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The Great Rift Valley extends some 4,000 miles southward from Syria north of Israel, through the Gulf of Aqaba, through Ethiopia, and all the way to Mozambique in southeast Africa. It harbors a giant fault, which has been under investigation as a model for sea floor spreading. A recent geologic event rent a gaping crack through the desert of Ethiopia, causing safety concerns for locals. These crustal plate motions may foreshadow rifting events further north in the Great Rift Valley...

Nairobi (dpa) -- Dozens of witchcraft-related murders of albinos in Tanzania and Burundi have left the albino populations of both nations living in fear, a report released Thursday said. The report, Through Albino Eyes, by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), found that around 300 children were hiding in schools for the disabled or emergency shelters in Tanzania. The children are afraid that hunters employed by witchdoctors could murder them for their body parts. "It has been a crisis for over two years, 56 albinos have lost their lives as a result of killings done...

A Boeing plane that used to transport cocaine from Venezuela to West Africa crashed in northern Mali earlier this month after a failed take-off, the representative of the UN's regional office on drugs and crime said Monday.

Volcanic activity in 2005 accompanied the formation of a deep, wide rift in Ethiopia on part of the 4,000-mile-long north-to-south trending Great Rift Valley fault. Studies show that the injection of mantle material that “unzipped” the earth along the fault operated the same way as similar material does in less-accessible undersea rifts. Scientists knew that rifts were formed in this manner, but the suddenness of this one’s formation astonished them...

Monday, November 16, 2009 Islamic Extremists Kill Somali Church Leader Thirteenth Christian Assassinated This Year By Jeremy Reynalds Correspondent for ASSIST News Service WASHINGTON, D.C. (ANS) -- A human rights group has learned that members of al-Shabab (a Somali Islamic extremist group) have killed yet another leader of an underground church in the Somalia capital of Mogadishu. Washington-based International Christian Concern (ICC), reported that on Oct. 10, Pastor Ali Hussein Weheliye was returning home from a worship service when two masked members of al-Shabab ambushed and shot him. He was later taken to Darful Shifa Hospital where he died of...

New Zealand, Denmark, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland are among the top five least corrupt nations, according to a new survey released by Transparency International. Canada is in the top ten. Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan are the most corrupt. Canada ranks amongst the top ten least corrupt countries in the world while conflict-torn states such as Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq are labelled as nations rife with bribery and corruption, according to a new 2009 corruption perception index revealed Tuesday by Transparency International. New Zealand rates as the least corrupt nation followed by Denmark, Singapore and Sweden. Others on the...

ROME – Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe used the U.N. summit on world hunger Tuesday to lash out at the West and defend land reforms blamed for plunging his people into starvation. Addressing the summit hosted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Mugabe said the policy under which thousands of white-owned commercial farms were seized in 2000 was a quest for "equity and justice." He blamed the subsequent meltdown of Zimbabwe's economy on "hostile interventions" by "neocolonialist enemies" that have imposed sanctions on his regime. Western countries have slapped travel bans and asset freezes on Mugabe and his...

Ethiopia Prime Minister Meles Zenawi says failures in the U.S. financial system are largely to blame for Africa's economic crisis in a keynote address to the annual African Economic Conference.Speaking to an audience of academics and policymakers, Ethiopia Prime Minister Meles Zenawi painted a gloomy picture of Africa's economic outlook.Mr. Meles, a former Marxist rebel leader, launched a blistering attack on what he called "discredited neo-liberal economic policies" imposed on Africa from outside. He said unsustainable consumption by the United States when times were good had condemned Africa to a protracted period of low growth ahead."The United States has hitherto...

Deputy police minister yesterday called on police to "shoot the bastards" as the country tries to bring its fearsome crime rates under control. Despite outrage over the killing by police of a three-year-old boy at the weekend, Fikile Mbalula said innocent deaths were unavoidable. Atlegang Phalane was hit in the chest when an officer who thought he saw a weapon opened fire. According to reports his family were not allowed access to his body for several hours after the incident outside his home in Klipfontein, north of Johannesburg. But Mr Mbalula told reporters at the parliament in Cape Town: "In...

MOGADISHU, Somalia – Gunmen have killed a top Somali judge who had sentenced many pirates and human traffickers to long jail terms, the security minister for northern Somalia said Thursday. Mohamed Said Samatar said three men were arrested Thursday over the killing of High Court Judge Mohamed Abdi Aware. In addition to jailing suspected pirates, Aware also recently jailed four members of Somalia's Islamic insurgency. Eyewitness Mohamud Dahir said masked men with pistols shot the judge in the head and chest several times as he left a mosque Wednesday evening in the port city of Bossaso. "These gangs hate him...

