As the Kenyan military and Shabab rebels accuse each other of killing civilians in southern Somalia, a BBC report suggests Nairobi hopes to carve a separatist enclave to be called “Azania” out of Somalia as a military-controlled “buffer zone.”
King Emere Godwin Bebe Okpabi and other tribal leaders in Nigeria’s Ogoniland filed suit in US court against Royal Dutch Shell, charging the oil giant polluted local groundwater with benzene at levels 900 times World Health Organization limits.
The populace of border towns have fled into the bush ahead of feared clashes, as Kenya sends troops into Somalia to hunt down Shabab insurgents. Shabab protested the “affront to Somalia’s sovereignty” and threatened retaliation within Kenya.
Human Rights Watch applauds Obama’s move to send US military advisors to help crush Uganda’s notoriously brutal Lord’s Resistance Army, while Michelle Malkin and other right-wing bloggers decry the intervention.
President Omar al-Bashir announced that Sudan will adopt an Islamic constitution based on sharia law now that the mostly Christian south has seceded. The creation of an Islamic state raises grave concerns the one million southerners living in Sudan.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said in a joint press release that they have evidence the Sudanese army has committed war crimes in the country’s South Kordofan region, with villages coming under aerial bombardment.
After Boko Haram’s deadly car bomb attack on the UN compound in Abuja, police immediately responded by deploying bulldozers around the city to demolish all “illegal” structures, with the aim of securing better control of the city.
Rep. Peter King claims Somalia’s Shabab insurgents are aggressively recruiting in the US, while The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill claims the CIA has established secret prisons in Somalia where suspected Shabab collaborators are detained.
A new report by the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Centre finds that piracy on the world’s high seas has surged this year, and calls for concerted action by international naval forces.
As South Sudan formally declares independence, thousands of Ethiopian “peacekeepers” are headed for the contested border enclave of Abyei, and the indigenous Nuba people take up arms in the North’s Kordofan region.
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.
