Joe DeCapua | May 24

VOA - A new assessment has been released on efforts to end LRA rebel attacks in central and east Africa. The Enough Project says despite the deployment of U.S. advisers, current operations lack resources and troops.

Enough Project field researcher Kasper Agger spent several weeks in the region affected by LRA attacks. He said in the first three months of this year, there were more than 50 attacks, 9 deaths, 90 abductions and the continued displacement of nearly 450,000 civilians. Agger, who’s based in Kampala, Uganda, titled his report Mission in the Balance.

“I wanted to give it that title to stress that despite progress on the ground we are still far from seeing an end to the LRA. So I wanted to stress some kind of urgency,” he said.

The Enough Project is an advocacy group working to end genocide and crimes against humanity.

Stephanie Nebehay | Geneva | May 24

Reuters - The last three countries where polio is still paralyzing children -- Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria -- said on Thursday that they have enlisted Muslim women and religious leaders to allay fears of vaccination and wipe out the disease.

Polio cases are at an all-time low worldwide, following its eradication in India last year, raising hopes but also fears about a threat of resurgence especially in sub-Saharan Africa unless remaining reservoirs of polio virus are stamped out.

Racist attacks on black Africans - they're not just for Libyans.

Demonstrators have attacked African migrants in Tel Aviv in a protest against refugees and asylum-seekers that indicates an increasingly volatile mood in Israel over what it terms as "infiltrators".

Miri Regev, a member of the Israeli parliament, told the crowd "the Sudanese are a cancer in our body". The vast majority of asylum-seekers in Israel are from Sudan and Eritrea.

Around 1,000 demonstrators took part in the demonstration on Wednesday night, waving signs saying: "Infiltrators, get out of our homes" and "Our streets are no longer safe for our children." A car containing Africans was attacked and shops serving the refugee community were looted. Seventeen people were arrested.

A reporter for the Israeli daily Maariv described it as an "unbridled rampage" and explosion of "pent-up rage".

Seems to me everyone in the North has it in for sub-Saharans. But I do wonder whether the Israeli bigots have a heirarchy of racism which ranks Arabs and black Africans on a scale of hateability. The bigots would doubtless complain that their hate is also about "infiltrators" taking jobs and causing crime. As Ta-Nehisi Coates notes today though, "Complicating racism with other factors doesn't make it any better. It just makes it racism. Again." That's as true in Israel as it is anywhere else.

Aris Roussinos | May 24

The Independent - The villagers of Angolo were gathered around the crater, mournfully staring at the bomb when we arrived. For over a month, the Russian-made cluster bomb has sat in the centre of this quiet farming village in Sudan's restive Nuba Mountains, its clutch of unexploded submunitions spilling from its belly into the red African soil. A makeshift attempt at cordoning off the scattered bomblets with a low circle of stones had little visible effect, with cattle and barefoot children moving unhindered through the long grass.

"Where is the West, where is the UN?" cried an elderly man, leaning against his spear as he gestured at the bomb. "How are we to clear this from our village? We need experts, and help from the outside world."

But South Kordofan's Nuba tribesmen have little hope of outside intervention. The UN's mandate to operate in Sudan's war-torn rebel provinces is heavily constrained by the government in Khartoum, and since South Sudan's declaration of independence in July 2011, little overt assistance is coming from their former allies a few dozen miles across the border.

David D. Kirkpatrick & Alan Cowell | Cairo | May 23

NYT - After weeks of fevered debate, speculation and argument, Egyptians went to the polls on Wednesday in the Arab world’s first competitive presidential election, choosing between a dozen candidates spanning the nation’s secular and Islamist traditions after decades of authoritarian rule.

With the skies clear and the weather warm, long lines of people queued at polling stations to vote in an election cast as a watershed in their political history.

May 21

ABC - Starting Wednesday, Egypt is holding its first free presidential election since it came under dictatorship 60 years ago. The winner will succeed Hosni Mubarak, one of four rulers toppled in the uprisings that began 18 months ago across the Middle East and became known as the Arab Spring. But replacing dictatorships with democracy is proving much harder. Here's where things stand:

Martin Vogl | Bamako | May 21

USA TODAY - Demonstrators attacked the interim president at his office Monday, knocking him unconscious, a witness and a presidential collaborator said.

