) have merged to form one party, an official of the coalition said on Thursday. The All Ethiopia Unity Party, the Union of Ethiopia Democracy Party, Rainbow Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Democratic League announced their unification on Saturday.
No image available
/ 29 September 2005
The Kenyan Wildlife Service on Wednesday suspended the relocation of elephants from an overcrowded coastal reserve to a more spacious park in order to monitor their resettlement and avoid bad weather, officials said. The operation began in August to move 400 animals from Shimba Hills National Reserve to Tsavo East National Park.
No image available
/ 28 September 2005
Police have detained a journalist on charges of incitement stemming from a commentary he wrote during a constitutional debate that has brought Kenyans to blows, his editor said on Wednesday. Detectives lured David Ochami of the Kenya Times from the newsroom on Tuesday by pretending to be news sources.
No image available
/ 19 September 2005
Since gaining independence in 1963, Kenya has held four elections. But, perhaps the most decisive ballot of all has been cast by citizens who voted with their feet — leaving Kenya for countries that seemed more promising. Concerns about corruption, economic decline and insecurity have prompted an exodus of professionals.
No image available
/ 16 September 2005
Researchers in Kenya and South Africa are using cellphone technology to gather information on elephants, cheetahs, leopards and other animals. The relatively cheap tracking device includes a no-frills cellphone that is put in a weatherproof case with a GPS receiver, memory card and software to operate the system. The unit, placed on a collar, is then tied around the neck of a wild animal.
No image available
/ 16 September 2005
A lion calls to others in booming, short moans during a night’s downpour. Just after dawn, a group of rhinos forages for the day’s first meal. Meru National Park, has only recently begun seeing such scenes again after decades of poaching obliterated its rhino population and scared away most other animals.
No image available
/ 14 September 2005
The roads are dirt tracks, the children are barefoot, and there are no street lights in Funyula village, western Kenya. But as darkness falls, and villagers huddle around paraffin lamps, three red neon lights come to life on a hillside overlooking their huts. They illuminate a cellphone mast, the latest addition to the landscape.
No image available
/ 13 September 2005
Torn by conflicting desires to help and with desperate needs at home, perennial aid recipients in Africa have confronted a blizzard of emotions in their response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in the wealthy United States. At least five African nations, three of them in the highly undeveloped and disaster prone sub-Saharan Africa, have contributed money to relief efforts.
No image available
/ 13 September 2005
United Nations staff have returned to their offices in Somalia’s temporary seat of government in Jowhar after Somali authorities locked them out of the UN Children’s Fund compound, a UN official in Nairobi confirmed on Tuesday. This follows the relocation of 13 staff on September 8 owing to security concerns in the area.
No image available
/ 13 September 2005
A Somali warlord, whose fighters over the weekend seized control of the United Nations premises in the country’s disputed capital of Jowhar, on Tuesday handed back offices to the organisation’s local staff. Mohamed Omar Habeb, who in June offered the Somali transitional leadership refuge in Jowhar, about 90km north of Mogadishu, returned the keys of the UN Children’s Fund offices to the staff.
No image available
/ 12 September 2005
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees urged the international community on Friday to take measures to stop desperate people being smuggled out of Somalia to Yemen by unscrupulous traders. At least 150 people have died in dangerous boat journeys across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia during the past three weeks.
No image available
/ 12 September 2005
Everyone wants a piece of Kenya’s national parks: the Somali herdsman in search of pasture for his cattle; the villager hunting antelope; the Tanzanian entrepreneur seeking a rare plant. And, of course, ivory poachers. Park managers say they can’t deal effectively with these problems because of insufficient funding, staff and equipment.
No image available
/ 9 September 2005
Everyone wants a piece of Kenya’s national parks. The Somali herdsman in search of pasture for his cattle. The villager hunting antelope. The Tanzanian entrepreneur seeking a rare plant. And, of course, ivory poachers. Park managers say they can’t deal effectively with these problems because of insufficient funding, staff and equipment.
No image available
/ 9 September 2005
A new strain of a wheat fungal disease that has emerged in East Africa may spread if steps are not taken to develop resistant wheat, researchers said on Thursday. As much as 10% of the world’s wheat crops, with an estimated value of -billion, could fail if the disease is not tackled, said Masa Iwanaga, the director general of
the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre.
