Somalia's government and the international community must deal with Islamists to avoid a security crisis when Ethiopian troops withdraw later this month, a think-tank said on Tuesday.

"Despite the reluctance of the international community to engage with the Islamist opposition, there is no other practical course than to reach out to its leaders in an effort to stabilise the security situation with a ceasefire and then move on with a process that addresses the root causes," ICG said.

Fears are mounting in Zimbabwe for the lives of more than 40 opposition officials and human rights activists who have been abducted as part of a renewed crackdown by the regime in Harare. At least two more members of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have disappeared in the past week, along with a freelance investigative reporter.

This figure, as horrific as it is, may well not be telling the full story.

As reported in

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/cholera-kills-3000-in-zimbabwe-14080561.html

And now the Bush Regime -- going out in a Götterdämmerung of blood and fury aimed at the world (and at the American people) -- wants to intensify the chaos in Somalia, laying it bare to more invasions, "precision strikes," death squad operations, renditions and other atrocities, this time coming from not just from Washington and its Terror War proxies but from all directions.

The US government said Wednesday that it believes a new UN Security Council resolution on Somalia authorizes air strikes against pirates in Somali territory.

The resolution "authorizes states cooperating with the Somali Transitional Federal Government to extend counter-piracy efforts to include potential operations in Somali territorial land and air space, to suppress acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea," the State Department said in a statement.

The final version of resolution 1851 does not explicitly say Somali air space can be used.

Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf named a new prime minister on Tuesday, snubbing a vote by parliament to reinstate sacked premier Nur Hassan Hussein and further deepening rifts in the fractured government.

The split at the top of the Western-backed government is blamed for stalling a U.N.-hosted peace process and threatens to tear the weak administration apart at a time Islamist insurgents are camped on the outskirts of the capital Mogadishu.

The resolution sets up the possibility of increased American military action in Somalia, a chaotic country where a U.S. peacekeeping mission in 1992-93 ended with a humiliating withdrawal of troops after a deadly clash in Mogadishu, as portrayed in the movie "Black Hawk Down."

A Bush administration proposal to allow foreign forces to go ashore into Somalia to hunt the country's notorious pirates is getting a cool reception from U.S. military leaders, regional analysts and some Somali officials.

The proposal — which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to put forward Tuesday at the United Nations Security Council — is the boldest yet aimed at stopping the pirates, who've hijacked 55 ships this year, secured tens of millions of dollars in ransoms and kneecapped maritime trade between Europe and Asia.

Meanwhile, the commander of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, cast doubt on the wisdom of a separate U.S. plan to seek U.N. approval for commando raids against pirates on Somali soil, saying the possibility of inflicting civilian casualties "cannot be overestimated," according to the Associated Press.

Proceeds from the control of lucrative natural resources, from gold and coltan to charcoal and cows, remain a key driver of the insecurity in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The report by the UN Group of Experts on Congo states that the main parties to the recent fighting - Hutu and Tutsi-aligned rebel groups as well as government forces - continue to earn vast sums from artisanal mines and captured farmland.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi declared “mission accomplished” in their two-year military effort to prop up the self-appointed transitional national government of Somalia, and told parliament that Ethiopian forces would withdraw from the nation within weeks. Zenawi claimed the mission was meant to “defuse the plan orchestrated by Eritrea,” but conceded that it was not possible to bring lasting peace to Somalia.

Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe could be forced to step down if South Africa and other neighbors take the bold step of sealing their borders with the landlocked country, a senior U.S. official said Thursday.

"It takes something as simple as closing the borders. Zimbabwe is a landlocked country. The closure of the border, literally in a week would bring this country to its knees," he said.

The United States is seeking international authorisation allowing foreign navies to pursue Somali pirates on land as well as at sea in an effort to curb the growing threat to international shipping lines.

A draft proposal granting nations that are combating piracy permission to “take all necessary measures ashore in Somalia” is being circulated among UN Security Council members before a key meeting on the crisis next week.

Under normal circumstances the water-borne disease is relatively easy to treat. In Zimbabwe it is spreading uncontrolled amid the country's economic collapse and political turmoil as the 28-year-old regime of the President, Robert Mugabe, clings to power after disputed elections.

Somalia's moderate Islamist leader Sheikh Sharif Ahmed returned to Mogadishu for the first time in two years on Wednesday and a local rights group said fighting had killed 16,210 civilians since then.

“I am happy to say our doctors have been assisted by others and WHO (the World Health Organization)... so now that there is no cholera,” said Mr Mugabe, in a speech screened on national television.

Ethiopian troops are pouring into neighboring Somalia to fight radical Islamists who have taken over much of the country, raising fears of more violence in a country fighting a deadly insurgency and piracy, witnesses and the Somali government said Tuesday.

The Ethiopians' advance comes just weeks before they are scheduled to withdraw after an unpopular, two-year presence here. The Ethiopians are integral to protecting the Western-backed government, and their planned withdrawal at the end of the month will likely herald the administration's collapse.