Dioncounda Traore was brought to the Point G Hospital, said Sekou Yattara, a medical student there.

Yattara said Traore had suffered an injury to the head. The interim leader was not conscious when he was brought in, Yattara said.

A close collaborator of Traore said that he learned from the president's body guard that the president was injured when protesters broke into his office which is in a building next to the presidential palace. Traore had not been using offices in the palace itself as that building was ransacked during a coup in March.

Chris Stephen/ Tripoli, James Meikle & Matt Williams | May 20

The Guardian - Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people, has died, his brother has said.

Abdelbaset's brother, Abdelnasser al-Megrahi, confirmed reports that he had died aged 60 after a long battle with cancer. Abdelnasser, who was at the house in Tripoli where his dead brother lay on Sunday, told the Guardian: "I don't want to talk right now, I am very upset, I don't really feel like talking. He's dead, that's it, what more do you have to know?"

In an interview with the Guardian earlier this year, Abdelnasser said that his brother, who had moved to the secret address from his large home in Tripoli, was innocent. "He really is ill, he is too ill to even change the channel on the TV, he is lying down all day."

The Scottish government and East Renfrewshire council are investigating the claims of Megrahi's death. The Foreign Office is awaiting their confirmation. Megrahi was the only man convicted of the bombing, which killed 270 people, including 11 on the ground, when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie four days before Christmas in 1988.

There was no immediate reaction from the Libyan government.

Lesley Clark | Washington | May 18

McClatchy - President Barack Obama will announce an alliance Friday with nearly 50 companies to boost productivity among small farmers in Africa with the goal of lifting 50 million people out of poverty.

Business executives from agricultural giants such as DuPont and Monsanto will join Obama, along with the leaders of three African countries who have pledged policy changes that U.S. officials say will improve business climates and encourage investment.

“We believe we’re really unlocking business investment in African agriculture in a way that will transform that sector and support improved outcomes for small farmers,” said Raj Shah, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The plan comes as aid groups are calling on the U.S. and members of the G-8 nations gathering Friday at Camp David to renew a pledge they made at their 2009 summit to spend $22 billion on efforts to alleviate global hunger.

Advocates said they hoped the largely private effort would complement, not replace, a public commitment from the countries, which gather amid worries over the troubled European economy.

Mark Leon Goldberg at UN Dispatch passes along this World Food Program video from Chad, "ground zero of the Sahel food crisis".

London-based journalist Neal mann is in Burkina Faso, where children are eating the leaves off trees to survive. You can follow his social media posts from his journey here.

Now, ask yourself why footage from across West Africa isn't on your nightly news, every night.

There's nowhere the U.S. doesn't consider it's own backyard, whether the locals like it or not.

The US army has said a combat brigade will be assigned to the Pentagon's Africa Command next year in a pilot programme that will send small teams of soldiers to countries around the continent to do training and participate in military exercises.

A brigade from 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, NY will be assigned the task of putting US boots on the ground across the continent.

Africa Command is still based out of Kelley Barracks, Stuttgart, Germany because not a single African nation volunteered to host the US military basing required when Bush first stood up the unit in 2007. The view of the Southern African Development Community, which includes South Africa, Angola, Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, that "it is better if the United States were involved with Africa from a distance rather than be present on the continent" was echoed by every other African security organisation and individual nations. Given that, one has to wonder just how welcome the guys from 10th Mountain will be.

Go read David Axe on how Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti joined the dots to throw some new light on America's shadow wars along Africa's Indian Ocean coastline. F-15s based in Djibouti carrying out airstrikes in Yemen, spyplanes at the same airbase, Reaper drones with bases in the Seychelles Yemen and Ethiopia. Axe himself adds the possibility of a floating headquarters for special forces ops sitting somewhere of the coast.

America is waging more wars, with a bigger involvement, than it wants to admit.