SNIPPET: "An al Qaeda leader wanted by the US for a string of deadly attacks has been named the new leader of terror group's network in East Africa. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, one of several al Qaeda leaders charged with carrying out the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, was appointed the leader of al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa. Fazul was "inaugurated" during an open ceremony in the southern city of Kismayo, according to a translation received by The Long War Journal of an article posted Waaga Cusub, a website operated by the Hawiye clan,...

On November 9, 2009, TV5, the international French TV channel, featured a panel of journalists on the theme of "Barack Obama, and a new vision of the United States in Africa". The Africa's correspondant of the French national newspaper Le Figaro gave a surprising comment : "despite what one can think of George W. Bush's policies, we have to admit that he helped Africa enormously. He had a real plan and vision for this continent. This is not the case anymore with Obama. Obama as no vision for Africa. His speeches are only words." Even the Sudanese journalist agreed :...

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt — China's premier on Sunday pledged $10 billion in new low interest loans to African nations over three years, offering the beleaguered continent sorely needed cash while dismissing criticism that Beijing's motives in Africa are far from altruistic. Wen Jiabao's promise at the start of a two-day China-Africa summit was warmly received by African leaders and officials, most of whose nations confront a miasma of despair further accentuated by a global financial crisis that is only now showing signs of abating. "The Chinese people cherish sincere friendship toward the African people, and China's support to Africa's development...

Where is the hardest place in the world to be a Christian citizen? North Korea, perhaps? Saudi Arabia? According to Lars Widerberg of Intercessor's Network, it is the nation of Somalia. There are thought to be no more than a thousand Christians in a resident population of 8 million people, with perhaps a few thousand more in the diaspora. The Islamist Shabab militia, which controls most of southern Somalia, is dedicated to hunting these remaining Christians down and eliminating every one of them. Christian men attend mosques on Fridays, so as not to arouse suspicion. Bibles are kept hidden. There...

Here's how to pitch this (true) story to Hollywood: Ordinary guy named John, ordinary Sunday, cycling home into a setting sun. Monster roars out of the bushes! John abandons his bike, flees in terror. The creature smashes the bicycle, catches him in a few short strides, grabs him by the shirt. But he slides out of his shirt and falls to the ground. It picks him up again and he slips out of his trousers. Naked, too afraid to even to scream, he scrambles away. But he doesn't get far. The shrieking monster smashes him against a tree. Camera pans...

Following up on my posting of Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin's speech at University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, PEU Report/State of the Division has done yeoman's work in digging deeper into what the power elite are up to in Africa. Here's some of what he has discovered, most of which originally appeared as comments by PEU Report to my original post: Alice Albright, formerly of the Carlyle Group & JP Morgan and daughter of Madeleine Albright, joined the Ex-Im Bank. Their October report is clearly focused on Africa. Here's their blurb: EX-IM BANK WELCOMES ALICE ALBRIGHT We welcome...

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will eventually become a new ocean or sea, researchers now confirm. The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005. Some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

Ardipithecus ramidus is an extinct primate whose fossilized remains were first found along the Awash River in Ethiopia about fifteen years ago. Many fragments were collected, including shattered bones from a four-foot-tall female nicknamed "Ardi." She was chosen to represent her kind, apparently because of the comparative completeness of her remains. Now Ardi's discoverers believe they have collected enough data to reconstruct her history--but what does their data actually reveal? ...

Four Tanzanians have been sentenced to death by hanging for killing an albino man last year - one of a spate of such murders in the country. The court, in the northern town of Shinyanga, convicted them of murdering the man and removing his head and legs. In September three men were sentenced to death for murdering an albino boy - the first such ruling in Tanzania. Witchdoctors sell good-luck potions made from the body parts of albino people for thousands of dollars. More than 50 albino people are thought to have been murdered in the past two years in...

"This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln," gushed Rocco Landesman, the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Landesman was referring, of course, to Barack Obama, specifically for Obama's presumed role as author of the acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. As evidence that Obama did not exactly write Dreams mounts, Landesman gives us a good indication of how America's cultural honchos will react. For a century, in fact, they have been heaping uncritical praise on undeserving artists of...

