By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
Thousands danced in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hundreds chanted in South Africa, carrying signs and candles. The Philippines held a 24-hour dance party. Scores of students in India gathered for a candlelight vigil.
Anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela spent a 12th day in a South African hospital after being diagnosed with a lung infection and undergoing gallstone surgery.
The fight against malaria is slowing down amid a dramatic drop in efforts to reverse the epidemic, even as health officials insist they will try to meet their idealistic target of virtually eliminating deaths from the parasitic illness by the end of 2015.
Security forces Thursday arrested an al Qaeda chief in southern Yemen who had taken part in several terrorist attacks, state news agency Saba reported.
A rebel group created just seven months ago seized the strategic provincial capital of Goma, home to more than 1 million people in eastern Congo, and its international airport on Tuesday, officials and witnesses said, raising the specter of a regional war.
Diplomats said Iran is on the threshold of boosting output of material that can be turned into weapons-grade uranium used in nuclear warheads.
While the international community is focused on the M23 rebellion, other armed groups have taken advantage of the security vacuum in eastern Congo and killed more than 260 people since April, says a U.N. report released Wednesday.
Local authorities in eastern Congo said that the population's lack of information on Ebola and the traditional practice of washing corpses before funerals are helping the epidemic to spread.
Ibrahim Nsanzimana says he can no longer return to his home in Rwanda for fear of death. The 28-year-old recounted the tortured history of his Rwandan family's entanglement with neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, and his latest recruitment by Rwanda to fight in eastern Congo.
Africa will continue its economic growth next year, but faces increasing threats from continued political instability, youth unemployment and the global recession dragging down oil and commodity prices, a leading economist said Tuesday.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been married since 2009, and his wife once visited South Korea, a Seoul lawmaker said Thursday, a day after the secretive North first disclosed the match.
The president of Kenya was upbeat.
A Congolese general already sought on an international arrest warrant for his reputed use of child soldiers during an earlier conflict has forcibly recruited an additional 149 boys and teenagers since April, according to a Human Rights Watch investigation published Wednesday.
A group of Congolese soldiers who created a rebel group after defecting from the army have no intention of laying down their weapons, despite an ultimatum from the government and the expiration of a cease-fire with the military, one of their leaders said Thursday.
Nearly 5,000 people, mostly women, children and the elderly, have been displaced because of fighting in Congo's North Kivu province, the U.N. refugee agency said Wednesday.