Abdi Guled & Slobodon Lekic | Mogadishu | May 15

AP - European Union naval forces and attack helicopters conducted their first onshore raid on a suspected pirate lair in Somalia Tuesday. A pirate said the strike destroyed a supply center and set back their operations.

No deaths were reported in Tuesday morning's attack on Handulle village, about 18 kilometers (11 miles) north of Haradheere town, a key pirate lair.

Tina posted earlier today about the HRW report on NATO-caused civilain deaths in Libya. Here's more,from the Guardian. I can't help but feel this is just another sign that universal law is a joke and that what really operates is privilege in it's original meaning of "private law":

At least 72 civilians, including 24 children, were killed by Nato air strikes during the alliance's military campaign in Libya last year. Human Rights Watch has issued a report, based on extensive on-the-ground research and multiple visits to bombing sites where civilians died, in which no clear evidence of a legitimate military target was found. Nato and the nations that participated in the air campaign – including the UK government – have refused even to acknowledge these fatalities, to provide specific information on the military target or to conduct a field investigation into the incident. No compensation has been provided to any of the families of the dead and the wounded.

Nato's claim that it cannot investigate civilian casualties because it has no mandate to be in Libya is feeble and disingenuous. If Human Rights Watch can visit each of the sites – to inspect weapons debris, interview witnesses and examine medical records and deaths certificates, alongside reviewing satellite imagery and photographic evidence – Nato should certainly ask the Libyans for access to the sites to do the same. It has not done so.

Without investigations, Nato is saying it won't provide compensation to the victims of unlawful strikes, as required by the laws of war. Nor has it considered providing compensation for all civilian victims of Nato strikes, as it has done in Afghanistan. Many of the same countries that participated in the Libyan campaign make compensation payments in Afghanistan to families harmed by international military action without any claim of a laws-of-war violation. In a curious piece of logic, Nato's spokeswoman, Oana Lungescu, said this morning that Nato was not obliged to pay compensation to affected Libyans because the international military operation was conducted from the air, without any international troops on the ground.

Brussels | May 14

Reuters - Alliance called on to compensate survivors and victims' families and explain attacks on 'military' sites that killed civilians

Nato air strikes killed 72 civilians in Libya last year, Human Rights Watch has said, accusing the western alliance of failing to acknowledge the scope of collateral damage it caused during the campaign that helped to oust Muammar Gaddafi.

In a report based on investigations at bombing sites during and after the conflict, the New York-based HRW said Nato strikes killed 20 women and 24 children. It called on the alliance to compensate civilian victims and investigate attacks that may have been unlawful.

"Attacks are allowed only on military targets, and serious questions remain in some incidents about what exactly Nato forces were striking," Fred Abrahams, special adviser at HRW, said in a statement.

The report claims to be the most extensive investigation to date of civilian casualties from Nato's air campaign and presents a higher death toll estimate than a March paper by Amnesty International which documented 55 civilian deaths, including 16 children and 14 women.

Nato considers its Libya operation highly successful, illustrating the allies' ability to work well together in a limited campaign. Nato carried out 26,000 sorties including some 9,600 strike missions and destroyed about 5,900 targets before operations ended on 31 October 2011.

Associated Press photographer, Ben Curtis, has documented the conditions in the Sahel region of West and Central Africa where as many as one million children are at risk of severe acute malnutrition. here's just one of his heartbreaking photos. Click through to the Boston Globe for more.

Aid agencies in the region say they need $200 million to avert disaster - the equivalent of only three and a half hours of US military spending.

Meanwhile, regime change by military intervention in Syria, which would end with US and NATO forces embroilled in yet another civil war and have an estimated cost of some $40 billion, is being disguised as a liberal and humanitarian thing to do by the DC "serious people".

Two quick snippets:

Human Rights watch flags up a new law against dissent in Libya that's a direct copy of the old one, just swapping Gadaffi for the NTC. Just like the old one, the new law allows sentences of life imprisonment for "offensive statements".