The United States failed disastrously in its peacekeeping mission in the early 1990s. (Remember “Black Hawk Down”?) In 2005 and 2006, the C.I.A. paid some of Somalia’s most reviled warlords to fight the Islamists. That backfired. In the winter of 2006, the United States took a third approach, encouraging Ethiopia to invade and backing them with American airstrikes and intelligence.

“The Bush administration made a major miscalculation,” said Dan Connell, who teaches African politics at Simmons College in Boston.

WESTERN calls for radical intervention in Zimbabwe rose dramatically over the weekend as the United Nations warned that the number of cholera cases in the region could reach 60,000 and the death toll rise to 3000.

In the spring of 2003, three young Americans traveled to Africa in search of such as story. What they found was a tragedy that disgusted and...all » In the spring of 2003, three young Americans traveled to Africa in search of such as story. What they found was a tragedy that disgusted and inspired them. A story where children are weapons and children are the victims. The "Invisible Children: rough cut" film exposes the effects of a 20 year-long war on the children of Northern Uganda.

Condoleezza Rice and Gordon Brown are among the main responsible for the slaughter of more than a million innocent children of God in Iraq and dozens of thousands in Afghanistan but in your view that very same God would be acting through their blood-stained hands. What a grotesque (and sexist) idea of God you must have to invoke Her name in this unholy farce. Or do you think those innocent human beings are children of a lesser god?

Zimbabwe riot police charged protesting doctors, nurses and union members with batons early today.

At least one hundred doctors and nurses protested outside the health ministry in the capital of Harare as the country faced the worst cholera crisis in its history.

Zimbabwean trade unions have also called a day of protest over a deepening banking and cash shortage crisis.

POLICE shot at rioting soldiers in Harare on Monday as unpaid troops sided with the country's impoverished people for the first time in protest against Zimbabwe's collapsing economy.

Tensions erupted when about 50 soldiers were denied money from banks after queueing all day.

The soldiers, who were wearing camouflage dress, staged an impromptu protest. They were joined by hundreds of civilians at the corner of Robert Mugabe and Fourth streets, in the heart of the capital. When armed riot police arrived to break up the demonstration, the soldiers from Cranborne Barracks fought back.

The seething anger felt by ordinary Zimbabweans exploded yesterday as hundreds of off-duty soldiers went on the rampage in the centre of Harare. Witnesses said that the violence erupted at a bus depot on the edge of the city centre where soldiers, frustrated at not being able to draw cash from banks, confronted illegal moneychang-ers. The dealers scattered and the soldiers turned on the city, followed by civilians spurring them on.

Zimbabwe health authorities say 425 people have died in a cholera outbreak and they are concerned it will worsen with the onset of the rainy season.

More than 11,000 people have been sickened since August, the official Sunday Mail newspaper reported. The number of cases has shot up in the past two weeks.

City authorities in Harare on Friday offered free graves to impoverished families of cholera victims.

Hundreds of people were killed in the central Nigerian city of Jos when Christians and Muslims clashed over the result of a local election, witnesses said Saturday.

Local residents said several churches and mosques were razed in the violence, which started with a rumour that the All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) had lost the election to the federal ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP).

The ANPP is perceived locally to be a predominantly Muslim party, and the PDP to be mainly Christian.

A cholera epidemic is sweeping across Zimbabwe, with over 9,000 cases and 360 deaths, according to the United Nations. Local sources tell me these figures underplay the seriousness of the problem.

Today cholera can easily be controlled by maintaining simple sanitary standards — but there is no running water in much of Zimbabwe today, and sanitation systems have collapsed

It is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that Washington appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.

"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."

A senior official in the health ministry told The Independent yesterday that more than 3,000 people have died from the water-borne disease in the past two weeks, 10 times the widely-reported death toll of just over 300. "But even this higher figure is still an understatement because very few bother to register the deaths of their relatives these days," said the official, who requested anonymity.

The situation in Zimbabwe may soon "implode" as a cholera outbreak spreads and basic services collapse, South African leaders and a group of international statesmen warned yesterday.

About 6,000 people have contracted cholera in recent weeks, according to the UN, and almost 300 have died. A chronic shortage of medicine has sent hundreds of people south to seek treatment in South Africa.

The response of President Robert Mugabe’s failing government has been to cover up the scale of the problem and to send in riot police.

Last Friday the World Health Organisation confirmed that 294 had died so far. Deteriorating sewerage systems and declining supplies of clean water have been blamed. The aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières said 1.4m were at risk. Thousands may die.

Zimbabwe has refused to let Kofi Annan and two eminent colleagues visit the impoverished African country for a humanitarian mission, the three said Saturday.

Zimbabweans are suffering from disease and hunger while political crisis over a power-sharing government occupies its politicians. A current cholera outbreak has killed nearly 300 people in Zimbabwe, the United Nations said.

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."