Children in Somalia are being systematically recruited to fight on frontlines, killed in indiscriminate attacks and denied an education, Amnesty International said on Wednesday. Other abuses include being flogged, and being forced to attend public stonings and amputations by Islamist groups, including al Qaeda-affiliated al Shabaab, the rights watchdog said in a report. 'As a child in Somalia, you risk death all the time: you can be killed, recruited and sent to the frontline, punished by al Shabaab because you are caught listening to music or "wearing the wrong clothes", be forced to fend for yourself because you have lost your parents or even die because you don't have access to adequate medical care,' Michelle Kagari, Amnesty's deputy director for Africa, said in a statement.

In a review of Afyare Abdi Elmi’s ‘Understanding the Somalia Conflagration’, Farah Abdulsamed praises ‘a book which is well-written, inventive and amazingly readable’.

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The United Nations is set to declare famine in parts of southern Somalia, signalling to donors the need for more aid and to insurgents that the population's suffering is being taken seriously. Mark Bowden, humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, was expected to make the announcement in Nairobi, based on fresh data from the food security and nutrition analysis unit for the violent Horn of Africa country, aid officials told the Reuters news agency on Tuesday. 'It will declare famine in several areas of southern Somalia,' a Geneva-based aid worker said. The world body has described the Horn of Africa drought as an emergency, one level short of a famine, citing dire levels of acute malnutrition among Somali children reaching camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Hospitals in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, have been hit by a shortage of drugs following the arrival of large numbers of drought-displaced people in the past two months, with health officials reporting that up to five patients were dying daily due to disease outbreaks. 'Hospitals are experiencing shortages of medicines yet they need to distribute drugs to deal with outbreaks of measles, diarrhoea, malnutrition, malaria and respiratory diseases,' Aden Ibrahim, the Health Minister in Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, told IRIN in Mogadishu.

Renditions, an underground prison and a new CIA base are elements of an intensifying US war, according to a Nation investigation in Mogadishu, by Jeremy Scahill.

The head of the United Nations refugee agency has described the situation in drought-hit Somalia as the 'worst humanitarian disaster' in the world, after meeting with those affected at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. The camp, located in the northeast and the world's largest in the world, is overflowing with tens of thousands of refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia and within Kenya. Antonio Guterres, the head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), visited the camp on Sunday, appealing for 'massive support' from the international community for the more than 380,000 people estimated to be living in Dadaab.

Persistent violence compounded by a serious drought have forced 54,000 Somalis to flee in June, bringing the total number of displaced Somalis to a quarter of the country’s population, the UNHCR has said. The food shortage problem is so acute that there are now reports of children under five dying of hunger and exhaustion while fleeing, or dying within a day of their arrival at refugee camps despite emergency aid, the UN refugee agency said.

With hundreds of new Somali refugees arriving daily at the congested and overcrowded Dadaab refugee camps in northern Kenya, incumbent refugees are going around the camp with loud-hailers appealing for help for the newcomers, most of whom lack food, clothes, and blankets. 'As the numbers [of new arrivals] kept increasing and more people kept coming, we decided to organise and pool our efforts,' Abdiwali Hussein Mohamed, a member of the refugees' committee, told IRIN. 'We must do what we can, even if it is one pair of shoes.' The new refugees arrive in a deplorable state, Mohamed said.

The Inter-Governmental Authority on Development Assembly (IGAD) wants the United Nations to impose a No fly zone on Somalia in a bid to cut off arms supplies to the Al Shabaab terrorist group. President Kibaki led the East African leaders in asking the UN to enforce no fly zones on key towns during an IGAD meeting held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The meeting also directed its anger on Eritrea, which they accused of supplying arms to the Al Shabaab through Kismayu.

Some 3,000 Ugandan soldiers from the African Union (AU) mission have arrived in Somalia to help government forces battle al-Shabab, a group trying to overthrow Somalia's weak Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and impose Islamic law. This comes after the mandate of the AU mission was expanded from peacekeeping to enforcement of peace last month, meaning that AU soldiers can now lead the onslaught against al-Shabab.

Somalia's prime minister says he has resigned, following an agreement between the president and parliament to remove him from office. Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo had initially refused to step down, but will now go 'in the interest of the Somali people'. His removal was part of a UN-backed deal that extends the mandates of the president, the speaker and deputies to August 2012.

The Somali Journalists Association Network said on 14 June they had learnt that the National Security Agency for the Somali government had detained two radio journalists in the capital city of Mogadishu. Both were working for the privately owned independent Radio Kulmiye Based in the capital Mogadishu.

A Thomson Reuters Foundation poll may have found that Afghanistan is the most dangerous place to be a woman, but Somalia's women's minister is astonished any country could be worse than her own. 'I'm completely surprised because I thought Somalia would be first on the list, not fifth,' said Maryan Qasim. 'The most dangerous thing a woman in Somalia can do is to become pregnant,' Qasim said. 'When a woman becomes pregnant her life is 50-50 because there is no antenatal care at all...There are no hospitals, no healthcare, no nothing.'

After months of squabbling that angered donors and jeopardised gains from Islamist militants, the rival leaders of Somalia's government have agreed to delay elections. Despite the row, pro-government forces have been gaining ground in Mogadishu. African Union troops have seized territory from the al-Qaeda linked group, al-Shabab. However, al-Shabab still controls much of southern and central areas of the country.

Somalia, which has not had a functioning government in almost two decades, is listed as Africa's deadliest country for journalists with 34 journalists killed since 1991, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Despite these killings and daily death threats, a few reporters remain in the country to provide the world with an inside view of the fighting that plagues Somalia.

Violence in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, has driven the number of child casualties to a new high, the United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO) said, noting that the main cause of children’s deaths were burns, chest injuries and internal haemorrhage resulting from blasts, shrapnel and bullets. Of the 1,590 reported weapon-related injuries in May alone, 735 cases or 46 per cent were suffered by children under the age of five, compared to only 3.5 per cent in April.

According to Dutch Defense Minister Hans Hillen, in an interview with Dutch business news radio station BNR: 'It is a disgrace and it truly annoys me that a bunch of Somali pirates with their $2000 dollar fishing boats, a few Kalashnikovs and some RPG’s (rocket-propelled grenade) can keep the western world’s high-tech navy ships and commercial fleet busy for months and months. Of course those small boats and those pirates don’t stand a chance with the modern navy ships and our well-equipped navy sailors, but the sea at that location is so huge, that it is impossible to guard it all.' When the interviewer Niels Heithuis of BNR asked the minister if sending ground troops to Somalia might be the answer to this problem, Minister Hillen reacted: 'No, please don’t call our plan sending ground troops. That would be overly exaggerated. We just want to order some marines to go to the Somali beaches and "play a little bit with the pirates’ boats". When they are finished, the pirates won’t bother us anymore'.

The European Union, one of the major financiers of Amisom and the Somali Transitional Federal Government, has threatened to cut further support if the current office holders do not relinquish power when their term of office comes to an end in August. This has not gone down well with the East African Community, whose members Uganda and Burundi are providing the boots on the ground in Mogadishu, and feel that the proposed extension of the TFG’s mandate for another year, would help consolidate achievements in service delivery. Being a major financier, EU’s withdrawal will severely hamper efforts to pacify the war-torn country.

In a review of ‘Milk and Peace, Drought and War: Somali Culture, Society and Politics’, edited by Markus Hoehne and Virginia Luling, Nilani Ljunggren De Silva highlights an ‘important work for all who wish to understand Somalia and its beleaguered and courageous people’.