Ghana’s first Catholic Cardinal, Peter Appiah Turkson is closer to becoming the first black pope ever of the Catholic Church. Saturday October 24, 2009, Pope Benedict appointed Cardinal Turkson to head the Vatican’s justice and peace office. This position is a high-profile one that cements his reputation as a possible future candidate for the papal office, according to the Associated Press. The justice and peace office is responsible for promoting the church’s social teachings on justice issues, such as war, the death penalty and human rights. Turkson told reporters three weeks ago there was no reason there couldn’t be a...

Bill Gates took on the Famine Lobby while addressing a forum on the world food supply in Iowa. Speaking at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Gates took aim at the chorus of environmental leftists and organic food advocates who believe Africans should starve rather than eat genetically modified (GM) foods. “Some voices are instantly hostile to any emphasis on productivity. They act as if there is no emergency, even though in the poorest, hungriest places on earth, population is growing faster than productivity,” he said.The opposition is significant, because Gates is left-of-center himself. The Bill and Melinda...

Does HIV mean certain death? In the quarter century since the world was introduced to the idea that a new sexually transmitted virus was the cause of Aids, HIV has been generally regarded as one of the biggest killers of our time. HIV/Aids has not been the mass disease in Britain that people were led to believe in the 1980s, but the death toll from immune deficiency diseases ascribed to HIV in Africa has been staggering. The scale of death there is an ongoing tragedy that tests the moral resolve of the rich world. How much do we care? Enough...

A mob in central Kenya has beheaded two suspected members of the Mungiki, a gang itself famous for decapitating its victims, police say. The two young men were beheaded and had their fingers chopped off... Twenty-one men who had been charged over the April violence were freed on Friday alongside former Mungiki leader Maina Njenga. Once a pseudo-religious group of dreadlocked youths who worshipped spirits in Mount Kenya and embraced rituals such as female circumcision, the Mungiki has evolved into an extortionist gang notorious for beheading its victims.

The US has imposed a travel ban on a senior Kenyan government official for obstructing efforts to rid the country of corruption. Johnnie Carson, the US state department Africa chief, said he was considering bans on three other officials - but declined to release any names. Kenya agreed to carry through reforms after 1,300 people died in post-election violence last year. But the US believes some officials have deliberately been blocking the reforms.

‘Moderate’ Islamist group had long suspected woman in Puntland was Christian. Three masked members of a militant Islamist group in Somalia last week shot and killed a Somali Christian who declined to wear a veil as prescribed by Muslim custom... Members of the comparatively “moderate” Suna Waljameca group killed Amina Muse Ali... in her home . Ali had told Christian leaders that she had received several threats from members of Suna Waljameca for not wearing a veil, symbolic of adherence to Islam. She had said members of the group had long monitored her movements because they suspected she was a...

South African traditional leaders plan to perform ritual animal slaughters to bless stadiums for the 2010 World Cup tournament ahead of the start of the showcase event next June, they said on Friday. Zolani Mkiva, chairman of the Makhonya Royal Trust, a grouping responsible for co-ordinating cultural activities, said the tournament, the first to be held in Africa, needed to be blessed in true "African style." "We must have a cultural ceremony of some sort, where we are going to slaughter a beast (cow)," said Mkiva. South Africa is set to host the World Cup -- the world's most watched...

(CNN) -- Rape has turned into a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the number of attacks on women having grown threefold over the past few years, human rights activists said in October. Anneke van Woudenberg, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, told Christiane Amanpour that 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Eastern Congo since 1998, and the condition of women has become more dire as the Congolese army has pressed a military campaign against armed groups in the countryside. "Rape is being used as a weapon of war in eastern Congo. So we...

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary ___________________________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release October 23, 2009 White House Announces Global Technology and Innovation Fund During his speech in Cairo on June 4, the President announced that the United States would "launch a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries." As the latest step in delivering on this commitment, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation announced this week a call for proposals for a Global Technology and Innovation Fund. This fund will help catalyze and facilitate private sector investments that promote...

Humans were living and thriving on open grassland in Africa as early as 2 million years ago, making stone tools and using them to butcher zebra and other animals... All of the other earlier hominins that have been found in the geological record -- such as Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus afarensis -- known as Ardi and Lucy, respectively -- lived either in dense forest or in a mosaic of woodland, shrub and grasses, says Plummer... Plummer's team first started excavating Kanjera South in the 1990s, in search of primitive toolkits consisting of hammer stones, stone cores that were struck to...

KARONGA, Malawi (Reuters) – The latest discovery of pre-historic tools and remains of hominids in Malawi's remote northern district of Karonga provides further proof that the area could be the cradle of humankind, a leading German researcher said. Professor Friedemann Schrenk of the Goethe University in Frankfurt told Reuters that two students working on the excavation site last month had discovered prehistoric tools and a tooth of an hominid.

