Image via WikipediaThe Big Question: What would a genocide charge mean for Sudan's leader and his country?
Cape Town on Friday, 2 February 1990, 20 years ago today, was an extraordinary place to be. Everyone seemed to be there. The world's press had descended on South Africa's coastal capital in expectation of what would be the biggest news story of the year. Television cameras roamed the town, but as the day wore on they concentrated outside the State Parliament where a momentous event was expected to be announced. In Greenmarket Square and along Grand Parade in the heart of the city, wealthy young whites mixed happily with black demonstrators carrying the black, green and gold flags of the banned African National Congress (ANC) party. Archbishop Tutu was at St George's Cathedral with his flock, which included more whites than blacks, ready to celebrate a happening which he seemed to regard as the Second Coming.
An anti-piracy maritime group today insisted it should be allowed to negotiate a payment for the release of two British hostages before their captors lose patience.If a proposal under consideration by the African Union this week were to bear fruit, Haitians made homeless by the earthquake could start afresh in a new homeland in Africa.
Nigeria's main militant group called off a three-month-old ceasefire in the Niger Delta on today and threatened to unleash "an all-out assault" on Africa's biggest oil and gas industry.
Nigeria's cabinet rallied around ailing President Umaru Yar'Adua yesterday, passing a unanimous resolution that he remains capable of holding office despite a two-month absence for medical treatment.
Two African countries are trying to open a new breach in the worldwide ivory trade ban, which conservationists fear could lead to more African elephants being slaughtered by poachers.
Mosque and government officials have pulled more bodies from wells and sewage pits in a village near the Nigerian city of Jos, victims of what the US-based Human Rights Watch said appeared to have been a targeted massacre.
More than 30,000 victims of toxic dumping on the west coast of Africa may never see a penny of their compensation, British lawyers have warned, after they lost a crucial battle in the courts of Ivory Coast.Sectarian violence spread to two more cities in central Nigeria last night, after troops brought calm to Jos by forcing residents to stay indoors.
Angolan police are rounding up peaceful activists and accusing them of responsibility for this month's deadly attack on the Togo football team, a human rights lawyer said.
Most people in most places dread an encounter with a dentist. In the wilds of South Sudan it amounts to a fascinating surprise. Michael Deng Ngok is the only dentist for thousands of miles. Even he has no idea how many potential patients he caters for. A rough guess comes to more than one million.
A decade and a half after the genocide that decimated Rwanda, the country appears quite peaceful; prosperous, even. Aid workers in shiny 4x4s may still be conspicuous on the streets of its capital, Kigali, but more cheerful are the guys in bright-yellow tabards flogging pay-as-you-go airtime on the street corners, cashing in on Africa's mobile-phone boom. And, if you listen closely, there is another hopeful sign that this small east African republic is attempting to put the horrors of 1994 behind it: the sound of choirs and the inanga, the region's zither-like instrument; of hip-hop and rootsy reggae.
An archaeological team led by Dr. Zahi Hawass has discovered several new tombs that belong to the workers who built the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre. “This is the first time to uncover tombs like the ones that were found during the 1990s, which belong to the late 4th and 5th Dynasties (2649-2374 BC),” said Dr. Hawass.
A whispering campaign is under way in Uganda's capital, Kampala, accusing Paul Semugoma, a doctor, of being a predatory homosexual, actively recruiting younger men into his "vice" with the help of foreign conspirators. His home and business addresses have been published online and he has received a string of death threats. "They are saying that I'm the 'gay tycoon', spreading the infectious disease of homosexuality in Uganda," he says with a bitter laugh. "It's such nonsense."
The Angolan separatist group that carried out the deadly ambush on the Togolese national football team at the African Nations Cup has vowed to strike again. The year in which sporting events will decide Africa's standing in the world has barely begun, and one of the continent's almost-forgotten and least understood conflicts is threatening to dash optimists' hopes.Sudan dismissed warnings from aid groups and activists that it was sliding back to war, as it marked the fifth anniversary of a faltering peace deal with the south and prepared for two divisive votes.
