Nairobi

Unidentified gunmen shot and killed an award-winning Italian aid worker in the west of self-declared republic of Somaliland during Sunday evening. Annalena Tonelli, who devoted more than three decades to helping Somali refugees, was murdered in the Somaliland town of Borama late on Sunday.

An Aids wave is washing over Southern and East Africa, devastating families and communities, says a UNAids report released at the 13th international conference on Aids in Africa. ”HIV is the first wave of the epidemic, entering silently and virtually unnoticed,” says the report.

Given that an HIV vaccine ”is certainly many years away”, the quest is on to find a microbicide to provide protection during intercourse. An HIV-killing barrier cream, used like a contraceptive gel, is one of the most important yet also most elusive goals in the fight against Aids, a top scientist has said in Nairobi.

HIV/Aids has finally reached the top of the African agenda, according to a new UNAids report. However, the increasing political attention the epidemic has received has not translated into sufficient action, as total funding for HIV/Aids is only half of what is needed.

Somali delegates to a peace conference in Nairobi have endorsed a transitional federal charter under which the strife-torn country will be governed when a final peace accord is reached, but the charter was immediately rejected by key figures who shunned the talks in the Kenyan capital.

Kenya’s government has lifted a ban on the Mau Mau movement, which spearheaded an uprising against British colonial rule in Kenya in the 1950s. Mau Mau fighters are now seeking compensation from the British government for maltreatment in detention camps.

Kenya will this month destroy most of its anti-personnel landmines, National Security Minister Chris Murungaru said in a statement this week.

Nobel Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa arrived in Nairobi on Thursday to attend an international conference on truth commissions.

Kenyan women, who claim they were raped by British soldiers in a period spanning 30 years demonstrated on Thursday in the streets of Nairobi, urging the British government to pay for the cost of raising their mixed-race children.

Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki left Nairobi for Pretoria on Monday to begin a three-day visit expected to include trade talks with his South African counterpart Thabo Mbeki.

Twelve US tourists and two South African crew members were killed when their light plane crashed on Mount Kenya, apparently after flying too close to the mountain, Africa’s second highest, a civil aviation official said on Sunday.

A Kenyan parliamentary committee on Tuesday rejected a new draft Bill aimed at stemming terrorism in the east African nation, citing concerns over individual rights.

The head of the main rebel group in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has officially announced the end of his movement’s five-year war against the Kinshasa-based government, the rebel group said on Saturday.

The Kenyan authorities have been accused of approving a controversial titanium mining venture along the country’s Indian Ocean coast without addressing the economic and environmental concerns raised by the local population.

They had come to see lions, but not like this, decapitated, pawless, bloody and spear marked. Visitors to the park saw the carcass of a beast that was speared to death and mutilated on the edge of Nairobi National Park, Kenya’s oldest game reserve.

Four people were charged with murder on Tuesday over last year’s suicide bomb attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa, as defence lawyers warned that foreign interference could influence the outcome of the trial.

Kenyan police will this week charge four people with murder following an attack last November on an Israeli-run hotel in the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa, the government announced here Monday.

People living on the edge of Kenya’s oldest national park have killed nine lions in the past two months in retaliation for the loss of livestock, Enviroment Minister Newton Kulundu said on Thursday.

The Kenyan government is to declassify and release secret documents to help unravel the role played by retired president Daniel arap Moi’s regime in a financial scandal that defrauded the treasury of billions of dollars.

The London-based rights group Amnesty International has called on delegates attending Somali peace talks in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, to choose leaders who will protect the human rights of all Somalis.

President Mwai Kibaki has declared himself willing to be publicly tested for HIV, Kaffim Mambo, the head of public relations with the Kenya National Aids Control Council (NACC) said on Tuesday.

Finance ministers from across Africa gather in the Ethiopian capital this week for the the 38th annual meeting of the African Development Bank group (ADB), where attention will focus on easing the economic woes of the world’s poorest continent.

There is no lock on the door, no phalanx of guards, no visible impediment to the drugs leaving the glass chamber that the laboratory technicians call a ”stability room”. The pills come in little white boxes with labels such as lamivudine, zidovudine and efavirenz, technical names disguising the fact that these tablets are the stuff of life.

A decade ago, many saw newly independent Eritrea as a beacon of Africa’s democratic potential, but these days, political freedom, elections, and a free press are nowhere in sight in the Horn of Africa country.

Bodies lay in the streets of the DRC town of Bunia on Friday, following a day of clashes between rival militia groups vying to fill a power vacuum left by departing Ugandan soldiers, witnesses said.