Obama is losing his bid to socialize medicine in this nation, he is losing favor with Americans, and he is losing respect for America and for himself on the world stage. So the best he can do is try to pick on a Fox News?( http://www.nowpublic.com/worst-african-dictators-all-times-past-and-present) The worst accusations he can make is that Fox News is a leader , not a follower; and that they fact checked his staff, (and found them to be lying)? He is calling the other News Stations to "boycott" Fox News for not being nice to Obama, as if those stations are his to...

A foundation set up to award a $5m (£3m) annual prize for good governance in Africa has said there will be no winner this year because it could not find anyone to award it to. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation, set up by the billionaire businessman and philanthropist, said its prize committee considered some credible candidates, but could not select a winner. "The prize committee is independent of the board," Ibrahim said. "It is the prize committee's decision not to award a prize this year and we entirely respect it. We made clear at the launch of the foundation that there...

We already knew that Barack Obama's brother Malik was a Luo activist and a militant Muslim who argued that the black man must "liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture." Malik Obama, older brother to Barack Obama, holds an undated picture of Barak, left, and himself, middle, and an unidentified friend in his shop in eastern Kenya. (Karel Prinsloo, AP) Now there's this:Audio found (Here) of speaker in Kenya on the election of Kenyan (Obama) being elected in the US as President. Starting around the 2:00 minute marker, the speaker discusses ethnicity problems towards the Luo tribe in...

Following my article last week on whether Barack Obama deserved to get the Nobel Peace Prize, my inbox was inundated with emails from American readers seeking to know whether I have proof that Obama was really born in Kenya. If he was born in Kenya, they theorise, he is therefore not entitled to claim American citizenship and the presidency of the United States. I could not help laughing at those emails, most displaying a naivete' and lack of understanding of this sentence from last week’s article: "It seems Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America (via a...

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Sell the Vatican to help the poor? U.S. comedian Sarah Silverman might think it's a great idea, but a Nigerian archbishop called the suggestion offensive and "stupid." Africans from poor countries admire the Vatican, and have no desire to dismantle it, Archbishop John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan of Abuja told reporters at a briefing on the Synod of Bishops for Africa Oct. 16. "The few poor people who come here have never said, 'Oh, why don't you sell this and give us money for food.' They always say, 'What a beautiful place.' They admire it ... maybe because...

(IsraelNN.com) African immigrants are a strategic problem of the first degree, according to Professor Arnon Sofer, an expert on demographics and the head of the the IDF's National Security College. The campaign for taking in the African immigrants was mounted by extreme leftists, Sofer told Arutz Sheva's Hebrew service Friday. “They want us to absorb 1,200 sweet children, but where is the red line? 250,000 children of foreign workers? Two million?” The extreme leftists, said Sofer, want to destroy the Zionist state. “They do not want a Jewish state but a state 'of human beings.' They do not understand that...

IDF units responsible for guarding Israel's expansive western border with Egypt said Thursday that there are one million would-be infiltrators from Africa waiting to cross the mostly barrier-less border and enter Israel illegally...

An ongoing poll by AOL News currently shows that 58% of Americans have doubts about Obama’s citizenship. The poll was started on July 28 and continues — you can go here to vote. And lest you think that this survey is being conducted in a very anti-Obama venue, the title of the article is Birthers, Beer and Stuck on ‘Stupidly’ — it is an environment contemptuous of skeptics. So we can conclude that the results of their poll are not what they were hoping for.A scant five years ago, Barack Obama was a little known Illinois state politician, aspiring to move...

LONDON– A campaign warning girls not to stash or carry guns for their boyfriends was launched by London police Wednesday. The hard-hitting adverts, which are aimed at 15 to 19-year-olds of African and African Caribbean heritage, are designed to combat a worrying growth in the number of young women being arrested and convicted of possessing weapons. "This year's campaign has been designed to tackle an emerging and concerning trend," "Sadly, young women have always been involved in carrying and storing firearms," said Claudia Webbe, chairman of Trident's Independent Advisory Group. "We are deeply concerned, however, that this involvement seems to...

As the African Synod opens its second week, by now the Aula's heard a word on seemingly everything thanks to the five-minute interventions from its 250-some bishop-members and non-bishop auditors, which comprise the first part of each global assembly. But even as the delegates have heard no shortage of strong comments calling for everything from debt forgiveness and inculturation to combatting corruption and advancing a greater role for women in the church, perhaps the most emotional and profound of the bunch came Friday, when the testimony of a Rwandan religious, Sister Genevieve Uwamariya, provided the monthlong gathering's most personal reflection...

