Officials from Mugabe's party toured the Doma district recently and told the new farm owners that the government could not supply their needs. They were advised to make do with what seed they had left, and with animal manure for fertilizer.

Ordinarily, after harvest the cotton fields are burned to protect the next year's crop from disease. Not this year. People couldn't afford to buy new seeds, and were hoping to get another season out of last year's crop. Instead, the crops came up diseased.

The rise of al Shabaab — from the Arabic word for "youth" — in many ways represents the very scenario that the Bush administration sought to avoid two years ago, when it quietly backed an invasion by Somalia's neighbor, Ethiopia, to drive a federation of hard-line Islamic courts out of Mogadishu.

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said on Saturday his efforts to end fighting in Congo were going fairly well and that President Joseph Kabila had not given conditions for talks with the rebels.

The United Nations says weeks of fighting have caused a humanitarian catastrophe. On Friday, aid workers began feeding tens of thousands of refugees in rebel-held areas.

After seizing swathes of territory in battles last month, Nkunda threatened to take his rebellion all the way to the distant capital Kinshasa unless Kabila negotiated with him.

As panicked thousands have abandoned villages across eastern Congo in recent months, the scale of looting that has followed has been massive, a crime reflecting the predatory culture pervading Congo since the Belgian colonizers perfected it decades ago.

"They are regrouping," Richard Barno, an analyst at the Institute for Security Studies in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said of the militants. "Is this part of a bigger plan to take over Mogadishu? I think so. They are preparing themselves."

The Bush Administration has backed the presence of Ethiopian troops to shore up the Somali Government, fearing that the rebels could seize control of the Horn of Africa nation and provide a refuge for Islamic militants from other nations.

My Photos of empty shops In Johannesburg's shopping malls...

Libya and Russia signed a civil nuclear cooperation deal Saturday, Tripoli's foreign minister said, as Moamer Kadhafi visited Moscow for talks he said could help restore "geopolitical equilibrium".

More than 150,000 people could be hiding in the Congolese jungle without food, water or shelter after rebels destroyed camps for refugees near the town of Rutshuru. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said camps holding more than 50,000 people had been forcibly emptied, before being torn down and burnt. Sources in Rutshuru said more than 150,000 people from the town and the camps had fled north into the jungle.

Congolese government forces are fleeing the eastern capital of Goma as Rwandan-backed rebels press towards the town, threatening a lethal confrontation with United Nations peacekeepers and the prospect of all out regional war.

Western aid workers in Goma, with a population of 600,000, described scenes of mayhem in the streets as columns of government tanks and military vehicles streamed out of the city and panicking civilians fled for cover, fearing an imminent rebel onslaught.

The United Nations has confirmed that the UN Development Programme (UNDP) compound in northern Somalia was attacked this morning, resulting in a number of deaths and injuries.

“At approximately at 10 o’clock this morning the UNDP compound in Hargeysa, Somaliland, was hit by an explosion, caused by a vehicle which forced entry into the compound,” according to a statement issued by the Office of the UN Resident & Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, which is based in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

The restrictive Ethiopian security regime hiding the worsening crisis in the country's southern Somali region has infuriated important donors. Western officials privately warn that a damaging stand-off with the country is unfolding.

Addis Ababa this week conceded that 6.4 million people were on the brink of death and agreed to open up the worst hit parts of the country to shipments of outside assistance.

Why is a Scot newspaper the only one to report this from Somalia?

"Troop pull-out leaves government on brink - Ethiopian withdrawal marks end of disastrous intervention that sparked new violence and suffering."

Aid agencies say that half the population, about five million people, face starvation, two-thirds of children are out of school and water shortages have led to deadly cholera outbreaks.

Emaciated children are dying in hospitals, many more are being turned away to die at home. At one Manicaland hospital a doctor said that they were getting more cases of hunger-related diseases than ever before. “Half of the admissions end up in the mortuary,” the doctor said.

SOMALIA'S FRAGILE government appears to be on the brink of collapse. Islamist insurgents now controls large parts of southern and central Somalia - and are continuing to launch attacks inside the capital, Mogadishu.

Ethiopia, which launched a US-backed military intervention in Somalia in December 2006 in an effort to drive out an Islamist authority in Mogadishu, is now pulling out its troops.

The causes are unemployment, drought, inflation, a squeeze on global food supplies and a war that will not end. Fighting between Somalia’s weak transitional government and a determined Islamist insurgency has been heating up in the past few weeks, driving thousands from their homes and cutting people off from food. The hospital wards here are one indicator of the conflict’s intensity.

Last week, in a small Pentagon conference hall, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, inaugurated the newest regional headquarters, Africa Command, which is responsible for coordinating American military affairs on the continent.

