Kenyan fighter jets have stricken several targets in the southern Somali town of Diff, raising fears of potential casualties, Press TV reports. A Diff resident told Press TV that four warplanes launched raids on Monday 5 March and bombarded training camps of Somali militant group, Al-Shabab in Diff, about 20 km from the border.

With nearly 20,000 Malian refugees now in Burkina Faso, according to Burkina Minister of Communications Alain Traore, and up to 800 more crossing the border each day, the government says it urgently needs more help. The most urgent need is for 'shelter, food and medicine' in the country’s northern Sahel Region, said Denis Ouedraogo, coordinator of the National Commission for Refugees.

Shortly after Michel Sidibe became executive director of the United Nations’ AIDS prevention agency, a court in Senegal sentenced nine gay men, all AIDS educators, to eight years in prison for 'unnatural acts'. Sidibe flew to Senegal to ask its aging president, Abdoulaye Wade, to pardon the men. Sidibe, the son of a Muslim politician from Mali and a white French Catholic, asked the president – who is married to a white Frenchwoman – if he had ever suffered discrimination. 'Oh, Sidibe, you have no idea,' came the reply. 'And for not marrying a Muslim.' 'Then, Uncle,' Sidibe said, 'why do you accept that men here are put in jail for eight years just for being gay?'

Nearly 130,000 people have been displaced by fighting between Tuareg rebels and government forces since mid-January in Mali, the UN has warned. The clashes had displaced an estimated 60,000 people inside Mali, and a further 69,000 had fled to neighbouring countries, a spokesman told the BBC.

The Ogaden Somali Community in South Africa says it has filed a complaint with the country's top prosecutor and the International Criminal Court (ICC), urging an investigation into the actions of the Ethiopian government against the Ogaden people. In a statement released on behalf of the community, a South African media advocacy group, Media Review Network, called on ICC authorities to probe complaints of alleged crimes in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. The crimes include extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, rape, torture, disappearances, the destruction of livelihood, the burning of villages and the destroying of life stock, the statement said.

The UN says the number of Malian refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries to escape fighting between Tuareg rebels and the military has doubled over the past 10 days. More than 44,000 people have crossed into Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso.

Human Rights Watch has hailed Mali's plan to probe child labour in gold mines. 'Our research found that children in Mali start working as young as six years old. Many child laborers are denied an education or drop out of school. Some children come to the mines without their parents and suffer economic or sexual exploitation,' HRW said in a letter to the Minister of Mines, Amadou Cisse.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has deployed its workers to assist some 20,000 people forced to flee fighting between government troops and rebel Tuareg groups in Mali. In a statement, made available to PANA in New York, it said that, 'most of those uprooted by the violence in the Azawad region of northern Mali that began in mid-January have fled to Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania'.

Anxiety has gripped Mali in the face of contrasting positions by the government and rebels in the north following clashes that have left scores dead in what is shaping up as a secessionist battle. Rebel leaders of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) said they were ready for a major offensive inland following a series of attacks that have targeted mainly small towns in northern Mali.

On 2 December 2011, the Malian parliament passed a Family Code, which threatens to set back women’s rights in Mali quite considerably. Women’s organisations like WILDAF Mali, Women in Law and Development in Africa, have been pulling women, and men, together into various formations to inform and to organise. On 31 December, they pulled together representatives from over 20 organizations to think through the intricacies of the new bill and of the new moment, to strategize and to begin to implement counter-strategies.

Algeria withdrew military advisors from northern Mali last week in an effort to force a political solution to the Touareg revolt. The Algerian troops were partaking in joint counter-terror efforts, including training and equipment maintenance, and were flown home on an Algerian air force plane last weekend, El Khabar reported. Algeria's decision to freeze military support to Mali came after the country halted counter-terror operations in Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu and redirected troops towards areas now in rebellion.

Cases of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), as well as domestic violence, are increasing in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Hargeisa, capital of the self-declared independent Republic of Somaliland, with social workers attributing the trend to hard economic times made worse by recent drought in the region.

Kenya has been urged to continue providing refuge to Somalis fleeing violence and hunger in their homeland, a US State Department official said. 'We continue to rely on and advocate strongly for the protection of Somalis inside Kenya, that they should not be sent back into Somalia in order to create some sort of a buffer zone,' declared David Robinson, acting assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration. Mr Robinson spoke at a press briefing in Washington Tuesday on the status of the food crisis in Kenya and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa.

The sweep of arrests followed a protest by journalists after Somaliland police raided the offices of a private TV station on 14 January and forced all the workers to leave and suspended the station.

Mali's army has said it fought off attacks by Tuareg rebels, some of whom recently returned from fighting in Libya and have launched an offensive to seize several northern towns. Fighting erupted in the towns of Aguelhok and Tessalit, keeping residents indoors as gunfire was exchanged, a day after the army said it had fought off an attack in the town of Menaka by bombing rebel positions.

A Somali National Consultative Constitutional Conference took place in December 2011 and issued the Garowe Principles. The jury is out on whether the principles will have any impact on the Somali crisis.

In this article from the online journal The Chimurenga Chronic Parselelo Kantai looks at the rise of Somali diaspora capital in Nairobi. 'Somali money was supplanting more established ethnic capital; the Indian and Kikuyu, the two most visible mercantile communities, were being outmanoeuvred. As a result, street panic curdled into open xenophobia.'

Somalia's Islamist al-Shabab group have killed at least six Kenyans in a cross-border raid, claiming revenge for Nairobi's troop deployment against the al-Qaeda-linked group, police and fighters said. Four police officers, a local government official and a civilian were killed in the attack by assailants, using firearms and an explosive device, said regional police chief Leo Nyongesa.

The Kenyan security forces are beating and arbitrarily detaining citizens and Somali refugees in Kenya’s North Eastern province, which borders on Somalia, despite repeated pledges to stop such abuses, Human Rights Watch said. On 11 January 2012, in the latest of a series of incidents documented by Human Rights Watch since October 2011, security forces rounded up and beat residents of Garissa, the provincial capital, in an open field within the enclosure of the local military camp. A Human Rights Watch researcher witnessed the incident.

This 108-page Human Rights Watch report reveals that children as young as six dig mining shafts, work underground, pull up heavy weights of ore, and carry, crush, and pan ore. Many children also work with mercury, a toxic substance, to separate the gold from the ore. Mercury attacks the central nervous system and is particularly harmful to children.