Egypt has imposed an overnight curfew and deployed soldiers around the Defence Ministry after protests against the army's handling of transition to civilian rule turned violent, continuing the meltdown after many candidates were banned from taking part in elections on various pretexts.

Scenes of troops beating protesters with sticks in anti-army demonstrations in recent months have angered many Egyptians, who expect the generals to wield their influence from behind the scenes even after a formal handover.

...The presidential race broadly pits Islamists against more liberal candidates who at one time or another served in Mubarak's administration.

Do we get an Arab Summer or will Spring give Summer a miss and go straight into Fall?

Tiemoko Diallo & Adama Diarra | Bamako | May 5

MSNBC - Malian fighters from the Ansar Dine Islamist group attacked and burned the tomb of one of the town's saints, classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, residents and a regional official said on Saturday.

The militants broke off doors, windows and wooden gates from the grave and burned them, they said, in the first reported attack on a shrine in Mali.

El Hadj Baba Haidara, an elected member of parliament from Timbuktu told Reuters some young people were discussing how to react despite being unarmed.

"There is a risk the people may revolt because this is something that affects their dignity. This tomb is sacred, it is too difficult to bear," Haidara said.

Ansar Dine, along with Tuareg rebels and other armed groups, swept through northern Mali in March and April, seizing the northern half of the country and its ancient towns of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal after the government collapsed in a March 22 coup.

While the rebel MNLA has declared an independent state in the north, al Qaeda-linked Ansar Dine - led by veteran Tuareg leader Iyad Ag Ghaly - has rejected that idea and said the group's objective was to impose Islamic law in Mali.

Ibrahim Mshelizza & Mike Oboh | Maiduguri/Abuja | May 3

Reuters - Gunmen set off explosives and fired on a cattle market in remote northeastern Nigeria overnight, killing at least 56 people, a nurse who received bodies in the local hospital said on Thursday.

The police commissioner put the number of dead at 34.

It was not clear who was behind the attack on Wednesday night in the town of Potiskum, in Yobe state, which has been an occasional target for militant Islamist sect Boko Haram.

"I have counted 56 bodies at the morgue and I am sure that the death toll could rise in view of the serious nature of injuries sustained," the nurse at Potiskum hospital, who gave his name as Babangida, said.

"The Potiskum mortuary is made up of a room and a parlor and I counted the 56 in the parlor only. I didn't go into the inner room."

Police Commissioner Moses Namiri said security forces had confirmed 34 killed and that Islamist sect Boko Haram was suspected to be behind the attack.

Bamako, Mali | May 1

Al Jazeera - Several people reported killed in fight between coup troops and those loyal to ousted president at national broadcaster.

Fighting has broken out in Mali's capital, with troops who took part in last month's military coup and the guard of the newly installed president exchanging shots, witnesses said.

Several people have been killed in a gunfight on Monday between the coup troops and the presidential guard loyal to ousted leader Amadou Toumani Toure at the national TV and radio station, employees said.

Edmund Blair & Sherine El Madany | Cairo | Apr 30

Reuters - Egypt enters the last stage of its first democratic presidential race on Monday with its field narrowing to a two-horse race between the urbane former head of the Arab League and a charismatic Islamist medic jailed for years under Hosni Mubarak.

A poll published in state-run al-Ahram daily on Monday showed veteran diplomat Amr Moussa in the lead, followed by Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh, who has emerged in recent days as the leading Islamist candidate after securing the support of the ultra-conservative Salafist movement.

Both men are well ahead of 11 other candidates and, for now, look the most likely to face each other in a second round. That would give Egyptians a stark choice about the future of the Arab world's most populous state.

Moussa, 75, served for a decade as Mubarak's foreign minister before taking over the leadership of the Arab League, and must win over voters skeptical of the old elite.

Abol Fotouh, 60, grew to prominence in the 1970s as a student activist opposing Egypt's military rulers and was jailed in the 1990s as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he split from last year. He needs to maintain the support of Islamists, while reassuring secular Egytians he will not impose a radical transformation on society.

