A Yemeni man pleaded guilty to acts of piracy for the hijacking of a US vessel that resulted in the deaths of four US citizens. Prosecutors pledged that “pirates who attack on US citizens on the high seas will face justice in a US courtroom.”
Activists in Nairobi say police used tear-gas against several hundred protesters marching on the offices of Kenya’s president and prime minister to demand action over a growing hunger crisis in the East African nation.
The US has brought a Somali terror suspect to the US to face a civil trial in New York after announcing he had been held for two months at sea—immediately prompting harsh criticism form both civil libertarians and Republicans.
Al-Qaeda leader Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, said to be behind the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, was killed at a checkpoint in Somalia by forces who didn’t realize he was the most wanted man in Africa.
Thousands of families have been displaced in weeks of fighting between the Ahlu Sunna sufi militia and fundamentalist Shabab insurgents in central Somalia. Drought conditions in the countryside have worsened the plight of the displaced.
Security forces killed seven when hundreds of local artisanal miners who invaded the premises of Barrick Gold’s North Mara mine in Tanzania—the latest in a series of deadly confrontations in Africa’s mineral sector.
Ethiopia’s Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) charges that the army has opened an offensive that is targetting civilians in the ethnically Somali region in the country’s east, and is demanding an immediate UN investigation.
South Sudan is witnessing a sharp rise in armed conflict—with less than three months to go before the formal independence of the fledgling nation. Heavy fighting has killed some 1,000 and displaced an estimated 100,000 since southerners voted overwhelmingly for… Read moreWar continues on borders of South Sudan
President Yoweri Museveni has ordered the Uganda Communication Commission to shut down all social networking sites, fearing they will be used as a tool for organizing protests following deadly unrest in Kampala.
Inspired by the Arab Spring, protesters in Swaziland are calling for King Mswati III—Africa’s last absolute monarch—to allow multi-party democracy and rescind salary cuts to public employees.
French special forces aided in the capture of Ivory Coast leader Laurent Gbagbo, who apparently surrendered after French tanks moved in on his residence while it was surrounded by opposition leader Alassane Ouattara’s forces.
A Somali pirate was sentenced by a US district court to 25 years in prison for attacking a Danish ship off the coast of Somalia in 2008, for which he and other pirates received a $1.7 million ransom.