Six months after the elections, Zimbabwe still lacks a functioning government and is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe.

Following the worst wheat harvest since the independence war, bread has run out and sugar supplies are set to follow. USAid, the American government humanitarian agency, is warning that the country could run out of the maize, the staple food, by next month. Farming officials say the government's stated aim of producing maize on 500,000 hectares this season is unattainable.

A huge war crime -- a massive crime against humanity -- is going on right now in Somalia, courtesy of (but only indirectly traceable to) the Bush administration and Washington's bipartisan power elite.

What's happening? And why doesn't anybody want to know? These are troubling questions for anyone who cares about the soul of America, and even more troubling for anyone who's beginning to suspect that America has no soul at all.

Here is a follow-up to yesterday's post about Somalia. The BBC has a report from inside "Africa's Guantanamo," the Ethiopian prison where refugees fleeing the American-backed invasion of Somalia were "renditioned," often with help of U.S. agents.

Byrs says thousands have been driven from their homes in the last two weeks. She told reporters Friday that nearly half of Somalia's 8.3 million people need food and other assistance.

Recent droughts and high food prices have added to the country's problems. Somalia has been without a stable government for more than 17 years.

U.S. officials have billed the new command, known as Africom, as a sign of Africa's strategic importance, but many in Africa see it as an unwelcome expansion of the U.S.-led war on terrorism and a bid to secure greater access to the continent's vast oil resources. Several countries have refused to host the command, and officials say Africom will be based in Stuttgart, Germany, for the foreseeable future.

Uganda's ethics and integrity minister Nsaba Buturo is seeking a ban of miniskirts because of the distraction it causes, equating it with nudity:

"What's wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of our people are weak mentally. . . If you find a naked person you begin to concentrate on the make-up of that person and yet you are driving . . . These days you hardly know who is a mother from a daughter, they are all naked."

Somalia's warring parties pounded each other with artillery in Mogadishu on Friday after an African Union military aircraft defied a rebel ban on planes using the capital's international airport.

The bombed-out city's airport had been abandoned since Tuesday after Islamist insurgents from the hardline al Shabaab group vowed to shoot down any aircraft trying to land there.

In another demonstration of their increasing strength, the Islamists also chased away pro-government militia manning roadblocks in the south of the lawless Horn of Africa nation.

A rare military raid on a militant camp in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta last week points to a new, tough approach by the Nigerian military that could force the region into a deeper state of anarchy.

Militants have responded to the pre-dawn raid with a series of deadly counter attacks on oil facilities and military positions. The delta's most prominent rebel group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) issued a statement Sunday via e-mail declaring an "oil war."

Militants in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta region say they have "declared war" on the government after battling security forces guarding facilities.

In an email released by Mend, the group said it had launched an "oil war" on the government in response to what it described as unprovoked aerial attacks on its bases in the Niger Delta.

"The operation will continue until the government of Nigeria appreciates that the solution to peace in the Niger Delta is justice, respect and dialogue," the group said.

Clashes in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo last week between government forces and a rebel militia threatened to plunge the region back into all-out war. The violence also threatened vulnerable wildlife including the rare mountain gorilla.

The attacks displaced more of the war-fatigued Congolese people, who have endured a decade of armed conflict. More than 100,000 have fled their homes already this year and are living in huts in squalid camps. At least 5.4 million people have died in the 10-year war making it the deadliest conflict since the Second World War.

American forces have bombed fleeing refugees, slaughtered innocent herdsmen and destroyed villages in attempts to assassinate a handful of individual alleged, on shaky and specious evidence, to be "part of" or "associated with" or "linked to" al Qaeda. American agents have seized refugees from the Somali war, including U.S. citizens, and had them "renditioned" to the notorious prisons of the Ethiopian dictatorship. And as we have noted here many times, the Bush Administration has sent in death squads to "kill anyone left alive" after American strikes.

MOGADISHU: Islamic militants said they have seized control of Kismayo, Somalia's third largest city, after three days of fighting that left about 70 people dead and led thousands to flee.

Ethiopian troops have helped Somalia's shaky transitional government push the Islamists from power in Mogadishu and the south, but failed to establish security or improve living standards.

Fire has erupted in Egypt's parliament but there is no word on casualties or the cause.

ZIMBABWE'S President, Robert Mugabe, has been forced to return home following intense political pressure from the Chinese Communist Party not to attend Friday night's opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games.

At the center of the conflict is the unrefined metallic ore, coltan. After processing, coltan turns into a powder called tantalum, which is used extensively in a wealth of western electronic devices including cell phones, computers and, of course, game consoles.

Allegedly, the demand for coltan prompted Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to plunder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.