The problem with African coup d’etats is not just the fact that they flout constitutionalism — they also have an unfortunate tendency to propel virtual clowns to power whose only distinction is force of arms. Moussa Dadis Camara in Guinea is a perfect example. A small-time army captain whom nobody had heard of before, stormed to power in December last year promising a clean sweep. The regime of Lansana Conte, who had just died, had presided since 1984 over a basketcase of a country, dirt-poor despite having perhaps the leading deposits of bauxite in the world, plus a fair amount...

A British farmer who stood up to Robert Mugabe and was beaten, abducted and finally had his house burnt down has travelled to Washington to ask the Obama administration to put pressure on the Zimbabwe government before it seizes the last remaining white farms. Ben Freeth and his wife Laura with their children Anna, Phillip and Josh. Ben Freeth, who moved to Zimbabwe from Kent, joined his father-in-law Mike Campbell in taking Mugabe to an international court to stop the farm seizures. Their secret footage of the campaign of intimidation launched against them will form part of a film to...

A strange disease only affecting the joints of women and making them fail to stand on their own has been found in Zambia's Luapula Province, the Times of Zambia reported on Thursday. The strange disease dubbed Dwarf has broken out in the Chembe area of the province and is only affecting women and girls, making them fail to stand on their own, Times said. Teleshi Lwando, an employee at the local Lwela Health Center, told the visiting lawmaker from the area, Mwansa Mbulakulima, that the disease was not "very serious" and that patients were healing after three days. He said...

* Between 70 and 80 people were burned alive when a fuel tanker truck exploded in Nigeria, reportedly after a policeman fired a shot to keep passers-by away from a road accident, newspapers said on Saturday. The truck hit a pothole and overturned on Friday on the road between Onitsha and Enugu in the south of the country, spilling its cargo of petrol, witnesses and police told the papers. Several witnesses said that the truck exploded when a policeman who wanted to distance inquisitive onlookers fired his gun in the air. One witness said that people had been trying to...

William Kamkwamba dreamed of powering his village with the only resource that was freely available to him. His native Malawi had gone through one of its worst droughts seven years ago, killing thousands. His family and others were surviving on one meal a day. The red soil in his Masitala hometown was parched, leaving his father, a farmer, without any income. But amid all the shortages, one thing was still abundant. Wind. "I wanted to do something to help and change things," he said. "Then I said to myself, 'If they can make electricity out of wind, I can try,...

Archbishop Joseph Tlhagale of Johannesburg, South Africa Vatican City, Oct 8, 2009 / 11:41 am (CNA).- Archbishop Joseph Tlhagale of Johannesburg, South Africa said this morning at the Synod for Africa that the continent faces a "second wave of colonization" from "liberalism, secularism and from lobbyists who squat at the United Nations."The South African archbishop began his five-minute intervention by noting that moral values are "embedded in the diverse African cultures," and that, "alongside the Gospel values, are threatened by the new global ethic." This ethic, he said, "aggressively seeks to persuade African governments and communities to accept new...

Oct 2, 2009 — A new fossil human ancestor has taken center stage. Those who love Lucy, the australopithecine made famous by Donald Johanson (and numerous TV specials), are in for a surprise. Lucy is a has been. Her replacement is not Desi Arnaz, but is designated Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus – the new leading lady in the family tree. Actually, she has been around for years since her discovery in Ethiopia in 1992. It has taken Tim White and crew 15 years to piece together the bones that were in extremely bad condition. But now, Ardi has made...

Your Taxi Driver Might Be A Terrorist!!! Somali Americans Become National Security Problem!!! By Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. thelastcrusade.org A group affiliated with al Qaeda could strike the United States in the near future. That’s grim assessment of FBI Director Robert Mueller, who spoke this week at a meeting of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Mueller’s remarks represent the first time a senior law enforcement or intelligence official has stated on the record that the al-Shabaab, a Muslim terrorist group with ties to al Qaeda, is no longer content to strike within the East African nation of Somalia. During...

I had just 24 hours to prepare for my trip to Africa. We had been reporting on the killing of Tanzanians with albinism, a genetic condition characterized by a lack of pigment in people's eyes, skin and hair, as part of an ABC News hour special. In Tanzania, there has been a grotesque rash of albino killings: 54 people have been murdered since 2007, though observers say more incidences go unreported. Renegade witch doctors have convinced locals that there are magical properties in the blood, bones and skin of people with albinism, which has created a sickening black market where...