NYT - In Vast Jungle, U.S. Troops Aid in Search for Kony

No one knows exactly where Mr. Kony is, but here in Obo, at a remote forward operating post in the Central African Republic, Green Berets pore over maps and interview villagers, hopeful for a clue.

Their biggest challenge, they say, is Mr. Kony’s turf, a vast expanse the size of California in the middle of Africa that is so rugged it renders much of the American gadgetry useless. Picture towering trees that blot out the sun, endless miles of elephant grass, and swirling brown rivers that coil like intestines and are infested with crocodiles; one of them recently ate a Ugandan member of the force.

WaPo - Kony hunt proving difficult for U.S. troops -

Six months after President Obama ordered 100 elite troops to help capture the messianic warlord Joseph Kony, U.S. military commanders said Sunday that they have been unable to pick up his trail but believe he is hiding in this country’s dense jungle, relying on Stone Age tactics to dodge his pursuers’ high-tech surveillance tools.
..
Kony’s methods have proven effective against the U.S. military’s satellites, sensors and other forms of surveillance. Commanders warn that it could take years to find him.
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Another complication is the remoteness of the region, where even dirt roads are scarce and it can take weeks for word of an encounter with the LRA to reach authorities. The Green Berets said they were bracing for nonstop rains in a few weeks, which will turn the ground into mud soup and make it difficult to reach Obo by road.

“All these little nuances we didn’t imagine when we first got here are now rearing their head,” Capt. Greg said.

Tom Pfeiffer & Tom Perry | Cairo | April 29

Reuters - Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood said on Sunday the ruling generals planned to reshuffle the government in an apparent attempt to defuse a political feud overshadowing a presidential election campaign that gets under way on Monday.

The Brotherhood has pushed for more say in the government for months since sweeping to a dominant role in parliament in an election marathon that ended in February this year.

Essam el-Erian, a senior Brotherhood lawmaker, told Reuters the generals would initiate talks over the reshuffle but army officials did not immediately confirm any plans to do so.

Kano, Nigeria | April 29

BBC - At least 16 people have been killed in a gun and bomb attack at a university in Nigeria's northern city of Kano, Nigerian Red Cross officials say.

Six others were in a serious condition following the attack at Bayero University campus where Christian worshippers were holding a service.

Police are searching for the gunmen.

Nima Khorrami Assl | Apr 30

Gulf News - Ever since the fall of the Somalia’s pro-US president, Mohammad Siad Barre, in 1991, the country has been in a state of chaos and disorder. In the absence of a central authority, tribal conflicts, warlordism, and a resurgent militancy in the form of Al Shabab have come to dominate and define the political reality of Somalia.

Economic stagnation and lawlessness, moreover, have given rise to one of the oldest profession’s in human history, thereby turning a dangerous majority of the bright yet hopeless Somali youths into the world’s most prominent pirates. And as if this is not depressing enough, an unfortunate geography combined with a lack of state-planning have brought food insecurity and malnutrition to the proud inhabitants of this ancient land.
That Somalia has not received a single piece of positive coverage over the past 20 years, therefore, ought not to be surprising. After all, this is the “most comprehensively failed state” where human suffering starts at birth. However, Somalia’s fortune might be about to change. This anticipated alternation, in turn, is not because Al Shabab’s power and influence is ebbing. Nor is it due to the approaching expiration of the Transitional Federal Institutions mandate which some claim will help to support a more inclusive political process. Rather, it is in the renewed international interest in Somalia as an oil producing nation that one can trace a fast-changing geostrategic role for Somalia; one that will no longer be confined to counter-terrorism and anti-piracy efforts.

After British Prime Minister, David Cameron, hosted an international conference on Somalia on February 23, The Observer revealed that London has been in a “secret high-stakes dash for oil in Somalia” in return for British humanitarian aid and security assistance. The revelation and British Foreign Minister William Hague’s comments during his visit to Somalia, where he talked about “the beginnings of an opportunity to rebuild the country”, cast a question mark over London’s, and indeed the entire western world’s humanitarian endeavours with some commentators going as far as dubbing the summit as ‘aid for oil’.