It was billed as Africa's Statue of Liberty, an artistic colossus to celebrate the continent's renaissance. To many in Senegal, it has become nothing but a monumental scandal.On a continent plagued by droughts and floods, an unremarked revolution is under way in the arid Southern Province of Zambia where 58-year-old Munalula Mate has harnessed the internet to help forecast and prevent natural disasters. Once the bread-basket province of the nation, the region around the city of Livingstone has in recent years experienced a slump in its agricultural fortunes because of the floods and droughts that ravage the area at regular intervals. But thanks to Mr Mate's work, that trend is being swiftly reversed.
A radical Muslim cleric who was once jailed in Britain for inciting murder and racial hatred was deported from Kenya to the West African nation of Gambia today, an official said.
They are popularly known as Border Gezi camps. They are named after the man who, as Zimbabwe's Minister of Youth, was put in charge of recruiting young supporters of Robert Mugabe into the militia which is implicated in violent attacks on the political opponents of the Zimbabwean President.
If nowhere really has a middle, then it can't be far from Macha. This southern Zambian village is about 50 miles from the nearest town and two hours' drive from the nearest paved road. Nonetheless, 130,000 people live within a 20-mile radius.
Up to a million people are facing starvation in southern Somalia after the World Food Programme was forced to suspend operations yesterday following threats and attempted extortion by armed militants.
To fetch water from the Ewaso Ng'iro river you have to climb all the way down its collapsing banks to the brown trickle at the bottom. Carrying her yellow plastic container, this is what Jennifer Kutinyia does.In the desert borderlands of Mali and Niger, UN envoys have been seized and one tourist executed by a group calling itself al-Qa'ida in the Maghreb, the same organisation that is waging a bombing campaign in Algeria.
( Al qaeda is a lie )
A Human rights group has accused Unesco of gross hypocrisy for its collaboration with Equatorial Guinea's dictator of 30 years, Teodoro Obiang Nguema.
Ask yourself, where would you be today without gold? For some people, the answer might be several ounces lighter around the neck, ears and fingers. For others, possibly, in search of replacement fillings.
As Sudan approaches its fifth anniversary of peace, the fragile accord which has held the north and the south together is unravelling and Africa's biggest country is sliding back dangerously towards what was the continent's longest war. Momentous elections are due in a matter of months, a referendum on separation looms and Sudan's complex ceasefire is in open crisis.
Even all this time later, the women were ashamed to give too many details. But it happened, they said, in the village of Nadugne Agam. There was no water locally and the women had to carry it from the river, bent double, in back-breaking, 25-litre heavy-duty containers strapped to their shoulders.
Yidnekachew Seif is 16 and has not been close to a computer ever before in his life. He is so overawed that he sits back from it, about three feet away, allowing his two friends to control the keyboard and mouse.
Dr Maslah was still writing a message of congratulations to his best friend when news reached him of the bombing. The young surgeon was starting another gruelling shift at Galkayo hospital and was happy that a few hundred miles south in Mogadishu his friends at medical school were celebrating their graduation. A year earlier he had been the one collecting his degree as one of the first class of university graduates in Somalia since 1991. He was looking forward to getting some reinforcements.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, blessed with an abundance of precious minerals but blighted by years of war, hope can sometimes seem the scarcest commodity. But if that is the case, no one told Henri Bura Ladyi.The Government yesterday welcomed Rwanda as the newest member of the Commonwealth.
The attack came at first light. The village of Bogoro was turned into a slaughterhouse where "some were shot dead in their sleep, some cut up by machetes to save bullets", the International Criminal Court (ICC) was told yesterday. "Others were burned alive after their houses were set on fire by the attackers," the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, recounted. ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=bc1bcbd3-22d6-4ab3-900f-1767dc3713c1)
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