No image available
/ 7 September 2005
The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, has expressed concern over the death of at least 75 Somali and Ethiopian would-be immigrants who drowned last week as they were being smuggled to Yemen on boats from Somalia. The UNHCR quoted survivors as saying that they were forced to jump into the sea and swim to shore.
No image available
/ 6 September 2005
Rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) have arrested three suspects and seized 22 elephant tusks they were trying to sell in the southeastern part of the country. KWS spokesperson Gichuki Kabukuru said undercover rangers arrested the men in the town of Garsen, about 390km southeast of the capital Nairobi, last Thursday after posing as prospective buyers.
No image available
/ 5 September 2005
Kenya will hold its first-ever nationwide referendum on November 21 when voters cast ballots on a new Constitution that has already deeply split the East African nation, officials said on Monday. On that date, 11,8-million voters will be asked to accept or reject a draft Constitution containing sweeping changes to Kenya’s founding document.
No image available
/ 2 September 2005
A ship carrying food aid for Somali tsunami victims remains in the hands of Somali pirates after more than two months, a spokesperson for the United Nations World Food Programme said on Friday in Nairobi. ”We received a request through a third party to change the port of discharge,” he said.
No image available
/ 1 September 2005
Illegal fishing off Somalia’s coast has reached proportions of about -million annually, a United Nations official said on Thursday in Nairobi. ”It is mostly foreign vessels but we don’t know who they are,” said Ghanim Alnajjar, the UN’s independent expert on the situation of human rights in Somalia.
The European Union on Tuesday warned Somalia’s bickering leaders to resolve a long-running and deepening dispute over the seat of the lawless nation’s transitional government or lose out on much-needed aid. ”The leaders have some differences that are not fully encouraging aid to Somalia,” British envoy David Bell told a meeting of EU diplomats.
A Kenyan court in Narok on Thursday charged two men with capital offenses in a brazen armed attack on a group of Japanese, South African and United States tourists in the country’s famed Maasai Mara game reserve this week. The pair, who were escorted into the courtroom under tight security, pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The Land Rover bounced down a yellow dirt track, carrying three khaki-clad European tourists streaked with sweat, exhilarated after an elephant-spotting expedition. By the roadside, farmers sitting on fallen tree trunks complained that a herd of elephants had broken through electric fences yet again, wreaking havoc among their plots of cassava and fruit trees.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) welcomed a cash donation from Germany for its aid operation in Mali on Tuesday. The German ministry for economic cooperation donated €500 000 (R3,9-million) for urgently needed food aid for the people in the West African country, according to a WFP statement.
Two Japanese tourists were wounded and three others were robbed along with two South Africans when an armed gang hijacked a pair of safari vans in Kenya’s famed Maasai Mara game reserve, police said on Tuesday. Seven men armed with a rifle, clubs and machetes attacked the tourists on Monday evening as they were returning from a game drive.
The Kenya Wildlife Service will relocate 400 elephants to Kenya’s largest national park, from a smaller national reserve in the country’s south-east that has too many elephants, a spokesperson said on Monday. The ,2-million exercise will begin on Thursday and involve transporting elephants more than 350km.
A seemingly endless cycle of extreme violence in lawless Somalia is having a ”catastrophic” effect on the war-shattered nation’s civilian population, the international charity Médécins sans Frontières (MSF) said on Monday. ”The frightening fact is that Somalia is officially not even at war,” MSF said.
A Kenyan Cabinet minister has made an outspoken attack on white settlers, telling a public rally that farmers of British origin ”will have to go away”, in the latest spat in a feud with the British government over allegations of corruption. Transport Minister Chris Murungaru, who launched the attack at a public rally at the weekend, was banned from travelling to Britain last month.
African conservationists on Thursday dismissed with contempt a suggestion by United States scientists that the best way to save the planet’s large wild mammals, most of them native to Africa, is to build a huge nature preserve in the midwest United States.
Africa’s demand for two permanent veto-wielding seats on an expanded United Nations Security Council is non-negotiable and must be met if the world is serious about improving conditions on the continent, Kenya said on Thursday. Kenya said Security Council expansion as part of broader UN reform is essential.